Peas in a Pod

When did you last have fresh peas straight from the pod and eat them like sweets/lollies/candy?  Well for me the answer (before a few days ago) was many years ago - perhaps even as long ago as my youth because I don't think we ever grew proper peas on Lewis and the other things of that ilk that we tried were usually destroyed by the wind almost at birth.  I love them.  Why I have never bought them I have no idea.  Wendy gave me some a few days ago and I thoroughly enjoyed them.  There were none left to cook.

Christmas Is Coming

I have two concessions to Christmas decorations:  The Christmas Tree that Catriona made for me when she was 5 and about which I blogged last Christmas and the Father Christmas which Friend Who Knows Too Much gave me one year as an accompaniment to my Christmas gift.  This year it is standing on my table with the first Christmas card to arrive this year.  Don't you just love him?

Up at 6am

I'm very happy getting up at 6am as a rule but if I happen to want to get up at 0800 .  So how is it when I have to get up at 6am I don't like it?  Is it some deep psychological desire not to be compelled to do something?   At the moment I'm playing in the Golf Croquet National Championship Doubles which are being held at 'my' club and the Te Mata Croquet Club 30 minutes drive from The Cottage.  Yesterday was the ideal day for playing: full sun out of a cloudless sky, warm and just a slight breeze.  Today has started off very cool with drizzle.  C'est la vie.  I also have a friend from Gisborne staying.  He's playing too.  It means early starts and long days.  

I'm only playing for two days out of the six and shall be helping set the lawns and hoops at our Club for the next four days.  That means being at the club at 7.15 am instead of 8.15 am.  And I do this for fun! 

Mind you the way things are going in the Doubles I'm not sure that I regard croquet as 'fun' at the moment.

The Swimming Pool: Day 4

Progress indeed:

Thankful Thursday

SP at Secretly Skint blogged yesterday on Oradur-sur-Glane.  My first comment on SP's post was "I first went to Oradur-sur-Glane over 10 years ago and it was probably one of the most emotionally difficult experiences I'd had.   Subsequent visits have been less stressful but nevertheless have been an incredible reminder of man's inhumanity to man. I did quite a full post on it on Eagleton Notes back in 2008.".  One of the things that I was reminded of was the image of a person in the recent Bosnia/Croatia conflict being crucified on their own door.  That is a mental image which has never left me.  How the British UN soldiers trying to keep some sort of order who found that must have felt I cannot begin to understand.

Bearing in mind that I read this not long after I'd got up in the morning I knew that it was going to affect my thoughts for the day and it did indeed.

This evening I revisited it and noticed that the last of many comments was by SP and was "It's a wonderful world, it's the people who spoil it.".  How apposite.

I have led a very sheltered life in that I've never been involved in such conflict where man has tried to annihilate man and do it as cruelly as he possibly can.

Today I am truly thankful for that.

I would be even more thankful if I felt that man would learn from these atrocities and stop.

The Swimming Pool: Days 2 and 3

The swimming pool at The House is coming on in leaps and bounds.  Three days ago it was a hole in the ground.  At the end of Day 2 it looked like this:

And at the end of today - Day 3 it's coming on in leaps and bounds:

They say that tomorrow it will be filled with water and then they will backfill the outer walls with concrete.  That seems rather a big ask to me.  I want to know what goes on the bottom first.  I can't wait for tomorrow evening when I get back from the pre-Nationals practice session.

A Morning Chat

Last night I blogged about friends and Wendy coming down for an evening chat and concluded that face to face chats really were Good Things.  This morning Wendy was going off to Mitre Ten Mega (our B & Q/Home Depot equivalent) at crack of dawn and dragged me away from my Christmas cards and so on to chum her and have some coffee.  When I got back I had to go off to Havelock North and by the time I got back and had lunch it was 1400 and I still hadn't written a card (good job I got the first lot posted yesterday).  Another crack at the cards this afternoon and then some other odds and ends.  I was just settling down to cook some meals in advance of my houseguest who is staying for the next week of the Golf Croquet Nationals when a frantic Wendy returned to watch the last episode of Downton Abbey's second series (the house renovation is at the stage when they can't get into the living room or their bedroom to see the TV).  I've specifically avoided watching any of the second series after I missed the start and decided I'd watch it all on DVD when I returned to the UK.  So I now know the end before I know any of the lead up to it.

It's little things like this that make me realise just how much I enjoy people just dropping in.  I should really be making this my Thankful Thursday post.

More Lewis Snow

An email was waiting for me this morning from Spesh1 aka Pat telling me about the snow and forwarding some photos that Dave had taken on his mobile phone:

From the back of Pat and Dave's house

Briagha in The Lews Castle Grounds

A footpath in the Castle Grounds - so why the tyre tracks?

I'm Becoming Paranoid

Blogger is after me.  I'm sure.  SP from Secretly Skint keeps telling me that A Hebridean in New Zealand  has disappeared from her blog reading list.  She mends it and then I disappear again.  Likewise I've had problems with her blog disappearing.  There may be others but no one has mentioned it.  As I refreshed the blog a few minutes ago to check the last post I've just put up I noticed that the unusual pig photo representing SP wasn't there.  I might not notice less distinctive pictures.  In fact all my followers have been randomly shaken up and I'm not sure who is and who isn't there but as the number has just decreased by one I am assuming that it is just SP who has disappeared.  It's not me SP honestly it isn't!

An Evening Chat

My friends are scattered throughout the world. I know no one in the city in which I was born and brought up, went to school and uni and worked until I was 26 and left.  A friend recently said that when her friend left the village in which they both lived "I could leave here now. She was part of what made this village home. Su hogar fue mi hogar. These are the ties that bind us.  And in a way that is difficult to define, I feel alone again.".  And I knew how she felt.

When we went to Lewis in the '70s we left 450 miles behind the life we had made for ourselves, our friends and our families.  We forged new lives with new friends.

I stayed on the Island.  Most of the friends I made in those formative years have left even though many have remained very close friends.  There are times when I have felt alone again.  And then new people have arrived and new friendships have been forged.

And now I have deserted them for six months of each year.

In fact because my friends are scattered throughout the world I have become used to keeping in touch by all sorts of means in this age of easy communication.

But this evening as I was about to do something or other Wendy came down to bring me the mail she had collected from the mailbox and to have a chat.  Several hours and several glasses of conviviality later she poddled off back up the lane home.

And the above words came back to me.  And I understood what she meant with a new clarity.  There is nothing like sharing words face to face.