A temporary lull…

…metaphorical as well as physical. After yet another bout of high winds, heavy rain and raging river, today is still, grey and drizzly and the hills around our valley are shrouded in mist. Indoors it is warm and rather untidy, with the dining table piling up with presents to be wrapped and cards to be hung when I get round to it.

In my study the card-writing table has been put away until next year and I’m taking a break from sermon writing and service preparation before going out again to a service of carols by candlelight in the smallest church in our group. First I need to head off to the kitchen to make the soup for supper, which will simmer gently as I sing carols.

As I go, I’ll leave you with a somewhat different carol, sung by the inimitable Tom Lehrer, who as ever can be relied on to put his own idiosyncratic slant on the activities of the festive season.

Capricious April

“Oh, to be in England now that April’s there”  Robert Browning may have had a point, though he was writing from the lush warmth of an Italian spring, rather than the chilly dampness of a northern Scottish season. The last fortnight’s scattering of lovely sunny days may soon seem like a dream if the weather forecast for this area is to be believed. 

With luck the promised showers will be of rain, rather than the snow which accompanied our journey north at the beginning of the month, but wintry showers are not beyond the bounds of possibility by the weekend.

Thank goodness DH and I took advantage of the sunny weather to get out and about a bit. The landscape of the North-West Highlands is wonderful whatever the weather, but in sunshine it is truly spectacular and our respective cameras have been working overtime.

The road north on a snowy April Fool's Day

Ben Loyal the morning after our arrival

And a week later after a beautifully sunny Easter.

The Kyle of Tongue heading north to the sea

A symphony in grey - no leaves to soften the trees yet

Clouds over the mountains of Sutherland herald a change in the weather

A very different sunset this evening

Still, at least the disappearance of the sun gives me an excellent excuse to abandon gardening for family history research, which is proving ever more absorbing as I learn the techniques of finding and assessing the wealth of information available online. Knitting too is coming on apace, with the weekly knit & natter group enabling rapid progress on my latest pair of socks. 

I’ve also been busy reviving the almost forgotten art of knitting a new toe for the socks which DH’s iron toenails have worn into a hole. There’s too much work in a pair of hand-knitted socks to throw them into the bin at the first sign of weakness and it’s been fun giving a couple of pairs a new lease of life, even to matching the pattern of the self-patterning yarn. I knew it was worth keeping all those remnants of yarn from the many pairs of socks I’ve knitted over the past few years.

Now all I have to do is to spend more time on my shamefully neglected clarinet and my life will be in perfect balance again, which is more than can be said for Simon’s rather bedraggled cat.

From family past to family present

After my recent forays into my family’s history, daily life has caught up with me again and I’ve been running fast to keep up these last few days. From leading a Mothering Sunday service last Sunday, to hosting a meeting on Monday and welcoming a friend today, life is suddenly very full and busy again.

Now I’m getting ready to welcome my next-to-youngest sister and her husband and pet dog for a visit which begins tomorrow afternoon and will end nicely in time for me to finish my final preparations for next Sunday’s service. Think of me tomorrow morning, as I dust and hoover and change beds and prepare food. 

Hopefully I won’t get lost forever in the duvet covers before I can enjoy a couple of days of not-stop conversation and laughter, interspersed with pleasant relaxation over lingering meals.  Our youngest sister and her husband and dog live not far away and will join us, so there will be a lot of chatter and teasing and “do you remember when”. I hope our poor husbands can keep up…

Cartoon via The Poke.

Who stole February?

Or at least the first half of it…  The last two weeks have been very busy and the coming one will be even worse, with one appointment or another taking me out of the house for a good part of every day and a visit to DD at the weekend for her birthday. I feel tired already. All of this makes me realise that I’d better show a sign of life before search parties are sent out to look for me.

I’m pleased to report that the daily exercises are continuing to foster progress in my hand and wrist and thankfully clarinet practice is sounding a little less dire as time goes on. I’ve also been tackling the boxes of books which have been waiting for me to have two good hands to deal with them, though we now need more bookcases to house all their contents. I’ve even been starting to think about how I would like to develop our new garden, once the weather is warm enough to tempt me outside.

At least I don’t have a mischievous cat undoing all my good work, or I’d never finish anything.

Image via Wikipedia

Christmas busyness

After an unusually quiet beginning to Advent, life in the Transit household has speeded up considerably this week. This is partly, of course, because I have more to do as Christmas approaches and it all takes a long time to accomplish and partly because we’ve had several enjoyable days of visitors and visiting. 

On Tuesday and Wednesday I had the pleasure of long and chatty visits from two good friends, who came bearing very welcome gifts of home-made mince pies and stollen, exactly the kind of Christmas goodies I can’t make for myself this year.

Then on Thursday DH and I went to lunch with a former colleague of his who is a truly excellent cook. After a meal that would have put a West End restaurant to shame and a great deal of light-hearted conversation, all we could manage to eat at supper time were a few crackers with cheese.

Friday brought a kind visit from the vicar, who brought with her a lovely bottle of wine as a thank-you for my help while she’s been waiting for her new colleague to be appointed (we are a united parish consisting of a small market town and six surrounding villages). I still feel bad that I can’t help her at this very busy time, but some things really are beyond me at the moment.

Today I’ve realised that it’s only two days until we leave for our round of Christmas visits and I still have presents to wrap, cards to hang and the packing to do. Help! At least I don’t have a tree to decorate and a cat eager to explore it…

Image via Google

Variety is the spice of life

As I slowly and awkwardly unpack and tidy up after our return home, blog inspiration appears to have gone missing en route from Scotland. However, in her recent comment my blog friend Dancing Beastie mentioned how much she’d enjoyed the contrasting musical items in my last two posts. To cheer us all up in the current miserable weather, I can’t resist sharing a very different seasonal offering by a group of American high school students, which has just been brought to my attention by Annie, another blog friend, and which had me wiping tears of laughter from my eyes. Enjoy….

Time to go home

Gosh, it’s all go! From Advent quiet to ever-decreasing circles has taken just one day.

Yesterday DH drove me on the 170 mile round trip to the hospital for my check-up, from which I emerged minus the cast, but sporting a wrist splint, which I have to wear day and night for the next 4 weeks at least. My lovely surgeon was very pleased with my progress, but gave me strict instructions on what I can and can’t do until I’m seen again by a surgeon in Wales in the New Year. Absolutely no lifting or carrying with that hand and no pressure on the hand or wrist, so no Christmas baking and no clarinet practice. Sigh.... 

Today we went to visit a friend and it was on our return that I discovered that the Met Office had issued a snow warning for Scotland for Sunday, the day we were planning to make the long journey home to Wales. After some discussion we decided to bring our departure forward to Saturday, so while DH is out at a meeting this evening, I’m piling together  clothes and other items I can move one-handed, ready for him to pack tomorrow while I’m out in my turn at the monthly Eucharist.

So until we’re back in Wales, I’ll leave you with this seasonal offering, the perfect antidote to Christmas hype, from the wonderfully evergreen Tom Lehrer.

Thank goodness we don’t have a cat…

…or this would be a regular scene here at the moment.  

Enjoy...

Au revoir to Normandy

…for this year at least. The van is almost completely packed and I’m getting down to the final cleaning and tidying.  However, before the phone line is suspended, I just want to give you a few snapshots of this varied summer in France, with details to follow once we’re safely back in Wales.

It began with gardening 

and went on to involve making bread 

and jam (and, of course, socks).

It included a couple of fetes 

and a lot of awareness of the 70^th anniversary of D-Day 

and the liberation of Normandy.

There were meals with friends and enjoyable chats with our French neighbours,

together with a gift of her lovely roses. 

There was some lovely sunny weather, but also rather a lot of rain.

And it wouldn’t have been a summer in Normandy without kittens in the woodshed 

and on the doorstep.

So until we’re unpacked and sorted out, I’ll say au revoir and leave you with the latest antics of Simon’s wonderful cat.

P.S. I’m afraid the dratted spammers seem to have latched onto my blog again, so until they give up and go away, I’ve reluctantly switched on word or number verification for the time being.

It’s no use!

Despite the ever-lengthening daylight, there just aren’t enough hours in my day. Since our arrival on the north coast just over a week ago and very late at night, I’ve barely stopped. The first couple of days were spent unpacking and recovering from the long, tiring journey and then the social whirl started with my first visit to Knit and Natter last Wednesday morning. Since then I’ve been out for much of the day every day except Thursday and my first free day this week is Friday.

I have a post simmering gently on the back burner, but there are a lot of photos to be gone through and worked on and background information to research, so it will have to wait until I can step off the merry-go-round. Music practice takes up a chunk of every day and I’m busy keeping my promise to catch up with your blogs, which I’ve sadly neglected in recent weeks. I can hardly expect you to take the trouble to read and comment on my blog if I never return the compliment.

Ben Loyal with his cap of cloud

So to keep you entertained until my mad frenzy settles down again and I too stop chasing around for a bit, here’s the latest, and very appropriate, escapade of Simon’s Cat.

Three years ago today

It was a cold, grey February day and DH was away visiting his mother for a few days. With no car to take me further afield, I was spending my time catching up with the spring-cleaning, in my experience a job best done when you have the house to yourself. In between bouts of cleaning, I was reading blogs, an absorbing pastime I’d discovered some time before and which fascinated me more and more.

That day, however was different. Almost on the spur of the moment, I decided to stop fantasising about starting a blog myself and just do it. It took surprisingly little time to register with Blogger, find a name and set up a very basic template and that evening I wrote my very first post and set it adrift on the world-wide web.

That first post must have looked very austere – no images, no links, no videos, just text. It only took me a few days to master posting images and a few weeks to work out how to post a link. Videos however had to wait for several months and of course there was always the spice of danger involved in learning to live with Blogger’s vagaries. J

I always knew I would enjoy writing posts and to my surprise I even enjoyed the technical challenges. What I could never have foreseen was the enormous, life-changing enjoyment and satisfaction I would gain from interaction with other bloggers and their blogs. Moving from passive reading to active blogging, commenting and replying was one of the best decisions I've ever made and three years on, blogging is still one of the great joys of my life.

So thank you all for reading and commenting and generally encouraging me, for giving me so many insights and so much pleasure though your own blogs, and for being as nice a bunch of people as one could ever hope to meet and count as friends.

As a small token of gratitude, here is one of my favourite songs by those masters of words and music, Flanders and Swann. Enjoy….

P.S. DH is off to visit his mother tomorrow, so I'll be catching up with you all very soon.

Image via Google

WordPress Wednesday

There’s a blogging meme I often see on other blogs called Wordless Wednesday. Knowing me as you all do, you’ll easily guess that wordy Perpetua doesn’t do wordless very well. However, I can’t resist borrowing and twisting the title to express my utter frustration at trying to comment on the WordPress blogs I follow. For the last two days it's been a case of sometimes I can, but mostly I can’t, and it’s been driving me up the wall.

A quick ferret around in the depths of the WordPress help forums has cast some light on the subject. Apparently one or more of the servers which carry communication between users with certain UK internet service providers and WordPress have been falling down on the job, resulting in much gnashing of teeth around these islands. Normal service appears to have been resumed, but I won’t hold my breath just yet. I’m glad it isn’t only Blogger that has off days.

When life is stressful, there’s one sure-fire way to relax and here it is…..

Image via Google

Even Homer sometimes nods

I occasionally wonder how (to coin a phrase) I manage to walk and chew gum at the same time.   

I've just treated myself to my very first e-reader - not a Kindle, but a Nook, because above all I want to be able to borrow e-books from the library (via my laptop to the reader) and Kindles don't let you do that. I'd thought first of getting a tablet, but we're on a wired network here, not wi-fi, so that wouldn't have worked. However, what silly me didn't take into account is that I would need wi-fi to register my e-reader with the manufacturer (the book chain Barnes & Noble) to get it to work at all. 

The result is that I have a spiffing little e-reader, fully charged, but not able to go anywhere until I head off to borrow my sister's wi-fi tomorrow. Doh!

At least I don’t have to grapple with a cat at the same time….

Image via Google

The wheels on the car go round and round…

This being a chauffeur business is certainly keeping me busy. Last Tuesday I had to take DH to the health centre for a BP check (still far too high, but gradually coming down) and on Friday across the hills to the hospital for an ultrasound scan of his carotid arteries. This was followed by a very welcome and enjoyable weekend visit by DS who came by train, so had to be collected from the station. Except for the hospital visit (a nearly 80 mile round trip, none of the extra journeys are very long, but it's amazing how they mount up. Thank goodness for the comfy new car. 

This afternoon it was back to the health centre to see the GP to get him into the system for his medication. DH is not a good passenger – too many years of driving many miles alone in connection with work - but he's having to get used to being driven. I’m pleased to report that the initial white knuckles and worried looks have diminished as he has accustomed himself to not being in control of the car for once, but he still can’t wait for the end of the month when he will be allowed to drive once more.

Our lovely GP has checked for us and found out that my cataract operation has been rescheduled for November 5^th, though we’re still waiting for the official letter to confirm that date. So life is gradually getting back onto a more even keel and we’re even starting to make plans for our annual family visits for Christmas and New Year. In the meantime, the daily walks are continuing and at the weekend DS and my dear brother-in-law helped us to dust off and reassemble the exercise bike, as we both heed the wake-up call to get fit and stay fit. Even when DH can drive again, in the Transit household the wheels will continue to go round and round.

And while we're on the subject of wheels....

Brain on strike!

It’s Saturday morning, inspiration is totally lacking and I’m up to my elbows stocking the freezer with soups and stews, cooking not being one of DH’s many talents. So I’m turning to probably my favourite blogging standby, the wonderful Simon’s Cat. Enjoy…..

Wind in the Willows be blowed!

Kenneth Grahame has a lot to answer for. Having read and loved The Wind in the Willows as a child, I grew up with a roseate image of Mole which I’m now telling you couldn't be further from the truth. If a small, short-sighted, furry creature were ever to show his nose in my Normandy garden, I’d probably chase him away with my garden fork, that being the implement which barely left my hand for much of this summer.

When we arrived at the end of June, the grass in the garden was approaching knee-high, which meant putting my sturdy mower on its highest setting to prevent it clogging up completely. At first all went well, though emptying the capacious grass collector at the end of every couple of passes was hard work, but then I came to the area under the trees. Instantly my relatively smooth progress was punctuated with sudden bursts of metallic clinking as earth and stones spattered the underside of the mower. Yes, I’d hit yet another hidden mole-hill!

Who knew what was lurking beneath the green?

After much cursing and sweating the first cut of the grass was finished and the full extent of the devastation was revealed. I don’t know why the long cold winter and spring were so conducive to mole activity in southern Normandy, but the fact remains that the grass under the fruit trees looked like an ancient battlefield, full of humps and bumps and bare patches of earth. If I wanted to get the grass shorter than the five inches I’d already achieved, I’d have to get down and dirty to clear the concrete-hard mounds laboriously by hand.

No faking here and this was only one corner

It was scant comfort to find at the next garden club meeting that I was by no means the only victim of mole subversion. Garden owners preparing for a visit by the club sent out warnings to the members to wear stout shoes and be prepared for less than perfect lawns this time. The otherwise welcome hot weather didn't help either, as the sun baked the mole-hills to an even stonier consistency, making their levelling a form of not-so-subtle torture to my aching back.

However, Perpetua is made of stern stuff and I refused to let myself be beaten by Monsieur Taupe and his works. By the time DD and her family arrived in early August, every one of the three dozen or so mole-hills which had greeted me had been flattened more or less and the garden could again be used to play our version of crazy boules, though with a few more obstacles than usual.

Because we are only here for a few months of the year, my garden in Normandy will never be more than an expanse of uneven grass and a rather small flower border by the house, which is why I so enjoy the garden visits arranged by the garden club. I only managed to make it to two of the monthly meetings this time, but hopefully a small selection of the photos I took will give you a taste of the wonders achieved by others with far more time, skill and stamina than I possess.

First came a visit to the Manoir de Saussey near the west coast.

The Manoir de Saussey and its wonderful garden

I do like a good vista

Such noble limes

Lost in a green shade

A very French courtyard garden

I love the hidden corners

The next visit was to a private garden only a few miles from our cottage, but in a different world of age and scale.

Mirror image

A French knot garden

My kind of kitchen garden

Granite - the bedrock of southern Normandy

P.S. With many thanks to Kerry Dwyer, who gave me the link, here is the inimitable Jasper Carrott with an animated cartoon of his famous mole sketch. Enjoy.......

It’s off to work we go

Yes, I know that in the UK it’s a Bank Holiday weekend, but I have to grab my opportunities when I can. J Yesterday evening DH left for a three-day visit to his mother and this morning I leapt into action. Just as spring has been much delayed this year, so has my spring-cleaning. Normally I get down to it in February, when DH and his brothers have a family get-together, but this year the weather was so cold and miserable when he was away that I simply couldn't motivate myself to leave the fireside and venture into the chillier regions of our rambling house.

But now the sun is making intermittent appearances and the temperatures are solidly in double figures, I have no excuse. So it’s down to work and out with the cleaning equipment while I have the house to myself with no interruptions. Today I had a practice run in my own study and am in fighting form for tackling the obstacle course that is DH’s office, before moving on to the rest of the house.  

Memo to self – don’t forget to clean beneath the fridge….

S is for sky....

  

…..and of course snow.....

…..and  supplies.....

The top of the lane, where we shall meet Tesco on Tuesday. Hurray!

We shan't mention spring yet, shall we?

Easter bonnets be blowed!

On the coldest Easter Day on record in Britain, I sensibly marked the day, not with a new spring hat, but with new, warm and woolly socks. J Time enough for flowery Easter bonnets when I can actually see some flowers, rather than the patchwork of green and white which still decorates these hills. 

After an unsettling and in some ways difficult Holy Week, Easter Day was lovely. The TV morning service from historic and splendid Paisley Abbey was beautiful and deeply satisfying. The sun shone for at least some of the time, and all day long snow and icicles swooshed and tinkled encouragingly onto the roof of the conservatory and the surrounding ground. This means that ten days after the bulk of the snow fell, our solar panels are at last free of their icy covering and able to generate electricity properly again.

Being unable to go shopping, on Good Friday I was forced to dig out my recipe for hot cross buns and make my own. I didn't go to all the bother of making pastry crosses or glazing them, but they were still delicious and have vanished remarkably fast over the past couple of days. After all, my dough doesn't have preservatives in it and we wouldn't have wanted them to go stale, would we?  We even had eggs for Easter – sadly not chocolate, but scrambled for lunch, but, as my mother would have reminded me, it’s the thought that counts. 

And now it’s April and summer time has started. I have a strong suspicion that spring and summer will come all of a rush this year, but at present spring is on hold up here and we just have to wait patiently for winter to relinquish its lingering grip. It’s also April Fools’ Day, so I will leave you with a link to a simply splendid spoof from the British newspaper The Guardian. Enjoy…..

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