Holiday snaps

 More holiday snaps. I’m feeling too lazy/relaxed to write.

Stackpole Estate on Sunday…

An inlet full of flowering lilies 

The day began on Monday with Liz taking a shine to a snail in the patio doors and trying to get a picture of it with the moon behind.

Then we went to Whitesands Bay, where the sun was bright and the wind was cold and we had the authentic British seaside experience:

Can you spot our windbreak encampment?

I sent Dave the photo above and he said “Just the faintest touch of Death in Venice about that.” 

We walked from the cottage to the harbour for tea

And tried a new footpath home

But after another beautiful fairytale trek through grasses and red campion and hemlock as tall as us

we came to a stile and met some frisky young cattle who thought we were interesting, so turned back and came home our normal route.

Today it’s sunny and cold again so we’re going to try to find a sheltered beach.

Picture postcard

 Liz and I are staying in a cottage in Pembrokeshire, half a mile from the coastal path. It’s perfect for us - quiet, two bedrooms, two comfy sofas, good shower and a low tech kitchen. (I don’t want to be going on holiday and having to spend half a day working out how to control the cooker.)

The weather is iffy, but yesterday we had two great walks…one on the coastal path

Porthgain harbour

Liz looking for a swallow’s nest

Photo by Liz

And a later walk along an ancient fairytale bridle path. Photographs can’t convey the quiet, the fecundity of the red campions, the ancient feel of the place.

Photo by Liz

Photo by Liz

I’ll keep you posted.

On ageing

My dear friend Het sent me a link to an interesting article this week about maintaining your cognitive abilities as you age -

https://verycryptocurrency.substack.com/p/neuroscientists-studying-cognitive?r=77padt&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true 

which was both interesting and challenging. It’s worth reading. The gist of it is that it’s not doing puzzles and word games that keeps your brain cells sprightly as you age, it’s challenging your brain in unfamiliar ways. Here’s a section of the piece:

I found it very convincing. Look at David Attenborough and David Hockney as two examples.

Het is currently learning Cornish and it’s a struggle, so she’s doing OK in the challenge stakes, but what am I doing? 

She was very encouraging: “I think grappling with a blank canvas and engaging with all the micro-decisions involved in completing a painting” counts. Everyone should have a friend like Het.

But painting aside, I obviously need to engage in more such challenges. For one thing I need to stop watching reruns of favourite TV programmes, such as Call the Midwife. But while we’re on the subject, I really think Trixie should have stuck with the lovely dentist. The man she ended up marrying was such a dud. What’s his name? Don’t you think?

I cut Dave’s hair yesterday, and while bemoaning his receding hairline and thinning crown, he suggested that at the age of 40 you should be given a choice as to which signs of youth you would be able to retain as you got older. He’d like to keep the whites of his eyes white, and not to have hairs growing in his nose. I’d like my two front teeth, top and bottom, not to show the signs of tea and coffee drinking, as they do, and I’d also like my eyelashes back. Oh yes, and the whites of my eyes.

This is me at the age of 38

Now:

See the teeth?

A dentist once told me that if you drink your coffee and tea through a straw it helps. Hmm. 

Garrison Keillor is a good example of happy ageing. In one of his recent pieces he talks about appreciating summer days much more than he did when young - ignoring the newspaper -  “a catalogue of decline, despair and dereliction” - and going for  a walk in Central Park.  I feel the same. On one of my favourite walks above the village this week, I stopped and lay down in the buttercups and looked at the blue sky for a while - it was all so beautiful.

A Mary Oliver poem…

Buttercups and Daisies

 It’s been so beautiful here this last month. The May blossom has faded now, and the cow parsley is on the turn, but ox-eye daisies(moonpennies) are coming into their own,

 and the buttercups are a wow…

Daisies are our silver,

Buttercups our gold.

These are all the treasures 

We can have or hold.

They are a constant inspiration…

Wayside daisies. On display in the Ashbourne Art Exhibition, June 20 - July 4.

The year the buttercups grew tall. Sold.

Moonpennies. For sale.

Daisies. Not for sale.

Daisies on the Trail. Sold.

Happiness

 I’m sorry but I’ve just got to say something about Tony Blair’s latest advice to Labour. 

Does he really think anyone cares what he has to say after the Iraq war? after he joined the Gaza “Board of peace”? when he says we should move closer to America? 

My response is PSHAW.

Moving on…on Tuesday I had a wonderful and a hot day in Liverpool, visiting my old university friend, Margaret. It was excellent! We caught up some more on each other’s lives from the last 25 years, I met her husband for the first time (though I’ve been reading his Christmas newsletter for 50 years), and we went on the ferry across the Mersey. I couldn’t have my photo taken next to the statues of the Beatles  because we didn’t have the time to queue.

Margaret’s memory is phenomenal. She even remembers an essay I wrote comparing the poetry of Blake to the songs of Dylan. I have no memory of that whatsoever. She also insists I am not an intellectual lowlife. I need more friends like this!

I did some hard work sorting out the garden yesterday and feel pleased with myself. There is more to do, of course. 

I had all four of my paintings accepted for the Ashbourne Art Festival Exhibition.

It’s going to be another sunny day.

Two small boys are coming to visit.

This is how I feel - William Stafford’s poem Any Morning:

Mish mash

 I knew it was going to be blisteringly hot again yesterday, but I needed some exercise, so I went out on my bike very early. 

“Make sure you shut all the windows,” Dave said, as he set off on his. 

Dave and I agree wholeheartedly about a lot of things - politics, the utter crapness of Starmer, the bliss of cycling, the delightfulness of small children, how funny it is when Joey in Friends says “supposably” - but we don’t agree about windows. On hot days he goes around the house opening every single window, even in rooms we’re not using. I open them selectively.

So anyway, I shut all the windows he had opened, and set off. I’d been cycling for half an hour, when I started worrying. Had I shut them all? I could remember doing the ones upstairs, but what about the kitchen window? No memory at all. Anxiety set in (which it seems to do far too easily these days) and I turned the bike round and cycled home as fast as I could, arriving hot and bothered to a closed kitchen window. 

So I parked my bike and without even going in the house, I walked up the back garden to the seat we have under the plum tree, and drank my flask of coffee there. 

 

It was heavenly, and easy to imagine I was in a wild patch off the Trail, because we do No Mow May on our top back lawn.

After that I planted the sweet peas, repotted some pelargoniums and collapsed because of the heat.

In the afternoon, MsX and family came and I had a lot of fun playing pretend games, while MsX’s parents tried to get us up to date with our technology. First our recalcitrant telly, with no success, and secondly our car. The latter may be a success, but it doesn’t  have a CD player, so the lovely Jaine showed Dave how to use blue tooth to play music from a phone. The trouble is that Dave doesn’t have a phone, and I don’t have music on mine. Life used to be so simple. Buy a CD: stick it in a player. I miss mechanics.

Today, I’m going on a day trip to Liverpool to meet up with a friend from University. More fun.

Letter from home

It has been a quiet week at Hepworth Towers.

The family member who declines to be named rang on Thursday to ask if I’d go over at the weekend with Dave (who was going to help with some landscaping) because on Tuesday MsX had come out of pre-school and said she thought Sue was picking her up.

The lovely Jaine asked her why she thought that, and MsX said “Because I love her and I miss her.”

You can imagine how I felt when I heard this. And of course I said yes, I’ll go. I was missing her too.

Then at half past seven in the morning on Saturday, the family member who declines to be named rang to tell me that he thought I should know that MsX had a nasty cough and the lovely Jaine also had a bit of a cough. If I didn’t want to go because of the risk of catching something worse (as grandparents often do) then they would understand.

Readers, I went. MsX is irresistible, just like all of my other grandchildren.

Our garden has been looking lovely for a month, and now the bluebells are fading, the wallflowers are nearly over, and the honeysuckle is out. 

The cow parsley is at full height along the lane. I’m in heaven. There is nothing that compares to May in the Derbyshire Dales.

View from our lane

Just round the lane from Hepworth Towers

I’m watering my wildflower patches every evening, and they’re certainly germinating, which is encouraging. I’m waiting for Dave to put up the canes so I can plant my sweet peas. Our blackbird has been singing for much of every day and when I go out and hear him I always call up to him on the chimney, or the laburnum tree, or next doors larch, and say hello. I tell him how lovely it is to hear him. I’m an utter soppy date when it comes to our blackbird. 

Today we have to drive over to Ashbourne, 35 minutes away, to deliver some paintings I am submitting to the Ashbourne Art Festival exhibition. We’re allowed to submit up to four paintings. These are they. They are ones I want to sell. We have run out of space on our walls. Wish me luck!

That’s my week. I hope you’ve had a good one, and that you’re free to enjoy this glorious weather.

Old crocks on the road

 If you book something called a ‘private en-suite room’ you expect to be able to step out of bed take a couple of steps and sit on the loo, don’t you? 

Liz and I stayed in a great Youth Hostel last week and I was lucky enough to have a room with a double bed and views of Swaledale and fresh beech leaves.

It was billed as en-suite, which I’d been very pleased about because I need to go to the loo in the middle of the night at least twice. At home, I creep along the landing in the dark and manage to stay semi comatose so I can slip straight back to sleep. But this “en-suite” room was outside my bedroom door and up twelve steep steps. 

When you got to the top there was a cavernous room where a bright light went on automatically. It was palatial and it had the same lovely views…

but it wasn’t exactly what an old crock like me was looking for when she books an en-suite. 😀

Having said all of that, I loved the hostel, and I loved the trip. We had chilly temperatures, sunshine and showers, in which we never got soaked, and that was far preferable to dry weather with a blank grey sky. Swaledale and Wensleydale were looking lovely, and we had some good walks. But when two dopey friends in their seventies go for a five mile hike there are sometimes hiccups…

I missed a footpath sign that was plain to see;

In a churchyard Liz found some unusual flowers “Sue, come and look at these, they’re like a tiny sedum! Oh! They’re plastic!”

Trying to find the way is a palaver when you have to take off your rucksack to find your reading glasses before you can read the map;

We forgot to take our walking poles and really needed them on slippy wet stones;

Photo by Liz. Note my pose.

We forgot to take our mats for coffee break and had to adopt the one buttock pose against a drystone wall;

I thought I was talking to Liz in a visitor centre and looked up to see it was a friendly stranger I’d been discussing a calendar with.

We visited waterfalls which were not very full, though still impressive in their way:

Hardraw Force

Aysgarth Middle Falls

Aysgarth Lower Falls

Now I’m home and have an equally lovely view from the bedroom window. 

I’m getting ready to submit some paintings for an art exhibition. Wish me luck.

Meanwhile, here are some extra photos of the holiday…

Photo by Liz