Settling in

 

If I had any idea once back that my return would usher in a period of lolling about on a deckchair in the sun-dappled shade of an apple tree, G&T in hand, the last month or so have thoroughly disabused me of any such idea. To start with,  for me as for everyone else the weather hasn’t been cooperative. Endless grey skies, cool temperatures, rain showers and only the occasional glimpse of the sun. Indeed at one stage I thought I must have spilled something on the stair carpet when one step had a curious streak on it. It turned out to be a ray of sunshine stealing diagonally from a nearby window. Two connected results for the garden have been the more than usually intermittent presence of my necessarily  part-time gardener and vigorous growth of everything green, especially if noxious. So I have spent a lot of time trying to rescue the garden from the saddest state I think it’s ever been in. Hacking through the bamboo to get at the pond, locating the brick path under its new coating of grass and weeds, that sort of thing. It’s been an exercise in archaeology. Quite satisfying actually but there’s still a long way to go. Of course, one comes across jungle glades, where tomatoes, onions, leeks and rhubarb are growing on an industrial scale, thanks to my gardener’s efforts. I exaggerate of course, but not that much.

And its been quite inspiring sometimes. Not only did I move and clean the existing bird feeder but I also at long last after several years of putting it off,  erected a new much larger and grander one making use of a Victorian Chinese garden seat, which has been lying around doing nothing very much for a decade or more. The result is flocks of birds that come and devour the lot completely every two days, peanuts, fat balls, niger seed, mixed seed and all. In and around them, I get all the ones in the RSPB’s top ten, plus rarer things like Thrushes, Spotted Woodpeckers and on one occasion a collared dove (introduced in 1955 but now a much declining species) that sat on top of the new feeder for at least an hour, looking enviously at what it couldn’t access.  

Much less satisfying but probably more urgent has been getting domestic business up in all its variety to date after what amounts of up to 5 years of  the kind of cumulative neglect that comes about through having to take short cuts by automatically renewing everything, sometimes only when reminded. I just haven’t had time to investigate alternatives, sorting out the filing and that kind of thing. This of course is part of the hidden costs of flitting all over the place for much of the year, especially for long periods, and played a part in my deciding not to take up the offer of an extension to my Newport contract

On top of that,  the academic side of things is still chugging away if now at a slower rate. A few foreign gigs have appeared, now that I am less constrained by Newport teaching. Like many other people I am watching as closely as I can what’s going on in Ukraine, sharing in the developing consensus that this awful conflict is likely to still be going on this time next year. I fear that Russia will ultimately emerge from all this in a better position than we would like, but hope I'm wrong. Simply ploughing through the deluge of feeds about this and other things I am interested in, that come in every day, can easily take two hours of sitting-under-an-apple-tree time, but it’s very, very hard not to do it. I expect no admiration for this kind of effort, it just reflects the fact that I am a news junkie. Sad but true. 

Of course there’s a very nice part of continuing academic endeavour, like being treated to a sumptuous ‘thank you’ dinner at the Savoy on one night and a very nice lunch in the West End the following day. Good for the self-esteem, if not the waistline. The former involved a spectacular pyrotechnic display for my colleague’s ‘chantilly.’

That was part of a self-indulgent London trip which included time spent in the V&A, checking up on Junware, one of my favourite types of Chinese stoneware ceramics. Its untypical, but has a distinctive lavender glaze and colour mix that I like. The trouble is there seems to be quite a lot around online that is so cheap it must be modern copies -which are very hard to tell from the originals. Since I got all mine from the late Jimmy Wong in Singapore I’m pretty sure all mine is original, typically fired about 1200-1550 AD at the Yaozhou kiln in north China, but frankly I can’t be sure. Nice though.

Even nicer of course has been the chance to catch-up and reacquaint myself with my delightful family after 5 months away, especially my two smaller granddaughters who are growing up remarkably fast. I don’t want to miss this process ! The elder grandchildren are likewise flourishing in their different ways. Nothing stays the same: changes come and go, blink and you miss them. There have been two occasions for catching-up. The first was a major, long weekend gathering of all the clan (including Graham and Lo ) at West Lulworth, in a modern thatched cottage near the famous cove.

Despite the evidently ravenous tics in the garden which latched on to both Martha and me and unreliable weather, this was a splendid success.

We enjoyed our time in the cove itself, marvelling at its symmetry especially from the Pepple point headland.

But for me the highlight was the sentimental trip down to Durdle Door, complete with paraphernalia that included a large and rather heavy plastic dinghy and oars that we used, decades ago, to paddle through the famous arch. I had checked it before taking it, but had somehow missed a hole in it. This was only discovered when we tried to blow up the key (and biggest) section of the dinghy on the beach, having lugged it all the way down a long and sometimes quite difficult track from the carpark. It says much for the general niceness of my family that, whatever they may have thought, there was no word of reprimand from anyone ! Perforce, then we had to make do with swimming round the arch instead.

The offending dinghy may be seen in this pic. the white dot in the sea is me swimming out to the arch. The event ended with a soggy pic-nic in the drizzle in the New Forest on our various ways home, or, as the case may be, to a Star Wars gathering in Fordingbridge. We all have our special interests. Mine was in re-visiting Corfe castle for the first time in decades which I managed to squeeze in on the way to Lulworth.

The second such occasion  was much less strenuous,  a partial gathering for Violet’s 5^th birthday at Cross-in-Hand. 5^th birthday no less – evidence of my earlier point about needing to be present in order to cope with the passage of time. This was part of a week of celebration and all concerned  found it highly enjoyable. As, despite the ravages of the mice lamented in my last transmission, have I found the process of settling back into a more normal life. So far  !