Stormy February

February has sloshed its soggy way into history and here we are in March!

I spent most of February in Cheltenham with Mum, but managed a day’s catch-up with my old school friend, Madeleine, who lives at Royal Wootton Bassett. We had not been in touch at all until a few years ago when we both attended a school reunion, here in Cheltenham, and then became friends on Facebook. I think it surprised both of us how quickly we fell back into friendship and Facebook has enabled us to keep in contact, even though we have only met up twice in the intervening years. I got there at about coffee time and we were still nattering at about 7pm, with hardly a pause for breath! Even then we hadn’t exhausted our topics of conversation – to be continued soon, I hope.

School Reunion 2015

Cheekily, I also contacted my first boyfriend, who still lives in the Cheltenham area, and we met up for lunch. We’d met up for coffee about four years ago but before that we hadn’t seen each other since my sister’s wedding back in 1978! It was good fun reminiscing about our teenage years and trying to fill in all the gaps since – an impossible task in one lunchtime, but we gave it our best shot!

In the middle of February I had arranged to return home for a long weekend to run my stall at the Shepton Mallet Snowdrop Festival, but Storm Dennis had other ideas and, for safety reasons, the market part of the Festival was cancelled, but I’d already made plans for the days either side of the weekend, so came back anyway. My route across the Cotswolds bore sad marks of the storm’s destruction, with many large branches lying at the side of the road and, in places, huge trees hastily cut into piles of logs.

Tiny dormouse in a wooden pot

I had made a few snowdrop sculptures specifically for the market and had resigned myself to putting them into stock until next year but, when I gave my second talk to Mum’s Luncheon Club, I took some of my sculptures with me as part of a display of woollen items (my talk was all about wool and its varied uses), and was very gratified to sell some items, including my prize-winning kingfisher and a tiny dormouse in a wooden box, plus two of the snowdrops. I must look into getting on the speaker circuit in my neck of the woods, as it could prove quite profitable, and I really enjoy doing it.

Snowdrops at Rendcomb

Mum has always loved snowdrops and the first signs of Spring and, when she was still driving, would make a point of taking a friend or two to see the streamside snowdrops in a garden at Rendcomb near Cirencester so, one afternoon, when it was (amazingly) dry and bright, we drove over to see them. They are an absolute delight and, although they are in a private garden, you get a wonderful view of them from the little bridge over the River Churn. We didn’t think we would get another chance to see drifts of snowdrops as the wet, windy weather continued to pound the countryside but right at the end of February, when a lot of the snowdrops were over, we finally got a clear, bright afternoon and drove over to North Cerney House (again near Cirencester) where we wandered through the Snowdrop Walk, beneath the trees, and saw Hellebores, Snowdrops and tiny yellow Daffodils before going into the Walled Garden where there was lots of work going on, pruning the fruit trees and roses.

On exiting the grounds I asked Mum what would happen if we turned right at the end of the driveway, instead of going left and back onto the main road. ‘We get lost’ she said, so we did! Mum had actually been that way before, so we weren’t truly lost, but we were well off the beaten track as we went up hill and down dale on narrow Cotswold lanes. As we drove along we spotted a kestrel, a pair of buzzards, a red kite, pheasants, partridges and a cheeky squirrel with a huge maize cob in his mouth, so it pays to go ‘off piste’ sometimes!

We finally managed to tie the plumber down to a date when he will come and start the shower room but, unfortunately, it will not be until the last week in March when I will be back in Somerset trying to get back on track with my gardening jobs and regular markets. I think we now have everything bought to enable him to do the job, but time will tell.

Needle-felted Kingfisher sculpture