I used to be shy. Not any more. But I'm still rather modest and retiring ( Read more... )

I found myself watching Robin and Marian again last night ( Read more... )

Our good deed for yesterday was sorting out a mix-up over walking sticks. Terry had walked off with John's stick on Sunday, leaving his own behind, so we went to his care home, returned him his stick and collected John's- which we will return on Sunday ( Read more... )

The YouTube feed threw up a nice little BBC film from 1990- in which Spike Milligan- comedic genius- wandered round East Sussex looking at archeological sites and deploring the modern world. I found I had some passing aquaintance with just about every place he visited. He flew over The Long Man, walked round the footprint of a Roman villa at ( Read more... )

I walk out into the garden to feed the birds at sunrise. The sky is still grey, the world is still grey, but next door's chimney stack is gleaming a rosy pink- where the slanted ray of the still invisible sun has struck it ( Read more... )

The English Churches are wilting away- and have been through the course of my lifetime. One of the charities Ailz and I support is The Churches Conservation Trust- which owns and maintains over 350 historic church buildings for which the Church of England has no further use. It is continually adding to its collection- as building after building ( Read more... )

At present we can't just step into the kitchen but have to go into the hall, out through the inner front door, into the garage by a side door and so through the garage (which is very cold) and down a short, dark, passage. It makes me think of the servants in big houses who had to shuttle continuously between the rooms where work got done and the ( Read more... )

Here's what the kitchen looks like today. Dodgy wiring and piping have been removed from the under the floor and the area properly prepped and then flooded with cement. Until this dries we have to access the working area of the kitchen by way of the garage....


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The housekeeper at the Meeting House is a hoarder and uses the Meeting House to store overspill from her collection. This can't be allowed to get out of hand ( Read more... )

Here's an idle wish:

I wish I had a native-speaker's grasp of German so I could read Rilke in the original.