I must confess, sitting in front of a computer for hours has been the hardest thing to accomplish these last few weeks, but I’m still here and I did want to stop by and check in with you all.
Having had to sort out and clear Bookhound’s family council home from 350 miles away,( following the death of his dad at New Year) the experience has spurred us on to Sort Out the Loft and Clear Out Cupboards here. It’s become our mission for this latest siege, and that sees us knee deep in stuff that we don’t quite know what to do with...
I mean how long do you keep it for...
Who might ever want it...
But it’s all memories that have demanded our shared attention and reflection and before you know it a day has passed with just one box done. It’s been all-absorbing but well worth the effort.
We’ve done five trips to the tip and it seems we are not alone, nor unique in the detritus. I’m not sure how we accumulated a stack of ring binders other than assuming they had been breeding of their own accord, but there was much hilarity as the people in the car next to us opened their boot to reveal...a stack of ring binders.
Watching world events seems to be more involving than reading a book right now sensing that, whatever happens next, somehow we are at a real turning point in history and not wanting to miss it. But we have both ‘read’ Frostquake by Juliet Nicolson. Bookhound listened to the audio version and I read the book, and we’ve had great fun remembering how cold our knees were in the winter of 1962-3.
And how did we keep warm in houses without central heating or double glazing?
It perplexes us daily as we wrestle with the vagaries of the newish boiler and its controls akin to a space station. It was my degree in Quantum Science (joke) that finally twigged that the clock for some reason (one of us randomly pressing buttons without glasses on) said 2am when it was actually 11am. No wonder the heating was coming on at the strangest times. As far as I can remember our life revolved around two paraffin stoves in 1963, supplemented by a fairly inefficient coal fire.
Music features large in Frostquake and we had an interesting coffee time session at the kitchen table one day as we checked out the list of number one hits (the Hit Parade, remember?) for 1963 and found ourselves to be worryingly word perfect on almost every one. More fascinating has been seeing events that surrounded us then as children through our now adult eyes. So much that we missed but our parents must have known and worried about and yet they spared us that fear. I'd like to think children have been spared fear in the same way through this last year too. In a way it all feels joined up, this perspective on the past as we head into the future, and this last year feels like a dividing line, a watershed moment between the two.
I’m now moving onto fungi and Entangled Life How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake.
Heaven knows the diversionary trails this will lead me along. We get outside as often as we can each day, taking dogs and hot chocolate to the woods and the Sitting Log where we can wonder about the tangled world wide web of life, both above and below ground.
Oh yes, and I've made marmalade too. Sevile oranges at the farm shop begging me to oblige.
I'll bet some of you have too.
And please do let us all know your latest reading triumphs. Bookshops will be open again soon and we'll all be rushing in with lists.
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