Christmas is coming

After Thanksgiving I dragged all, or at least I thought all, of the Christmas boxes out of the garage because I had a cousin gift that I wanted Ian’s parents to post.  I searched the boxes several times but it was only days later that I remembered we had a sixth slightly smaller box and of course that was where the angel chimes were packed.

I needed the boxes out anyway for GG’s advent “knitting” – the beautiful embroidery that took her so many years with failing eyes after my birth that it was finished just as Melanie was born.  But other than the knitting I really needed nothing else out of the boxes for ages, but of course I didn’t put them away and they’ve been regularly raided throughout December.

Norman got his Christmas hat.

Ian and Oriana went and bought a tree.  The weather was awful.

Though possibly still needing to improve her design sense, Oriana is a champion decorator with more stamina than any of us, even returning in her nightie to keep up the good work. 

Ruth was more careful.

And then it was finished and we just sort of stopped.  There were so many boxes around and so much clutter and the ironing board lost in the middle of it all and so many events at school that I rather lost the will to live and abandoned it all.

And then there were the Christmas cards to devise, create, write and despatch.

And finally we got our collective acts together and started decorating.  Perhaps we were inspired by our pretty little very subtle coloured lights exploding on the tree.  Fortunately the different strings all run throughout the tree so we weren’t left with a bare unlit spot.

Oriana put stars all over.

I found a way to make the mantle a little less heavy and dull.

Ian unleashed his creative flare and got to put his extra long ladder to use.

And now we’re done.  Christmas boxes are back in the garage and Amazon boxes have taken their space.  We’re getting the hang of decorating this huge space.  Merry Christmas everyone.

We’ve gone solar

A little slow with the news as first I was waiting for the scaffolding to come down so I could actually take a picture and then Christmas overtook me.  Why do I get it wrong every year – it’s not exactly a moveable feast.

Pretty much since the day we signed the contract for the panels the weather turned and we’ve had grey days, flurries of snow, lots of rain and precious little sun, but we’ve now passed the shortest day so it’s all got to get better from now on… hasn’t it?

After the first few days we made a spreadsheet… the money we’ve spent, the money we’ve earned and the money we’ve saved by generating our own power.  It was the kind of exercise you have to do to make yourselves laugh in the face of so much debt, or you’d definitely cry.  

Ian's keeping a proper tally of the amount we've generated each day.  Yesterday it was the worst day so far.  Ho hum, it's midwinter... onward and upward.

The agony of indecision is over

… let the financial pain begin.

We decided to go ahead with solar panels.  The deal is just too good to miss and with our shocking electricity bills we really need all the help that we can get.  The scaffolding is up and the panels go in on Wednesday.

The current deal is good, 43p in for every kilowatt you produce and you get to use it yourselves rather than buying that same kilowatt from the grid (at about 18p if memory serves me right).  So that’s a pretty good deal in itself.  You don’t get a great deal (3p/kW) for selling unused energy back to the grid, but our house is so inefficient that it’s probably an irrelevance for us.  The power company assumes that we use half of what we’ve produced and that will probably also work in our favour but I can’t for the life of me remember why at the moment.

We’re pleased to have got it organised before the tariff changes not only because the current deal is great, but because the new deal will also require that our house meets certain green criteria that are only a distant dream for us… insulation, double glazing, all those DIY words that are somewhere off on the horizon.

Financially it’s going to cripple us in the short term, but we hope it’ll all be worth while. 

A financial dilemma

Remembering that a Victorian house in Britain barely counts as “old” it is no surprise that a lot of houses are not eco friendly.  Cavity walls, if they exist, are often unfilled, attics have no insulation, windows and doors are draughty and single-glazed … the story goes on.  But our wise government thinks that it’s about time we all shaped up and filled our walls, insulated our roofs and invited round some clueless 20 year old in a sharp suit to sell us double glazing and there are grants for many improvements.  Not to mention, of course, the incentive of a warmer house for less money.

And just in case you have no cavity walls or attic and have not yet decided which windows are going to be pulled out and which just need a facelift (how-about-some-luvverly-leaded-windows-in-plastic-surrounds-madam double glazing) our government has been making some very generous offers to households willing to go a little greener.  The feed-in tariff offered on solar panels has been very generous indeed.  Almost too good to be true, one might think.

And one would be right… and the government also thinks it’s too good to be true.  In fact, the government realised that it would be mad even to let the offer run to the end of April as it was supposed to do because so many households were rushing to get solar panels installed by the cut-off date.  So it brought the date right forward, to mid December.  If your panels aren’t installed and hooked up to the grid with all the paperwork signed by 12^th December then you can’t get the great deal.  You can get a good deal, but not a great one.

At first we thought we’d missed the boat and cursed ourselves, though only gently as the timing was never good for us.  But then friends signed up and got started all in a couple of weeks and we realised we might be able to do it after all.  Their guy came round, looked, didn’t think the glass roof was the insurmountable problem British Gas previously claimed it to be, and is sending us a quotation.

So here’s the dilemma.  Our fuel bills are high.  Our water runs off electricity.  Our house was set up when Economy 7 was all the rage so we are on a dual rate system but don’t really benefit from it.  If we fit solar panels before December it will be financially quite nerve-racking till we’ve paid back the loan, but the long-term benefits will be huge… we’ll have a healthy monthly income and our electricity bills shouldn’t be nearly so scary.  And it will add to the value of the house because future owners would also benefit from the excellent feed-in tariff.

Of course, it’s all still a big What If.  Will the quotation be ok?  Will they be able to do the work in time?  Would we even get a loan to pay for the work?

But if the quotation is ok, and if they can do the work in time, and if we can get a loan, do we really want to do it?  The long-term benefits are great, but the short-term burden is big and times are tight.  And think of all the other things we could be doing with the same money!  Decisions, decisions.

Professional at work

John the gardener came the other day.  What a transformation.  I decided that I’d like him to concentrate, at least initially, on getting the big flowerbed sorted out and boy has he started sorting it out.  Ian, naturally, is appalled.  He doesn’t really care what is growing, or how it looks, so long as something is growing… and right now not much is. 

For my own part I’m not sure whether to be blown away by how much John got through, depressed that he covered in half a day what took me about a third of the summer, or relieved knowing I wasn’t the one having to do it.  Of course, I can console myself that everything he’s dug so far has already been dug by me so it’s relatively easy, but I know that’s probably not the real reason… really he just knows what he’s doing and what should die and what could stay.

Whatever the reason, I’m impressed.

A thousand bluebell wood

OK, well it’s not quite Pooh’s Thousand Acre Wood, but I’m pretty excited all the same.

The first 500 bulbs seemed so relatively effortless that I foolishly ordered a further 500.  They arrived before the weekend but we had guests here, and Monday and Tuesday were so wet and miserable that I had no desire to go planting.

Today I’d run out of excuses.  I’d done the wedding planning I’d promised to do.  I wasn’t cold after walking Bonny.  So out to the woods we went with secateurs, a bulb planter, gloves, and a box of bulbs.  “We” being my trusty servant Bonny and I, though there were occasions where she seemed to mistake herself for my playmate rather than my servant.  She mainly likes to sit directly in front of me on whichever patch I’ve just cleared for planting, but has proved useful on occasion: she finds particularly stubborn roots a great game.

I continued with the technique perfected on the first batch of bulbs, clearing a patch of ivy, working methodically across it planting, then clearing the next patch.  It seemed even easier this time.  I’m not sure if that means I was lazier or that the ivy was just less troublesome, but the ground was certainly easy to dig (or did I never get to the ground, was I just digging into mulch?)

Hooray.  All done.  Can’t wait to see how many (if any!) come up. 

We have a plan

In fact, we have two plans: Plan A and Plan B. 

Our meeting with Bryan the architect was prompted by the need to get solar panels on the roof by 31^st March next year when the feed in tariffs were due to be reduced, but now the installation deadline’s been brought forward to December it all becomes rather unrealistic and irrelevant.  Ho hum.  So the urgency for architectural discussions is somewhat diminished and it’s not like we can afford to do any building work anyway, but it’s always good to dream about what you might do… architectural dreams can turn into building nightmares so we might as well enjoy the dream time.

One idea gets rid of the pool.  He couldn’t resist toying with that idea, but with a bit of adaptation we could keep a lot of the plan and keep the pool… at least until the girls have outgrown it.

The other I like better so far and it has an archway through the house with a bedroom above and the oil tank and a bike shed on the other side of the arch.  It allows under cover parking on rainy days and creates a lot of upstairs space but most of all I’ve always wanted a home with an archway.

Both plans would give us a huge kitchen and a lot of extra bedroom space and he rightly said that he thinks if we can only do one part of the house it should be that end because it’s the kitchen and the living and the least appealing and will add most value (as a home for us or resale) when it’s done.

Right now both designs have the staircases sticking out of the house in glass boxes.  They are very modern, rather surprising, and quite exciting.

Who knows when we could ever do it.  There’s no money in the pot these days but it’s nice to think about and we might win the lottery one day (at least we might if we were ever to play the lottery).

And then I had a cuppa with Katherine and she offered her annexe for us to hide in when it all gets too much… she’s close enough to the memory of living in a building site to remember that we’re quite mad.

But, oh, it’s so exciting.

A bluebell wood… maybe

I have this crazy idea that we should fill our wood with bluebells.  We have snowdrops and daffodils and crocuses galore, but no bluebells.  This is the year that I hope to rectify that oversight.

So just before half term 500 bulbs arrived and a bulb planter.  I set to work.  I didn’t have much time and barely made a dent in the 500, but I found a working method.  First I tore back a patch of ground ivy, then I planted.  It’s a useful technique… you know where you’ve been.  When we got back from Italy I was energised and ready to finish the job.

Peel back some ivy, plant.  Peel back some more, plant some more.  After a time the ball of ivy would be sufficiently large that I could bundle it up and add it to the mound that was building on the side of the path.  Occasionally I’d stop and strip a tree of its ivy – not as time sensitive, but a strain on different body parts and hopefully it’ll even out any resulting aches and pains.

 And in a short time I’d reduced the box to a final handful of bulbs.  It was tempting to leave them for another day but I slogged on and got them all done.  What was once a mat of ivy is now all planted and in a few years should be a sea of blue in May.  Should be.

I was so ecstatic I ordered another 500… what have I done!?

There's a post script to this.  On ordering my second batch of 500 I discovered that my garden fairy, aka Dad, had been to visit while we were away and done some planting for me.  What an angel.  How many of the 500 did I actually plant?

Picking scabs

On one of the numerous occasions tht Ian and I came to see the house last summer, when we were supposed to be buying it, but it all seemed like a hopeless dream, there was a jungle of sunflowers growing between the cracks of the paving.  They looked fabulous, like something an outdoor space with an urban clientele (like the Botanic Gardens in Singapore or perhaps even Kew) might design so that children might play hide and seek in nature on ground designed for a high volume of traffic.

Then Dad took it upon himself to come and weedkill the lot.  I understood his logic.  Weeds, or even sunflowers, push up the slabs and just because a house isn’t lived in, it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be maintained (though arguably it’s not the job of the perhaps-future-owner’s father).  So, a little bit annoying, but I saw his point.

This year the weeds came up again. I saw no sign of a sunflower jungle, which was a disappointment, but the weeds were definitely battling their way through.  So I borrowed Dad’s supercharged weedkiller and off I went.  I haven’t counted the slabs, but I do know there’s a lot of them.  Up and down the rows I went, left to right and back again.  I sprayed and sprayed.

Now weedkiller is supposed to work its way down to the roots so once you’ve sprayed you’re really supposed to leave it for a week or two.  I find that hard.  If I’ve sprayed, it’s because I think the situation’s desperate.  It’s like my hair… once I book a haircut, it’s because I should have had it cut at least three weeks ago… to delay once this decision has been made is nothing short of madness.  But I waited, watched some of the weeds die back… and then left them.  By then I was onto another project.

Then the same again.  The weeds grew and the situation was dire.  I weedkilled, I waited, and I drifted off to deal with something else.  And then the weeds won, because I didn’t spray them again.

Then Malika came to stay.  Not content with looking after four kids, showing them the sights, cooking for everyone while I went on a bender, and cleaning the house, she started weeding… amazing.  The difference was incredible… What an improvement!

But then she left… job unfinished (how dare she?!) and so the weeds taunted me again.

And to make matters worse a gardener came round to see if he can transform our flowerbed and I was so embarrassed by the weeds blowing in the breeze, the thistles and nettles and the general neglect that I blabbed “see, I am trying” and pointed at all Malika’s hard work.  And the only way then that it couldn’t be a lie (a real and complete great, big lie that is, it was obviously a lie) was to get on and do the rest. 

So I weeded, and weeded, and weeded.  And I wore through the fabulous gloves Melanie gave to me.  And I weeded on.  I have a paving-slab bruise on my index finger.  I weeded on.  Melanie came to visit and declared it was like picking scabs.  She was right, I couldn’t stop.  It’s not perfect, and I’ve not yet done the path, but it looks so much better.

And now I’ve bought myself a fabulous tool to help with the next time the weeds spring up, but for now I can sit back and enjoy the paving slabs in all their glorious hideousness.

Country living

I always used to maintain that Ian’s idea of happiness was to have a stack of books, newspapers and a computer in the room with him (and a pen in his pocket) and the people he loved in the next room.  He would know they were there, could reach them if he wanted to, but they would not disturb him.  Things have changed a little and he now likes to work right in the middle of everything, where life swirls around him.  But for the garden, his old way of loving lives on.  He likes to know it’s there, he loves it being there, but he really would rather not have too close a relationship with it.

Now I know our splendid ride-on mower belongs to me, but true happiness for me is seeing my mower being used by my man.  It’s not that he’s way better at mowing than me, though he is… he seems to be able to get it to mow through the swings and much closer to trees than I can ever manage, it’s that I don’t like mowing.  It drives me nuts.  It is sooo slow.  You can go slowly or more slowly on the mower; you cannot go fast.  It makes me impatient and as I potter along I see a hundred other jobs I’d rather be doing in the garden.

But I missed a trick last week.  I asked Ian to do three jobs.  Too many.  I asked him to empty the pooper scooper (a great big horse scoop so it can get horribly full and very stinky) as it was his turn, to collect poo from the garden, and to mow.  Now that was daft.  That was far too much.  Had I just asked him to mow, he’d have had to scoop the poo and to do that he’d have had to empty the scoop. 

Anyway, all that is a little irrelevant as though it meant I had to spread my requests over a couple of days, Ian did do the mowing.  And, as always, he did it far better than I.  And when he did mow he came across a baby bird.  Ruth, who was out (starkers but for her wellies) filling a huge gardening bucket with windfall apples in the hope of earning herself a pound, was despatched to ask what one does with a baby bird.  I know what we used to do… we’d find an old box, fill it with cotton wool, attempt to feed the bird milk through an eye dropper and eventually we’d have killed it with our kindness.  Nowadays I’m more inclined to suggest that nature is a marvellous thing and just to leave it alone to die or survive. 

But I’m not so heartless that I can’t remember wanting to save small birds so I looked on the RSPB website, but my internet connection was hiccoughing and my patience short and I wanted to get back to organising the village harvest supper (how did I get myself into this??) so I found no answers. 

Ian’s solution was to fill a bucket with leaves, put the bird in and place it in the wendy house, leaving the upper door open (so a parent bird could get in) but the lower door closed (so the cat couldn’t).  The next morning after reading up on bird rescue he put it back on the grass for its parents to find, but then he couldn’t stand it any longer and put it back in the wendy house away from predators.  What should he do next, he asked?  I don’t know.  I suggested chewing up some worms and spitting them into its mouth.  That apparently was not a helpful answer.

Then when I asked the girls to come and make their Menu C lunch selections for school they came hurtling down the garden full of talk of a fox.  A fox.  It was right at the back of the garden, on the path under the leylandi neighbouring Tim’s garden.  It was simply lying there, flat out.  Not very fox-like.  Ruth and Ian went up close to investigate.  Oriana wanted to see but didn’t want to get too close so I carried her round the other way so she could see better without actually having to pass its head.  It was clearly injured.

What to do, they asked.  My thoughts naturally turn to who might have a gun to finish it off and wondering if it can go in the green bin, which goes out this week, or if I have to leave it in the black bin, which has another ten days of festering before heading off for the landfill.  And then I realise my family are not thinking of a quick end but rescue.  Rescuing a fox!

And before I know it their collective cloud of fox-love has blown me back into the house and I find myself on the RSPCA website.  I am flabbergasted.  All the more flabbergasted when I find myself phoning them.  Luckily Ian walked in at that moment and I was able to hand over to him as he’d examined the fox far more closely.

They advised him to prod the fox with a long stick and if it didn’t move to call back.  To my huge relief it limped away to Tim’s garden.  I feel a little bad that Tim will now probably have to deal with a dead fox, but greatly relieved that I will not be implicated in interfering with nature.  I think the RSPCA does amazing work, but surely with limited funds then they want to concentrate on cruelty to animals not the cruelty of nature?

The next thing I know, Ian is up a ladder looking for nests for the bird.  He discovered that the only nest up the tree above the bird’s original landing place was a little smaller than the bird, but concluded it would give it the best chance of survival.  This only I scoffed at his suggestion that he hang the bucket in the tree.  I just couldn’t see the bird’s mother knowing what to do with a bucket and if the bird could not yet fly, which it had already demonstrated, how on earth would it get itself out of a high-sided bucket?

Before Ian ascended the ladder to place the bird in the aforementioned far-too-small nest, he insisted I take a look at it.  Baby!  It was bloody enormous.  The size of a duck!  We haven’t seen it since and there have been howling winds for a day so perhaps our baby duck was happy in its too-small nest.  And if it did blow out into the jaws of a passing cat, at least we didn’t see.

I am still chuckling at the duck in the tree.

Incy Wincy Spider

I don’t know what possessed Ian to leave the house on Thursday, but he did.  He rarely goes out the back of the house (no cars there) so to do it in rain seemed most uncharacteristic, but go out he did.

Come to think of it, he was probably going out to call me in.  Friends had arrived and I was out picking soggy mulberries for a crumble mulberry cake (yum). 

Whatever Ian saw in that brief visit, he passed me on my way into the house on his way out and then he was gone for the next couple of hours.  I spotted a ladder briefly then spied the man himself from the kitchen window as I made coffee, but that was it - sightings as fleeting as those of our hedgehog.

It turned out that the torrential rain had reminded him that the gutters need some work.  He’d already celebrated the arrival of the new ladder by getting down the small forests sprouting from various points in the guttering (photo op missed), but it really takes rain to show you where the problems are.  And they were everywhere.  In particular he found that the rotting bathroom window downstairs is because the join in the gutter immediately above is not sealed.

I feel rather shamefaced that I don’t know what else he repaired, but I do know he was the unsung hero of that rainy day.  My coffee was good and the mulberry cake delicious!

Plumtastic

We have plums growing all over the place.  These aren’t all of them, just the ones that were most photogenic at this stage.

Some look like they’re going to grow into normal plums.

Some are small, but absolutely delicious.

And the rest are tiny, tasty and abundant, but most of all very, very pretty.  Sadly the yellow are the least delicious, but I’m sure they’ll make excellent gin.

The weeds in pictures

Here's the pictorial version of the weeding I’ve been banging on about intermittently all summer.

This is the bit I’ve largely done.  It looks a bit of a wasteland.  Well, it is a bit of a wasteland.  Not all my fault.  A lot of it was in the shade of the old horse chestnut tree and there never was much growing under there.  But it’s clear in my ground elder obsession I must have removed rather a lot of good stuff too.

The bit I didn’t get to yet looks great.  Look at all that purple.  And all those weeds.

The big green mound is a miniature mulberry.  It’s been trained into that shape – makes it virtually impossible to pick the mulberries, but it looks good.

I read somewhere that nasturtiums outgrow the ground elder and as I also read that they are one-year-wonders I thought they’d be perfect to outwit the elder.  They haven’t stopped the elder, but the girls had fun planting and they distract the eye from all the nettles and thistles that have leapt in to fill the gaps left by the elder.  Of course, I didn’t realise there was a purple theme when we planted them.  They’re very cheerful though… I say they, I mean it is very cheerful… only one has flowered.

Norman liked it fruity

Wow!  How did we miss all this on our regular visits to the house last year?  Several times we came down to the house before we bought it, ostensibly to measure, meet builders, or talk to tree experts, but mostly just to wander in the gardens and remind ourselves why we were taking such a crazy plunge.  But somehow, in all our visits, we missed the fruit, or at least almost all of it.

We did find the wild strawberries.  Exquisitely small and utterly delicious these tiny gems are hidden all along the garden wall.

And we have apple trees all over.  Some look like they’re going to be eaters, though they’re still pretty tart.

And the grapes are coming along nicely – they were delicious in October last year though everything’s come early this year so who knows when we’ll be starting wine production.  Ha.

 

But I think my absolute best are the mulberries.  I’m not sure I’ve ever tasted them fresh before, but they are delicious.  The juice from a single berry is enough to provide enough “blood” for even the most over-zealous props department in a school play, but they are worth every ruined T-shirt.  Heaven.

Caution: Man working overhead

Ruth and I were out of the house all day today.  First she completed her next marathon swim (2000m), then we collected the deeds to the house (rather overdue), and finally a shopping trip for essentials: coffee (Ian), books (Ruth) and underwear (me).

When we got home, I found this:

Domestic bliss.  My very own gardener.

A more entertaining shot might have been of the chainsaw stuck in the tree, but then Ian might have returned to base camp and never again ventured into the garden.

He’s done an amazing job.  Lots of the branches have dead limbs, or had… now we just have piles of them waiting for the bonfire bus.  Some will become Ian’s new hedgehog and frog hangout.  He’s worried than when we finally take down the old bonfire there will be nowhere for them to hide.

Sterling work, Ian.

And here is the Indian bean tree groaning with happiness.

And this?  Well, I haven’t a clue what it is, but I think it’s fabulous.

Bee careful

As always, the weeds are winning.  As the girls were happily entertaining themselves this afternoon and Ian had gone off to do some hunter gathering in Sainsbury’s and the Sony shop (though his laptop lives doggedly on he has to shake it occasionally in meetings to quiet the fan, which can’t look too professional), I decided the time had come to grab my tool bag and head for the muck.  Actually, as I did some weeding yesterday too, it was more a question of gathering up the gloves and tools and buckets I’d left scattered around the place, but you get the drift.

I am absolutely sick of the front flower bed and my bid to clear the ground elder.  One side of it is clear and I pounce on the smallest elder shoot, but this new desert I’ve created appears to provide ideal conditions for thistles and nettles so I’m not sure it counts as progress.   And to make matters worse, the remainder of the bed, weeds and all, is in full bloom with every purple flower you can imagine so I can only suppose I’ve dug up a lot more than ground elder from the now very empty end.

So for variety I sent off for new shadier climes today.  I chose the nettles that are blooming beneath the Indian bean tree.  The tree is looking fabulous with huge light green leaves and delicately scented blossom with boughs that grow horizontally (thanks to years of yearning for light from under the privet growing round its base).  It is clearly now a very happy tree.

I’d dug about a square foot, if that, of mainly nettles and thistles when I realised that the noise I was hearing was not electronic and in the distance, but something close to me, very close, underneath my fork.  Paying closer attention, I saw the ground was moving.  Not much, but gently, like the ground was breathing.  I didn’t wait around, but gathered my stuff, told the girls not to play in the area and backed off a little.  Then out of the blue, or actually out of the dirt, and apparently in front of my eyes though I didn’t see it coming, a huge bumble bee appeared and was examining his property for earthquake damage.  Or that was how it seemed.  We backed away and left him to restore his property.

I moved again.  Always more weeds to choose from.

Hardly had I begun when a few sharp cracks presaged the breaking of a branch from one of the plum trees.  The branch didn’t’ fall all the way (someone – Ian, I suppose – will have to head up with a tree to free it from itself) but was still a little alarming.  The second branch in two summers… I sense a pattern emerging.  It’s a pretty big tree.  Nothing like the sycamore that lost a branch last summer from several tens of feet up, but high all the same.  I could only just reach the tip of the broken branch as it dipped to greet me.

I tried to turn the moment into a learning experience for Oriana, explaining that the sound she heard first is a warning to her to get away from the trees.  It didn’t quite fall on deaf ears.  The drama thrilled her:  “Daddy, I was so scared.  It was very frightening.  It sounded like bombs going off,” she told Ian when he got home.  We get a lot of bombs in this particular backwater.

The pool is cool…. really cool

Right through the winter the pool looked rather tantalising, a promise of balmy summer days to come, with children frolicking in the blue and parents hopping in to refresh themselves after toiling in the flowerbeds.  Ha!

The moment the weather started to warm up, the pool started to turn green.  The pool man eventually came, but without any wares to flog to us (what recession?  does no-one want our business?) and he’s been almost impossible to contact since.

While we waited for the promised chemicals the pool went green, and greener, and greener. 

I did get as far as trying to work out which chemicals we might need and where we might buy them, but couldn’t decide if the pool counts as outdoor or indoor: it’s cold, but the room gets hot (like the greenhouse it should probably be) and though it doesn’t get all the strange stuff landing in it that perhaps an outdoor pool would, it’s not exactly pristine.  Basically, I got bored.  And time dragged on.  And the pool got greener.  And the pool man didn’t call back.

Though Ian doesn’t want to keep the pool, he agreed that the swamp it was becoming was not in his top ten of alternative uses and eventually he took on the case and boxes and boxes of chemicals began to enter the house and then the pool.

But there comes a time that you weigh it all up and realise the 30 quid or so that it will take to refill the pool is a lot cheaper than the chemicals you’ve chucked into the “spinach soup” over the last few days.  So Ian began the heroic work of emptying the pool and every half hour or so brushing off more of the mould growing beneath the old waterline.  At 1am he eventually declared the pool empty enough that we could climb in and start to clean the bottom.

We made a motley pair, Ian in his budgie smugglers and wellies, me in waterproof trousers and wellies, scrubbing away in the eerie green spotlight while the water sloshed around our feet.  Since we first saw the pool it’s had a nasty rim of mould around the top so we set to scrubbing that too, me with a long-handled broom and Ian with a rather more appropriate scrubbing brush.  I was exhausted.  I’d been falling asleep even before we started and though the pool doesn’t look so big when you’re swimming it, it’s bloody enormous when you work your way round it inch by mouldy inch.

Ian proved himself the more heroic of the two of us, removing black that had defeated me, tackling the corners, and scrubbing well after my spasming exhausted fingers had me whimpering my way to the steps.

The pump began to struggle without sufficient water in its system so we concluded the last many bucketloads of water should be removed by hand.  No easy task.  A combination of scoops and sponges and squirters got the water from the bottom of the pool into a weeding bucket into which Ian could then plunge a bucket that he could lift out of the pool for me to pour down the drain.  Ruth was heroic working tirelessly to fill the weeding buckets.  She didn’t give up, even when left to work alone for a while, till the pool was empty. 

That was the point at which I concluded we’d dislodged so many paint flecks that we should hose down the walls and floor… and of course that water too needed scooping up again.  Again, Ruth leapt in to help.  She was inexhaustible.  Child labour is certainly underrated.

Finally we could refill the pool.  Perfect timing.  It was the hottest of hot days and working round the pool had us all as red and shiny as the tomatoes that the pool’s glass roof was clearly designed to nurture.  As soon as we turned on the hose, the girls stripped off and clambered in to play.  The pool filled with balls and floats and water guns and the shrieks of summer making it all worth while.

Ruth swims almost daily, if not more.  She loves it.  She skinnydips before school or as soon as she’s home from school and is in heaven.  Oriana is a little more hesitant - the pool's still very cold.  But she loves the excuse to add another outfit to her daily wardrobe – suit, sun top, hat, goggles and armbands essential whatever the weather and whether or not she actually ever gets wet.  As for actually swimming, I'm sure she’ll get there in the end.

Time flies; computers crash

I would like to blame my silence on how busy I’ve been, but really despair has been the cause.  Twice now I’ve written about the house, and even occasional occupants, and twice I’ve failed to save and lost the lot.  Words that may once have shown sparks of wit are like burnt out twigs on their third re-write…. but I will endeavour to catch up.

A Bonny day

Our household grew today when a 16^th month old black Labrador called Bonny came to live with us.  Bonny (not our spelling!) belongs to a fantastic organisation called Dogs for the Disabled and is to be one of their brood bitches, having puppies to provide the next generation of support dogs.

She’s still young and playful with bags of energy and though she’s probably wondering why she’s moved house is clearly happy to be here. 

The highlight for Bonny has probably been the stream (if we keep talking it up like this we’ll be able to sell fishing rights soon… it’s really just a ditch) which stinks.  We rubbed her down well when she came in but failed to close the door properly so she was able to dry off nicely on the cream sofas.

The lowlight was probably falling into the pool, which she really didn’t enjoy, but handled well.  She was able walk back along the plastic cover until she reached Ian who was able to help her out to a soggy reunion.  With luck she’ll have learnt her lesson about swimming.

Of course the real fun will start next spring when she should have her first litter.

Move over for the mower

An old soldier on sentry duty, long since past his prime, no longer on active service, but still standing tall and to attention, Norman’s old freezer has been guarding the garage since we arrived.  It did contain a couple of ancient Christmas puddings (now no more than dust and nuts) and an awful lot of old plugs and wires, but it has not been working for many a long year.

There is no electricity in the garage now.  It was probably linked to the mains from the big house and when he sold up it was easier to cut the electricity than rewire to our house.  That was in 1983 so our best guess is that the freezer – a Bejam one, just like the very first one my parents had – has been idle for nearly three decades.

Our brand-new-used mower arrived today.  I thought when I called to check on the progress of the repairs that I was being spun a bit of a yarn “we’re expecting the parts today, love… or tomorrow”.  But an hour or so later he called me back.  The mower was ready.  Could they deliver it (though it’s too wet for them to demonstrate it today).

And thus today the freezer was unceremoniously dumped.  After all those years waiting loyally to see active service once again, it was loaded into the back of the Subaru and bundled off to the tip, its place to be taken by a younger warrior not reliant on electricity for its fuel and rather better at cutting grass.

April showers

The weather’s turned.  It always happens at this time of year.  One sunny day and everyone takes their clothes off: builders shed layers and Oriana asks me why they don’t have their clothes on, legs in shades of translucent purple pop out from all-to-short skirts like uncooked drumsticks, and the more overweight the women, the more likely they seem to be to go sleeveless, strapless, backless.  And it’s still only March.

Then the next day it rains, like today, and everyone covers up again and bemoans the passing of the summer.  And it’s still only March.

As it’s so lovely now though doors are being left open more often, children fly into the garden for a quick swing before school or fling down their school bags to run into the garden rather than come home.  The house has a bit of a fresh-air chill about it.

And then the rain comes and it beats down on the roof and it feels like we’re camping.  The rain is so close.  It really does feel as though we’re under canvas or just hiding in some wooden shack that’s barely protecting us from monsoon rains.  I love the feeling that you are snugly protected from the elements, but it does make me wonder about the insulation on the roof that we hear the rain quite so clearly.

Is she Izzy

Meet the newest member of our household.

Izzy, if that is to be her name, is Oriana’s birthday present from Granny and Grandpa.  She was born on 6 March so is still too young to leave her mum, but Oriana got to choose her on her birthday.

We hope that her early throttling will not leave her traumatised for life and that her presence will go some way towards discouraging the creatures that scrabble round our loft each night.

Slowly but surely

A week ago lots of nursery mums and kids came to play and one mum told me I should definitely cut back the monstrous bush that was rather a gloomy presence in the middle of the garden.  So I began…

The bush is privet-like and dense at the surface so all I could do was to clip away from the outside pruning ever more until eventually I could reach further and further towards the inside and finally climb into the midst of it all to start hacking from the many roots that the bush had put down.

This (pic 3) was how it looked in the winter.

And this is how it looked part way through the hacking.

And this is what we’ve been doing with what I remove.

  

Slowly but surely, distinct trees are beginning to appear.  The Indian bean tree, one with a very black smooth trunk that is just budding, a lilac, an evergreen and some purply-stemmed flower that Oriana thinks - wrongly - must be rhubarb.

And to cheer me up in the middle of all the destruction, this is the spring just edging its way into our garden.

Historic homes

Estate agents promote “original Victorian features” above the modern amenities that actually make the house they’re flogging desirable.  Home owners brag “the oldest part of the house is Elizabethan, of course.”  My in-laws even pay additional property tax for the privilege of owning a house listed as historic, as if the rickety plumbing, ancient fittings and draughty windows weren’t enough to contend with.

I wonder if spiders are the same.  Do the spiders lurking in the shadows of our ceiling, spinning webs across the stonework of our walls tell proudly how the web’s been in the family for 72 generations and lay their eggs in the crib spun by a great, great grandmother of yore? 

If they do, then I am sorry.

I have just been donated a couple of extension poles (been in the family for two generations, don’t you know) that with a feather duster slotted on the end can reach even our highest ceilings.  The resulting duster is unwieldy and the synthetic feathers catch on the stonework.  I cannot wind up the spiders’ silk with a deft flick of the wrist like the candyfloss man spinning sugar.  I’m rather more like the incompetent angler momentarily snagged on weeds before my rod frees itself showering all around as it flicks through the air.  The webs when they finally release their 30-year grip are heavy and black.  But it works.

To say that we are now free of webs would either be lying or the clearest indication yet that the spiders’ silk is not getting finer any more than the print on the Calpol is getting smaller, but that I’m long overdue a trip to the optician.  But the ceilings do look better.  It no longer feels quite so like Miss Havisham’s.

How much more beautiful the mustard yellow ceiling is now that we can see it in all it’s unwebbed glory.

Happy birthday to me

For my birthday I asked not for clothes, which I always need, or books, which I always love, but for a ride-on mower.  Not the most romantic of gifts, but you cannot get romance by request and you cannot get romance from a man working on a bid that’s keeping him preoccupied night and day for weeks on end.

And you cannot get a ride-on mower on a tight budget.  But birthdays fall outside budgets, sort of. 

I’m not sure if we can fully justify a ride-on mower.  It’s true we have a lot of land, but some of it’s paved, some of it’s wooded and some of it’s orchard so perhaps doesn’t need such regular trimming as a real lawn.  But ignoring all that, there’s still a huge garden (big enough to hold the marquee for the village ball in years gone by) and our little electric mower with the lead slightly shorter than the one on the vacuum cleaner was barely going to reach from the plug to the grass, let alone to the end of the lawn and round all the trees.

I have lived many summers with Ian, and for several of them we’ve had a lawn, and for one we’ve even had quite a substantial lawn, but the terrible truth about Ian is that he doesn’t like mowing.  He doesn’t see that the grass needs cutting till it’s at least a week overdue.  This means that by the time he considers mowing, someone else invariably has already given up hope that he’ll ever do the job and has done it for him.  And he has no compunction about letting others do the work – not even the site of his ancient father-in-law sweating up and down the lawn will drag him from his coffee if, in his opinion, the grass is not yet long enough, not yet knee high.

So, if I am to mow the lawn, then I would like to have a mower fit for the job.  I want a tractor mower.  And more importantly, I know that Ian secretly likes things with wheels – bikes, cars, motorbikes, go-karts.  And if I have a ride-on mower, then Ian will want to ride it.  And if I am right, my real present will be that I never have to use my present at all.  Now that would be a great birthday.

Ian has been browsing Ebay for mowers for a month now.  I don’t have his patience.  I don’t want to wait all summer for a tractor mower at the right price.  I don’t want to get a bargain in Inverness and then pay an arm and a leg to ship it here.  And I don’t want a mower as temperamental as the car or which like the vacuum needs you to spend ¼ hour unjamming the tubes at the end of every use. 

To this end, I did something I rarely do: I dragged Ian shopping.  We went mower shopping.  There was one reconditioned mower.  It wasn’t the type Ian wanted.  We discussed it over pizza.  We bought the mower.  It’ll be delivered on Wednesday, and demonstrated.  If it doesn’t suit the lawn, he’ll probably take it back. 

He even threw an axe in for good measure.

Hooray.  Happy birthday.

Armed and dangerous

I think I understand how undercover agents go bad.  Not how they become turncoats, but how they become obsessed by the target and take the law into their own hands.  In all the best crime novels and films where a drug cartel is unravelled or a terrorist cell unearthed, it is tidy work.  Every last member of the gang is identified, caught, destroyed.  Even the sleepy supporters and reluctant but silent spouses are identified and brought to book for their crimes of indifference.

But in the real world crime is a messy business.  However many clues are gathered on the surface as to the hidden connections of the gang, there will be links and connections that we cannot see, cannot find.  They can be tightly bound together, but in unexpected ways, invisible and impregnable.  Yesterday I decided my standard-issue equipment was not up to the fight.  As a friend of Mum’s used to say, if you have a problem, throw money at it.  I have thrown money at the problem and am now armed and ready for the fight.

I bought obscenely expensive gardening gloves.  (Ian, I trust you are not reading this.)  I bought them for the girls too - not the expensive ones, but gardening gloves all the same: bright green for Ruth and for Oriana, of course, bright pink.

They are wonderful.  They go half way up my arm, are so soft I could play the piano in them (if I’d ever been able to play in the first place, though for the money you’d expect them to play for you) and they are tough.  I can grab brambles, yank ivy tendrils and most importantly of all, tackle my garden enemies and at the end of the day my hands are as soft as they always were, as soft as an old scouring pad.

So now I can dig down for my nettles, hunt down the enemy.  I can fumble about till I get to the root of the problem, wriggle with my trusty new fork and up come the most enormous tubers, the heart of the enemy.  Spotting the first tender shoot, I can follow it back through the wilds of forlorn flower beds and unmown lawn till I reach the hub, the Godfather, then back out to all the other branches of the family, picking up cousins in the snowdrops and uncles in the celandine, in-laws in the lawn and disgruntled teenagers lurking in the dead leaves.  I can get the whole lot. 

I’m loving it.  I want to be a rogue agent, fighting the nettles before they surface, catch them while they’re still sleepers, drag them from their beds.  I don’t want to play by the rules.

More nettles

I think I’m obsessed.  It must be my age.  I just spent another two hours outside in the flowerbeds.  I’m getting better and better and getting up great long roots of nettles.  Half of what I pulled up was just dead stuff lying on top of the other plants – no green fingers needed to work out if it was good or bad. 

Now I just need to figure out what to do with it all.  I filled a bin at the weekend and another today and there's still another huge pile of debris by the garden wall.  It’s another week till green bin collection day.  I know nothing about composting other than that nettles must be drowned for a month before they can be composted.

A bonfire perhaps?

My hands are tingling.  If this habit is to continue I must equip myself with gloves offer some protection.  And with a nail brush.

A Christmas star

Since shortly before Christmas, our vacuum cleaner has been ill.  I spent ages cleaning it on Christmas Eve of all occasions, as if I had nothing else to do that day.  After unscrewing bits, taking out the brushes, and digging about with a knife and a chopstick I eventually removed all the clogged dust balls and revealed the root of the problem: a luminous star.  All this had to be done with the aid of a torch and fortunately Ian has a collection of torches that could have been designed for the job, all just the right size to beam down the clogged tube.  And the added bonus of the torchlight is that at the end of cleaning there is a glowing star to reward you.  Practically makes it all worthwhile.

I made the girls come and see the star and gave them a spiel about why they should leave stuff lying about on the floor and how they should look after their stuff a bit better.  “Don’t worry,” Oriana reassured me, “I have another star.”  Thanks.

Since Christmas, vacuuming has become a routine of cleaning the floor then sitting down with a chopstick and a torch to clean the cleaning machine.  I’m not a big fan of cleaning and this extra discouragement is really not what I need to make me house proud.

Yesterday morning I was driven to whizz through the house which was looking a little the worse for wear after a weekend of four little girls, including a toddler with a passion for flapjack.  This time I could not find the dust ball… or the star.  This was not good news.  It meant that something was jamming the dust ball more surely than it had been jammed before.  I even looked up vacuum repair shops; the nearest two are both a long way off and in towns I have no other need to visit.

This morning I was driven to clean again.  Now I know this makes me sound like a serious clean freak, but the truth is that we do have carpet – however hideous, however impractical, carpet nonetheless – in the kitchen and we did have eight small girls to play yesterday and it’s easier to vacuum cake up from under the table when it’s still crumbs than to wait for it to be ground into the carpet.

I didn’t vacuum much, just the bits with lumps of cake.  The vacuum flashed at me red and angry “bag full, bag full” to tell me that there was a jam.  I know.  I can do nothing.

Armed again with my chopstick and torch I did something slightly different, turning the vacuum cleaner upside down with its upright unhooked.  A huge dust ball… and a star.  Eureka!  That wasn't in the instruction manual.

I doubt it’ll make me clean any less often, but it’s still bloody marvellous.  Hooray.

The joy of gardening

Today Oriana asked me to join her in the garden and push her on the swing.  I resisted.  I was on the sofa.  It was cosy and I was tired.  The Webbs had just left and it was time to recuperate from being up too late and drinking too much.  And anyway Ian was zonked on the other sofa and sleepiness is catching.  But Oriana was bouncing joyously on the trampoline and her entreaties through the window were endearing and I hadn’t paid her too much attention all weekend.  She deserved some of my time. 

I went out via the recycling.  As bottle after bottle – wine, beer, champagne – clanged to the bottom of the bin, I could hardly forget that my exhaustion was self inflicted.

Now I love being a stay-at-home mum.  I wish I’d had a career I loved so much that it had already lured me back to employment, but I didn’t.  Those who don’t love their jobs, or need the money, seem to me often to be driven back to employment… driven back by the little munchkins they love so much their hearts could burst… if they haven’t throttled them first.  I think I’m happy at home with my girls because I’m fundamentally rather a bad mother.  I don’t worry too much if they’re stimulated.  I play with them sometimes; I ignore them often.  I listen to them sometimes; my mind wanders often.  I love them to bits, but I am not the doting type.

But there I was, out in the garden on a damp cold February afternoon indulging my youngest daughter, pushing her on the swing, hoping she’d soon get the hang of swinging herself… actually, I think she can do it, but she likes the company so prefers to act dumb.  Of course, my neglectful mothering technique meant that my mind soon began to wander and I was in the garden it was wandering along the lines of “Oh my God what have we done… I know nothing about gardens and this one’s huge.”

I started wandering physically as well as mentally from my maternal duties and pulling Old Man’s Beard from the plants near me.  Soon I had so much that I need to dump it so I told Oriana I’d be back and went off to get the green wheelie bin.  (Of course we’ll need to figure out composting at some point, but for now we’re green binning it.)   I didn’t get back to the swings as I was diverted by the brambles smothering one of the fruit trees. 

The brambles turned out to be climbing roses (probably!) but whatever it was, it was still wrapped around ever branch of the plum and even I know that can’t be good.  Oriana helped to unravel it and cut it back before getting cold and abandoning me.  But now I was on a bit of a mission and turned my attention to some dead stalks near another plum tree.

Now I know a bit less than nothing about gardening.  To date I’ve pretty much stuck to sweeping up leaves and cutting back ivy.  I’ve no idea what is good and what is not – I’ve only been tidying up, not gardening.  That’s not so hard in a garden that had no owner at all for over a year.

But then I spotted some nettles and remembered on Gardeners’ Question Time they’d said it’s a good time to pull up nettles, a good time to get their roots.  I pulled at one or two – nothing – another gardening disappointment.  But with the third I learnt something I’d never known about nettles.  Their roots are endless.  I guess I’ve only ever yanked at them in the summer before when they sting your hands and cling to the ground like a drowning man to an overhanging branch.  But these ones pulled up effortlessly, long purple roots stretching along the ground.  I followed them around the base of the tree.  Often when the roots stopped, it would be at another plant.  Often that plant looked legitimate.  There were a number of primroses and some tubular things that I imagine grow from bulbs but I’ve no idea what they are.  But what I did know was that if there’s a legitimate plant there then the stuff around it was probably uninvited… I could weed it. 

As I progressed round the tree I started to realise that all the grass growing there was also stray.  It had looked like grass around a tree, with occasional snowdrops, which are already out in abundance and therefore identifiable.  What I found was a flower bed, carefully planted and totally overgrown. 

I weeded till light stopped play, as they say at the cricket.  My hands are tingling from the nettles, despite my gloves.  I didn’t completely blow the cobwebs away.  But my wheelie bin is full.  I am happy.  I cleaned up a bit more of the garden than the bed around the plum tree but that was the highlight.  I knew nothing, but by following one root I could work out what was good and what should go and make it look like a real flowerbed. 

And how did I know, in all my ignorance, that it was a plum tree?  Well the birds, squirrels and other wildlife had left the stones at the bottom of the tree and even I can identify those!