High Lands

 I didn't post my photos of half-term in Scotland with Catherine and then Jacqueline, my oldest and my newest friends. I was still warming up for a while and then the world broke. But here are some remembered moments of high places and wide places in case you need to look at something different this weekend. And chickens! (And thank you - Prince Charming is much better and back at work. We are very grateful x)

January's solitary swim

But at least it wasn't lonely. There were lots of women on the old slipway this morning, and it was good to get back in the water. Tomorrow marks the start of Week 6 in the Great Ankle Recuperation, and my physio said I could go back to the bumpy rocks and slippy seaweed and waves. She also said that if I could run and jump this week then I could go back to the hills. Which will be a miraculous recovery, as I could do neither of those before!

But in the end, this only swim I've managed this month wasn't rocky or slippy or even wavy, despite this weekend's storms. The tide was high and we were straight in. "Is it not cold?" everybody always asks. Honestly, even in summer it feels cold over your feet but once you're all in, you're thinking about so many other things. In summer you really don't notice the cold once you're in, and in winter - cold isn't what I feel. I feel pain! All over burn! And so you keep moving and keep breathing and you're part of everything around you and it's real and your mind can't do much because your body is intent on living.

And back home this is my view from the green sofa where I can be found in the quiet times, just watching the winter in the sky with my mind not doing much. Everything feels white this winter, all white and wide and empty (and sadly devoid of snow). But empty in that good way - isn't there a good empty? When there aren't too many expectations, too much rush, too huge a crisis. I'm enjoying a season of empty. I'm sure there'll be more of the rest soon enough! So in the meantime: intent on living x

A weekend

Prince Charming and I had breakfast together this morning (it was still Saturday when I started typing this!) to the sound of Radio 4 while our mostly adult children slept on. It was the start of a good day. When boys emerged, one studied and t'other helped me clear childhood clutter toys. In my head there will be one room completely cleared and completely cleaned each 2022 month. Forward, I suppose, but methinks this first room is going to be greedy for some February!

Not all 'in my head' things come to pass. In a new Meadowplace order, we are realising that these mostly adult children of ours have minds of their own which must be respected. So the blast to the coast after lunch was just the two of us. This is recently new, and we are adjusting! We did nonetheless love breathing in the last of the daylight all the way from Ballintoy to White Park Bay and back. It's not so far, but being in week 4 of a six week ankle recovery time, it's far enough! It transpired over Christmas that we have four front steps and not three. Who knew?

And here is some progress thus far. The sock was doing well until it became clear that I couldn't really go on knitting joyful rounds indefinitely. So now it's stalling. Fortitude needed for the next bit, or just some concentration. Both of which sound like a lot of effort! The second panel of Mum's tree blanket is nearly finished, though. Size 4 clogs for scale. The book is a proof copy of Francis Hagan's latest novel. FH is novelist and poet, psychotherapist and local English teacher... in the school where I work! Leaving for America is a poignant and increasingly teasing tale, written with Shakespearean scope and beauty. I have to read it very slowly. And this chromebook is my chromebook, to paraphrase the Bard himself.

 Can I tell you about the bags? The red one is A4 size which is perfect for the pattern for Trees. It was bought for its size at a craft fair that I must have gone to with my mother in 2002. I only know this because I got it to keep my first antenatal notes in. It hadn't been used since 2004 when it became redundant after the second now mostly adult boy was born.

The little white one, book-sized but also perfect for sock-things, was bought in July 2019 in a gorgeous bookshop in Germany, as you might have guessed. That was our last time out of a UK country (except for the quick drive across The Border that I had to do last Saturday - which was another quite nice day). We were on holiday with three friends and stayed in a centuries old watermill. One of the friends is a German teacher, and she did translate the Nietsche for me. I can't quite remember it now, but maybe you'll work it out!

I do hope that you might be having  a lovely forward-looking weekend, full of breath and joy in whatever makes you smile. I hope she won't mind me quoting it but the hardest working woman I know, who has an enormous heart full of big pain-won faith, said this, crowning my good day, forward...right out the door, to the barn with prayers God will overwhelm you with His blessings this year. This entire year. XO

First weekend in February

This week not only could we not really remember a pre-Pandemic world but we also started to struggle with memories of antediluvian life! We are obviously more than used to rain here in the Frozen North, but five solid, torrential, stormy days? That's rough even by our standards! But today, today the clouds scattered and we had a reprieve full of big blue sky. Just what we needed, now that January seems finally to have left us for another circuit of the year. 

The hurricane tree is still very bare, and I can't even see buds, but I did find snowdrops looking very confident in their overgrown corner of the drive. The maple tree too is leafless and budless, as far as I can tell. But the air whispers portents of longer days and fuller branches. I'm happy to be here, even in this chapter of our histories, as the air also whispers portents of a slow but steady end to These Strange Times, I hope. And isn't faith being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see?

So, this month I am doing this: 

Reading - absolutely nothing at the minute. I've hit a concentration hiatus. All recommendations welcome! I did read some Michael Longley poetry last night. His wife taught me The Waste Land at Queen's. She was wonderful!

Making - Cushla's Comfort is finished, bar a great big blocking manoeuvre tomorrow followed by some pompom attachment! Then I will have to work out how to get it to Downpatrick under the current restrictions. Maybe February will be the month I finish the skirt I started making LAST February... And then I'll discover that it doesn't fit my Lockdown body any more!

Doing - Trying to keep swimming, but my goodness, it was painful this morning. I only swam twice in January what with all sorts of body things, and I am now woefully de-acclimatised! Trying too to keep the boys working well through their home-schooling. Trying to keep God somewhere in the middle of it all. Trying to remember that I am a daughter as well as a mother, and a sister as well. 

Belfast 4 Corners Festival has been on this week - digitally, like so many other resourceful events. So something I have been doing is going to 10pm Night Prayers with Jim Deeds. a wonderfully reflective character on the creative spiritual scene in and around Belfast. The Festival's theme this year has been "Breathe", and for fifteen minutes every night we have been doing just that. Breathing in and breathing out. Breathing in God, and breathing out hope. It's been lovely. Try it x 

 

January Reading

 Happy St Brigid's Day! I wrote about St Brigid last year, just after I had made my first ever St Brigid's cross. Here it is a year on, the green of its sap all dried up, but still a promise of Spring! February has come round again, arriving in winter, and February will roll away again, but by then we'll have our lungs full of much less wintry air. Hopefully, at least, so let's not get our lungs filled up with anything else.

I noticed in last year's post that I had reread La Peste last January. I remember pulling Camus of the shelves and his feeling interesting and topical, but still a year ago there was no real sense of what was to come to all of us. At that stage we were watching the news from China and even Italy, but pandemic implications still seemed a distant thing.

MK has an interesting reading project this year. I'm always following everyone else's reading recommendations, so I thought this might help me think of what to read next. Having said that only two out of the three books I managed to read in January can be made to fit a category. I was a bit disappointed that I only read three books in the month, which did feel like a very long month! But I notice from last year's post that I only finished three in January 2020 as well, though maybe we shouldn't ever after use 2020 as much of a yardstick...

I reread Ali Smith's Winter in the New Year. She has been publishing a book a year for four years now, following the seasons, and using one of David Hockney's Yorkshire paintings for each cover. I saw this exhibition of his ages ago at the Guggenheim Bilbao, would you believe. All the way to Spain for a day to see an English's painter's Yorkshire series! Hockney looks at exactly the same scene at different times of the year, reflecting on the influence of the seasons on our daily lives. What a wonderful metaphor for the year we've been in.

Smith is doing much the same thing, ambitiously. Assessing Britain after Brexit in four seasons, in four sets of stories, all of which intertwine with other stories, worded in layers of scintillating, metaphysical word-play that Smith conjures with such a light touch for such erudition. I love her work. I definitely don't understand it all, but she must be the only author I can read and savour without even worrying about what the tranche of landscape hovering over Art's head at the Christmas dinner table means.

And trees. She writes a lot about trees, and I do love her trees. Hockney's too.

Mattman and I both got Richard Osman's new book for Christmas. He had mentioned it shortly before online Christmas shopping crossed its threshold and I silently wrote it on the list in my head. But Prince Charming apparently overheard our conversation and silently wrote it on the list in his head! I've passed my copy on to a maternity leave colleague who had twins last August. She's now at home with three boys under the age of three. It's the perfect book for her - clever and funny, but not at all hard to read. Much less concentration, and time, needed for this one than with Ali Smith!

Osman does something very brilliant with the detective genre, I think. I hardly ever read detective books, though I do fall into glorious binges of Dorothy L. Sayers every now and then. So I'm claiming this for "A book in a genre you don't normally read", even though Osman's intrigue feels very fresh and new. It reads like comedy most of the time, maybe because it's narrated partly by one of the characters through her diary. And you are piecing together the characters as you go, then, working out who you trust or suspect or like or don't. And what a cast of characters! Mostly residents in the most atypical pensioners' community you could imagine. I'm quite sure we have nothing like it here in Northern Ireland! It's a brilliant book really. I think it would satisfy the most meticulous detective reader, while still being very engaging indeed just on a human level for someone like me. There's a wonderful wonderful wonderful relationship between the main retired characters and the two police folk. That's all I'm saying. Read it!

And then because it is quoted in Smith's Winter and because of "A Shakespeare play" I ordered Cymbeline. I'm used to watching or rereading Shakespearean plays with which I am very familiar indeed. This is the first time in more than decades that I've come completely fresh to a new story. And what an amazing story to read! I think this may be my new all time favourite Shakespeare. I couldn't actually work out if it was tragedy or comedy. It has the heroes with the tragic flaws, and is absolutely dark enough to be tragedy. It has the separated children and the disguised noblefolk and the forests of the comedies. And, one of my favourite parts, it has a literal deus ex machina. I'm not going to tell you the end so I can't say more on category, but this was a genuinely edge of my seat, well edge of my bed, experience. I loved it. 

(And on an edge of your seat note - we are currently watching the utterly gripping Designated Survivor on Netflix. Kiefer Sutherland looking the same age as us. We're about to finish series 1 - no spoilers, please!)

So, fine far friends, here we all still are. We've survived January and nearly a year of These Strange Times. I send you much love and many prayers from the frozen north! And here are some more of Hockney's glorious trees: The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, in 2011 x

First weekend in November

The hurricane tree lost its last leaves sometime in the middle of the week. I had been watching them carefully, but then they were suddenly all gone even before Storm Aidan blasted through this weekend. The skies are steely, the days are getting dark, and it's now November so, while it's not really cold enough yet, I suppose I'll have to start getting ready for Winter!

What I'm still reading then this Winter: Psalms right up to Old Year's Night, and I'm in Psalm 119 now. I didn't know that it's an acrostic poem - every one of those intriguingly titled sections represents a letter in the Hebrew alphabet, and in the original every line of each section starts with that letter.  Also still reading Kierkegaard's Lilies and I should really read the last essays in my William Morris book. I think I'm not going to try to read anything else, except maybe Ali Smith's Autumn and Winter. Oh and I find I'm already looking forward to Rosamond Pilcher's Winter Solstice (I do love that Scottish house with its big Belfast sink). But mostly I'm finding it hard to settle my mind to reading. It was the same at the start of Lockdown - I just couldn't still myself. I feel some of the same unsettled fragility just now.

What I'll be making this Winter: up to Christmas it will be all about Cushla's Comfort blanket. PC helped me do some hard ratio sums today based on the seven out of 26 balls of yarn used thus far and I think it might turn out alright in the end. Still spending Wednesday Hookery zooms on my shawl. Still hoping to make the Harris Tweed Christmas presents pouches before Christmas! And would I be able to make ten crochet bauble covers for the ten teachers in my school department? We'll see...

What I'm doing: the course - first assignment submitted last week - and swimming. I was in the Lough this morning so that definitely feels like winter swimming if I got to November! Will I still be swimming in the first weekend in December? Oh, what an exciting question!

Here's the maple tree right outside our living room window. It's gloriously vibrantly defiantly red, during the day when we can see it glow. So it's my next leaf counting project.

 

The silence of snow

 I am yearning, groaning, longing for the silence of snow! It's the end of our half-term break and I am, for the first time ever, relieved. We have had incessant storms all week, making the very idea of leaving the house abhorrent. Every day had been full of noisy, noisy weather: boom banging of the house all night long for days with Storms Ciara and Dennis, then lashings of torrents of rain on every window and roof tile. Hibernation continues here at the Meadowplace!

I think though that we have no chance of snow this year at all now. There has been sleet and hail, hard, hammering hail, but no gentle, enveloping, silent snow. I t would be lovely to have a blanket of white to make all things new, for a while! I was amazed to find snowdrops in the garden earlier in the week. It seemed inconceivable that anything would have survived the storms, but there they were. Brave and resilient despite being so small.

I've been thinking about Elijah on his runaway mountain. Hiding in his cave from all the pounding elements, and waiting for the still, small voice of God. It has been good today to read Ang's prayer response about Jesus stilling the storms; and to read of the importance and beauty of stormy days over at Gretchen Joanna's.

We'll just have to keep going with the brave and resilient for another while.

Reading=hibernation

It's definitely still Winter here in the Frozen North, though I am bizarrely insulated from the cold most days by this particular chapter of my life that seems to come with built in, if somewhat erratic, central heating. However, in the afternoon there is a glorious hour or so of full sunlight, with no shadow of dusk. So, with the resolutely cheerful flowers that someone gave me on Sunday and the first ever St Brigid's cross I've made myself, I look forward to Spring!

So far this year I've finished three books and started a fourth. I suppose that, having absolutely nothing else to share with Blogland, I could talk about that! Bedtime reading snuggled deep down under my quilt listening to stormy winds outside is as close to hibernation as I'll get just now!

 I am going to buy everyone on my list "Christmas Days" for Christmas next year. It's a beautiful collection: a story and a recipe with an anecdote for every one of the twelve days of Christmas. The perfect gift! The stories are appropriately spooky and explore Christmas from lots of quirky perspectives. Lots of twists and turns. Winterson is so warm and gentle and generous and honest throughout, especially about her life with her family, wife and friends.

 I didn't mean to spend January with short stories, but I'd bought Prince Charming Tom Hanks' collection for Christmas because I'd been wanting to read it for ages and filling PC's Christmas stocking seemed a good excuse at the time. Obviously PC saw through it not immediately but certainly as soon as I spent two weeks guffawing through it when he was trying to get to sleep. (Note to self: don't buy PC "Christmas Days".) This book is genius. There really is a typewriter in every story: it's like an erudite Where's Wally. The stories are brilliant, just brilliant. Mostly unconnected, but there is a group of four friends who do pop up throughout with another instalment of their misadventures. I might like the space one best, or the girl typing at the window...

Now, "Olive Kitteridge" is not, I think, a collection of short stories in the purest sense. It is the coherent story of one place, and though it took me a while to work out why she claims the book's title, it is the story of Olive Kitteridge. But Olive is a bit like the typewriters in Uncommon Type, isn't she? Sometimes the chapters are all hers, but mostly she appears in the background to a greater or lesser degree depending on how well the chapter's protagonist knew her. It's a very clever book. I loved her husband. I was terribly disturbed by her. She made me fear for my future relationship with my sons. She made me fear for me. This was a book that seemed to be gentle, but was in fact harrowing.

And just now I'm re-reading la Peste; what else could you read during this Coronavirus? Here is a book that seems to be harrowing, but is in fact gentle. That's why I love Camus. I love his love of life, his enjoyment of the simple things, his respect for people and his faith in them. My Masters dissertation was about "le Christ de Camus", because of his respect for faith and those who chose it. The most poignant thing, thus far, in la Peste is the sadness of separation for those whose loved ones are outside the quarantine. I was shocked that when I wrote about it nearly twenty years ago I didn't actually twig that the plague in the book symbolises Nazism and its taking of Paris, where Camus was stranded when France fell. Not that shocked actually; my preparation for that dissertation was nothing if not desultory!

 By the way, did you know that St Brigid is buried with Columcille and Patrick here on the hill beside the cathedral in Downpatrick? This is the big stone that marks their grave. It's a very lovely spot, looking out to the Mourne Mountains, with a bench just behind the camera where you can sit and think awhile. Brigid apparently wove her cross from reeds that she plucked as she sat telling a dying Irish chieftain about Jesus. He came to faith, and her cross is still made on 1st February all over Ireland as people look forward to Spring. Until then, I'll be hibernating and reading!

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

Not very Valentine views

 I think I get worse and worse at getting things done, but here are some views from last week! This tree does display signs of Spring with lots of buds. I have lots of time to observe its progress as it lives outside our piano teacher's front door and I spend enough time every week waiting for two of her pupils! This was Wednesday.

 This was Thursday and is a view from my school. Our Prince's Trust group was planting hanging baskets, and it was actually a really good activity for kids of their attention/ability. I thought I'd get a picture before they are taken outside to do battle with the weather and the footballs.

And this was Thursday back at the Meadowplace. We are starting to see some hope of Spring finally. Not least in the sheer fact that this photo was taken not long before five o'clock in the evening and look at how dark it isn't yet. Prince Charming has spent much of the weekend out there digging through the weeds. Sandra, our snow was completely gone in a day.

Badger must be feeling some stirrings of new energy too, because he decided to leave the Burrow and find out what the noise was all about. Some new friends he approved of...

And others he did not.

Not sure what he made of his climbing session, but I am sure that he is not finding this a very hygge home. His arrival has really made me think about this new place of ours. It just doesn't have quite the cosy feel that you would want over these winter months and that is something I need to address for our second winter here!

The one room I find myself nestling into is the Book Room. We can use it now because Prince Charming has moved all the unopened-because-unopenable boxes to the spare room. It is quite hygge, I think, especially when the fire, right of picture is lit. (Just don't anyone else come to stay for a while!)

So Badger has been reading. I'm not sure what he made of Valentine's but I did notice that shortly afterwards he moved himself across to the books on DIY and gardening. It's good to see someone using them.

He will be journeying onwards to Betty's Wild Wood soon. We're going to take him on one last Irish adventure tomorrow as its our half-term, and then off to England for him. Do let Pom Pom or me know if you'd still like to host him- his world tour is filling up nicely.

Views on hygge and craic

 My goodness, we are all just out of school to discover a world of colour all around us! It is still freezing, baltic, cold, but the blazes of green grass and blue sky and Lough have been enough to make us smile and run out to the garden with a football. Well, two of us ran out to the garden with a football...

My tree is still bare.

Badger de Mourne has warmed up nicely but needed some burrow time to escape the general noise that is our world. We thought that a warm corner of the living room would be best.

 We cleared out the bottom shelf of Aunt Margaret's old dresser.

I have been thinking about this concept of hygge. MK discovered a variety of Scandinavian words that were not just words but expressions but a whole way of life. Hygge seems to belong to a cannon of words that express a way of embracing the cold dark of Winter by snuggling down into cosy comfort with friends, hot drinks and lots of good talk. I don't think we have a specific word for this in Ireland, and I'm going to venture to suggest that this is because we don't counter cold dark Winter in that way. We moan on through and live for opportunities for a bit of "craic". English English speakers will now need to remember that this is not a derivation of drug terminology!

What's the craic? It was great craic. Sure the craic was mighty.  You can Google it and find a wealth of cultural explanation! To me it means fun, a laugh, something happening out of the humdrum. It puts a smile on your face and quite possibly a Guinness in your hand. So Badger will probably not be experiencing the best hygge of his world tour here in Ireland. However, we will try make sure he has a bit of craic! I introduced him to his burrow the other night, and left him there with cosy blankets, a fairy door and some warming beverage. He hasn't wanted to come out yet...