times they are a changing

This week has seen some fairly monumental changes in my world.

Let's face it, when you're a dyed in the wool Spurs fan, things have been a bit gloomy of late so Harry's unexpected and sudden appearance at "the Lane" last Sunday was just what the Doctor ordered. I did comment this time last year that I thought that "Juande we might live to regret firing Martin Jol". Ah well, I'm a bit chuffed to welcome Redknapp senior to WHL, especially if he can keep those points coming in. First eight games, we managed a whole 2 points, the last two games, we've managed to treble our tally!

COYS....let's hope that we can keep it up this Saturday at home to Liverpool. (Especially as we're going out to the pub to watch the game because we're too tight to cough up for Setanta and the landlord is a Liverpool fan.)

Now, as I type, I can also report that I am, for the first time in my adult life, unemployed. I officially left my company today so as of 4pm this afternoon, I have no source of income and I have no idea what tomorrow will bring. I am pretty terrified but I am also hopeful that a clean break is just what I need.

So, I will wake up tomorrow in a new phase of my life......I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Digging a big hole

I apologise for my lack of communication over the last three weeks or so. I have an excuse in as much as after a week of anguish over Archie's well-being, DM and I both went down with the lurgy and it took us a couple of weeks to get over it. Follow that with turmoil/difficulties/uncertainty in my work life and my thoughts have been elsewhere in recent times.

Archie is, for those who are interested, getting on better than he has for some time, albeit with a wobbly head and a distinct lack of balance, which means he now matches his "Mum" (me) and can't stand on his own four feet!

He has been taking cod liver oil and glucosamine for his arthritic joints for a good couple of years now and even so has been increasingly infirm. He's been unable to get over styles or to get into the back of our car for some time and we've had to use ingenuity and cunning to transport him around as he hates being picked up and lets us know that very quickly. Anyway, he's now got himself onto one of the super-dooper new NSAID drugs, especially for arthritis and he's a transformed baby.

He's trotting around the place with a smile on his face, jumping up and down steps with gay abandon and otherwise is perkier than we've seen him in ages. I was digging a big hole in the garden as part of an ongoing project to try to eliminate the need for me to go out murdering slugs by envouraging toads and frogs to our domain. This means putting in a big pond, with plenty of frog-friendly stuff to give them a good reason to come here.

I've got an old bath that was taken out from our bathroom soon after we moved in and have dug a hole deep enough that the bath can be submerged as part of a bigger pond (so you can't see the rectangular shape). This project has taken a whole load of time because our ground is not easy to dig, comprising of a thin-ish layer of top soil then deep shale, so I've taken my time, doing an hour here and another hour there.

While the top soil was on a tarpaulin next to my big hole and the bathtub was behind it yesterday, Arch's attention was on Mo, who was on top of the soil mound, digging around for worms and other bits and bobs. She disappeared down the other side of the mound and Archie took a flying leap to get closer to her. He landed, very bemused, inside the bathtub, then went straight into pogo mode and leapt out the other side. He landed in a sprawl on the lawn, with a look of utter confusion on his face.

So, by digging my big hole, I discovered that my beautiful baby has regained some of his elasticity and bounce. Boy did that make all of the hard work seem like a really GOOD thing!

Coming of age - the adventures of Dusty

OK - I know that some folks will see this pic and think "how has she taken a photo this good of planet Zogg". Others will look at it, and think "huh?". Others will realise what it is and either think it's a miracle of nature or that it's truly gross.

I fall into category three - to me, it's a miracle of nature and one I've been waiting and hoping for over the last three months very anxiously.

It's the first egg from our three new babies - Dusty has been growing a fantastic bright red comb over the last couple of weeks. This is a sure-fire indication that she's about to start laying. On Wednesday, I poked my head into the nest box to find this little beauty - a pale alabaster pink egg, quite small but absolutely perfectly shaped. The egg was smeared with blood as is always the case on the first occasion a hen lays an egg. My little girl is now an elegant and beautiful young woman - she has come of age, biologically speaking.

She's a Blue Andalusian (a rare breed), small, slim, has a terrific long tail and a massive comb compared to our other hens. To be fair, it's a breed thing and she's just got what all Blue Andalusians have, it's simply that we only have one. Her feathers are amazing - dark on her head, then getting lighter along her body, though each individual feather is edged with black, giving her an appearance of being almost scaly. She's named after one of my heroes - Dusty Springfield, because when we picked the three new hens up from the farm where they were born and raised, they sang to us in low voices so they're all named after singers.

To celebrate her journey into womanhood, she decided to go on a "rites of passage" rebellious romp on Thursday. I could hear a commotion that was obviously chicken, coming from up the hill from our home. I thought nothing of it because several of our neighbours also keep chooks. Then I looked up and noticed a lovely Blue Andalusian sitting on top of the six-foot high fence between our next-door neighbour's house and their next-door neighbours on the other side of them. Ooops. There is only one Blue Anderlusian in our village and that's Dusty.

I called for reinforcements (David), got a couple of long sticks and some corn and we set off next door to effect a recapture. She, of course, like every rebellious young woman, was not interested in recapture so she flew over my head, landing in the garden. There followed ten minutes of charging around with us after her while old nimble feet neatly evaded our every lunge. Finally, she flew up onto the shed next to our own boundary and all we needed to do then was to give her a gentle prod in the bottom to get her to fly down into her own territory.

By the time we'd got back round to our own garden, she was in the hen house clucking indignantly and looking a bit "bothered" about her adventure. Let's hope that she has exhausted her wanderlust!

By the way - this is the first time I have taken a new photo for my blog in the six months or so since I left pbase.

For anyone wondering about Archie, his progress is slow but he's certainly showing improvements.

Emotional Weather Forecast

For the last year, there has been a constant fog stretching in every direction from my world, as far as the eye can see and as far as the imagination can contemplate. This fog is now beginning to lift and there are occasional glimpses of blue sky appearing.

From tomorrow onwards, the occasional flashes of blue will become more frequent and the fog will lift over the course of the next few months. This is odd given that we're probably about to go into a period of prolonged fog/cloud/rain in our real world but "it may be winter outside, but in my heart it's spring".

That's the end of today's forecast, I'm going out to look for blue sky!

Memories are made of this

My childhood is peppered with memories of picking fruit in various guises. My Mum used to work in the strawberry fields picking strawberries. That may sound idyllic but is, in fact, gruelling work, bent double picking fruit that's at ground level in full sunshine with no shade whatsoever. My Mum used to work in shorts and a tee shirt and had nut brown legs, arms and a little patch across her back where her tee shirt parted company from her shorts. The pay was terrible and the work hard but she did it because we needed the money. Nowadays, I'd guess that much of this sort of work is done by migrant workers but in those days it was all women just like my Mum.

We also picked the blackcurrants that went into the 1960s Ribena - I've discovered recently that 90% of the commercially grown blackcurrants in this country are sold to GSK for this purpose. The nuts we picked (chestnusts and hazelnuts) from hedgerows and blackberries and you have a pretty good set in terms of fruit picking but these latter things went nowhere further than our own tummies.

I love picking food from hedgerows, to me it's one of the purest pleasures you can have. It's free food - in these times of rising food prices how much better can it be than eating something you've not paid for in any sense except for the time taken to pick the berries or nuts.

Years ago, we picked our berries and nuts in the hedgerows of farmers fields and on several occasions, got turfed out by angry land owners for trespassing. Yesterday, I picked myself a big bowl full of blackberries from our own field's margins. I got scratched and stung - the brambles grow in perfect harmony with gorse and nettles so if the brambles themselves don't get you, you're gonna get "bit" by one of the others!

There is a deep sense of satisfaction, gained from the very pleasure of an hour in the autumn sunshine picking, with Rosie running around full of joy. She even ate a blackberry that I held out for her. Despite cuts, scrapes and nettle stings, it was one of the best things I've done in ages, especially knowing the blackberries were pollonated by our own bees and there was nothing "nasty" on the fruit from farming sprays.

Coming inside, the whole bowlful got tipped into a saucepan, water and cooking apples added and boiled to within an inch of its life. Then my heath robinson straining kit was used to extract the juice from the pulp and it's now ready to go into the final step of making spiced bramble jelly - juice, sugar and allspice. This will happen later today and our latest batch of free food will be ready for consumption from tomorrow onwards. Yee haa.

Heath Robinson straining kit - an upturned stool with a china bowl placed between its legs, a tea-towel pegged to the ends of the legs so it's suspended like a hammock over the bowl, then the hot mush poured into the tea towel. The whole lot is covered up with tea-towels so the flies can't penetrate and then it just gets left overnight for the juice to drip through slowly.

Update on Archie - as I type, he's in the garden, chasing chickens as best he can when his illness means he basically goes round in circles - but he at least has a bit of speed up and he's managed to eat some food. The eye movement is gone but the dribbling is still there. He's considerably better than he was but still far from the dog he was until last weekend.

A little better

He's improving a tiny bit. He's eaten a little tuna fish and pottered about a little bit. Fingers crossed.

Archie's progress

He's still very sick but the vet is encouraged by his responsiveness so he's home with us again after another exhausting (for all of us) trip to the vet.

He's got old dog vestibular syndrome, which in most cases clears itself up, although the underlying cause can be a tumour. We just have to watch, wait and see - lots and lots of TLC are on the menu, along with "special" supper, which amounts to being hand-fed with chicken or fish.

This morning, I was the one cracking up under the pressure but I feel calmer now I've been able to look the condition up online and see what a range of experts have to say.

This pic was taken eighteen months ago when he was enjoying a romp on the moor.

Please send any good vibes to Archie and if you have any fairy dust in your pocket, sprinkle a bit for him......and for us.