The picture says it all

A year ago today the British Isles were basking in unusually warm spring sunshine and in many places it was warmer than the Mediterranean coast. Today much of the country is blanketed yet again in snow or swamped with rain, with much more still to come, and spring is just a word, not a reality.  Though we have got off much more lightly than many places so far, the world outside my window is still white and snow is falling continuously.

But this isn’t just another post bemoaning the dreadful weather and the way it interferes with my little life. It’s late March and throughout Wales hill farmers are in the middle of lambing, which is normally timed for the beginning of spring to give the newborn lambs the best chance of survival. Instead the lambs and their mothers are struggling with snow or, further south, with driving rain, and everywhere it is still much too cold for animals to thrive.

This is also dairy country, but there is no possibility of the cows being let out into the fields, not only because of the snow, but because it has been so cold for so long that the grass hasn’t yet started to grow again and the fields are almost waterlogged in any case. So the cattle remain in their barns and the farmers continue to have to feed them with the remains of last summer’s silage, or else expensive bought-in food.

Elsewhere, in the crop-growing areas of the country, autumn-sown crops are water-logged, if not actually under water, and the ground is far too wet and cold for spring ploughing and sowing. After a year of exceptionally bad weather the situation for many farmers is becoming desperate.

We take it for granted that when we need food we can go to the shops and find everything we need, at a price we can afford to pay. As we fill our trolleys this weekend, let’s spare a thought for the farmers and their problems and be grateful that they don’t just give up on what must often seem like a very unequal struggle.

Postscript  HERE and HERE are two news items from the BBC website, showing the devastating impact the deep snow and continuing cold are having on livestock and crop farmers around the country.

Image courtesy of the BBC website

A glimpse of the sun….

….and doesn't it make a difference!  The tightly-furled daffodil buds from the posies I was given at church on Mothering Sunday have finally unfolded their petals and yesterday the evening sun made them glow in their full glory. The sun may have vanished again today, but the daffodils are still there, brightening not only the kitchen but my spirits.

Another thing which gave me a huge lift over the weekend was the news that DD shared with us on Saturday. As I mentioned in one of my earliest posts, about 4 years ago, at the grand old age of 38, she began to learn the saxophone. How she finds time to practice in her exceptionally busy life I do not know, but find time she does and to such good effect that she has just passed her Grade 6 exam in classical saxophone with distinction, achieving the very rare accolade of full marks in one of her pieces!

This news made not only my day but my week, so this clip is for her, with my love.

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

Oh joy, Oh rapture!

Anyone who watches TV in Britain can hardly miss the plethora of property programmes extolling the pleasures of escaping the pressures of the city and moving to live in the country. What they somehow fail to mention are the inevitable downsides of living in remote places, far from the services taken for granted in more populated areas.

I’ve yet to notice anyone talking about what to do when your well runs dry or your broadband slows to a trickle and, more pertinently for us at the moment, what to do when you discover to your horror that the drain to your septic tank is blocked and there’s no Dynarod service just round the corner!  Yes, there are firms who will come and help you out – at a price - but they are miles away and often not available when you really need them.

All this explains why DH and I, instead of taking advantage of this week’s lovely spring-like weather to work in the garden, have been forced to don our wellies and oldest clothes and sally forth into the field behind the house armed with picks, shovels and drain-rods to do battle with a recalcitrant drain.

After much prodding and cursing we’ve located the problem and tomorrow, with the help of our farmer neighbour and his digger, we will hopefully  solve it, but in the meantime I’m aching from head to toe with the unaccustomed hard labour and realising that I really am not as young as I was.

Now I’m off to put my feet up and relax with my knitting (this time birthday socks for DD) leaving you to enjoy one of my very favourite comic sketches. If only DH and I had had the Two Ronnies to help us, we’d have found the problem in a trice. J

Grrrrr!

As those who know me in the flesh would tell you, now that I’m happily retired and no longer trying to do three things at once, I’m usually reasonably  laid-back and good at taking life as it comes.  Of course I get angry about the big things, like injustice and corruption and the mess we’re making of our wonderful planet, but I don’t often get irritated by the little things nowadays.

However, as the past month has gone on, I’ve become more and more irritated by one particular little thing and that is spam. Not email spam, as our ISP does a wonderful job of filtering that, but blog spam - those annoying pseudo-comments that have recently been cluttering up my blog.

In the past Blogger’s spam filter has worked well and I've been able to carry on happily without the dreaded word verification I find so hard to decipher and without needing to use comment moderation. However this new wave of spam seems to be much more sophisticated and able to fool Blogger’s filtering system, with the result that I’m having to clear spam messages from my blog on a very regular basis.

Being a stubborn old biddy, I still refuse to put word verification on my blog, but I have reluctantly switched on comment moderation for all posts more than 10 days old. I also make sure that all comments are emailed to me, not just the moderated ones, so that I can go to my dashboard and mark them as spam, rather than simply deleting them from the comments section of my blog.

This, I gather, is known as training the spam filter and it’s not the way I would choose to spend my time. Knitting socks is much more fun and DH and I have warm feet at the end of it, but a spamless blog is also a worthwhile objective , so I will do what it takes to achieve it. That won’t stop me grinding my teeth with annoyance just a little, as I do my bit to frustrate the spammers. Let’s hope my dentist doesn’t notice......

Postscript

In her comment Annie at knitsofacto gave two excellent tips which I think deserve to be more easily found by those engaged in the battle against spam:

1.       Never leave the spam comments on a post. Just having links in place on a legitimate site gives the spammers legitimacy.  

2.      A quick scan of those comments the spam filter does pick up is all that's then necessary before deleting them. If you just look at the end of the comments, phrases like 'my site' are a dead giveaway that you're looking at spam.

 Image via Google