It might look a bit (well, more than a bit) ramshackle, but the little shed we’ve made to house the hot tub pump, filter and heat exchange unit safely against freezing and rain, is robust and cheap. Nor are we…
Category: Anecdote
Shifting things for the auction . . .
Every year, the annual charity auction re-appears at Allendale Village Hall. There’s junk galore, it’s true, but there are treasures amongst the dross that the cognoscenti are actually very keen on, though they always profess nonchalant disinterest. More on the…
A memento for the grands
For over a year now, I’ve sat myself at our kitchen table, looking through the big window out over the garden, thinking about things, life, the universe — you know, thinking. While I’ve been sitting, I’ve been watching the birds,…
Gordon the guinea fowl
I saw my first guinea fowl at Beamish Open Air Museum, probably twenty-five years ago. They were scurrying around the miner’s cottage, just near to the Methodist chapel, and they even rated a descriptive legend. Apparently they were favourites of…
Working towards pleasure
Sometimes, probably most of the time, we work for survival. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we work for pleasure, for the sheer delight of work, and then it doesn’t feel like work at all, of course. But there are times, and…
Pulling the nettles
It’s not my favourite job, I can say that! But somebody has to try to keep the nettles at bay, and now that it’s relatively dry, and yet with damp ground in near-perfect conditions to release the root tangle, it’s…
Summer Sunday sighs
Supposed to be a rainy day today, as it was yesterday, though with interludes of brilliant sunshine, perhaps? But disruptive weather is predicted to occur all over England, with numerous events being cancelled. Anyway, it feels like an ideal day…
Mr Robin is back
I’m no ornithologist, but I kind of suspect that the crowds of finches that gathered around the bird feeding pad, along with assorted jackdaws, collared doves, the blackbird family, and Earnest the pea cock shaking his tail feathers, might have…
Just cheerfully pottering about . . .
I think I’m getting more used to the retirement lifestyle. Instead of filling our days in a rather frenzied rush to accomplish all the tasks we’d set for ourselves, we’ve retrenched, with a longer schedule pushed further and further ahead,…
A small engineering solution
Now that our water challenges are sorted, we’d like to keep a handy record of what our daily monitoring shows us, so that we will know early on if something goes amiss. The best place to put the tick sheet,…