Making bunting

Yesterday I had the bright idea to make some bunting. I'd never done it before, but I soon got OH to make me an appropriate template, and then I set to. Well, I have to say it wasn't to difficult, but talk about time-consuming . . . It would have been a doddle if I'd been using felt flags and ready-made bias-binding, but making your own bias binding takes forever . . .

Still, I'm very pleased with the results, and hopefully they will be well-received in due course. Photos to follow . . .

Winter weather!

Well, we knew it was meant to rain "a bit" yesterday, but what the weathermen omitted was the bit about "rain of Biblical proportions" . . . Hell's teeth, it was a cross between a gigantic bath being emptied over the land and a monsoon. Our steep lane turned into a river. The river came up across the lane and backed up a fair way towards the Chapel. When it subsided a little, there were still big streams of water at the sides of the lane, and piles of leaves dumped higgledy-piggledy, along with big chunks of tarmac, where the water had undermined the road! I think that the Council workmen are going to be busy out there in the New Year.

I stayed indoors, listened to the Archers, finally got around to bottling 10 bottles of Damson Wine, and cleaning out 3 demi-johns and racking the New Forest Crab Apple wine. I meant to change the oil in the chip fryer, but that had to wait until today. I also made a fresh lot of Damson Ice Cream. Oh, and I managed some x-stitch, and some card and unavoidable letter writing.

Tippy is slowly getting better, but I want him to suddenly become his old self, and I think it is going to be a slow business, perhaps 1 step forward to 2 back. He is eating better, but after I "missed" with the Boscopan injection he was meant to have yesterday and DIDN'T get the needle beneath the skin, his bowels have slowed down again. I am still administering oil and water by the dropper.

The photo wasn't taken yesterday. It's one from a couple of years ago I think, and the rain was much worse yesterday. A real flash flood.

Anyway, I will try and get myself out of the doldrums where I seem to have descended, because of worrying about Tippy.

Oh, and just when we needed it, a stray cat which has been doing the rounds locally for a couple of months now and which I have discouraged from coming up the hill every time I have seen it doing so, has finally turned up here, desperate and will NOT go away. It's a girl, and she looks pregnant. She is going to have to go to the CPL, because we CANNOT have any more cats - certainly not pregnant ones. The old Christmas story - there is no room at the inn . . . even for cats who are half-sisters to our boys, and are grey with apricot/buff highlights and eyeliner and white bibs and paws . . . and are tame.

Winter weather!

Weekends

Well, The Invalid is still seeing his Personal Doctor, but things are - hopefully - moving in the right direction now. He had to go down again this morning for, ahem, one of those "bend over" moments, but this time no enema necessary. I am trying to get liquids down him (I am not his favourite person when he sees me arriving armed with a small syringe). He ate a very good breakfast though, and LOVED his cream and egg yolk. Tomorrow there will be fresh ox heart for supper. (Thank you Susan for your advice, which has been taken on board). In fact, many thanks to all of you who have been so helpful and supportive during the last couple of weeks. Your thoughts are much appreciated, I can tell you.

Now I have the weekend ahead of me. The usual routine is grocery shopping on a Saturday morning, when we have dropped D off at work. Meals will be loosely based around what is available in the "reduced" area! We are having a frugal week this week, to try and put money aside for bills (including the vet's bill, although they have been VERY good about what they have charged for - only one enema when he had 3 . . .) I want to try and clear that as soon as I can. So it will be an "eat from the freezer" week, and we will only buy essentials.

Of course, one person's essentials differ from someone else's. One of this week's "essentials" in our house is (ground) Cinnamon. We use this a lot. My husband has it sprinkled on his home-made muesli each morning and says it helps ward off colds. I use it for baking too. Anyway, we have nearly run out.

Bread flour and fresh yeast are more essentials. I am back to trying to bake fresh bread every other day. It has gone by the board recently because of nursing Tippy, but tonight I made two pizza bases and with the 1/3 of dough left over, I baked a small crusty white loaf. After years of me telling him - but him not REALLY listening - we saw a programme this week about bread making where they showed the ingredients in the average loaf, one being derived from animal hair . . . OH was suitably horrified and said he is never going to eat Supermarket bread again. Well, the occasional best quality loaf won't hurt, but I agree with him, home made is best and only has 4 ingredients - flour, water, a little salt and fresh yeast. It takes very little time to make - perhaps 20 minutes from start to finish - and is so much more filling than the rubbish bread . . .


Cheese bread . . .

Saturday afternoon will be spent watching the horse racing, whilst I work on another Christmas gift for my daughters. One piece of knitting is now finished, so I need to crack on with the other. There is a half-done piece of x-stitch needing to be finished as well.

Sunday morning rain is forecast, which bodes ill for the Car Boot Sale, but there are always some stalls under cover, and you never know what turns up. Sometimes there are more stalls than you can shake a stick at, but nothing worth buying. Other times, there are only a handful of stalls but something just up your street is on offer. You never know.

I had hoped to go to the local auction tomorrow, but finances are tight. I will be listing more belongings on e-bay instead, as this is really helping our tight finances at present, and we have far too many things we don't need so we may as well get some money for them.

Sunday afternoon is "free" - I'd like a walk, weather permitting. So much to try and cram in though, during the short hours of winter daylight.

What are your plans for the weekend?

Yet another update

He's back from the vet's, and his night at one of the female vet's houses where she said the first thing he did was to pass big sharp bones all over her kitchen floor - and it would appear he had eaten a Rattus Giganticus (the farm next door breed 'em BIG). She thinks most of it is now out, but he still "may" need another enema etc. I do hope not. He has been delerious with happiness a being home and very clingy - it's just like having a poorly toddler all over again. I couldn't do anything - tried the ironing and he just sat on what I was trying to iron!

Anyway, he's having a snooze now, which is good. I will have lunch whilst I can and get back to the ironing.

Tippy . . .

He's back at the vet's again today. In a very bad way this morning straining to go, and crying in pain, then being sick again. Another drip, another enema - which has produced large sharp bones - where were they hiding when they took the X-ray last week then? Lord knows what he ate - pheasant perchance? He is on steroids now, to try and calm his inflamed bowels, and spending the night at the vet's home, under the radiator in her bathroom (bless her), as she said how much they hated being left in a cage overnight at the vet's. He has had his bowel greased a good way up too, to help him pass anything still lurking inside. I am exhausted with worry and the awfulness of watching him starve to death in front of my eyes.

Say a little prayer for the wee man, please.

My favourite shops . . .

This follows a set pattern for me, in chronological order. From the age of little till my teens, sweetie shops were IT. I could tell you the range of sweets for sale in any sweetie shop in our part of Southampton, and can still recall the wonderful one at Weston Park, with its huge counter of penny sweets, four for a penny sweets, parma violets, Spanish Gold "tobacco", chocolate fish, mushrooms, shrimps, lips, false teeth (these latter three in a tasteful Germoline pink), Flying Saucers, Gobstoppers, "cigarettes", Opal Fruits, Lovehearts, Sherbert Dabs, Rainbow drops, Lucky Bags, Fizzer bars, Five Boys chocolate, Frys Chocolate Cream bars, and many of the chocolate bars still on sale today (though with different names). Then there were the sweetie jars (now, I note, being offered for sale (empty) at Antiques Fairs for upwards of £20 a time!!!) Rows and rows of them with anything from Barley Sugar Twists, Peardrops, Quality Street (always too expensive to buy!), rhubarb and custard, chocolate limes, apple drops, acid drops, kola cubes, blackberries and raspberries, pineapple chunks, to the - horrid to me - clove balls, aniseed balls, Fox's Glacier Mints, Fisherman's Friends, Zubes, Cough Candy and Coltsfood Rock. No wonder I had so many fillings!!!

Around ten, my taste in magazines changed from comics (the Beano and the Dandy religiously every week) to taking Horse and Hound weekly. I used to always look at the Countryman magazine too and Country Life (ideas beyond my station there!) I was never far from books, but they were usually the sort on offer at the Library (I devoured four new books every week), or the offerings in the hardware store down the road, which were mainly Enid Blyton (whose books I scorned as they didn't have PONIES in them) to the Children's Classics, which I read my way through. Then when I got my first job at 16, I discovered the delights of Gilbert's Bookshop in Southampton, house in a tall terraced Regency building, and it was my first port of call on pay-day. My collection of antiquarian horse books dates from that time and I still have them all, and have greatly added to that collection over the years, and still do. I have been a bookaholic all my life and needless to say, rarely come home empty handed from the car boot sale (another 4 books today!) and our regular trips to Hay-on-Wye are one of our greatest pleasures.



Around this time (16) I got my first pony, and although he was only a yearling, and spent lots of my wages buying equipment for him from the saddler's at the bottom of Southampton High Street. How I LOVED to go in that shop - the smell of leather was so seductive - and I bought my first saddle by paying £1 a week for it. It was a 16" half panel leather-lined pony saddle and cost me £16 - £1 an inch . . . and it was a bright London Tan colour when I first got it. Subsequently I bought a girth (red nylon I seem to remember), linen saddle cloth (white with red and white Tattersall check), numbered stirrup leathers and solid nickle stirrups.

Food for Maize (my pony) was initially bought in 7 lb brown paper bags from a feed merchants in Woolston. I would go and buy 7 lb bags of broad bran (huge flat flakes, not like the rubbish you get today), rolled oats, pony nuts, and rolled barley and stagger home on the bus with them. I bought linseed and boiled it up on the cooker. Eventually I saw sense and bought my feed in half hundredweight sacks which lived in the back of the larder, underneath the stairs.

My dad gave me my first initiation into the delights of antiques shops and I can remember us regularly looking in the windows of the ones in Wickham when we all went out for a Sunday drive. We never went inside though, as we couldn't afford to buy anything, and didn't want to be "time-wasters" . . . He would have loved the Antiques fairs we go to now, and was no stranger to buying stuff at auction as he bought old prints to use the glass for painting his copies of Impressionist paintings on. I still have them . . . A few old chairs came our way in the same manner - half a crown a time perhaps - and a jug and basin set (very plain with a grey pattern). My real love of antiques has come since I married my OH, although when I lived just outside Salisbury I always used to buy little things from the antiques and junk shops in Lammas Street, and the big collection of antiques stands where Sainsburys now is. Little sugar sifter spoons at 50p a time, blue and white china, interesting little bits. Dorchester Market was another hunting ground of mine.



Somewhere along the line came my interests in crafts and making things, embroidery, sewing generally, quilts, knitting etc, and so I have been in enough shops to have stashes of material, wool and craft paraphenalia. This has been passed on to my eldest daughter though her sister rolls her eyes and sighs if she sees me stroking wool or trying to persuade myself NOT to buy another piece of material . . .

What are your favourite shops?

P.S. Tippy is hopefully on the mend again - cheese got him "moving" (a bit too well!), but today he is eating a little and has been out hunting. Currently asleep on our bed . . .