Tea time in France

‘I don’t think that woman realises that she’s had a near-death experience,’ whispered Sean my indefatigable travelling companion to me as we stomped out of the ‘Salon de Thé’ late one evening.

It had been a long hot day on our holidays in ‘la belle France’. A day in which, for me at any rate, this was just the final straw in our struggles with French eating habits.

Our first obstacle arose at lunchtime. We’d selected what we thought sounded like just the spot for lunch – a town with a harbour along the Canal du Midi. And, most importantly we’d be hitting it just at the right time for lunch.

 As anyone knows, the French seem to be obsessed with routine when it comes to meal times. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are all served between certain times, and outside of that you can forget about eating.

On arrival we could see that this town was in the middle of a festival. Market stalls and a stage were being erected in the town square ready for a concert that evening. So far, so good. What we didn’t realise, until we began to search for food, was that the town was about to celebrate the ‘Festival of Cassoulet’.

Cassoulet is a delicious bean and meat stew, ideal for those cold winter nights when you need something hearty and warming. It’s not, to my mind, the kind of thing you want at lunch time when it’s 35 degrees in the shade!

Every restaurant in the town had only one thing on the menu – cassoulet. After about 45 minutes of wandering we eventually managed to buy a sandwich and a cold drink which we consumed in an exhausted heap on the side of the road.

Undaunted we pressed on, promising ourselves a mid-afternoon pit-stop for some patisserie and a nice cup of coffee. We were beginning to think we were jinxed when the next town was also mid-festival. This time it was a ‘Festival of Prunes’!

But back to the Salon du Thé (or tea-shop to you and me). We’d had a lovely evening meal (no cassoulet or prunes on the menu!) and I’d hoped to end it with a nice cup of tea. But yet again my hopes were dashed when instead of the black tea I’d ordered, outcomes a pot of Earl Grey. Again, lovely if that’s want you fancy, but to my palate I might as well be drinking a bottle of perfume.

But I was not too alarmed because earlier in the evening I had spotted the aforementioned tea-shop and I had it in reserve for just such an eventuality. Full of hope and bright anticipation I approached the young woman at the counter and in my best broken French asked for a pot of tea.

Despite the many people seated around the Salon, and without batting an eyelid, she told me that she was ‘fermé’. I have enough French to know that this was a disaster. If I don’t get a cup of tea before I go to bed, I have the most unmerciful headache the next day.

I must have looked quite deranged as I held my head in my hands, shook my head and mumbled ‘closed, closed, I don’t believe it’. At this point I think any Irish barista might have asked if I was alright and offered me at least a take-away tea.

But not this lady. This lady was not for turning. She was ‘fermé’, and that was that.

Back on to the street with us, me in a caffeine-starved daze and Sean frantically looking around for an alternative. Thank goodness we didn’t have far to go till we found another establishment where amongst the long list of tea strewn with rose petals, tea flavoured with orange, rose hips, raspberries and every other kind of flipping bark and berry known to man there lurked an ordinary, common-or-garden, normal, not flavoured with anything except tea, tea.

In fairness it was a great holiday and I had some fantastic food along the way, but for the sake of my blood pressure I may just have to re-think the whole tea drinking thing next time!

The Oil Man Cometh

There’s nothing like expecting  visitors for giving you the motivation you need to organise a really thorough bit of housekeeping. Having an overnight visitor demands even more exacting standards.

When you live alone – well apart from Scrap the cat who isn’t very demanding, although I haven’t managed to get him to hoover up a trail of hairs he leaves in his wake – you can be as untidy as you like. Of course the reverse is also true – you can be as fastidious as you like and no one will pass any remarks.

But I was entertaining an overnight visitor last weekend and so the whole house was going to be under scrutiny. So I got stuck in with gusto and, to be honest, was quite enjoying my industriousness and the sight of newly dusted shelves and table tops, nicely plumped cushions and not a cat hair in sight.

I had a good mornings work under my belt and was enjoying a spot of lunch when I noticed something was missing. The comforting hum of the central heating boiler, clicking in and out and keeping my wee home and myself quite cosy, was absent.

I checked one of the rads. Lukewarm. I turned the system off and on again. Nothing – no burst of warmth. I had run out of oil. It was cold and damp outside, it was lunchtime on Saturday and my guest was arriving tomorrow.

Luckily I live on the outskirts of a small town and know my oil supplier well, so when I put in a call and explained my situation I was assured that help would be at hand shortly. In fact they rang me back to say that since the oil truck was on a delivery out my way, he’d be there in about fifteen minutes. Terrific.

Much relieved I sat back down and looked over in the direction of the oil tank. Hell’s bells! I had forgotten about the chopped down hedge!

You see my oil tank is up on a raised bank that runs along one side of the driveway. It’s cunningly hidden in the middle of a very thick laurel hedge. I’m sure the chap who put it there thought this was an ingenious idea – but try telling that to the oil delivery man who has to grapple with the steep bank and laurel branches!

But last autumn I had this 30ft hedge chopped down to a more manageable 6ft, leaving 24ft of assorted branches and undergrowth in situ till I had time to retrieve it. Guess what. It was all still there and I haven’t had an oil fill since and had no idea if they blooming tank was accessible and my lovely oil man in shining armour was on the way!

I was out the door and scrabbling up the bank in a flash and horrified to find that indeed the top of the tank covered in branches. A frantic trip back to the house to grab a saw and I was soon sawing for all I was worth to clear a space for the oil pipe.

 I was sawing and pulling at branches like a woman possessed and didn’t hear  the oil truck coming until it was reversing up the driveway. It was too late to jump down so I had to stay where I was as the truck made it’s way towards me.

But was worth it to see the surprised look on the face of the oil delivery man when he saw me, saw in hand, in my bright orange fleece peering out from the hedge just in his eyeline! Poor man, I don’t think he is used to finding people in hedges when he’s out and about – but fair play to him, he held his nerve, filled the tank and even primed the boiler which had developed and airlock.

But I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when he got back to HQ and told the story of the mad woman in the hedge!

Bat Wars

Bats. Funnily enough they were not creatures I had ever given much thought to as a city dweller. But they’ve been a feature of my life ever since I moved to the country twenty years ago.

We have had our adventures, the bats and I, as they sometimes found their way inadvertently into my house. Hanging on the bathroom curtains, lurking under my bed or flitting silently around the sitting room. Every visit has caused mild panic in me. I do realise they are harmless creatures and I have always done my best to evict or remove them without injury to either them or myself.

But now my two lunatic young cats have added a new dimension of bat warfare to life.

For the last while I’ve noticed that the cats have taken to thundering around the roof of my house at dusk. It’s a single storey cottage type and they leap up on to the oil boiler which is adjacent to the lowest point of the roof. It is only a couple of feet – nothing to these agile young cats – from there up to the roof.

The first thing that alerts us – myself and my wee doggie Pippin – is the thud of them lepping onto the boiler.  Pippin makes a rush for the sofa next to the window giving of her best imitation of a Doberman or German Shepherd right beside my ear. Of course by that stage the intrepid pair – Seamus and Dusty – are nowhere in sight, so after some more warning barks, Pippin resumes her dozing on the sofa beside the fire.

Shortly after they find their way onto the roof there are intermitted bouts of what sounds like a herd of elephants running across the roof of the kitchen. Needless to say Pippin is yet again quite perturbed by this unexplained and unseen sound of galloping intruders. Her ears perk up, she rises from her prone position and glares at me as if to enquire what am I going to do to sort things out.

At first I thought they were just larking about, exploring new territory, indulging their curiosity as cats are wont to do. I did think however that it seemed a strange place to be running around at night when there were acres of fields and hedgerows to explore.

But the other evening I found out what they were at. Chasing, and I am sorry to say, catching bats. How they do it I do not know. There is a pitched roof on the house, so no flat surface from which to pounce and surely the bats have enough sense not to be sitting around on top of the roof. But catch them they do.

I saw it with my own eyes in the deep dusk the other evening. I thought it was a mouse that Dusty was ‘playing’ with in that awful way that cats do. As I watched mesmerised out the window however I realised that, since mice do not fly, it must be a bat. Uuurgh!

I banged on the window to distract the cat and indeed she did look my way and the bat took its chance and flitted off into the hedge. But alas next morning on the door mat was a dead bat – either that one did not effect a successful escape, or another one took its place. Either way, the bat population around here was reduced by at least one.

What to do about it I’m not quite sure. I cannot move the boiler. I can’t visualise what kind of barrier would prevent the cats accessing the roof. I suppose all that I can hope for is that the bats learn by experience to avoid swooping low enough at that point to evade capture.

In the meantime I’ll just turn up the TV and myself and Pippin will try to ignore the mayhem all around us!

Abe Lincoln & Me

I have just discovered a link between Abraham Lincoln and myself. It’s tenuous, I’ll give you that, but a link it is, sent to me in black and white, nonetheless.

For the last several years I have been determined to ferret out what family history I can. It started after the death of my mother, reading through old letters and postcards trying to piece together from fragments of correspondence a whole missing line of my family.

Perhaps it’s an age thing. The older you get the more important the past seems to become. I have become intrigued to see patterns emerging – patterns in occupations, health conditions, looks and personal characteristics.

For instances – and stop me if I’m boring you – but I discovered that my great grandfather was a policeman and served in the RIC. On the other side of the world and almost a hundred years later, I found a second cousin of whom I had no previous knowledge who had just retired from Los Angeles police department.

Coincidence, probably. But surely if doctors, lawyers and politicians can run in families – why not policemen?

But I digress. Back to Abraham Lincoln and me. As I said I have been researching my mother’s side of my family, since naturally, it was mostly to that side that the correspondence referred. My mother’s father had married a Catholic woman, to the seeming horror of his two Presbyterian brothers. While one of them eventually was reconciled, the elder brother broke all ties and I never even knew he existed before I found the store of letters.

Genealogy is a huge area of interest for people all over the world. There are people poring over documents, scanning micro-fiches in dusty rooms, searching on-line, off-line and between the lines trying to connect with people living and dead.

And while there is nothing like turning the pages of an ancient ledger of birth records – there is also a lot to be said for the internet and the wondrous speed and accessibility it affords to the part-time researcher like myself. 

It was a combination of searching the 1901 and 1911 Census of Ireland along with placing messages on genealogical sites that have lead Abraham and me to the same page. And it’s not that I have presidential ambitions and hopefully it’s not that I’m in line for assassination.

But it turns out that a very distant relation was a famous detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. According to my source he was also an undercover agent in discovering the so-called Baltimore Plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

My son-in-law has already pointed out to me this evening the tangled nature of this link. This guy was my gran-uncle’s wife’s mother’s brother. Yes I can see that it’s a bit of a mouthful and hard to get your head around if you say it out loud. But written out like that … well, I can almost see me and Abe putting the finishing touches to his Gettysburg speech, or pondering the station of the nation over a couple of iced teas on his front porch!

Windy Birthday Balloons

Over the course of a life one is presented with many challenges large and small. Mostly you have a long lead in time and lots of opportunity to prepare yourself – becoming a brain surgeon, an astronaut, an engineer, having a baby .

 But every now and then something pops up quite unexpectedly and you have to manage it with no help, no lead in time and no preparation except your own native cunning, physical dexterity and stubbornness.

My son-in-love (daughter’s husband) was turning forty and there was going to be cake. It is a big ‘cake’ house – she is great at making them and her family are great at eating them. The children were ‘up to ninety’ at the idea of surprising Daddy with a large cake for his birthday.

Joe had even administered a questionnaire during the week to ascertain Daddy’s current favourite in the cake stakes. Drawing up a list of questions and disguising it as a school project he had asked ‘what is your favourite food’, ‘what is your favourite colour’, he had thrown a seemingly innocent question about favourite cake into the mix. So a lot was riding on this surprise cake.

Seeing as how it was a special birthday, I was invited down for the ceremony. I was glad of a bit of a diversion on a wet Sunday in November – my wee dog Pippin loves cake and is also very fond of my son-in-love who feeds her the occasional slice of ham.

My daughter is a bit like myself. She concocts elaborate plans and scenarios and ropes in lots of unwitting people to help her achieve her aim. She had managed to bake the cake and help the children create cards and decorations for the house whilst unsuspecting Daddy was otherwise engaged.

She had organised a Sunday lunch outing with Daddy’s parents so that the house could be prepared for the surprise on their return. The person she had in mind to actually do this preparatory work was me. I of course was ignorant of this fact when I accepted the invitation.

What she also kept secret until I was practically in my car and heading down the road was that I was to pick up some helium balloons which she had pre-ordered. ‘Just put them in the sitting room where he and the kids will see them when they come home,’ she said. No bother.

My experience with helium-filled balloons is pretty limited. I know the basics – don’t let them out of your hand or they will be gone. So I reckoned it was a task I would be able for as I walked into the shop to pick them up.

But these were no ordinary small balloons that you see tied to the end of a hospital bed wishing you well. A huge number 4 and a 0 were hovering over the shop assistant who happily handed them over.

Did I mention a wet November? I also should have mentioned a windy November. No sooner did I walk outside than me and the balloons nearly took off. Luckily I had parked near the door, but my problems were only beginning.

I couldn’t believe that nothing in my life so far had prepared me for trying to get two huge helium balloons into the boot of a hatchback car in the wind and rain while a small dog is going ballistic in the back seat. 

To this day I do not know how I managed to sufficiently distort myself to have one hand holding them down while the other hand reached high enough to grab the boot and bring it down without bursting the bloody things.

Luckily Daddy was suitably surprised, the kids were ecstatic and the cake was delicious and I have another life lesson learned!

Hips, Nuts & Bolts

I caught sight of my left hip in the shower this morning and was momentarily puzzled to see that it looked like I’d done the proverbial ten rounds with Mike Tyson. I couldn’t figure it out for a few minutes. I do bruise easily and have often found mysterious black and blue marks where I didn’t remember getting any bangs or wallops, but this was quite a collection and was in fact pretty sore.

The only thing I could put it down to was some small repairs to my campervan which had entailed me crawling underneath it. The ground where it was parked was particularly rough, so I reckon it must have been all the rolling around on the hard surface.

I had lent the van to number one daughter and her family for a much-anticipated weekend away, but as luck would have it, it had come back a little worse for wear. Nothing major that couldn’t be fixed, and I had already called Tom my trusty fixer of all things mechanical around the place. He was on his way to have a look under the bonnet, but I thought to myself, no harm in trying to have a go at sorting one or two of the smaller items.

The broken catch on the wardrobe door was easy enough. I had a spare and once I’d figured out which way up it went, the new one worked like a dream. Thus inspired with confidence I decided to tackle a water pipe which had come loose from its moorings underneath the van.

The pipe comes from the fresh water tank which is attached to the undercarriage and when not draining the tank is attached to a wee hook-y thing under the body of the van. The first thing I had to do was get one of those hook things.

Now many years of going into hardware shops has taught me that unless you know the exact name of the thing you’re looking for, it can be a fruitless journey. But once again Mr Google is my friend and I showed the assistant a picture of what I was looking for. Bingo!

Getting the old hook off was a bit of a palaver. Years of rust and dirt had built up and despite my best efforts with spanners, wrenches and a hammer it wouldn’t budge. Luckily I managed to find a hacksaw and some fresh blades which cut through it fairly easily and that was stage one complete.

And I now realised that with the nuts from the old fitting now unusable, I was going to have to return to the hardware shop to get a new nut and bolt to fit. At this stage dear reader I hope you are keeping track of the number of times I had been in and out from under the van – and it wasn’t getting any easier with time!

Finally with a new nut, bolt and hook thing (properly called a ‘tool clip’ in case you ever need one) I hoped the job was nearly done. Alas no. The new bolt was bigger than the old one and so I was off again looking for a drill to make the hole bigger.

I was turning the last few threads on the nut when from my prone position under the van I spy Tom the mechanic’s car coming up the drive. To say he was surprised to see me scrambling out to greet him is somewhat of an understatement.

‘In all my years,’ (he must be 70 something) ‘I’ve never seen a woman come out from under a car’, he said. And looking at my hip this morning – it is a sight he might not see again around these parts!!

Bat Woman

As I have learned to my cost, when you live in the country, you need to be prepared for battle at a moment’s notice and in the most mundane of circumstances.

Last Friday morning I was getting ready to go to circuit training. What with one thing and another – being a new granny mostly – I hadn’t been for a couple of weeks. It’s not something I particularly enjoy. All that huffing and puffing, sweating and straining is not my idea of fun of a morning. But I go because I said I’d go. I go because it’s hard enough to find opportunities to really exercise hard and at my age I so need to keep those muscles moving.

So these are the kind of thoughts that are swirling round my head as I stand in the bathroom brushing my teeth. Out of the corner of my eye I think I see something moving – just a faint blur of black at the very periphery of my vision.  Thinking I am imagining things I bend to spit into the sink. Still holding my toothbrush I raise my head and again, have the feeling there’s something there.

I turn around. And in a split second my eyes see a black winged thing flying around the room and my brain registers the fact that the flying creature is a bat.

Aaarrrgh!

Totally freaked I run as fast as my bare feet will carry me out of the room, screaming blue murder and slamming the door behind me. My heart is pounding out of my chest and I am breathless with fright. So much for needing a couple of rounds of the gym to get your heart racing.

Now the thing is I live alone – apart from Scrap the wonder cat, but even he is not up to this task. So running around the house screeching for help is not an option. It’s nine in the morning and my next door neighbour will be at work.

It slowly dawns on me that there is nothing for it but to tackle this problem myself. And I need to tackle it now.  I cannot take the thoughts of coming back to face it later – what if it gets out of the room into the rest of the house. It could hide anywhere. I wouldn’t have a moment’s peace wondering where it was going to pop out of next.

So I prepare for the task. First I get dressed. Then from some primeval (and totally false) notion about bats getting into your hair I put on a hat. I don my rubber gloves – they always make me feel like I’m going to do some serious work.

And finally – and this was an inspired idea – I retrieve the long-handled feather duster from where it lurks in a dark corner behind the wardrobe. What I thought I was going to do with the feather duster I have no real idea. I think that I thought that it seemed like a harmless (bats are an endangered species) yoke with which to fend off a direct attack by a frightened bat.

Outside the bathroom door once more I took a deep breath. One, two, three – I’m going iiiiinnnnn….!

Talk about an anti-climax. The poor creature (note the change in tone!) was by this time fluttering on the window sill. Trapped behind the net curtains (thank god for net curtains!) he looked a lot smaller and less scary than he had done five minutes ago.

Dressed in my now totally unnecessary battle gear, all I had to do was open the window and let nature take its course.  A puff of wind caught his outstretched wings and out the window he flew.  Where he came from I have no idea, nor did I stop to wonder. I had a date with a skipping rope, a stepper, a hula hoop and … eventually a nice fat cappuccino with an extra shot for my nerves!

 

 

 

No hugs or kisses

The words from the Joni Mitchell song ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ were running through my head as I removed the children’s booster seats from the back of my car last week. ‘Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’ Somehow their removal seemed symbolic of the shock and turmoil of the past couple of weeks.

I was giving the car a bit of a clean out. I’m sure most of us have been cleaning our houses to within an inch of their lives these days, as much from boredom as anything else. So I had moved on to cleaning the car. You’d swear a herd of mucky sheep lived in it – but it is really only one grubby small dog who, because she is so low to the ground picks up every bit of dust and mud going when we out walking.

And I took out the seats to give them a wipe and to hoover underneath them. And there they were sitting all forlorn on the driveway and I realised that there was no point in putting them back in for the foreseeable. I have to say I had a bit of ‘a moment’.

In the same way that you incorporate your children when they are born into your life, so us grandparents somehow expand our hearts, our homes and our days to accommodate the extra small people. Without our realising it, they become part of the fabric of our lives.

All of a sudden we have dodies appearing behind cushions, bits of Lego tripping us up on the floor, artworks hanging yet again on the walls. We become aware of Peppa Pig and LOL dolls, Thomas the Tank Engine and Paw Patrol. We find ourselves yet again having to tackle spellings and sums, reading about how Maria and Dermot are playing ball in the park and learning all about what are now called ‘tricky words’.

I now have small person wellies permanently at the kitchen door and for years had a travel cot tucked under the bed. I have a supply of art materials for rainy days in a press and two small wheelbarrows lined up in the garden. I have a set of swings, a football and a trampoline all ready and waiting for action whenever they are required.

Like thousands of grandparents all over the country I have taken on the task of regular childminding. My daughter’s generation are still feeling the effects of the last recession and so my generation have tried to take up some of the slack in whatever way we can. And so my weekly timetable – such as it is now that I am retired – is based around my babysitting days.

And now, almost overnight, it has all come to a halt.

And yes I know that I am inclined to be a bit of a drama queen at times, but I do think we are all entitled to shed a tear or two at what has come to pass. I cannot be the only one finding it a huge shock to go from all that involvement, all those hugs, hand holding and kisses to social distancing and isolation in the space of a week. And I haven’t even mentioned how much I miss their Mammy!

So I am going to allow myself a couple of days of tearfulness and whinging and bit of lying on the sofa to contemplate my misery before I pull myself together. I know I’m not the only one feeling this way, so that is some comfort.

In the meantime we are making lots of video calls to each other and sending virtual kisses. They’re not as good as the real thing, but at times like this you take what you can get.

Abe Lincoln & Me!

I have just discovered a link between Abraham Lincoln and myself. It’s tenuous, I’ll give you that, but a link it is nonetheless, sent to me in black and white.

For the last several years I have been determined to ferret out what family history I can. It started after the death of my mother, reading through old letters and postcards trying to piece together from fragments of correspondence a whole missing line of my family.

Perhaps it’s an age thing. The older you get the more important the past seems to become. I have become intrigued to see patterns emerging – patterns in occupations, health conditions, looks and personal characteristics.

For instance – and stop me if I’m boring you – but I discovered that my great grandfather was a policeman and served in the RIC. On the other side of the world and almost a hundred years later, I found a second cousin of whom I had no previous knowledge who had just retired from Los Angeles police department.

Coincidence, probably. But surely if doctors, lawyers and politicians can run in families – why not policemen?

But I digress. Back to Abraham Lincoln and me. As I said I have been researching my mother’s side of my family, since naturally, it was mostly to that side that the correspondence referred. My mother’s father had married a Catholic woman, to the seeming horror of his two Presbyterian brothers. While one of them eventually was reconciled, the elder brother broke all ties and I never even knew he existed before I found the store of letters.

Genealogy is a huge area of interest for people all over the world. There are people poring over documents, scanning micro-fiches in dusty rooms, searching on-line, off-line and between the lines trying to connect with people living and dead.

And while there is nothing like turning the pages of an ancient ledger of birth records – there is also a lot to be said for the internet and the wondrous speed and accessibility it affords to the part-time researcher like myself.

It was a combination of searching the newly available 1901 and 1911 Census along with placing messages on genealogical sites that have lead Abraham and me to the same page. And it’s not that I have presidential ambitions and hopefully it’s not that I’m in line for assassination.

But it turns out that a very distant relation was a famous detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. According to my source he was also an undercover agent in discovering the so-called Baltimore Plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

My son-in-law has already pointed out to me this evening the tangled nature of this link. This guy was my gran-uncle’s wife’s mother’s brother. Yes I can see that it’s a bit of a mouthful and hard to get your head around if you say it out loud. But written out like that … well, I can almost see me and Abe putting the finishing touches to his Gettysburg speech, or pondering the station of the nation over a couple of iced teas on his front porch!

Smashing concrete

Most people I know relax by sitting down having a nice cup of tea. Or maybe stretched out on the sofa with a good book or watching a bit of mindless telly. Exercise can be good too – a bit of fresh air in the lungs is always reviving. For me at the moment however, taking a break means trundling wheelbarrows full of earth around the garden.

As if I didn’t have enough to do I decided to create a new raised bed around at the back door. I know, I know – it’s not exactly a priority – it would be more in my line to spend what little free time I have doing a bit of dusting, or investigating what lies beneath the sofa. But honestly the outdoors seems a far more attractive option.

There are three aspects to the construction of this new raised bed. First of all I needed to break through the existing concrete. I have been contemplating this for some time but as I don’t own a pick-axe I kind of put it on the long finger. To be honest I was saving it up for some weekend when number one son might be in the mood for a bit of concrete smashing.

But as it happens a couple of weeks ago I had work done in another part of the garden and the chap who did it left behind this very heavy lump of metal. It was lurking around the back of the shed for a few days before I took note of it and realised its potential for smashing concrete.

I’ve learned since that it is a ‘half shaft’ of a tractor, but it’s much more useful to me as a yoke that you lift up and just let drop on the concrete. After a few bangs, hey presto, the concrete is broken into small enough bits to be shimmied out with a crow-bar.

The second stage in the process is the building of a small wall around my raised bed. Over the years here as I have dug my way around the garden I have released a lot of rocks back into the wild. I’ve used them in a rockery, to edge my vegetable and flower beds, and – having gone on a course to learn how to do so – to build small dry stone walls.

Building walls with field stones is like a 3 dimensional jigsaw puzzle for which you have no picture to work from. You have a sort of an idea how long you want the wall to be and how high, but after that it’s totally dependent on the rocks and stones you have to hand. And how it turns out is always a surprise.

And the final stage – the bit where I am up to now – is the filling of the bed with fresh earth. Good topsoil is like brown gold to me. So when about 2 months ago a chap with a digger came to create a new gravel path at the side of the house and wanted to know where would he ‘dump’ the soil, I told him to leave it right where it was and that I had great plans for it.

He gave me a bit of a funny look, but fair play to him he did just that. So now I have a lovely 3 foot high, 10 foot long mound of earth to play with. I’ve been using it to replenish the soil in the oldest flower beds and to add a bit of extra life to the vegetable beds. And the plants in the polytunnell don’t know what’s hit them with all this extra goodness they’re getting.

So when I am sitting at the computer for hours on end – sending emails, designing flyers, writing up class plans – and I need a break, I just stick on my wellies and reach for my wheelbarrow. There is something tremendously satisfying about digging into the earth, filling a barrow and seeing one pile of dirt diminish and another pile take shape.

And having moved a few barrow-loads I can come back to the computer refreshed and renewed and ready to tackle the world again.