I have seen grisley bears up close and their paws are the nearest thing that I have ever seen to compare with the hands of the Keresley miners.

You know you are becoming countrified when after 2 or 3 hours working in the garden you find yourself looking up at the Sun's position and calculate that it must be about 3:30pm..... AND only being 10 minutes off!
Having completed many time critical maintenance tasks over the last few weeks in preparation for both the new seasons B&B guests and Holiday Cottage I finally found time to get out into the garden to tidy it up in readiness. Thus the compost bin area tidied, lawn mown and patio totally cleaned all completed just in time for our new guests, B&B tonight and the Holiday cottage on Saturday night.

Claire, my right hand 'man', chief menu tester, companion shopper, nag, bully admonisher and Daughter is abandoning me for a job in Somerset, that's right Somerset! Just 5 ~ 6 hours down the road then. Yes it is her dream job (she is a Speech Therapist), yes it will give her the freedom that she has so longed for, yes she will escape from having to live with her 52 year old fart of a Dad and yes the whole world is about to open up for her....... BUT WHAT ABOUT ME? 

The work that Claire has done has put us many months more advanced than we would have otherwise been and of course with her being here so much of the time in the refurbishment and setting up of the business, well she kinda softened the blow, so as to speak, in getting me customised from running a team of some 300 staff to suddenly just managing, well just Me I suppose. This was always going to be the tricky bit after all I had had about 30 years working in large teams and working alone was an unknown, a foray into a completely different work climate and indeed in a County with the word 'slow' often written in front of it's name!

Don't get me wrong I have worked in several 'slow' supermarkets in my time several of which were in the dozy county of Surrey. I was put into a tiny, tiny little (it was very small) branch in a small village called Bramley (which I guess is where the apples came from). Four customers an hour and you'd have been happy! The postman made it 5 and on delivery days everything just went crazy as an extra member of staff was called in to put the 12 cans of beans on the shelf. I had been working in a fairly busy store and so this was totally nuts to me and I couldn't see how it could ever pay. Then the bomb shell, I found out that the reason I was covering the Managers job was because the Manager had been fiddling the books by swopping the one and only till with one of his own and pocketing all the proceeds, then swopping it back when another member of staff was actually working with him (delivery days). SWOPPING THE TILL! How an earth he thought he was going to get away with that God only knows, for goodness sake he only had 4 customers an hour, it could hardly have been worth the bloody trouble!
       Then there was Keresley store just north of Coventry which was just a small shop in a terrace of small village stores. However the thing about Keresley was that it only existed because of one thing.... The coal mine. It was like the Midlands version of Merthyr Tydfil and every now and again you'd get an actual miner come in and pay and he would hold out the loose change in what appeared to me to be the biggest hands I had ever seen. Honestly you would think that they were digging the coal with their bare hands, I have seen grisley bears up close and their paws are the nearest thing that I have ever seen to compare with the hands of the Keresley miners. The Store was so small that when you were restocking the shelves you had to stand up to let any customer that was in the aisle squeeze past. I worked a winter in that store and I even cycled to it from Shirley (nr Birmingham) some 17 miles (my car had broken down), in the new laid snow and on the way back I can remember cycling back through snow filled country lanes in the dark winter evening under a full moon. God was it spooky as the bare tree branches seemed to reach out and try to touch me. It took bloody hours and I never did it again. My overriding memory of the Keresley Store was that there was a hole in the roof right above the toilet and as I sat there, doing what I had to do, slowly but surely snow flakes silently wafted down on me as it started to snow.

I should not miss out the Wisborough Green Store, another of the small Surrey stores where I was put in to cover for a suspended Manager allegedly on the fiddle. What it was with those Managers I'll never know, it must have been something in the water., In actual fact that branch took just £4,000 a week and half of that was in alcohol and the other half included 200 water syphons a week. For those of you that don't know what a water syphon is well you may have seen old comedy sketches / films where a person picks up a large bottle with a sort of trigger spray on top and squirts a lot of water at another person in a slap stick sort of way. They are really meant to be used to add fizzy water to a Gin or Scotch. |The store was the only one where I kept the cold foods in the back up chiller that was made of wood, oak I think. Again I was often the only member of staff and I was  most tested when I arrived at 7am one morning to find that over the weekend someone had captured my little shop in the biggest butterfly net that I had ever seen. The net was held up by two enormous poles in the genre of cabers (the sort that Scotsmen toss on a regular basis) and the mesh stretched from the roof of my store to the far left and far right, and there right in the middle was the front door in sight but right out of reach. I stood there and pondered a little. It took me a second or two before the reason for it being there dawned on me, then the penny dropped. The shop sat prominently on the said 'green' and they played Sunday cricket there so the net had been placed across my shop to prevent a stray cricket ball from smashing a window. Only thing was that I now couldn't actually get to my front door and I'd need four hearty fellows to move these two tree trunks to allow me to do so.
    Then a Toyota Truck trundled around the corner whilst I was still standing their in bewilderment and a young guy, dishevelled and bleary eyed as if he had just woken up in the realisation that he was meant to have taken down that net last night before he started that last session in the pub with the rest of the team. He said nothing to me other than a greeting grunt then he simply dropped one caber at a time to the ground, detached the net lifted and shoved the two massive poles onto his pick-up and job done he sped of back around the corner leaving me standing in his dust cloud with my door key poised and ready to go. That is middle England for you.

So I will carry on without Claire and yes I will 'manage' just fine but a little something will be missing and I will be looking forward to her return in the school holidays....





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..........and it keeps coming back like a homing Tit.

So I nipped into the office to check email and glance out of the office windows which look across the patio and over the lawn onto the extension opposite. I say extension but it is more of a conversion as it would have been a small attached barn originally and is probably as old as 200 years!

Now as I sit here there is a familiar knock, knock, knock on the front edge of the flat roof above me. It has been going on for 3 - 4 days but there is no or little breeze and nothing appears to be hanging off, as it were. So what is the noise then? Well I am so glad that you have shown such an interest, it is a Blackbird whom has found that my gutter provides a good source of sludge, much to my embarrassment. He is tapping away at the plastic guttering stuffing as much of the goo into his beak as possible (urggggg!) then he launches himself from the gutter sinking straight down towards the lawn as if he has forgotten to account for the extra payload he then levels off, with his belly all but tickling the grass, pulling up out of his dive he flies up to a rambling climber on the opposite side of the garden and disappears into the thicket of branches. I guess that my gutter is somewhat a bit of a cement factory supplying a good gunk to hold the nest together.

Meanwhile on a top floor window of the said barn conversion opposite me a Blue Tit has been going crazy for about the same amount of days. You may remember that I had to withdraw a mirror from my garden because several Blackbirds were arguing with their own reflections getting all territorial about themselves and Percy my visiting Pheasant was spending hours and hours checking himself out in it.
Well this poor Blue Tit flies up to the Fig tree branches that are in front of the barns window then launches itself up to the top of the window and with beak pressed up against the glass it struggles to fly forward, loses all lift and ends up fluttering and sliding down the glass until it hits the window sill where it will either fly back up for another go, or fly to a branch next to the window, or simply rest on the sill if it has been doing this for some time. It has easily made this foray several hundred times. So why have I not shooed (in the british context you understand as "Shoo, Shoo, be off with you pesky little Tit" and not in the Iraqi I'm a journalist and I don't care very much for George Bush Shooing) it away? Well I have and it keeps coming back like a homing Tit. Mmmm, hold that thought for a while....

In the 15 minutes that I have been writing this the Blue Tit has left, come back and fluttered up and down that window many times and the Blackbird has been pecking away over my head 5 times (lucky I don't have hangovers eh?).

I just stopped and counted how many times the Blue Tit fluttered down that window, in 60 seconds it did so 14 times and was still doing so when I stopped the clock!

Yesterday pre-empting the hose ban (April 5th or so we are warned) I have power washed my front yard and my oh my was it dirty. Mainly as a result of moss growing between the cobbles which I believe are 'set' far too high above the cement. As I blasted the ground with the washer hundreds of little bits of moss flew off in every direction and half way through the clean up it looked like a moss factory, if there was such a thing, had exploded. Now it is finished the whole thing looks so much better. The jet wash machine was just £25 and I bought it about 7 years ago only getting it out of the packaging when I moved here, just as well it works because I don't think I would be able to get my money back now even more so as the receipt has faded to become just a blank piece of paper!





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I fully expected the end credits to roll and a John Williams theme tune to accompany the scene.

Last week I was on a mission of re-discovery..... The re-discovery of our patio. Last year my son Stephen spent a couple of days peeling away a thick layer of muck from our patio with a pressure washer. As a result we found that our patio was red and not the grubby black that it appeared to be.

Well it is a year and a bit later and once again a black film has appeared on the self same patio fooling us into believing that the slabs are black. So I have had to get the pressure washer back out once more to attack the grubbiness.

As you can see there is quite a difference between the cleaned tiles and the dirty ones but it is not a fast job and each tile takes an average of 2 minutes to clean. A few of the tiles are very old and have disintegrated under the force of the washer and so I have some repair work to do but on the whole it is a really nice rustic terracotta patio. The big black manhole cover caps our Well. It is not the deepest Well (when I dropped a plumb line down it I measured about 8' deep) but under the cover it has the 'traditional' round Well shape and is very full of water. I like the trend of having a thick sheet of glass capping wells so that you can see into it whilst standing on it. However I think if I did that then it would become a serious slip hazard when it rained, so I'll let that one go this time.

Today the dry spell of weather broke and as I write this there is icy cold sleet falling in the darkness of the evening so it looks like the days of the wintery sunsets are done. However the last two days have once again provided excellent sunsets and so I have dragged different family members off to different places on the coast to see these. I don't think I have experienced so many stunning skies in so few weeks.

We went back to Cley and a Jet was flying high above in vast circles leaving expansive vapour trails which cut through the existing clouds seemingly smearing them as it did so. Meanwhile the sun had started to set and the circular trails began to turn red. The jet carried on with these large circular motions covering many miles returning every 5 minutes or so.

Meanwhile behind us the honking of hundreds of  geese was building up and from behind some houses a huge flock of geese appeared. I took the snap below and then I zoomed in with another and counted them all. Whilst it may not appear to be the case there are actually approximately 720 geese in this photo!

As we watched the sky colourize Claire suddenly whispered to me to look at something in the stream below. I missed it but she explained that she was sure that it was an Otter. A few minutes later it reappeared and swam across the open water right in the centre of this photo.











We saw further evidence of its movements as the still water broke into ripples when it swam along the bank of the pool.

The trouble is that there is so much else going on all pulling on our attention, the sun had set and the after burn was warming up as the sky reddened, There were Herons flying over every few minutes, there were all kinds of bird calls from the marsh and then a Hercules aircraft flew over us and disappeared into the sunset in the manor of a finale of a film. I fully expected the end credits to roll and a John Williams theme tune to accompany the scene as it flew into the embers of the nights action.

On Saturday Claire and I went to Wells-Next-The-Sea but this time there was so little cloud in the sky that the sunset was not going to stun us with her varied colour schemes. However we were in for an unexpected treat as we noticed swimming in this perfectly tranquil pool several seals and although it was getting dark both of us managed to get some photos of them.

There were a handful of people dotted around this vast beach, a few near us also watched them but others had no clue that they were there and had decided to call it an evening as the sun dropped behind the dunes.

 The seals seemed just to be having fun, splashing about and were unperturbed by us although as you will see they clearly knew that we were there and checked us out on several occasions.

Tête à Tête

I'm watching you too!

Boo!

 Claire and I sat on the beach watching the seals until it got too dark at which point they were just landing themselves, in their rather awkward way, on to the beach.
Again the backdrop of noise came only from the loud gull across the pool in front of us and the restless trumpeting of several hundred geese which floated on the still air from about a mile away as they were settling down for the night.

We returned to the car as the Moon shone down on us whilst Venus,Jupiter and Mars made their appearance in a totally cloudless sky.

I am writing this on Sunday night and the weather has changed significantly now. Outside I can hear the rain beat against the windows whilst inside the wind is howling in the chimney breast and the kitchen door and living room curtains are being gently blown back and forth. Every now and again the lights of the house flicker probably as a result of the electric cables touching as they are blown together in the street by the high winds. I feel we may lose power completely soon and so I am heading off to bed where it is of no concern if all the lights go out and I can dream of the next sunset instead.....

Perchance to dream...

Click on this photo for a slide show of the full size photographs.

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