The Yucca

From Facebook archives

31 August 2010 at 10:55 ·

The yucca in my front garden flowering.  

It is the offspring of a yucca that used to be in the garden at home in Wales. That one only flowered once in the 40 years or so I knew it. When Dad gave me the offspring I thought it would never survive NE winters. How wrong I was!

The Blodfa yucca was in a fairly inaccessible part of the garden.

In 1988 Dad brought up an offspring which I didn't think would survive up here so planted it next to the front door, where it thrived to the point it stabbed most visitors.

Around the millennium I wrapped a pair of tights around it, pulling all the leaves together into one spike, Fester dug it up and we planted it in a more inaccessible corner of the garden, where it only stabs us when we trim the hedge or go and try to pick blackberries.

And now …

It flowered, or attempted to, several times after that; once so late in the year the flower spike got frosted and we thought that was the end of it.

Oh no.

The damn thing grew three more heads, which each try to flower every year or so.

It has half a dozen heads now and it just keeps growing and getting taller.

At first I was wary of taking shears to the leaves in case I damaged it.

I’m coming to believe there’s little, short of a drone-strike, that will harm it.

 

Dad also gave one to Bigsister in London.  It grew so tall it toppled over in a gale.  

She thought it was finished and gave a sigh of relief.  It just carried on, sideways and upover.   

Every time their little grand-daughter is due to visit brother-in-law is sent out with a set of shears to take all the sharp ends off, for fear she cuts herself on it.

 

Here’s a photo I took of our yucca yesterday.

At a rough estimate I’d say it was getting on for 10ft tall now.

It’s providing a wonderful safe home for spiders, snails and goodness knows what else.

Shavers

From Facebook archives

30 August 2016 at 08:45 ·

Of my favourite early memories is of watching Grampa shave at the breakfast table, next to a sunny southeast facing window, with a shaving mug mirror and cut-throat razor. 

Then of watching Dad shave in our tiny bathroom with his Wilkinson Sword safety razor. 

This morning I persuaded and helped Ferretfingers to have his first wet shave using a freebie Wilkinson Sword Hydro5.
He's been dissatisfied with the closeness he gets from his electric razor so I thought it was time and worth the effort.
I doubt I'll ever see a grandson shave though.

Mrs Lasagne Ben you are an A 🌟 mum xxxx ❤️ 😘

Mrs Leftfoot  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  I would watch my dad shave... I must have been pre-six. It's a lovely memory for me too.

 

Autumn Thoughts

From Facebook Archives

29 August 2016 at 08:03 ·

Just been out in the garden and I can smell autumn

Hagrid  Yes absolutely!  Petrichor!  Smells strong here today! X

Bentonbag  It always makes me feel a little bit excited.  The year turning, old things dying new things just starting to develop but still invisible.  Maybe it's all those years of a new academic year but, ever since my own birth day, autumn has always been the start of big changes for me.  Including losing Phil and having to rebuild my life, and conceiving my boys.

Hagrid  I have mixed feeling about autumn but regardless I do love it, it is a season of big change, you are right! X

V M  Wish I could😞when I go into my garden all I can smell is Blaydon Landfill! xxxx

Mrs Poet Tell her to bugger off.

Cousin Daisy We too can smell Autumn at the coast 🏖

Woolerwoman  I rather like autumn too but I can hear autumn before I notice anything else - it's hard to explain - things like traffic in the distance begin to sound more hollow and muted somehow.  Then, as you say, the smell.  And just now, in my new little house in Wooler, I've got a real live harvest going on just outside. xx

Bazoukiboy  I think you are right. I sensed a definite turning of the season on Friday... And the new students are moving in...

Bentonbag Oh joy oh effin rapture.

Bear Waistcoat

Before the present unpleasantness put the kibosh on such things the other LDNE knit’n’natter volunteers and I were thinking of making ‘pocket money priced’ doll and teddy outfits to sell on craft stalls.  As well as raising some funds, and the charity’s profile, it would have helped to use up all those odd little balls of donated yarn.

From Facebook archives …

28 August 2019 at 15:55 ·

Build-a-bear sized waistcoat and bow tie (the next one I make will be slightly shorter).  Thoughts?  

Mrs Quilt I rather like the length.  He has the air of an amiable academic

Mrs Leftfoot Looks good. Making each one a different colour might be good...so no outfit is exactly the same.  

Bentonbag The way I knit nothing is ever exactly the same - and I have a variety of single ball donations to work my way through ...  

Mrs Bun What about one in my size??? 

Bentonbag !?!  

Mrs Bun For me to wear Ben xxx 

Bentonbag I'm leaving you that jumper you like in my will xxx 

What Mothers Do

Thunderthighs has been emailed forms to apply for apprenticeships.

As I have mentioned before (Form Filling Blues) I hate filling in forms.  They put me in a cold sweat and churn my stomach.  But they must be done.

I’ve just persuaded him to email his college tutor for permission to use her as a referee, and reminded him to ask the newsagent he delivers papers for the same, and suggested he compile all his various certificates.

Fester has taken himself off to the Mining Institute for a second day with 

“I’ll get out of your way while you mess about with Thunderthighs.”

“’Mess about’!  Is that what you call trying to sort out our son’s future?”

Sheepish silence, then a penny began to drop in the back of my mind.

“Was it your mother that did that sort of thing?  Did she do all the pushing?”

More sheepish silence, then “Well …”

 

Different families, different cultures.

 

Then, of course, Fester’s career has been spent in academia combined with self-employment as a consultant.  The first giving qualifications for the second (BSc MSc PhD Visiting Scientist), and the second providing data useful for preparing papers supporting the first.  The last time he had to present himself as himself was probably when he first applied to University in the early 1970s.   

And things were very different then.  Anything since was based on research he’d done and papers he’d written; so preparing CVs and application forms are a foreign country to him.

 

To be fair, since giving up paid work to concentrate on the boys I’ve not much recent experience.  The last time I prepared a CV for a job was in 1992, and then I went freelance.

Unless, of course, you count all those Disability Living Allowance, Statements of Special Educational Needs, Education Care and Health Plans, Personal Independence Payment, Employment Support Allowance, Capability For Work Questionnaire, college and day centre information and other forms which were somehow my role to fill.

 

“Oh but you’re so much better at that sort of thing than me luv.”

I wonder why that is?

 

Small Potatoes

From Facebook Archives

 

26 August 2019 at 17:53 · ·

I planted ffa (broad beans) in the raised bed made from an old drawer divan.    

They came up but then all these potato plants appeared and loads of comfrey seedlings.

The ffa threw in the towel.   

I told Fester (whose first degree was in Agriculture) we were going to have to dig out the bed to get rid of the tatties. 

"Not worth it, they'll all be tiny marbles."  

This afternoon Ferretfingers and I ripped out all the comfrey, dug out all the compost and harvested the spuds.  

There are about 10lb in this trug.  

Not bad seeing as we didn't plant them and they've come from rogue volunteers.

The Naming Of Cats

Since I first got Dominic for my 25^th birthday I’ve had: Tiddles, Matilda, Kitty, Lisa, Felix and Teddy.

  

Some cats are easy to name.

Dominic was named for the Blackfriars of St Dominic.   

Tiddles the tortoishell after the lovely Tiddles the tortoishell we had at home.   

Kitty after my mother’s old family cat.

Lisa because Thunderthighs is a Simpsons fan and Felix because he looks so like the cat on the catfood ad.

 

Matilda on the other hand…

 

When Dominic was put to sleep, just before the Millenium, and we were left with Tiddles, I learnt that one of Will Fixit’s cats had had kittens just before Christmas.  He only discovered this when he found her moving them from where they were born, in the back of a speaker, to a quieter nursery.  I rang him and offered one a home.

“Oh that’s ok” he replied “We’ve homes for all three.”

In the March he rang me back “You know you were looking for a kitten …”

He’d been let down.

So we went over with the cat box.

At the time Will Fixit was single and his house contained an eclectic mix of builder’s tools and materials, musical instruments, recording equipment, various cats and a cockatiel. 

The boys were 5 and 3; when we arrived the kittens took one look at us and starburst all over the house.  It was like those fluffy worms you see at the pantomime; now you see it, now it’s gone.

“Which one would you like?” asked Will.

“Whichever we can catch!”

I eventually caught a tabby kitten cowering behind an overstuffed armchair in one of the bedrooms, brought her downstairs, put her in the catbox and took her home.

It was a Sunday morning so I suggested we put the box in the kitchen, open the door and then go out for the day so she could explore that room in peace and get used to the smell of a different place.  Tiddles was out and introductions could wait until the kitten had found her feet a little.

Off we went to Druridge Bay.

When we came home I opened the kitchen door to find – no kitten.

Not in the box, not under the table with the litter tray and wellies, nowhere to be seen.

There was no way she could have got out so I was flummoxed.

Then I looked in the gap underneath the work-surface between the boiler (an ancient floor standing thing) and the washing machine.  There at the back was the tail end of a kitten sticking out of a previously unknown hole.

A pipe (gas or water) came out of the floor by the wall, ran an inch or so above the floor parallel to the boiler for a few inches, then turned 90⁰  and a couple of inches into the side of the boiler.   

The kitten had got herself over the pipe and half way into the boiler, couldn’t go any further forward and every time she backed up bumped into the pipe but couldn’t climb backwards over it.

Although I could just about get my arm between the boiler and the washer, I couldn’t reach far enough back to grab her.

The washer would have to be moved.

But in order to do that the kitchen table had to be moved to make a space for it, together with the litter tray, wellies and everything else that had accumulated under and on it.

This was when we discovered that the cats had kicked quite a lot of, thankfully clean and dry, litter underneath the washer.

Eventually Fester lay sideways on the litter strewn floor, grabbed the kitten by the tail and dragged her out, both of them spitting and swearing.  She was dumped unceremoniously in the cat box and shut in until we got the kitchen put back together again.

Not surprisingly, given where she was raised and the welcome she got, she turned out to be quite an unfriendly animal (at first) much given to hiding under things. And she was never totally properly house-trained, either that or it was spite.

We rejected several names - Fluffy (too fluffy), Ash (for her colour), Spot (too whimsical) –  nothing seemed to suit.

A few days later I phoned Middlesister I regaled her with the story of the kitten behind the boiler.

Ferretfingers, sitting nearby, commented “Stupid bloody animal”; something of a landmark as he hardly ever spoke.

Telling Fester about this he looked sternly at the kitten and said “Yes!  Don’t do it again.”

“Matilda!”

I added remembering the chorus and title of an old music hall song, performed in the1970s by the duo Cosmotheka.

Cat Tales #28 More Annus Horribilis

As I’ve mentioned before, 2012 was our annus horribilis. 

Both Fester and I had health scares.  His brother was discovered dead on the weekend of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.  The day before the funeral ThunderThursday flooded Thunderthighs' school.  Over the next two months both my last remaining uncle and my first/late husband’s father died; they were in their nineties but it was still hard to handle.  We spent every other weekend in Sheffield clearing and dismantling Fester’s old family home.  It was easier to bring a lot of it back here to sort out (thank goodness for the Multipla’s boot).  Meanwhile Will Fixit was adding to the chaos converting the loft into a bedroom plus en-suite, so that Thunderthighs and Ferretfingers could have separate rooms.  The house became a cross between Steptoe’s yard and a building site. 

From Facebook Archives …

24 August 2012 at 10:22 ·

And now - went to call the cats in last night to find Matilda lying distressed at the back of the lawn: head shaking, legs not working and eyes flicking.

Went into the house and told Fester, who was emerging from his bath, he immediately goes out into the garden, stark bollock naked, picks her up and carries her in.   

Thank goodness the neighbours’ security lights don’t reach as far as our garden.

Mad phonecall and midnight dash to the overnight vets in Sherriff's Hill; praying 

"We've lost a brother-in-law, father-in-law and uncle - we can't lose the cat as well.”

She probably has the cat equivalent of labyrinthitis (inner ear infection - I've had it - it's horrid). Injection of antibiotic, steroid and antinausea.  

Spent the night next to her on the living room floor (upside no snoring) and now off to Strachan & Tyson.

Wonder what this summer will throw at us next?

Kentishlady  Poor Matilda.  Hope she has a speedy recovery.

Bentonbag  Another antibiotic jab at vets and tablets and liquid twice daily for the next week or so - which somewhat scuppers our plans to do more sorting in Sheffield this bank holiday weekend.

Dulcima  What summer?  Hope the cat is getting better, too!

Bentonbag  I'm using summer purely in a chronological sense

Henlady  Big hugs to you all and for Matilda.  Do hope she recovers quickly.  It is awful trying to comfort a sick pet.

Bentonbag  She's refusing to drink, or eat, and getting really upset when I try and get medicine down her and just drools horribly.  Feeling rather useless and very worried about her.

Dulcima  Poor thing.  That's awful - both for her, and you.

Mrs Whyte  Sorry to hear about Matilda hope she's on the mend soon you could try chicken sandwich paste or cheese in a ball round the pill it works for with our Meg and it’s a lot less stressful.

25 August 2012

Bentonbag  My next door neighbours have been looking after her today, while we've taken Fester to Sheffield, and worked wonders getting fluid and food into her.   

That and a day of peace and quiet has done her good.  She's still very wobbly but her eyes have stopped flickering.  But not looking forward to pill and medicine time!

Henlady  Glad to hear she is making progress.  Be strong at pill time, she is worth it! Hugs

Dulcima  Fingers crossed the good progress continues.

26 August 2012

Bentonbag  Let Matilda out of the living room this morning so she could have a bit of exercise.  She has a terrific list to starboard but has worked out that if she leans up against the wall whilst walking she's less likely to fall over.  Proceeded this way to the kitchen, dischuffed at not being allowed out the back door so proceeded to the stairs, and then slowly up them to the landing.  Thunderthighs and I dash up and close the bedroom doors so she can't hide under a bed.  She settles on the landing.  We go downstairs then Thunderthighs goes up to get ready to go out, comes back down 

"Matilda is in my room".  

Tell him to go up and hang duvet over the side of the bed so she can't get under.  

He comes back down "I've been a silly boy".  

So now I have to drag the cat out from under the bed to medicate her - so she'll be twice as furious - and she's getting stronger!!

St Bernard Awaw. Was at Sherriff's Hill emergency vet with Skip a coupla weeks back. Hope she gets well soon xx

27 August

Mr Melodeon  How is Matilda's recuperation programme proceeding?

Bentonbag  She's spent most of today as far under the couch as she can get, deigned to lick fish paste off my finger but refuses to come out so I shall have to shift furniture before medicine time

Mr Melodeon  Kindness cures!  This sounds like progress anyway--a good sign.

Dulcima  Getting stronger may make her harder to medicate, but it seems like a good sign.

Bentonbag  We're now down to half a tablet twice a day and this morning she licked it off my finger secreted in fish paste

Henlady  Carry on the great work, kisses to Matilda and get well wishes speeding to her.

In The Bag

As Facebook archives has thrown up nothing useful for today, I am grateful to OldestBestFriend for allowing me to cannibalise the email she sent me yesterday.

She and her husband are in the process of moving into his late parents’ house.  Tudor is a builder/painter/decorator/handyman and is remodelling and refurbishing the house to their requirements.

The Material For A Sitcom

Having been brought up on a farm I don’t tend to be fazed by spiders, mice, rats etc, however last Saturday was the exception.  I have spent most of the summer sorting out stuff in Llundain Street and Alfred Road (house we are moving into).  Tudor has now finished converting the attic into a craft room for me with storage at either end for general attic stuff.  This means that most of my stuff has now moved over to Alfred Road and is either in the attic storage space or craft room.

My mother in law (Mary ) was an avid knitter and sewer, so there is a lot of stuff of hers to go through and sort (mostly done now).

Last time I was in Llandeilo I brought some wool to make a cardigan and needed to look for my knitting needles.  On Saturday I got my knitting box out to find the needles and thought I might as well sort out the wool Mary had stashed away at the same time.  Another thing that would be sorted.  I take the box and various carrier bags of wool from the landing into the attic to look through and keep or pass on.  I am happily sorting and pulling out various balls of wool from the carrier bags until I put my hand in one bag and pull out a dead rat.  Being brought up on a farm did not help this time, I screamed.

The funniest thing about this is how it came about and being totally unintentional on Tudor’s part.

Alfred Road is next to the park and due to people leaving food after picnics etc it encourages rats.  These have come into the house and attic.  We put down some poison blocks (the sort we use on the farm).  As a result of this Tudor found a deceased rat in the attic, picked it up and put it in an empty carrier bag ready to be got rid of and left the carrier on the floor of the attic craft room to collect later.  I come along unaware of this, drop the bags of wool from the landing on the floor of the attic then scoop up the rat carrier with the wool bags.

 🐁

 

I forwarded OBF’s email to my sisters with the comment

“... and Bigsister thought it was bad enough finding a set of teeth in Mum's dinner lady overalls.”

(Mother's Teeth)

Middlesister replied

“Also found a bar of out of date chocolate in another item of clothing . I would have disposed of it but family pressure insisted we share it and we live to tell the "tail" fortunately not a rat's !xx"