CLICK ON ANY IMAGE IN A CLUSTER TO ACCESS ITS ENLARGED GALLERY, EACH MEMBER OF WHICH CAN BE FURTHER ENLARGED BY CLICKING THE BOX AT BOTTOM RIGHT
We began this cold, bright, day with two trips to the recycling centre to dispose of bags of garden refuse. Afterwards we drove around the east of the forest and back.
The waterlogged green at Pilley reflected the houses beside it.
Trees,
horses,
and buildings were similarly mirrored in the more permanent lake. Some of the animals drank the clear water, others dozed on the bank. Note the thatched homes.
The workman seen to the left of the nearest cottage was ignored by the ponies as he walked backwards and forwards from front to back of the house. Apart from the presently muddy bank and sodden bench, this was a convenient site for a bus stop. The house is named Gravel Pit Cottage, thus giving an indication of the origin of the lake. I’ve only ever seen animals drinking from the edge, suggesting that it is probably quite deep in the middle.
This evening we dined on Jackie’s special cottage pie; perfectly prepared broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, and cabbage; and very tasty gravy. I finished the Chateauneuf du Pape.
CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE. THOSE IN GROUPS CAN BE VIEWED FULL SIZE BY SCROLLING DOWN THE PAGE AND CLICKING THE RELEVANT BOX.
This morning I tidied up the Head Gardener’s Walk. It was becoming a little overgrown.
This was the result.
Apart from a brief spell of sunshine when I was carrying out this task, today was very dull and overcast. It was not the afternoon to go in search of a field of bluebells – especially as we didn’t find it.
We understood that it was part of Ballard Water Meadow and Woodland.
So dry has been our month of April, that the streams that cross the area are all but dried up.
Conservation has been in progress for some years. A footpath, logging, and cutting back of undergrowth beside the main ditch provide evidence of industry.
A handful of small black cattle sat around chewing the cud as I left Jackie sitting on a bench and went off on a bluebell hunt. The beasts contributed plentiful pats as their contribution to the ecology.
The cows quietly tolerated the flies crawling around their eyes.
Many dog walkers availed themselves of the pet-emptying facility.
I continued in search of the elusive bluebell field, and settled for the odd clump of the English variety – not the Spanish Armada.
I reached a man-made lake with its share of water fowl and reflections of nearby buildings.
Unfortunately there was a smattering of litter in the surrounding woodland,
and in the lake itself.
The Maltesers container lay at the edge. A couple of bottles stood up in the water. Was there a message in this?
On my return the cattle had risen to their feet and started foraging.
This evening we dined at The Crown Inn at Everton. I chose well-filled steak and kidney pudding with carrots and swede wrapped in a cabbage leaf, chips and gravy. Jackie chose duck with noodles, stir-fry vegetables and hoisin sauce. Desserts were respectively bread and butter pudding with pomegranate seeds floating in creme Anglaise, and sticky toffee pudding with vanilla ice cream. Jackie drank draught Becks, and I began with a glass of Brown Brothers Everton Red, which was accurately described as having the flavours of the hedgerow. My second glass was the well-tried Mendoza Argentinian Malbec.
On another low key day Jackie drove me to Lymington to collect my laptop, the battery of which had needed replacing.
Later I scanned the last of the colour negatives of the French holiday taken towards the end of 1985.
In the evenings Matthew, Sam, and Louisa liked to sit and contemplate the pool;
Jessica kept an eye on proceedings.
One day Matthew, starting with Sam, took family members in different combinations on a paddle boat trip on a local lake.
Louisa joined in, as did Becky, whose trailing arm is visible here;
and, later, Jessica.
Back at the gite Matthew, with an improvised rod and line, went fishing,
and introduce Sam to the pastime. The little chap made his own rod.
Before bed, Sam and Louisa made an exciting den with kitchen furniture. The scabby knees still look impressive.
This evening Jackie produced an excellent meal of Chicken fillets marinaded in sweet chilli and mango, on a bed on vegetable rice. The vegetable included onion, mushrooms, peas, beans, sweet corn, and carrots. The Culinary Queen drank Hoegaarden and I finished the Barbera d’Asti.
Despite repeated attempts, intermittent loss of connection has made it impossible to load most of today’s pictures. I am giving up and going to bed, hoping that there will be some improvement in the morning.
Watching the suspended petal of a Japanese anemone this morning set me musing. First I considered the strength of the thread that grasped it. As the flower part spun and twisted in the breeze, its captor clung on, just as it would with a fly’s frantically thrashing death throes.
On a more musical note, my head recalled the rhythmic tones of chirpy Chubby Checker from 1960:
This afternoon we went on an outing to Stratford Tony Manor House garden which was open under the National Gardens Scheme. It was my idea of a delightful garden.
There was space for large lawned areas, many trees, a stream, and a lake.
The large borders, especially those planted against walls, were really rather splendid,
and admired by many,
including Jackie.
There were a number of interesting sculptures.
The story behind those of three girls sheltering among cyclamen under a weeping willow is rather endearing. Made some twenty years ago, they are the daughters of the family. The eldest, now brings her own child to visit the family home. This scene, reminiscent of Enid Blyton characters from an earlier time, has been brought into the 21st century with the subtle placement of a mobile phone. The standing child once had a tennis ball placed with equal whimsy, but the dog kept taking it.
Two apparent sculptures were in fact fossilised stumps with polished tops.
A more modern garden ornament features in this photograph of a photographer and her subjects. We had a delightful conversation about this, and I gave them details of this blog.
The next picture I made of them will be a surprise to them. (I hope you like it, folks).
Some quite large groups of visitors wandered around, negotiating the sometimes steep slopes,
leading to the tea terrace where a very busy team of helpers kept us all supplied.
On each table was placed one or two very tastefully arranged vases of flowers.
There were suitably placed bridges over the still lake;
visitors enjoyed crossing them,
or just contemplating the tranquil scene,
the tempting water,
and the swans.
The nicely rusting iron gate to the kitchen garden contrasted with the green grass behind it, revealed by suitable excised symbols.
At a short distance from Stratford Tony, an army helicopter chugged over crows in a recently harvested field
now draped with striped curtains.
Back at home, Mr Chatty Man Chan of Hordle Chinese Take Away provided our evening meal with which Jackie drank sparkling water and I drank more of the Kekfrankos.
A brief window of sunshine emerged in an otherwise wet and dull day, to enable me to cut the grass, do some dead-heading, and repel bramble invaders on the back drive.
Otherwise I scanned a batch of colour slides from a trip to Richmond Park in May 1981.
Jessica, Sam,
Matthew,
and Becky were my companions.
It was the season of Aquilegias
and Azaleas.
When Matthew and Becky began fishing for sticklebacks in the lake, I walked around to the far side to see what I could do with my long lens.
Gradually, a certain amount of interest was aroused.
Jessica, Sam, and Piper, the dog, soon became involved.
Hello; who’s that behind Sam?
The people in the background were more interested in the shrubbery,
but soon there was quite a crowd of spectators,
who slowly drifted away.
This evening’s dinner consisted of Jackie’s classic chicken jalfrezi with vegetable rice salad. She drank her Hoegaarden/Bavaria mix and I drank Royale Pays’ d’Oc Merlot 2014.
Today we completed the weeding of the rose garden, and Jackie cleared out the potting shed, to which she adapted a set of shelves to fit.
This afternoon, I scanned a batch of colour slides from a French holiday in September and October 1981. We shared a house in Cabrieres, Languedoc with Jessica’s friend, Sue Sproston. The house belonged to a colleague of Sue’s who was in the process of renovating it, but hadn’t been too bothered about fixing potential leaks in the roof. Trust us to experience the worst thunderstorm locals could remember.
Here, Jessica and Sam see me off on a trip for the obligatory croissants from the boulangerie.
I found the local gardens fascinating. Some were carefully tended;
others seemed to be spaces to park trucks or trikes.
Cacti were in abundance. It seemed to me that, if the barbed wire had been designed to deter inquisitive fingers, it was probably somewhat superfluous.
Here Sue joins Jessica and Sam in investigating the local lake.
It was clearly the time of the vendanges, or the grape harvest.
We drove around the area and visited a number of villages, like the beautifully kept St Guilhem, and the almost abandoned Villeneuvette, where Sam sloshed in the fountain, a little less elaborate than the one in the grapes picture.
Wikipedia, currently has this to say about Colbert’s social and economic experiment:
Villeneuvette is a small village made up of a group of buildings initially erected in the 17th century to create a royal clothmaking factory and provide accommodation for its workers. Apart from a hotel and restaurant, the buildings are now restricted to residential use, many for holiday purposes.
Creation of Villeneuvette was promoted in 1677 by Jean-Baptiste Colbert the noted finance minister of King Louis XIV. It was one of his many initiatives to develop France’s industrial base. Power for the factory was hydraulic with water supplied via different water courses from existing basins. The factory was privately owned and produced cloth for the king including uniforms for his armies. The factory was in existence until 1955.
Since 1995 the village has been classified as a “Zone de Protection du Patrimoine et du Paysage” recognising the originality and importance of its heritage.
The original inscription above the gateway was “MANUFACTURE ROYALE” but was later rather crudely changed by the Republic to “HONNEUR AU TRAVAIL” – Honour in work.’
When we stumbled across the commune most dwellings were unoccupied, except for a few people who, to us, appeared to be squatters. We were able to amble around and marvel at the higgledy-piggledy nature of the accommodation, often with one family’s upper rooms above those of the residents below.
In 1982, J.K.J. Thomson published ‘Clermont-de-Lodeve 1633-1789’. Since it contains an erudite history of Villeneuvette, I had to buy it. It was, in fact, far too academic for my taste, but I did struggle through it. Interestingly, the book jacket shows the changed inscription mentioned above.
I was, perhaps fifteen years later, rather pleased I had, when one of my consutatiion clients told me that a couple of her friends had bought one of the residences which were now being sold on the open market. I was able to describe what we had seen, and to hand over the book. I didn’t expect to see it again, but, it was eventually returned to me by the wife, who happened to be a committee member of another agency client. Even then, before we were all overtaken by the Web, it was a small world.
This evening we dined on Jackie’s delicious lamb jalfrezi, savoury rice stuffed with goodies, and vegetable samosas; followed by apple strudel. We both drank Kingfisher.
Wollaton Hall is an Elizabethan country house of the 1580s standing on a small but prominent hill in Wollaton Park, Nottingham, England. The house is now Nottingham Natural History Museum, with Nottingham Industrial Museum in the out-buildings. Its additional interest for us is that Noel Gervis Pearson, a great great grandfather of Louisa’s two children donated a butterfly collection to the museum sometime in the early twentieth century.
Louisa, Jessica, Imogen, and I spent a gloriously mild and sunny morning and early afternoon wandering the deer park and visiting the house.
Noticing the stags basking in the sunshine, and the does caring for their offspring under the trees, Louisa observed, in a telling fashion, that they were carrying out traditional male and female roles.
In our attempts to approach the young cervine family, we reached a very boggy stretch. The girls thought it would be quite fun to see Grandpa clambering along the logs. Grandpa didn’t think so. He wasn’t wearing sensible footwear. He took the long way round.
There has to be a lake in a country house garden. This one attracted many water fowl.
On the approach to the house, a large, grazing, stag attracted numerous lenses.
In the building, the girls spent a pleasant time hunting out exhibits and completing a linked Halloween quiz. I thought expecting them to work out an anagram of CAULDRON was a bit tough. Easy peasy for Mordred, of course.
After lunch, it was time to carve the pumpkins. Using templates from a book, Jessica produced a more than creditable ghost, but Imogen’s went ‘a bit wrong’. She had a most impressive stab at an ancient mummy, the most complex design of all; then recognising that she had bitten off more than she could chew, she made her own drawing for the other side of the pumpkin. This time, Louisa cut out the necessary sections.
For dinner, we travelled by bus to Pizza Express in Nottingham. This outlet has come on apace since the first one was opened in Soho’s Wardour Street in 1965. There were a number of entertaining activities for the children to complete whist waiting for their food. One of these was the creation of their own Halloween masks.
After Jessica and Imogen were photographed wearing theirs, Louisa and I had to borrow them.
My choice of pizza was American Hottest Romana.
On leaving the restaurant, we discovered there was a 25 minute wait for the next bus, so we caught a cab back. This impressed Imogen who kept saying she had never been in a taxi before.
Although my virus has definitely improved, it is still taking a while to clear my head, so, when I set out this morning to scan another batch of Elizabeth’s returned prints, I couldn’t face sorting them, so, instead, scanned a group of carefully catalogued colour slides from March 1973.
On a walk in Westminster’s St James’s Park I made some pictures
of briskly striding wrapped-up walkers, with Westminster Abbey in the background;
and of perching pigeons and other passers-by.
Against the background of the apple tree that featured in Becky’s Book, I photographed
Matthew.
and Becky.
This afternoon Helen, Bill, Shelley, and Ron came fro a late lunch which extended into the evening, when we watched the first day’s highlights of the final Oval Test Match.
Jackie offered a choice of excellent meals well up to her usual standard. There was a tender beef casserole, mashed potato and swede, with crisp carrots and green beans; and there was choice chilli con carne with superb savoury rice. I enjoyed small portions of each. Desserts were lemon tart, profiteroles, and forest fruits strudel. We could take our picks. Assorted red and white wines were imbibed.
Australia, finishing on 287 for 3, had a better day in the cricket.
Aaron came today to continue completing my work on the back drive. He was as quick, efficient, and neat as usual. This young man certainly gets through a phenomenal amount of work in a day.
Jackie had a better memory of our ‘Engagement’ outing. I appended her Facebook comment as an informative P.S. to that post.
I then spent the morning scanning 36 colour slides from our four day honeymoon in March 1968. In ‘Tales From The Window Sills’ and ‘The Watchers Watched’ I have described and illustrated aspects of this holiday in Ockley. The first of these mentions the deserted house, and the second the fire.
The King’s Arms, where we stayed, is a 16th century coaching inn with attractive beamed walls and ceilings. We took all our meals at the hostelry and spent the days exploring the environment, the farms, the fields, a lake, and the churchyard.
We wonder what has happened to the deserted house that fascinated us so much.
The one event that seemed to draw out the whole village, streaming past the derelict home, from which it was visible, was the exciting fire which, at first, seemed to be engulfing a rather grand house, but transpired to be burning a shed.
The fire brigade were called and dealt with it quite swiftly.
This afternoon I watched England beat Italy 47-17 and Ireland beat France 18-11 in the Six Nations rugby tournament.
This evening we dined on Jackie’s classic chicken jalfrezi and savoury rice, followed by apple crumble and custard. We both drank Kingfisher, neither of us finishing a bottle. Never mind, we both continue to improve.
P.S. Update on the deserted house, from Jackie’s Facebook comment: ‘Having driven fairly regularly past this house over the years, I can report that altho’ it has lost some of it’s character, it still exists, and houses on this prestigious Surrey village green cost an absolute fortune (close to £1,000000!). It was a distant village in 1968, but with rail and road connections so improved, it is now considered to be within working distance of London so commands premium prices. It is a shame really as the whole village is now full of very rich people and does not have the character of the 1968 village we knew. Even the wonderful village store, that sold everything (even leather boot laces for farmers’ boots) has been converted into a very posh dwelling.’
Heavy overnight rain had left lakes on the landscape and pools on the roads. Tractor tracks disappeared into a field now occupied by waterfowl. On my walk home from car trip to Milford on Sea, I took one look at the overflowing stream alongside the footpath leading to the nature reserve, and decided to take the Park Lane route to the clifftop. As I received a sparkling cascade thrown up by a speeding motorist, I realised I may have been slightly mistaken in this.
Councillor Matthew Goode has been helpfully engaged in a conversation on Streetlife about the replacement of the footpath that fell into the sea last summer. Local residents are concerned about the time this is taking. It seems to me it would be rather rash to replace it before proper geological studies have been undertaken. It is easy to see where the next falls could possibly occur. The dog in the photograph was perhaps conducting its own survey.
Whenever rooks or seagulls find themselves a convenient post on which to perch, they are dive-bombed by relatives wishing to supplant them, and generally take off in a hurry. So it was this morning.
Later this afternoon, I finished reading Virginia Woolf’s novel ‘Orlando’. Woolf herself termed it a biography, which was why it was less popular with booksellers than with the reading public, because the shops believed biography did not sell as well as the fictional genre. Quentin Bell, in his introduction to my copy, describes the work as a prose poem.
James Joyce, in his lengthy novel ‘Ulysses’, manages to occupy no more than twenty four hours in the life of Leopold Bloom. The shorter piece from Mrs Woolf has Orlando, born at the end of the sixteenth century, still living in 1928, changing sex from male to female at the midway point, bearing two children, and reaching the age of just thirty- six by the end of the book.
Having met in 1922, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West’s friendship developed into a two or three year sexual relationship, perhaps culminating in this gift from Virginia to Vita, first published in 1928. The writer has found a fascinating form with which to celebrate her lover; her lover’s family, the Sackvilles; and Knole, their ancestral home. Orlando/Vita glides through three centuries of largely indulgent life in elegant surroundings described in beautifully flowing, opulent, and gloriously seductive descriptive prose. Woolf was having fun, even to the extent of calling it biography.
Illustrations of the adult, female, Orlando are photographs of Vita Sackville-West.
My copy purports to be no. 191 of a limited edition of 1000 of the Hogarth Press Collected Edition published in 1990. The £1 pencilled on the flyleaf suggests I bought it second-hand with no dust-jacket. Although the boards look genuine, I was surprised to find the book perfect-bound; containing several typographical errors; and a number of blank pages, not, as in Lawrence Sterne’s ‘Tristram Shandy’, deliberately left so by the author.
Two stamps, one superimposed on the other, giving an impression reminiscent of the London Underground, are in what my uneducated eye imagines to be Chinese. The only signs that the book may have been read before me were a few splashes of what I hope is coffee on the page edges; and pages 212/213 pasted in. Where has it been, and who drank the coffee?
Becky is, I know, not responsible for the stain, because that was in place when I lent it to her recently. She did, however, take the trouble to find the two missing pages of text on the internet and stick them into the blanks. Other empty pages should be part of the appendices.
This evening we dined on Jackie’s juicy chilli con carne and my plain boiled rice, followed by Pearl’s delicious Dutch Apple Cake with a.n. other’s cream. I started on an excellent bottle of Arene des Anges Costieres de Nimes 2013 given to us for Christmas by Helen and Bill.
