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Earlier this year I was getting ready to head out to work when there was a knock on my door. I opened it to see a young woman backing rapidly away while talking to me through her mask. She was out-of-sorts maybe not sober maybe upset, I didn't think I'd seen her before (but I have poor facial recognition skills and regularly blank old friends in the street). 

What with the mask and the distance she had put between us and her distress and my confusion, it took a while to understand that she was asking to borrow a ladder because she was trying to get into a flat in the house next door and her key wasn't working. I live in a row of tall old houses which have a storey below the front pavement level.  Spear-tipped railings  along the front of the houses protect people on the pavement from falling 20 foot into this cellar well. 

The woman wanted access to the first floor flat and had a mad plan of balancing the ladder from the railings, across the deep drop and up to the windowsill of the flat that she wanted access to.

She looked a bit frail. I always seem to think I am obliged to do everything that is asked of me so I realised that I couldn't just hand over the ladder, I'd have to do the death-balancing thing and the breaking-in thing because somehow whatever befell her would be my responsibility.

To stall, I stayed at the door listening while she kept talking, going over her story and I realised that I wasn't convinced - had she been locked out by a dastardly lover or was she a burglar with an unusual MO? maybe her story was a bit true - there was definitely something else going on and I really didn't want to pull on that thread. I said I didn't have a ladder and suggested she find a locksmith, I wished her luck and continued on out to work, the image and the mystery of her went with me.

Last week I answered the door to a woman asking to borrow my ladder to gain access to her flat because 'her key wouldn't work', she was the same sort of age and hair type as the first woman but this woman said she lived in the basement flat I remembered chatting with her through the hedge in the summer when we were both outside gardening but we were hidden from each other by all the leafiness, I remembered she was called Martha and Martha's plan was to lower my ladder over the railings into the basement, her boyfriend would climb down and hope he could access though there. I gave her the ladder, the boyfriend tried, failed and was stuck in the cellar until a locksmith came.

Yesterday afternoon I answered the door to a young man in a towelling bath robe. He wanted to borrow my ladder to get into the first floor flat - he had locked himself out. His plan was a lot better than the first woman - he said that he had no idea who she might have been, he seemed sober and he knew Martha, Martha had told him that I had a great ladder and would hand it over to anyone who asked for it.

Kittens

 

The beginning of November was spent in London in the company of a kitten doing all the adorable kitten things including sneakily creeping into cupboards and drawers then getting stuck inside.

The sea temperature has plummeted, I'm still swimming and wanted to share the experience but it's harder to draw myself encased in a block of ice than I imagined*, enough to say that the commonly used term for the lobster red colour of the swimmer's raw flesh as they haul themselves out of the water is 'The Clevedon Tan'.

*I post about chilly swimming with a monotonous regularity, the web view of this blog shows tags that could lead you to more swimming-related posts - this one is typical

My Garden of a Thousand Bees

I am married to a bee-fetishist*, he is also an insect-botherer and a garden-stealer . During the last eighteen months (the Lockdown project) he has been indulging all of these passions by stealing my garden to make a film about all the bees and other insects that live there. PBS are streaming the movie which is titled 'My Garden of a Thousand Bees' 

 obviously it should've been 'Lulu's Garden of a Thousand Bees' but apart from that error I have to admit the film is perfectly decent and, judging by the comments on PBS's site, so do quite a lot of other people.

This blog started with an account of filming insects in France, anyone new here and wanting more hymenoptric content could check out some early posts

I just revisited this post  and only now realise that the garden theft started in earnest 11 years ago

This post  about a disastrous attempt to film a bee hive   is from 2009

 

*he refuses to take my surname so we have to call him Martin Dohrn, he's worried that if he becomes Martin Labonne people will think that he's related to Duran Duran

 

 

image credit: Jack - Thank you Jack

September

 

is my birthday month:  

On the evening of 31st August I stepped on a  Pacific Oyster while paddling in the sea, slicing an eye-watering amount from the underneath of my foot - the first half of the month involved a lot of hopping

back on both feet by mid-month and off on the Grand Scottish Birthday Swimming Tour: 

swim 1

my little sister lives next to the Kingdom of Fife which has a beautiful coastline. We drove out to a windswept and out-of-season-empty village with a fantastical tidal swimming pool created by the natural rock formations on the shoreline. Wanting to jump in but spooked by the lack of people we spotted a silver Airstream caravan/coffee bus with two young women inside, we went over and asked

do people swim there?

Ooch aye, it's usually rammed, they all go in with balloons on their backs* it's a wee bit cosier in there than out in the sea

 *fluorescent towfloats used by sea swimmers 

swim 2

west highlands, visiting a friend. She took me to Loch Maree, reknowned for being 'spooky' with a haunted burial island in the middle of it and for having 'black water'. At the edge of the loch the water is copper-coloured and the mossy pebbles below glow like gold.

swim 3

skinny dipping on the westernmost edge of mainland UK - Sanna Bay - a series of soft white sand bays and sand dunes, the water crystal clear

swims 4, 5, 6 ...

The Ardnamurchan Peninsula: rain showers and rainbows coming fast and furious. I'm staying in a converted barn called 'The Folly'. 

By walking a mile uphill along a tarmac road. I come to a farm gate, with astonishing views of mountains, the outline of Mull and all the weather coming and going across the vast sky. Far below is a sandy bay, reached via a zigzag path through bright green fields. Sheep stop and stare as I squelch past them. There are Bronze age burial sites and standing stones in the fields. When I finally arrive at the shore a congregation of cattle hurry over, jostling to point and laugh as I wade into yet more water.

 

Doggy talk

I've been staying near Oxford for the last two weeks, dog-sitting for an elderly greyhound, here he is sleeping on a stripey rug. 

There was a river at the end of the garden and I took daily dips, it's a funny thing, swimming along chatting to people on their houseboats, I can't be on houseboats for too long because I get land sick when I go back onto dry land - I stayed on a barge once and by the end of one week I couldn't walk straight on a pavement which felt dangerous.

I like the effect that walking a dog has on other people, I've had some curious conversations, one lady asked me what breed my dog was and then noted how dog breeds have changed since when we were young - 'My Nan had a Jack Russell but you don't see the terriers any more, or the Lassie dogs, everything's some sort of poo these days'.

Seagull Attack - the return

 

 

Last time I visited Cornwall, a demonic seagull stole my ice cream - I wrote about it here.

 

Without noting the date* I visited the same beach last month, I was meeting a long-lost friend there. Telling her the amusing story - hahaha I said so let's not go buying any ice creams here 

 We went swimming and were having a lovely time and lost ourselves in chat and then she said I've got some lovely sandwiches will you have one? and I said yes please and we laid out a blanket and all the while that same evil seagull had been waiting for me and was watching us and when he knew we were good and stupid in our chat he swooped down with his knifey beak and sliced that delicious bun out of my fingers taking a good portion of my thumb with him

 

* it was exactly two years later - TO THE DAY

hot off the hook

 but not pressed yet

This double bed-sized bed-spread, it's on the grass getting a bit damp before I do the final finishing 

The month is bookended by giant squares

 

 

 

at the beginning of the month I made this metre-square patch from old pillowcases to be part of a giant patchwork covering a bridge in Wales 

This stitchy-stuff is in contrast to May which was mostly about inventing  puddings using different sorts of custard

I shall devote next month to gravy

Now we can go Out out I'm overhauling my look

 

Mask - check  

Cool shades - check

Snazzy earrings - check 

the hair's not behaving - Alice Band?

The Ears say No Way!!!

Low tide at dawn

 

London 

scrunching feet on  sandy-gravelly beach  

sounds of lapping water  

geese 

first visit here in over a year and I'm easing myself back   

 

looking after a cat that I first knew years ago  

her feline friend died while I was away

 

 

 

naked sunbathing

 

I'm loving all the gorgeous nude trees brandishing their limbs in the sunshine at this time of year. I'm particularly feeling kinship with all those feisty pollarded trees raising their knobbly fists in protest.

Today we are remembering Sarah Everard, a man kidnapped and killed her because she had the gall to go out walking by herself. In today's Guardian Marina Hyde wrote about a normal everyday walk to her son's school, a day that included the sort of encounter that has happened to me more often than I want to remember, Hyde describes how we usually deal with this kind of encounter

'... I genuinely forget about these things soon after they happen... Should have just tied a weight round it and sent it to sleep with the fishes, with all the other ones. The healthy option.'

Green shoots and shadows

 

I'm loving the impending sense of spring even more than usual and once again I'm making my annual attempt to get to grips with water colours,  the lesson I have to learn every time is that I go with far too many things,. My 'travelling' water colour set has a choice of tiny paint pots but my fidgetting keeps tipping the paints over and that makes me a bit sweary. 

I have finally realised that the future is monochrome. Last Sunday I went out painting with a solitary paint pot - my world became less blue and more green

Spider with Yumen Zed

Yesterday I passed a man telling a small boy that he was 'getting spider with yuman zed' -  my first thought was that this was must be a new and interesting foodstuff - maybe on the takeaway menu at Wagamama. Lockdown has made me obsess about food even more than usual so it was a bit disappointing to realise a few seconds later that the man was actually telling the boy that he would be getting 'a spider with a human head' and I think that sounds too big to eat. 

Maybe I'm just making up excuses,  I buy sheep and deer from the butcher, I hardly think a human-headed spider would be much bigger than these creatures, if they do arrive on the market, portion size is probably not going to be the main issue.

 

In other news

This morning I set fire to the vaccuum cleaner after hoovering up warm ashes - the smell was far worse than I could've imagined

I still swim in the sea but only for 5 minutes because it's reached the sort of cold that makes a person go completely crispy  - in the way of those lettuces that get stuck at the back of a fridge

A dog fox has been patrolling our neighbourhood every night for the last week making a noise that sounds like a queaky-toy