At last! Since my last blog entry I have been on holiday, and it has somehow changed my sleeping pattern. We spent two weeks touring the southern part of England, visiting sites of interest, both historical and natural. Day after gruelling day was spent climbing hills and walking cliffs. All this physical activity resulted in early bedtimes with more than nine hours sleep a night. There were no late nights or waking early and writing, I was just too tired. Since returning home, we’ve been busy with gardening and housework but it’s not the same level of physical activity. Nevertheless, I’ve found myself flagging in the afternoons and succumbing to the urge to nap. It has meant that I’ve gone to bed well after midnight and slept till nine, missing my early morning writing slot. Yesterday, I put my foot down and forced myself to stay awake through the whole day before going to bed at eleven. The result? I was awake at 06:30 and writing at 07:00. Thank goodness. My urge to write was beginning to wither, like most of the plants in our back garden had done!

Dessicated Stems
During the holiday, we left the house and garden to the tender mercies of our grown-up children. They were given lists of things to do. As we are keen gardeners, they were shown all around our garden and told that the pot plants would need watering while we were away even if it rained, as the foliage shed rainwater, leaving the soil dry. In Cornwall we enjoyed beautiful, sunny days and during conversations with our children, constantly asked about the weather back home. We were assured that it had been raining heavily and everything in the garden was fine. Imagine our horror when we stepped into the back garden to find every container housing a shrivelled, dried-up corpse. A rapid thorough drenching, peppered with harsh words to our house-sitters, resuscitated some of the plants, but for most, we were too late.

Many had been specimen plants we had enjoyed for years; ones that had been protected from the winter’s worst effects, then carefully transplanted, fed and nurtured in anticipation of the beautiful flowers that the summer warmth would tease from frost-damaged stems. Our children stared at the brown sticks in their dried-out pots and endured the harangue we poured on their heads with numb fortitude. While they didn’t understand our fierce disappointment, they felt its sting and offered to buy replacements. We told them that wouldn’t be necessary, that we’d sort everything out and sent them back indoors. Before unpacking the car, before having a cup of tea, before saying hello to the pets, we clipped, pruned and emptied container after container. When all the desiccated corpses had been disposed of, we trooped silently into the house for a well-earned cup of tea.

Did we over-react? In the grand scheme of things, do a few plants really matter? When compared to the health and happiness of loved ones, perhaps not. However, these were our favourites and we had invested a considerable amount of time and energy in them. Some plants can be replaced easily, but others will be very difficult to find. Either way, the containers will now remain empty until next year. It’s a good job we have plenty of flowering plants in the borders to enjoy when looking out the window or having coffee on the back patio with our children; who are now forgiven.

 

Trees
I love looking out at the view from my bedroom window. From there I can see the roofs of the houses in our corner of the village. Dotted between the houses are huge ash trees, smaller hawthorn hedges, garden shrubs and fruit trees, with lines of populars marking the field boundaries in the distance. There is something about large trees that totally enthrals me. I love to watch the wind rippling their leaves and marvel at their majestic height. Some of those trees are older than I am. The tallest have been here for more than a hundred years. They were saplings when most of the surrounding houses were lit with gas lamps. Today, with our electric lighting, computers and superfast broadband, I am aware of our Johnny-come-lately status and their permanence. They give us a visible connection to the distant past. There is also the realisation that long after we humans have vanished from the face of the earth, they will remain. They will colonise blighted landscapes, provide shade for struggling seedlings and in their turn, fall, to make way for a new generation of towering, green giants.

For those who enjoy following my blog, I'm on holiday till the 16th July.

but I'll be back!

 

I think I am an obsessive, someone who concentrates on one or two things to the exclusion of all else, shutting out the rest of the world, focussing on a leaf or an insect and missing the glorious panorama that is life. I am also certain that it makes me stupid, having seen this effect in my working life. If I carry out a limited number of tasks then my appreciation of my surroundings, the way I interact with it, becomes narrow and sterile, making me feel unhappy and stifled. I need more new experiences not less, to be able to function properly.

We are hoping to sell our house and buy a newer, smaller, easier-to-heat property. Every day I check the property pages like an addict looking for a fresh fix. I know this is obsessive behaviour; that I am wasting my time and my life with this daily regime but I still do it. I tell myself off but my hand still moves to the link that shows me the new houses listed that day. It’s not that I need to move, or that moving is all I think about but I do feel a desperate impatience about getting on with the rest of my life. I am a very impatient person. I hate waiting and being dependant on others for what I need to do next. This is strange since I work as a management consultant, helping companies set deadlines and objectives and monitoring their progress. Perhaps it’s because these are their deadlines that I don’t feel the impatience I normally experience when my own deadlines are being ignored and thwarted.

I know I need to take a step backwards, to be more easy-going, to go with the flow, but it isn’t easy. Can one be impatient and obsessive about letting things slide? I really have to give it a try.

 

A close friend’s mother died yesterday and I am quietly devastated. We met six months ago when I sat down to tea with my friend, her mother and grandmother. I knew beforehand that my friend’s mother had been battling cancer for a number of years. That afternoon, as she cut the banana cake she had baked earlier and poured tea into delicate china teacups, I found her feisty, capable and interested in everything. It was strange to discover that we had gone to the same school in Blackpool, a convent for girls. She had been a couple of year ahead of me but knew all the teachers I remembered and suggested a few I did not. We chuckled when we both recalled reading a series of books that could only be labelled as soft porn. I was at the school for three years, but didn’t remember meeting her. She was older and to a younger student, unapproachable. Afterwards, we both went our separate ways; both going on to lead busy, fulfilling lives, having children, and her case, grandchildren.

I could see a lot of me in her eyes as she stumbled around her kitchen. It was obvious that she was suffering. The cancer was attacking her legs she needed a crutch to move. In the best of convent girl traditions however, her home was immaculate and she took pride in showing me around...She lived in this world for 61 years and now she is dead.

I know my friend will be mourning and I wish I could say the right thing, something that would ease her pain, but also know from experience that those words just don’t exist. I feel numb when I think about that afternoon; our smiles, the conversation, that instant connection, and now she’s gone. I don’t feel angry, although her life was shorter than many and she suffered more than most. I just feel empty, as if part of my home had fallen into the sea, and there is now a vast gaping wound where memories and my most precious possessions should have been.*sigh*

I will text my friend and tell her that I am thinking of her, and know how she feels. I lost my mother to liver cancer a number of years ago. It is going to take a few days before the news sinks in and I can think rationally about this. It touches me in many ways, some lightly and others needle-sharp. She had been a presence in life, a strong matriarch to her family and now she is dead. In true convent school tradition, I’ll go on, we’ll all go on, and in the silences between moments grieve for what has been lost.



 

I have just been listening to the music for the “Life in a Day” film. A rather uplifting selection of videos made on one particular day last year. All the videos were edited by Ridley Scott, and from the trailer I can see that he has done a wonderful job. I can’t wait to see the actual film. One of the things I am eager to see in the film is the feeling that I get at 59 years old – that the world is filling up. I remember empty motorways as a child, quiet countryside walks, broad, tree-lined avenues in towns and cities, terraced houses with children playing in the streets or houses in the suburbs fronted with by a patchwork of small gardens. Now it is all different.

All those front gardens are gone, replaced by ugly patches of concrete that are home to cars and a selection of rubbish bins. The streets that were once a pleasure to walk down, peering over hedges, enjoying the different plants and paths heading to numerous front doors, have been converted into ugly, faceless car parks, edged by rubbish and over-filled dustbins. There is something unloved and utilitarian about our streets these days. It seems that every household has two or more drivers in it, with the same number of cars parked next to the front door. Instead of relying on public transport, most people own a car instead. This effect is most noticeable at the weekends when quiet cul-de-sacs become littered with vehicles, with cars sprawled across the pavements and blocking streets.

I remember reading an article written in 1870 about the vast number of horses and carriages in London streets. The increase from previous years had been so great that the writer predicted London would be buried beneath a foot of horse manure within ten years if something wasn’t done about it. Today, instead of eating hay and oats, our cars consume expensive fuel, instead of paying vets bills, we pay for servicing. Garages have a similar footprint to stables. Is it that we have just replaced one mode of transport for another? Somehow, I think not.

I doubt the Victorians left their horses and carriages out on the street each evening. I think I can say for certain that parties at private houses didn’t result in all the surrounding streets being flooded with abandoned carriages, each accompanied by a mutely blinking nag. Would our forebears have put up with seeing them out of every window? Were they so feeble of frame as to insist on alighting right outside the front door, and leave the vehicle there for the next time they might need it? Of course in those days, the majority of the working classes walked or used public transport. Today, those working classes own a car, and seem content to rip out the front gardens of their Victorian terraces and replace them with off-road parking. Our streets may not be piled high with horse manure but they are littered with huge, metal-panelled monstrosities. Our cities and towns have been given over to car ownership and look like one vast, unkempt car-park, and nobody seems to care. I remember walking down tree-lined avenues when I was a child, peering over hedges, keeping an eye out for the number 7 bus, which trundled down the street like a tank, belching out dark smoke. While the air might be cleaner now, the streets look more barren and desolate. But that’s progress for you, eh?