The end of 2024

Needle-felted pumpkins

 I thought I’d better squeeze in one more sneaky blog before the end of 2024, as I seem to have been very lax this year!

September continued in pretty much the same frenetic way as the previous few months as there were the regular gardening jobs and two markets in the Town Hall.

I had agreed to do a weekend farm sit for the alpacas, even though I have said that I can no longer do the longer farm sits, as I find them too tiring and stressful. Just to complicate matters, Jeni and her partner, Adrian, had the trip-of-a-lifetime offer to accompany Adrian’s mum to visit his godfather who is very ill in Canada. I agreed to cat sit for the 10 days that they were away but it clashed with the alpaca sit, so they had to get a friend to feed the cats until I could get there on the Monday evening. I drove straight from the alpacas to their house, even though I passed the road to my village on the way!

Before the Canada trip had come up, I’d agreed to look after my friend’s ponies and chooks while she went away to Croatia on holiday so, having picked up the Canada contingent from Bristol Airport in a minor monsoon, I headed straight off to her house for 5 days! My best friend teased me that I slept around a lot! She’s right – 3 different beds in two weeks, and none of them my own! 😊 I did begin to feel that everyone was going away on holiday, apart from me. I must try harder to get away more in my camper van next year.

New porch

Suddenly, October was halfway through, and my porch door and window arrived. I’d decided to bite the bullet and have all of the rest of the windows replaced at the same time as the front had been double-glazed about twenty years ago, and some of them were beginning to fail, and the back of the house was still single-glazed which meant, once the cooler weather came, they ran with condensation. I’d found the double-glazing guy via my brilliant builders and his price was very reasonable, plus it only took him and his mate (Kev and Trev!) two days to fit everything. Within a couple of days of their completion of the installation, the builders came back and finished the porch, matching the render really well with the existing render on the house. I still have to paint it to match but that can wait until better Spring weather, but I have now painted the inside walls and ceiling.

Back in the summer, Dave had been given notice to quit his rented property in a secluded spot on the Mendips. He’d tried hard to find something similar but private rents have gone through the roof, as they are in such demand, and he couldn’t find anything in the area in his price range. It seemed as if he might be about to be made homeless, when it suddenly occurred to me that my friend, Mary, was looking for someone to take on the tenancy of the little annex that I’d inhabited for 6 years. She didn’t really want a stranger so was more than happy to let Dave rent it until he could find something else. It’s very small so quite a lot of Dave’s belongings had to go into a storage unit nearby, but we managed to shoehorn in the essentials and he seems to be quite happy for the moment.

And so to November! I decided to have a bonfire on the evening of the 5^th as I had a whole heap of hedge offcuts, some old lengths of timber, the sitting room door, etc and decided to invite my next-door neighbours and Jeni, Adrian and Dave for a party! I was going to cook jacket potatoes in the ashes of the fire but, on reflection, decided that that would be too hit-and-miss, so cooked them in the oven instead. We also had mugs of homemade soup that we drank whilst watching the fire consume the vast amount of material I’d accumulated. We did move the entire heap of twigs and branches so that we didn’t accidentally cremate any wildlife, but there was no sign of anything hibernating in the bottom.

Snowy Bristol in November

Blossom tree on the same day!

Jeni had to have an operation at a hospital in Bristol in the middle of November. She was due to be in and out on the same day but wouldn’t be able to drive herself, so I volunteered to go with her and wait until she was ready to go home. As we drove over the Mendips, it began to snow and it got more persistent the nearer to Bristol that we got. Jeni had to be there for 11.00am but, after she’d registered, I wasn’t allowed to stay with her, so I wandered off to the coffee shop in the reception area and spent a bit of time there, reading the book that I’d put in my bag. I then went out for a walk around the area which turned into a rather long walk all the way down into the centre of Bristol and then back up what used to be one of the main shopping streets. It’s a very long time since I trudged the streets of Bristol and I was surprised to discover that Park Street is now mainly coffee shops and barbers! I decided to get some lunch, but most of the venues were packed with students, so I eventually wandered into a Wagamama, not having a clue what sort of food I’d find there but, in the event, I had a lovely plate of little spicy meat dumplings and a delicious cup of lemon and ginger tea, made with sliced lemon and grated ginger. Jeni texted me to say that she was still waiting to go to the Operating Theatre and so I went back out into the snow, trying to find something else to occupy myself. I stumbled (almost literally) into the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery and spent an hour or so there before making my way back up the hill to the hospital, where I once more took up position in the coffee shop. The day dragged on and, at about 7.30pm, the coffee shop closed, and I had to resort to a seating area in the hospital foyer. Finally, at about 8.30pm I got a phone call from the day bed nurse to say that Day Beds were now closing and that they were transferring Jeni to a ward as she hadn’t long come out of Recovery! I was allowed to see her at about 9pm when we decided that it would be best to leave her there overnight and I would return in the morning to collect her. Apparently, she had gone down to theatre at about 4.30 so she had been more than 12 hours without any food – no wonder she was feeling so wiped out and weepy when I got to see her!

The fallen beech tree

Another weekend farm sit for the indoor/outdoor cats, Reg the Labrador and some poultry rounded off November. I went there after Storm Burt had ripped through the area and Reg and I went for a walk in the local wood where we had to clamber under a huge beech tree that had succumbed to the wind. The streams were full and it was easy to imagine that the area once hosted water-driven grain and paper mills.

Swollen stream near the ruined paper mill

When Jeni and I were driving over to Cheltenham at the beginning of November, my car’s wing mirror, which had been making the most constant, horrible noise ever since it had been hit in a supermarket car park 3.5 years before(!), suddenly went eerily quiet – I thought I’d gone deaf for a moment! However, the relief was short-lived as I then began to notice another worrying noise from under the bonnet. After a week or so I plucked up the courage to take it to my local garage and get them to take it for a test drive. The verdict was not good – they thought a bearing was going in the gearbox and, with a Christmas drive to Sheffield on the cards, I made the decision to find a new car. Amazingly, I quickly found another, later model, Honda Jazz being sold by the same garage where I’d bought my last one. They had a Black Friday deal on but, unfortunately, it clashed with the weekend farm sit, so I asked Dave if he would go down and test drive it for me, which he gladly did. He managed to persuade them to hold the car at the reduced price until the Tuesday, when I could get there, and we both went down to Yeovil and I took it for another test drive. It has rather a lot more ‘bells and whistles’ than I’d like but in most ways it’s very similar to my previous model, which has stood me in good stead for 8 years. A week later I drove my old car to Yeovil, bid her a fond farewell and picked up the new one. I couldn’t think what to name her as I couldn’t make a name out of the registration letters but, in the last two weeks, she has named herself - Hyacinth. This is because she is blue but also tends to be like Hyacinth Bouquet in Keeping up Appearances in that she is constantly trying to make me aware of non-existent hazards and keeps trying to tell me how to drive! 😊

Jeni and I travelled up to Sheffield together for Christmas, at my long-suffering sister’s and brother-in-law’s, together with the rest of the family. We had a lovely time; too much was eaten and too much was drunk, but we had a lovely walk in bright sunshine on Boxing Day afternoon in the Peak District which is only a 10-minute drive from their house.

The view from Higgar Tor

Unfortunately, the weather on 27^th December was nothing like as pleasant as we all said our goodbyes and headed homewards. Dave took Jeni back to Somerset and I brought Mum back to Cheltenham where I aim to stay for a few days. We were heading for the M1 but, as we neared Chesterfield, the fog rolled in and when we got to the motorway it was absolutely stationary with the joining queue starting on the roundabout! I changed my mind, went round the roundabout again and took off towards Mansfield, briefly stopping in a layby to warn Jeni and Dave about the holdup, but also to program an alternative route into my Google map app on my phone (My new vehicle doesn’t have built-in satnav, which is just as well as I have only just found out how to turn the radio on!). I have no idea exactly where we went as visibility was awful but eventually we found the Fosse Way, with which I’m familiar, and headed back. The fog only lifted significantly when we were about three miles from home and by then it was pitch black, but at least we were home safely.

The next time I communicate with you all it will be 2025, so I hope you all had a good Christmas and that the New Year is a peaceful and a healthy one! xx

Needle-felted fox