It's been quite a good week...I had three days in a row of being able to breathe reasonably well so took advantage and painted a small Welsh dresser...it was pretty nasty. It'd been varnished with some orangey sort of colour...now it's been sanded and under-coated and painted in a colour called Real Cream...just have the doors to finish.
That dresser was given to us when Luke and Cindy moved to Sweden and it'd become a sort of dumping ground for the binoculars and bills...dogs leads and old carpentry planes...a tiny wooden bird cage and books waiting to be read or to go to the charity shop...
Hardly anyone has cut their silage yet...they're waiting for a spell of decent weather, which is promised for England next week by all accounts...don't know about us though. So far the summer has been truly dismal, with only a few scattered days of blue skies and sunshine.
Silage is a sort of fermented grass fed to cattle during the winter...most local farmers have it baled...then it's wrapped in black plastic to keep it from going off. It stinks to high heaven. The boys who cut and bale often work throughout the night...we can hear the steady thump, thump of the balers on the fields...
Something else we often hear at night are young Owls flying over the cottage...can't remember now what kind of Owl...I think they are juvenile Long-Eared, but my memory is letting me down completely...their call is high-pitched and quite un-earthly in the dark.
This week, while I was sitting up doing my pursed lip breathing after I'd gone to bed on the settee...was looking out of the window at the Honeysuckle and saw a Humming-Bird Hawk Moth...they're quite big and they hover exactly the way that Humming-Birds do with their long tongues sipping the nectar from the flowers...lovely to watch as the moth went from flower to flower.
It doesn't really get pitch dark at this time of year...sometimes it seems as though there isn't any proper night-time at all before the dawn begins again...there's often a thick mist as the day begins on the field opposite our cottage...a cock Pheasant suddenly takes flight and the cattle blow clouds of vapour through their noses...these are the magical hours, when it's all too easy to visualise wraiths and lonely spirits abroad. An old man maybe, with his leather satchel on his back...walking down the road in worn boots and socks with holes and much mended coat.
We've been eating strawberries...fat, scarlet and so sweet and juicy strawberries...with ice-cream...with cornflakes for breakfast and just on their own for the pleasure...
Our Gooseberries are almost ready...if you make jam, try adding a couple of heads of Elderflowers to your Gooseberries...it gives a heavenly Muscat flavour.
So another week has gone by...
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