My father had several jobs during his life – dairyman’s assistant, window-cleaner (stop laughing) and accounts clerk for the King George docks – but he was briefly a professional photographer. He worked in the docks during the day, took photos and wrote articles for the docks’ magazine PolaNews and took photos for weddings on Saturdays.Continue reading “Letting Go”
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With a Little Help…
As I write this, the wood in the photo above is sitting in the 2020 bay of our new woodshed. We got started on stacking the wood this weekend, with a little help from our friends, and finished stacking all of our cut wood this afternoon. It’s surprising, seeing how much wood we’ve cut overContinue reading “With a Little Help…”
Ready for winter
After all the designing and re-designing and searching for the materials and cussing and working… we have a woodshed. Anyone who thinks it’s too large needs to think that we have to have a roof over it, and a roof high enough off the floor that we don’t have to crouch when we go insideContinue reading “Ready for winter”
Walking with Llamas
Well. After three cancellations due to Covid and really wet weather, we finally got the chance to walk with llamas at Briery Hill Farm Llamas. It was – surreal. We were taken to the male llamas’ pen and every hairy head turned our way. We were introduced to each llama and their main personality –Continue reading “Walking with Llamas”
Not quite Chicklit
I almost didn’t finish the story for the Globe Soup competition, but I don’t like being defeated by a writing challenge. The request was for a story with the theme “Knowledge is Power”, word limit 2,000 words, and I was put into the group asked to write in the genre Chicklit. I hate the term,Continue reading “Not quite Chicklit”
The Hay Wain, 200 years on
We went to Colchester Castle on Saturday to see a play based around Constable’s painting ‘The Hay Wain’, which is 200 years old this year. The play imagined the lives of the farmworkers who would have been depicted in Constable’s painting as the people sitting on the wain, and as little white dots in theContinue reading “The Hay Wain, 200 years on”
Jelly Roll Julia
Last year, I managed to get 1.5 kilogrammes of fruit from our John Downie crabapple tree, and made one jar of crabapple jelly from it. It looked like molten rubies and tasted sharp and sweet together. I said then that I would make sure of gathering the fruit from that tree earlier next year, ofContinue reading “Jelly Roll Julia”
Putting the tin lid on it
We’ve been spending time over the last year designing and constructing a woodshed for ourselves. We started by looking at other people’s woodsheds, but they didn’t answer what we needed – all were fairly small, designed to keep out of the way against a wall or fence and house a shipment of seasoned wood droppedContinue reading “Putting the tin lid on it”
Dot Dot Dot
The treat we chose for the last day of August was a day at Sudbury Quay theatre for Dot Production’s adaptation of ‘Jane Eyre’. We saw their version of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ in 2019, and we’re still raving about it to friends. With only five actors, we assumed they’d cut the part of Margaret theContinue reading “Dot Dot Dot”
All the way to the end
This year’s Essex Book Festival was partly online, partly on site, and wholly excellent. I was in the Zoom for the first event on June 3rd, and again for the Festival ‘opener’ on June 6th (‘We Need To Talk About Essex Girls’), and today I was at the grand closing event at Cressing Temple Barns.Continue reading “All the way to the end”
Julia Chalkley 