Grey and Amber

Everything softened and blurred by the fog this morning. The only colour from the traffic lights.

Chasing Sunsets

I am always doing this-chasing sunsets that is. I think of 'The Road' when I see one, and feel lucky to be living in a time where they can still be seen. I don't take them for granted. So tonight, as I drove home, another spectacular sunset was happening-and distracting me from driving so I had to really stop myself and make myself concentrate. There were towers in the distance, in layers of hazy light, faint and lovely. When I got home I went for a very quick walk, and took some pictures on my phone. It was just the right light to make flowers glow. As well as glowing, these Hyacinths had a delicious scent.
Shapes and lines against the sky always catch my eye.

This last picture makes me laugh. Nothing to do with my walk but I thought I would share it anyway. This is Tiger, having just triumphed by walking around my book, in order to be able to sit on my chest, right in front of my face. This is what she likes to do nearly every night. She is very affronted by books or anything else taking my attention. She perseveres, and will only leave a short gap between repeated attempts to get what she wants. She does the slow walk to get this, and that makes me laugh so I can't say no! If you have a cat you will probably know about the slow walk. It is used to get away from confrontation-there may have been a bit of hissing or puffing of the tail, but a fight is not really wanted, so one cat will turn very slowly and walk very slowly away. Non-threatening I think. And I suppose Tiger is avoiding confrontation with me. But what it makes me think of is that she is trying to make herself invisible so I won't notice her sitting on me! She does not stay once the light is switched off, but goes into the sitting room. What this routine is all about I have no idea.

I will try to film her doing the slow walk one day.

She also does it to be able to sit right in front of the computer-usually on my arm.

Camelia flowers and other garden news.

The chamomile is looking a bit brown after the winter and I need to sprinkle some compost on to encourage side shoots of new growth. This advise was included on the information sheet that came with it, as was the fact that chamomile does not like stony ground. So why is it spreading quite happily into the stones surrounding it? Uncharacteristic and revolutionary behaviour! (And I spent hours removing stones from its little patch too!) It looks like a tiny section of Dungeness in this view from above.

I think these multi-leaved bulbs are my snake's head fritillaries-which I thought had long gone. I am quite excited that they have come back, as they are so beautiful and strange with their chequered pattern.

And here is the Camelia-the star of the garden this week. It lives in this pot because of its love of ericaceous soil, and it does very well considering. Last year there were lots of promising buds in some late winter warmth, but then a frost-or possibly even some snow, killed them off and hardly any opened. This year it has lots of flowers and shines out pinkly in the sun when it is out.

A view from behind the hedge-the jasmine, which needs pruning but which provided Cassie with a prickly seat for about twenty minutes when I was out there on Sunday! She was trying to retain her dignity but without much success. These pictures are taken using the miniaturise setting on my camera-I like the blurry look of them and the way it slightly distorts the colours.

Flower in focus, fuzzy cat.

Fuzzy flower, cat in focus.

You may be able to see that I have been digging up the path. No progress has been made since last year on how to make it into a proper path, how to mend the shed, etc etc. However, rather than waste the growing season, and all this lovely unplanted space-which will only become covered in weeds, I have decided to make a meadow of annuals. I was inspired to do so by a programme I saw a while ago with Sarah Raven, all about an ongoing campaign to reassign some public planting areas in cities as meadows, rather than either grass or bedding plants. The reason for this of course being the need to provide plants for pollinating insects. It was lovely to see these areas of pretty meadow springing up. I would love to do something like this in Forest School when I finally get it back from the clutches of the builders. In the meanwhile I will test ideas here. I have bought some annual seed mixes and am going to start sewing soon. If you sew seeds in cycles the flowering is prolonged. I really do not know if it will work but it is worth a try!

Books and Doors

Do you have bigger book eyes than your book shelves? I do. I really do. It is an addiction I think, especially rummaging around in second hand book shops. New ones are fine, but the surprises to be found in second hand ones win every time for me. And then there is the mystery to be found above the sign. Joe Specks? I have found, this morning, that he is a character in 'The Uncommercial Traveller' by Charles Dickens-a doctor in his childhood hometown of Dullborough which I presume is Rochester, and which he has visited for the day, finding everything to be smaller and less impressive than his childhood memories suggest (a familiar experience to many) and who saves the day, by filling in the gaps in the history of the people they had known as children, and by talking about the past they shared. This is in chapter 12 should you be interested. The book can be read here at project Gutenberg. Books and doors go well together-both being openings to somewhere else. Last week I was living partly in 16th century border country, and now I am in 1860s Canada. I have also been visiting the 1940s, by looking at a make and do children's book of the time, and have discovered this bird sanctuary in Mousehole through a free book given to me yesterday. It was in a pile by the till that I was looking at as the man rung up my purchases. He asked if I would like it. I said no, but then he said it was free so I changed my mind! I picked it up because of the painting on the cover-a woman holding up a bird as if to give it freedom. The book tells of the two founders of the sanctuary in 1928 and has lots of black and white photos of them with various of their charges, and altogether looks like a very lovely book to have been given. The reason for it being given away was the extremely large and almost unmanageable pile of books the owners of this shop have. It is incredible. The corridors of books go on seemingly forever, over two floors. You could get lost in there for days.

I loved this door.

A view back towards the street-but I am not even at the end of the shop!

I loved the Sherlock Holmes spines. I didn't notice the book 'Goose Shooting' until I downloaded the photo. How unpleasant.

These piles of books make me feel better about my own, which are bad, but not this bad!

This is the door to the Oxfam shop, a proper old fashioned kind of charity shop which has all sorts of things to offer, including lots of books. Yesterday though I had already bought enough books in the other shop, so only bought a bag of fabric scraps-all different polka dots which are really pretty and will be useful for something. I am sure.

More piles-I like the covers of this series of books, though this one didn't come home with me.

I don't know if I have mentioned it, but we are moving the nursery to another school down the road for the second half of the summer term, as the next phase of the building will start with the nursery building being knocked down, and the mobile classrooms for year six being moved from the top of the school to the nursery area. To be ready to move, we need to start sorting and packing now. We can only take a limited amount of resources with us, and need to pack the rest for storage. As this is a lot of work on top of an already too full day, we are taking turns to cover each other and have packing days. My first day was today, and I did all the Forest School stuff, and a lot of old folders and resources in our office. Some of the Forest school resources came home with me as this was the only sure way to make sure it does not get lost. I had to take the things to the shed, and so I saw the beautiful glowing sunset, and took lots of pictures of it. It is so lovely that the evenings are lightening-already I feel so much happier than a month ago. This was before I went home-parakeets in the tree near the post office. I have to admit I have digitally enhanced (coloured some low opacity green over the bird) the picture-and now he looks as green as he did in real life! I still have not managed a close up picture of one of these birds. This was taken on my phone.

These are the sort of clouds that suggest pictures. To me the one at the front was a teddy bear or a rearing pig.

I've been painting!

After a long while not doing any painting I have suddenly done two! One of the excuses I make to myself when buying dolls and other exciting second hand purchases, is that I am going to draw/paint/use in an artistic way-them (excuse the lack of grammar but you know what I mean!) How little I actually do this, compared to how much I think about it is very unequally shared, but this weekend I decided to paint a lovely doll I bought a while ago on Ebay. Andy says I have made her look old-whereas she has a young face in reality. Her hair is made of some kind of cottton and she is slightly damaged on her face-chipped bits. She is a very pretty doll with a red bow and red boots. Her dress is quite grubby really-years of being loved.

 The second painting is a girl called Ocean. She has this air of serenity and a little sadness about her.

Cosy Weekend

Lily is summing up how I feel today-like staying in and being cosy as it is cold and wet outside. I was working on my blanket this morning and she wanted some lap time, so we combined the two and she ended up cocooned in colours. Now all three cats are cosied up on the bed and I have been pottering around, watching films and making a cake. I made a banana cake the other night-following a different recipe than normal. It had the addition of yoghurt. I didn't have any plain yoghurt so used a pot of Activia strawberry yoghurt. It has made a tasty cake even better!
Today I made a pound cake. I have not tasted that yet, but am waiting for Andy to come home-he has been to see his Mum this weekend. I also discovered a delicious brand of chai tea. I love Starbuck's chai tea latte, and have been searching for a teabag that tastes like it. All the types I have tried have been disappointing, until this weekend when I discovered Natco's.
I have made it in two ways-first by brewing the teabag and heating up and frothing milk, then adding a sugar, second by heating the milk and sugar with the teabag, frothing this and then topping up with boiling water. The first way was good but the second was delicious and had that spicy kick. Better than Starbuck's!
In addition to 'Seraphine' which I watched last night and loved, I have watched 'Enid' today-about Enid Blyton. Quite depressing really-if the film is accurate then she was a person who had a sad childhood which seemed to damage her and make her almost retreat into her world of stories, needing the affirmation of her child fans or 'friends' as she called them, and not be able to be as loving as she could be to her own children. I enjoyed it though-mainly because of Helena Bonham-Carter who I really like. Now I am watching 'Pride and Prejudice'-the Kiera Knightley one as opposed to the BBC one. It is good but the BBC version created the characters so perfectly, that they are forever etched in my mind, and the people in this film are like imposters. Though the actor playing Mr Collins is just as funny as the actor in the other version. Judy Dench is also very good.