Sunshine & Bumble Bees (and Volcanos)

I am sorry for all those people who are standed by the grounding of flights as a result of the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, but I have to say the lack of noise from flights is rather nice. I don't live under a major flight path, and have never thought of it as being particularly noisy here, but the quiet is VERY noticable. And as natural disasters go, this one is stunningly beautiful. I was watching the news earlier, and they had film showing the ash cloud above the volcano, shot through with crimson lightening caused by the eruption. It's (literally) awesome.

Despite the suggestions on the news that we were all to be buried under drifts of ash, it has in fact been a beautiful clear, bright, sunny dday - borrowed from June, not April. I cut my (postage-stamp sized) lawn, planted the rest of the lettuces and tomato seedlings I bought yesterday, plus some seedds which may, perhaps, one day become spring onions, and tidied up the (also postage-stamp sized patio. and, as I am still not 100%, in between I spent quite a lot of time sitting in the sunshine doing nothing much bar listen to the bumble bees and birdsong.

Although I did leave the house briefly to take the car to Kwikfit to get a new tyre fitted - whie they were doing tht, I wandered into town and ened up buying two new pairs of jeans, and a bag, and i have seen some shoes I may go back & buy, if they fit (I didn't try them on because I have a rather large blister right now, which doesn't seem the optimum condition for trying on shoes)

It's been a good, relaxing weekend. and next Saturday (volcanos and health permitting) I shall be in London fopr the EvelynEvelyn show.

I An't Dead (yet)

So, it turned out that the bacteria (or virii) were just lulling me into a false sense of security, and instead of the worst being over last weekend, ameliorated by having a very good friend for company & tea making, they were just biding their time.
After J left on Sunday I curled up & snoozed, expecting to me more-or-less fit for purpose by Monday. Instead, by Monday morning I was at the stage where I took 3 attempts to succussfully make a cup of tea, (it seems that both tea & hot water play important roles in the process) and was coughing up half a lung every few minutes.

So I decided that I probably wasn't safe to drive a car, and that any advice I might be able to give my clients in between coughing all over them would probably not be very dependable, and went back to bed until Wednesday.

The rest of the week passed in a bit of a blur, as getting to work, getting home, and occasionally eating something took up all of my energy.

However, I do now appear to be on the mend, and I'm hoeful that I shall successfully see off this chest infection on the strength of my own immune system alone, no antibiotics.

Today, the sun is shining, I have spent some time in the garden, alternately sitting in the sun & enjoying the unusual lack of aeroplane noises & vapour trails, and getting my hands dirty planting out baby tomato and cauliflower plants. The fact that aftr planting 3 tomato seedlings I need to sit down and get my breath back is a hint that this bug is still out to get me, but sitting down to rest in the sunshine, with no sound but birdsong and bumbling bees is no hardship.

And tonight there will be a new episode of 'Dr Who', with Daleks & Winston Churchill...

In Which There is a Day Out

My parents came to visit at the weekend. They didn’t really come to see me, I just happen to have a conveniently placed house, so the first evening was:

6.15: parents arrive. I give them cups of tea and biscuits
6.30: parents leave
8.15: father returns. I give him supper
9.30: father leaves again to fetch mother
11.00: I lie in bed, listening anxiously for them to return home, in a weird reversal of roles.

Then the next day I went to work.

But on Saturday we went out for the day, to Lacock Abbey.

It’s nice. I like it.

It started life, as the name suggests, as an Abbey - a nunnery, in this instance – ‘abbey’ was a not a gender-specific term in 1229 when Countess Ela of Salisbury founded it. She was a tough cookie.

She was the Countess in her own right, and was married at the age of 9. Her husband (illegitimate son of Henry II) was one of the Barons who signed Magna Carta. They had 8 or 9 children, Her husband was reported to have died while on crusade, but she refused to believe it, and was vindicated when he eventually returned,( possibly to be met with a slightly miffed wife asking ‘what time do you call this?’. ) and promptly died.

The pair of them laid two of the foundation stones for Salisbury Cathedral, and later, after being widowed she established Lacock Abbey and 9 years after establishing the abbey she became a nun there, becoming Abbess about 2 years later. Who knew that fast-track promotion was available in medieval monasteries? I imagine having founded the place did not hurt her prospects.
The nuns then spent the next 300 doing nun-stuff, until Henry VIII came along. Apparently when the Abbey was inspected by the King’s Commissioner he couldn’t find any excuse to dissolve it – the nuns were living within their means, abiding by the Rule of their order, and just going around praying, doing good works and being all poor, obedient and chaste. They got shut down the following year anyway.

Lacock is unusual in that a lot of the original abbey survived – the cloisters and chapter house are almost untouched, and other rooms were converted rather than being destroyed. In the cloisters, there are lots of decorative bosses in the ceiling - I like the the mermaid-goat best. No idea what it was intended to be!

It’s very popular with film makers. The cloisters/chapter house were used in film Harry Potter 1,2 & 6 (the scene where Harry frees Dobby’ f’rinstance, and the classroom scenes) and in ‘The other Boleyn Girl’.

One of the later owners of the house was William Henry Fox-Talbot, who lived in the 19th C. and who was the inventor of modern photography, having worked out the negative/positive process and also how to treat paper to create light-sensitive paper and then to fix images. Because of this, the Abbey often has exhibitions of photographs – currently Aberlado Morell – I hadn’t heard of him, but enjoyed his pictures, many of which use the camera obscura technique to project inverted images on the walls of rooms, and photographing the results.

We also enjoyed the gardens, which included some weird and wonderful plants - Alliums, I think.

They were full of bees – mainly bumble bees, in two sizes, but also honey bees. And Painted Lady butterflies – these are extraordinary insects – apparently they hatch in Morocco, in the foothills of the Atlas mountains. They then (little butterflies, remember?) fly all the way here, then they mate and die. The eggs they lay here in England hatch, and the new butterflies fly all the way back to Morocco and start again.

They seem so fragile it seems impossible that they can make, or survive, such a journey. I wonder whether these are Moroccan butterflies in the twilight of their lives, or young, thrusting butterflies gorging on nectar in preparation for their marathon journey?

In what was the stable block there is a (sadly disused) brewery - origianlly 15th Century, it was still in use until the turn of the 20th Century. Now it is on display, and they keep spare gargoyles on the walls.

Lacock village is also very pretty. It is owned by the National Trust which has kept it’s appearance free of most modern alternations – this means that it is very picturesque, and also very popular with the BBC and filmmakers, (Cranford, Pride & Prejudice etc)

And the tea-shop sells yummy organic ice-cream. Mine was rhubarb & custard, and it was lovely. Lots of little chunks of rhubarb.

Did I mention it was a very good day?

In Which it Rains (But there is tea, so that's OK)

I spent the weekend in Devon, staying with my parents. The past week has been a week of blazing sunshine and I was hoping, in despite of the weather forecast, that at least some of the weekend might be similar.


My hopes were unmet.

I arrived at about 7 p.m. on friday, and it started to spit with rain just as I pulled in to the gateway. I left at about 4.30 on Sunday afternoon, just as the rain started to clear. Over the weekend, there were occasional periods when it stopped raining, but never enough to make it worth while going out for a walk or to the beach, which was a shame (Last weekend, when my sister visited them, it was so sunny they were at the beach until after 8 p.m....)

However, despite disappointing weather I enjoyed the weekend. The luxury of having someone else cook meals, bring me tea in the morning, and so forth would make it worth while even without the added pleasure of, y'know, seeing the family.



And I spent some time wandering around the garden, between rain showers, looking at bumble-bees and flowers.




We went out, one evening, so my parents could do some bell-ringing. My bellringing is on hold at present, as hurty shoulder means I can only do it one-handed, and I know from experience that that doesn't end well, but I went along in anticipation of the pub-going part of the evening, and spent some time hanging around in an atmospheric graveyard, and finding a rather charming little skull on a tombstone inside the church.

I love how the stone mason has put in the anatomicly correct 'seams' on the skull, then added a little backwards ear.


The tomb it comes from is from around 1750. It's odd that you get these skulls for a (relatively) short period in the early to mid 18th Century, and not much either earlier or later. There were also some early 19th Century memorials to the local gentry, who seemed to make a habit of marrying late, and on multiple occasions (the men) and dying young (the women & children) One gentleman was married 3 times, and had 9 children, yet when he died in 1817 he was succeeded by his greatnephew, which suggests that none of the children (or at leat none of the 6 sons) could have survived.

Back at the house, it rained some more, and I watched the Goldfinches on the birdfeeder, and the rain on the flowers.

And although nothing happened over the weekend, I think it was practically perfect.