The Scotland Diaries: Part Two - Ashes to Ashes

Just a quick one, to bring the year to its close:

There was a death in the family recently - no excuse for not writing but it's the only one you're gonna get so make the most of it - and it has Been Decided that next year we will return the Dear Departed's remains to Scotland.

So should you be passing Loch Awe some darkening evening (see above) and you notice several furtive-lookin' blokes and a now-ash-blonde dame apparently shaking a huge pepper mill out over the silver waters ... you'll know it's just the family releasing Mum back into the wild where she belongs.

Knowing her sense of humour she'll get into all our eyes and up our noses and refuse point blank to be ejected over the loch because she never could stand deep water.  She'll blow away on the wind, up the mountains and into the free far north where her ashes will dissipate over the Beloved Country with those of my father and grandfather and all who have gone before.

Requiescat in pace

The Scotland Diaries: Part One - Staggered Stars

I've just been reminded that I've not written on here for some time. I confess to having forgotten all about you.  However since you have not been waiting with either held or bated breath you can't have missed me much, so I shall simply dust you off, check your pulse and respirations are still in order - and continue.

In mid-September I drove north from my beloved Exmoor to the equally beloved Other Country, from which my family originates.  Eleven hours - get out your atlas - took me to a near-deserted loch below Oban. Alone I was, since The Others although invited, declined to accompany me - but not lonely. 

Odd how one can feel lonely in a crowd and not on the edge of a wild, glacier-designed landscape with only curlews, owls, bats, red squirrels and huge red deer for company. 

The sunshine on the loch made dancing flashing mirrors of every movement of the water and the reflected light from the sky turned the sea turqoise. The air was so pure that mosses and lichens capped the granite stone walls to a depth of nearly two inches.  And my cabin was so close to the water that I could hear the gentle ebbing and flowing of the tide lapping on the shore. 

That evening as dusk fell, I walked the two miles to The Big House, along the narrow lochside lane, often stopping to examine trees, tiny flowers, still-purple heather and many rocks and stones both in and out of the water.  The geological history of Scotland ('Land of Mountain and Flood') is fascinating ... but not my story to tell. 

The red deer were already in rut and in the fading light I watched two stags sizing one another up for possession of a single hind who was waiting on the rocky foreshore. As it happened it was no contest - I think the younger stag saw the magnificent antlered  head of the older (sporting brow, bey, trey and I think four atop) and realised he was outclassed.

I watched the Elder trot off with the hind and a couple of bats swooped low, no doubt feasting on the late summer midges still around.  The light did a cinematic fade-out and my eyes adjusted to it in gradual and natural relaxation.

As one sense lost its supremacy, another took over. Night sounds serenaded me back to the cabin - was that still curlews?  Owls, Tawny and Little from their calls, mourned across the evening, rushes of wind shivered through the leaves of birch, oaks and pines, small mammal rustlings twitched the undergrowth.

Seemingly from everywhere - and dominant over all the other noises - the eerie primeval roaring of red stags came at me: from the other side of the loch, from the lane behind, from somewhere high up on the hillside above. 

Oh, glorious night!

I stayed out for a long, long time.  The heavens were unbelievable - just a dome of stars stretching to eternity in every direction. The Milky Way was clear and constellations such as Orion very easy to spot, with the Pleiades up beyond and oh, how I wished I'd brought my 'Observer's Book' with me to identify all the others!  Once enchanted by such a night sky, one puts up with the inevitable sore neck - but at last I had to go indoors.  I did consider setting a camp bed out there on the shore and just lying on my back to stare up all night at the beauty of a trillion miles of starstruck forever ...

Oh, glorious, glorious night!

Flea Free

No, we're not giving away free fleas.

This is to announce that we are now a Flea Free household.

If that can ever be true where there are HunterKillerCats.

End of Announcement

The Flea Flee Fee

All the HKCs have been scratching a lot recently.  It's bloomin' irritating, being woken at 4am by the powerful 'thud-thud-thud' of a hind paw vigorously working at an itch.  I investigated, come daylight, bowl of hot water at the ready.

The 'nit-comb' (designed for children's heads) removed about a dozen live fleas from HKC2, and I drowned them in the bowl.  HKC3 has a thing about being combed and buggered off before I could get more than four out of his fur and HKC1 heard me coming and also scarpered.

A colleague reminded me that the chemists now sell the appropriate 'spot on' flea-killer drops - cheaper than getting the same thing from the vet - so I rang a large well-known pharmacy to enquire: for just over £30 I could have six phials.  With a discount for working where I do, there was a 10% reduction in that fee.

While discussing this at main reception, the head pharmacist from another well-known company  (based next door to the practice) overheard and offered to check his fees: after discount - £21.

I took that offer.  But the nerdy-number section of my brain was disappointed: there would have been about 2000 steps to the vet's, great for a lunch-time exercise.  Had I gone for the first pharmacy, 1000 footfalls could have been added to my count.  As it happens, the second (and successful bidder) pharmacy lies less than 200 steps there and back and that's the one I chose.  Good for the pocket, bad for the pedometer.

I did an extra walk to and from Hoss that evening to make up for the 'lost' steps, de-flea-ed the HunterKillerCats and wondered what I should do with the 'saved' £9 ...

Sunshine and Shadows

Weird weather, the sun is shining but the rain is pouring down.  If I could be bothered I'd go and look for the rainbows that must be arching across the skies over the Moor. Unfortunately apathy has set in as well as the rain and I can't get motivated. 

That must be why there's nothing in my 'writing in progress' file.

HKC2 is at present sitting on that file, washing his nether regions.

This act counts as 'showing' not 'telling'.

Nerdy Numbers 2

Yesterday, after I'd reported my early morning total,  my counter at 11am showed 2,245.

I hadn't been walking backwards.  The counter had somehow pressed against something solid (I blame Hoss) and reset itself.  Somewhere I lost a few hundred steps but at the end of the day, even with the reset hiccup and NOT adding in any extras as those lost ones, I'd still done 14,522 steps.

Which, for the nerdy part of my brain that wants to know, says that my apparently sedentary Friday was just about as active as my Day Off Saturday.

So if the recommended number of steps a day is this 10,000 and I'm already doing well over that, I'll need to double this figure to halve mine - if I'm ever to get into a size 10 again.

Hmmn.   I'll think about it.

Nerdy Numbers

Hoss has got his way, as he so often does: I've joined the 'Go For It' challenge being run at present by the NHS in conjunction with the British Heart Foundation. I only wanted the bloomin' pedometer but my contact on the MotherShip said I had to register for the whole package, so I did. 

There's a whole heap of healthy-living information, a free T shirt (will I be wearing that? No, HKC3 is now sleeping on it and if he turns round one more time, he'll wake up wearing it) and a cute little pedometer.

I clipped said pedometer onto my waistband yesterday morning at 05.53am (not that I'm obsessive or anything) and forgot about it until 07.49 when I arrived at work: 4,752 steps, and I'd driven in.     

The calling system failed, so I had to walk from my office to the waiting room to collect my early patients: 50 steps each way.  And that morning I saw 22 people.  You can flick your own abacus.

Feet off floor at bedtime, 14,758 steps taken.

Still full of enthusiasm this morning, I reset the counter, rolled out of bed and started again.  By 07.06am I'd taken 5,129 steps - Hoss is currently living just under a mile away and I mucked out his field while I was there.

He gave me one of his Looks: "What's this all about then?"

"Your fault." (step-step-side-step-bend-scoop-muck-dumpinbarrow-step-step-step)

"Have I got to wear one of those?"

"Yup. It'll be on me when we go to Saturday Club." (step-scoop-dump-step-step-sneeze-step)

"Bleshoo!" (nuzzle-nuzzle-nuzzle) "Lost any weight, then?"

"Hoss, tell me after our ride." (step-step-step etc)

Make hay while the sun shines

Last night we got the hay in from the Little Field with a final count of 179 bales.  The Big Field next door but one yielded nearly a thousand.  I've told Hoss he can have breakfast in a net every day from December 1st and he gave me one of his Looks that said: "Sissy, those nets. I'll take mine on the ground, like every other self-respecting Welshman"

"If you remember, (see BlogthoughtsFromAbroad) The West Wind spread your breakfast all over the hedge last year and you had to spend half the day picking it off again."

"On the ground, please. My rump is big enough to act as a wind-shield this time."

I looked at it.  He has a point there.  He looked at my rump and gave me another Look. This one said: "That could act as a wind-shield, too."

And since he had a pole down in the Open Jumping last weekend and blamed it on the weight he was expected to hump over all those fences, I think he might have a point there, too.

So I'm going on a diet.

Annual Turnover

I've been watching one particular field above a neighbour's house very carefully since Easter. It's an old meadow attached to a single-horse family that no longer keeps one, is fairly free of thistle and buttercup, and it hasn't been grazed since last year.

Farmer Caroline has asked the owners if she can make small-bale hay from it.  Every acre in the vicinity has been put to work this year to overcome the shortage suffered after last summer's low crop and Caroline has promised to set aside some some hay for Hoss as well.  There are maybe 3 acres of 'my' field and we hope it will yield several hundred bales, plenty enough for her own animals and some left over for Hoss.
 
So 'my' field is in good heart, awaiting a spell of dry weather which has at last returned. Nick went up there and cut it and has been out twice each day with the Grass Twiddler attached to the back of his tractor.  The Hay Twiddler looks a bit like a collection of several  giant wire egg-whisks and is towed behind the tractor, turning the grass over and over as it goes, to make sure it dries evenly.

We're hoping the rain will stay away another couple of days so that the boys can get in there to bale up the grass and tow it all away to the barns where it will 'make' over the next few months into lovely meadow hay for Hoss and the others.

If it rains, the crop could ruin.

Please don't rain.

We all need this hay.

Stripped Out

I visited Barrington Court recently, a National Trust property near Ilminster in Somerset.  It is, to my mind, unique and delightful in this uniqueness: there is no furniture.  The interior of the house has been stripped out and laid bare.

On a blazing hot summer's day a friend and I wandered around echoing halls of rooms where the space could really be appreciated.  There was no queuing, no ropes cordoning us off from anything remotely interesting and best of all, no drawn blinds over the lead-paned and in places unevenly-glassed windows.  Barrington Court was filled with sunshine from all angles and was truly being displayed in its best light.

If you want a history of the place I suggest you visit the National Trust Website because I'm not about to repeat it here.  But the Trust seems undecided about what it wants to do with this, its first (and nearly its last!) gem of a purchase.

Some people, unprepared, might feel cheated at the lack of usual Trust Fare - antique or otherwise valuable furniture, glassy-eyes mounted stags' heads and Do Not Touch signs at boringly regular intervals.  But for those who like a feeling of indoor space, quality wooden panelling, acres of unadorned oak floors and wonderful ceilings - particularly that in the entrance hall - this is a refreshing change from the bog-standard Trust Property.

They've got recordings in various rooms of activities that might have taken place there: a hog-roasting in the kitchen had the spit being turned by some obviously struggling lads and in the once-derelict galleries you'll hear owls calling.  A cleverly-timed trigger sets a bakelite telephone ringing as one approaches. (Yes, I answered it, but there was nobody there)  The idea of a sound museum is a good one but not fully explored by the Trust here as yet.

Personally I loved the whole thing and filled out my questionnaire accordingly. As to what the Trust could use Barrington Court for, if the idea of a beautiful empty shell doesn't take off, well, if you'd care to visit and offer your opinion, I think it would be welcome.

Once outside again, the grounds are classic Trust - green meadows where cows rest under oak trees - beautifully kept walled flower gardens and an extensive kitchen garden. One could see where the fresh vegetables came from for the excellent lunches they serve in what was once an old stable block.

It was a day well spent, but if you are lucky enough to visit on a wall-to-wall sunshine day, get a parking space in the overflow car park where there is a least some shade.

The image above comes to you courtesy of the camera of The Baggster, whose Blog may be found here: http://baggytales.blogspot.com/

A Long Lost Locker and A Last Look Round

In BlogthoughtsFromABroad I told you about the closing of the Old Luttrell Memorial hospital in  February of this year.  This beautiful old partially-listed building has been empty for 5 months now, boarded up and looking dead and unloved, a blot of inactivity in the centre of a small seaside town. Nobody has decided yet what is to become of it but believe me, if they don't do something positive, they'll be needing a lot of buckets come the winter: that roof leaks.

A colleague at the New Operating Theatre said: "I went to look round and all the lockers in the changing rooms were open: yours is full of junk. You ought to clear it."
"I did." (I remember Blogging about it)
"Your Changing Room Locker."

Silence.  I've not used that changing room for many, many years.

"There was a key in the door."

Obviously honest folk worked at The Old Hospital - a locker open for 12 years and it hasn't been ransacked?  I said as much and Jayne looked at me pityingly. "Who'd want anything that smelt like that?"

I went after work, parked in the Doctor's Bay (now just used as a Shopper Bay for anyone who can't find parking on the High Street) and rang the Casualty Bell.  It didn't make a sound - actually I'm not sure it worked even when the Hospital did - and it took a lot of Heavy Rattling before the Guard heard me.  He nodded at my ID and ushered me inside the dark shell.

Alone I wandered through the shadowed Out Patients and up the Old Back Stairs. Windows that never did latch rattled in the wind. My right hand automatically reached out to touch the rubbed-bare wood of the bannister's ornamental ball at the turn in the stairwell.  No matter how many times that got painted, it always wore back to wood grain within a year because so many people swung round on it as they passed. I paused after two flights. Where was the bloomin' changing room?  The stairs narrowed and rose again so I climbed the last and steepest flight up into The Gods, on the same level as Theatres but on the opposite side of the roof, a fire-escape away from my old workplace.  I really had forgotten this part of the building existed.

The Changing Room was full of dozens and dozens of steel lockers. I went to Number 24 and turned the key.  If I tell you I found SEVEN pairs of old work-shoes and THIRTY THREE pairs of tights (Eleven of them still boxed) it'll give you some idea of the odour.

I piled through the rubbish, chucking everything out.  I found handwritten notes requesting me to contact Personnel, Occupational Health and the Sewing Room.

I found a draft of a poem I'd written when the TeleLink to the Mother Hospital (25 miles away) first opened.  It was ditched in  1998.

There were two brand new uniforms at the bottom of the locker, still in their plastic bags, size 10, but they were TWO uniforms ago ... I've gone from navy to white since their stripey days and haven't been a size 10 since the Millenium.

I found the little gold fob watch my Westminster colleagues gave me when I left there.

I found £3.30 in change, including a 1961 florin that had been masquerading as a 10p piece until they made them so much smaller more than 10 years ago.

I found a Daily Telegraph, dated 22nd December 1992.

The hospital felt weird and hollow as I returned to Casualty to be let out and locked out again. The light was wrong, the smell was wrong, the sound - or rather the silence - was wrong.

What will become of such a rabbit warren of a place? who can do anything with it, it being partially Listed and split into such odd compartments.  There was talk of it becoming a Civic Centre, an Arts centre, a concert hall even. But my fear is that in the current economic climate, it will just be left to rot because nobody has the kind of money it needs to turn it into anything serviceable again.

I think this really is 'Goodbye' now, Luttrell Memorial Hospital.  Rest in Peace.

Secrets and Saddlers

A good saddler, repairing stitching and straps, can tell what kind of a rider has been using the saddle.  I've just noticed that my stirrup leathers need re-setting due to worn out stitching at the buckles and, just for curiosity, held up the pair of leathers side by side ...

And noticed that the left one is about three quarters of an inch longer than the left.  Which means:

a) I obviously don't clean my tack very often or I'd have picked it up sooner

b) I should be changing the leathers left to right whenever I do clean them

c) I've been sitting slightly unevenly for about 4 months

Which might tell the saddler:

a) she's a lazy sod

b) she never notices anything

c) her horse is a saint

The scuffing at the pommel and on the fronts of the flaps and on the tip of the cantle (go google) tells us both that I've been a little cavalier (pardon the pun) about how I've set my saddle down - it's been allowed to rest on the ground against a tree.

The angled buckle marks on the stretching rawhide girthstraps announce that I've been using the same girth for a long time and the horse's weight hasn't changed much - although there are variations on that theme which might give away the fact that I deliberately move the buckles around the straps so as not to wear out any one set of holes.

The neat repairs to the seat and the flaps prove that I have visited the saddler before, to get things mended before they really went wrong.  The supple leather of the underneath proves that I  clean the saddle more often than the stirrups and keep it in a leather-friendly environment despite how I plonk it down before riding. The lighter-coloured areas of leather towards the back of the flaps mean that I've got short legs which spend more time in contact with leather than Hoss's sides.

We're lucky around here to have a lovely saddlery repair centre where they seem to be able to mend just about anything leather and what they can't mend they can replace.  They're known to some of their customers as The Leather Ladies, which sounds kind of kinky but their workshop is called, unassumingly, The Leather Workshop and since Liz and Linda are female I hope they don't mind the title.  When they mended worn out stitching on my 'half-chaps' recently, Liz handed them back to me and remarked succinctly: 'Keep your lower leg still.'  

So I know what she's going to say about my uneven stirrup leathers and I'm wondering whether I should take them in one at a time so that they can't be compared!

Summertime and the Cotton's High ...

Several loads of washing have been done in This Household since yesterday evening and there is now a glut of summer cotton-mix clothes hanging about waiting for an iron.

A what?

Quite. It's not going to happen. The tee-shirts and tops and jeans and jumpers are going to 'Air Dry' straight from the washing machine, over great heights such as the bannister and from the beams.  If the weather forecast people have got their isobars and pressures and things right, there will be a Barbeque Sunday tomorrow and because I believe them, I'm getting ready.

My alarm clock is set for five am.  I'll need to be up and out early to beat the horseflies onto the Moor.  I'd like to ride up and over Dunkery Beacon, down the other side and back along the Eastwater and Horner valleys, sploshing in the rivers and letting Hoss have a proper gallop along Luccombe Allers before anyone else is out and about.  I'll let you know if it really happens. It's quite possible I might just smack the alarm off at two seconds past five, go back to sleep and wake at nine to realise I've missed the best of the day and it's too hot to ride until the evening.

The horseflies have just kicked in for the summer: Five-Nil to me so far, but it's early days yet.  The ticks are becoming a problem too and everything that itches - no matter where - must be investigated in case one of them has buried its head and started to feed.  I nabbed out a couple on my inner arms earlier. I ought to be grateful that's the only place they were, 'cos I do hop off for nature's call sometimes, out on my wanderings with Hoss and there's nothing the ticks like better than a nice warm fold of skin where the sun don't shine ...

Lyme Disease, carried by infected ticks and passed on to humans, is fortunately not common but it can be a real threat. Any tick should be removed completely, head and mouthparts included, the area thoroughly cleaned and any subsequent redness or swelling around the bite-site taken seriously. I've come across several bad cases in my time on the Moor, one fatal and others leaving nasty legacies such as facial paralysis.  Usually, of course, if caught as soon as the infected tick is removed, a course of antibiotics is all that's needed.

The preferred meal of ticks in the larval and nymphal stages of life is mouse-blood.  They
share this pleasure with the HKCs (HunterKillerCats to anyone newly involved on Blog) who keep leaving me with mouse-heads and gizzards as little gifts.  Do they honestly think I intend to mount the heads as trophies round the walls?  Unfortunately, since the mice have come from The Moor and its environs, ticks also hitch a ride on said HKCs and are not averse to settling in for a Cat-Blood meal instead.  I have a neat set of Tick Removers handy.  There was a time, at the Old Luttrell Memorial Hospital (see BlogThoughts) when I kept a set handy in Casualty, too.  We used to get a lot of unsuspecting tourists in, having been walking on the Moor in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, with various collections of ticks on board.  I became very adept at allaying fears, cleansing limbs and other parts, removing ticks and giving out Bravery Certificates to victims of all ages.  I did it all free at the point of delivery - which is more than I can say for the vet, who cheerfully charged the tourists for removing ticks from their dogs.

The sun has come out at last and the wind has dropped.  I'm off out for a walk and you may as well go back to watching highlights from Wimbledon.

Return to Duck Patio

You may remember, those of you who read 'BlogThoughts' before its transformation into 'MoorBlogThoughts', the unsolved murder of the Aylesbury drake at the beginning of June.  The eggs in the duck house were removed, incubated, candled and found to contain embryos.  All bar two hatched a week or so ago and there are now seven gorgeous waddly yellow fluffettes wack-wacking round the Reverse-Colditzified Duck Nursery.  Six of these ducklings are female.  The seventh is male.  In "Draco" lie the hopes for the continuation of the Duck Line.

The Larch Descending

Woodlands and forestry estates must be managed - fact.  One expects to see logging work going on in the vast tracts of commercially grown forests of our country. That is, after all, why the trees were planted in those horrid serried ranks in the first place - to be grown and eventually harvested for their timber value.

It came as a shock to me however as I rode along the woodland tracks from Wootton Courtenay into the Holnicote Estate a few weeks back, to find that I suddenly no longer recognised where I was. The ancient oak, beech, holly and birch-filled woods give way to about 20 hectares of larch plantation just above Luccombe. Lovely quiet timberlands full of flora and fauna and wild things of all kinds - but it has all gone.

I'd heard the sound of the logging operation and thought little of it until I saw for myself the absolute devastation of the forest all across the hillside.  Great trees, forty years old, 50 metres tall, had been felled in their hundreds: no thinning out here, this was total wipe-out. The woodland tracks were now heathland rides, out in the open, exposed to bright sunlight and high wind and rainfall that used to be filtered by the branches of the larches.

I rode the tracks carefully, letting Hoss pick his way over stripped branches and matchwood chippings, hunting for landmarks, for turnings and undulations I used to know so well.  Here one would let Hoss gallop on, here one must slow down as the corner is too sharp, here one can leave the track to jump a fallen trunk.  The pine-forest scent of the resins and sap from so many felled trees was overpowering.

All the familiarity had been cut down or uprooted and dragged away to towering logstacks. The paths had been churned to black mud by the weight of the vast logging vehicles as they plundered through the plantation. It looked like irresponsible annihilation of an area of outstanding natural beauty. It looked like commercial vandalism.

It was, in fact, a desperate attempt to eradicate a dreadful tree disease - phytophthora ramorum - that has swept across the country allegedly from Cornwall, killing larches and devastating plantations in its own right.  It could be as destructive, unchecked, as the Dutch Elm Disease of the last century.

So, awful as it looks now, this ravaged, scarred landscape has been made so for a clear purpose. Only by destroying the infected trees might the disease possibly be contained and controlled. The National Trust apparently has plans: eventually to replant the area as mixed woodland or maybe to leave it all open to the elements and let heathland rule again.

Either way, all is not lost. Nature will help, of course, working her magic on the ruin of the plantation.  By next spring, all sorts of new growth will have pushed up through the blasted heath, beetles and bugs and birds will have made homes from the new flattened habitat. Life will go on - just a different life from the one before. And where there is life, there is hope.

Press Release

In 2001, Foot and Mouth struck. The management of the disease, run by MAFF, seemed ... extraordinary.  The horses were very grateful to have solid hooves as many of the cloven footed stock on the Devon side of the Moor ended up slaughtered and cremated on hideous pyres that could be seen burning from miles away. We couldn't ride except on the tarmac lanes and even then we had to scrub-disinfect on return to the farm where we lived at the time.

Unable to ride the Moor in case of spreading the virus by HoofPrint, I was getting a little stir crazy and a friend decided I needed a new project.  She chucked a couple of packets of seeds on my kitchen table one morning and said, "Get growing.  It'll give you a hobby until you can ride again."

I took her up on it, thoroughly.  By the time the panic was over I had about a thousand little plants growing and that summer the cottage garden was absolutely rainbowed with larkspur, sweet peas, antirrhynum, stock, zinnia, marigold, livingston daisy, helichrysum, geum ...  dozens and dozens of flowers of all varieties and scents and colours.  They were banked up in baskets and pots and disused lavatory pans, in wellington boots and dead wheelbarrows and in every spare inch of soil I could find.

Many of the flowers were harvested as bouquets for friends or cut and hung up to dry, but some of the more delicate ones found their way into a Press.  I packed layer after layer of drying-papers with larkspur and forget-me-not and pansies between, carefully adding a little of each variety, to preserve them for some vague future Other Hobby - card-making, perhaps.

I am not a creature of Edwardian disposition by nature and my elegant floral-engaging enthusiasm didn't survive that summer.  By the time I moved house a year or so later, all the beauty of the garden was largely due to the self-seeded offspring of my first crop, and the beauty of my interior decoration to the hardiness of the masses of dried flowers.  The Presses (one of them a copy of Gray's Anatomy, circa 1938) were moved into bookcases or trunks and completely forgotten.

Until last week.

I was coming back from a nerve-soothing walk after a particularly horrible day, finally relaxing enough to enjoy the late evening sunlight on my face.  I was eating wild strawberries from the hedges and admiring the very last of the Queen Anne's Lace when it occurred to me to pick a little of each of the flowers growing in the hedges. There was red campion, honeysuckle, foxglove, valerian and several tiny orchid-like purples and a host of others I can't name and by the time I got home I had a wonderful wildweed bouquet.

I remembered the flower press, thinking to preserve my gatherings.  I found it eventually and, filled with curiosity, unscrewed the wingnuts and released from a decade of squashed neglect my collection of now silk-sheen pressed flowers.  Page after page of tiny delicacies I lifted from their long incarceration. The colours had faded but everything was still exquisite and the shapes of the leaves and each petal delightful.  I spent an hour going through my lost treasures.

What does one do with such things?  I'm no artist, no card-maker, no craft-worker.

I carefully and lovingly packed them all away again, maybe for another ten years. There was no room in the main press for any additions.  I eyed up Gray's Anatomy and the Large Animal Veterinary textbooks, unopened in years and their pages full of more beautiful things than the dry words of wise men.  No room for more there, either.

So the little bouquet I'd picked in the lanes went into water instead and the scent of the honeysuckle filled my bedroom as I later drifted off to sleep.

That sleep was sweeter and its dreams more peaceful than any other I've had of late.

The healing powers of flowers, maybe?

Back in the Saddle

My Debut Account (Blog Thoughts From Abroad) has unfortunately lost its identity following a very unpleasant 'hacking' episode last week. I won't bore you with the details but if something calling itself 'Jack' ever presents on your doorstep whining about being left out in the cold, please present in return my compliments of the season and blast it to smithereens with your blunderbuss.

I continue Blogging with the attached  word 'Moor' instead of 'More' because it is entirely appropriate to do so and those of you who understand my occasional need to pun will forgive me.  The rest can go hang, and please use enough rope to take 'Jack' with you.

It is now 02.00 in the morning and I can't sleep. A waxing gibbous moon (full on the 15th) has just sailed slowly down through the silhouette of trees beyond the fields and the owls are calling.  It's a beautiful night and I want to be out there. I'll leave you now, to walk the tracks and the peace of the unsleeping Moor, where the word 'hacking' takes on a completely different meaning.