21 Today!

Happy Birthday Linas.

Linas is 21 today. I spent a nostalgic time looking through his photo albums reliving so many happy memories. It was hard to narrow the selection of photos, each one told a story. I'm just glad that I took so many photos throughout each of the boys' childhoods. He has been a typical 'middle' child with mood swings and a foul temper but I'm glad to say that he is now maturing and much more reasonable. He should graduate next summer from Plymouth University with a degree in IT for which he has always shown a natural flair. We celebrated his birthday with a 'kebab feast' at home. Peter always gets extra large servings of kebab meat at the Turkish take away simply because he can speak a little Turkish, ( North Devon is 95% white English,) and we prepare the salads etc at home.

11 weeks old.

( I decided to spare him the 5 mins old photo.)

11 months and walking well.

A sweet 3 years old.



7 years old and showing an interest in guns.



8 years old on Nutty.



A long haired 17 with Gemma at her prom .

Last summer with Gemma, Vytas and Kate.



This morning we woke to a hard frost. The road out of the valley was iced over and we couldn't get out to go to church. I took a chance in the afternoon but it was somewhat worrying sliding and wobbling slowly up the hill. Although all the roads that were in the sun were clear there were still odd icy stretches and I nearly came to grief braking very slowly in Barnstaple. The front of the Micra stopped but the back end fish tailed. I didn't attempt the hill on the return journey but left the car up the hill.

I think this will be the end of the roses.

A Day At Home.

I started the day badly, well, it actually started well with Peter volunteering to drive Romas and Linas to Braunton to meet up with the chap who was giving them a lift to MIA in Bude for a day of airsoft games, but when I went downstairs I found the kitchen looking like a bomb had hit it. Dishes and saucepans from several meals, plates brought down from the bedrooms, dried mud all over the floor and all Romas' cymbal stands cluttering the place up. It took me about an hour to clear up the mess. I wasn't that pleased when Peter failed to be sympathetic with my annoyance saying ' They're only teenagers.' and then that made me very cross with him. However a good blogging session reading about people who are content with their lives and others like me having a good old rant soothed the frazzled nerves and before escaping to the outdoors I actually baked 2 Christmas cakes. I used an old recipe that I copied out of a book when I was 16 years old and and on holiday with my mother in Pendeen near St Just. I don't think I actually copied it correctly because there were no spices in the list of ingredients, no instructions to add flour and the final instruction was to finish with a 2" thick layer of almond paste. I made my own adjustments including upping the alcohol content from 1 spoon of brandy to about 6 of whisky and 4 of spiced rum, ( the brandy had been used up in previous years). My main problem when baking Christmas cake has been that the rayburn temperature was always too high but last week someone mentioned that you could get a special cake baker for aga like a biscuit tin that you put the cake tin in, I improvised using 2 roasting tins and I think it did the trick though we haven't tasted them yet. After all this house wifely stuff I got outside for more leaf clearing wrapped up well against the cold.

I remembered to take a before photo.
Da da! all nice and tidy.

Another view of some tidy stones.

A little winter sunshine brings these grasses to life.

Some young riders coming back from a ride up the hill.

Goodbye to Woolworth's.

It looks as though Woolworth's UK is finally finished. Staff have now been told their jobs are secure till Christmas but after that who knows?

I can't say that I was much of a Woollies customer, Linas would buy Pick'n Mix and I would sometimes have a look at sale time. Today it was announced that many of the goods would going to be discounted by up to 50% and as I wasn't working till the afternoon I thought it might be the time to do a little shopping in town once I'd raked up the drive that had washed down in last night's heavy rain. (The heavy showers continued for the rest of the day.) Predictably Woolworth's was heaving with very long queues at the tills but I managed to get most of the rest of my Christmas bits and pieces at reasonable prices. Teaching in the afternoon was lovely and peaceful, sitting with children making gift tags. A quick trip to Liddll's after work to pick up Christmas goodies - chocolates, herrings and a panettone, Brian Ford's for more food and then home. All that shopping left me feel really tired when I got home and I took a rest day from the 300 sit-ups that I have been doing almost every day. I'm not a natural athlete so that's a big achievement for me but it is one exercise which does not involve the knees which always leave me in a lot of pain at night if I over use them. I started by doing the easy sit-ups where you touch your toes and when I got to 300 I started substituting the ones with arms crossed over the chest and now they're all the crossed arm ones. I watch tv at the same time which makes it easier. The plan is that when I've dieted off the fat I'll be nice and toned underneath and I'm certainly noticing the beneficial effects.

Linas came home in the week to collect his new gun and take it to Womble for a check over, he went back to Plymouth last night because he had a test today and now he and Gemma are back for his birthday week-end. They are all off to Bude for an air-soft game and then I'm not sure what their plans are. Well the freezer is full if I have to feed a crowd of youngsters this week-end.

Restful Evening, Stressful Afternoon.

Last night I went out with 18 of my WI friends for a meal at Patchole Manor. This is a local B&B at Kentisbury Ford. It's such a small world round here, it is just down the lane from the original farmhouse that we were going to buy before we were gazumped. The couple running Patchole Manor used to have a farm at Combe Martin and also kept sheep and cattle on the field that backed onto our garden.

The house was very tastefully furnished and decorated and felt very Christmassy something that has been lacking elsewhere. I had an excellent meal of goat's cheese souffle & mixed leaf salad, chicken breast with a light lemon sauce,apricots and chestnuts and for dessert I took a chance on a creme brullee. The sugar crust was a bit too generous and some of us feared for our teeth, apart from that it was an excellent meal all cooked on an aga. What luxury to sit there, have such lovely food and at the end of the evening no clearing up to be done. As a family we almost never went out for meals because by the time you multiply the cost of anything by 5 it is just too expensive. Being in an old farmhouse there was lots of reminiscing about life for previous generations. One of my friends was brought up in the Hebrides and her mother cooked everything, including roast dinners, in a single pot suspended over an open fire. Their fireplace was so big that the tin bath in which they bathed fitted into the fireplace beside the fire. Others recalled food being cooked in wall ovens where you make a wood fire inside the oven and then cook food in the heat of the ashes.

Lately there has been a group of heifers in one of the fields by the drive.

They are very tame and if you call them they come running over.

Then they stand there waiting to be fed and trying to chew my fingers as I stroke them. The weather has not been too nice and they almost seem to be saying "Take us back to our nice warm barn."

Today as I drove into work at lunchtime that is just what Andrew the farmer was doing. Luckily I met them fairly close to the farm where they were headed and hadn't had to follow them the whole mile and a half from our drive. Note the dog travelling in style in the back of the landrover. He often travells on the back of a quad bike. One of the heifers got spooked and climbed up and over the hedge on the left so Andrew had to follow and guide it through a gateway.

School this afternoon was not a lot of fun as the children had to sit still! for an hour during a play rehearsal apart from when they went up to do their group dances, oh and they were supposed to join in the songs. This was after 2 boys in my class had been in BIG trouble at lunchtime for peering over the toilet partitions and even crawling under the partitions, yuk! then as I was getting my class ready to go down into the hall another 2 boys for some reason had been in the same classroom toilet and one had we'ed over the other one's trousers, lots of denials and I was already frazzled before the rehearsal started. Then just as the children were getting ready to go home, the sky darkened, heavy rain came followed by hail followed by lightning followed by thunder. Children were squealing as I tried to make sure that all coats were done up and hoods on. I breathed a great sigh of relief when the last child had been safely delivered to her mother.

Getting Colder.

A chilly morning today though not quite as bad as expected. I hitched a lift up to the top with Pete and Romas, took some photos of the sunrise and collected the micra from the gateway where it had spent the night just in case we had black ice.

I used the flash to create the dark background behind this golden oat grass seed head which was glistening with the early morning dew.

The micra got rather cold spending the night up the hill and had a beautiful tracery of frost ferns on the back window. I had to use a lot of de-icer to get the door open. It was a lovely sunny morning but I didn't get out in the garden as a friend's husband was coming to look at and give a quote on the guttering. There is one big problem at the back of the house where water is pouring onto the wall and made the 2ft thick stone wall so damp that the plaster has fallen off. There are also quite a few down pipes which needed finishing off and we never got round to doing so we might as well have all the work done at the same time. Then when the wall has dried out we can re-plaster. I had to take a parcel to the post office so at the same time I got ALL my Christmas post sent. That's another job out of the way.

One Section Cleared.

When I drove Romas up the road this morning the sky was grey, the road was grey and it was raining so I didn't take the camera. Of course there was that buzzard. sitting on the fence and it didn't fly away until the car was just a few feet away, drat! It started to clear a little so I decided to continue with my leaf clearing despite the temptation to sit in a nice warm kitchen and wrap Christmas presents. I did take the precaution of wearing 2 pairs of trousers and 2 pairs of gloves so the rain and the hailstones weren't too much of a problem.

At last the stone circle was cut back, weeded and cleared.

As I didn't think to take a 'before' photo, this is another part of the scree garden waiting to be tidied.

This was the circle in early summer before the sedum had started to flower and attract hoards of butterflies.

Early spring the year before. I am very proud of the aubretia as I grew it from seed and it was the first time I had managed to get it to grow without being destroyed by the slugs.

It was back to school for the afternoon where the children were all hyped up because it was the Christmas Fayre. My class spent the afternoon folding paper to cut out snowflakes. Very educational though I could write a lesson plan linking it to maths and design if I had to .

The forecast is for -2 C in the night and early morning and it's raining so I've taken the precaution of leaving my car up the hill in case of black ice.

Everybody's Tidying Up.

I was able to spend this morning working out in the garden. What caught my attention today was the variety of sounds that I heard.

First , one of the resident (in our loft), families of jackdaws was in a tree at the edge of the garden cawing at the other half of the family who were sitting in a tree by the house. Then there was the ever present sound of the wind in the trees surrounding the garden. Because there is nearly always a breeze in one direction or another I've got wind chimes hung around the place and today the longest chimes were clanging quite melodiously. Another constant garden sound is the rushing of a stream on the other side of the hedge which drops down a steep gradient and consists of a number of small waterfalls. Mondays are rest days at the stables next door so there were few cars going down the road. I could hear the chinking of the farrier shoeing horses which reminded me of the time when I worked with horses. Some of the horses were turned out on the hillside in their winter rugs and there was lots of squelchy gallumping as they cantered around enjoying the freedom of the fields. Later on I heard the high call of a buzzard which sounds like a bosun's whistle (pipe) and the lower answering call of a second buzzard. Blackbirds in the trees were making their characteristic chink chink call and in the distance I could hear a solitary seagull. All this symphony of sounds kept me occupied while I tidied up in the scree garden, cutting down dead seed heads and picking leaves up from the stones. The area is completely covered with stones so that even when the plants have died back it should be a place of beauty. But all the fallen leaves have to be removed to reveal the stones. I've got one of those leaf sucker things but it doesn't like wet leaves. We had our first frost last night and defrosting sedum leaves are disgusting ..... like dead frogs. One more session and they'll all be dealt with, then it's just the beech leaves from all the surrounding trees. But it's worth it.

The farmers have been tidying too. This is the time of year that the hedges get trimmed making the countryside look like a park with the squared off hedges. Above you can see one side done and the other waiting to be cut.
I taught year 1 in the afternoon and after school it was the oh so familiar wait for Linas. He'd come into town with me and planned to go to Braunton and come back home with me after school. I waited an hour and 40 minutes before giving up and driving home. When I finally got through to him on his mobile I refused to return and told him to wait in town until Pete drove through on his way home. I had thought my days as a taxi driver were over!