A cautionary tale

Once upon a time there was a very small campervan. It was neat and white and new and very, very shiny. All its beautiful fittings and furnishings were spotlessly clean and tidy and its owners were very proud and very careful to keep it looking pristine.

However, as the years passed and the miles and trips started to add up, the very small campervan began to look rather less shiny and new, and, I regret to say, the once-proud owners became a little less careful. Indeed they began to take the very small campervan for granted and to rely on it carrying them and their belongings uncomplainingly up and down the country and even across to the continent without them having to worry about anything.

Alas, this happy state of affairs was not destined to last. One terrible day the very small campervan went for its yearly health-check and instead of being told to go away and come back next year, the somewhat neglectful owners were given some very bad news. Thanks to a series of hard winters and the over-lavish spreading of road-salt, the very small campervan’s underneath was in a dreadful way and it would no longer be allowed to drive anywhere until a great deal of extremely expensive mending had been done.

Now the once-proud owners bitterly regretted that they had taken their faithful small campervan for granted and had omitted to pamper its underneath enough with lots of soothing grease and oil. All they could do was to find a very kind and skilled mechanic who told them reassuringly that all was not lost and that he could and would restore the very small campervan to full and legal health in time for them to set off for their summer journey to France.

The moral of this tale is that if you want your very small campervan to go on carrying you everywhere your fancy takes you, out of sight must never mean out of mind. 

A box full of memories

Earlier this week I was happily sitting upstairs at my desk, still in my pyjamas, drinking my mid-morning coffee and reading blogs, when there was a knock at the kitchen door. Despite my protests at my state of undress, DH insisted on my coming downstairs, where I was greeted by my youngest sister who dragged me outside to see the surprise she had found for me for my birthday next week.

There, on the makeshift bench by the door, sat an old hand sewing machine, which she had just found outside the local antique shop and snapped up, knowing that I had been searching for just such a machine to replace my hated modern electronic one. Now it is sitting on the table in the conservatory while I clean and polish it, before trying it out for the first time.

Having checked a specialist website on old sewing machines, we believe it was made in the late 1920s, and in its probably chequered career it has lost all its spare bobbins and the key to its lovely wooden case. While DH ferreted among his hoard of ‘things that may come in useful’ for a substitute key, I went off to search through my crammed and untidy sewing-box for any bobbins left over from the ancient Singer treadle machine, which, in a fit of temporary insanity, I long-ago replaced with the modern monster.

After an exhaustive search I did indeed find a spare bobbin, which will soon be residing in the nifty accessories compartment in the sewing machine base, along with packs of almost vintage machine needles. However this was only the beginning.  

Having gradually emptied the entire contents of the sewing-box onto the spare bed in my search for the bobbin, I found myself trapped in a hoard of almost-forgotten bits and pieces, heavy with memories and nostalgia.

First there were the buttons, so many buttons. Spare buttons from clothes long gone, including probably almost every suit or shirt DH ever wore in his working career. Cards of buttons from abandoned knitting or sewing projects, mute testimony to my ability to get distracted, and a medley of old buttons, obviously kept just because they were attractive or unusual. 

Among these were three small, pretty, flowered buttons, which catapulted me back to our first married home and the flowered maternity dress my mother made for me and which I wore during both my pregnancies.

Then there was a chaos of hooks-and-eyes and press-studs (remember them?) and spare zips and bits of Velcro, and even the odd buckle from the children’s sandals, kept just in case…. Tangled among these was a somewhat dusty length of black velvet ribbon, which I last wore nearly forty years ago, when it did duty as a necktie for the academic dress required for me to attend the formal ceremony at which I belatedly received my degree.

In another compartment lurked the battered, curved top of what had once been a brass darning-mushroom, together with a small, heavy, horseshoe magnet for picking up dropped pins and needles. Both of these once belonged to my grandmother and were passed on to me by my mother for my little sewing kit, when I left home for college in the mid-1960s.

With those was the now battered felt needle-case or hussif, made as a Christmas gift for me by DD when still at primary school. The inner 'pages' are now rust-marked and one of the appliquéd holly-leaves is missing, but I still treasure it.

Finally, at the very bottom of the box, hidden under the dressmaking scissors and pinking shears, I discovered a couple of the tiny garments I made on my old treadle machine for DD’s Barbie doll back in our impecunious youth. I even made a snowsuit from old sheeting for DS’s Action Man, but that has sadly vanished.

Perhaps I should stop teasing DH for being such a hoarder, as I try to convince myself that what I've been hoarding aren't just things, but irreplaceable memories.

Stop the world, I want to get off!

I can’t be the only blogger around who sometimes feels that all she has to write about is yet another thing going wrong. In my case it’s been a fortnight I would much rather forget than dwell upon, if that didn't mean that I would otherwise disappear from the blogosphere.

First it was the ongoing saga of the septic tank, which was almost immediately compounded on Monday by our central heating going wrong in the coldest March weather here for 30 years. On Tuesday my brother-in-law generously gave up much of his day helping DH to track down what the problem was, while my youngest sister and I sat in the only warm place in the house, the sunny conservatory, and put the world to rights.

The very next morning I had a extremely nasty shock when I woke up to discover that I’d completely lost the hearing in my left ear overnight!  Some rapid googling and an urgent visit to the doctor taught me that sudden hearing loss is more common that I would ever have expected and having ruled out some worse possibilities, the doctor prescribed ear-drops for what he hopes is an otherwise symptomless infection. Two days on I’m starting to be able to hear some loud sounds very faintly with that ear, but it’s still like listening to the world in mono rather than stereo. Most odd…..

Finally, to put, as my Lancashire grandmother would have said, the tin lid on the week from hell, I opened Google Reader yesterday to find the terse message from  the Google power-that-be that in July they are going to retire what has become for me one of my essential blogging tools. It’s only a few weeks since I was gently gloating about the simplicity and reliability of Google Reader in comparison with the flaky WordPress Reader other bloggers were bewailing and now Google is planning to pull the plug on it, presumably because they haven’t found a way to milk it for every cent they can get. There are alternatives out there and I’m sure I’ll be able to find one which does the job just as well, but I was perfectly happy with the reader I had. Sigh…..

When things conspire against us, it’s lovely to be able to escape into a world beyond the petty annoyances of everyday life and last Sunday afternoon that’s exactly what I did. As nature froze outside the living-room window, I curled up on the settee with my knitting and lost myself in one of my all-time favourite films, that childhood classic The Wizard Of Oz. Sadly none of us can stay in that world over the rainbow, but a couple of hours of music, laughter and innocent enjoyment make our own world seem so much brighter. Now to see whether an oil-can will sort out my stiff knee. J

And now for something completely different

Forty years ago, when DH and I had only been married a few years, the children were small and money was very tight, one of our greatest pleasures was listening to the radio. Back in those dim and distant days, radio meant, of course, the BBC, since in Britain commercial radio didn't start broadcasting until 1973.

We listened avidly to classic drama, current affairs and comedy and one of the now almost forgotten gems we loved was a comedy series, written and performed by the hugely talented Ronnie Barker, and entitled Lines from my Grandfather’s Forehead.  Back then Ronnie Barker was almost unknown, but the skilful and very funny short sketches he wrote for the series foreshadowed the immensely popular work he would later create as he became a household name.

Our absolute favourite among those sketches is one we have never forgotten and despite our increasingly unreliable memories, we can still recite chunks of it to each other after all these years. Tonight, however, DH made my day by discovering that it is now on YouTube, and I have just had the enormous pleasure of hearing it again and finding it just as funny and as clever as I found it back in 1972.

Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats for the Three Minute Hamlet.

 

Bring me sunshine

Fans of the unforgettable Morecambe and Wise will, I hope, forgive me for borrowing their theme song for the title of this post. It sprang irresistibly to mind when I opened Google Reader yesterday to find that my friend Croixblanches of Nowhere-on-Thames had kindly passed on to me the Sunshine Award she had recently been given.

Longer-term readers of this blog probably know by now that I sometimes sit a bit lightly to the conditions attached to many blogging awards. Today, however, in gratitude both for the award and for the real sunshine which has so brightened up the past week, I will be a good girl and do as I am asked. After thanking the kind giver, I am to choose 10 bloggers, who, in my opinion, “positively and creatively inspire others in the blogosphere” and then answer a few simple questions about myself.

I recognize that not every blogger wishes to receive awards, in which case please feel free to decline. It’s even possible that some have already received it and are running out of space on their virtual mantelpiece. The main thing is that I’m given the chance to highlight some of the blogs I enjoy and offer them for further exploration, so, without further ado, here are my choices. They come from near and far, some are long-established, others newer and still small. Some post very regularly, others quite infrequently. The one thing they have in common is that I enjoy reading each and every one.

A Skinny Fair-trade Latte in theFood Court of Life

ABroad with a View

Astrid’s Soapbox      

Bonnie’s Thoughts and Jots

breathelighter  

coming home to myself

It Helps Fill the Day   

Kamo Lady    

Some Other Mountain   

Where Five Valleys Meet  

Now for the questions – 9 rather than 10 for some reason, but I'm not grumbling. J

Favourite colour:  Blue, ever since I could pronounce it, though I'm told I look good in coral pink.

Favourite animal:  Cats, by a mile. When we stop travelling we’ll have cats again.
Favourite number:  Whatever age I’ll be next birthday.

Favourite drink:  During the day tea, in the evening red wine. (OK, I cheated)

Facebook or Twitter:  Neither. There aren’t enough hours in the day.
Your passion:  DH and my blog - an offshoot of my primal passion for reading.
Giving or getting presents:  Let’s be honest here – both.
Favourite day:  I’m retired and getting on a bit, so every day I wake up feeling well is my favourite.

Favourite flowers:  I particularly love spring flowers such as snowdrops, primroses and bluebells, but if I had to choose just one flower, it would be the old-fashioned scented rose.

Now it’s over to you, both to explore and, for the recipients, to accept and pass it on if you want to. Enjoy...

Lying fallow?

Like a number of bloggers I follow, I’m finding that after the intensity of Holy Week and Easter, my mind seems to have gone on to standby as far as inspiration is concerned. Or perhaps it’s just that all my available mental energy is being absorbed by my new acquisition.

Yes, dear readers, all the detailed and careful research I mentioned in passing in my last post came to fruition last Saturday with the delivery of this year's birthday present and my brand-new pride and joy – my very first laptop!  

I feel I should apologise for teasing you all with such secrecy about a basically mundane purchase. Yet to me it feels very far from mundane. Since the moment I first clicked tentatively on a computer mouse nearly 20 years ago now, all my computing has been done on a series of desktop machines, mostly DH’s cast-offs.

Not for me the app-laden smartphone or glossy tablet: instead I’ve been nursing the same ageing desktop since before I retired 5 years ago and it’s still going strong, albeit rather more slowly, like its owner. I blame my addiction to blogging for making me realise I needed a means of mobile computing, and for me a laptop was the only sensible solution.

Hence the poring over internet searches - reading reviews, comparing specifications and looking for reliability reports - which took so much time early last week. The Transit household really doesn’t go in for off-the-cuff purchases. J

Now that DH has finished setting up my new baby, I’m spending every spare moment getting to grips with Windows 7 and all the other innovations which have passed me by for so long. It’s a steep learning curve and my brain is beginning to hurt a bit, but I’m gradually getting there and am enjoying the process enormously. It doesn’t take much to make me happy…….

A sentimental old fool

In the Transit household, as in most others, there are differences of opinion between DH and myself on many subjects – in this case, as to the value of keeping things. Not to put too fine a point on it, DH is an inveterate hoarder, an almost indiscriminate keeper of “stuff that might come in useful one day”.

I, on the other hand, am simply a discriminating guardian of things worth preserving. At the same time, I’m a mainstay of the local charity shops, that is, if I can manage to sneak the bags out to the car, without DH catching me in the act.

But even when I’m in my most fervent house-clearing mode, there are some categories of object at which I draw the line. Books, for instance, unless they are library books, only ever come into the house, never out again. I think I must be almost constitutionally incapable of throwing a book away. After all, books make excellent insulation.

Given my passion for making preserves, I will admit also to finding it hard to throw jam-jars away, but of course I really do need those, don’t I?

And then there are the souvenirs…. Whether it’s a postcard in childish handwriting from a long-ago holiday with grandparents, or a vase that belonged to my mother, and possibly to her mother before her, if it has sentimental value to me, it’s worth keeping and I’ll leave the throwing-away to those who come after me. However, occasionally I do look at something and wonder whether one can take sentimental attachment too far.

The example that comes to mind lives in the cupboard under the sink. It’s a smallish, white, plastic tub, with a cracked and mended pale-blue lid, and long ago it bore a label proclaiming that inside was the then new and magic powder known as Napisan. Today it holds dishwasher powder and I handle it every day. To be honest, it is barely fit for purpose, but I simply can’t bring myself to stop using it and throw it away.

Over forty-two years ago, when DS was born, I was plunged into a new and exhausting world of terry nappies and endless washing, with no washing machine to lighten the load. The height of technological innovation in our kitchen was the gleaming new spin-dryer which DH’s parents kindly gave us for our first Christmas in our new home. But I had one great advantage over my mother at the same stage – I had Napisan. Instead of having to boil all the baby’s things, I could simply soak them in this wonderful solution and hey presto – white again!

The nappies went for cleaning rags decades ago, and the baby who wore them now has a rapidly-growing son of his own, but as long as I can pick up that battered tub and take off its mended lid, I have a concrete link to those far-off days. With the tub in my hand my mind fills with memories of babyhood and a lot of hard work and happiness, when I was young and thin, and my first baby wore hand-knitted leggings and his nappies were soaked in Napisan.

I’m such a sentimental old fool – or am I?

A bit of a treat

One of the many advantages of living for most of your life in fairly remote places is that you rarely have to dress up. In my case that’s a great advantage, as I really don’t do dressy. With my legs I’m happiest in jeans, and with my feet high heels are out of the question. All this means that I don’t have much use for jewellery, other than my rings, of course.

This is fine by me, but a little while ago it posed a problem for my dear mother-in-law. She is a generous person, who enjoys giving presents, and at a local craft fair she spotted some pretty crystal pendants which she knew would be much appreciated by her other two daughters-in-law. Sadly for her, pretty pendants, whether crystal or not, don’t go very well with jeans and sneakers, so she sensibly didn’t buy one for me. Instead she gave me the money and asked me to get myself a little treat.

Usually, as she well knows, a treat for me takes the form of yet another book or CD, but this time I knew just what I wanted. Not something to wear or read or listen to, but something to use, something which would make one of my interests easier and more successful.

Instead of a pendant, however pretty, I wanted a proper preserving-pan – a beautiful, heavy-bottomed, stainless-steel maslin pan - for the jams and preserves I've always loved making. For years I’d made do with either a pressure-cooker (too narrow) or my old, cheap, aluminium preserving-pan (too flimsy) which had been all I could afford at the time.

But now, at last, I had the real thing and I was thrilled. No more boiling-over because the pan was too small. No more burnt-on jam because the base was too thin. There was no stopping me and I went mad – filling the store cupboard with more jams and jellies than the two of us could hope to eat in years – so many that I had to start giving them away, to stop us both expanding to the approximate size and shape of barrage balloons.

Thankfully we’re all different and my idea of a treat probably isn’t yours. Nevertheless my little treat gives and will go on giving me enormous pleasure and satisfaction. OK, I can’t wear it, and other people will probably never see it, but every time I take my pan out of the cupboard and set to work, and the kitchen fills with the tantalising aroma of freshly-made jam, I think of my dear mother-in-law and realise yet again what a very lucky woman I am.

You’ll have to excuse me now – I have some marmalade to make. It’s a bit of a treat.

The tale of a swing-seat

Isn’t it odd what we set our hearts on, even if it’s totally unsuited to our circumstances? As I mentioned in my last post, DH and I have lived for many years in an old farmhouse high in the Welsh hills, with an unkempt apology for a garden, no appreciable lawn, and not a neighbouring house in sight. And yet what did I yearn for?  A swing-seat, that’s what, the kind of garden equipment that cries out for a barbered lawn or neat patio, neither of which this place has ever had or is ever likely to have.

Ten years ago we left our house in the tender hands of tenants and moved into the huge Edwardian vicarage which went with my new post as vicar of three small rural parishes, a few miles away across the valley. Lawn we then had aplenty, a full tennis-court’s worth in fact, but I was so busy that I hardly ever had time even to look at it, let alone think about putting a swing-seat on it for my rare leisure moments.

It wasn’t until I moved to Oxfordshire three years later, to a part-time post that carried with it a nice, modern house in a small village, that we acquired the kind of garden that could reasonably be graced with a swing-seat. On leaving my previous parishes I’d been given a gift of money as a farewell-present, so what better way to remember the kindness and generosity of my former parishioners than to treat myself to something I had dreamed of for so long.

Thus it was that my swing-seat entered my life. We bought it in a garden centre as a kit to take home and assemble, before placing it in our back garden which boasted a small lawn and an even smaller patio. What could be more simple? Just lay out the components on the sitting-room floor, read the instructions and, in next to no time, voilà, my heart’s desire in my very own garden. Several hours, much muttered cursing, and the odd pinched finger or two later, DH and I finally threw down the instructions, which might as well have been left in their original Chinese for all the use they were, and staggered into the garden with the finished product.

But oh, it was worth it! I sat on it, swung a little, and was mentally transported into a timeless (and probably idealised) world of long, leisurely summer afternoons in the garden, with tea on the lawn and a restful read or doze on the swing-seat, all my troubles forgotten or disappeared.

That was the theory and, just occasionally, the practice. More often it became a place for sitting with parishioners to chat or listen to their problems and concerns, and from time to time a plaything for visiting grandsons, or somewhere to cuddle them and read them a story.

Then, quite unexpectedly, it became the place where I could sit with family and friends, as I came to terms with my second cancer diagnosis in seven years and faced a possibly very uncertain future. Sitting and swinging gently as we talked didn’t take away the uncertainty and fear, but it made them more bearable, because they were shared with people who really cared. Later the swing-seat became the place where I could rest and recuperate during the lovely Indian summer days which followed my surgery, until I was well enough to go back to work and the swing-seat was put away in the garage to wait for the return of summer.

Finally, it came back with us when I retired and we returned to Wales. Now that we spend every summer in Normandy, it isn't getting much use here and seems to have entered upon a well-earned retirement of its own.  Perhaps one day DH and I will summon up the courage to take it apart and reassemble it in France. Until then, whenever I see it I’m reminded of how important our dreams are to us, even if they don’t always come true in the way we imagined.