Yesterday I managed to find enough dry minutes to add spring bulbs to the tubs in the yard by the door and plant twenty daffodil bulbs in a corner on the allotment.

The bags of bulbs had sat rather to long in the garden centre and both crocus and narcissus were already showing shoots. As there has been no frost one can only hope that they settle down at the front door before winter chill becomes serious and the soil turns seriously cold. The twenty daffodils look to be fine if a little late planted on the allotment. They will either grow or not as may be. It would be nice to see more spring colour at the door and any at all in the spring on the allotment. We shall see.

It is too damp to do anything more useful on the allotment than to add to the compost heap as ever and find a spot for the daffodils.

There are two compost heaps which could do well with a turning, merging and moving over to be ready in the normal spot where marrows and courgettes seem to thrive. If we have a couple of really cold, deeply frosty weeks like we did after last Christmas, the ground will drain relatively rapidly and allow this work to be done. Last winter was seriously dry from the start of November through to February which meant that we had very solid dry soil before it froze.

Who is to know how hard the presently totally sodden ground will be over the next seven or so weeks if we do get serious frost. I’m bored with being housebound though, would like to get out in the fresh air and take some exercise. But it is winter. And winter is apt to be very wet, very windy and very cold if we get a classic winter. Such is life.

Flaming Christmas!

It’s that season again. The one of spendfest, running up debt, buying and trying to eat too much food, visiting relatives that you haven’t seen for the last twelve months, giving too much to children ….

Yep by the end of the week most places will have had the big switch on of the Xmas lights, organised late night opening of shops to get people to spend their last coppers and then some more and generally be pleading with us all to go and and spend everything we have and more to save the economy.

Whilst of course the powers that be are holding climate change conferences where the basic premise should be that for the good of the planet we should all consume less in the wealthier parts of the world (I would hate you, dear reader, to think that I’m suggesting that those without adequate food, clothes, heating, housing and clean water should consume less). A simple premise that would help both the environment and the climate.

We’re a small rural town with a small library – and as a result not a lot in it. So of course it’s well supported – not.

There are fewer newspapers than there used to be and the replacement books are the cheap paperback books of lightweight reading.

Now I’ve nothing against Jilly Cooper, Mave Binchy, Sophie Kinsella and others such, but our library is not even a great stockist of such books as The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, The Other Boleyn Girl or any of the other books that have caught the nation’s fancy and become well read.

As for going into the Science Fiction area and finding more than one of Anne McCafferty’s Dragons of Pern series (and that will be one in the middle which gives you no clue as to anything), or any of the Terry Brookes series of books (well maybe number three of a series of five) ……

So there is a well stocked shelf of spoken word (limited selection again mind), a few very old CDs and DVDs (but more taped videos). Most of us want books not Queen CDs or Teletubby videos.

Perhaps the fact that the central library in Morpeth suffered badly in the floods last year could  be used as an excuse. I fear not though as I came from a well stocked town library and found that I had read most of the limited offer here when I moved in 5 years, 5 months and 1 week ago.

So what do I do? Rely on the family to buy me books, buy books for the family that I want to read when funds allow and borrow from them when they buy books. The whole new swap share scheme then. Now that says it all that in a reading family we actually have to buy books if we want them. I thought that libraries were for people like us who wanted books to read for pleasure or information. Seems not. Sigh.

Yep, the River Tyne in the valley down the hill is over it’s banks and all over the place. It must have been raining a lot.

Let’s just say it rained so hard last night that I jumped out of bed at about 3.30 am thinking that the flat was being flooded again. But no – only wind blown rain lashing on the windows. Outside.

Hey ho, with more to come over the next two or three days according to the weatherman, it’s good to live half way up a nice steep hill well away from the offending river. There are flood warnings on all the usual bits in Hexham, Corbridge and the Riverside Park in Prudhoe. From here I’d say that the last one is fairly well under water.

I don’t know that I will be going to the allotment for a day or three from the looks of the present forecast. Perhaps the forecast is wrong. Hmm – unlikely.

Home with a pile of housework, knitting and books to read seems to be the answer till Sunday.

Well this one anyway. It was nice and sunny at 08:45 so the team of us went litter picking. At 09:30 the rain started so we came home half an hour short of our allotted time despite having moved a damaged child’s paddling pool, a wrecked tent and three or four bags of rubbish.

So I merely changed shoes and dropped into the garden centre for a couple of items for a Christmas present along with tea and cake. Hmm – thank you George for the greeting of “I came in here to get away from you” said with a big grin. He did offer me a lift home which was very nice of him but I’d not done the shopping.

Whilst still dampish, I decided to visit the housing office to see if I could get a cash donation towards the cost of using the dehumidifier that was required to dry the flat out after the last flood. Hmm – housing officer due back in about twenty minutes they said on the desk as her superior, the team leader, didn’t want to deal with it. So I went down the road to the library and found one book to read as well as getting a couple more items for a Christmas present from a nearby shop.

I walked towards home and stopped off again at the housing office. Still no housing officer but I was prepared to sit and wait as I had a book to read. Eventually said team leader gave in and came down to the interview room. It was a very simple explanation of the damage done by two overflowing baths from the upstairs flat.

There was some buck passing back to the repairs department over the electricity payment and not a lot of happiness over a request for help on decorating. “Haven’t you got insurance?” was the question. “Well yes, contents but the insurers say that decorations count as buildings insurance because you can’t take them off the wall and move it if you leave the property and you carry the building insurance” was the simple answer to that one. As I said, it’s not the cost of the paint but the man to go up the ladder and do the decorating as ceilings are involved.

I’m under the physiotherapist with a balance problem involving the ankles so no chance of catching me up a ladder doing decorating. How very convenient. Well for me.

Perhaps other people hate Mondays more than me. Well this one anyway.

It’s far too damp and muddy to work on the allotment despite the jobs that need doing. A walk to the compost trench to add more “stuff” from the house has been as useful as it has been possible to be this week.

There is the forecast for wet and windy arriving here any time now. Windy over night should bring down the last of the leaves so that I could finish sweeping up a few more from down the little road that has been so productive this year. The associated wet that is forecast won’t make the ground any more fit to work on so it’s a case of doing other useful things where possible.

At this point last year the weather was very dry indeed and cold as well. I could have turned and moved the two compost heaps with no trouble at all. But that was then and this is now.

At this rate I might even have to do some housework if all else fails!

It doesn’t make biscuits at all - it sells art - pictures, photography, woodwork, glass, ceramics, jewellery.

None of the items on display are particularly off the main stream of artistic – nothing that would really be found so far towards the cutting edge of creativity that it will frighten the paying public and none of it so large as to need a mansion to house it.

However, one has to ask who is going to use a hand carved coffee table? Would you dare to put it in the sitting room where it’s going to actually have coffee cups put on it? The same goes for hand crafted wooden bowls? They aren’t quite the thing that you would use to put the fresh fruit in when serving a meal or to pass round the table full of sweets.

Would you care for some very attractive glass coasters? Hmm – drop one of those and you have spoiled a set that cost you maybe £40. You’d possibly be happier with the wipe clean, mass produced ones from the supermarket for everyday use. 

Mugs anyone? Well you can nip down the supermarket and see what's on offer, or you can go a little more upmarket with somewhere like John Lewis. You can pay £1 for a mug or upwards of £20 for a set. So are you sure that you want to pay £20 for an artistic mug (very attractive) that you can’t put into the dishwasher? But if mass produced, would they be as individual and attractive as these? 

With so many things so cheap and cheerful because of mass production, would you buy something made by a craftsman for everyday use? I can appreciate that jewellery is personal and could well be tempting if you are out of the teenage years of must have fashion. But what would make you buy a picture by an individual artist when there are so many cheap ones printed on canvas which do perfectly well in a working household?

Thank goodness.

Every time you watch a costume drama on the telly or hear Granny saying it’s not like when she was a girl, you need to wonder about what it was really like.

You've never had it so good said the prime minister. That’s fine Mr Prime Minister but you didn’t have to clean the grate out after last night’s coal fire. You didn’t likely wake up to ice on the inside of your windows in winter. I know what central heating has done for me – it has saved me from the tyranny of the coal fire and unclean air.

We are told to reuse, recycle, reduce by the government now. Well aren’t they just a bit behind the times? The present government ministers are mostly the children of a generation who had no option but to recycle and reuse because there was almost nothing new to buy. 

Their parents were definitely the working man and the wife at home – women were automatically made redundant in the early 1950s on getting married to free up jobs for the blokes. They lived on one wage packet and so had to be careful with things. Which explains why we have a generation of older widows who haven’t worked since they were in their teens and twenties.

Would I go back to the 1950s of my childhood? In some ways – yes as it was a very environmentally friendly childhood in that furniture was handed down the generations, clothes were mended, hedgerows were tended as they produced food (blackberries, sloes, crab apples), the garden was virtually organic as we had access to manure and home made compost, we bottled and preserved for the winter. Yes we kept our own seed for the next year and things like that. We were lucky as a family – we ran a farm so could do so much more.

But nope I would not go back to cleaning out coal fires, ice on the bedroom windows in the morning and the prospect of not working again once I married. Good thing that changed when I was a teenager.

I decided to take most of Monday off and wandered down to the allotment well after lunch. To find that one of the other plot holders had been sweeping down “that road” and had moved most of the remaining leaves. Well fair shares for all I suppose. I still managed to move a final nine bags for my collection.

Between the two of us by Wednesday afternoon, about 80 bags of leaves had been moved. There was hardly a leaf showing when I looked. I wonder if the council leaf sweeper has turned down that road yet and discovered that it is clear.

Not bad going for two old age pensioners with nothing more than rakes, brooms, wheelbarrows and garden sacks.  But leaves are free to clear when they fall on roads and anything free that makes good compost is always welcome.

Eventually and slowly the council workmen have turned their attentions to clearing out the town’s decorative tubs and flower beds. Goodbye to the dead summer bedding plants and assorted weeds and hello to the winter staples of spring bulbs, pansy, primula and wallflower.

Better later than never. But just a little observation. Every year the council workmen clear the pavements of leaves and take them away. Now to save us money you would think that these leaves would be taken to a central point and composted for future use on flower beds. Surely there is nothing difficult in tipping leaves into an open wire container and leaving them to rot down. As the lorries used by the teams doing the planting out carry bins for collecting weeds, it must be possible to top up these empty bins at the start of the day with leaf mould to be turned into the flower beds due for attention on the day in question? But no, the lorries are loaded with bags of commercially purchased compost instead.

For goodness sake, is there no financial incentive to be environmentally friendly in this situation? I’m hardly surprised that green issues are not very high on the agenda of a council with serious monetary problems. But if green meets financial interest? Obviously not – just charge the tax payer it seems.

Overnight the watch stopped. No obvious reason, no recent and obvious mistreatment, no warnings, no recent errant behaviour.

Sure the strap was coming to the end of it’s useful life but the battery was only about a year old and watch had not been in line of water during the previous flood.

Had it just needed a new battery and a new strap that would have been about £10 locally. But nothing so obvious. It cost about £28 5 years ago, been as good as gold at timekeeping, had one new battery, one new strap and had now sentimental value at all.

With using it mainly to ensure that I catch the bus back up the hill from the allotment, back from the garden centre and on outings where I want to know what time it is so that I can catch the bus home – leaving it at a repair shop didn’t appeal. Not at that price and with a new, almost identical model costing £19.99!

Talk about a throw away society where it is cheaper to replace than to repair unless you have the appropriate skill. Nope I know nothing about the inner workings of a wrist watch.

Funny but many of them apply to other groups in the country as well.

So the heating bill is high? It’s the same for people on the minimum wage and people on jobseekers allowance who don’t get an allowance in the winter.

So the food bills are high and many of the offers are for families? But there are single people such as students too.

So we are beginning to wear out physically? Arthritis, false teeth, deafness and failing sight happen to younger people too.

So we feel shut in, housebound and lonely? Now if you are older and very frail that I can understand but there are a lot of older people who don’t make the effort to do what they can.

Maybe the GP doesn’t always consider that you need to have something done to make you better but are you sure that you are doing what you can to help yourself?

Perhaps the two areas where real reform is needed are in care facilities (which apply to younger, disabled people too) and suitable housing if you can’t afford to buy a retirement home for yourself.

But then again – housing is a hot potato for the local authorities and the government at the moment due to the fact that many more people are asking for social housing. Which means that it’s not entirely an older people’s issue.

I wonder how often things become issues because older people don’t have the option of going to work any longer and have more time to notice things.

The dehumidifier has left the building. That’s because the plaster and woodwork is dried out from after the flood.

Now all that is needed to clear up completely is:

1. plastering to repair a couple of damaged patches
2. the tiles on the bathroom window ledge grouting back into position
3. three rooms redecorating

Not a lot really. There’s no need to hurry for the landlord to do the plastering as I’m going to have to save up to get the decorating done as there are ceilings involved.

Besides, there might be another flood. Things are apt to come in threes aren’t they? Or does two floods and plaster damage from an overflowing gutter count as the three?

Nope not in some important cricket match, but in my road sweeping activities. Leaf collecting is definitely on hold at the moment due to rain.

The forecast if for windy and very wet this morning. It might just all calm down by mid afternoon just as darkness begins to deepen.

Now how am I supposed to finish my road sweeping duties down by the castle on behalf of my compost heap before the other allotment holders decide to join in and take their fair share? Mind you, the covering of leaves is considerably less than it was on Wednesday morning when I started off with broom, bags and barrow. A couple of hours working every day every day has cleared a lot of road and pavement whilst adding to the ever growing pile of bags of leaves.

I’m surprised at people who think that I am just sweeping the road for the benefit of the local walkers, the community or because I’m putting in community service time due to some misdemeanour. Only one person – an older gentleman on a mobility scooter – came passed saying that the leaves would be good compost before I even said hello to him.

Such is life – people so often don’t see the use of free things that come their way.