An egg in a pocket

 

Autumn photos from the canal and a couple of great reads from last month. I particularly enjoyed reading 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' around Hallowe'en time, it's deliciously dark. I have moved on to 'Fourth Wing' now, one of those books I am reading to see what all the fuss is about/so as not to miss out. I'm enjoying it so far.

I made miso and surprisingly it has been an absolute triumph. It matured for ages and I'd sort of forgotten about it or assumed it wouldn't be anything to write home about, but it's fabulous. As good as professional miso! I have loads of it, so I'm hoping it will keep. In the meantime, I'm making lots of soup and aiming to boost everyone' immune systems - they've been bringing various viruses home from school on a regular basis.

I have a new washing machine, which plays Schubert's "The Trout" at the end of a cycle which I am told may be some complex metaphor for being trapped by doing the washing. One of its first tasks was to wash an egg out of a pocket.

Someone gave the littlest boy a freshly laid egg which he was intending to cook for his breakfast the following day. This was around lunchtime. He put it in his pocket (I KNOW) and wandered around with it in there ALL DAY. He even flopped down on his bed and still it was fine. 

In the end he plunged his hand into his pocket to put his ear buds away and that was the end of it. Me and the middle boy have not got over our amazement that he could carry an egg around for as long as that without breaking it.

I am in the middle of doing NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month at the moment. It's challenge where you aim to write 50,000 words in a month, which isn't generally a whole novel, but it's nice start. I am all on track so far, even a couple of days ahead in fact. I do love writing a first draft, but the editing bit is a strain. 

When I am not writing (which is my day job as well), I am looking out the window at the wildlife. Lots of long-tailed tits appear sometimes, right outside of the window. A squirrel came looked right in the other day as well. Good job the dog didn't spot it. Still no hedgehog though. There was a dead one on the green the other day which was sad. Someone told me that they eat pumpkin and it can kill them.

So I may be adding unattended pumpkin to the things that I am opposed to now, which already includes fireworks and Christmas. Well, more of the packaging/landfill side of Christmas, you know what I mean. But I worry that it makes me a Grinch and that the list is getting longer.

I hope all is well at your end and that you haven't been too badly battered by wind and rain. CJ xx

Of butterflies and moths

A little more Wales, which seems like a while ago now. A storm moved in and whipped up waves on the lake. The castle is Conwy Castle, built between 1283 and 1287. I can't imagine how, it's completely amazing. The old town walls are apparently some of the finest and most complete in Europe and are part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I'd love to visit in winter when it's quiet and have a really good look round.

At the moment I've been enjoying the warm evenings, walking about the place with the dog as the sun sets. Windows are thrown open to try and capture a breath of air and lights are on as the evenings draw in. It's been lovely, although the afternoons have been a bit hot for my taste and I do love regular rain keeping everything green.

On the subject of green, let's talk about box moths. I don't know if it's the same across the country, but they have absolutely devastated box hedges here. There has been a little damage over the past couple of years, but this year, oh my. Below is a box ball a few weeks into the summer.

The other ten or so I have were in similar shape. Then in a matter of days, they were like this:

Shall we take a look at the culprit?

There must be hundreds of thousands of them. Big box hedges have been reduced to straw, it's astonishing. There were around eight box moths in the bathroom the other evening. 

I have ordered some yew plants to replace the box, but they'll take a while to grow. In the meantime I have quite a few empty pots. 

I've added a few acers and ferns though, which should be nice when they're bigger. I do like lots of green shady stuff. The back of the house faces south, so I put the shady stuff along the east-facing fence where it's not too brutally sunny. I have a prized acer at the moment (prized by me, probably not to anyone else, it's not exactly spectacular, but I have high hopes) and I am moving it round during the day to keep it out of the sun. 

Something that has surprised me is that a cloud of butterflies has turned up to feed on the ripe figs. There are a handful that are too high up to pick, and I have had red admirals fluttering around them every day, it's been lovely. No pictures, they've been too high up, but I do have a gatekeeper for you. 

I have also tackled the pond, which is a non-favourite job. Although the anticipation is worse than the actual job. Once I've got a grip of myself and plunged my hands into the murky depths it's quite satisfying. The frogs and newts have more space to swim about now that most of the waterlily and weed have been removed.

Not much news at the moment. I am working hard now the urchins are back at school and learning as much as I can about writing and self-publishing in my spare time. And also cooking the mountain of windfall apples that I have this year. I thought about getting a dehydrator and making apple rings, but I'm trying not to eat too much sugar. Although of course cooked apple has exactly the same amount of sugar, so I don't know where my logic is on that. 

I've noticed that People can be quite slow to take a homegrown apple out of the fruit bowl if it has a blemish on it. I usually have to rant at them a bit to persuade them. Ridiculous, because they taste sublime. Luckily ranting is one of my strengths.

Hope all is well at your end and that you have apples and butterflies aplenty. I'd be interested to know if box moths are as common and have done as much damage where you are. CJ xx

As wise as David Beckham

 

Photos from a week in beautiful North Wales. How fast a summer week flies by. How fast a whole summer flies by in fact. There has been walking and kayaking and rock climbing and surfing. The dog went on a boat, which he hated, as did another less portable dog. He also found the kayaking very stressful and stayed in the lake too long trying to keep everyone together and got cold and shivery.

Other major shocks included sheep strolling about the streets, a hang glider dropping out of the sky i front of him and the above goat, which was larger than it looks in the picture. I persuaded the dog to edge a bit closer for a photo and we both jumped out of our skins when it had a huge snorty sneeze. 

On the home front, I have been tackling a couple of enormous evergreens this evening. It's one of those jobs that I started on a whim and may live to regret. Now I have a couple of enormous evergreens with a giant chunk cut out of the sides and more green waste than I know what to do with. The inside of the trees is very brown and dry. Fire hazard dry. The trees are overhanging the new neighbour's garden, but it turns out they like trees and are quite happy with them, so I'm trimming rather than removing. At the moment the trees are winning.

When we moved in, they were small and manageable. Somehow they have romped away when I wasn't looking. But the pigeons love nesting in them each year and the smaller birds like to look for insects in there, so they are quite nice to have. They look vastly better from upstairs, where you are eyeball to eyeball with the birds and it's like being in a nest.

The littlest boy, who incidentally is now 15 and taller than me, has been making me laugh. He absolutely loves a treasure hunt and suggested I hide his phone and give him a clue/riddle as to where it was. I could immediately see the problem with that plan, in the event that he didn't find it straightaway, so I gave him an easy clue. I hid it next to an owl and said, A wise one can help you. 

After things degenerated and got a bit tantrummy I helped him a bit by asking him what word he immediately thought of when I said 'wise'. Oh my. He did not immediately think of 'owl'. In fact he did not think of owl at all and things got even more tense. Some of his guesses were 'bread' and 'David Beckham'. Suffice to say he has very different thought processes to me. And probably to the rest of the world. I gave the clue to a brother in the end who found the phone in ten seconds flat.

Another conversation that made me laugh involved a mention of Leonard Cohen. Littlest boy: Was that the bloke that invented the spud gun? In case you were wondering, it wasn't. I did check, in case he knew something that I didn't and LC had put it together in an idle moment in between writing songs and wrestling with poetry.

Any wisdom at your end? I do hope so. CJ xx

Elephants in the garden

 

Photos from an afternoon garden tour at Highgrove House. For overseas peeps, that's the King's country home. And very nice it was too. I booked it ages ago, assuming as I always do that at some distant future date I would somehow have spare time to go swanning around country estates. And of course when it actually came around to it I didn't really, but I went anyway. Work has been busy, busy, busy lately, and I rarely take an afternoon off, so it was lovely.

The guide told us that the garden 'wasn't manicured', and it was really refreshing to see the odd thing that had been nibbled or an apple tree that looked a bit like mine. Apparently the King doesn't much like stuff to be cut back either, so there are lots of climbing plants over the house that aren't to be touched.

The pictures are from outside the private gardens, with no photos allowed inside. You can see inside here though. 

I left with a really good feeling about my own scruffy not-always-productive garden, which was nice. I imagine if I went to the Chelsea Flower Show I'd get home and look at my patch and be a bit despondent. But Highgrove was very encouraging. Let it all grow! It's all brilliant, let's just see what comes up etc. The wildflower meadow had faded this late into the season, but there were still lots of butterflies. 

Takeaways were:

1. Don't give up on the olive tree (mine had some sort of leaf problem and I was thinking about composting it)

2. More wildflowers - keep going and just see what comes up every year

3. Yew always looks amazing

4. Keep planting thyme - theirs hadn't done very well, so they were replanting

5. A group of life-sized elephants on the grass is absolutely the way to go

I bought a little salvia to go with my (small) collection, none of which are doing very well at the moment for some reason. I suspect some old potting compost might have been to blame, so I've repotted.

I've been loving the showers (except yesterday when me and the dog pushed our luck on a long evening walk and had to stand under some plum trees for about 15 minutes to avoid a deluge). The local authority have planted lots of saplings and they were struggling in the dry weather, so it has been nice to seem them well-watered and perking up nicely.

In other news it is of course perilously close to the end of term. As above, I always imagine I will somehow magically have time off, only to take on a load of work at the last minute. But the urchins are fairly self-sufficient and don't generally need to be taken to the seaside or to see the goat at the garden centre any more. 

I am knowing my limits this year and not pretending I will accomplish all sorts of amazing summer things, such as fantastic trips, arts and crafts projects, minor garden construction (raised beds, hedgehog house refurbishment and insect hotels), working through the To Be Read pile, decluttering and award-winning cuisine. You can see I haven't even thought about it.

How is everything at your end? I hope summer (or winter) is chugging along nicely. CJ xx

Tranquility, and the magnificence that is Patricia

 

Photos from a glorious day by the canal with the middle boy, who wanted to go fishing. We were out pretty much from sunrise to sunset. He caught a pike while I pottered around taking photos and reading about canal history.

It's fascinating. Take this pill box for example:

It is one of a ring of around 260 pill boxes forming a protective circle, known as Stop Line Green, around Bristol and the port of Avonmouth, to try and prevent German forces from approaching from the east in the Second World War. It was also to defend the factory there, which was a ghost factory, ready to take over munitions production if another factory was bombed. Scary times indeed. The pill box is unusual in that it is two storeys high, rather than just one, and has what is believed to be an anti-aircraft placement on top.

The factory was in an old cloth mill, originating from the late 1400s. Lots of history down on the canal, I'm telling you.

The bit I liked best was called 'The Ocean':

Not exactly ocean-sized, but very pretty. No-one knows exactly why it's called The Ocean - maybe a touch of sarcasm. Or maybe because back in the day it was as near to an ocean as the yokels got.

I also read about how a railway bridge over the canal has just been rebuilt after they drained a stretch of the canal, moving fish and everything. The wildlife has reappeared now the water is back. A kingfisher flew right past me and I saw a buzzard right overhead and a greater spotted woodpecker in a tree. A family of swans spent the day drifting up and down a pretty stretch of the water. All in all a good day out. I even managed to stay calm(ish) when the fish was caught. You will be happy to know it was released again and no-one was bitten.

The old manor house behind the wall with the grass and the bench (ate my sandwiches there) is Stonehouse Court and dates back to 1601. In fact the estate is mentioned in the Domesday book. The church next to it (the photo with the weeping willow) dates back originally to the 1200s, but the building that is there now was started in the 1400s.

Panning out, there was a glorious barge in the canal next to Stonehouse Court called Patricia. I know you'll want to see her...

Magnificent, no? Who knew you could get a JCB boat?

In other news I am ignoring both the World Cup and Christmas. There is almost nothing positive about the former and the latter is just annoying and generally an eco-disaster.

I've been enjoying the early sunsets and the cosy winter feeling. While simultaneously trying to hold back with the heating :) Tricky isn't it. I do so love the countryside in winter. All that cold clean sky and pretty cottages with lighted windows in the dusk. 

Do you think it's time to put sunflower seeds out for the birds? They naturally dispersed in spring so I stopped feeding them, like they do at the wetlands place. But I feel it might be time to start up again.

I'm also contemplating getting a crab apple tree for wildlife. Although I never see birds actually eating crab apples. Maybe that's because I am always walking past the tree at the time. I have pretty much persuaded myself anyway. They are very pretty almost all year round. I would want one with small berry-sized (bird-bite-sized) crab apples for the birds I think. 

I am still waiting for a hedgehog. Well, there could actually be one in the hedgehog house but I don't like to look in case there is and I disturb it. I think the rat is still living under next-door's decking though. Bertie has a good sniff around on a regular basis and he should know with his super-spaniel nose. I am not fussy about wildlife, a rat will do nicely for now. 

All okay at your end? Ignoring anything? Got a hedgehog?