Solstice flies by. I find a lot of time flies by now. But the sun is out, there is a blue sky fluffed up with clouds nothing to be worried about. Still haven't stood on one leg for 10 seconds, should I dice with the future and know my inevitable end ;) ;) I fell over two seconds in...
Well it is all change in this house, a washing machine arrived yesterday promptly after the day it had been ordered, £10 secured that. Someone is coming today to take the enormous leather settee away and a new velvet one is arriving next Monday. The dog is forbidden from ever going into the sitting room!
The marvels of technology still worry me. Lillie has just rushed off to get her phone from school where she left it, you can track them down. Of course this tracking lark is a bit worrying, not only phones but people as well. But the phone has been registered as lost, so no one can use it.
My daughter is about to dice with the trains to Manchester, I am not going to go into the argument about unions and strikes. It causes upheaval but it is wise to remind those in power who actually runs the country, instead of pontificating from above. And when I say run the country, I mean, doctors and nurses, careworkers, cleaners, the person who picks up your rubbish, or mends the road. My only comment would be that the Conservatives have come unstuck on their own governing.
Debby mentioned how her grandson is getting books from the library. It brought back memories of how each Saturday as a child, I would get my four books and weekly ration of sweets. And then in the summer, would go down the garden to the sand pit my grandfather had built for us. There amongst the irises, delphinums and the long flowerbed filled with all those flowers of summer I would read to my heart's content.
That Victorian garden with its old fruit trees we climbed, with its immaculate beds kept by Jerry the gardener was a paradise on earth for children. Now when I look on the net, I see that the lawn next to our road facing house has had a bungalow built on it, where did that long line of populars go, chopped down in the pursuit of gain I suppose. Does the monkey tree still sit in its bed below the back door, or has it long gone. The old greenhouse where I kept the animals I collected, frogs, sick birds and the tortoise. I had a graveyard as well for dead birds (we had a large white cat called Snowy). Childhood long gone.
My childhood is long gone as well, but it is a special thing to me to be part of my grandchildren's childhoods. In a way, I feel as if I'm reliving some very golden days.
ReplyDeleteYou have triggered my memories of summer reading outdoors. Our small town library was open only two afternoons per week and it was usually a Saturday that my mother might have the family car. I wasn't limited to four books, thankfully. There were times when Mother fussed that I was reading too much--somehow it was meant to be bad for my eyesight [?] I would stuff the current book into my waistband and scuttle outdoors to a spot in the pasture where I couldn't be seen. As I grew older I smuggled a flashlight under the bedcovers to read at night.
ReplyDeleteI think as children we absorbed everything written, I was also allowed to choose books from the adult section, so ghost writers, Poe and P.D. James, and then Dennis Wheatley and Georgette Heyer, all monitored by the librarian. Childhood memories of course dictate the way we grow up, I also remember the gladiolus's which grew by the sandpit are still a favourite flower.
DeleteI read about standing on one foot for ten seconds. It's been twenty years since I could do that. Have I passed the "dead in ten years" mark?
ReplyDeleteObviously Joanne ;) ;)
ReplyDeleteWe had an informal pet's cemetery but not for wild animals. Nature has its own way of disposing of them. When was the last time you saw a bird that had died of old age?
ReplyDeleteFor some reason, probably vanity, I always put my socks on while standing on one leg - a skill which I'm sure will come in useful someday.
ReplyDelete