Up a lace lined hill

We have had such glorious weather these last few weeks that it has felt more like summer than spring. This is the time of year I love the most, when the country lanes are lined with frothy trails of Queen Anne's Lace (or Cow Parsley, to use it's more common name). In search of a view, I headed off to a hill. Because to get a magnificent view, there is always, annoyingly, a hill to be climbed. 

I think the last time I attempted this mile long uphill drag was about seven years ago, on my dear old 'acoustic' bike Marjorie. I pushed her almost all the way to the top. To be fair, it is the kind of incline that only the really fit and hardened would be able to manage. This is the edge of the Shropshire Hills and very popular with serious cyclists, who seem to enjoy the endless ups and downs.  

On No.6, with pedal assist of full throttle, I actually made it two thirds of the way up before dismounting. Pushing is a chore. but when the scenery is so lovely it's nice to take things slowly and drink it all in.

At the top, the views across Shropshire are simply breath taking. Below you can see across to Wales, with the Long Mynd snaking low across the horizon.

Across to the north and even further views out towards Shrewsbury and beyond that,  the Cheshire Plain.

I had planned to go further this day, but I was quite hot and tired, and No.6 wasn't fully charged. We were only a few miles away from the cottage and it was past lunchtime.

The blissful reward after all the effort of getting to the top of a long hill is naturally the prospect of going down it. I think we covered a mile in about five minutes and were home in under half an hour.  

There was no question that I had earned my carbs. This is a small batch bread roll loaf made with just 250g of flour. It's perfect for my needs and one quarter is more than enough for a meal. 

I don't think there are many more satisfying meals when you are properly hungry - especially after exercise - than bread and cheese. Unless it's bread and cheese with piccalilli. 

There are lambs, green fields and olive rolls

 

It's hard to believe that at the start of the Easter weekend it was so chilly that I lit the fire when I was working downstairs. But that is part of the charm of a British Spring - it is by nature capricious and teasing; one day lifting your heart with a light breeze and cloudy sunshine, the next going into a cold sulk and making you wish you hadn't switched to a summer-weight duvet. 

I've managed a few more excursions on No.6 - it's been so long since I was able to get out and enjoy my favourite time of year that I am drinking in the fresh greens and scatterings of tiny, demure flowers sprinkling the hedgerows. And, of course, lambs.  

There have been almost no April showers though and the intense, dry heat we've had has given us hot blue skies and baked fields. 

Continuing my rediscovery of baking, I attempted a batch of rustic olive rolls the other day. I haven't made bread for a long time and this dough was almost ciabatta-like with a generous amount of precious olive oil (now used only for special occasions, since the price of it has almost put it out of my reach). 

I wish I'd left it in this shape and made a small loaf, as it looked perfect at this stage. But I went ahead and formed small buns, which turned out fairly well. I should have left them to prove for a little longer, but that is the fault of myself, not the recipe, which can be found here at Apron and Whisk. 

There are, of course, other recipes out there, but this was the one I felt comfortable with.

I'm using my mornings to paint and am having a steep learning curve remembering everything that I've forgotten. So progress is slow, but I've almost finished 'Lucifer and the Angels', seen here in all it's very large glory. 

I began sketching it out on Boxing Day and it's been a drawn out affair as I have had other things to work on. After so many years in the wilderness with anything art oriented, I think I'm back on track. 

Country social

 

Not living in a village it's quite rare to meet up with neighbours, unless it's a brief chat while out walking (which is usually quite enough for me). However, at the weekend I received an email asking if I'd like to join in with someone's surprise birthday celebrations. It was a small, spur of the moment gathering, nothing formal and just a ten minute walk away. I accepted and then panicked about what to make and take with less than 24 hours notice, as if there is one thing I learned from my mother, it was that under no circumstances do you visit someone empty handed.

Overnight I churned ideas about in my head, trying to fudge together a recipe that used ingredients I had to hand (because I'm a long way from shops) and that would be not too simple but not too complicated. In the end I decided to make little pasties filled with feta cheese, cumin baked crushed chickpeas with garlic and lemon juice and strained frozen spinach, encased in rough puff pastry with an egg wash and sprinkled with sesame seeds. 

Of course this was not the uncomplicated plan I'd been aiming for and I was already exhausted from a long day of sitting in on an interview panel for my other outside work. But I rested in the morning and eventually started pastry making a few hours beforehand. At one point, I looked at the pastry and the bowl of filling and thought 'shall I just make one big pie?' Then I dismissed this very sensible idea and began cutting out dear little pastry rounds, painstakingly filling, crimping and trimming them into miniature pasties. It was worth the effort though, as they looked pleasingly like proper party food. I had just enough time to bake them, half an hour before I was due to meet up with a local friend who was going to walk with me to the party. I was only five minutes late.

   

Now that we are in official British Summertime, the longer evenings are a welcome break from the short, grey days of Winter. This Spring has been exceptional and so we wandered slowly down the lane, enjoying the mellowing light and long shadows.

The hedgerows are spattered with tiny floral treasures of Celandine, Primrose and Stitchwort, with the promise of tall, fronded Queen Anne's Lace to follow, later in the month.  

The field across from my cottage is just coming into flower. I love the smell of rapeseed and for me it is the quintessential smell of early summer, as well as adding a cheerful splash of citrus yellow to the landscape. Not so pleasant if you suffer from hay-fever though; poor Jean-next-door is suffering already from it.   

It felt strange to be out and socialising, but I knew several people there, including a couple of older women who have moved away and who had been ferried in to enjoy the meet-up. I was put in the awkward position of having to guess someone's age and tentatively suggested '80?', to be met with a rather pleased guffaw followed by 'don't be daft, I'm 90'.

It was a joyful occasion, with the birthday celebrant being suitably surprised and delighted. I was content to sit on the edge and chat to people as they came to me. I had a small glass of champagne and enjoyed being part of something nice. This being a British Spring evening, the setting of the sun was our cue to wind up the festivities and soon we were packing up, chivvied along by a cool Easterly breeze that had picked up as the light lowered. A short and tired walk home was all I needed to round off the day and return to the cottage, where my warm bed was waiting.

No place like home

 

Just dropping in to add a bit of humanity to an internet that seems increasingly bloated with bots, false news and AI. I’m still here, in every sense of the word and hoping to be staying in my scruffy home for a little longer. My cottage isn’t the prettiest but she is much loved. She is a grand old dame of over 130 years old; we are both a bit tattered around the edges and feeling the cold. 

There have been one or two changes in my life, including my finally having a diagnosis for autism, to add to my ADHD. I wasn’t surprised and I was glad to get it confirmed. Not only does it explain my many struggles throughout my life, but at last I am able to access the support I badly need. It’s been a difficult and lonely time since Andy died twelve years ago, but I feel as if I’m at last emerging from some kind of horrid coma, with at least one positive thing happening soon. So here is a big wave from me and the cottage, to all who continue to visit here. The evenings are getting lighter and there will soon be snowdrops. 

Field painting adventure and overcoming blocks

I have started to reserve Saturdays as a day off, otherwise I'm working every day without a break, which isn't particularly good for my fragile mental health. The weather at the moment is perfectly 'May' - not too hot, with a pleasant breeze and everywhere around is bursting with greenery, blossom and bird song. I have been yearning to do some landscape sketching for ages and decided to stay close to home, because I have a certain amount of anxiety about going out. So I packed a rucksack with a stupid amount of art stuff, made up a little picnic of a cheese sandwich and a bottle of water and after a lot of deep breaths, I set off on my monumental adventure; a minute's walk down the road to the back field which my bedroom overlooks. This is my usual  pleasant view, when I am working in bed (which is most days). It has the best light after midday and is comfortable.

I haven't  set foot in this field in the ten years I've been here. There are two reasons for this; the first is practical. There is a designated footpath which goes across it, but it ends abruptly at the hedgerow boundary, so it's fairly useless. The second is that I've had a mental block about it, as this was the field that Andy walked across on his last, ghastly walk in the dark snowstorm, leaving only his footprints, which remained there for days. I remember kneeling at the bedroom window the next morning, watching a police dog tracking what it could find of his scent and that image will never leave me. So despite it's beauty (and since then, I do appreciate it, every day), I have had little desire to actually go into it, even for a change of scene. So this was the day and it felt momentous. The footpath is just on the edge of Jean-and-Brian-Next-Door's garden and is almost never used (for the practical reason I mentioned before). It was overgrown with lovely Queen Anne's Lace and less lovely nettles.  

I scrambled over and waded through the jungle. Suddenly there I was, and what seemed like a vast expanse in front of me. The footpath leads to that gap ahead in the hedgerow. Beyond that are more fields, but technically inaccessible without extra footpath. I don't think the farmer would mind me pottering about, as we are on good terms, but I don't like going outside 'the rules', so I stuck to the  route. 

Happily, the area that I intended to sketch was perfectly placed for me to settle my gear and myself on the path - there is a small blossoming area of hawthorn that I wanted to capture, just beyond the oak tree on the edge of the woodlands (which belongs to another less friendly farm). 

It's been years since I attempted anything like this. I did a very rough prelim sketch of the composition, which was a messy scrawl that only I could interpret. 

I have no pretensions to being the next Cezanne or Paul Nash - this was really about getting out in the nice weather and doing something different. It was hard work though, even with copious amounts of pastels. I didn't create a masterpiece, nor even anything like how I emotionally 'feel' about the landscape. But I did have a marvellous two hours, sat in the sun, scribbling away in the middle of a field that I had feared entering for a decade. Now I felt safe and comfortable. I ate half a cheese sandwich and dickered about with my pastel mess until it was time to stop before I completely ruined it. 

It's been  long held wish of mine to be able to spend most of my time focussing on landscape art, but I'm not good enough to make it pay and I can't afford the time it would take to get to a standard I am happy with, nor the big canvases and oils I'd like to paint with. But this will do for now and more importantly, it was a break from my other work and I had fun. 

The problem is an old one - back when I was doing my art training over thirty years ago, I decided to go down the path of illustration, which suited my naturally 'tight' and high definition style of working. So it's hard to break out of that habit and needs a lot of practise to get out of. However I made a small start and the colour capture wasn't too bad - I'm just not happy with the way I depicted it, because it in no way expresses the way I 'see' a landscape in my mind's eye. There's no lyrical rhythm or magic. It is what it is.

However, self criticism aside, I also enjoyed seeing our cottages for the first time from the back - Jean and Brian's larger sections on the left and my bit tacked on the right side, with the white window frames. I had the odd sensation that maybe  (in some freakish quantum alternate reality kind of thing) there was simultaneously another Me in the bedroom, needle felting and gazing out of the window, while present Me looked on from the other side of the field. 

That's another block overcome and for the first time in ages, I have two mini- paintings for sale, in my usual style, over in my Etsy shop. I'm hesitant about mentioning them, as my art barely sells, compared to my needle felting, but I'm going to be brave again. 

This is 'Marmalade', one of my imaginary toys, which comes in a 6 x 6 inch mount but is unattached, so that it can be reframed if wished, which is available here. 

And one from last year, which I've only just listed, 'Autumn Pincushion' (very unseasonal), which is also in a 6 x 6 inch mount and is available here. 

Now I'm going to take the rest of the day off again, as it's Saturday, and I might sit under the willow tree in the overgrown garden and finish some Christmas ornaments so that they are ready in time for the holiday season, which will swing around all too quickly. 

In the lambing shed

My first little adventure of the year and a day away from the cottage, to the other side of Shropshire where Friend One had arranged for Friend Two, her little girl and myself to visit a local sheep farmer who was in the middle of lambing. It was a chilly, wet day with a  keen wind, but warmer in the shelter of the large hangar barn with the sweet scent of straw and wool scenting the air.

Not to mention the gentle bustle of dozens of sheep tending new born lambs, waiting to have lambs and ewes being jumped over (and sometimes on) by older lambs who had found their bouncing legs.

  

And of course, lambs copiously feeding from their ever patient mothers.

There was also a trio of orphaned lambs, being hand fed by the farmer who was on site all the time to look after his flock at this busy time of the year. Farming is a tough job and often gets a bad press, but this farmer dedicates his life to the welfare of his livestock, and it was very apparent from the way he cares for them. In fact, he almost persuaded me to adopt a friendly stray who followed us around like a little dog. I was a finger's width away from taking him home to keep the grass down, but came to my senses. Although I did decide he was called 'Henry'.

 

When we'd had our fill of woolly adorableness, we returned to Friend One's lovely house, where she provided us with a delightful lunch - lamb was not on the menu.