Even before waking this morning, I admit to a mood a bit more Scrooge than Santa. The local FaceBook page got me cross as early as the 15th, when a resident at the far end of our village posted a shot of the anonymous letter shoved through her door telling her how vile her outside decorations were – sparking a long round of “Well, we know who wrote that!” and “It wasn’t me, I love her Christmas lights!” “Yes, you did, it’s your writing!”. Five reports of Santas and deer and lights stolen from outside people’s houses in the night over the course of last week just made the point that some people don’t care about landing on the naughty list.
Me? I’m full of Christmas dinner, and the cats are full of the turkey that would have been my share – already turning their noses up at freshly cooked poultry, and it’s not even the 26th yet. Slumped horizontal in the warm, sure there’s nothing decent to watch on TV and with a short story to finish for the Globe Soup competition that closes in a week’s time. Plus a terrific idea queued up behind it, courtesy of a book about fantasy writing sent to me by a friend for Jolabokaflodit.
The Jolabokaflodit began in 2019, for me, though I’m told it’s a Scandinavian tradition. The idea is that you give a book to a friend to be opened and read on Christmas Eve. I tried it out on friends in 2020 – got two books in return, one so sad that I struggled to finish it; the other so lyrical I bought the next two books in the trilogy within a fortnight. This year, three books have landed on our doorstep, and I have a new tradition to pass around – la Befana, the good witch who can be persuaded to send a friend a present to open on January 6th. I am waiting impatiently for that one, and in the meantime – hoping the Meanie Spirit flies away from our village before anyone is tempted to steal our guardian demons from our doorstep.
Hope your Christmas has been more good than evil, and that 2022 brings a better time for us all.
Clifton in Buckinghamshire sets up a Santa display every year. Excuse the blurs, guys – couldn’t stop.
Sage. Green. Rough idea of the colour of one wall. Photo by PL_Mapho, Pixabay
We spent yesterday painting one of the walls in the living room. The colour we finally chose looked completely different on each sample patch we painted, so in the end we chose the closest to what we wanted and slapped it on one of the walls. It looks good. On that wall, and that’s the best we can do. If I’d been on my own, I’d have painted this morning till it was all done once over and stuck the Christmas decorations up tomorrow morning, but he’s a tad more conventional than me, so we called it a day yesterday evening.
This morning – one half-decorated wall (needs another coat) and the sample patches covered over so they aren’t standing out. He wouldn’t let me write ‘Merry Christmas’ across the wall in the colour we’re going to paint it, but – if you’re ever going to graffito your own walls, now’s the damn time.
We put up the decorations around the walls, near the ceiling, and they look even better against the paler green. Next step was to remove the decorations Genie brought in for our delight – so many feathers on the dining room floor that I know there’s one less blackbird alive out there. We haven’t found the plucked corpse yet. Genie has gone on the naughty list.
This is the last week of the excellent project called ‘What the Cat Dragged In’, the doctoral thesis of Hannah Lockwood, student at the University of Derby. She started a citizen science project three years ago as part of her research to investigate what domestic felines prey on – whether they kill, injure, fetch it home, let it go… I registered two of our cats on it, knowing that neither was a hunter – Sasha too elderly and stately, Genie too timid – hoping that they would rack up a nil score that would skew the overall total of cat-kills in the UK towards the ‘not-so-deadly’ side. And that’s the point when Genie became a stone-cold killer, fetching us home a variety of rodents, birds, one rabbit, maybe a rat three weeks ago and today, a blackbird. I still treasure the day she and her brother dragged a live blackbird chick in through the catflap and let it go. The chick chased them up the hallway and up the stairs, and swore at me as I tried to rescue it – swore all the way back to its parents. Maybe this is the same blackbird, grown up and off guard. Much as I hate it, the alternative is to lock her in permanently, and she’d hate that. So I have to dob her in one last time for slaughter of the local wildlife. Best of luck to Hannah Lockwood, hopefully soon to gain her doctorate.
There we are. House dressed for Christmas, tree up and lit, presents under the tree (not many – we don’t buy big presents). Ten minutes to go and we are ready for Christmas.
We’ve even listened to ‘A Fairytale of New York’. Done.
We have just thawed out after an evening singing Christmas songs and carols around a bonfire in the community wood. It was a good evening. It started with us walking down to the wood with lanterns and lighters and stakes to help light the way from the gate to the bonfire site, and finding a car already there, parked across the gate. I thought it was an early singer, keeping warm, so I bent down to say hi, and it was a policeman. He was just catching up on updates, but when he heard we were holding a carol singing evening, he said he’d come back later – if it was okay?
It was an open invite. We had around thirty people gathered around the bonfire by the end, with varying degrees of tin ear from my basso growl to a group of serious choristers discussing who would take the descant roles. The policeman turned up close to half-time and was directed to take a mince pie and a mug of coffee or tea – we were all standing laughing and chatting when the serious choristers started up on the second half.
From ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ to Mariah Carey and ‘Fairytale of New York’ (though they didn’t take up my suggestion of ‘WTF Are My Presents?’ by Letters From Cleo), we covered the range and finished with ‘Come All Ye Faithful’. We did teach our version of ‘Shepherds Watched’ to the tune of ‘Ilkley Moor Bah Tat’ to a friend, and it was echoing across the field as we packed up all the lights and left.
It’s just past full moon, a perfect frosty moonlit night to be singing round a fire. When we doused the fire with water, the steam rose up in a column and fell around us as flakes of glittering frost.
From this day on, the days will get longer and the hours of stargazing shorter. We have the hardest weather yet to come, but there’s hope, and Spring is on its way.
I admit, the picture above is an image from the excellent site Pixabay. Nothing quite so festive exists in our house at the moment. We’ve stalled on progress on getting our living room into order; the carpenters who installed the new living room floor advised us to leave it a week to let the oil settle before rolling heavy furniture in, and we took our week away in Devon as the break the floor needed. But having returned, we’re finding that it’s not just a case of rolling the furniture in.
We’re still looking for the colour we want on the walls to replace the dark sage green we’ve had for almost twenty years. We have a stone surround to the fireplace in a strong, dark bluish-green that restricts the range of colours we could have without making visitors want to hurk (and yes, I have looked into replacing the surround – nothing’s as nice as what’s there). It should be easy, but the wall is a patchwork of sample colours that looked ideal on the colour card, but look like a large bird has been very ill at regular intervals when the paint landed on the wall.
We’re filling cracks in the wall that have appeared over the years, painting the new sections of skirting board and putting softer feet on the base of the sofa, brought in from the outside shelter. I wanted to wait until the wall is painted and the room is finished, but today is a Soddit Day.
We won’t get it painted before Christmas. I’m still planting bulbs in the local wood, still sorting Christmas cards (spent three days writing them, with notes, writing an extra card to a friend who is now widowed and facing poor health alone – and then one of our cards was returned to us, which is a whole extra worry). So today we set a series of tasks.
We sanded the Polyfilla, got all the Christmas decoration hooks firmly set into the wall, painted the last four sample patches on the wall (still not sure) and sealed all the Polyfilla with paint from reject samples. A quick coffee and mince pie, and then we set the sofa on its new feet and rolled the TV and stand in. One table and a G&T each later and the room was transformed.
Stuff waiting for all the decorating to be done. We have TV for the first time in seven weeks, we have a warm living room with beautiful new floorboards and we have a sofa to sprawl on. It’s made a huge difference to how we feel. The elderly cats have come to loll on the sofa with us, obviously pleased to be on familiar ground again. We’re not telly addicts by any measure – it’s the return of normal life that has pleased us.
We were going to move all the stray furniture from the dining room back into the living room and then put up the tree in the dining room as usual – but this is a year of changes. TV, sofa, cats and table – tomorrow, the tree goes up in the fashionably sparse living room, the decorations go on and the lights get wound around and switched on. When that happens – I will count it as the start of Christmas, and the painting can wait till next year.
I should think everyone’s the same. You’ve worked hard, you’ve reached the point where it feels as if it’s not worth the effort to write one more card or wrap one more present, and Christmas feels like three months’ slog for a day’s regimented fun. I’ve called a halt. We’re warm, the cats are asleep all around us and we’ll have some festive lights and decs up tomorrow. That’s good enough for me to call it Christmas.
Photo by Myshun, Pixabay – because ours wouldn’t dare.
Lynmouth in sunshine – photo by nhughes552, Pixabxay
We’ve just had a few days’ holiday in Lynmouth, north Devon, to celebrate His Lordship’s 70th birthday. We’ve never been to Lynmouth before, though we did spend a week at Croyde Bay in the late 70’s. Camping. We aren’t that tough these days, especially in December.
Don’t be fooled by the photo above, we’ve had typical December weather – chilly, drizzly, windy and Storm Barra blew some slates off when we first arrived. We’ve yet to find out what our garden looks like, but we’re hoping the dead trees are still upright and the power’s on.
Lynmouth from Watersmeet Road
We’ve walked around the local shops – about half of them are closed for the season, re-opening in March or April 2022. It’s better, somehow, peering in through the windows at the goods laid out, not able to get in and buy them. Like a permanent Christmas Eve.
The shops and cafes that were open were welcoming visitors. On our visit to Woolacombe Bay, the entire town was closed, except for one cafe overlooking the beach – which was doing a roaring trade. Windows starting to steam up against the chill outside, though we could still see the sand being blown along the beach from sea to dunes below. After we’d walked a short way along the beach, got the sand out of our eyes and had a tea and (eventually) sandwich, we’d sampled everything Woolacombe has to offer in December and left – Lynmouth and Lyntown are a lot more efficient at relieving winter visitors of their cash.
Christmas decoration on the pier – piled up fishing crates decorated like a Christmas tree
Last night, we had a meal in the RIsing Sun in Lynmouth and rolled out of the pub at nine at night. We’d been watching the boats slowly rising on the tide beyond the harbour wall and came out to inspect them. There were some solid little fishing boats, a half-submerged dinghy and a deflated inflatable. Luckily, without an outboard to drag it down. It reminded us of the time we returned from a three week sailing holiday in Norway to find our dinghy had been dragged under by the tides and was completely submerged on the mooring. It took us an hour’s bailing and lifting to retrieve it, and my sister in law was less than amused at the delay to our published arrival for dinner.
Today we’ve walked from Lynmouth to Lynton, from the Exmoor Visitor Centre to the main street of Lynton 500 feet above. First of all along the poetry trail – twice crossing the funicular railway (closed in December) and passing poems written by members of the public. Lyrical thoughts on the sea below, warnings about the seagulls after yer chips and the heartfelt prayer of “Please, please, please, Can I have some new knees!”. We had an award-winning pasty in the Cracker Barrel Tea-Rooms at the top before going back down in the drizzle. The view down into the valley is spectacular, and the end of the Lyn Gorge route passes over the powerful rush of the West Lyn River, then up to the last clatter of the East Lyn River – the two rivers that caused the 1952 floods that destroyed a large part of the town.
It’s been fun, it’s been a holiday (so far) undisturbed by vehicle breakdowns. He’s seen the places where he went on holiday as a child and where he rode the Lands’ End Trials on a motorcycle as an adult. I’ve seen the places I was apparently taken to as a very young child on holiday, and can understand what my brothers are referring to.
It’s been time off, and frankly, we’ve had very little of that over the last two years.
In terms of writing – I managed to finish the Globe Soup 7 Day Challenge just before I left, and I’m pleased with myself. It’s not an award-winner by any means, but I was randomly allocated the genre of Western, and I was never likely to write the gold star version of a Western. I’ve seen Rawhide and The Big Country as a young child, and watched Clint Eastwood Westerns – enjoyed Blazing Saddles when I’m in possession of enough alcohol – seen High Noon once, and that’s enough. As with most What the Ell genres I’m asked to write in, it’s been fun trying.
One poem from the top of the Poetry Walk between Lynmouth and Lynton – steep!
Our living room floor was a mess when we moved in. It’s a project that’s been waiting its time behind all the others – the leaky roof, the flaky render, the bowed studding, the drunken sailor of a fenceline, the complete lack of flues and chimney pots in the chimneys and the windows that were so rotted we could squeeze water out of the woodwork. This year, it’s the most urgent job, and it is close to being finished.
The carpenter running the job is a man in love with wood and everything that can be done with wood. He’s serious, practical, pointing out what can and what should be done and listening to what we want. The floorboards that were there originally were oak, ripped up, cracked, stained, cut across in stupid places and replaced with cheap painted pine where they’d been badly damaged by some previous owner, and we thought it was right to have oak there again.
The sofa got evicted to the outside, and Max found a soft spot in the sun to sit on
Harry and his partner have taken up the floorboards, removed the old joists (basically, tree branches with a flattened edge cut on them), dug out the soil underneath, put in a damp-proof membrane and a wooden ‘trestle’ structure and nailed a solid deck on the trestle. Then he went off for a few days to prepare the boards themselves.
The old boards – recycled as shelving where possibleThe trestle structure, partly completed
Our lovely neighbours dropped in to say hi and were politely unimpressed by the new floor. It wasn’t until he returned on Monday and spotted the new boards being stacked in the room, ready to go on top of the basic deck, that he realised that the deck was just the underfloor – there’d be new boards on top of that, replacing what had been there before.
The doors have been open all day today and yesterday, and the house was freezing – the pond has a thick layer of ice on it and the cats’ outside water-bowl is frozen solid. The cold has got into the walls and floor and iron radiators and the heating struggles to bring the house up to temperature. The woodshed proved its worth – we had the dining room stove running within minutes of Harry and Ethan packing up and leaving, and we thawed out within an hour. Max settled himself in front of the fire and soaked himself in warmth.
They’ve worked hard all day, with a lot of sawing, planing, fitting into place and nailing and they left it all finished at half five. All the boards are down, and they look incredible. We’ve been shuffling around in there in socks, tracing grain lines and imagining what it will look like when the boards are sanded down and oiled.
The walls need to be repainted, but – we have Floorboards.
I had the chance to attend a woodland workshop last week, learning how to light bonfires and whittle spoons. It was fun, taking a small axe to a chunk of birch branch to take off the largest excess parts, then taking a small whittling knife to the wood to carve a more delicate outline, and then a hook knife to carve out the inside of the spoon bowl. The image above is after fifteen minutes with the axe and straight whittling knife.
I got hooked. I bought a crook knife online and had to prove my age before they’d send it on. I thought I’d grown out of proving my age when I was seventeen and applying for a pint of cider with a straight face, but no, into my sixties and sending a copy of my driving licence to prove I was responsible to have a sharp edge.
The spoon has been sitting in my fridge for the last week and has been whittled into a pretty respectable spoon shape by now, a couple of millimetres at a time. The real wood work has been going on in our living room today, with the carpenter returning to plane and stack the oak boards to finish our floor.
The grain is beautiful, distinctive, the story of the tree it was clearly written. The dark patch with a black heart to it was where someone nailed a bird box or notice to the living tree and used an iron nail, tannalising the wood. The knotholes appear where branches were. The lines of grain are the years it spent growing. All this will be our living room floor. I can’t wait.
I was encouraged to return to the community wood this morning to talk to our local water board. The committee want to find the water source to set up a water-pipe, and despite finding the water taps and the rough direction, finding the pipes themselves is proving a challenge. The water board arrived with its computers; I brought my dowsing rods. Snipped off bits of coat hangers, I ought to say, but they do work. I’m no expert, but I did trace the outlines of a buried well and underground spring with them, and had two solid twitches for the water pipe in the wood.
The water board man didn’t laugh. He was encouraging. He said he’d seen dowsing rods used with real success in the past and advised me to hold them looser to let them indicate without my interference. Again, two solid twitches – now marked with blue paint – and when the other committee member there tried her luck, she got twitches in exactly the same places. We’re digging for the water pipe in the right place, just not yet deep enough – probably four feet or more down. And maybe digging in earth frozen solid in minus temperatures is not ideal.
This is the end, I promise, the very end of the Essex Book Festival 2021. Today was the big reveal on the Story Hunters project, the invitation to visit one of twenty nominated sites in Essex, take a photo of yourself to prove you were there and write a story of between 50 and 250 words inspired by the site. The organisers put back the closing date from July to October to let more people take part, and the choice of the winning entries was made in November.
Storm Arwen had its say. We arrived at Cressing Temple Barns in a squally burst of cold rain and strong winds, though from what my friends have told me we got off lightly. Lost roof tiles, power cuts, hefty objects blown around. People have died when debris and branches have hit their vehicles. Still, we weren’t tempted to wander around the grounds, and the lively closing event to the main festival in August seemed like a different world.
I didn’t get a mention, neither runner-up nor winner – but the people who did get runner-up were chuffed, and they should be. There are some very talented writers in Essex. The girl who won the under-16 prize was very shy, hiding her face and running back to her seat with her prize, but the director made the point that she was now a published author at eight years old. I hope she remembers that tomorrow.
All of the stories are on the Essex Book Festival website under the space for ‘The Story Hunters – Flash Fiction Competition Entries’. I’d like to visit the places next year, virus allowing, to see what they’ve seen.
And I hope the Essex Book Festival keeps up its momentum and comes back with a bang next year. I will be there.
I had a strange encounter last Saturday, and it’s taken me until now to decide whether to write about it. I doubt the man involved will ever read this blog, but I do worry about upsetting people by what I make public.
I went to our community wood on Saturday to help plant the bulbs they were gifted by a charity, only to find that the session had been cancelled as the keenest volunteers had been driving to the site when a deer crossed the road without looking and put its hooves through their windscreen. They were unhurt but very shaken, and with a badly damaged car to sort out. The deer ran off unharmed. Val (the committee member who brought the bulbs up to store in the cabin) told me the news, and I said I’d stay and plant a few.
Then a man arrived from the direction of the wood. He was dressed in an old woolly jumper and a home-knit woolly scarf, though he spoke like a member of minor nobility. Val greeted him as Malcolm and took it as a matter of course that he had pitched his tent in the wood and was intending to stay the night there.
After Val left, I was alone with him. If she hadn’t been there to introduce him, I would have greeted him politely, made an excuse and left. As it was, I stood chatting to him in the chilly late afternoon. He knew the birds flying swirls above the wood, where they’d migrated from and what they fed on and spent as much time watching them through binoculars as he spent talking to me. I asked if he’d be cold in the tent and he said he was looking forward to it, waking to the early morning damp and the wildlife chuntering through the leaves. I told him where we were – four hundred yards away – and invited him to knock on the door if he needed anything, up to and including a hot meal and a bed for the night.
It was said in a moment of impulse and compassion for an elderly man in thin clothing on a cold night, followed by a moment of sheer O Shit as I wondered how to explain to Himself that he needed to make the pizza stretch to three people rather than two. Malcolm was startled, asked if I was sure, and after that it would have been rude to say “Actually, no, my husband will run round the kitchen quacking like a duck when I tell him”, so I said “Oh, of course, we’ll eat at seven – turn up any time.”
We stood chatting for another thirty minutes, then I went home to explain myself. By then, I had found out who I had invited to dinner. Malcolm was the son of the man who had donated ten acres of Essex woodland to his local community in his late wife’s memory, to be used for recreation and as a nature reserve. Malcolm had missed out on inheriting a share in a valuable piece of land, and he thoroughly approved of his father’s decision
He arrived just after seven with a bottle of very nice red wine as a guest-gift. His car had got stuck in the mud at the lower end of the wood, so he was doubly grateful for the offer of a meal – there was no chance of reaching the nearest pub or restaurant for a hot meal there. He’d walked to the Co-op for the wine and walked back to ours, a couple of miles in the freezing cold. He had mistaken next door’s mansion for our shabbier house, and ended up being accosted quite aggressively by our wealthier neighbour to the west (our lovely Glaswegian neighbours to the east of us would have sat him on their porch with a glass of whiskey and called us over to join them all). He settled at the table, thanked us both for the meal and we were away.
It’s the best evening we’ve had for a long time. He was well read, had thought out his opinions and was ready to discuss ours and his without hinting that he was right. Above all, he listened. It’s a rarer skill than you might realise. I have been interrupted, talked over and ignored for most of my adult life and to have someone sit quietly, listen and respond to what I have just said was a rare treat. He also talked. He dissed the Roman Empire, discussed the legends of which trees were supposedly inhabited by evil spirits and told us of the strong reaction to the pidgin version of Romeo and Juliet performed by his Cameroonian students (their parents stormed at him for teaching their kids to disobey their parents). We spent a long time listening to him. His life had never been conventional.
He enjoyed the plain veggie pizza and the warm mince pies but he wouldn’t be persuaded to sleep in our spare room. At the end of the evening he wound his scarf around his neck, slipped into his battered shoes and disappeared off into the night, thanking us again.
The following day he was there in the wood, surrounded by people who were happy to see him and keen to talk to him. He reminded me of his father, a man I had met just once. His father was sociable, cheerful, optimistic and driven to help others, and Malcolm is definitely his father’s son.
Malcolm has a standing invitation to drop by whenever he’s in the area, and I hope he takes us up on it. And the next time I’m in the community wood I will be thanking the whole family who have wanted this wood to belong to us all.
Preparing the front room for the builders’ return with the new floorboards is a bigger task than we’d bargained for. The cement base for the tiled plinth around the fireplace seemed to have been built in several small chunks, and the old floorboards ran through the middle of one side, like an oak sandwich with cement instead of bread above and below the boards.
On Monday we shuttered the missing corner and built it up with concrete and cement. On Tuesday, we discovered that part of the shuttering came out easily, and part of it had wedged itself so tightly that it took three hours of patient work and effort to get it free. The only job after that was to knock off a bulge of old cement to give space for the new boards to go under the edge of the tiles. Ten gentle taps and the kind of catastrophic collapsing sound you hear on Tom and Jerry cartoons, and a slab of cement the size of a large turkey fell off the bottom of the tiles and into the floorspace below. We’d found the other missing corner, apparently. One bucket of concrete and a lot of ingenious work later, and we’d filled the large gap it had left behind and blocked it in to make a sharp edge.
Today we thought we were on the last leg. We repaired the broken plaster and filled in all the cracks in the plaster that had opened up since we last painted. The room looks like a group of toddlers have been throwing white splodge at it but we are ready to paint the walls when we know what colour we want. The room is going to look great. Better yet, we’ve blocked up the holes outside that were letting mice get in and live under the floorboards and in the walls, and the room feels warmer. The draughts running under the floorboards and up through the gaps have gone.
The very last stage will be to set up the nails on the walls where we always hang our Christmas decorations. The walls are thin render over wattle and daub, and the nails get looser every year, threatening to drop boughs of holly on our noddles. With the Christmas decs secure, fresh paint, no draughts and good floorboards, it’ll be a different house. I hope I’ll still love it as much as before.
Julia Chalkley 