Blackbird and thyme.

 Our songster decided to have a rest next to the thyme.

Driving over lemons

Coming from wet and cold Yorkshire, I would never have imagined that I would have a surfeit of lemons in the middle of winter. I read Carol Drinkwater's book entitled "Driving over lemons" many years ago, and envied her the challenge of using so much citrus fruit from her trees.

Our tree went berserk this year, despite being planted in the wrong place. It's the excess rain - they love being rained on. So here I am, wondering what to do with them all.  They are ugly, in a way that only their mother could love, but delicious and juicy.

There are only so many lemon drizzle cakes you can make.........or perhaps not. 

Arthur

I inherited a lot of family postcards from the Edwardian era, which were largely correspondence between my grandmother and her sisters and brothers. As is often the case, there were a number of mystery cards, either because I had no context for them, or because I simply didn't know enough about my grandma's life at that time. Also, the mystery cards could have come from my grandmother, her siblings, my great grandmother or my great Uncle, as all their effects ended up with my father and later with me. 

Tonight, courtesy of a WW1 website called "A Street Near You" I was able to finally put a history to a photo. 

This postcard said simply "Arthur" and on the reverse "Remembrance" and the date he died, a month before the end of the War.

Arthur was a similar age to my grandmother's eldest brother Bill. They would have grown up together in the village.  Both worked as gardeners on large estates, Bill in Canada, and Arthur for Stapleton Park, whose grounds and gardens were designed by Capability Brown. Bill signed up to go to France with the Canadian Regiment, but was never deployed, Arthur joined the Durham Light Infantry as a Lance Corporal and died in France.

I cannot imagine the devastation caused by his death in such a small village. Three young men were lost from the tightly knit community. A hundred years later on I find it so sad as I look at this young man with so much promise.

RIP Arthur Etty, son of Alice and Thomas Etty. 

Forever with the Lord

Royal Funeral

 Grief caught me today, as I watched a coffin draped with a Standard.

My own father's coffin was draped with his Squadron's standard and his service medals. He wasn't a Duke, or a Lord, but he was a father.

And today a father was mourned, by his children who walked. No matter the titles and wealth and position and the history of millennia. They were fighting back tears as children do when they know they will not hear that voice again, hear that laugh.

So grief grips us by the hand and we walk, so reluctant, wanting to run back in time.

Grief is an eternal companion, sometimes with the iron grip of memory, other times just a sad reflection in an old mirror looking behind.

But we walk and we walk on.

Waiting for the rain.

The air this evening smells like Africa before a storm; that high tension state when the grass almost speaks to the cloud heavy sky and begs for rain. The grass is very, very dry, baked hard with no possibility for birds to feed. We have fire warnings in place, and we wait for the sky to crack. The smell will change first then the colour, then the light will sharpen and refocus through the haze. I wait for the moment. But I will miss the smell. The Smell that invites animals to scratch in the shadows, pause and listen, then scatter. I wait for the scattering at the first boom, the first hammer and flash. Then the metal roof will timpani and throw the drops to dance and white water will gutter in gutters and overflow and crash. Yes, tonight feels like the veld.