Barmy, tired or mental health issues?

I've had a fantastic response to my badger post. Apparently cloths soaked in eucalyptus oil might literally put badgers off the scent. I love them but don't want my seedlings withered and emaciated because they've been uprooted. It'll be interesting to try that remedy before being driven barmy!

What with the badgers and our welcome but demanding social life we've had a busy few weeks: We had a small party before our Open Studios, thereafter we were open house for three days, meeting & greeting and making sales, raising charity funds etc. Between the gardening - a very busy time trimming, watering, mulching, tieing back, lawn cutting - we've had two more big parties and I've been trying to sort out wearable clothing, unwanted crocs, second hand books and other items for a car boot sale. Yesterday I neatened the lawn edges and generally hoovered outside. I washed endless linens and T shirts which may be good for a car boot and fell asleep in the sun for about 5 minutes. Why this activity? The warm, dry weather was merely coming to an end! Gardening and drying rugs and heavy towelling robes are far more difficult when the rains come. I sat down mid-afternoon - after a party the night before - and managed to take a photograph of the manicured garden.  I was just in time. Within moments the heavens opened!
                                               

Today Richard and I are surprised we are tired. And we shouldn't be shocked by our weariness. We all have to be sensible about flagging energy levels. Fatigue can play funny tricks on one's mood and mental well-being. The body is saying it needs a rest.

More importantly, regarding mental health, I note Eva Wiseman, in yesterday's Observer was quite rightly saying awareness of mental health issues is at an all-time high. But, she asked, where's the provision to help said issues? While I tap away here, feeling glad I am merely tired from overdoing it, my heart goes out to those who have overpowering mood changes, panics, depressions and anxiety or personality disorders. At least I know that if I rest or go for a walk or watch Casablanca I'll feel restored. It's not that simple for those for whom a cup of tea, paracetamol or a lie down aren't the answer. Eva Wiseman hit the nail on the head. Awareness of issues is not enough. Mental health needs preserving, nurturing and treating - when an inbalance sets in for more than the odd few hours, simply because we've done too much! Well said Eva. As a special needs teacher I know that provision is all.

The badgers got me off my guard today

In the old days, let's say 2013, I could dig and weed the flower beds in February, if they weren't frozen, enjoy the daffodils in March, put compost down for the French beans and in April think about planting leeks (or sowing them). By April Richard would have cut the lawn at least four times and by now, mid-May, we'd be enjoying the splendour of the vegetable beds. But that was then!

Since early spring this year we've been thrown by the activities of the woodland wildlife who visit our garden. They feed (and dig) our lawn and beds like it's an all-night diner. The leeks I sowed in March were scooped up one night. It made the raised beds look as if the badgers ( for it is they) had decided to become wine growers and had taken up grape-treading. I bought packs of leeks to replace my stillborn seedlings. Within days the pencil-like plants were lying flat on the soil, their roots out of the holes I'd made carefully for them with my dibber. Instead of 36 leeks I now have about ten. One of the original 36 is now thickening - the way it should - the rest are flailing around like blades of grass recently trimmed by the lawnmower. I won't be sowing my usual lettuces and leaves - can't cope with the carnage when I go forth with my watering can.

Now we have no hose pipe and garden tap at the top of the garden the vegetable beds are truly suffering. The early broad beans were upended by a badger who must have learned his technique from queuing for ice creams; watching the servers scooping vanilla ice out of a big tub.Richard has replanted his broad beans and resown more. We now have 50 small plants - far too many - as he didn't expect his first set to grow - they were for autumn sowings. Since the raised beds will have no access to the hosepipe I have sown spinach seeds (as a medicine for Richard's macular). Spinach suffer less from a lack of water. So far these seedlings haven't been interefered with. My French bean seedlings are so successful I have run out of window ledge to house them. About ten grew last year.  Most of those were eaten.This year I have more like sixty. Now I'm making space for them in our mini-greenhouse but they are going to be ready too quickly. It's been so warm they have leapt out of their seed trays like a goldfish jumping out of its bowl. (Before the cats we had a goldfish who jumped out of his bowls so often his new home became a baby's bath. We think he was a carp.)

In order to cope with too many seedlings I'm turning old flowering plants out of their barrels - hoping the badgers won't stand on hind legs to get at our brand new beans. The water butt, usually overflowing this time of the year is getting decidely short of water. It's been so dry and we haven't quite worked out how to water our vegetables now the water pipe has been shut off.  The water butt has never been in so much demand. Is it a good idea to lay a hose the full length of our garden, up two sets of steps, so we can have instant liquid for our kitchen garden? It could be 100 feet in length...

When the beans are planted how long will they last? I wanted to add more compost to a bed today. What did I find? Six heavy stones had been removed from in front of the compost bin (badger deterrent) and a scattering of rotted vegetable matter strewn around my neatly swept gravel paths. ( I only swept them yesterday.) I feel like the mother in Harold and Maude on finding her son, Harold, who has pretended to cut his wrists, spraying blood all round the mirrors in their well-appointed bathroom, (not his first quasi-suicide attempt). On seeing blood everywhere she cries 'This is tooo much!' Do I battle on or grow flowers in the raised beds next year...? I love badgers but we had a hole about a foot deep in the broad bean bed today. It's been quiet for a few days. I thought we were safe. But no. The badgers were back...They got me off my guard...

Time and Place

Watching the excellent film interpretation of Ishiguro's Remains of the Day I was reminded of the day, in my early years as SENCO (school special needs co-ordinator) at Patchway, when the A46 was closed for filming. I travelled along that road morning and night, from Bath to Patchway and back, for twenty years. Early in the 1990s, when filming of Remains of the Day began, our section of the A46, just outside Bath, was blocked, and we took another route.
     The early scene in the film where Stevens, seemingly trapped in Darlington Hall for decades as a butler, seen driving out of the big house on a rare visit to Clevedon, was captured in the space of a few hours. We know this because the A46 was open as usual the next day. Of course the 'hall' being used was beautiful Dyrham House, in Dyrham Park, and I passed its entrance, from where Stevens drove the 1930s Daimler, twice a day, from 1990 to 2010, but in a much less prestigious car! However, whenever I see the opening shots to the film I'm so grateful that when passing the entrance to Dyrham I was always free to go home, unlike Stevens. The final shots of a trapped pigeon finally making its escape from the hall are moving. Unlike the bird Stevens is still incarcerated with little or no privacy, family nor home of his own. He was 'in service' for life. The novel encapsulates duty, its virtues and restrictions. I know no-one in such a subservient role.

Even more of a jolt - when comparing my life and fortunes to others' - I was horrified to learn that it was on March 13th, a day before my birthday, but removed by a mere 13 years, that the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto at Krakow took place. In researching the war years for the sequel to my novel 'Coming of Age', beginning in 1939, where the first book left off, I was shocked that a mere thirteen years to the day when my mother went into labour with me, her first born, established Jewry in Krakow was no more. I learned these facts from watching Schindler's List. I have yet to read the book but the film shows the gradual lack of freedoms endured by Jews, until the ultimate is achieved; their annihilation. Thirteen years is hardly a life-time. It's a shockingly short passage of time between their deaths, their tortures, the brutalities meted out on them, and my birth. It feels very,very close.

When I was three I would take my mother's hand and 'help' push my newborn brother in his pram to our local park. There, peering between the pink and yellow rose bushes, I could look down at shiny railway tracks, wait for a whistle, see white smoke and finally jump up and down at the site of the steam train passing through to Birmingham and the huge world beyond.

When the Jews of Krakow stood in railway trucks, melting in the heat, passing out from hunger, lack of air and water, and herded about like cattle, condemned for slaughter, I cannot believe they viewed the steam train, so beloved by nostalgic train-spotters, with affection. For us the steam train represented a journey of excitement, into the big city, into a world of the unknown. For them, in March 1943, they could only feel fear and doom. My memory of  seeing shiny railway tracks as a three-year-old will be for ever corrupted by the image of  tracks entering Auschwitz.

Adverts on the television still show suffering: street children in Asia, refugees in camps, the starving babies in parts of Africa and Yemen, donkeys crippled with overwork. While I sit in the comfort of my study watching scenes of depravity I recall the day my father told us he had been in the liberation party for Belsen camp. He had never talked about it until I was in my thirties, the year we took him on holiday to Arromanches, France, where he had served in D-Day. I had had no idea he had witnessed the results of acts of gross inhumanity. It explained, however, why dad had given me 'Spotty' for my first reading book. It was written, at a child's level, as a plea that we should accept those who are different from us, even if that difference is merely being spotty in a non-spotty world.
     Dad had witnessed wicked cruelty, intolerance and lack of freedom for human beings who happened to be living at the wrong time, in the wrong place. I am ever grateful to have a comfortable home in a beautiful city. I can come and go as I please. Not everyone, not even the butler Stevens, had those freedoms. He's seen 'disappearing' into the wainscotting he had just polished, accepting he had to be seen and not heard, pushed to one side, unimportant. A different time and place.

Not what it says on the tin

I don't know whether it's 'hats off' to Cuprinol (other garden shades are available) for being helpful or just a clever tactic on their part... ie their successful sale of fence paint to an unknowing me.  In a roundabout way I'm referring to the endless task of maintaining our home - more specifically, on this occasion, to the garden fence. Have Cuprinol been our rescuers? Please read on ...
       About 16 years ago I paid a lot to have the whole length of our garden refenced. Within a few years the weight of honeysuckle from the other side of said fence had eroded the tops and some panels had to be replaced. Since then even more have weakened but I rescued them - visually at least - by painting them - laborious panel by laborious panel - with an elegant fence paint named Cuprinol Holly. It was a dark green - it matched our garden furniture - it set off the flowering plants very nicely and looked so much better than the traditional orange freak-me-out wood stain which looked positively vile and was not easy to slap on.
        In the welcome spring sunlight I can see one or two sad panels have grown moss (now there's a shade) and they need recoating. Others are still splattered grey - cement having been hurled at them while the boys from Abergavenny replaced our old water pipes last November.They dug up most of our patio and there's more cement on the fence than between the replaced slabs. Can you imagine the scene when I tried washing the fence with soap and water? A freezing day made much worse by having my hand in cold water performing a fruitless task ie making the fence look super-important and me like something out of a back-to-back slum from the poverty-stricken 1930s.
       This week I decided to repaint the panels. We've had plenty of dry weather. Why delay?
Why delay indeed. Firstly no-one either in the flesh nor on-line had tins of Cuprinol Holly. It wasn't just our garden centre becoming shy of stocking that shade ... Even Cuprinol themselves don't have  it. Imagine my surprise when I heard back from my email to their 'helpline'. ( I didn't sign myself 'Desperate of Bath' but was trying to avoid days and days of painting our long stretches of fence with a new shade ...) The Cuprinol email was long, addressed my concerns, told me how to rescue the situation and sent me a voucher to buy a brand new tin of 'Cuprinol Garden Shades.' So pleased was I to learn that although  'Holly' was no longer made by Cuprinol two other shades mixed in a ratio of 3:2 was the new equivalent. I felt certain our fence would soon be elegant once more.
     Sadly the reality of DIY projects always makes me glad I'm not answering those questions on Desert Island Discs which begin 'If marooned do you think you could build yourself a shelter?'I planned out my strategy - what could go wrong? I had three tins :- 1) Remnants of Cuprinol Holly - the last cms of said stain on planet Earth 2) A free tin from Cuprinol called Ash and 3) Another tin from Cuprinol - paid for by me - called Sage. The lengthy email from the helpline told me that others had found three parts Ash mixed with two parts Sage = Holly. I must have looked a strange sight measuring and marking 5 cm on the side of an almost empty tin, and pouring the remnants - for colour matching - into the lid. An even stranger sight was my getting covered in Ash whilst trying to pour it into the old tin up to the 3 cm mark. Could I judge 3 cm depth of fence paint? No I couldn't. I managed to dip the end of of a tape measure in to judge the amount of stain I'd poured and found I was way over 3cm. If 3cm:2cm is the ratio 3:2 in a quantity of paint measuring 5cm depth, what the bloody hell is the same ratio for 4.75cm Ash to ...???... Sage? It took me aeons to do simple arithmetic. Eventually I poured in the almost-correct amount of Sage. The tape measure showed this time I'd added too little. And did the mixture look anything like 'Holly'? ... Of course not! Many pourings of stain and my coat, hands, hair in-a-state later I decided that was the best I could do. I tried painting the magic mixture on cement splattered panels and instead of looking a deep, rich green the effect was grey, thin and very messy. But I ( quite deterred) continued painting the fence. Even grey was better than cement encrusted panels.After half an hour of yet more pointless DIY the stain began to dry ... and looked remarkably like 'Holly'.
      I was coated in grey, green, near-black and various other shades but the desired outcome may have been  achieved. Now the old tin of Cuprinol 'Holly' contains Ash/Sage - not what it says on the tin. My hands were so covered in paint I couldn't get to a label to stick on said tin thus it still looks as if its full of anything but the newly homemade shade. It definitely isn't what it says on the tin. Bravo Cuprinol - I think - but it would have been so much easier to have bought a tin of 'Holly' - wouldn't it?? I really don't to remix tins in order to restain the whole of our long fence but ...

What's a Ford B max?

Over the last few days the good people of Devon, my husband and my friends have all shown great restraint. Why, on sunny afternoons, have I, dressed fully in black, save for a necklace of multicoloured lozenges, been seen wandering around car parks? Why have I surreptitiously positioned myself to take the best shot of the rear end of a Ford motor car? Have I suddenly become fascinated by 'Top Gear' now Clarkson's gone? Am I a sex-starved voyeur? Am I in hot pursuit of holiday makers having a quickie, before ambling through the car park to the rear entrance of Boots for their painkillers and haemorrhoid preparations? And why am I wearing a long black, warm, woollen winter coat with the sun high in the sky and temperatures well above 65 degrees?

I haven't found myself short of things to do on this early spring holiday. That's not the reason. And it has been a cold wind out there - once we've got out of our holiday cottage for down-town Beer, Branscombe, Budleigh or Sidmouth - hence the winter coat. 

No the reason for this odd photograph-taking behaviour is this: There being a shortage of Ford B max motor cars on the road I was trying to take a piccie of one nestling between more well-known makes - thus enabling me to show our Devon-residing friends the car we're going to get. They'd never heard of the model. Since my aunts said we could have their hardly-used Ford B max, with full service,  immaculate within and without, I've been trying to see one 'for real'. There's such a poor signal here I can't google an image of said vehicle and the only other one I've seen was loaded with a family, all doors and windows open, wing-like, as if ready for take off, parked at the Donkey Sanctuary. My husband didn't want to drive round to the rear end of the car, once its inhabitants had eaten their sandwiches and locked up. He wanted to stroke wiry donkeys and talk to the poor beasts, not take photographs of a black Ford B max in a muddy, grassy field. 

Makes sense. (Although when I spotted the only other B max that I've seen on this holiday it was silver, like the one my aunts are selling us. The black one at the Donkey Sanctuary was rather smart.)

Beggars can't be choosers. 

Brand new the cheaper B max retails at £13K and we're having my aunts' silver one - two years old and only 14K on the clock. No point looking for a better deal than that - anywhere!

Now I have my piccie of a Ford B max - this one's in a royal blue finish - I'll ogle it until I can google it - and get back to receiving an internet signal. ( And I find I prefer silver or black car bodies.) 

After all the effort of wandering round car parks, suddenly darting down side streets and sitting at a pavement cafe just so I can see the traffic stop at the lights ( who me?) I have an image of said car. Ford B max. That's the one. You don't see many of them around. Why is that? They've only been available for a couple of years and the Fiesta, Focus and other models seem more plentiful. Are we buying a white elephant? No we're buying a silver Ford B max with superior upholstery and bleeping things to help with parking. Anyone seen one? What are they like? There don't seem to be many on the road ...

Time

When I woke this morning my to-do list was, amazingly, empty. I have written before about how the blissful state of being  en retraite  is nothing like how I dreamt it would be. My imaginings of having oceans of time to go to the coast, sit in the garden, read, even read the papers, travel and people-watch never became reality.

But - for once - today - I can read, catch up with the papers, even sit in the garden ... and next week I can go to the coast. Why? Because we are in a new season!

In my dreams of retirement I had forgotten something called winter - which annually eats up four months of garden-sitting and people-watching. It's too damn cold to be outside unless you're jogging. And I don't jog.

I'd also forgotten housework has to be done and no matter how long I put it off there's always ironing.
Machines wash and dry clothes and dishes but they don't press shirts, trousers, t-shirts, jeans etc.

Retirement isn't one long blissful journey to foreign shores with endless sunshine and a heavy privy purse to pay for it all. Retirement is simply not leaving the house every morning to go to a place of work in exchange for a salary cheque at the end of the month. So how have I replaced that ' going to a place of work' ?

I do clean, dig the garden, get workmen in to fix our 125 year-old-house (and pay for it handsomely.) If I didn't live in an old house would I have more money for travel? More importantly would I have the time?

If waking -  with nothing vital to tackle - as I did today - was less of a rarity maybe I would have time to wander abroad. But, I wonder, why am I so busy the rest of the time? Perhaps writing a novel has taken over where my job left off. I read far more now - as much to inform myself of the craft of writing as for enjoyment - and perhaps I'm more particular about the state of the house and garden. Maybe I'm using more of my free time on domestics than I care to reveal. After all I'd never admit that retirement has meant my cooker hardly ever looks in need of a polish. I can't imagine myself bragging to anyone about the latest vacuum cleaner and how much better my carpets are now I have time to devote to them. And I rarely tell anyone I bake my own bread - but I do. ( Just don't pass it on.)

I did dig my herbaceous borders and raised vegetable beds a few weeks ago and the miniature daffodils always look brilliant for my birthday. This year was no exception. I have to admit it, grudgingly, retirement has meant I do more around the house and garden. It doesn't sound glamorous but it makes sense that, as a result, I rarely wake with nothing on my to-do list.

But today I really am going to read-for-pleasure and loosely plan part two of my trilogy - i.e. begin making notes for my second novel. It opens in 1939, from the pov of a very young volunteer soldier - a rich field - and continues through the war to the emergence of the NHS and the end of rationing.

I have my father's diaries of his duties in an armoured car during the big campaigns of WW2. He was in the Royal Corps of Signals. To be able to use his first hand notes and experiences of battle in The Italian Campaign, in El Alamein, the D-Day landings and - even more frightful - being part of the liberation task force for Belsen - should translate vividly into a novel.

But first find his diaries. That will take days of searching. Time - there's always something to eat into it. And perhaps if I really am a writer it would explain why I don't feel as if I have left work. I haven't. I've just exchanged one modus operandi for another. My choice. No-one made me use my time in this way. And - in theory - time is what I do have. I certainly didn't when I was an employee.

March On!

The weather men tell us March 1st is the first day of spring. The spring equinox is March 21st but we don't put the clocks forward until the end of March. This is why winter seems so long here; it's too late after shortest day, December 21st, to wait for much needed extra hours of light. My iphone calendar tells me it was dark at 5.20 pm on 30th October - my husband's birthday, the night after putting the hour back. Four 'rough' months later - 1st February - it was dark at 5.30pm. Isn't that about the time we should be moving the hands of the clock forward? Early February would be roughly two months after shortest day ... October 30th is roughly two months before that date, shortest day is just about in the middle of those two dates.

Why do we have to trudge through near-darkness for almost eight weeks longer than I would deem necessary? There is a reason - something to do with the shift of the moon or the inclination of the earth. Or some other half-remembered truth.

I was a school girl when the experiment to do away with light-saving took place. The issue was that to gain longer, light evenings we had to trade this for evil, black mornings. We were dressed in flourescent arm bands as it was so dark in the mornings on our walk, yes walk, to the primary school gates. The experiment showed light evenings, ie putting the clocks forward before the end of March, was too dangerous for morning rush hour traffic. The mornings were simply too black. That's the reason we suffer long dark evenngs in February and March; to do otherwise means dangerous roads and school children at risk of accident.

Nature doesn't stop, thankfully; it believes it's spring whatever time the big hand is telling us. This weekend our miniature daffodils have bloomed and are sitting in their barrels and tubs on our front steps, welcoming visitors, postmen and passers-by. Our primulas also look beautiful and another barrel - of pulmonaria - is ready to move to the front of the house too. Spring is in the air. There was real warmth in the sun on Thursday.

I always look forward to this time of year; it's my birthday in ten days time, prunus are flowering, scattering petals confetti-like along our semi-rural road, and gardens start to look very pretty. It's still dark at 6.45pm on the fourteenth of March - not light at 8pm until we alter the clocks. I crave the light nights!! We need sunshine and daylight, especially for us, this year, as mum died so soon after we put the clocks back. It was already dark by 5.30pm the night she left us. It's been a long four months since 4th November.

Given the horrendous stories from here, the USA, Syria and many places covered by world news it's good for the soul to see spring come round again.  Since Brexit, Trumpism and the terrible underfunding of our NHS, prisons, libraries, schools, the disabled ... the news seems more miserable  as the weeks go by ...  it's important to remember the good things. Seed packets at the ready, forsythia blossoming, an array of cut flowers to be had and good company. Solid, fun friendships forged with like-minded folk equally stumped by events in the news are of the essence. My manuscript is with my editor - that's draft three of my novel - but the first time she has read the whole in one sitting. Editing and making cuts has taken me some weeks. Now to emerge from in front of the screen! Get out into the fresh air. Spring clean (!). It's March. Things are moving forward.March on!