On the 6th December I took myself off to Claydon in Oxfordshire to help Phoebe move the raised beds in her garden so that she could put up a polytunnel. I took a slightly different route this time as I avoided Chipping Norton and Banbury by continuing up the Fosse Way and then heading due east above Banbury to emerge very close to Claydon. The Fosse Way is amazing! Originally built by the Romans it runs from Exeter to Leicester and, if you look on a Road Atlas, it is still used for nearly all of its original route as a roadway – it breaks up into tiny lanes and trackways a bit around Bath but is still visible. In fact, when Jeni came to stay at Claydon with me in the summer, she went home all along the Fosse Way, only deviating for a short way around Bath.
Near Stow-on-the-Wold
my attention was grabbed by a large bird of prey circling over the
road. I was about to dismiss it as the ubiquitous buzzard when I
noticed its forked tail – a Red Kite! I didn't know there were any
kites in the Cotswolds, but I have since seen another one (or could
it be the same one?), again in the Stow area. They are such graceful
birds in flight and make buzzards look like blundering bumble bees in
comparison.
The weather forecast
for the weekend had been dire but the journey to Claydon was lovely
and took just over an hour. The cottage was warm and welcoming when I
arrived and, after a lunch of home-made leek and potato soup and
home-made bread, we went out to look at the job. Phoebe has been
offered a polytunnel frame for next to nothing, but she will have to
buy the polythene cover, the only drawback being that the frame is
eighteen feet wide! This is about six feet wider than we had
originally talked about back in the summer, but you can't look a gift
horse in the mouth, so we duly paced out the dimensions and marked
the corners with canes – it looked enormous! However, it does mean
that Phoebe will have plenty of room to plant all sorts of crops
without having to worry about the weather.
In the evening we went
to the pub and met up with Eamon there – he'd already bought me a
half of cider and had it waiting on the bar! Its such a nice,
friendly pub and we were made to feel very welcome – we also booked
to have Sunday lunch there again, which was definitely worth it.
We couldn't do an awful
lot to the polytunnel site apart from dismantle the raised beds and
move them out of the way. We did start to shovel all of the topsoil
from the beds onto a large tarpaulin to get it out of the way until
we realised what hard work it was! Phoebe then decided that, as she
would probably need Eamon and his mini-digger to dig out the trenches
for the polythene to be buried in, he could also move the soil with
that in a fraction of the time. Phew! Hopefully, Phoebe will get the
frame early in the New Year, but she has to wait for a warm day to
put on the polythene cover so that it stretches over properly and
doesn't sag, so we busied ourselves by sorting out the little
greenhouse, as some of the polycarbonate sheets had been dislodged
and/or broken by the high winds. Once it was secure again I washed
off all the algae, both inside and out, so that it will be ready to
use come the Spring.
I had a lovely weekend
by the canal and the weather did not live up to the dire predictions
– in fact on the Saturday I was working in a T-shirt as the sun was
so warm.
Once back in Cheltenham
there was really only the Luncheon Club Christmas Dinner to help out
at. It was incredibly busy – we catered for about fifty guests plus
half-a-dozen helpers and were on the go continually for about two and
a half hours. It was only as I walked home that I realised how tired
I felt and that my hands were really dry from having them immersed in
hot soapy water for the best part of two hours!
Christmas crept up on
me, as it always does, but I managed to complete my second peg loom
rug in time to wash it, dry it and wrap it up for my son's Christmas
present. I more-or-less managed to keep to the 'homemade or under a
fiver from a charity shop' challenge that we'd set ourselves
acquiring two books on soups, a pretty top, a child's 'computer' and
then making lemon curd to augment my stock of sloe gin, blackberry
vodka and plum jam that I'd made back in September. Being a woman
with quite a lot of time on her hands I then decided to knit some
Christmas tree decorations from a pattern I acquired last year on my
travels. I decided to use them as place markers on the Christmas
dinner table instead of hanging them from a tree and they were much
appreciated (mainly, I suspect, because the filling was a Ferrero
Rocher chocolate!). I was really pleased at how well they turned out
and have thought about knitting some more to sell at some point in
the future.
We all descended on my
sister, and her family, in Sheffield for the festivities so Mum and I
drove back up the Fosse Way on Sunday 22nd, all the way to where it
meets another Roman road, Watling Street, which is now the A5. We
then joined the M69 and thence the M1 coming off at the Chesterfield
turning and heading into Sheffield. It took three hours, which
wasn't bad, as we drove through some appalling sleet storms that
really cut down the visibility, but arrived in time for lunch –
very civilised.
Christmas was a
wonderful family time – there were eleven of us for Christmas lunch
and more than that on other occasions, and the food just kept on
coming! If I haven't put on pounds this Christmas I will be amazed.
My sister and her family really pulled out all the stops - the
crowning triumph was the turkey – cooked for fifteen hours in the
slow oven of the Aga and incredibly moist and tasty, or was it the whole salmon that we had baked in
the Aga on Monday, in sandwiches several times afterwards and with
the cold meats on Boxing Day? Dave brought homemade pork pie and gala
pie to add to the groaning Boxing Day table and there was mulled
cider to warm us up after a couple of walks that we did.
One of the walks on
Boxing Day was at Stanage Edge in the Peak District which is only
about a fifteen minute drive from their house. It had been a bright,
sunny day but with a sharp frost overnight and the Peak District
looked spectacular. However, there was hardly anywhere to park as all
of Sheffield seemed to have had the same idea. We scrambled over the
tumbled boulders that make up the 'Edge' and emerged at the top to
fantastic views in all directions. However, the wind was bitingly
keen and the clouds started to roll in so we didn't stay up there
long. We heard the strangest sounds as we walked across the marshy
ground, almost like a chuckling laugh, and Lynda told us that they
were grouse – the moor is full of them at this time of the year and
if we followed the sound quickly enough we could see the large birds
fluttering above the heather before disappearing from view again.
On Friday, 27th
December we packed up the car and headed back down to Cheltenham.
However, we had an extra passenger in the shape of Jeni, as Dave had
been taken ill and we had had to leave him behind to recover. He had
brought Jeni up to Sheffield but she needed to be back in Wells for
Saturday evening and it looked doubtful that Dave would be well
enough to drive back in time. After sleeping for a lot of the
following 24 hours, he felt well enough to drive, but by no means
fully recovered, so collected Jeni on his way back to Somerset on
Saturday afternoon. The journey back was worse than the journey up,
as the M1 was three (sometimes four) lanes of solid traffic and we
ran into torrential rain and sleet storms on the M69 and for most of
the journey home from there. Luckily the Fosse Way was devoid of
traffic for most of its route and I still managed the journey in
three hours.
The house felt really
chilly when we arrived back, although the thermostat was reading 11
degrees, so we put on an electric fire, turned up the thermostat and
lit the fire. Luckily we had been sent home with a 'party bag' of
Christmas goodies including cold meats and pie and a selection of
cakes, so we weren't going to go hungry!
The next time I write a
blog will be in 2014 so I would like to finish by wishing you all a
Happy New Year and look forward to seeing some of you next year.
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