As the long and slow process of my recovery continues apace, I find myself thinking intermittently of just what sort of rural idyll I’d imagined we’d find ourselves in, at this point in our lives. You don’t usually plan ill…
Category: Anecdote
The middle lane, and edging slower
I’m juggling two parallel concepts today (I imagine an extended hospital stay exerts kind of a philosophical tug on the old heartstrings — at least it did on mine). I remember so well, some 35 years ago, when suddenly we…
Into the ITU . . .
This is the second holding page of the editor’s surgical hiatus — sounds like a medical condition! — AllendaleDiary.org will be bringing you more news about entities around and about the village soon! — but just to bring some further…
A surgical hiatus . . .
With apologies, this really isn’t a post, as such, but just a pretend-post to hold the date for the diary, so that another interesting snippet of thoughtful commentary and analysis might be edited in later. Larry is having surgery on…
New gardening capacity
Getting a little professional help on the raised beds early in the week somehow seemed to stimulate all those creative gardening juices, and by Friday they were in full flow — so much so that after I got the new…
The first mowing, and again
Down in Allendale, I’m sure folks started mowing their lawns some weeks ago now, but up on the fellsides of Sparty Lea, the week running up to this past glorious weekend was the first opportunity for mowing this year. I…
Letting go . . . finding more
I was told how to trap monkeys at a very early age. Not that we had many monkeys in Canada, but still, even then I knew it was an object lesson, and naturally I would be smarter than any monkey,…
Easter Sunday
It was the late Bishop of Durham, the Reverend David Jenkins, who opined that the resurrection which encapsulates Christianity was “not just a conjuring trick with a bag of bones”. Blunt, but frank, at least. How he loved controversy, yet…
Barbecue Saturday!
Seems like it might be our first real opportunity of the year for a family barbecue today! Our brother-in-law is from South Africa, and his life is built around barbecues, which down south in hearty Herefordshire he fires up every…
Tweet-a-pedia to the rescue!
I could not quite believe it, upon interrogating Google to find out some useful information about our resident cock pheasant and his cheerful harem of three hens, expecting to be pointed towards a Wiki-pedia entry, only to find that ‘Tweet-a-pedia”…