Reading Week: Being Mortal, Bees, Meadowland and Gods in Ruins

Lady in the Mirror by Harold Dunbar

The In-Charge tells me that I'm not very good at taking time off.
He has always had the knack of pacing himself. He does a job and when he gets tired, he stops and does something else. Later on, he goes back to job A.
How enviable that is.
How sickening.

The thing is, my To Do List is endless, so I throw myself at things like a headless chicken, and if - for any reason - a gap opens up in my schedule, I gleefully try to squash in an extra, unscheduled job. Even then, I often end up feeling as if I've achieved nothing by nightfall.
'Never a moment to lose,' the In-Charge says. 'That's your problem. One of them,' he adds.
I didn't ask what the others were.

However, I've been tired recently.  The sort of tired that a good night's sleep isn't curing. There seems to have been a lot going on this last while, and on top of everything else I pulled a muscle in my right arm in November and it isn't getting better.
So I've taken a week off and spent it reading.
It's been bliss.

Reading Woman with Dog - Birbee

Perhaps it's my Protestant upbringing, but normally I find it impossible to read during daylight hours. Nagging voices in my head taunt me with laziness, list things I ought to be doing, threaten the devil itching to commandeer idle hands. I'd have to be ill in bed to read a book during the day, but - thank heavens - I'm never ill in bed. The trouble is, I'm so tired when I climb in at bedtime that I generally fall asleep after a few pages, so the pile of books beside my bed gets higher and higher. In fact, the In-Charge once asked me if I could please sort them out, as he couldn't vacuum round my side. I blush to confess there were 73 books in tottering stacks, but I have turned over a new leaf since then, and the heap is a good deal more modest.

Angelica, The Artist's Daughter Reading by Vanessa Bell

I started with Atul Gawande's slim volume, Being Mortal, thanks to Isobel who recommended it.

For such a serious book, it was amazingly easy to read, and I would urge everyone to get it.

Gawande, as a doctor, sees more clearly than most that as science has given us unprecedented quantity of life most of us have stopped considering its quality. He shows how easily, without our even realising it, the goal posts keep shifting. I found the book an eye-opener. It reaffirmed many things that I already think, opened my mind to possibilities I hadn't been aware of - especially in how we care for people, and made me realise how important it is that each of us choose how we spend the final stages of this one, special, unrepeatable life that we are given. 

Fairy Tales by Mary L Gow

Then I moved on to The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

It's an older book, that I'd picked off a swap shelf recently. In fact, I nearly put it back, but I'm glad I didn't. I loved it. I loved every bit of it. It's about a 14 year old girl in South Carolina in the mid '60s,  consumed by half memories of her mother who died when she was four, and the problems of living with an angry and unloving father. How she deals with these, with Rosaleen, her 'nanny' and everything else that happens, is recounted with humour, insight and an incredibly sure touch. It was funny, it was sad, it was a glimpse of life in a different place and era. Wonderful. 

I believe it was made into a movie, but I haven't seen it.

  

Painting by John Ennis

I have now moved on to the wonderful Kate Atkinson's most recent book, A God in Ruins. I happened to see it in Waterstones when I was in the UK last week. Oh Waterstones, where art thou? I miss you! Easons just isn't the same, I'm afraid. Anyway, I picked it up automatically - I love Kate Atkinson, but have only this week opened the cover. Imagine then my joy and delight to find that it is a sequel to her wonderful, absorbing, strange but seductive Life After Life which I read at the end of last year. Oh, the joy of being reunited with characters you thought you'd said goodbye to! I am still in the depths of the book, but once again I find myself under Ms Atkinson's spell.

Mrs Graafland-Marres by Robert Archibald Graafland

In between all these delights, I have been dipping in and out of Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field by John Lewis-Stempel. On the face of it, you'd wonder how much one could write about a field, but from the first sentence I was hooked. Ironically, words cannot describe how beautifully this book is written - sometimes Stempel's prose is so aching beautiful that I have to go back and read the page all over again. Aside from that, his one-ness with the field is remarkable, as if it is just an extension of himself. I have been dipping in and out only because I want the book to last for as long as possible. The whole year would be nice - especially as it is written in monthly chapters - but there's no hope of that, I will have gobbled it up all too soon.

 A Favourite Author by Poul Friis Nybo

And, as the icing on the cake, I've been catching up with back issues of The English Garden which is, for my money, the best magazine out there. My mother gave me a subscription for my birthday a year or two ago, and I have enjoyed it so much, I've carried on. I came back from the UK armed with the last two editions and have been reading them - again in small bites - from cover to cover. 

Heaven.

  

 The Reader by Roberto Ploeg

I'm not quite sure how I'll switch out of this mode. It becomes quite moorish after a day or two. Especially when the wind is howling and rain is battering on the windows, as it's doing now.

Pudding Row Posies

It's Wednesday today. My elder brother's birthday, as it happens, but closer to home, it is Flower Day.
A lovely girl - a contemporary of my two sons - has returned to the area and opened a café in the village. It is delightfully called Pudding Row and, although I have not yet sampled any puddings, her bread and jam - both homemade - are dangerously good. We dropped in late one afternoon and she had sold out of cake (and pudding), but offered us some toast instead.

She contacted me several months ago, to ask if I would supply her with little table posies from the garden.
She got, poor girl, short shrift at the time.
'Yes,' I said vaguely. 'No problem', and promptly forgot about it. I was in Dublin, building the show garden for Bloom.

However, when I finally got back home, I did get my act together, and on Wednesday mornings I take little jugs of flowers to adorn her tables.

Because they need to last until Sunday evening, when she closes for two (much needed) days off, I don't pick them them night before.
But most Wednesdays this summer, I have been out picking in the rain, so this morning's sunshine made a welcome change, although I still needed wellies as everything is permanently soaked.

The rain has played wily beguiled with my garden this year. And in my absence, my garden has played puck with me. It is a sorry mess. The weeds are running riot, none of the early perennials have been cut back, and all the worst imaginable seed heads are wafting where they will.
The endless rain means I can rarely get out to call it to order.
The only - small - consolation is that, because it's such a cold, wet summer, lots of plants are still blooming that would generally be over and done with by now, so I haven't missed out as I might have done.

This Year's Weed is the minor rose bay willow herb. Minor is probably not its official title, but I've had enough official titles to last me a good while this year. You have to submit a complete plant list to the judges at Bloom, and, not having given the judging end of Bloom a thought, I planted quite wantonly, so mine ran to six pages. In Latin.
And inevitably, the final list was compiled at midnight the night before submission.
So I'm quite happy to go with any old handle at the moment, and 'minor' will do just fine.

Whatever it calls itself, it is everywhere.

When I was a child, I thought to myself: 'One day I shall have four children, and I will call them Rose, Bay, Willow and Herb.'
Yes, well...
It looks like that has come back to bite me on the bum.
Still, it could be worse. At least they pull out easily. If the sun only shone a bit more often, I might have a chance to get out there to pull them! 

The bees are not happy. Our bee man told me they are starving to death in all this rain, and has had to feed them emergency supplies to keep them going. But happily, my soaking garden is full of birds and frogs. Wherever you move, something leaps.
They are totally invisible in the dense jungle that has taken over, but I hope they are eating morning, noon and night. A rainy summer is a slug's idea of paradise, but a surfeit of slugs is probably an endless cream tea for a frog or a bird.
Yum yum. Pudding Row all round!

Bine's wonderful photo of a frog wallowing in our pond

Pests!

I've been feeling rather sorry for myself.
I think I got bitten by a horsefly. There are gazillions of them around this summer, so that's what probably homed in on my ankle. Whatever it was, it's been so swollen and red and hot and sore that I have been laid up, foot propped up on 25 cushions, for a couple of days.
Well, it felt like 25 cushions.  In fact it felt as it my foot was strung up to the ceiling.
I've stopped now - the resultant backache was threatening to be worse than the ankle!

Cleggs.
Miserable creatures. And poor horses, if that's what they generally bite.

There are gazillions of wasps too, this year.
A few years ago I bought a 'waspinator', and very pleased I was with myself, too.
I'd never heard of one before.

Waspinator

We 'inflated' it with a few plastic bags and hung it in the courtyard.
Result: no wasps.
Not a single one bothered us that summer. Or the next, or even the one after that, which was last year.

But right now, we are wasp-central.
What is that all about? And, I bought a new waspinator this year, as the camouflage-y markings on the old one had washed away (wasped away), so I splashed out. It is identical to the old one, except for the presence of camouflage-y markings, of course.
I didn't throw the old one away, they are both hanging out there.
Maybe that's my mistake. Instead of frightening the allegedly territorial wasps away, two nests in fairly close proximity are sending out a different message: 'Wasp Commune, All Welcome!'

It's either that or the bees. Perhaps our new high rise bees have ousted the wasps from their usual nesting sites.

High-rise bees

Whatever it is, I'd like it to stop. I loathe and detest wasps, especially when they hold massive get-togethers in my kitchen and around the table where we eat outside.
The In-Charge got stung on the inside of his arm while he was mending the gutters.
And he's been bitten by a horsefly too, on his shin.

The poor cats are in misery as well.
It's that time of the year when the mites in the grass spring to life, sharpen their gnashers and turn into little piranhas.
Hobbes is OK. Nothing seems to disturb his equilibrium, but poor Pushy and Pixie can''t stop scratching and tearing at themselves. They have great, raw patches all over them.
I keep them in as much as I possibly can, but I don't know if it makes any difference.
My sister's cat was prescribed anti-histamines, which made all the difference to her, but when I tried the same pills on Pushy, she reacted strangely to them, so I stopped giving them to her. And trying to get a pill down Pixie's throat twice a day is a purgatory worse, quite frankly, than the initial itch, so I have given that up as a bad job.

So much for summer.
Not such fun when it's all pests!

Pretty little Pushy, in happier times - ie, not summer

The Good, The Bad & The Downright 'Orrible

I feel a bit of a part-timer, these days. It seems as if I'm no sooner here than I'm gone again, what with one thing and another.
A bit discombobulating, Life In Transit. I should write a book - I could call it something like There and Back Again - an homage to dear old Bilbo Baggins.

I've been in sunny, blossom-filled Suffolk visiting my folks again, and now I'm back in a, miraculously, sunny Sligo where my own patch, anyway, is also blossom-filled. June is in full swing. There can be no doubt - the Summer Umbrella is up in the courtyard - so you can tell, it truly is the season of wine and roses.

As it happened, this trip, I was away for my birthday, which was celebrated in the bosom of my family. My papa took us all out for lunch, and then my sister and I spent the afternoon happily rummaging through a couple of Suffolk's many antique/salvage/vintage/junk yards. Perfect.

I bought this pretty plate to hang on my kitchen wall.

On the way home, I met my charming boy at the airport. He'd just flown in from Brisbane, via Kuala Lumpur and Colombo and we did the last leg to the west of Ireland together.
It's weird, isn't it, when you are looking for someone in a crowded place. Either every person you look at somehow resembles the face you are hoping to see, or else the whole place becomes a blur.
Stansted was a blur, but that might have been due to my bus-induced headache.
It didn't matter - he found me and enveloped me in a 4-year-overdue hug that was wonderful, if slightly oxygen-less.
Have both my boys grown? I thought they'd stopped growing years ago. They are like cranes. They go up forever.
Perhaps that's why this boy loves climbing - his head is already in the clouds anyway.
I have generally been called tall, but I don't feel tall around them anymore.
Perhaps I have more in common with dear old Bilbo than I thought - he was vertically-challenged too, wasn't he?
Or perhaps I have shrunk.

It was very good to see him, and it was very good to arrive home to evening sunshine and sit in the warm, bee-buzzy potager drinking a celebratory glass to salute his return, my beloved Model Dog rolling upside down on my feet, waving her legs and tail in the air, grinning with delight.

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Just as good to hear him exclaiming over the changes the passing years (and my labours) have wrought in the garden, as we wandered around in the long, light, pre-solstice evening.

'The strawberries are coming along,' the In-Charge said. 'Some of the smaller ones are ready.'
We opened our hands and he placed a few beef-tomatoes in them.
Oh Barney McCreavy - what strawberries!
Fat and fulsome, juicy and gigantic.
And - typically - I've only got 4 empty jars on the shelf in the pantry.
Why didn't I think before recycling?

Climber-boy and I stopped in amazement when we reached the herbaceous border. I don't think either of us have ever seen such huge delphiniums. The girth of them - they are obese, like the paeonies.
Obese and utterly 'tivine' as my other son used to say when he was little. Utterly tivine.

And the bees! The garden is buzzing. Hundreds of our own bumble bees (of all sizes and colours) and lots of our new native Irish black bees to be seen and heard everywhere.
The In-Charge had seen a dark mass of bees on the outside of the hive just a few days ago and rang the Bee-Boss. 'I think they're planning to de-camp,' he said. But when the Boss turned up, he said no, they were just too hot in this sultry weather, and were outside cooling down.
He removed a chunk of honeycomb and added another storey, so now we have high-rise bees - and a foretaste of our very own honey!


Lots of good things to come home to.

But alas, not all good. Bambina's sister, for no good reason that we can think of, upped and died on the day of our return.
The In-Charge had put her into the quarantine cage, because she was sitting in the orchard 'looking a bit gleckit' - but to no avail. I am all the more glad of Bambina's ten little chicks.
Not so little any more. They are definitely entering the spotty, gawky teenage years. I've removed all mirrors from their pen, so that they don't get too depressed. And we won't show them the photos when they're all grown up and over it.

So much for the Good and the Bad .
And the Downright 'Orrible?
I've got all-consuming, uber-ghastly, life-diminishing, headache-grinding, sinus-punishing, sleep-destroying, med-defying, all-orifice-streaming, in-snot-drowning, push-me-under-and-hold-me-down-forever hayfever.
It just isn't fair.
I've been chewing on the honeycomb frantically. Some say it will make a difference.
I've been chugging down the echinacea - a friend told me it worked for them.
The anti-histamines ain't doin' nothin'.
Any other remedies I should try?
I'm willing to try anything - beheading starts to sound appealing...

Glorious Lives

The trouble with hens is that they die, often suddenly and unexpectedly.
We have, occasionally, had hens grow so old that I don't think they'd have recognised an egg if you'd thrust it under their beaks. The original Wilhelmina was once such. But more often than not, they are creatures that lead short - and in my orchard, glorious - lives.

We have lost two hens in the last month or so.
The first one just disappeared. With no corpse to mourn over, I suspected M. Renard, but our red-pelted neighbour always leaves a telltale pool of dismal feathers, and they were not to be seen. Definitely a point on the plus side.
However, there was no Bambina.


I was rather sad about Bambina. She wasn't my darling in the way that Napoleon, or the little Empress or Mrs Smith, the Golden Princess were - but even so.

We searched high and low and then went back to the beginning and searched again, but I didn't lie awake at night agonising over her vanishment. It was a shame, though, because she was actually Napoleon's granddaughter, given to us by our friend Colin, who'd had some of our eggs to hatch way back when.

Before I'd had time to get used to losing one little bird, Mrs Scissorhands fell ill.
When hens get that hunchy, huddled look, you kind of know it isn't likely to end well. I have tried various remedies, but rarely with success.
Once, years ago, I asked our vet - visiting a sick ewe - if he'd take a look at a 'hunchy' hen. An expression of sheer panic flitted through his eyes and he opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. 
'The average vet wouldn't know a great deal about poultry now,' he eventually managed. 'Generally...' He gave up at that point and ran one finger significantly across his throat.
I got the drift. 
I did take the Little Empress to (a different) vet when she became so poorly, but even though the vet knew what was wrong, there was nothing she could do.
So alas, it came as no surprise when Mrs Scissorhands - she of the most unfeminine spurs - died a day or two later, despite me hand-feeding her and coaxing her to get better.

Two hens in a couple of weeks. Not good.

But then, about a fortnight later, on my way back from the market a text came blipping into my phone.
I pulled over. It was the In-Charge.
'Hen and 10 chicks in turf shed', it said. (He doesn't waste words, the In-Charge.)
Oh joy of joys! Over the moon and back again.
What a clever girl - I've no idea how many times we searched that shed, and I don't know if she even came out to eat or drink in all that time, let alone how she managed to incubate 10 eggs - she's only a little half-pint.

Bambina is only a little half-pint

So what does that make these two?

Napoleon would be very proud - his grandchildren! One or two of them might even be chips off the old block.
We'll have to see.

Who does this remind me of?

A distinct top knot. Will it develop into a tricorne, I wonder?

But ten baby chicks aren't the only new kids on the block.
Two little beehives arrived last week, courtesy of our friend, the Artist-Extraordinaire. His wife, the Shiatsu-Queen was telling me that he wanted to split his hives, and I rushed in.
'Please, please, please,' I said. 'If you think they'd settle here.'
'Settle?' She laughed. 'They'd be moving to bee-heaven.'

The little bee hives arrive

They are, I think he said, Irish black bees, and they are sharing the hen's paddock, where the morning sun will wake them up, warming up their hives; but the whole property (and beyond) is, of course, theirs to share with the bumble bees that live here.
We haven't spotted them around the garden yet, but they're probably still getting their bearings and rearing a new queen, or whatever it is they do in a new location, but I can't wait for them to come over the wall into the flower garden like the cavalry.

Maybe we'll even get back to the days of yore, long ago when the boys were about eight.
'Listen, mummy,' my curly-haired son said as we sat on the bench together. 'That's the sound of summer.'
I listened.
Behind us, the fuchsia hedge sounded like a helicopter about to take off. It was, literally, humming with honey bees.
'That's the sound of happiness,' he added.
I couldn't have summed it up better myself. The sound of happiness. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.
But that was long ago, and the hedge has been silent for far too long.

In a few weeks, my curly-haired son will be back from a long sojourn in the far-flung antipodes.
I hope he will be greeted by the sound of happiness.