Oh, My Days!

  The experience of being a healing channel triggered in me a fascination for all things ‘alternative.’ I don’t know why everything outside of science and standard medicine is, these days, considered to be ‘alternative’ because once upon a time science was considered to be one nut short of a bowl of muesli, but hey ho - such is the playground of life and all its swings and roundabouts. I digress... ...I set about reading and experimenting and researching all sorts of alternative practises. I dread to think of the money I invested in books and oddments of kit. Luckily, I belonged to a discount book club and I’ve always been one for sniffing out a bargain in a sale. Anyway, I read about EVERYTHING! Some things I read very little about because they immediately struck me as being utterly bonkers and nothing more than a lightly veiled excuse to partake in dodgy substances in order to achieve ‘enlightenment.’ You know, like lots of musicians and artists in the Sixties, who created their work

 Thirty years ago, my sister was ill. Desperately ill. After being failed by both G.P and the local hospital she was, at last, being cared for at University College Hospital in London, on the Adolescent Oncology Unit which is part of the Teenage Cancer Trust. Mum was travelling up and down on the train during Jackie’s chemo sessions, and then bringing her home and nursing her between chemo sessions. My Dad and brother were running the family farm, where I also worked whilst raising my own family and studying for a degree. It was a busy time, full of comings and goings, phone calls, tests, news of test results, trying to keep life as normal as possible in an abnormal situation. I remember it as a blurry rollercoaster of a time.  I also remember feeling a bit helpless. Aside from popping in to see my sister and either chatting rubbish or watching her sleep because she was so exhausted, there wasn’t much I could do apart from try and hang  in there for her. At the time, I was living about

 

 Today at work: 1) We potted on some rosemary cuttings. I almost forgot what I was writing there, which is ironic, given rosemary is the herb of remembrance. During this activity, one of the gang presented me with a worm. We called it ‘George’ and released it into the wild. It shall henceforth be known as ‘Wild George.’ 2) We de-stoned some damsons which had been languishing in the freezer for months. It was a messy job. And it certainly did not look like we had done murder unto someone when we had finished. 3) We washed out a load of pots and trays in preparation for the new gardening season. This is provided the zombie apocalypse doesn’t occur ‘twixt now and April. If it does, I shall be bloody annoyed, because washing out pots and trays is my least favourite of all gardening jobs. I might have strong words to say to the zombies who may, in turn, regret their decision to start their apocalypse. Stupid zombies. 4) We dug up celeriac. I do not like celeriac. It looks too weird for word

 Bloomin’ cold in the countryside this morning. Minus six when I checked the garden thermometer at 7.45 a.m, accompanying a massive frost bomb. Honestly, I thought it had snowed again. Magnus Cockerel was covered in frost but that’s his own stupid fault for insisting on sleeping up a tree every night.  Anyway, I wasn’t going anywhere, so cosy home day faffing around and reading by the fire for me.  His Lordship Malarkey had a busy day yesterday. He fixed the dribbly kitchen tap, for a start. Well, he’d tried to fix it before by dismantling it at least four times and replacing washers of varying types, sizes and styles, but to no avail. Chinese water torture entered our lives. So then he researched drippy taps on the interwebbly, and I consulted my brother who knows about plumbing and heating stuff, and it turns out the culprit was a worn doodah thingummy valve. So a new doodah thingummy valve was duly acquired and the tap it no longer drippeth, which is a sanity saver for us both!  Whe

 I was going to blog yesterday because yesterday was the birthday of this lady... She is Stella Gibbons, and the literature buffs amongst you will know her for writing ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ which is one of the THE best novels EVER! Stella Gibbons is my favourite writer. She is clever, witty, ever so good with satire, observant, a grafter of industrious proportions, and a writing crafter of excellent standard, and I adore her. I especially like this photo of her because she has a proper telephone, a sewing basket near by and is wearing a pair of slippers pretty much identical to a pair worn by my maternal grandmother. She also has a look on her face which says, ‘I wish whoever put that coffee table there would put it back where it belongs, because I know I’m going to crack my shin on it AGAIN if it stays there.’  Stella Gibbons died in 1989. But it was her birthday yesterday. So Happy Birthday, ma’am, and thank you for writing 22 novels and keeping me madly happy with reading them! If I w

 Tinkering about with various things, as one tends to do on wafty, no direction days like New Year’s Day, I found this... It’s the One Penny Savings Challenge! Today, 1st January, you save a penny. Tomorrow, you add 2 pennies to the pot, the following day, 3 pennies, and so on, adding a penny extra every day until 31st December when you add £3.65 because it will be Day 365 of the year. And when you add that £3.65, you will have saved, over the course of the year £667.95! How good is that? Just by adding a penny extra each day, every day.  Well, I thought I’d give it a go. See how far I progress before it becomes a bit of a faff. Of course, what with the development of our increasingly cashless society, the practicalities of using cold hard coinage is immediately causing impracticalities, so what I thought I’d do is, instead of using actual pennies, use something like grains of rice or beads instead, and then when I get to 100, I’d swap them into a pound coin, or 1000, into a tenner.  A