Morning at Wallog

It was one of those 'never before, never again' moments:

Perfect weather for a walk, great moods, Kitty chasing the tennis-ball...

Inspired...

...to tackle obesity (ha ha), Alistair got slightly carried away shopping for fruit this week!

Things to do in Aber...

...on a wet Monday afternoon - 'I have an idea..let's take up the landing carpet and see what's underneath!'

Bit of attention needed where the house has slid westward...then sanding and waxing...

SO... 'A Suitable Boy'

Although I own copies of, and have read, The Golden Gate and An Equal Music, I have to admit I have NOT read this, Vikram Seth's most well-known novel - so I enjoyed the first hour-long episode of Andrew Davies' adaptation tonight.

How does it shape up to the novel?

WHO?

Randomly turning on the TV this afternoon while I stopped for tea after some serious domesticking, I came across David Tennant and Billie Piper heroically saving the world with action, love and fine speechifying.

Oh, what we need now is a doctor!

And a squashed wheelbarrow...

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

"As I look out at all of you gathered here,

I want to say that I don’t see a room full of Parisians

in top hats and diamonds and silk dresses.

I don’t see bankers and housewives and store clerks.

No.

I address you all tonight as you truly are:

wizards,

mermaids,

travelers,

adventurers,

and magicians.

You are the true dreamers.”

Brian Selznick

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Things I have found this week...

Oxfam is open..yay!

Huge yellow cotton M&S sweater

(£2.49)

Bulrushes (I just happened to have my secateurs with me ...)

And then there is the squashed wheelbarrow...watch this space !

Reading Matters

Today I reached for another old favourite off the bookshelf...'Crusoe's Daughter' by Jane Gardam.

Truly Polly Flint is a great heroine, though my favourite is Marigold Green, the eponymous 'Bilgewater',(Bill's Daughter).

Here is the cover picture of the book:

And here is the postcard I keep in it, another yellow house - this time Van Gogh's from the museum in Amsterdam nine summers ago:

Ben and I had had chocolate brownies for breakfast...

'Band-Aid chocolate'...

for E. who wants, needs and deserves SO much better...

The Other Side of You...

Yesterday, unaccountably hurt, I retreated, as I do, into my book - and finished it late last night. 

Again...cos it is another of those old favourites, to which I return again and again to righten my world.

I once read a book called 'Brother of the More Famous Jack' - of which I remember nothing, except the clever title.

'The Other Side of You' (a quote from TS Eliot, the Bible and other stuff) is one of those books, of which I have quite a few, which I adore, but which are a lesser-known title by the author.

In this case Salley Vickers - most people who read modern novels will have read, or know of 'Miss Garnet's Angel'. 

I also infinitely prefer 'So Many Ways to Begin' to Jon McGregor's 'If Nobody Speaks if Remarkable Things'.

And 'Of Love and Shadows' to 'House of Spirits'...

And 'Devisadero' to 'The English Patient' - but only by a whisker...

And, above all, 'Human Traces' slated by critics and readers alike, but which I love waaay more than 'Birdsong'...

Please come and raid my bookshelves...I could talk books with you all day.

(I wonder if I should find a lesser-known Ferrante than 'My Brilliant Friend' and if I would love it EVEN more?)

Flopsy...etc

Have washed and hung my white cotton duvet cover THREE times today. 

One can go off seagulls...

Just saying.

Wrinkles...for J-M J

There are things I mind more

like famines and war -

Though I gotta confess

I'd mind everything less

If it would just STOP RAINING!!!

Autumn...

... no I know it isn't yet.

But we enjoyed June and July weather this year in the strangest of all April and May.

And June and July have been like August and September...this morning there was a distinct late-summer scent in the air - that sixties- childhood-summer-holiday-in-Cornwall scent of warm ferns and puddles.

Already there are fruits in the hedgerows...today, on our walk, we saw elderberries plumping-up, sloes where only yesterday (it seems) there was blackthorn in flower,

and bright red Rowan berries.

And tasted the first ripe blackberries of the year.

candle-wax etc...

My day started badly with spilling pink candle-wax on the carpet in the attic...

Cue a quick 'google'; downstairs for the iron and a roll of kitchen paper, up again, down again to find an extension lead, up again with a choice of two...

I have spent a considerable part of the rest of the day mulling over why I chose the white, rather than the black lead and socket - could this be some hidden racist leaning rearing it's very ugly head?! Some hitherto unexamined murky corner of my psyche, which needs a sharp poke?!

But I don't think so...I think the white lead and socket speaks of friendly domestic white goods and all things manageable. The black lead and socket is infinitely more threatening, speaking as it does of workmen's untidy vans, corners of deep toolboxes and Things about which I won't worry my 'pretty little head'

!!!

Ho hum...conditioned then. But at least not racist...

Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail...

...are the three seagull chicks who have hatched in the gully (!) between two ridge roofs opposite our west-facing windows. 

They have grown with quite frightening speed, from tiny fluffy mewing open-mouthed babies to today's loud-mouthed teenagers, squawking and strutting their stuff among the ridges whilst Mum and Dad are off finding food...

They are making some attempts to fly and in the next two or three weeks wil do just that...

Bufo bufo...

... the common toad, is visiting our garden. Probably living under the wheelbarrow and enjoying spilt birdseed, today I took a seven-second video...

Which I wanted to post here.

But it won't allow me.

Even as a 'still'.

So I won't.

Sorry...

making stuff...

I have been playing with ink and wax to finish off some of my latest dishes and things...

Coed-Hedd - drifting day

Dappled sunlight

damsel-flies 

and dreams...

Name-calling...

A couple of days ago, in the rain and wind, Kitty and I were passing the top of the golf-course when we saw a large flock of corvids. There were 25 in all, and I say corvids because I really don't have much idea which sort of large black bird is which...

Except that they were strutting about, squawking loudly at each other and not really listening.

Rooks then..it's called a parliament of rooks, isn't it?

Ah, art and creativity...

The beach does it better!

Kiln-opening this evening...

...so exciting!

And candle-making today too...

...more raspberry than strawberry ice-cream this time!

Of 'Astapovo'

Under my bedside table is a fat paperback entitled 'The Assassin's Cloak' - a daily read of diaries of all sorts of people over the centuries, from Marcus Aurelius to Adrian Mole (the only fictional entrant, honestly).

I gave my Dad the book,  probably 15 years ago. He loved it and read it nightly for two years, and then lent it to me. I did the same and returned it to him.

When Dad died and we cleared the house, it was among the books under his bedside table - along with a selection of others, some of which I had given him...

Edward Thomas' poetry (which I had bought here in Aber on a visit) was one of them, as was A.S Byatt's "Possession", which I had lent him and I swear finished him off!

Last night, tired and in between reads, I dipped into the diaries before sleep, and was amused to find this from July 1854

The strange genius who was Tolstoy wrote "War and Peace" 15 years after this and was to live till 1910.

Browsing BBC Sounds this afternoon, for a drama to listen to while being domestic, I chanced upon "The Jester of Astapovo" by Rose Tremain, whose writing I like. This turned out to be a fictionalised account of Tolstoy's last days, in a tiny village in Russia - fleeing his wife of 48 years, Tolstoy was taken ill and died in the station master's cottage.

And yes, his diary was mentioned, though only briefly...

Things We Have Lost

Beaches, on those far-off Irish holidays we took with assorted children and dogs, were generally wild, windswept and deserted. And each had their own personality and took on their own family name.

There was, for example a scruffy bit of coast and harbour at the tip of the Maharees Peninsula, which, on the Irish map, bore the name 'Scraggane' - but to us was always and forever 'Scragend'...

And then there is the beach which goes by a name unknown to me, and is called something banal and descriptive by windsurfers. But for us it was always 'Lost Beach' - so named, not because, like some Irish Brigadoon, it appeared and disappeared out of the mists, nor because we got lost on it.

But for the things we lost on it - I seem to remember Twiggy, a larger and unreliable version of Kitty, tied loosely to the picnic bag, taking-off after some poor unsuspecting pooch, scattering food, drinks and beach-toys as she went...

And so? And so the summer of 2020 is destined to be forever the 'Lost Summer' - not because it has disappeared into the mist and rain (yet), nor because we have got lost, though I fear we have. A bit.

But for what we have lost along the way...

Dierama Pulcherrimum...

... or Angels' Fishing Rods are an incredible plant - pretty, delicate pink flowers on a tall thin stem, they are flexible and strong enough to withstand the very worst winds and rain this last couple of weeks have thrown at them...

Calloo-callay!

Many years ago (not many, many...just many), there were days like today on our Irish holidays in late August. At the end of one particularly wild and sunny day, full of beach-walks, swimming, probably water-sports, rainbows and storms - I was dropped at the local 'supermarket' to pick up supplies for the hungry hordes. I would have been in cut-off Levi's and a hat, wind-buffeted and sunburnt. And was chatted-up, in an easy way, by the man behind the deli counter as I bought sausages, or coleslaw or...something.

"Mighty day!" he proclaimed, and I agreed. And this has passed into our shared language, complete with soft Irish accent, so it presents as "Moighty day!"

Today was like that, wild and sunny. Only today was extra-special, as I met up with my mate for the first time in nearly four months, for a walk along the prom...

Mum and Dad would have quoted Jabberwocky...

"Oh, frabjous day, calloo callay!"

Frabjous, indeed...

"Hello? Is Anybody There?"

...by Jostein Gaarder, a sort of 'Sophie's World' for the younger reader. I used to read it with Ben, when he was ...ooh, seven or eight I guess, and entering his second dinosaur era.

I'm reading it for my own pleasure now...

Emily Bronté's dog...

Starting my morning in the nineteenth century, I stomped around the hills in the rain and mist today, being Emily Bronté, wondering if she had a dog companion out on the Yorkshire Moors? And reflecting that, if she did, it must have been a singular, wolfish lurcher, like my wild Kitty.

Getting warm and dry, I rejoined the twenty-first century  - well the twentieth anyway; I may have been in a Zoom meeting, but, catching sight of myself in a mirror, I looked like a refugee from a 1950s Enid Blyton story.

Later, wearing a woolly skirt and shawl, reading a book beside the fire, I am again in Haworth Parsonage...

And Emily's dog? 

'Keeper' was actually a huge, loyal mastiff...about as unlike Kitty as is possible to imagine. Still, she gives me pleasure...

Random sort of day...

Our first nasturtium flower of the summer...one of the VERY few annuals I like to grow from scratch - even my clumsy digits can manage to poke the chick-pea-sized seeds into odd gaps in the pots.

And I am rewarded with peppery green leaves and brilliantly bright tasty flowers.

It was rainy for our walk this morning and the ground was still wet when we came to work-out in the garden gym. Kitty participated from the comfort of her in own armchair (well, one of them!)

Little sculptures I have been making...

This and That...

Sample page of the MOST beautiful book I have read in a long time...and am re-reading less than a month later - I love beautiful words and sometimes devour them too quickly!

Aced it with the sourdough this morning...slightly olivey and fresh herbs. Yum.