Oh, My Days!

There is only one thing Halloween means to me and that is memories of being scared witless by these when I was a small child... In fact, when I found this image on the internet, after typing '1970s animal mask' into a search engine, my heart skipped a beat when it popped up. These masks - I remember there was a chimpanzee and a giraffe, too - were issued to us school children at this time of year as part of the 'fun and jollities' of Hallowe'en and Bonfire Night combined. Or Guy Fawkes Night as I more rightly remember it, which was a way bigger thing back in the 70s than Hallowe'en. Guy Fawkes Night I enjoyed. It meant building a huge bonfire on the field of my grandparents' farm, having a few fireworks, and eating baked potatoes and tomato soup in the dark. THAT was fine. It was the masks I hated. I still don't like masks. To me, there is something sinister and deceitful in the wish to voluntarily hide one's face from view. I guess, probably...

When was the last time you wore a vest? Yesterday? Last week? As soon as the Autumn chill set in? Do you ALWAYS wear a vest, no matter what ‘coz no one is going to catch YOU out, no way, no how? Or like me, back in the mid-70s as soon as you left primary school, because no-one wears a VEST to secondary school, right? Let me tell you, my dear friends, this morning was the first day I have considered vest wearing since 1973. A combination of the first overnight frost of this Autumn plus a blanket of freezing fog made me feel the chill right to my bones as I headed up the garden to feed the hens and stupid cockerels. This is it, I thought. I am officially on the edge of old lady territory. I am heading into the ‘vulnerable person’s’ danger zone. You know, when health agencies and the news give out warnings to groups of people who are at risk if they do certain things like overheat, eat raw eggs, catch ‘flu, GET TOO COLD! This Group of Vulnerability almost certainly involves small childr...

Today is St. Crispin’s Day. He is the patron saint of shoemakers, or cobblers if you can avoid being confused with the edible type of cobbler. Gosh, we haven’t had a cobbler for dinner in ages. If only I had the requisite ingredients in the freezer. I can manage the cobble bit on the top - flour, butter, milk and cheese. But the bit that lies beneath? Poor freezer pickings today, I’m afraid, unless I can be the inventor of the Spinach, Pea and Ginger cobbler. Now there’s a hideous thought. Anyway, back to St Crispin. Shoemakers, or cobblers, celebrate with goodly doses of alcohol which could explain the invention of the Croc. There are dubious rhymes to be had that recognise the carousing that takes place. For example: ‘The twenty fifth of October, Cursed be the cobbler who goes to bed sober.’ Or: ’Now shoemakers will have a Frisken All in honour of St Crispin.’ Take your pick. They are both terrible and not a patch on the song I’ve just made up for Day 5 of the Christmas S...

Yesterday afternoon. One almighty ‘CRACK!’ against the kitchen door window drew me to investigate. I peer through the window and see this... ...a sparrowhawk, sitting on the back door step, and a pigeon, looking rather stunned.  Well! It all happens here, doesn’t it! You can see what happened for yourselves, and I know I shouldn’t have intervened with Nature and all that rubbish, but firstly, I wasn’t going to have a bloody murder committed before my eyes on my own back door step, and secondly, I like to think that Fate has deemed this encounter to happen under our noses in order that the pigeon be saved.  The sparrowhawk flew off as soon as we opened the back door. The pigeon did a flappy hobble to the safety of a peppermint patch by the patio doors which I had cut back earlier this year only to see it spring forth again with new growth. Anyway, Pigeon settled itself into the minty undergrowth and we let it be for a while to hopefully recover. Half an hou...

Who knew that choosing a floor lamp could be such a mine field of decision making? Actually, I had already decided what I wanted but could I find it? Could I chuff. I wanted wood, upright and straight but maybe with a bit of simple carving on it, not too expensive, and I didn’t mind if the wood was painted. But not grey. Obvs. However, la mode for floor lamps these days seems to be either tall spindly metal jobbies with teeny tiny pinhead shades or efforts on tripods, whose legs spread soooooo far apart one would need to extend one’s modest living room before purchase in order to accommodate the unwieldy thing. Either that or the TV would have to go to make room in the Dark Alcove, and I can imagine the howls of protest THAT would bring from the quarters of His Lordship Malarkey. I scoured around several websites for an hour or so this morning - all the usual High Street suspects like John Lewis, Dunelm, Ikea, Homebase, B & Q, Next, Wilkos etc - then some of the online only sho...

Readers will be THRILLED to know that with barely 6 weeks to go, I have settled on the subject matter of this year’s Traditional and Annual Christmas Story. Phew! In fact, so settled am I, that I have started writing it and for the first time in EVER I am almost 3,000 words ahead of the game instead of playing my usual game of arriving at the eve of 1st December with little more than a few notes scribbled on a scrap of paper which will inevitably get itself lost and/or chewed by one or more cats on the look out for a game of ‘Shred the Paper.’ It’s all this time I have, you see - when it isn’t disrupted by annoying shizzle like having to be a teacher, it can be filled with the gloriousness of doing things one loves, like writing. My dilemma now is do I have a go at this year’s NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month - which is fast approaching in the form of November? The challenge is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I’ve done it twice before - once with ‘Poulet Nous, the Race to S...

Lovely weather this morning, so I got into the garden and did a couple of hours of leaf sweeping, weeding and pruning. I shall admit I have fallen a little out of love with gardening of late, mostly I think because I am madly in love with writing and also because of the recent rain which has turned areas of the garden into a spongy, claggy mudfest. However, attention is required so I told myself sternly to ‘get out there NOW and do stuff’ and a jolly two hours were spent in the sun! Starting with the Sisyphean task of Leaf Sweeping 2019, I soon got into a goodly swing with the leaf rake. We have 31 trees in the garden and they are all beginning to shed leaves like there is some kind of leaf shedding championship going on. It’ll get worse before it gets better as the leaf shedding season is but still young, but I am determined to keep ahead of the job this year because last year (when I was still teaching full time) I drowned under piles of leaves during the rare dry weekend moments I...

Firstly, I am pleased to report that my Mum (aged 79 and three quarters) underwent a very successful hip replacement yesterday and when I called the ward, the nurse I spoke to said that Mum was currently sitting up in a chair eating dinner and having a cup of tea. And that she had been walking around with the aid of a Zimmer frame (Mum would NOT have liked that, but would have done as she was told) and had been to the toilet, which I thought was too much information but necessary to know, I suppose, given how fixated hospital wards are about bodily evacuation habits. The nurse also went on to say, ‘She’s a jolly little thing, isn’t she?’ which immediately went in my book of ‘Phrases To Cherish and Remember’ and which I shall repeat back to Mum when she goes off on one of her rants about the state of the world/ people/ Maidstone town centre/ the garden. Later, I got to chat with her face to face via the magic that is FaceTime on my brother’s phone when he visited her. And she looked...

This is me, perambulating the grounds of Damson Cottage in the morning, accompanied by a leonine  Bambino Bobble Wilson and Flora Bijou Mybug disguised as a cute likkle lambkin... I jest, of course. The cats are house cats and I'd never wander about in our garden dressed like that at the moment because all the rain has rendered the ground very claggy and can you imagine the EFFORT it would take to get the mud out of the hem of that frock? Nope, jeans and wellies are the order of the day. Folklore, though, declares that if today, 16th October, remains rain-free, then next Spring will be dry. It's not looking hopeful, folks. The painting is, in fact, called 'Una and the Lion'  and it was used on the British £5 gold coin that was minted to depict Her Maj Queen Victoria at the start of her reign. Lots of Victorian imagery there - lions = strength and bravery, lambs = innocence, bucolic scenery = wasn't England going to be FABULOUS under the reign of ...

Not exactly sure why but I've been feeling the urge to blog about my paternal Gran. Although she died just before Christmas 1986, I think she is ‘around’ at the moment, in spirit if you like, keeping me on the straight and narrow regarding using my time wisely, resting a calming hand on my shoulder, because she was a no nonsense, always busy sort of lady herself. This is her... She is the one on the right of the photo (doh!) which was taken by me in 1974 with my first ever Kodak camera. The man standing next to her is my Grandad. They were the best of grandparents. They must have been in around 60 years old here and I remember the door they are standing in front of was their coal house. Here is a photo of me (aged around 6 months old) in front of the very same door. I have been placed in Ringo the Poodle’s dog basket. For comic effect or to keep me still? Who knows? Anyway, I don’t have many things to remind me of my Gran - a few photos, and a couple of bits I man...

I’m putting it down to being middle aged and therefore entitled to get iffy about things (training, if you like, for full-blown awkwardness when I am an old lady), but the other week I had a proper antsy moment about mugs. We had a rush of visitors and during the many tea, coffee, biscuits and cake rituals my favourite mug was being bandied around various guests and never once made it my way. And it was then that I realised how irrationally possessive I have become over my favourite mug. This is insane talk, I know. The mug arrived chez nous a few years ago as a birthday gift for Andy but he never used it so I adopted it because I discovered it was jolly lovely from which to drink tea. This is it... ...a hedgehog! Anyway, this mug became my mug of choice and this is the mug that was being pimped around various guests because His Lordship Malarkey is very good at saying, ‘I’ll make drinks,’ and bolting to the sanctuary of the kitchen leaving me with the hostess chat when we hav...

Working from home I have come to realise how often the 'phone rings during the day. When I say 'phone', I mean one of these... ...which the younger generations find a) hilarious and b) confusing. They might find one of these even more hilarious and confusing... ...but this was the style of phone I remember from my childhood in the 60s and 70s. Added to that, we had a party (shared) line with my grandparents who lived across the road and sometimes you would pick up the receiver to make a call and hear someone on the party line, so you'd replace the receiver gently (no, you would NOT listen in to the conversation!) and try again later. Can you imagine that situation these days, when people are so impatient and want everything to happen NOW? Sheesh. Young people don't know they are born, do they, with their mobile contraptions glued to their hands 24/7, everything happening in the instant? It seems to be an increasingly rare thing, too, to have a landlin...

Since I decided that being a Writer is the work of my destiny (albeit unpaid) I have been putting in the hours, and then some. I’ve been getting up each day and preparing for a day at work like I did back in the teaching days. Sitting down at my desk at 8.30 sharp, taking an hour for lunch (different from my teaching days when we were allowed 17 and a half minutes, so an hour is BLISS and also excellent for the digestion), then finishing at 5 to start preparing the evening meal. And after dinner I’ve been going back to writerly activities such as background reading, research, idea development and editing. Yesterday, after a considerable amount of editing and deleting and rootling through piles and files of writing I have started across the years and not finished, I have decided that a novel (currently in infancy at 18,000 words) featuring a character called Minerva Thing, is calling to be completed. I am very fond of Minerva Thing. She was born in the café that is situated above th...

I'll be honest with you - I've not been paying much attention to the news these days because it has been getting on my Right Royal Wick. There is always something hideous going on which is always someone else's fault, and people are sniping at each other, verbally and physically, and according to this book I've just read, it's all the fault of Facebook and Google... It's an interesting and, at times, thought-provoking read. I waded my way through the tech jargon and took on board the arguments. I sometimes felt the author was grinding a personal axe, but a lot of what he said was pertinent to how our society is changing. He has a proper full blown strop about Donald Trump towards the end, and I hope he feels better for getting THAT out of his system at least. What has caught my half closed news eye, though, is the hoo-ha currently surrounding the Extinction Rebellion movement. This is because a) some of them feel it is a good thing to walk arou...

Stupid news story of the day has to go to one which reported that researchers at the University of Edinburgh have studied children’s books which feature animals with human characteristics and declared that they could give children ‘a distorted image of the natural world and make them biologically illiterate.’ Of course, I did read this in the Daily Mail and, as I am constantly being reminded by my Left-Wing family, friends and colleagues, the Daily Mail is full of shite. However, in the spirit of no longer caring what other people think of my reading habits, nay, what they think of ANY of my habits come to that, I allowed myself ten minutes of indignation and went in search of this... My first ever book! It’s well over 50 years old now and looking a bit tattered through over-cherishing.   But I have kept it because it is a big part of who I am. Inside, you can see the improvements I made to the black and white title page. At aged 3 or 4 years old, I must have thought it rather...

I may have mentioned this before (!) but one of the biggest joys of living here in Damson Cottage is that we have hares for neighbours. We also have Don and Gill, who are not hares, but are very nice neighbours nonetheless, and Don is a whizz with his drain rods when the pipes to Vladimir Poo Tin (the septic tank) back up. They have only done this once since we’ve been here, but get Don to tell you the story about when it happened one Christmas Day back in the ‘80s and you’ll realise just what fun Salopians used to have with drains once they got a couple of bottles of Christmas whiskey inside them. I digress...the hares... About three weeks ago, this little chap/lady started visiting the courtyard... This is a still frame from one of the many videos I’ve taken since. It is the least blurry offering I can make because hares don’t half gallop around. For the last week I have seen the hare EVERY DAY! It is, as Julian and Sandy might say, becoming very bold. Sometimes it lollops ar...