Hobbits

We have a window in the kitchen, or is it a hatch?  The glass in the door is rather like the old lucozade bottles, the yellow glass has a wrinkled film effect.  A window would ideally have a view, but it doesn't.  It’s too low for a hatch and in the wrong place.  What’s more, it doesn’t lead to anywhere you might want to post your food, unless it was tofu or tripe, of course, in which case you might be glad to post it anywhere at all.  I wonder how much tofu and tripe the Royal Mail finds each week.

But enough of tofu and tripe and back to our hatch, which leads to the sitting room, behind the fireplace.  Ian calls it the hobbit hole.  The girls disappear through it and pop out behind the log baskets. 

 

Oriana asks if the fire’s alight, but Ruth just clambers through, or tucks herself in behind the fire.  It’s probably the warmest seat in the house.

But what was the point of it?

The log burner is centred centrally in the fireplace, but clearly in the days of the open fire the fireplace was actually over to the side, behind where the other log basket is now placed.  It all looks purpose-built, yet off centre.  The flue for the fireplace runs horizontally from the log burner before heading up the chimney.  And it still doesn't explain the hobbit hole.

We will probably never know why the house got a hobbit hole, but we think every home should have one.

Another one bites the dust

The daily school run takes me along beautiful roads.  There’s a place where the winter sun hovers behind the trees showing them in all their skeletal glory, sometimes through mist, sometimes frosted, sometimes with the sun so bright the trees are burned on your retina.  There’s a place where on sunny days the light flashes so fast through the trees you fear you’ll develop epilepsy.  The scenery is spectacular.  But the most dramatic bit of the drive is around a double bend above a steep, steep hill.  On aerial maps the tree line along the road and the shadow it casts on the fields below look almost like a river.  They’ve even had to cut and paste the map to show it all in focus.  (Oriana begs to home the long way just so she can squeal at the rollercoaster feeling of dropping down the hill.)   And just today I thought I should stop every day, and photograph the view.  Sometimes I drive the road in thick fog and can see nothing, sometimes in bright sunshine and the fog sits below obscuring the view, on some days you seem to see nothing but the army camp below and on others it’s the yellowy orange stone of the village below that catches the eye.  Always beautiful, always different.

Then I came home and realised that it’s a pipe dream.  We always start to get ready on time in the morning.  We are always late.  A forgotten packed lunch, a shoe lace untied, a lost reading book, unbrushed hair… there’s always something. Could I possible remember to throw a camera into the mix?  Every day?  And if I did, would I remember to stop?

Over the last two days an ash in the corner of our garden has been coming down.  It was one of the trees targeted for immediate attention by Tim the tree guy before we bought the house.  As permission to fell trees in a conservation area takes a while, we agreed that Norman’s estate would pay for the work, but that we would not delay the sale waiting for it to be done.  The chestnut was able to come down sooner as it was short enough not to require planning permission.  The others did.

First down is the ash.

The ash is in the furthest corner of the orchard and leans at 45 degrees over the fence, like it never wanted to be in our garden at all.  To get to it you must climb through a reclining holly and over branches I couldn’t identify but think is hazel before crossing the smallest stream to the very edge of our property.  Not an easy place to photograph.  Not an appealing photograph.

And now it’s gone, and I’ve made no record.  The whole corner has been transformed.  To get to the tree, to take equipment close, to get passed the holly, to avoid the tree bringing down other trees or at least splitting their branches, to protect the fence, a clearout was needed.

It looks quite different.  The corner has been opened up.  We don’t have to clamber to the stream, should we want to go there at all – it’s more of a drain that a burbling brook.  We can see the neigbhour’s house.  Oh, I know it will all grow over in a matter of days, but right now it seems so different.  And, of course, there’s no tree there.

It took two days to take the tree down and has been booked for weeks.  I had all that time to make my photographic record and I remembered too late.  What on earth made me think I could manage a daily record of anything, let alone a view on the school run?

But hey, we have a lot of firewood.  

Planning to plan… a journey around our house

Well the architect did make it over to see us, but it wasn’t the most productive meeting.  In my mind’s eye we were going to bounce ideas around, present our dream, listen to great architectural wisdom.  Perhaps I should have said dreams plural as we definitely have different ideas to bash against each other like conkers and see which one splinters leaving the other victorious… to do battle with the architect’s own ideas.

Anyway, none of that happened.  He forgot to come.  He was mortified.  He came the next day instead, but was clearly so distracted by whether the snow was going to leave him stranded in this chilly curiosity for Christmas that little was bounced.

However, he said the right things.  He likes the project.  He concurred that the kitchen would be better rebuilt in stone.  He could see why we’d like another floor above the kitchen.  He agreed that the external doors need careful consideration and the upper windows are out of proportion.  And, all of the rest.  But perhaps most importantly, he didn’t think it would be a problem to get possible changes through the planning process: the integrity of the house has, he says, already been compromised.  Too right.

So, he’s sent us off to a surveyor to get drawings done of the house: a ground floor plan, a first floor plan, roof plan, external elevations and a cross section of the main space.  The surveyor sounds nice.  He’s going to come at the end of the month.  Meanwhile I’ve taken him on a full photographic tour of the house so he can make up a quotation for us.  And here's the tour, complete with fading camera and grey January skies.