The other day EG unearthed many building stones from among the roots of a giant conifer in our garden. We have been here more than 30 years, but still find caches of great rocks and stones and strangely shaped bricks. The orange-coloured one on the right has a cylindrical shape on one corner.
We are rather curious about this boulder with the iron loop in the top. Any ideas?
I have noticed an interesting effect of age. I no longer put off doing a major job properly. So in the garden, finding the protective mortar flaking off the lowest level of bricks in one area – which was in the same state four years ago when I was laying paving slabs there – I know that I must deal with it. I have this feeling with all heavy work in the garden; best to do it now, I may not feel like it in a year or so’s time, and best make a good lasting job of it.
This feeling spreads to other areas not necessarily involving physical strength. There is no longer anything to be gained by waiting for a better/quieter/more mature period in my life. While the tendency to cook up long term schemes and projects has not left me, perhaps I am finally learning to live in the moment.
I read that you should only touch a piece of paper once – meaning that when you open a letter you should answer and file it in one go. Looking at the pile of paper in the box that masquerades as my in-tray, I still have a way to go on that front.
Of course it may not be age at all. I have just finished reading an unpublished memoir of a WWII Far Eastern Prisoner of War (Dishonourable Guest, by W G Riley). Riley is a young Signalman who starts POW life in Changi, works on the Thailand-Burma Railroad, gets transported on the doomed Hokofu Maru troopship, and is one of the 23 Britons rescued in the dramatic Cabanatuan Raid at Luzon. I have read many POW memoirs in the course of the last three year’s research. Elements are the same, but each man’s story is unique. You would have to be very obtuse to reach the end of even one of these memoirs and not learn to appreciate the moment.
Riley made, in his son’s words, ‘anguished attempts to get the work published’. His whole life was affected, not only by his experience as a prisoner, but also by his need to get his story written and known. It was never published as a book, but his son, Steve, had the second version of the text (the first was lost) typeset and printed 1988. This certainly puts the odd rejection by agents or publishers into perspective.
Spent this afternoon dodging Robins and being blatantly ignored by blackbirds. I was working hard on the new paths lifting turfs and either piling them up to fill the new bank or taking them elsewhere in the garden to fill in edges. I couldn’t move without the rush of wings close by as the robins leap in to grab the worms and larvae. As I shovelled sand into the spaces, unseen robins would fly up. No doubt there were only two, but they worked non-stop shifts. The blackbirds never even bothered to fly up. If in danger of actually being hit by a spadeful, they would hop in inch or two left or right, but made it clear that it was my problem to avoid them.
Made some progress on the brick paths, but am regretting my failure to use string and measure out from the wall. Having bricked round a small rectangular bed, I find the gaps slightly bigger on the other side. Of course the old path I made alongside the house path may not be dead straight.
Frost again tonight. Someone coming to wash the bricks on the old bit of drive that we are keeping on Tuesday. We think it was laid 20 years ago, so it is doing quite well as all it has had in the way of cleaning is me, EG and a trowel in all that time. The giant concrete slabs that are to go are now at least a 100 years old, broken, and very ugly. There is so much work to be done before the new bricks go in, it is difficult to imagine being ready. I guess we will be working all weathers by the time they start. I have to admit, though that I enjoy the challenge and feel better for the exercise.
Will get more fun exercise tomorrow night as Amy will still be here and will come Lindy hopping with me.
Flat out in the garden for the last two and a half days. The weather very unfriendly on the hands, but we have had some periods of sunshine. Trying to lay brick paths before the old slabs of concrete are lifted to revamp the drive. There is a great bag of sand on the old drive and I have to use enough of it be able to move it before the 16th April, so conditions that I would normally think of as indoor only, are suddenly possible. EG worked hard on clearing weeds off the drive that will remain and gathering the piles of pebbles that are in the path of the new drive. We still have to take out some shrubs and cut down others. In the midst of this I had a call from the local nursery to say that they had some bare-rooted box for me after all. Today has been a tricky series of gymnastics in the tiny knot garden we made when the girls were small. I dug up the worst plants and trimmed them back to live growth, replanted them and put in the ten new ones. It looked fine a few years ago.
But it had become very thin and full of dead wood. If spring ever arrives we may see it restored. The ground is strangely dry, yet I am reluctant to water, given the nightly frosts. All the buds on the fruit trees and the japanese quince are ready to burst open. I fear they are going to go ahead any day now, frost or not. I have continued to bed the granite setts into the edge of the old dragon bed (There is a pile of giant granite boulders through the middle of the bed hiding an old stump). I am not sure about the look of this – a bit contrived, but it will give a hard edge for the mower and I can’t think where else to put them. We are still baffled by the vast quantity of granite and other stones all over this garden.
Hope I get some more outdoor time over Easter.
I love the randomness of existence; so Monday morning there was a knock on the door and a great lorry craned a large bag of sand onto our driveway. The snow cover and the icicles everywhere make laying brick paths unwise. Instead I managed to send an email to an agent, who felt like the right person for my Prisoner of War non-fiction book – though the firm is closed for submissions, so I have probably just annoyed him. I also finally posted a submission to an agent for my fiction book Border Line.
An interesting post on How I Handle Rejection on Shannon’s blog http://shannonathompson.com made me reflect on how I handle both rejection and praise. I went to a recent email from a friend who had read Border Line critically for me and realised that I had lapped up the praise and not paid enough attention to the criticism. I had dealt with the post-it notes on the manuscript, but not really listened to a more fundamental worry in the covering email. So I spent a happy few hours – and I mean happy – addressing the problem. It is so much easier when someone has kindly identified the sticky patch or the unreal person. When you are writing you tend to have your nose up against the leaves and the shape of the trees get lost.
My mood underwent some yo-yo transformations as I tried to alter the picture for the (imaginary) cover of Border Line on my website. I learnt, as I always do on these occasions, a lot about how not to work in iWeb, but finally I got it sorted. Then, having published the new version, I was maddened to find that one page uploaded the new version, but another stuck to the old. Much trial and error later, I could get the new pages correct only of I used the www. before my address. Today it works properly. There are some gnomes working hard behind the scenes and I just don’t quite speak their language.
The other day EG was baffled by an advert talking about the number of slices of toast made in a life time or noses wiped or… you get the picture. It made me think of socks. Am I the only woman to have sat down one day and calculated the number of socks I washed as the girls were growing up. Let’s say 4 pairs, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year for 16 years… = 46,720 individual socks. That is not counting life before children or the 16 years since that calculation (or of course the rest of the garments we all wore in those years). So yes, I understood and felt at one with the woman in the advert – though I have no memory of what they were selling.
Happy moment today – a gift chosen purely by instinct, a garment with a label I had never heard of before – turned out to be a make known and worn by the recipient.
Much brickwork in the garden today, though when the sun vanished all that was left was a biting wind. EG and I started to chisel out the granite setts from the side of our 100-year-old drive. I rather enjoyed having both of us there in goggles bashing away at the old wall. We have relocated the setts. Heaven knows what the original owners of this house needed with the tons of pink granite brought into this garden. This project is definitely in the labour phase, but the delight of seeing a path emerging out of the designs never fails.
Expected bad weather still holding off, but my hands got very cold heaving bricks and moving turfs. I am taking up a grass path, but keeping the turfs to build a bank in the poor dry soil next to the drive.
No writing today either. Reading the 1853 A Year In Music in bed this morning, I was comforted once more by how little time the great composers of that period actually spent composing. They made a lot of music and they talked to each other about music and they travelled, but composing time was rare. I imagine that it didn’t earn them a living, any more than writing does today. Composing must be the most frustrating of the arts. It is all imagination – unless, say, you are a pianist composing for the piano. For orchestral work, or worse still opera, without the instrumentalists and the singers and the venue and the rehearsing time, you will never hear your own work, you cannot even show it to others except as a score.
It occurs to me that this is no longer true. Presumably there is now software that will allow you to compose and hear some version of your work… Hmm, I’ve always wanted to have a go. Now I recall the girls had a very simple music program on the old Atari. However in 1853 you had a page of music and, if you were lucky , a piano.
Yesterday was a weird day. We were expecting bad weather yet the sun was shining bright, so I scrambled into gardening clothes and went mad in the garden, mending the hose that takes water from one rain butt to another, clearing paths and finding the edges of them. EG had set a fine example a week ago clearing all the moss from the side path. I kept expecting the sun to disappear, but it was so warm I went coatless.
In the afternoon we went to the funeral of our 92 year-old neighbour. She was a feisty and determined lady. She lived alone in the house her father built, and insisted on maintaining standards as she thought fit. When we came to live next door – more than thirty years ago – I lived in dread of her. She went in for unparalleled frankness and had many things to say about our house and garden, but over the years we became friends and she was always kind and generous to the children. Latterly she became a great supporter of my writing and would lend her copies of my books to all her friends – insisting that they read them. She was lucky in having devoted friends, on whom she made great demands, who made it possible for her to stay in her own home to the end of her life.
After the funeral, as the bad weather still held off, I rushed into the garden and started work on the brick paths and beds in the area near the new drive-to-be. I had forgotten how much I enjoy the exhaustion of labour. I positively relish moving earth around and realising designs that had started out as pencil on paper. I think the two maples will look great in their re-made beds.
Later in the day, a lovely email from the researcher of the magazine on Far Eastern Prisoners of War to say that my article was OK. Much relieved. Apart from corrections, I did no writing yesterday.
To finish off the day I took myself off to a Lindy Hop session. This was mad. It takes place in the basement of a pub with limited floor room. Tonight there were suddenly about 15 newcomers. A crazy, lively and very noisy session, but not much room to dance.
Torn between a new project – redesigning parts of the garden near new drive to be – and further work on Border Line. Had enough discipline to spend a couple of hours, working on dialogue of one character and checking the re-written story of another, then allowed myself to play with the garden. Much measuring in freezing wet conditions, but I now have a passable plan to scale, so ought to feel cheery. I feel pleased with the plan, but slightly unfocussed.
Actually I am frustrated that the weather is too foul to get to work, and I am dissatisfied by my writing today. I also had feedback about Writing to a Ghost from a dear friend. Love the feedback, but the dilemmas remain. Do I try to publish as is, or do I tear it to pieces and create three different kinds of books. I could fulfil the Pen & Sword requirement for a 50 – 70,000 word social history, by using only the relatives letters, and write the story of Phyllis and the dossier and the wives and mothers. Hmm, I can feel the juices flowing a bit as I wonder how to set about this.
Out in the garden at 7 ish in dressing gown and boots. Ice crystals on every bud and branch. It looked stunning, but the birds had no water and some frost covers had blown off in the hailstorms yesterday. I know you shouldn’t plant tender plants where they are vulnerable, but the camellia given to us in memory of EGs dad is covered in fat buds.
We’ve had plenty of sun today plus some flakes of snow. The buds and leaves on the blue clematis on the fence are blackened and limp, but the one on the house as survived.
Goldfinches visiting and below that the newcomer – a siskin.
We now have another estimate for the drive, not as expensive but lower spec than the first and either way to do the whole job will cost more than we are willing to pay. A compromise on doing half the drive (where the old lifting concrete slabs lie) looks like being the answer. We are lucky to be able to do it at all.
Green Writing Room 