dovegreyreader scribbles

Mr & Mrs Ravilious

The poster from the exhibition is framed and on the wall because Bookhound called into the Fry Art Gallery at Saffron Walden, when he was up that way backalong, and had a wonderful browse. Mr & Mrs Ravilious proved to be a real treat with so much of Eric and Tirzah’s work on display.

Along with catalogues various my best gift was this. A tea towel far too lovely to use, so instead it is pinned up in my sewing room as reminder that a mere ten yards away is the barn owl nest box with sleeping owls within. This an Edward Bawden illustration.

I’m finding there is much to commend Eric and Tirzah’s work at the moment. They both encapsulate something about a firm foundation to a way of life that we’ve seen temporarily turned upside down. There’s a certainty about it.

Children will walk to school again...

The White Horse won’t have galloped off...

Cuckmere Haven will still be there for the looking at...

The lighthouses will carry on shining..

Our barn owls have been much quieter in the evenings than last year, but apparently this is probably because our pair are already happily matched and there is no need for too much of the mating game to be played. No week-long relentless calls from the nest box as one of them tries to attract another one, that bit’s all done and dusted and with any luck, as long as they both survive, our pair will stay put in their known residence and hunting grounds year on year. They will also want to keep their nest off the radar of any predators so silence is an intentional phase. 

We've been mastering the art of the new digital Wi-fi night vision binoculars, my Mothering Sunday gift, and can now watch what is happening on my iPad screen and take pictures. The quality will improve once we dispense with the window and set up outside, currently the glass blurs the image slightly, but we are still mesmerised at the sight of this...

And watching the owls walk along their newly repaired platforms is a huge relief after last year’s balancing act on a few dilapidated and decidedly precarious broken remains. Ten years-worth of storms had taken their toll so Rick and Mateo from the Barn Owl Trust came to install a new platform back in January. 

But just how long could we go on saying ‘That’s the male ...’ or ‘ Is that the female.’ We’d resisted naming them last year because it felt a bit possessive and, well somehow not right. But we have relented this year, and it was the exhibition poster and the consolation of the art right now that clinched it.

Meet Eric and Tirzah, Mr & Mrs Ravilious (last year’s picture).

Meanwhile I’m wondering whether art or perhaps music is working positively for you right now. 

Please do share in comments, and let us know how you are too...

Pleasings...

It felt like the right time to resurrect Pleasings and I have a few, so please do share yours in comments...

Scoring a supermarket delivery slot might have been my highlight of the century so far. A chance log in at 5am (early bird catches the worm etc) saw me sitting up in bed ordering easy peel clementines, disinfectant (hopeless, sold out weeks ago) and other sundries. We are a fair distance from any sort of shop here so we have always shopped as if for a mini-apocalypse when we do go to save on extra journeys. We are going to try and use local shops too, now that they are setting up and coordinating deliveries.

I booked a hair cut in early March thinking I’d be going to New Zealand (this week). ‘ Go short’ I said to Ed, ‘she’s bound to take me off wilderness camping so the less of it I have to worry about the better.’ Offspringette and I had actually planned a road trip to the very south of South Island, to get as near to Antarctica as we could, so the camping and long drop toilet facilities would have been inevitable and a delight. Of course the potential for this situation to last several months means only one thing...I’m going to have to let Bookhound cut my hair eventually because it drives me bonkers once it’s back down past my ears. I have this vision of us all emerging from confinement looking like the Count of Monte Cristo or Miss Haversham or in my case Worzel Gummidge.

And talking about New Zealand. Offspringette had the brainwave that, in the absence of the real thing, we share a virtual month together. Each day we decide where we are going and what we are doing and we send pictures. I actually get quite excited about it and can’t wait for the  Sheffield Pie Shop and Walking Bealey Spur Track day, plus I expect we’ll stop at Cass Station too.

My sweet peas, sown last October, have had a lovely winter and are now raring to be planted out. We’ve done one lot and just need to build a couple more twigwams for the rest. They are Solstice variety which don’t need long hours of daylight in order to flower, so I could be picking these by the end of April. Vases of sweet peas might just be lifesavers this year.

As well as watching Spooks from episode one (2002) we’ve started watching The Nest, a new series on BBC 1 on Sunday evenings. It’s one of those that quickly takes a hold and we are gripped. A Glasgow couple, desperate for a baby, take up the offer of a surrogacy from a teenage girl who has recently been in care. They know precious little about her but decide to to risk all with their last available embryo. Of dear...what could possibly go wrong. With so many series now on hold, so no Line of Duty or Call the Midwife in the making, there is going to be a dearth of these in the autumn so we are filling up on them now. It’s all about having things to look forward to and distract at the moment too, so that is our viewing sorted for a while.

Good news. I’ve started a grown-up book and am loving it. A copy of Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession arrived in a book parcel from a friend, and if ever there was a book for the now I think this might be one of them. 

Plenty of other good things are happening and this evening (Thursday) the National Theatre are making the first of several productions available to watch for free on YouTube. Tonight it is One Man Two Guvnors starring James Corden. One of the downsides of rural living far from the centre, is the prohibitive cost of getting to that centre for anything like this, so we are looking forward to a night at the theatre. Imagine if someone were to show the stage production of Wolf Hall...we can but hope.

If you have news of any other good things being made available please do share them, and of course do share your own Pleasings in comments too. The bar is never very high because Pleasings is about finding a bit of light in the ordinary day to day, so finding that forgotten bar chocolate (or bottle of gin) at the back of the larder would be right up there with the best just now.

PS Today’s virtual day in New Zealand is a visit to the hot pools in Hanmer Springs

and while we’re there we’ll nip into the deserted but beautifully preserved Queen Mary’s Hospital next door. It won’t be blossom time in Southern Hemisphere April but we’re overlooking minor details like that.

 

 

 

 

Erica Wins Through ~ Josephine Elder

I doubt I’m the only one who has sat down with a pile of books recently, searching for the right one to read, only to find they are all probably the right books, just at the wrong time. In fact quite a lot of my projects seem to be wrong for the moment so there’s been a lot of juggling here.

You might recall I was very excited to settle down and start reading my Dad’s wartime letters to my Mum a while back, having been inspired by Gillian Tindall's The Pulse Glass . The path of true love did not run smooth in the early days of 1944, and things were very on-off-on and off again. My mum was in Liverpool, my dad was doing gunnery training in Kent and it was all quite intriguing (and largely unknown to me). I was also busy investigating what life might have been like for my mum in wartime Liverpool, had made contact with her old school and was really enjoying the whole thing. Then all ‘this’ happened and out of the blue and unexpectedly (though hardly surprisingly) it all made me very emotional. That is the very last thing my parents would have wanted for me...I could just imagine them telling me to ‘put them away’ and so I have. There will be a right moment but again, it isn’t now.

I had somehow thought that every available ounce of emotional energy was needed for the present rather than the past, none of which explains why the shelf that eventually won me over was my modest Girls Gone By collection. Republished girls’ fiction and I settled on Erica Wins Through by Josephine Elder written in 1924, because it sounded as if Erica, the semi-feral child from Dartmoor, is going to have a baptism of fire at her new boarding school but will emerge triumphant.

It's a theme I am assiduously applying to the here and now... that we will get through this 'thing'.

She really only has herself to blame, because Erica has basically gone on strike since being left at home with a governess, this after her brother John is sent off the boarding school. A bit of a protest ensues which culminates in Erica cutting off her long hair , at which point her despairing father relents and off she goes. There doesn’t seem to be a mother, which is an interesting angle left unexplored by Josephine Elder but open to all sorts of musings for the reader.

On arrival at boarding school all does not run smoothly as you might expect, but it does end happily, as you might also expect from the title. There will be a lot of beastliness towards Erica, who again doesn’t make life any easier for herself by being a bit of an enigma, as well as streets ahead in Latin, but ultimately this is a book about friendship and compromise and meeting friends half way. I'm thinking friendships are more precious than ever in people's lives right now and perhaps some of yours, like mine, do go back to school days.

When class horribles Betty and Joan go to Head of House Margaret to tell tales about Erica there is a moment of pure deliciousness as Margaret challenges them mercilessly. Margaret, who apparently plays hockey like a whirlwind and tennis like a daffodil fairy, is also very fair-minded and will have none of it, dismantling the flimsy evidence and sending the pair off with fleas in their respective ears. Sustained by Margaret's wise counsel Erica makes two very good friends in Pen and Evelyn and suddenly life improves. Whilst the story does descend into some jolly japes towards the end it really didn’t matter. I can only begin to imagine how cheering books like this must have been for young girls who were emerging from the devastation wrought by the First World War, and Josephine Elder is certainly instilling a bit of gumption and ambition into their lives. 

There is also a wonderful hockey match which took me right back to my days as Centre Forward and sometime Captain of the First XI. I really can't believe how much I loved running up and down in a gym skirt in the freezing cold, pelted with rain, splattered with mud and nursing bruised shins. Orange boats at half time and tea afterwards with chocolate swiss roll. We'd play against all the local schools, Tiffins, Rosebery, Wimbledon High, James Allen's, City of London Freemen's, Sutton High, St Philomena's Convent, Wallington Girls, and us Nonsuch Girls were fearsome opponents. If any of you went to one of those maybe we first met on the hockey pitch, in which case I'll apologise now for that clout around the ankles. 

With so much happening it's taken me an age to read this single book, but it's also been a wonderful retreat into a bygone era. I am unashamed to admit that its been a pleasant escape and I'll be doing more of it.

Meanwhile, if you have scored any reading or audio book successes please do share them in comments..

And were you a hockey fiend too...

Or netball, or gymnastics, or tennis, or athletics or anything else... 

Or was hiding in the cloakroom more your thing (I've done that too).

 

 

 

An Outing ~ St Raphael, Huccaby

I think we could all do with a bit of an outing today don't you and maybe a nice pot of tea and a slice of cake...

It is almost twenty years since I read Miss Garnett’s Angel by Salley Vickers, but as we wandered around the tiny church of St Raphael - Huccaby, up on High Dartmoor a while back,  I remembered the book and its story of Tobias and the Angel Raphael which unfolded alongside Julia Garnet’s journey around Venice.

That morning we’d actually seen a glimpse of sunshine whilst sitting at the kitchen table and decided we’d better hotfoot out somewhere nice and enjoy it before it rained again. The light seems to have been quite unusual this winter. On lots of days it’s felt like a total eclipse is in progress, you know that sort of diminishing half-light that drops very quickly and has you dashing to put a light on before the gloom descends. We ended up driving across Dartmoor and out around the Dart estuary to visit Coleton Fishacre as our first proper National Trust wander of the year.

Coleton Fishacre, on the south Devon coast, was once owned by the D’Oyly Carte opera family and its 1930’s Art Deco design perfectly suited my reading of The Acceptance World, the third book in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. There is a spur of the moment weekend invitation for Nicholas Jenkins to Peter Templar’s house in the country and Coleton Fishacre could so easily be that house. I could visualise it in an instant, and here’s a glimpse..

and here’s the room where I could imagine Nicholas and Jean embarking on their grand affair...

And at this point I must ask forgiveness because I think we might have to shelve The Dance to the Music of Time project for a while. I thought I'd be able to soldier on with it, but I think my attentions are needed on too many fronts to do it justice.

I'm prioritising... I want to keep writing posts for all of you here, and answering comments, I want to keep talking to family and friends whenever I need to and I've offered to be an NHS phone volunteer. I want to go walking around the fields when I can, keep the home front going and fall asleep on the sofa at 11.30 am if I need too. I suspect we are all pacing ourselves through this and its really important that we do that. It's something thirty years working in the NHS taught me well and so I am paying good attention to it.

I'm so sorry, I hate to default having set it up but hope you will all understand. We will pick it up again when the Old Normal returns.

On the way back from Coleton Fishacre we stopped at St Raphael’s church at Huccaby to see the snowdrops. Ours had been and gone but the High Dartmoor ones flower much later and these are famous locally and there were carpets of them...

The church was built in 1868 by the Rector of Lydford (just a few miles from us here) for people who lived too far away to attend the parish church at Lydford, and was designed to be used as a school during the week and for worship on Sundays. He built another church at nearby Postbridge, St Gabriel's, and we have St Michael's Brentor near us here. I like to think of the archangels being the guardians of us all right now.

The church still has the Victorian school desks (with inkwells) and which still function as pews.

Unprepossessing from the outside but light and bright inside. Perishing cold on the day we visited but there was a huge stone fireplace with a wood burning stove that must heat it nicely when the church is in use.

I had half-planned a re-read of Miss Garnett's Angel but events overtook and suddenly it didn't fit my mood. But no matter because it was the battalions of snowdrops that took my breath away, and thinking back now to those heady days of freedom I just thought I'd share them with you as a reminder that they'll be up again next year... same as every year. 

PS Keep an eye on the Instagram feed over here <<<<<<< and please do join me there if you would like to, because I’m trying to go on a daily ‘outing’ on foot with a little commentary. 

 

Busy doing nothing...or so it seems...

I always remember my mum and dad singing this song as a duet in a church pantomime many years ago, and me of a young enough age to be proud rather than embarrassed. 

We're busy doin' nothin'
Workin' the whole day through
Tryin' to find lots of things not to do
We're busy going nowhere
Isn't it just a crime
We'd like to be unhappy, but
We never do have the time

Thank you so much for all your tips on routines, and what is working for you in this Strange Time that just gets stranger by the hour. We have read and implemented quite a few of your suggestions ourselves. We've both found ourselves thinking that we have to be productive in this time and not waste a minute, in fact be very productive, so we were making big plans each day...Bookhound would paint the house, I would make a dozen quilts, but somehow it doesn’t quite seem to work that way, so we’ve narrowed down our expectations.

I’m quite pleased to have potted up the new dahlias to get them started; some beauties from Peter Nyssen including  Downham Royal, Black Jack and Edge of Joy, while Bookhound, having watched a YouTube video, is currently ‘shearing’ and grooming the dogs himself. The post-winter trip to Pongo’s Salon is deferred. Armed with a pair of clippers he is doing them in instalments, because apparently it’s exhausting, so they do look a bit unusual and I can see this might end up being like painting the Forth Bridge. By the time the tail end is reached it’ll be time to do the ears again. Both dogs adore the whole process and lie there in the sun blissfully unaware that they are not about to win Crufts, fur is flying round the garden and will probably end up in bird’s nests. Next will be the baths, following which they will both jump in the next trough of muddy water they see to show their gratitude.

Possibly the best bit of our day is the afternoon walk to the woods, and right now they are looking stunning, though the next best bit is the fields on the way up.

We’re not that good at crop recognition (or birdsong) so we’ve been watching the four fields we walk through to the woods with interest. Ploughed and sown last autumn after last year’s barley crop (we eventually recognised it as barley in about June) we’ve watched green cabbage-y looking shoots emerge...maybe it’s a nitrogen crop we thought...surely not four whole fields of kale or something. It was about a week ago that the buds started to appear and having decided it wasn’t broccoli either (told you we were useless) it finally dawned on us that it was oil seed rape. Now like it or loath it, and I know it’s an allergen for many, what a brilliant piece of good fortune this is, because if ever there was a year when we absolutely needed to see Fields of Gold it is this one.

This week’s sunshine has really stepped the countryside up a gear. The hedgerows are starting to flower (celandines), trees reluctantly and then rapidly edging into green, the shoots in the woods holding promise of another carpet of bluebells, nature doing its stuff century on century. Good old reliable nature.

According to the 2019 diary the swallows returned on April 12th. We waved them off in September and every year, as they do their farewell circuits of the house and leave, I always wonder what might have happened by the time they come back. I hadn’t quite envisaged this, but goodness me they will be very welcome visitors this year.

And then there are the barn owls.

I’m pleased to report they are very noisy every evening at the moment, though we can’t see them because it’s dark. You only say that sort of thing to the Gamekeeper once and before you know it he’s round on Mothering Sunday, two metres of agonising social distance on the verandah, with a pair of wireless and Bluetooth digital night vision binoculars as a present. I’m that excited I can’t tell you, because once we’ve figured it all out ( more youtube videos) we can set them up on a tripod and watch the comings and goings on an iPad screen, as well as recording what we see on a memory card. This all bodes well for sharing the excitement here through the summer. 

So that’s us but how about you. I’m sure you are all being incredibly and amusingly resourceful too...please do let us know of new innovations in your life. 

And I’m hoping you are all able to get out for a walk if you want to...I’d love to know where you go and what you see...

And is anyone else listening to The Archers?

We all want to move to Ambridge because they don’t seem to have heard of C-19 yet, and I’m really hoping they decide not to introduce it into the script. It would be lovely to have a place to go where it doesn’t exist, and in the meantime there are other good storylines developing. 

PS I almost forgot to say that I defrosted the freezer too, have you done anything quite as exciting?

 

 

 

NHS volunteers...

Many are needed very quickly, as we knew they would be, and there are a range of options. 

For those self-isolating at home maybe think about signing up as a phone volunteer? 

The link for England is here.

Public Service Announcement Three - Routine

Someone sent me a lovely message saying ‘Have a good weekend’ and I thought ...weekend??

Is it the weekend??

in fact it is Mothering Sunday today and many of us won’t be able to hug or see our children, or our mums, but I’m sending a bunch of primrose everyone’s way because I refuse to leave anyone out. We all ‘mother’ in one way or another, especially at the moment.

But isn’t it strange that I barely know what day it is and am wondering if you are finding the same. Suddenly all the weekly markers have disappeared beyond the bin men on a Wednesday, and it was at this moment that we realised we needed a bit more of a routine...because suddenly time doesn’t matter really and it’s easy to slip into an existence.

I’m sure you will all have lots of tips and advice about what is working for you, so please do share in comments. There are no rights or wrongs but it might help others to know. 

I think there has been so much news to absorb and so much certainty removed from our daily lives on a worldwide basis, that it has the potential to create a state of shock from which we need to quickly contain anxieties if we can, regroup and reorganise. Perhaps control the things we can and acknowledge and somehow let go of the things we can’t. 

We are making sure we get out for a good, long,slow walk each day and are finding ways to extend it beyond the usual basically because we are not rushing back in order to be somewhere else. We don’t see another soul but I am very aware that some of you may be more confined to barracks by circumstances than we are, so please do share any tips about how you are dealing with that if you want to.

And then there’s the news....

From being a Fear of Missing Out person embracing everything on every channel and in every newspaper, I have become a much more discerning reader of the news so we have now created a cut off point for ourselves if possible of no news after the 6pm bulletin. We are trying to watch a good engrossing box set or recent series (The Split at the moment) each evening, or Bookhound and I migrate to our working corners and read etc. Again what is working for you...please do share, especially suggestions of good TV series to watch. We do have Netflix which would be great if our broadband was full speed but currently it is snail’s pace. 

I’ll be honest, reading hasn’t been easy, concentrating seems quite difficult at the moment but I feel sure this will settle down. Right now keeping in touch with family and friends in ways various is proving essential...it will all balance out soon I’m sure.

This brings me onto sleep.

If you are still managing your nightly average that is brilliant, if you are not it can be really hard. Waking in the night with that darkest hour just before dawn, fretting about family and friends, or ourselves, or have we got enough dog food, or OMG I’ve forgotten to get any disinfectant ( I really had). Sleep experts out there will know much more than me but isn’t it about thirty minutes or so before your circadian rhythms come around again and you feel sleepy. Kindle reading or drifting off to an audio book helps, even putting out a post among my circle of Facebook friends to see if anyone else is awake has worked this week. And it is an amazing comfort to know you are not the only one. 

And maybe you have more tips for sleep or night-waking so please do share them. We have become advocates of the Anytime Nap. If Bookhound or I feel overwhelmingly sleepy at any moment during the day, we don’t fight it, we slink off for a quick power snooze and wake up refreshed and recovered. This might not be for everyone but we are working to different rules for different times.

Meanwhile I hope you are all managing to cope with this new normal and please don’t be afraid to say if you feel you are not. It’s entirely understandable and I’m sure there will be lots of help and support and suggestions here that may help. Those that feel able please do respond to others in comments if you want to and I’ll be in there as usual.

And here’s a thing....

I’m rightly proud of my NHS career and will admit that I am really feeling the pinch now, because every instinct tells my generation to get out there and man the pumps in times of crisis, and yet the best help we can be is to stay out of the way and not become a liability. There are other ways to help and the next generation have taken over. I’ll bet quite a few of you have family or friends on the front line ( and not just in the NHS) and are feeling immense pride mingled with fears for them. The daughter of one of our ‘godmothers’ decided to change career a few years ago and do her nurse training, she qualified last year and chose to head into a career in intensive care, (good idea I said at the time, they’ll want you anywhere in the world) and here she is at the pointy end at Derriford in Plymouth.

Rosie is the pint-sized one holding the words ‘stay home’ 

She sent me a message, ‘You have put enough time in, stay home, stay safe

Bless all of them and here’s a lovely rainbow, guarding the sleeping barn owls, just because...

All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well and fingers crossed for the return of the swallows soon and owlets to come.