My 2018.

01 Tue Jan 2019

Tags

2018, building works, Christmas, church, Days out, holidays, home improvements, medical problems, no rector, retrospective, weddings

I will begin with a couple of thank yous. Thank you to everyone who has kept in touch with me and kindly asked how I have been during the past few months. Thank you to all of you who have continued to follow my blog despite my not having written much all year.

We have had quite a busy year which, as you know has included having our old conservatory demolished and a new room built at the back of the house.

During the building works in the spring

Building has begun!

Ta-da!!

Elinor continued attending art classes three times a week at Wensum Lodge in Norwich until mid-summer and was also interviewed by and accepted at East Coast College to start a Level 3 Art and Design course which began in September. Richard and I share the driving, taking Elinor to and from college in Lowestoft. There is no direct public transport between where we live and where she studies; it is quicker and probably cheaper for us to drive her there. In the autumn we took her to three East Anglian universities that run degree courses in the subject she wishes to study. They all held open days and we were able to tour the colleges and listen to the tutors speaking about the subjects they teach. Elinor was able to speak to these tutors and ask relevant questions. We visited Suffolk University in Ipswich, The University of the Arts in Norwich and Anglia Ruskin College in Cambridge. She is currently applying to all three and has filled out her UCAS form and paid her fee. We now wait to see if and when she is called for interviews.

Because we still have no rector for the eleven churches in our benefice we have had to become more involved in the running of the benefice by attending more meetings and in taking some of the services. Richard took a few services in Rumburgh church during the first half of the year and I took a couple in the second half. We have attended fund-raising events such as coffee mornings, sales and quizzes and have tried to be as supportive of the other churches in the benefice as we can. As well as being on the cleaning rota for Rumburgh church I have been doing most of the cleaning at St Margaret South Elmham church all year as there has been no-one well or fit enough there to do the job. All cleaning is done voluntarily as most of the churches do not have the funds to pay for a cleaner. As St Margaret has discovered, even when money is found to pay for a cleaner, no-one wants to do it as many local people are afraid to enter these old churches on their own. All of our churches are medieval buildings needing constant work to keep them from falling down. This past summer, with its lack of rain, we have found cracks appearing in many of the churches in the benefice. Some of these repairs have been attended to but we at Rumburgh are still waiting to see when and if ours can be done. We also have lost a number of glass panes from our windows which meant that birds and insects got into the church during the summer and cold, wind and rain is getting in this winter. The window repair job will cost about £1000 and we will have to find the money from somewhere. We have an on-going problem with bats roosting in the church.

Rumburgh church decorated for Harvest Festival. You can see the cracks above the East window.

A closer view of the cracks above the window

Another crack

and another.

The floor tiles are disintegrating.

I visited Alice in February so that I could see her act in ‘Sense and Sensibility’ as I mentioned in a post at the start of the year. I drove to Kent in March to make a long overdue visit to my sister who was not at all well at the time. Richard has visited Manchester a couple of times to see his brother, his nephew and his family. I travelled to Liverpool for a couple of days in June to re-visit old haunts and to see a dear blogging friend who made me very welcome indeed.

The Liver Building in Liverpool seen from the Mersey ferry in June

Richard, both girls and I spent a week on the Isle of Wight in July and then Richard and I spent a week in the Peak District in August while Elinor stayed with Alice in Sheffield.

Looking out to sea from the Isle of Wight in July

The Peak District in August

We visited my dear friend Wendy and her family in August and then, before we knew it, it was the beginning of term and we were driving to Lowestoft three times a week.

We celebrated my brother’s wedding to Helen in May and Richard, Elinor and I visited Pensthorpe Natural Park for the day in June to celebrate our 24th wedding anniversary.

Pensthorpe

We have all had to attend many medical appointments. I take my mother to the eye clinic every five weeks and despite having eye injections because of her macular degeneration she has almost completely lost the sight in her left eye and the sight in her right eye isn’t too good but it is stable for the time being. She also has cataracts and glaucoma. Her arthritis is painful and she can no longer stand up straight. Her pet cat died in the summer while we were away on holiday and she misses him very much. I am spending more time with her.

Richard had a hospital appointment for a procedure at the end of May during which he had to be sedated. During this procedure it was discovered his pulse rate was irregular and faded away at times so the investigation had to be abandoned. Since then he has had a number of tests to see what was causing this problem and the specialists were very puzzled for some months. Of course, Richard was quite anxious all this time not knowing how serious the problem was and wondering if he would need an operation or not. A couple of days before Christmas he received a letter telling him the latest test had shown that the problem wasn’t as serious as previously thought and he would just be needing a course of statins. This made us very happy. The test for the original problem for which he needed sedating is no longer needed either!

Elinor has scoliosis and has a trapped nerve in her spine which has caused part of her leg to become numb. The problem appears to worsen during the winter months when she gets cold. She has been having physiotherapy to see if anything can be done to ease the situation. Nothing so far has made a difference.

My rheumatoid-arthritis is still in remission, which means I have had no flare-ups for some time. My joints are quite severely damaged, especially my hands and feet but I am used to this as I have had it for many years. Unfortunately, I have now got osteo-arthritis which is causing yet more damage to my hands and feet. As everyone knows who has osteo-arthritis, there is nothing that can be done for it except pain relief and eventually joint replacement if appropriate. I also know that the best thing that can be done is to keep using the joints and keep them moving.

After many years trying to get a full-time job Alice was at last successful and began working at Manchester Metropolitan University in November. She now has a challenging job as befits someone with a doctorate but has to commute from her home in Sheffield to Manchester each day. There are regular problems with the trains and she often doesn’t get home til very late. However, once she is on the train she can enjoy an hour’s reading which is a great pleasure to her. She will be receiving her doctorate at a graduation ceremony in a couple of weeks time. She and her partner, Phil got married on 1st December. They organised the event themselves and as they couldn’t afford a big wedding they only invited very close family and friends. There were eighteen of us all together and the wedding was a Goth-themed one. We had a wonderful time and we all got on very well together.

Alice and Phil

Alice and me on her wedding day

Alice and Elinor

No photos of Richard, unfortunately!

We couldn’t get to church for Advent Sunday as we were returning home from Alice’s wedding that day; my brother and Helen took Mum to church. The following Sunday, the 2nd in Advent, I took a Morning Prayer service at Rumburgh and on the 3rd and 4th Sundays in Advent, I took Mum to church at her church in the town of Eye.

The Advent Crown on a table in our new garden room

Our Advent Crown

The view from the garden room. Apologies for the reflections in the windows.

Another view from the garden room

We have had a very nice Christmas. We attended the Carol Service at St Margaret South Elmham on the 20th of December and Richard organised and ran our Carol Service at Rumburgh on the 23rd of December. Richard, Elinor and I collected Mum and took her to Midnight Mass at Eye church on Christmas Eve. She came to us for the day on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. We had friends visit for coffee on the morning of the 28th. Alice came to visit on the 27th (on her own as Phil had to work) and was due to go back home on the 29th but when we got to the station we discovered that there were no trains running to or from Norwich due to signalling failures. She had to return here for the night and eventually got home the following afternoon.

St Margaret’s church at the carol service

A frosty view from the garden room on Christmas Day

I think that covers everything! I hope I am able to get back to blogging some time soon though, of course, I cannot promise to be any better at it than last year!

May I wish you all a very happy, healthy and successful 2019.

This and That

11 Sun Feb 2018

Posted by Clare Pooley in Rural Diary

≈ 57 Comments

Tags

'The Company', art, Deer, Diary, drama, gardening, health, home improvements, Jane Austen, London, moles, Rain, Sense and Sensibility, snow, snowdrops, Suffolk, the Gospel of Mark, violets, weather, wildlife

This will be a post full of bits and pieces of news; just a catch-up post on the things we have been up to during the past month or so. I apologise for the length of the post – feel free to skip past as much as you like!

Snowdrops and a few daffodil buds in a pot

We began January with heavy rain, as I mentioned in a former post, but the high waters gradually receded despite lots more rain during the month and we are now left with a few waterlogged fields, lots of full ditches and ponds and plenty of mud. A storm in the middle of the month left us without power for fifteen and a half hours but we suffered no damage to our house and out-buildings for which we are very thankful. We have had a little sunshine, some mild, wet and windy weather and a few colder spells too. Very changeable weather. This week has been cold with some snow showers. The following photos were taken on Tuesday at sunset on our way home from Norwich.

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A dusting of snow

My mother had another fault on her phone-line and we spent some few days trying to get it repaired – again.

Elinor’s lap-top developed a fault and had to be repaired. She doesn’t like to be without it as she finds her phone inadequate for some of the things she likes to do on-line. She borrowed my lap-top.

We now have Super-Fast Broadband – except it isn’t really super-fast but faster than it was, which is quite satisfactory. The downside is we have a new thick cable attached to the house right next to our bedroom window which loops over our front garden to the pole in the lane. We think it is dangling just a little too much and in the summer when it expands it may be low enough to snag the roofs of delivery vans. Trying to get someone back to deal with this may prove difficult.

Sweet violet

We have had some gates fitted at the end of our driveway, which look fine.

We are arranging for the old conservatory (which we cannot use) to be knocked down and a new one put in its place. This will be a very messy job and will take a few weeks to get done but we hope when it’s finished we will have a room which we will be able to use all year round. One which isn’t too cold in winter, too hot in summer, doesn’t leak when it rains or drip condensation when it’s cold. I need to move quite a few plants away from the flowerbed outside the conservatory and find a place to keep them while the work proceeds. We will also need to find somewhere to store all the furniture in the living room for the duration!

Snowdrops and early crocuses under a crabapple tree

We have all had the usual visits to the dentist, doctor and hospital. I was particularly pleased with my appointment at the Rheumatology Clinic. I have been in remission for some while and my blood-test results have been good. Because of this, I have been told I can stop taking one of my tablets. I have been taking this one for eighteen years and it is thought I don’t need it any more. It is also a tablet that can cause irreparable damage to the eyes and the longer it is taken the more likely it is that damage will occur. I wonder how long I would have been left taking this medication if my blood-test results hadn’t been so good? So far, after over three weeks without them I have noticed no return of pain and I feel fine! If I remain in remission for another year I have been told I may be able to reduce the dosage of the medication I inject myself with each week. I would love to be able to do that!

Molehills in the garden

Gardening can be quite difficult in the countryside as we humans are not the only ones who like flowers and shrubs. Most of our visiting wildlife love them too – as food. My favourite miniature iris started blooming at the end of January but the deer found them and have eaten all the flowers. A few of my other plants have been pruned severely by the deer and pecked by the pheasants. The only answer is to cover everything with chicken wire which isn’t attractive and it’s such a bother to have to remove it each time I wish to work on a flowerbed and then remember to put it back again afterwards! Despite my grumbling, I do feel lucky to live here and to be able to see all the wild creatures that visit us. Gardening on a plot surrounded by fields is different from gardening in a town or village. It is impossible to keep wildlife, including weeds like brambles, nettles and thistles, out of the garden. We have to be more relaxed in our attitude but it is hard not to be disappointed when a flower that is looked forward to for eleven months is eaten before it blooms! Before Christmas I was looking out of the window at dawn and saw a family of Muntjac deer in the garden a few metres away from me. A female, a male and a tiny spotted-backed fawn about the size of a large cat. The baby kept racing about and bouncing on all four legs at once. As soon as it got near enough to her, the female proceeded to wash him which he tolerated for a while and then ran off again!

We all spent a day in London on the 25th January but I took no photographs. It was a day for visiting bookshops as a treat for Elinor; she had recently celebrated her 21st birthday. We had lunch in an Italian restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue and when we had had enough of books we wandered down through Trafalgar Square to the Embankment to see how many monuments and statues we could see before catching the tube from Embankment Station back to Liverpool Street Station. We were very fortunate with the weather which though cold, was dry and sunny. All our trains ran to time and we had a wonderful day.

Richard and I have taken a short walk near home recently and all three of us have been to Minsmere for a walk. I will post about these later.

Richard and I went with friends to see a one-man performance of St Mark’s Gospel in Wangford Church last Saturday evening. The church was freezing cold, probably because it had had extensive building work done to it and the people from the village had only just finished the clean up that afternoon! The performance was absolutely brilliant! St Mark’s Gospel is the shortest of the gospels and was written at speed. It is said that Mark recorded Jesus’ life using Saint Peter’s recollections of Him. It was performed by Ian Birkinshaw who was the narrator but he also acted all the characters in the gospel. He had minimal props and costume accessories and I was very impressed by the way he used them. For example, he was wearing a keffiyeh which one minute was round his neck, then with a little folding looked like a child in his arms and then a baby which he held over his shoulder. Ian Birkinshaw’s performance conveyed the excitement about Jesus that is evident in the Gospel and his energetic recital which lasted over two hours was very impressive. I cannot recommend this performance highly enough. Here is his wordpress site.

As I have mentioned recently, Elinor, my younger daughter has been attending art classes in Norwich since September and has been enjoying them. She has shown great improvement in her work and has become much more confident; she is managing her anxiety a little better. She had been very disappointed last year when she failed to get onto a course which would have given her a qualification which she needs to get into art college. She applied to a different college to have an interview for the same course and this time she was successful. She will be starting college in September but instead of Norwich her new college is in Great Yarmouth on the coast.

Here are four examples of the work she has been producing recently. Each of these pieces were completed in two and a half hours.

Portrait

Painting

Portrait

Painted with twigs

My elder daughter, Alice belongs to a couple of drama groups in Sheffield where she lives and works. Next week, one of the groups – The Company – will be staging a dramatisation of Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’. Alice is playing the part of Mrs. Palmer. The drama group has produced a few vignettes to celebrate St Valentine’s Day and the opening of the play next Wednesday. I think you may be amused by the following, in which Mr and Mrs Palmer have been asked questions about their relationship. Alice tells me that they were given the questions and were asked to improvise the answers in character.

The Company have posted a number of these on their Facebook page and they are all amusing. I particularly enjoyed Edward Ferrars’ contribution!

If any of you are in Sheffield next week I would heartily recommend you going along to see the play at the University of Sheffield’s Drama Studio in Glossop Road. The performances are at 7.30pm Wednesday to Saturday. Tickets can be bought on-line on the link I have provided or on the door.

Thanks for visiting!

Doris Remembered

08 Sat Apr 2017

Posted by Clare Pooley in churches, family, Gardening, plants, Rural Diary, weather

≈ 45 Comments

Tags

church renovations, damage, Diary, garden flowers, home improvements, lay-led worship training, Mothering Sunday, power cuts, quizzes, Storm 'Doris', Suffolk

I arranged to visit Alice in Sheffield on Thursday 23rd February, spend the night in a hotel and return home again the following day. What I hadn’t expected when I bought the train tickets and booked the hotel room was a visit from ‘Doris’ that day too. For those who don’t know who ‘Doris’ is (or who might have forgotten), ‘Doris’ was a storm that caused some disruption here. Fortunately, my journey went ahead with no problems other than a speed restriction. Alice met me at the station and we decided to have lunch together before I went to my hotel. We nearly got blown off our feet on the way to the café, the door of which kept blowing open while we ate, but we weren’t inconvenienced too much by this. I spent a lovely afternoon with Alice either chatting in my hotel room, drinking tea in another coffee shop or buying books.

While I was enjoying myself, Richard and Elinor were having quite an unpleasant time at home. The power went off at about 2 pm and in the garden a few of our belongings started flying through the air despite Richard having tried to make them safe before the storm began.

I wonder if any of you remember how pleased we were when we got our new summerhouse last year? Here is a photo of it.

Our summerhouse when it was new last February.

The summerhouse after the storm this February.

The wind ripped the roof off and the rest of the building just broke apart. A number of trees in the area were blown over and roads were blocked. When I got back to Norwich the following afternoon Richard was a little delayed when collecting me from the station by having to make detours to avoid blocked roads. The power was still off when I got home and the house was cold. Richard and Elinor had coped very well using the gas hob to cook meals and heat water for hot drinks and washing up. They had sat together the evening before in front of the gas fire listening to the battery-powered radio by candlelight. We often get power-cuts living where we do, though not as many as we used to do before the power company changed the cables and started regular cutting-back of tree branches that are too close to the cables. Having said that, we have had six power-cuts of at least an hour this year already. We keep a supply of candles and lamps ready and have torches in all the bedrooms and in the kitchen, utility room and garage. We have a portable gas heater as well as the gas fire and gas hob. We can also use the caravan which has a large battery and a gas supply.

Fortunately, the power came back on later that day. I was very grateful for it as we were expecting my cousin Beverley and her partner Jeremy to visit the following day for an evening meal. I didn’t have the time to prepare all the things I had hoped to, but at least the house was warm and the evening was great fun!

We have been able to claim for a new summerhouse on our insurance and our replacement arrived on Monday of this week. We got an identical summerhouse which had to be put where the old one was which is a little worrying, knowing how quickly it succumbed to the storm-force winds. Richard will bolt it to the concrete base and try to make it somewhat sturdier. We will see what we can do. We lost our old incinerator during the storm and wondered how far it had travelled, but once Richard had taken photos of the wreck and started to clear up the glass and the panels he found it squashed as flat as a pancake underneath one of the sections. I am grateful neither Richard nor Elinor got squashed under it!

Here is our new summerhouse. Spot the difference!

Our new internal doors were due to be fitted that week in February but the storm put paid to that, and, because of storm damage the carpenter had to deal with, we didn’t get the doors until nearly a fortnight later. We are very pleased with them. They look good, they are more sound-proof than the old ones and the doors downstairs are now glazed and let much needed light into the hall. The sliding door to the en-suite WC has been replaced with a better one and the sliding door to the downstairs shower-room has been replaced with an ordinary door which is so much nicer. We will now employ a painter and decorator to decorate the hall, stairs and landing and to paint all twelve doors (we replaced the airing cupboard door too).

ooOOoo

Richard and I have attended a Lay-led Worship Training Course at a church in Beccles. To enable us to keep our churches open, the way forward is for us, the members of the church to take the services ourselves if there is no priest to lead us. This will be very useful to us when our Rector retires in the summer. The four-part course was interesting and well-attended and it gave us the opportunity to meet people from other churches in the Deanery. Our Deanery is made up of a number of benefices from Halesworth, Bungay, Beccles, Southwold and the villages in-between.

ooOOoo

We have carried on with the usual round of duties and chores; hospital visits, blood tests, appointments with opticians, hairdressers, acupuncturists and chiropractors; housework, gardening, shopping. We have all had bad colds. I continue to take my mother to church once a fortnight and join Richard at church in our benefice when I can.

Richard went to visit his brother Chris in Manchester for a few days recently and had a very pleasant time. On his return we took part in two quizzes. Last year we had been in a team that had won the quiz held in the village of Walpole. Part of the ‘prize’ was the honour of composing and presenting the following year’s quiz and Richard offered to take it on. The time for the quiz duly arrived and he did a fantastic job as Quizmaster (I was his assistant) and he was presented with a bottle of wine as a thank-you gift. The following night we were at the village of St James taking part in the quiz to raise funds for the Harleston Choral Society. A meal was included in the fees – very good it was, too – and the questions appealed to me more than usual as there were more music ones and fewer sport! Our team managed to win again.

ooOOoo

We celebrated Mothering Sunday on the 26th of March and it was our church at Rumburgh’s turn to hold the service. I helped make a few posies to present to the mothers or for people to give to their mothers or take to graves. Though we have no flowers in church during Lent I was asked to provide some flowers to put in the porch.

The flowers in the porch. Looking at this little work of art, you may be surprised to know I am not a flower-arranger 😉 The flowers are lovely in spite of my ministrations. As you can see, the porch is in urgent need of work. If nothing is done soon, the porch will collapse and we won’t be able to use the church.

The church was a little disorganised because we are having a tower screen fitted at the moment and there was dust everywhere. We have been saving for years for this improvement! We put everyone as near the front of the church as possible (well away from the building works) sitting in the choir stalls, which was very pleasant. Richard our Rector chose lots of good hymns and his sermon was amusing and instructive. I brought my mother to our church for a change and took her back home afterwards. I couldn’t ask her to lunch because I had no time to prepare a midday meal but she came for an evening meal instead.

This is the new tower screen. You can see the framework for the glass which has yet to be put in. There will be a glazed door at the bottom of the screen.

We will now be able to see and watch the bell-ringers as they ring before our services.

ooOOoo

I will end this rather wordy post with some photos of the flowers in our garden starting with my favourite iris reticulata that bloomed for too short a time in February.