Brushing up my blokeish (again)

Some serious home maintenance is needed.

Well,

perhaps not quite as bad as

this.

But this is the view from here

for the foreseeable future.

We escaped to Kew Gardens 

to see the newly refurbished Temperate House

with its pristine

new roof.

While ours was being ripped off.

And now, while you look at these fish who know not a day's worry 

about leaking roofs,I must go and practice.

My blokeish is terribly rusty and 

disconcertingly, they are right outside my first floor window.

I can hardly hear them though over the noise of the

falling slates and the tinny radio.

New Year blues

Our grand daughter was thrilled to be opening presents.

Anyone's presents.

The more the merrier.

The contents? Well they were not really the point of the exercise.

It was the moment of mystery that held her in thrall.

I received many lovely gifts too,

but the sighting of this blue glass gem on a beach that normally

only yields white and green was absurdly thrilling.

I felt as though I had won the lottery.

And yet and yet.

The glass once dry and cached with all the hundreds of other pieces indoors,

has lost some of its lustre. 

The magical feeling of acquisition has faded.

Where does this pull towards possession come from?

It seems to start so early.

And the longer it lasts, the older I get, the more complicated it is 

to shuck off the weighty legacy.

I had a waking dream nightmare, where I was trying to dispose mentally

of all the items in my house, as if in readiness for an imminent move

to somewhere much smaller than my present abode.

The practical difficulties seemed overwhelming.

And yet so many people have to do just this,

perhaps at a time when they are physically least able to cope.

My parents had a large house which easily swallowed 

in its attics and outhouses

the baggage of a long lifetime, raising a family

and running a nursery school from the premises.

My mother was incorrigible.

'You'll have to deal with all this when I'm gone,' she said laughingly.

And when both parents died within five weeks of each other,

that is exactly what we had to do.

It was haphazard and brutal.

A skip was ordered and house clearance people got very lucky.

There simply wasn't time to make considered decisions.

Today I started my Kondo-ing again.

Delete. Delete. Delete.

If anyone wondered where I was,

I have been Kondoing my Inbox.

I had to because my computer said it was full

and could neither absorb nor discharge any further information.

I understood how it felt.

There were 8835 messages there going back eight years.

Of course there must have been many more.

I certainly do delete as I go, but for some reason

these had resisted the routine culling.

It was, and is, a sobering experience. 
All life is there,
from the mundane to the momentous.
There is no easy way to approach this task.
I cannot risk taking out the box wholesale.
I have found some vital documents and some useful contacts.
I have been reminded of happy times and sad.

The computer has dropped a couple of dress sizes
and is feeling more comfortable, but I must press on.
We're aiming for a size 8.
People send funnies, and each of these links was opened and examined.
Mercifully many of them had expired.
Here are a couple that were brought blinking into the spotlight.
You'll notice a common theme:

 Retiree Bathtub Test

During a visit to my doctor, I asked him, 

"How do you determine

whether or not a retiree should be put in an old age home?"

"Well," he said, "we fill up a bathtub, 
then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the retiree 
and ask him or her to empty the bathtub."

"Oh, I understand," I said. "A normal person would use the bucket
 because it is bigger than the spoon or the teacup."
"No", he said. "A normal person would pull the plug out.
Do you want a bed near the window?"

                    

If it goes quiet again, you'll know where to find me.

Also - 32,544 photos.

Delete. Delete. Delete.

Shout out for shingle

This unpromising, nay bleak coastal terrain bursts into life in summer.

The yellow horned poppy.

Valerian.

Wild roses.

Just the other side of this hedge, people are working with nature

to make beautiful gardens.

They shared their efforts with us to raise money for the local hospice.

When I contemplate the sorry apology for a lawn at home,

I wonder if the way forward isn't just to scalp it

and ship in the shingle.

(My only caveat is that pebbles are

 so darned noisy and not barefoot friendly.)

Reminded me of this

and Freda's two gates.

Upgrade, downgrade, retrograde

Well I knew it was going to be a bore,

but with more and more of my usual processes being given

the computer says, 'No' treatment,

I made a last ditch attempt to bring my old Mac up to date

with its first ever upgrade to El Capitan.

It didn't like it one bit.

It groaned and protested and chucked a spinning beach ball around all night.

Then it said it couldn't find my Bluetooth keyboard or mouse

but would I please enter my password.

So my son kindly sent away for the plug in variety of both

and we were back on speaking terms.

But another part of the problem lay in my extensive photo collection

happily housed in carefully labelled Events in iPhoto.

Now they have been ported into a new library called Photo

and it as if the whole lot were chucked into the air

and then randomly stuffed into shoe boxes 

called Moments, Albums and Collections.

I hardly dare to upload a photo here,

because it must laboriously search for every single picture taken since 2008,

playing with the beach ball all the while, 

and then I must try to find one to illustrate my bon mots.

But I'm going to give it a go

because otherwise it's all up with this blogging business

and back to pen and paper diaries.

 Well worth the wait.

I think I deserve a little flowery crown too.

Reflecting

on this book :

A new attitude to stuff and
what to do about it.

Sweet

Sweet rationing ended shortly before I was born.

And after that, we couldn't get enough of the stuff.

Two sugars in tea, sugar on already sweetened cereal,

sugar cubes pushed into blood oranges to suck,

a little paper twist of sweets each morning for a snack,

sixpence to spend on sweets every Sunday,

pineapple chunks, Smarties, Jelly Babies, chocolate éclairs,

Spangles, Refreshers, Fruit Gums, 

Cadbury's chocolate, two lumps for break at school,

Turkish Delight, Maltesers, Rolos, sherbert lemons,
Lucozade to pep you up after an illness,
(doctors and nurses recommend it)

a Golden Delicious apple every night in bed

after I had brushed my teeth,
Mint Polos,
(the sweet with the hole/s)

and a mouthful of mercury fillings.

I have endured many hours in so many dentist's chairs,
often at the hands of a dentist called I.Screech,
sometimes without anaesthetic.

I am not convinced that all of those fillings were even necessary

despite the sugar onslaught, 

because dentists were paid per filling and would even fill milk teeth.

The latest programme of repairs to old fillings

has just finished and I am nursing an empty wallet and a sore jaw.

But now, I am going to watch this

to see if I should wean myself off sucrose and glucose, 
which still lurk, in admittedly more respectably disguised forms, 
in my diet, even if it is too late for my teeth.

Well I've watched the programme and, how interesting,
it's not just fat, and it's not just sugar,
it's the fatal combination of the two that lies at the root of the problem.
Luckily, I don't much like doughnuts,
but it looks as though meringues and cream
are off the menu and I'd better prise myself out of this chair
and build some muscle.

At my desk

Hard at work.

Greater Dixter

The garden that goes on giving.

Mine goes on giving too -

mostly weeds at present.

I think I should never have gravel

or slate chippings

anywhere ever again.
Ever.