Saturday Thoughts

When I discuss village life on this forum, I try very hard NOT to make the place sound saccharine and unreal.........Words sometimes can belie your true meaning of a situation....and I know I can sound a little “Pollyanna-ish” on occasion, but that is not my intention I can assure you.
Today I am remembering those small actions of thoughtfulness that occur when your life rubs alongside that of others in a small community. This week I was presented with a large bunch of dahlias from a neighbour after I made an off the cuff remark about how stunning they were waving in the back of her garden and a couple of days before that we were given a lovely apple pie by a lady who I had given some fruit to at the allotment open.( funnily enough she made a point for me not to mention her name on the “blog”)
Yesterday an elderly couple made the effort to call around to give me a teaching session on how to re design the back garden flower beds (I have a tendency to over-plant Everything) and I have not even started to describe the flurry of little packages of stale bread, pasta, old fruit for Boris and plastic bags full of egg cartons that are left with regularity on the cottage wall without ceremony.
There is one main reason why these small kindnesses occur ( apart from me being a lovely person tee hee) and that is time. I luckily have the time in this modern, rushed and frenetic world to interact with people within the village, and that others that work full time, just do not have the opportunity to do what I have the privilege to do.
Ok, I will also concede that I do make the effort with people also... and small kindnesses on my part, do go a long way........but generally I have learnt that a change from the modern hysteria of "getting things done" has opened up the positives of social interaction and barter.

I am working nights tonight and with the stupid change of when weekdays start at work ( they now start on a Sunday) I will be working all of next weekend...so today we will perhaps go out for lunch.

I harvested my artichokes yesterday which I steamed for a starter last night, and they were lovely! Artichokes for tea....very grown up!

The news is full of the Pope's visit......and although I am pretty ambivalent about him in general, I do hope that he has a positive visit.... The Vatican's vocal and outdated views on homosexuality leaves me absolutely cold and means that I effectively have turned my back on what else the Roman Catholic Church has to say.. To me Pope Benedict has experienced all of the problems that Kate Winslet faces with her reinvention of Joan Crawford's much loved role of Mildred Pierce.... he has stepped into the Papal slippers of the saintly and humble Pope John Paul........and to many he will always resemble a poor second.

I wonder what PR staff the Vatican employs?

ps. A lady left me a huge bunch of quail eggs yesterday....20 are now in the incubator!!!

Notes at 3.20am

I have no trouble sleeping as a rule.
We. like most couples have our own routine, and it is a routine which has become fixed and unchanging over the years.
Chris likes to retire early and will read before sleep. He and George will creep off to bed together, a treat which George absolutely loves, and the cottage is always filled with the scottie calls of "arrrrwwwwoooooo" when George rubs himself excitedly over the duvet and eiderdown when he has Chris' attention all to himself.

The Welsh terriers remain with me downstairs, and unfortunately both have now gotten into the habit of clambering onto the bed in the wee small hours after I retire , a thing which creates some logistical problems when you want to turn over,or even go to the toilet in the middle of the night.
Last night I was forced awake by some rather nasty breath wafting into my face. It was Meg looking earnestly right at me. As usual she had climbed onto the bed, commando style and had assumed her usual position effectively separating me from Chris. Now for those that don't know, Meg has a hero fixation on me, she cannot be out of my sight for the shortest of times ( and will even follow me to the toilet) , a habit which can be a little cloying at times.
Now I usually cope with this infatuation very well, but I must say that before last night's bed reunion she had been indulging herself in her one and only nasty habit! she had been eating her own poo!
It was all a little too much..this poo breath! , so I squeezed myself from under the duvet William, George AND Albert and sneaked downstairs to make myself a cup of tea. It was 3.20 am.
Now, I don't usually have the luxury of sitting in silence with nothing really to do in the middle of the night, and I found it a rather interesting experience.
All houses have a sound, and an atmosphere of their own at night. Unlike our old Victorian terrace in Sheffield, the cottage does not creak and groan when it settles down in the early morning. The only noises that you can make out here is the howl of the wind around the eaves, the faint buzz of the fridge in the kitchen and the very faint "pad,pad, pad" from Albert as he stalks back and forth from Kitchen to bedroom the rest of the time...there is silence.
Your mind can wander at these times and I got to thinking about all of the previous owners that preceded us since the cottage was first built in the late 1700s. Who were they? what did they do for a living? and were they happy?
The cottage , years ago had a tiny byre for a couple of cows and a pig sty located in front of the orchard; at another time it was thought to be some sort of tiny tavern and at another period had some connection to the Church way back in the far and dim distant past: I resolved myself, this morning, to find out all I can about the cottage's previous tenants and owners and to document all I can about the history of the place.
Anyhow, Meg with her toilet breath and her sad needy eyes finally joined me in the living room and we trouped back to bed to face the gauntlet of bodies on the duvet yet again. It was well past 4am when the whistling of the wind lulled me to sleep

I am not downhearted

honest.....( see next blog)

Mildred Pierce RIP

This morning I counted all of the animals out of the coops and all were present with the exception of one old hen.

Mildred Pierce, one of my original birds had been fading for quite a few weeks now.

She had "gone light" months ago and her belligerent manner ( put down to the fact she had been practically bald after a particularly bad moult three years ago) had mellowed somewhat by infirmity.

Recently she had spent her days alone in the turkey enclosure and I thought it only a matter of time before she tottered away to the big chicken coop in the sky.

Obviously she had been taken by the fox either during the day or after her death amongst the tussocks and hedges of the lower field.There would be no feathers to mark her death.. she didn't have any!!!!.

Out of my original 12 hens bought several yeas ago now, only Whoopie Goldberg and Colleen Nolan survive...

Below is Winnie the Gander with his beautiful Paul Newman eyes....... he is watching me lock the hens up at duck through the wondow of his goose house... and does so every single night

National Fear

I am sick to the back teeth, hearing about this recession that we are in. The media seems to be whipping up more anxiety and fear amongst the retail sector and every radio talk show, the BBC news and newspaper report screams of public sector cuts and job losses.
We are living in a time of fear
Our local health Trust has over 70 million to cut from it's budgets at the same time that our Intensive care Unit is being revamped and enlarged....I guess my job ( all 11.5 hours a week of it all) is therefore safe, but who indeed knows just where things will go.
What I am beginning to dislike (in addition to this media hysteria) is that because of the fearfulness of job cuts, people are putting up with bad managerial behaviour and poor HR support, a phenomenon that I am am sure some managers are taking advantage of.

Trade unions ( with perhaps the exception of the RMT(National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers) led by the bullish Bob Crow) remain impotent, so I am sure that some employers, under the guise of recession worries, are taking the opportunity to take advantage....

The media frenzy of reporting bad news is not helped by the creeping sense of doom that pervades tv advertising......every few minutes we see adverts for compensation solicitors (you get 100% of all costs!!!!!!!-they shriek!) offers of money by selling your spare ( spare?) gold jewelry and old mobile phones and there is even an embarrassed Barbara Windsor dressed up as a panto queen plugging the virtues of on line Bingo. (money for nothing?)

sigh....what can we do about all this? well we cannot ignore the economic mess that the country is in, nor should we reject certain cost cutting initiatives but I think there should be a national kind of therapy for everyone in these times of doom, doom and more doom.....

In the old days the Country's monarch would be the centre for some sort of celebration.......( I would love a street party).......and today our communities need something similar, to repair our fragmented and selfish society......Community events are sometimes seen as twee or intensely "middle class" but I think that they are vital in cementing relationships outside the home.......

The older I get, the more I really believe this.

A mouse Tale

Some people find blogging all a bit strange and I guess they could be right....however I ask everyone to go over to Lauren's blog and read this sweet little story about a baby mouse... it kind of gets under the radar

http://scratchandpeck.blogspot.com/2010/09/compact-life.html

The Ghosts and Mrs Muir

Cinema Buffs will understand this.......but the Ghost Hens' new companion has been named....and what else could I call her but Mrs Muir.....

House Watching

Autumn is here
Last night I lit the log burner after the chill from the sea made me wear a coat when I locked up the girls for the night. As the wind increased in the Churchyard elms and the drop in temperature brought Albert in from his nocturnal exploits early to lie in front of the fire's warmth I realised that summer is over after what seems like only a few minutes and winter will be soon with us. The cottage looked bright and strong against the elements when I took the dogs out for their evening walk as the rain set in for the night and the whole scene reminded me again of an illistration from Anne of Green Gables or perhaps even Candleford..
The cottage always looks at its best at night.
I love looking through the front windows from the road at the two rooms that are our living room and bedroom. Both are lit, with the subdued lighting of standard lamps, which make the 1930's decor and furnishings
look just right in front of the fire and inglenook fireplace.

From the lane, I can see clearly our much loved grandfather clock, the watercolours on the wall and the old green door that I hung myself between living room and kitchen.
The regency swirl hand rail of the staircase can just been seen in front of the cottage door and I love the fact that the bookcase that I designed in the bedroom is on full view laden with books and photographs.......The whole scene looks exactly like I wanted it to....it looks quaint, and old and cosy.
Room watching was one of my guilty passions when I lived in Sheffield. At 10pm me and Finlay used to go for our evening walk around the terraced houses of Hillsborough and I used to love the fact that when he went for a wee I would be able to cop a glance at the décor, design and lifestyle of the house that we had stopped at.

Now I was not a voyeur in the pervert definition of the word ( I would always look away if anyone was sat watching tv in their front room)..... but I was certainly a kind of style pervert! ( In the truest gay definition!)
I loved seeing what wallpaper was placed with what sofa...what accessories went with what occasional table and I used to delight ( in that awful snobby but enjoyable way) when I came across a front room with stripy wallpaper and a bloody awful dado rail that shrieked COMMON!! It was like living in my very own production of REAR WINDOW
We used to live next door to my waspish blog commentator Bel Ami......I used to love looking in his window when Fin and I returned home......mind you it was only because he has a wonderful pair of Clarice Cliff jugs on the window ledge!!!

Memories eh?