Julia Chalkley

A Walk in the Woods

We woke to snow again. It had started to thaw last night, but the temperature dropped far enough to form long icicles on the gutters and freeze the surface of the pond. A light dusting of snow on the pond stayed throughout the day.

We took a long walk down to our local wood and beyond; to the river at the bottom of the road (running fast at the ford; we’re all in for trouble when the snow melts) and back up to walk all around the wood. No-one else around. Last night’s news did include a feature on the new craze for walking at night, so maybe rush hour is now after midnight. Suits me.

Back home, I made a start on a project I keep meaning to start and keep putting off till tomorrow; painting two of our concrete statues. We bought so many statues from our local garden centre over our first year here that one member of staff suggested we might like to buy a couple of plants on our next visit – you know, the green things in pots? I miss those jokers very much, but they’re a whole eleven miles away – and three miles up the road, we have had a police presence stopping cars to ask whether their journey is essential. I doubt topping up on concrete statues and holly bushes counts, somehow.

I’ve spent the evening writing to another odd prompt – this time, a cyberpunk fairy-tale. I wasn’t sure my idea would count, until I took the time to look up the definition of cyberpunk. It does fit, better than I expected. I’m pleased. It’s an intriguing idea and I want to write it out anyway, but I’m pleased to know that it has somewhere to go when it’s finished.

Closed until further notice

The only people still cheerful about snow out here are kids and big kids like me. We’ve had a strong blast of cold air straight from Russia and Scandinavia hitting the east of the country and dumping up to ten inches of snow on counties that are really not used to the white stuff. I’m chuffed, because I don’t have to get up at silly o’clock and drive seventy-five miles to work every day, so I can get up when I feel like it and go out to take photos and make snowmen. I’m hearing the other side of the story now.

White van sliding into someone’s parked car early this morning and driving off (caught on CCTV, luckily). Bus skidding sideways down a hill. Vaccination centres and schools closed. A fierce debate on our village FB page about sledging versus lockdown rules, with a lot of abuse slung on each side. I’m staying firmly on my own grounds until everyone else has dispersed back to their normal lives.

It’s been snowing overnight, hard enough to settle on the roof and grass, and it’s been snowing lightly but steadily all day. The temperature’s dropped and is now around -3^o C. We spent this afternoon feeding the birds and shaking about 10cm of snow off the fleeces over the kale and winter onions.

Then we retreated indoors. He dozed, while I formatted the short story I’d been writing and sent it off to the magazine. I spent a few minutes working out how to explain the term Essex girl to an American magazine before running a quick search online – for them, it’s a Jersey girl. Willing to bet there’s an equivalent derogatory term for supposedly loose women in every nation. Depressing thought.

I’m working out the grumpiness at that by writing out another story, a cyberpunk version of a traditional fairy tale that suddenly sounded so obvious to me this afternoon that I’m writing it out quick before someone else nabs it.

Hope the weather and the inspiration strike together for years to come.

Snow at last!

We’ve been threatened, we’ve been warned, and finally, we got the snow we deserve. My friends up north have my permission to laugh, take the mick and share photos of REAL snow… but down here in the soft South of England, we’ll take an inch of snow and play in it till it’s muddy slush.

I took the chance to stay indoors writing. A friend passed on some magazine calls for short stories with prompts that were so odd that I think none of my writing friends will be sending in submissions. No idea what an American magazine will make of our local version of Bigfoot, but I will be sending in the story and hoping they find it odd enough to publish. I’m now fired up with another idea for a weird story and will be spending time tonight and tomorrow writing it out.

Having got a story written out, I was up for a walk in the snow. Down to our local open space for a walk (yes, it is allowed under our local restrictions; even so, I tend to go there only when I am fairly sure there will be few or no other people there). If you’d told me two years ago that I would be avoiding contact with other people to this extent, I would not have believed you. It was a reassurance today to see that there were no footprints in the snow on the way to the wood.

Snow still coming down while I stood in the field and looked across to the woods. There was snow on the aconites, on the snowdrops, on the beech leaves, snow still coming down, blowing off the roof of the cabin. There’s a periwinkle flower covered in snow, I kid you not. Flowers are incredible.

I went home smiling, woken up and cheered up by my walk, and joined my husband and our two surviving cats in the warm house. Tomorrow I will write out my second idea and make sure I have the right format for the first before submitting it to the magazine. If they don’t like it… I have plenty of places to send the story of the Crazy Cat Lady.

This old house

We’ve been correcting the door on the larder for the last few days. Excuse the fancy terms; we do tend to take the mickey sometimes. Our house was built many years ago for a family that had achieved moderate success rather than great wealth or just enough to keep out of the workhouse, so it isn’t grand and it isn’t basic. It has a cupboard set into the wall next to the cooker that we use to stack food in, and we can’t help but call it the larder.

The problem with the larder door is – well, it has two problems. First, it’s old. We don’t know how old the house is, but its builders weren’t working to a set of standard plans and the whole place has settled since then. The doorframes have twisted just a little – a lot, in one case. We think the larder door dates back to the 1930’s, and we do know that the owner before us tried to liven the whole house up by having all the doors dipped and stripped of their 1960’s paint, which is the root of the second problem.

We’ve pieced the whole thing together like some comedy village murder mystery over the years. First, he took off the doors and took all the ironwork off them – knobs, hinges, latches and catches. Then he sent them off to be dipped in acid and washed off. When they came back, he realised that he hadn’t noted which hinge set went with each door. There’s shadow marks on one door where a long ornate hinge used to be, different to the short square hinge that’s holding the door to the frame now – the long ornate hinge is on a different door, the one that clearly used to have little hinges like those on a box. Worse, the doors warped and cracked as they dried. Some don’t close all the way up, with the top bent a good four inches out of true, and the cracks are wide enough to see through.

It might sound easy to replace the doors. But. There are standard door sizes these days. Not one of the internal doors in our house is a modern standard size, and not one is the same size as any other door. We thought at first we could get a modern door and cut it to size, except – the widest doors are too wide for this treatment while the tallest are too tall.

We’re refurbishing the larder door. He’s been re-setting the hinges and bending the latch back into shape; I’ve been holding the door up while he notes where to cut a recess for the hinges, and chipping the crusty remains of bright blue paint from the grooves in the door. It’s taken me all day so far and we’re left with a door that looks like a plain and elderly wooden door of a simple design. It suits the kitchen beautifully. Give us another day at this, and the damn thing will also SHUT, for the first time in years.

Lighting up the darkness

Photo by Tomasz Pro, Pixabay

When one of our cats dies, I light a tealight and leave it burning in a lantern over the cat’s grave. Tonight there’s a candle burning on each grave in the garden, to acknowledge that every cat out there added his or her own flavour to the house. Looking out of the window I can see them all, and think of them.

Today the official death toll from Covid-19 in the UK passed 100,000, and many of those who died got a funeral to break the heart of every bereaved relative, with very few allowed to attend. A teenage boy died alone, as his family was not allowed to visit him (as for too many people). Patients were ferried miles away to hospitals with a few beds to spare, London borrowed ambulances from surrounding areas (themselves under enormous pressure) and oxygen supplies ran so low that Southend Hospital was reported to be rationing oxygen treatment to desperately ill patients. I’m upset at the loss of a cat, and I apologise to anyone who feels this is out of proportion.

It’s important to say goodbye. Funerals are for the living, an important ritual of letting go and passing memories and comfort among the survivors that is a reassurance that the deceased will not be forgotten. My father’s funeral two years ago was low key but important to all of his family and friends. It hurts that too many people have a family member erased from their life and the funeral is held with the attendance rationed. It damages the lives of those who survive.

I hear tonight that the civilian death toll in World War Two was 70,000 in the UK. I have heard suggestions that we should have a memorial to those who have died, like a war memorial. It’s an idea worth pursuing. It’s the least we can do for those who died in the sole care of strangers.

The Silence

Image of tortoiseshell cat by Didi S, Pixabay

We’ve woken every morning for the last six months to our young tom’s call to the breakfast bowl – a kind of rusty hinge squawk some mornings, a sudden loud “AWWWW!” on others.

This morning, we woke when the sun came round to our window. It’s small changes like this that bring home the fact that the house is different. He’s gone, and the house is quiet. His sister has a quiet squeak that we hear only when she is very hungry and our old tabby has an almost silent miaow that is more like a click. Neither of them are making any sound at all today.

We worked outside, in cold air and an increasing breeze. The clear sky and sunshine made it worth it. We cleared away the last twigs and branches from the area where we felled a dead elm on Saturday and stacked it on the bonfire site, enjoying the sound of birds practising their spring songs.

Tonight, it’s quiet in the house and silent outside. We enjoyed a vegetarian haggis and a tot of whisky in honour of Burns’ Night, and I stepped outside the back door. Silent all around. A candle burning on our tom’s resting place and the stars above. Life goes on for the rest of us, but it hurts.

Life hands you lemons. Unripe ones.

Picture by Eduardo Viera, Pixabay

This time yesterday, we had three cats; an elderly tabby female and a pair of youngsters just growing up to be adult cats. They’d negotiated their spaces in the house and everyone got along with everyone else. The tom was starting to show signs of preferring to sit with my husband, while the old tabby would sit in her favourite spots, with anyone who was there at the time and the young female seemed to enjoy surprising everyone with where she’d be next.

Then we had the knock on the door. A driver in tears who had seen a car hit a black cat on the road outside and wanted to know, did we have a black cat?

We did – but not now. Thanks to that driver who took the time to come and find us and tell us the bad news, we found him before the foxes and crows did. He’s buried in the garden, under the place he adopted as his little den in the summer. We’ve been locked down for months, and the cats have been our comfort and our entertainment in that time. We’ve seen the youngsters grow in confidence, becoming cheeky and affectionate, while the old girl began to act kittenish in their presence. The surviving cats are quiet tonight. The tom’s sister is not her usual cheery self and the old girl has retreated from our company.

We’ve been asking ourselves whether we could have done anything differently, a useless question; we did what we did. He went out at dawn as usual, and we expected him to return for his breakfast. We’d never seen him cross the road, and couldn’t stop him from doing so without making him a prisoner in the house, a miserable existence for an animal known for his curiousity. If we’d known he’d be in danger – but how many days do you bar him from going out before he’s safe?

There’s something missing from the house now. All through the lockdowns, we have taken pleasure in the company of these three furry idiots we’ve invited to share our house. Now it’s two idiots, and we’re all unhappy and seeing this lockdown as a prison sentence more than some bigger version of being stuck in a lift for a little while longer with a group of amusing people. None of us are looking forward to what comes next.

We’ve been lucky to have lost only one relative to Covid so far, and we’re hoping it stays that way. We’re guarding what’s left to us. Going to sleep tonight hoping our absent tomcat is resting in peace, that our families will stay safe, that life will return to something better than this miserable and isolated existence. When you can’t offer help to a stranger in tears on your doorstep, the world is a harder place.

It’s a generic photo of a black cat above, though of a cat very like our lad. He was a shy cat, and the few photos I have of him I keep for my own memories.

Now the year has really started.

Yesterday was another indoors day, and I used it to plant up the first seeds of the year. I’ve had the propogators set up for a week now; seed compost in modules, gently watered and plugged in to heat the soil. Yesterday I spent the whole day deciding which varieties I was going to plant, and how many of each. I use seeds from the Real Seeds company, mainly. If I do the right thing, I can harvest seeds from the plants at the end of the year which I can plant the following year. The plants themselves distribute seeds too; I haven’t had to buy or plant parsnips for years, and the main problem is pulling up the surplus parsnip plants. It does mean I have a wide variety of seeds to choose from.

By the evening, I had eighty modules planted up with sweet peppers, chilli peppers, aubergines, cucumbers, tomatoes and melons. No, I don’t have room for all eighty. That doesn’t matter, as I know not all of them will germinate, not all of those germinating will survive to be potted up and not all of the potted plants will thrive in the polytunnel. Last year I planted up eighty sweetcorn seeds and had eleven surviving plants. And three cobs.

Other seeds will come later. Inca berries, a few more tomatoes, squashes and maybe sweetcorn. By March, I’ll be setting up the vegetable plot for carrots, potatoes, parsnips if I need to and onions. It’s a hopeful time of year.

Shouldn’t have looked forward to a rest. A friend passed on news of a writing competition, closing on Friday, and could I read her entry? I did. I read the requirements of the competitions too, to make sure she hadn’t missed a rule or limit, and after I’d read and made comments on her entry I kept thinking about it. Who would I invite to a banquet, if I had no limits as to alive or dead, fact or fictional? I had an idea I couldn’t shake, of a perfect trio of guests at the feast. I started writing. I packed away at 3.50am this morning, and have spent the day cutting words, adding ideas, knocking out typos and checking the presentation requirements. Good luck to everyone who went in for the competition at https://www.thebookcollector.co.uk/banquet – my entry is there too. Anyone who’s interested, skates on, 41 hours left to write, primp and submit. It’s been a cheery day despite the weather, and I’m ready for a decent sleep tonight.

Waiting for the snow

We have friends in Scotland and the north of England and the borders of Wales. So I know that many people have had proper snow and are now wishing it would clear up and move on. Apologies for the excitement, but over tonight and early tomorrow we have snow forecast for our area.

I had enough of driving to work in snow over forty years; the first twenty years of it on various motorcycles as our sole transport. My husband rode a motorcycle to work every day for his entire career while I switched reluctantly to cars on the last few years. It teaches you to watch the road surface and other drivers, to take nothing on trust. Splats of diesel and patches of black ice and packed snow mean a wild skid if you aren’t riding to suit the road.

But now we’re retired… we’re peering out of the window every few minutes, long after midnight, waiting for it to snow. We’ve never grown out of it. Wishing everyone a safe drive tomorrow.

Didn’t it rain!

Wet day today. Started just before noon yesterday, and it’s been raining ever since. The roads out to the nearest town have been flooded, the river has burst its banks in several inconvenient places, potholes appearing in the roads are invisible under huge puddles, an accident a few miles south has delayed journeys home to our village. To add a splash of comedy, a notorious local flood point is due to be worked on this week and next, and was pumped dry of all water just hours before the rain marathon began. And it is still raining.

I’m grateful it isn’t the forecast snow, which would have been worse – though it is forecast to freeze overnight, leaving those travelling to work tomorrow facing freezing fog and icy roads. We are staying indoors till the weather cheers up. We have plenty to do.

I’m still following a challenge set by a friend of mine to write 1,000 words a day, and that initial push to reach an artificial word-count has led me to some good places. A complete short story about a pair of ghosts. A short story about someone taking victims of domestic abuse to a new life. Another go at a project stubbornly resisting arrest but potentially worth the trouble of working out all its plot-holes. Roll on rainy days. I have more than enough to do.