First weekend in October

 Hello, and Happy October to all the northern hemisphere bloggers for whom this is the happiest time of the year! The Hurricane Tree is resplendently golden (in the right light, though that was not today), and mostly bare on its north facing side. It's still quite green on the south side though. 

It's not particularly cold here yet. I did see the temperature below 10 degrees on the car display one morning last weekend. Otherwise it's still comfortable enough to be going to school in my raincoat, which I do leave in the car if I think the day will stay dry. However tights are most uncomfortably back after a blissful six month absence. 

The pears are still on the tree: please advise! We have discovered that there are in fact four of the wonderful things. One is much smaller and hides shyly above its three big siblings - I hesitated there on the gender of pears. Are all plants androgynous? Do I go out and pop them greedily from the branch, or wait for them to fall (there's a wee American pun for you) into the thick vegetation weeds below, risking never to be seen again by human eye?

I do get a thrill out of free food at this time of the year. It's like any time of the year when you can stand in the sunlight to warm up: free central heating. Our grocery delivery man brought four jars of jam this week. I should point out that he brought the rest for the order as well. 

I told him to take back three of the jars, thinking I'd ordered them by mistake. But he re-appeared at the door ten minutes later. It turned out that I had only ordered one jar, so because it was easier he told me to keep all four. That was more free food, albeit much less Godly!

I can more honestly claim the blackberries in the garden. We're not supposed to pick them after 1st October, according to folklore. A friend told me this morning that after 1st October the berries start to be eaten, from the inside, by little insects. I took the risk after lunch today.

I was at the same time able to be still picking strawberries, which seems utterly incredible in Northern Ireland in October! That mess of a broccoli bed has been cleared out and filled up with new strawberry plants that I had put in pots over the summer. They are long strawberries, with a strength about them. The flowers are pink rather than white. They must be a very hardy breed. Hopefully they'll do well in our rough environment!

There weren't as many ripe blackberries as I'd hoped for, so I just brought lots of branches inside to stick in a pot. The pumpkins are coming out too! I never quite know when it's the right time to be putting up "Hallowe'en" decorations. That only ever equates to pumpkins here anyway! Our half-term holiday is still three weeks away, so I will most definitely need the cheering up of much orange around the house before that! Our health minister is talking about a circuit breaker Lockdown when the schools would be off anyway, as seems to be the plan for the rest of the UK. The big question is will he give us more than one week off to make the circuit break more effective? You can guess which answer I'm hoping for!

And so, fine Blogland folk. blessings on your October! Here's what I'll be at:

What I'm reading: Psalms (up to 107 just now and isn't that refrain structure wonderful?); more of Lilies for Gretchen (I know, Gretchen, I'm nearly ready to talk about this!); the end of this William Morris collection (if you haven't read News from Nowhere, these Covid times are the ideal times).

What I'm making: Cushla's Comfort, and I'm back past the heartbreaking point at which I ripped it all out last month to work with a more comfortable hook; my Hookery Shawl which might get into its orange wool at some point this month, which is unbelievably exciting; two zipped pouches with gorgeous Harris Tweed remnants that a friend gave me and that are currently cut out and waiting for the Elves to come round from the Shoemakers.

What I'm doing: just about getting through the school days - I was so tired on Friday that Prince Charming made my porridge and then drove me to and fro; I signed up for that online course and now need to show up at some online tutorials, and probably even do some work; at the weekends I am still outdoor swimming in Belfast Lough with the wonderful women who have been doing it every day for years, and now that I've made it into October I find myself wondering if I can keep going to the end of the month when I too could swim every day for the week I'll be off...

Stay well, lovely bloggers, and prayers for the President; be blessed x

Under the Speading Chestnut Tree

Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree is apparently by Glenn Miller? Although Wiki people say that "Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree is a set of variations for orchestra composed in 1939 by Jaromír Weinberger. The work is based on an English popular song of the period, which Weinberger is said to have mistaken for a folk song." I thought it was just a child's nursery song, and was more than a little perturbed to find it on youtube as a horror song from Orwell's 1984!

Underneath our spreading chestnut tree yesterday stood a tearful teenager, and a wistful mum. Our tree started life as a little sapling at Lorne, a gorgeous estate which is now the Northern Ireland Headquarters of the Girl Guides (and Brownies etc etc) Association. Any group can book to stay there.


At the start of our chestnut tale a Lady Valerie was working at Lorne. New building work was about to begin on additional accommodation for residential groups. The sapling was due to be taken out, with other trees, to make way for what is now the Marion Greeves Brownie House.

Our Lady Valerie thought it was a shame that such a young tree would be lost, and brought it home to her own new-build house, where she and her husband were laying out a wonderful garden. They planted the little chestnut tree in the top corner of their upper garden, close to the fence where its branches could spread wide and shady on both their land and the farmer's field beyond. It grew and grew and grew. Lady Valerie and her husband eventually decided to move to the seaside and sold the Meadowplace to a rambunctious punnet of strawberries, whom they quite liked because they too had lived a life with boys. The strawberries instantly loved the chestnut tree, all year long for high, hidden climbing, but mostly in Autumn when a rich supply of conkers was to be had with no need to be dragged out for walks by the wistful mum.

But then, twenty-two years after moving from Lorne to the meadow, Ophelia came.

 What was the strawberries' main staircase to the blissful canopy was hauled out to whirl with the beautiful Ophelia. There must have been a mighty crack, but we were too far away to hear it over the volume of the dance. Poor chestnut must have changed its dancing mind at the last moment, or maybe its twigs and branches wouldn't carry it far enough past the smaller hedges to escape.

 It is still lying low, airing its wound, while the rustling dark comes down to remind it of home.

 Happily, underneath the still spreading chestnut tree there are yet conkers, and there can also, we have ascertained, be climbing. I hope the tree isn't too disappointed.



Meeting Ophelia, or Our First Hurricane

 9am Monday

 11am Monday

 1pm Monday

 3pm Monday

 5pm Monday

 7pm Monday

9am this morning

I decided that the tree right outside Mattman's window would be a good hurricane gauge- I was sure that by the end of Ophelia's dance through our country the tree would be completely bereft of leaves, and actually, out of all the trees in the garden, I thought it might be the one to topple. You'll see from the hardly dramatic results, that she shook us but spared us.

Ophelia did huff and puff and blow some houses in, but the tree fared very well all in all. The biggest casulaty was the orange man, who moved from the window to the wardrobe overnight, inexplicably to me. Teenage bedrooms. We fared well too. There has been great damage across the country- roof tiles from my parents' apartment block caused some commotion in the village at the bottom of our hill. Three people have died, and many are still without electricity. But I am sure that this is nothing on the scale of what countries are still managing across the wide Atlantic, whose distance curbs the violence for us. And certainly we stayed warm and safe all day long.



Schools were closed by our Department of Education yesterday and today, so we got the homework issue sorted in the morning, and spent the afternoon playing a most ingenious board game devised by Joshua to include most other board games in the house. We had to take comfort breaks. Then when Prince Charming finally made it home safely, an hour after the winds really hit hard, we settled down for the evening. There was Lego, and, as you can see, uninterrupted electricity.

I was so thankful for a society with an infrastructure that could cope (who needs working politicians, it would seem?), well-built houses, power, food and water. And thankful too that by lunchtime today, Ophelia had had her dervish and was gone. Driving beside the Lough this afternoon, it was hard to believe that just twenty-four hours before our hatches had all been battened down.

This piece of music captures the paradoxical quietness of the day for me- you can hear the storm recorded  beyond, but there was beauty still. Chris McCann is a local composer, music teacher, amazing drummer, and he lets Prince Charming play with him sometimes too!



Spring into summer, and then just back to Spring

 In terms of blog posts written since then, it wasn't very long ago at all that I was wondering about "autumn" as a verb, and you cleverly pointed out that "fall" and "spring" were indeed verbs.

 It is nonetheless two whole seasons ago. Must do better! And here are some photos from the last few weeks in Northern Ireland, the few weeks in the year when we wake up one unexpected morning to vast blue skies, temperatures warm enough to merit dragging out the suitcase with the barely worn summer clothes, and the firm belief that it could never rain again.

 You see, Spring in Northern Ireland springs straight into summer for a few weeks in May. Every year. Just at exactly the time when you need outdoor-craving boys to be indoor-revising boys. Not sure if Jo is smiling or begging in this shot. Five minutes more, and you oblige, because you don't really want to be an indoor-boy-curtailing-mother.

 So you wander round marvelling at all the colour, and all the heat, and all the sun. Rejoicing in the fact that the people who built the house were gardeners! Real gardeners, with a scheme and a plan and everything. We don't really have a plan. We just try to weed it all out as best we can, which doesn't admittedly amount to much effort on my part at all...

 Look at that sky. Blue. Ireland is mostly green, because of all the rain. But when it's not green, and therefore grey, it is very, very blue.

 So here we all are at the table. Inside. Books and files and pens and mind-maps. And tea. Door wide open for air! My sanity lies in the basket of small ends of things. Crocheting lots of little flowers to join lots of other people's little flowers to be joined into a little flower thing for our Knit in Public day at the start of June.

 Lots to look forward to- boys' exams start tomorrow, so obviously it has rained again, as revision season draws to an end, but at least the revision pain will end! A morning at Mossley Mill with Hookery for KIP, where we'll sit outside if the sun shines, and inside in the coffee shop if it doesn't! And maybe we'll still get glimpses of vast blue skies before the traditional downpours of July. The speck in this picture was a para-glider who had thrown himself from Knockagh Hill, just behind the tree. He served as a needed reminder that day that the feeling of falling off a hill can possibly be followed by the feeling of actually surviving and landing safe on the other side!

ps Thank you to everyone who did leave comments re Outside Tea in Lent. I have a little sachet of tea wending its way to  you all x

Outside Tea in Lent

 Well, there's the end of another Lent. I hope yours was full of insight, and warmer than ours here in the Frozen North! I think I did learn a few things along the way...

  If you drink tea outside every most days in Lent, you may catch cold. This cold could last forty days and forty nights plus their associated Sundays. You may well end up on a very strong antibiotic! Falling asleep outside, see below, will not bode well! If you do all this in the Frozen North, be not deceived by short moments of sunshine. And most of all, climbing Northern Ireland's third highest mountain with said levels of congestion will not be a happy experience, at least on the way up!

 Secondly, there is a distinct contrast between the earlier and the later days. At the start it was all about taking time out, literally, to be more disciplined about listening to God. Then the idea took over, to the exclusion of the reflection. This has happened to me before, and is for me, I think, quite linked to the whole social media thing. So in the days before Pentecost I am going to be much less on farcebook, and much more locked in the metaphorical upper room, before the invention of WiFi! Waiting for the Spirit, rather than the likes. This is a shameful admission for a woman of nearly fifty! I do have a greater desire to seek God now than I did forty pictures ago.

What strikes me very much about the pictures is that the vast majority of them are taken in our garden. The meadowplace is predominantly where I live and move and have my being, but there needs to be a bit of an effort now to have open doors, an open life as our sermon encouraged today. There are a few opportunities that I have ignored for weeks, but I am saying yes to them now. Very scary in all three instances, but small steps!

 And lastly the Cross. My main intention was to appreciate, not just understand, the importance of the cross. This has been a very humbling journey. Right through the denial of Judas, and predicted denials of Peter, in John 13. It was my sin, my daily denial, that held him there. And yet, immediately after John 13, in 14:1-4, Jesus promises a room for me, prepared, with safe passage guaranteed.You know the way to the place where I am going!

 It does tickle me that I ended up with forty pictures- admittedly they are not all outside! I thought I would be able to pick a favourite, but now I'm not so sure. My top four might be mountain tea, soon-moving-to-Glasgow-Catherine tea and the silly black and white ones: there's a trend among the wittiest of folk-from-church-on-farcebook to be witty in grayscale. I don't quite cut it, but it was fun to have a go!

So, cheers! A kind, and incidentally hilarious, colleague of Prince Charming's sent me at one point an envelope full of delicious tea sachets to help me along the way, and I have two left. Leave a comment and I'll pull a name out of the hat, and send them on. But if you're going to be drinking outside tea- do wrap up well!

End of an era

 I have been thinking that, apart from the working five days a week thing, and the looking after children and parents thing, and the being as lazy as get out thing, one of the reasons I have rarely blogged for a long while now is because I have allowed my mind to be ruined, ruined utterly, by a dependence on short, preferably witty sentences or sub-titles that require little effort and less thought, and which are usually found on facebook.

But this afternoon, writing this year's series of thank-you cards with my shining suns, it struck me that the place I really wanted to be documenting what is a big milestone for us here in the Meadowplace wasn't facebook at all. Despite the fact that blogs are much more open than social media with their supposed privacy settings, there is in blogging an atmosphere of intimacy and understanding that doesn't exist there. Here in the small nest of sympathetic readers is a small, precious space to lay down a little egg!

 Tomorrow Jo will leave Primary School. He will surge out of the red doors at 12.15 and bounce around for a while with all his friends, high on life and loud as a hoarse-from-a-morning-of-shouting thing can be. I think I started blogging in 2008, when Jo was about to start his nursery year. I was certainly blogging when he started school. He had seven years of hearing that school bell ring, running up and down that playground, doing homeworks, going on trips, walking/scooting/cycling down and up the hill, learning to play violin and protesting his hatred thereof at every pluck of every string! For most of that I was blogging cakes, books, trips, Wind in the Willows, walking down and up the hill- I'm not at all sure what!

I know that I did come to feel that I was eventually blogging all the same things at all the same times of the year. That did make me feel slightly boring! But what is life if not Autumn cosiness, winter lights, Spring emersions into the fresh air, and solo summer surviving when you have two suns and their high octane energy to channel and Prince Charming is safe in work!

Thankfully, regardless of his increasing propensity for teenage attributes, Jo has the living room floor covered in train track. Schools may change, height may change (that's definitely them rather than me), seasons may change- but some things remain to litter the nest a while yet!

Tomorrow our Primary days end, another holiday kicks off, and all will be well in the world x

Not still Advent, but in fact Lent!

My goodness, doesn't time fly when you're doing Christmas, New Year, back to school, school exams for Sun 1, looking at new schools for Sun 2, hibernating, stretching and breathing on occasional bright days when the real sun shines blue, organising the gamut of everyone's appointments for approaching half-term!


Time flies. I embraced hibernation between Christmas and the end of January. There was little else to do with everyone so busy! It was a revelation, though, to stop fussing about what needed done, about what wasn't being done, and just reconcile myself to a month in the house surrounded by one revising boy, one Victorian project researching boy, and one very work-stressed daddy! There were cakes as well as revision timetables, it was warm and dry inside, and the weeks whispered past into daylight.


Prince Charming cleared the garage and declared it a boat shed. He and the boys and our farmer neighbour and a school colleague have been sawing and filing and surveying and drinking tea for many cold weeks now, and apparently the bits are ready to be assembled. This has been most exciting!


I cleared my head and declared a Year of Ants and Elephants. I'm still not entirely sure what this means, but it came from friends with whom I was discussing my myriad of unfinished crochet projects. We were weighing the relative merits of clearing big things or small things first. In their house they call this squashing the ants before you can squash the elephant- or something to that effect! Maybe you know of this concept already? Anyway, I am determining to squash an ant or an elephant every month: January saw the completion of my Africa Blanket, and this month I really must finish the tank-top that was started two Springs ago! In fact, the trousers with which I envisaged wearing said tank-top are long past their best!


I also hit on a reading project. Last year a friend made it to the end of 52 books in 52 weeks- impressive. Knowing from past experience that I wouldn't make it past this point in the year, I  thought I would try to read an Alphabet of Authors instead. So in January I read Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, made all the more poignant by Alan Rickman's death mid-way, and Saul Bellow's Him With His Foot In His Mouth.  I am coming to an end of Chris Cleave' The Other Hand, and have Vanessa Diffenbaugh's Language of Flowers lined up and ready to bloom.


The reason why I have not blogged any of this is partly because I have no camera bar the one on a tablet, and partly because I never find the time. Jo's preparation for the transfer test has been replaced by Interesting Homeworks and Days in School. So once a week for more than a month now I have been racing about with him making and sourcing Victorian costume (visit to Folk Park), snow items (Book Day: the Snow merchant), baking and decorating many, many, many buns (P7 Fun Day), and reading all about the Irish Famine, the Victorian Workhouse, Victorian toys....


Conscious all the while that time flies, and that my high octane suns are becoming their own men, circling their own orbits now, and providing sources of energy in other places as well as in mine. Thank goodness for books and crochet!


Wishing you all a gentle end to your winter, or summer! I'm hoping to post some photos and some book reviews and some tales of life outside the Meadowplace, but in the meantime, Happy February x

Our daily bread

 Mattman baked his first loaf of bread this week. It was Savoury Irish Bread week in Home Economics this week and he came bolting out of school brandishing his box and a smile. There were three mouthfuls left! Two were buttered and left for Jo and Dad.

 I have been soaking lots of fruit in lots of brandy and ginger wine for Christmas cakes, but I haven't got much further than that, despite today's great plans, because Prince Charming has had the fire lit in here all day, and it's very hard to leave!

 Jo did the second of his three transfer papers for Big School this morning. Two down and one to go, and then it will be Christmas! So we're all at very humble stages of getting things done this week- all very ordinary, common activities that don't set the world alight, but that are nonetheless filled with lots of personal satisfaction. They're the sort of things that warm the house in gentle ways.

This weekend winter wanted to make sure that we knew it was here. We had lots of stormy snow last night, that didn't lie, but left us with low temperatures and the stark beauty of November in all its fullness. I do continue to love November! It is my time of my getting ready, quietly, gently, humbly.

What I have discovered this month though is the website of Our Daily Bread. The photography is lovely, the resources are extensive, and the readings are very helpful indeed. Love to you all, and to you all a good night x

My grandfather's chairs

 My maternal grandfather was a docker. In those days, in that Belfast, this meant that he worked at Harland and Wolff's. Everybody's grandfather worked at H&W's, maybe even their fathers too, if you believe them. Both my father and my grandfather did really. I'm not sure that they both worked on Titanic, which everybody's male predecessors also did. That's probably an urban myth too.

I'm sure that it is another urban myth that all these men were taciturn, tattoed and emotionally reserved. It just  happens to be really true of my grandfather, though I think the tattoes dated to his Navy days in WWII. It is true that he served on the Murmansk Convoys, and I think it's true that he survived the sinking of one ship in the Indian Ocean. I wish I'd recorded all this properly.

 This was my grandfather's chair. It sat in the living room window of his house, and he sat on it, and Max the dog sat on him, and the three of them weathered into one silent character in the story of my childhood. Sometimes Max would bark. I remember one speech that my grandfather gave. He was strangely at our dining room table, railing at God for having taken his wife so young and leaving him with six children to raise alone. I imagine this is when he left the Merchant Navy and joined Harland's.

His chair came to live with us last week, because my father got himself a recliner.I must take pictures of something in our house that hasn't come from someone else.

 But not yet, because here is the only other remaining chair of my grandfather. I remember when they bought a new dining room table and chairs- made of teak, with black leather seat covers. Very modern, very expensive. The seat came to me when my aunt sold the house. It was my desk chair all through school and university. And it has trundled along through three houses since. The leather ripped long ago but it took a Jo to demand repair.

 New foam, new material- beach boy, my Jo. X really does mark the spot now.

 No longer does he need to slide about on the hooked cushion that my mother made once upon a time. Now he has my grandfather's chair at his desk whence he can go to sea too. I'm hoping that they'll survive many shipwrecks.

One Weekend

It's Friday, Friday, Friday! It took me a ridiculously substantial amount of time after going back to work five days a week to realise that I was working five days a week, and that it was thus acceptable to feel the Friday feeling. First full week back done.

There are wild strawberries up that tree out there. This is not to imply that they have no homework, oh no. But it is not raining, it is not cold and it is not yet (completely) dark and there are two very happy wild strawberries up that tree.

Did you hear David Nicholl on Bookclub this week? He was lovely. He talked about how his title for One Day would have been St Swithin's Day, but that the marketing panel had insisted on One Day. It makes me think tonight of the one weekend we have each week, and of how life moves on slightly each time we put school uniforms into the washing machine, put away the lunch-boxes and breathe.

We're breathing with Brownies tonight. The fabulous Niqi was incredibly clearing out some scales and now they live with us. As does her little black stove, which currently gives gracious home to the tomato plant and will very soon give gracious heat to homework sessions. Cooking Catherine's bread machine lives with us too. We're most accommodating here at the Meadowplace! Hospitality as a sign of the Kingdom- obedient living which Europe seems to be embracing in a much less facetious way than us.  Bon weekend x