September

 One of you fine Susan Branch living people shared a picture of her September tree the other day on good old farcebook. But I can't find it now or you now, so here is a teeny tiny one stolen shamelessly from Goggle. The line at the top stood out for me even more than the fabulous words. "Wind gives speech to trees". Here in the frozen North for days now as soon as you go outside you hear Autumn. Up until this year I thought you felt it in the crisper, cleaner air. I thought you saw it in the blue, blue sky whose sun didn't burn. In a little epiphany I realised last week that you hear Autumn: in the dry leaves not yet ready to take their leave (excuse the pun...) of summer.

Appropriately, yesterday morning in church we sang "We have heard a joyful sound" and I did smile broadly when we got to the verse that says, "Give the winds a mighty voice: Jesus saves". I was smiling and hoping that the noise of His Autumn would be heard wherever the leaves fall and that salvation would come for all who most need it. As our very traditional preacher pointed out in a most untraditional way for the frozen North, being the word "saved" has many translations, among them finding peace and well-being.

 I have goals for this month! I told my extremely lovely Science teacher and co-staff room chatter today that I was going to get organised this month. She pointed out that you'd never set that as a goal for a child. "Be specific, Mags," she said. So here are the specifics, in an attempt to create accountability for myself:

I am going to have food in the house every day and that includes remembering that I need a packed lunch too!

I am going to stop forgetting swimming kit and piano lessons.

I am going to crochet my tank top from this book. My version will be in easy, monochrome grey.

I am going to start that 52 books in a year thing that everyone else started in January. So institutionalised are we, in three separate schools now, that September is really the start of our new year!

I will be in bed by eleven instead of midnight. (It's 23:29 now.)

If you're still here you'll want a cup of tea. Camomile at this hour. Thank you all for still popping in to the new Meadowplace x It is lovely to have so many porches to relax on when a moment even vaguely beckons from behind the conker-laden chestnut tree up yonder. I know that you're all finding ways to celebrate the speech of the trees this Autumn!

End of August Views x

It may well be the end of August but the messy end of Hurricane Bertha that blew all over us last week just took the last vestiges of summer and tore them into rain storms! This tree is one of two or three along our school route that show Autumn first. Showing clearly today!

I say 'our school route' so easily, but actually it's only Jo's school route now. Matt won't be crossing the road with Mervyn, the fabulous patrol man, but carrying on down the main road, cutting through the university and down the little lane into Big School. So as we watch the conkers on our new-to-us chestnut tree grow and get ready to fall, this Fall will be a big one for one strawberry in particular.

Go, Matt!

The Simms and Young Desk

This is the Simms and Young desk. My brother's first real job was with Simms and Young, a company at the heart of Belfast business. During his time there, cutting his teeth as an Elf in Safety, office furniture came and went. Just before the Managing Director's desk went my brother stepped in to save a small piece of Belfast's industrial heritage from landfill, and it served my mother well as a potting table, right up until my parents moved to their fabulous apartment a few months ago.

Since then the poor thing has languished in garages. The kind C stored it for us while we moved, and it has spent the past week in our garage, undergoing four evenings of what Prince Charming has been too happily describing as his affair with Annie Sloan! There were hours of sanding on the first day. Those of you expert in the current art of chalk painting will know that this was not necessary, but years of business had left the desk top patchy and uneven.

The string and the paintbrush are ours, but the ink stain in one of the drawers must have a story all its own from some office leak. I suppose business leaks now refer to quite different things!

I like the stamp inside that tells us that this desk is an Abbess 563,

and PC likes the quality of the woodwork. I like the lock. The key has gone the way of stamps and quality!

And so to Annie Sloan. Two nights of brushing two coats of her on, and one night of applying a nice, soft wax.

Followed by one night of sanding her off, and finishing with a final coat of wax. And here she is, a delight to sit at and no small motivation to get the bookshelves sorted! A happy conclusion to Prince Charming's affair...

Views, from a bigger picture

I thought that if I took Jane's Views from inside the room, I could bore you with the inside of the Meadowplace. This is the sun room. All of life ends up here. A bit like the kitchen back in Strawberry Land, except that at least now the stacks of untended crockery are hidden from view! Your eye will be caught either by the climbing wall or the bunting. This probably reveals as much about your psyche as do those facebook surveys that tell you which city you would be most at home in, what colour you would be and what sort of a job you could do. I should really be a social activist in Portland wearing blue. Of course your eye might just be caught by the mess. Try to spot the new wool instead!

Voici la cuisine, remarkably devoid of untended crockery. You should see it right now. Door right leads back into sun room; door left leads into what I'd like to call the scullery because I don't like the term utility room. But we do in fact call it the utility room. We utilise it for the washing and drying of clothes, but not really very often for the ironing thereof. Plus ca change...

I did mean to take other views, but my camera decided to have a little strike,coming round in time to show you a very wonderful present that arrived here today. Many astounded thanks to Scarlet from The Finished Article. Embroidered fraises on crisp linen. A joy! The kindness of strangers is such a beautiful aspect to blogging, I think. I would not recognise so many of you if our paths crossed on some street somewhere. We could be drinking coffee table by table! Yet here we are, checking in, catching up, smiling at the other's adventures of the day. Scarlet, you made me smile today!

So if you do find yourself at a table in a coffee shop on a street somewhere, beside a family with two boys who may or may not be sitting comfortably, if the mum is clearly grumpy and looks something like this, do say hello! (And leave quickly... )

ps I know. I keep forgetting to ring the kitchen cupboard people. Manana.

Dealing with Iraq

Prince Charming is preaching tomorrow morning. I know. He's a busy boy. He is looking at Daniel, and at believers in the face of the fiery furnace. We've been gathering email addresses all day in an attempt to do something in the face of Iraq's furnace. There's a great article here.

I would like to think I could stand firm in my beliefs faced with danger to myself. But if someone came for the boys? PC's going with slips of email addresses for those who would like them, rather than impossible rhetorical questions.

Tonight I made Brownies from my latest Annabel Karmel book. There's a woman who has my culinary level. They are particularly fine with the caramel sauce. The boys loved them. I loved them too, and the Brownies.

Reconnected

This is home at dusk! Boys' supper bowls still on table, DVD noise from next door. We have been reconnecting with Prince Charming who has just now fallen into bed- he arrived home this afternoon having been transatlantic to Big HQ for a three-hour meeting. His feet were in North America for twenty-four hours. He was away from home for forty-eight!

What interests me in all the disruption of back-to-back travel and also in the high cost to the company of such a short trip, is that it was clearly worth it to the project involved to have people in a room, face-to-face, reading each others' expressions, able to be fully understood and to fully understand.

Which seems ironic in this super-modern context of instant and diverse communication. I am about to log in to an on-line group to which I belong, and which I very much love. But often I dearly, dearly wish that I could be in the same real room, on the same real continent, with these women.

I wonder is blogging slightly different though. Is the marriage of words and picture a very tangible window through which we allow like-minded folk to look in on us? I don't mean the "lifestyle" blogs with huge followings and managed perspectives. I mean us. Those of us who have bumped into each other on the corner of someone else's street and said, call round!

I've been away from Blogland for ages, and am trying to reconnect. I have decided that I don't have anything particularly worthy to share with the group, but I am so deeply reassured on returning to find our years turning on their solid landmarks and seasons that I am going to pitch right back in with unending attempts to knit socks and a long list of vain sewing projects.

Though actually, it's all about boys here! So if you do call round, look out for the water balloons....

Book Club

So, life must be getting back to something approaching normal, or at least settling in to a new normal, because I made it to my second book club all year. To be honest, the only reason I made it to either was because they both happened chez moi, but I'm getting there!

Not only was I there, but I had read the book as well! Goodness knows how many titles I've missed this year, but I'm glad I didn't miss this one. Now, I'm not generally a big reader of detective/thriller books, but last year one of you kind folk recommended Martin Edwards as a Lake District read, and we're hooked on that series now; now I fully expect to be hooked on the Back Road sequels too.

Like J. K. Rowling's Casual Vacancy this book revolves around a very well described cannon of characters. Unlike Casual Vacancy, however, it is not at all a waste of however long you spend reading it. In a more positive comparison, like Roasmunde Pilcher's Winter Solstice it has a house at the core of the setting that becomes as much a charcter as the people who move in and out of it. I like books with house you can nearly feel. Unlike Winter Solstice you don't feel the need to count the number of Belfast sinks, although you will end up obsessed with yellow roses.

The Back Road moves on from a very distressing opening chapter into some very intricate weaving of characters and plot. Deliberate red herrings will leave you nonplussed until the end, and the distress of the beginning blossoms into a clever twist. It's not Great Literature. My definition of Great Literature is a book that will open up your whole life to you. This is entertainment, not the whole plaire et instruire upon which my ingrained Moliere insists, but I'm becoming less of a book snob either as I get older or as holidays approach. Or both. Actually, the lure for these books for me is the relationship suspense. I only read on with the Edwards books to find out whether or not they've got themselves together. I turn out to be a sucker for a nice love story.

 A quick glimpse at the rest of the night. Book Club is all about the food and the wine ultimately, don't you think? We have some very clever folk in our little band. Themed food and drink most months, don't you know? So because the house in the book has a huge drinks party at one point, we obviously had to have lots and lots of canapes as well. You might even spot one sinister yellow rose in their midst.

And here are two of my partners in crime. I think my life would be not quite so much fun without these two characters. Apparently if you lend a book to someone you should take a picture of them with the book to remind you where it is. I wish I had done that with my very missing crochet books...

Top is Heather Boss. My one time Library boss, and now Hookery leader. She would like to state that her Agatha Christie, our summer read, is all her own. Below is Queen Niqi, domestic goddess who is quite aware that she is re-enacting a mugshot! The rest of us are borrowing Agathas from Helena. So, Helena, I have pictures of all of us and books will be returned!