Beauty all around

The filling is cooling for the Danish pie i.e. one with leftover gammon in it, before I top it with some puff pastry ready for cooking this evening.

We went out for a bit yesterday afternoon. When we came in, about 4ish, and the day was starting to darken I was struck by a dazzling chain of crystals, a spider’s web with glistening water droplets on it, which had been spun on the kitchen window.

Yesterday had turned out to be a day of much beauty. We’d been over to the golf club. We were late & our usual friends had already left by the time we arrived. However, it was well worth the trip for the stunning view across the Bay. It was an incredibly quiet afternoon after a very wet morning. The sky & water was a brilliant ice blue, the fells more lavender as the receded in the distance. The clouds in the sky were infused with pinky purple. Altogether something absolutely fabulous.

I can’t help thinking we’re lucky to live in such a wonderful place. Going along the prom is always a surprise, always changing, reflecting a multitude of moods but always magnificent. Sometimes the water is cold, grey & rough, other days ice blue & still. The fells come into, & disappear from, view. Someimes they positively seem to float above bands of mistiness as though they were part of a Chinese or Japanese painting. Sometimes the Bay seems almost all sandbanks, other times it is overflowing with water.

Aye, lucky indeed.

Homes

I’m back to waiting. This time it’s for the man who is coming to measure up for some new blinds.

In the summer we had new double glazing installed, including new doors. Now that the clocks have gone back for winter we’ve come to the conclusion that something has to be done to cover over the window in the back door. The glass ends up looking like a dark accusatory eye, cold & unfriendly, staring at us as we cook our meals. We’re hoping the blinds people can put some venetian blinds up to match the blinds on the other kitchen windows as they did for the old door. It should be possible as it is a classic wood effect style.

It’s amazing the little things that make a place seem more friendly, more homely. It has to be admitted in winter I do like to close curtains/blinds, keeping the cold outside & making the inside seem more snuggly & warm.

At the moment I’m doing a jigsaw of the painting, “The Cottage Home” by William H. Snape. It’s a very Victorian painting. What really strikes me is just how cream & brown the house, & the clothes of the people in it, are. But then I suppose houses would have been far more like that at one time. It is only really since the 1960s that colour has invaded the homes of ordinary people. The upper classes, the rich, were the only people who could afford the extravagance of colours. I can’t help feeling relieved to think anyone can afford to be surrounded by colour these days, to wear clothes of many hues. Colour brings such joy.

On off

We had our central heating boiler & gas fire serviced last Friday. It was a long & thorough job. He was here two hours. Since then we’ve ended up feeling unsettled.

Saturday evening the heat didn’t come on at 5pm as programmed. The Fox eventually found a flashing light on the boiler, pressed it & all was well.

Sunday morning I checked it had properly come on. Fine. Come the evening the Fox had to manually go & start it again. I was all for ringing the heating engineer but the Fox said leave it, maybe it would settle down.

So yesterday, all was well in the morning. Come the evening the heat came on. By 9pm the Fox was feeling cool & checked the radiators. Cold. Once more he started the boiler.

This morning the radiator started to warm up as I got up but now it seems quite cool. I’ve hastily searched out a thermometer. It says 19º, the temperature the thermostat is set for. Clearly I’m just worrying for nothing. Maybe we should have checked the thermometer before. Sometimes it’s amazing how cold you can feel even when it is fairly warm. Maybe the reason the boiler hasn’t been coming on is that the thermostat was doing its job. 19º was reached so it just switched off.

Next time the radiator doesn’t come on when we feel cold, I’ll check the thermometer first. Maybe the fault is with our internal thermometers rather than the recently serviced boiler. We’ll see.

Tales of courage

The sun is shining. My washing hangs outside for once. I can’t imagine it will do much more this year.

I’ve started a new novel, “A Flower that’s Free’ by Sarah Harrison. It’s a sequel to her novel “The Flowers of the Field”, which was set in the 1910s and the build up to, & subsequent horrors, of the First World War. I found that a fascinating book, the more so as it was partly set in Austria & Vienna, where I was looking forward to visiting at the time. This second book is clearly going to be a similar thing. The main action starts in 1936 & presumably will continue through to the Second World War.

The story begins in Kenya. A child arrives in this unfamiliar country to be adopted by a white couple, the main characters in the previous novel. As the child makes the long sea, rail & cart journey, only accompanied by a woman she’d never met before she was despatched on the journey, I find myself thinking back about my mother.

 

She set off for Malaya in 1938 to marry a man she was engaged to but hadn’t seen for a full year. The company my father worked for were only prepared to ship out already married wives. Fiancé(e)s had to establish that their relationship would survive a full year with only written communication before they were shipped out. Engagements don’t always end up in marriages even in the most benign conditions & Malaya was a very different country from England. It was felt most women would just turn round & come straight back, unable to cope with the climate & life in Malaya.

I can’t help thinking it must have taken some courage to set off, just in your twenties, to travel for months alone to marry a man you haven’t seen for a year in a country you had no real idea of what it would be like. In those days there weren’t innumerable films & TV programmes set in such far off countries. Even books were illustrated in black and white. Although that might give you an idea of what lay ahead, it wouldn’t give you the impression of the vibrancy of colour, the humid heat, that is Malaya. It can’t of helped when she first re-met my father, who was by then just over 5 stone, having had a bad bout of yellow fever, with a letter from England to tell her that her beloved father had died while she was sailing half way across the world. I wish she had lived until I was of an age to appreciate such courage. Unfortunately she died when I was just 23.

Winter thoughts

Last night the clocks went back an hour as we move into winter time. I just ended up getting up an hour earlier! So much for the much vaunted extra hour in bed! With the extra hour so far we seem to be having extra rain.

As we move into the dark evenings, the holiday companies have started to send brochures & e-mails with holiday ideas, all visions in glorious sunshine.

We had been thinking we would go somewhere in France, possibly Provence, once more, & a trip to Italy, somewhere further south along Lake Garda perhaps. Now we’re getting other ideas. The idea of visiting the Dutch bulbfields when they are in flower appeals. As does another Rhine river cruise or even a Dutch canal cruise. Both these are being promoted by a travel company that specialises in accessible holidays so we are confident we’ll be able to get on & off the ship. The ship even gets priority berthing as it is essentially a hospital ship.

We’ve abandoned the idea of a Caribbean holiday early in the New Year. Indeed we’re feeling strangely relaxed for the first time in ages. If we go away at all in the winter months, we’re thinking it will just be a few days away somewhere in Britain.

Unless, of course, something else takes our fancy.

Sensual awareness

It is only now that I’ve finished reading my novel, “The Lantern” by Deborah Lawrenson, that I am aware of its influence on me, at least temporarily. In the book one character endeavours to describe the appearance, the colours, the essence, of things in all their moods,  around her to her blind sister.

I think that is maybe part of my heightened awareness of the autumnal colours as we drove over to Harrogate and back. I will also admit I envy the author’s ability to capture the essence of lavender, for example, in words. I quickly come to the end of descriptive abilities as can be seen from my last blog & this.

This sense of visual awareness was evident one day this week when we went along to the golf club. We looked out through the huge windows across the greens in two different directions.

First we looked eastward. In the foreground were some varied coloured shrubbery, reds & greens. Then the eye went further back to the fairways, so green interjected with some majestic trees in their autumnal glory. Beyond lay the bluey Pennines. The sense of recession was wonderful.

Then we looked north, up the fairways. Here the grass is dotted with yellows & silvers, shed by the trees which act as a windbreak to the winds blowing up along Morecambe Bay. Beyond the sun bounced on the whiteness of the village of Bolton-le-Sands, making it gleam. They must have some fabulous views from those houses, both of the open parkland of the golf course & across the Bay. As they point south & west they should see the magnificent sunsets for which this area is famed. Behind the village lie more hills as the Pennines meld into the Lakeland fells.

The views at the golf club are really wonderful. It is part of the attraction of being members here. It certainly isn’t the golf as neither of us play, or even follow it. But we do enjoy watching the ever active birds at the feeders, & just appreciating the views around.