saying goodbye

Regular readers will be familiar with our lovely Cat Chaps, Rum and Raisin. They came into our lives in late 2008, rescued from a very good RSPCA Center in Hastings. We had lost three cats in the previous couple of years and I had been sent out to find "just one female cat", but these brothers captured my heart and so became part of our family. They had been deserted when previous owners moved house and left them to fend for themselves. Raisin was quite extrovert, came out of their "pod" to see who I was and trotted about looking very cheerful; Rum was the shy one, refusing to come and perform, but when I put my hand carefully into the space where he was he let me stroke his head, very briefly, before ducking it away with a motion that became utterly familiar to me over time. It was his "not now, but maybe later" declaration of independence. I couldn't leave them there after that. 

Christmas in the menagerie window of daughter's old bedroom

Since they arrived we have moved house, coming to our current home after my Mum died in 2010, and they have appeared from time to time here as part of our happy lives. They found the advent of a much larger new garden rather overwhelming at first, especially as it was dusted over with frost and then snow in the first few weeks

Crikey, this needs a bit of a tidy up

But they soon settled in, and games of "cowboys and Indians" on the lawn, followed by exhausted luxuriating in the warm sun on the path, became a regular entertainment for us and them

a peaceful pause with paws

As all lovers of pets know, we only have them for a short time, and last week I had to take our beloved Rum to the vets for a final visit. He was very poorly and one always knows what the kindest course is when this happens, but the repetition of loss makes it no easier to bear. My daughter and I took him along, the Good Man being too upset to come this final time. All was done with great kindness and gentleness, and his leaving this earth was a quiet and peaceful passing. His death is a small and insignificant thing in the context of all the sadnesses that are happening in the world just now, but I found myself unable to come back to writing here without marking our loss. So this is to say "goodbye Rum", you were a very fine cat chap, warm and loving, always eager to be stroked and fussed and brushed, independent to the last and we miss you. We are so grateful for the joy and gentleness you brought to our lives. 

slumbering potted cat

An Open Garden

This coming Saturday we are opening our garden in aid of a local hospice which is dear to my heart. It is the first time we have done so, and I keep looking round hoping to manage another area of weeding before the day. Because of physical frailties I tend to pace myself in the garden, so can never achieve as much as I would like. An hour's session will exhaust me but I work slowly and thoroughly and hope to make a difference. My dear heart has similar problems due to age and old sporting injuries, so we do as much as we can and accept that this is not a show place. But is is our space, and we love it, and find it a very restorative and restful environment. We share it with a variety of folk as you know, wild and tame.

The vixen, who is keeping a close eye on us, 

while her babies are a little bemused to find these human folk down in their Dell

The cat chaps, on the other hand, are happy just chilling

Down in the Dell the rambling rose, which clambers all the way up a tall ash tree, is opening it's trusses of white flowers, filling the evening air with their scent. 

The greenhouse holds all sorts of growing things, and the bean rows catch the evening sunlight

Poppies and blue geranium make a lovely contrast

The bed by the new shed is looking just right for folk to peer at

And the ferns by the pond and in the fernery are bringing beautiful colour and texture to delight the eye

I love the contrast between those plump as pillows paeony and the little cushions of the knautia - the bees do too

and our red rose near the house is just beginning to open up its petals, 

Self portrait with cat :-)

I hope our visitors on Saturday enjoy our garden as much as we do, and don't notice too many weeds!

Patient

 Some day, my mouse will come!

In the evening garden

A cat who is sure that ~ some day his mouse will come along

a soft, warm fading light 

and Down in the Dell, yes a badger really does dwell

fossicking about, snuffling up goodies

Then the following day, lady fox, snooping about beneath the bird tree for tasty morsels

before scooting up the big yew for a quick check for birds eggs or baby squirrels - can you see the tip of her brush as she jumps back down?

such treasures

The DBM episode, another updated yarn

Well, I have to say this is not for the faint hearted, you have been warned!

You'll recall that Raisin, known for catching, but NOT eating, small furry creatures, brought us a gift which proceeded to hide under the bookcase in the sitting room. It then moved on to investigate the walls of the house, in particular my bedroom walls, which resulted in the great reorganisation, in panic mode in the middle of the night, of the contents of the "underbed" for want of a better word. 

Further explorations were made, in which our creature found that the fruit we stored on the kitchen counter was very tasty. Little scrabblings late at night, as I was reading quietly in the sitting room, alerted me to his presence, but still no sighting bar that first glimpse of grey fur under the kitchen cabinet. Aha, thought I, we'll soon sort this; the fruit was moved to the top of the fridge. This was, of course, no bar to our athletic rodent, who simply used the cooling fins on the rear of the fridge as a ladder. Bananas and pears developed neat little hollows. The fruit being made yet more secure,  great thought was given to how to capture this silly creature. Not being an advocate of poisoning, a humane mousetrap was purchased, baited with chocolate and peanut butter, and placed beside the fridge. A week or so passed. Nothing happened, but scrabblings were still heard in the middle of the night. You'll gather that by now my sense of humour was taking a bit of a battering, due to lack of sleep and general frustration. Then, one evening, hearing minute noises from the kitchen, I crept on soft feet to a point where I could see the fridge. I found Rum looking very intently at his bowl from the other side of the kitchen. And, yes, there, there (not on the chair) was that twitching whiskered thief of fruit and cat biscuits. Not a mouse, oh no, it was a rat! At this point, my sense of compassion for the natural world took a little bit of a battering. A rat in the house was just not cricket.

The following day the good man went down to our hardware store and yes, poison was purchased, along with a bigger trap in which the poison could be safely placed where cats couldn't go. The box of pretty blue blocks, carefully closed, was put to one side where, the following evening, after more scratchings in the kitchen, I realised that Mr Rat was helping himself; it was easier than going into that silly trap thing. I felt guilty, but I felt that this would soon bring an end to the whole sorry saga, which had been going on for about three weeks by now. But, no, this rat was a mighty rat. These tasty blocks of poison wouldn't defeat him. So, back to the hardware store, where the proprietor told us cheerfully that they had been selling lots of rat poison, the warm summer having been a very good one for rats! A more poisonous poison was recommended - you want the red blocks madam, not the blue ones. 

So home I toiled, still feeling guilty, and placed the red blocks where no cat could come across them, but where we knew Mr Rat was scurrying. We waited, and waited, blocks disappeared and were replaced; several more weeks passed - was he feeding an army for heaven' sakes?! Eventually, the absence of scrabblings from the kitchen and night time scurrryings in my bedroom walls suggested a victory. We assumed he had fled to the great outdoors in search of water, and had presumably breathed his last. I felt dreadfully guilty, but even more relieved, and began to sleep at night again.

Roll on a year, or was it perhaps two? Our dishwasher died, and an engineer was called. As he knelt on the floor by the sink, prising the kickboard away from beneath the unit, I jokingly said that I hoped he didn't find a corpse, and briefly summarised the tale of the DBM - or rather DBR. "That won't bother me" he said cheerfully, "I grew up on a farm .... oh yes, there it is!!!" And there it was, a desiccated little scrap of "stuff". "Have you got something I can pick it up with" the engineer queried, looking slightly less insouciant. So, yes, you've guessed, out came my rubber gloves and a goodly wodge of newspaper, and I sunk to my knees on the floor and retrieved said corpse from beneath our sink, where he had quietly and, somehow odourlessly died and decomposed. I bundled him up and popped him in the bin to go out with the rubbish the very next day. So that is the tale of the DMB, who became a DBR, or perhaps simply a D%mn Bl@@dy Nuisance. 

I'll spare you the tale of his cousin, brought in recently, very dead but entirely uneaten, by Rum. Fortunately confined to the conservatory by a securely closed cat flap. We have learned our lesson well!

keeping them off- sort of

Yesterday's post nicely highlighted the lack of weeding through the spot I focused on, so I thought I'd give a morning to doing just that. One of the dangers of weeding, of course, is that one then has to defend one's freshly turned soil from opportunists

the chaps, who think this is just a matter of a little local housekeeping by the mistress to ensure their latrine needs are attended to!

and our visitors, who are quite sure that any freshly dug soil must contain more in the way of worms, slugs and grubs than anywhere else in the garden (except the lawn of course)

So, when all has been loosened up, and surface and deep rooting weeds have been eradicated, and a lovely blanket of soil improver and mulch has been laid over the top to keep moisture in, some protection is needed.

Whether those canes have a hope against a ravaging badger is yet to be discovered!

it looks a small space to have tilled, but that is about my limit in a couple of hours, the rest will be finished when I have recovered my strength!

At least now you can see there really are hellebores and a fern here. The gloom is down to some gathering clouds which have arrived for the afternoon, promising a goodly amount of rain to sink down through the loose texture, rather than simply running off the packed earth. How lovely.

Beautiful rain

We English complain so very much about the weather. The minute it rains we're at it … "ohhh what a horrid day" … " isn't this weather just awwwwful", we've all heard comments like these, or made them ourselves. And of course on a day like today, when a town just down the coast from us is having the second of a series of four days of exciting aerial displays the rain that has arrived is a great spoiler of fun, and deep disappointment for all if parts of the show have to be cancelled.

But if, like me, you have just planted up a flowerbed, then a solid, lengthy downpour is just what you need, especially when the lawn and beds are so very dry.

In the foreground you can see the area we had landscaped just under a year ago when the pond found its way into the garden. There have been some excitements with this along the way, as the waterfall was allowing more water to fall outside its confines than was helpful - resulting in the need for regular top ups. It should be OK now, and has nonetheless been giving us and the five fish a great deal of pleasure.

The bed in question, with hydrangeas at the back, was actually planted out about eight years ago, then cleared and replanted, and now cleared and planted yet again! It hasn't been very successful, in part due to neglect, but in part because, south facing and sitting beneath the yew as it does, it stays awfully dry. I have tried this time to plant up with things like salvia and sedum, sun lovers which don't mind dryness. I shall water assiduously while the plants settle, and post a fresh image once they are more established. But for now, I'm just enjoying the raindrops falling like lines of milky light from the sky and the wonderful colour of the maple as its leaves shine in the downpour

The cat chaps, on the other hand, are distinctly unimpressed. Rum has hidden his head under his paw and is waiting for it all to go away

and Raisin is outside on the windowledge, expressing his disgruntlement, as only a cat can.

updated yarn

A yarn can be something that you knit or weave or even stitch with, or it can be a tangled tale with twists and turns and little diversions along the way.

The first meaning is obviously what the image below is all about. Yes, a little while ago I treated myself to some lovely Noro yarn, on sale in a very fine wool shop near where I live, which was closing down. Both my loss and my gain. Then a couple of weeks ago I went out with beloved daughter to buy a dress for her for our wedding, and was lured into buying yet more yarn, as one is from time to time. 

I felt it only right that the less recent purchase should be knitted up first, so here is the knitting in progress, along with the pattern.

I have to say, I don't think I'll look anything like as fey and girlish in my version, but (and this is very important to me) the cardigan will be symmetrical across the front, not all skew whiff like the illustration in their pattern book. I have puzzled over this for some time; why oh why are all Noro patterns knitted up all any old how in relation to the (absolutely beautiful) colour changes in the yarns? A brief bit of research online found me this little gem of a phrase from the "blurb" on their website.

"Harmonize natural unevenness, asymmetric pattern and complex color to portray the beauty of the nature. Taking sufficient time to dye and yarn natural flavors and tenderness of materials to preserve their original characters"

Well - apart from the delighfully idiosyncratic translation from the Japanese, I guess the "asymmetric pattern and complex colour" explains the lack of symmetry. But when did you last see an asymmetric butterfly, or flower, or bird's wing pattern, or tabby cat's stripes? 

Nope, just can't be doing with all of that. My cardigan will have, I hope, perfectly matched colour changes across the front and the sleeves, which will give me great satsifaction. Yes that does require hunting through the remaining balls to find the one which starts as near as possible to the end of the previous one, and cutting out the excess but I can use that up in the collar, so no waste there! And what satisfaction when I finally sew it all together and the colour bands flow across my imperfect body in perfect symmetry!!

So, to my second yarn, the tale of the Damn Bloody Mouse - known as DBM hereafter. Yes, there is a link with the following pictures I promise.

We have two lovely cats, Rum and Raisin, who have shared our lives for the past ten or so years. We love them dearly, and feed them far too many biscuits but they are cats, and they do what cats do; catch things. Rum's catches ususally get crunched up on the lawn, though occasionally they are brought in for consumption overnight, with little bits left by the Man's chair in case he's peckish in the morning. Raisin, however, is a bit more squeamish. Once the excitement of the chase and catch is over, he's not quite sure what he should do with this poor wriggling furry thing. So in he comes clattering through the cat flap, a scurry, a yowl or two, and I rush into the kitchen to find a mouse (DBM) cowering under the dresser (where all good mice should hide) and a grumpy fat cat doing his best to get under the dresser. A cat and mouse impasse. I removed the cat, and found things to block up the ends of the dresser so that DBM couldn't escape. However, DBM had escaped already, to hide beneath the bookshelf in the sitting room. Aha, I thought, I can block up the wavy front esdge of the bookshelf with "more things", heavy enough and malleable enough to fit under the wavy bits and leave one small space for DBM to come out. The one small space was, of course, cleverly adapted with a humane mouse trap, baited with rather nice nuts and chocolate biscuits. No problem I thought.

Two days later, having sat each morning listening to little mouse scrabbles, and thinking, "oh, he'll be out soon, tidily captured in the mouse trap" I came down to find that two of the "things" used to block all exits had been wriggeld through and there was no DBM any more. And, to add insult to injury, DBM had been very grateful for the nice feast I'd supplied him, easily accessed by nibbling through the soft corduroy cover that ennables wheat packs to be heated up in microwaves before being applied to sore necks. Perhaps not my best choice for a mouse barrier!

So what does this have to do with the pictures below?

Well, for the next two nights I was awoken several times by little scrabbles and scuttlings in my bedroom. Ye Gods, I thought, DBM has found it's way upstairs and is negotiating the maze of boxes and whotnot under my bed. This is definitely Not Good. The first task, obviously, was to buy more humane mouse traps; the second to move all the boxes out from under the bed, then crawl about, with no thought of dignity, with torch and long poky thing to find the whereabouts of the DBM.

What did I find? A great deal of dust; a pen I'd lost; a single sock; a bookmark; an empy pack of aspirin. I also reacquainted myself with the precious contents of these many and various boxes: old writing cases belonging to Ganna and Mum, stuffed with letters, diaries, account books and the like; a complete handwritten draft of one of Gannas novels, along with the typewritten version that Mum did for her to send to the publishers; a small suitcase with a set of old reel to reel tapes which I know have all of us (me, Mum, Dad, Ganna and Grandad) talking many many years ago in Petersfield when Dad was still alive and playing with his new Grundig tape recorder. And this very fine collection of rug yarns, complete with the canvas (3' x 6') and a handwritten list of the amounts of every yarn there. 

Some were easy - just count the drums and you know how many pieces you've got, but I had a vision of Mum sitting and patiently counting out 929 pieces of green, 482 pale pink, 33 dark blue, 2 khaki ...... as all those below were just small remainders, carefully packed into plastic bags to keep them safe.

They have sat there I'd guess, for the best part of the last 40 odd years, kept for "one day" when she would have time to make the next rug. One day never came - it often doesn't, so here they still are, awaiting a hand and a design to make the best use of them, along with the list of amounts, and calculations of how many pieces would be needed to fill that canvas.

But what of the DBM? Not a sign, not the merest twitch of a whisker, nothing. But still, occasionally, I hear a little scratch and scrabble in the middle of the night. Not in my room, no no, in the walls of my room. I assume the wretched creature has found its way in somehow, and is now searching the fabric of the house for more tasty morsels. All we can hope is that a) it doesn't start trying to eat the wires, b) it finds its way outside somehow, without encountering an enthusaustic feline on its journeys and c) it does so very soon, as I'm rather tired of sleeping with one ear cocked just in case it finds its way onto the bed!!

Evening sun and shadow

Evening light in the front garden, where the lovely sinuous brick bed contains

a weeping birch,

glowing tulips

wisteria brought from our previous garden, just coming into flower

and pasque flower, just beginning to set seed, named for the Passion,

while down in the Dell there is a great old silver birch netting shadows amongst its branches

dandelion clocks and bluebells amongst the wild plants

a planter and next year's winter warmth, not yet cut to size,

plantain,

apple blossom

and playful cats.

Further up the garden sunlight bathes the shed in warmth,

seagulls chat beneath the moon

and away above the trees, piled clouds are catching the evening light