wherethejourneytakesme

March 9, 2024

dear diary :: getting back into the swing

Home again and back to normal daily life and all that entails. Already there have been ups and downs in the couple of weeks we have been at home. Mum has had another urine infection – they make her say and do the oddest things as these infections disturb the brain. It is generally known now that a lot of the ‘dementia’ in elderly people is actually a lack of fluids but even though they are told to drink more they don’t as it means more trips to the toilet. For mum this is not easy as her mobility is so reduced she is on the verge now of not being able to walk at all.

We had a trip up to see her last Sunday after having Little L and Sweetie to stay on Friday and Saturday night. As they left we jumped in the car to drive the 90 miles to see mum – she hates being alone on a Sunday and my sister was away for a rest (though you can hardly call it being on her own as the carers go in 4 times a day).

I have started a course of acupuncture to see if it might help my ear problems and the peripheral nerve damage in my legs and feet from the ruptured disc I had over a year ago. I have never minded needles and quite frankly the doctors are at a loss so I will have a go at anything.

Last Monday we woke to a phone call from my younger daughter who, if you have been following my blog may remember, we helped to buy a new used car – the one that had a burst tyre on the motorway 14 minutes later. Perry’s in Rotherham have been very good and sent a cheque to her for the replacement tyre and we are hopeful we might recover some of the money for the recovery charge we paid to get her off the motorway. Anyway back to the phone call….”mum, the car is at the garage again”, “oh no” I said, ” what has happened this time?”…….. “a taxi driver came out of his driveway on the school run and straight into me and then drove away – I am waiting for the police”.

Daughter, Little L and Sweetie were shocked but OK, my daughter is now having to have physio because of bad whiplash.. the taxi driver eventually came back to the scene after his neighbour, who had seen the crash, rang him to tell him to come back. He has had a similar accident before coming out of his drive. Obviously he doesn’t have great timing and luckily daughter was not going fast. The car is not quite a write off but badly crumpled. Such
a shame.

On Wednesday it was such a beautiful sunny day we used our free NT coupon and went to Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire for the day. It must be over 30 years since we last visited and there is now a huge car park which was almost full and a new visitor centre. When we previously went you parked almost outside the door in the car park that had all of about 10 cars in it and the cafe was in one of the old kitchens. It was very interesting as the volunteers had time to chat and tell us quite a bit of the history and odd quirks of the place.

The little book on the left was found hidden behind one of the wooden panels in the dining room. There are never as many little artefacts of this nature in a place of this date as you find in later Georgian and Victorian properties so this was quite unusual.

We had arranged to go to help my elder daughter this week, who lives nearby, with her young baby but unfortunately baby Chocolate was unwell with a virus and a high temperature at the same time as her husband was also ill in bed. We could only help wash dishes and do a few household chores and nurse the baby to give mum a break as no way was he being put down in his cot – all he really wanted was to snuggle up with his mum. He is no better today so we will have Master Freddie here tomorrow to help out. I did have plans but of course I can put them aside.

I seem to have got quite a few unfinished decluttering jobs on the go now as it has been quite a broken up week one way or another. I am still wading through old paperwork and managed to scan on to the computer a lot of documents that I feel need keeping. I know you should not keep things ‘just in case’ but we have been saved a few times by hanging on to things. When we had the flood we could produce every receipt and got a good price for our contents, when there was all the endowment policy scandal we could produce plenty of evidence and more recently when the Skipton B.S. failed to transfer our ISA savings we could tell them the day and almost exact time that we had dropped the transfer request forms (that they claim they had not received) into the branch because I had kept the dental card machine receipt which showed the date and time we paid and the appointment was prior to us dropping in the forms. With each of these issues there has been a lot of money at stake that we might have missed out on if I wasn’t quite as diligent at keeping old paperwork.

It is so easy to keep a record digitally and I can then archive all these documents onto a memory stick. I hope I will never need to look back at them but you never know!

February 25, 2024

dear diary ~ homeward bound

We ached too much yesterday morning to go out into the cottage garden even though it was our last chance to clear up, weed, prune or do any other urgent jobs – we had to take the decision to just let it be.

Instead, as the sun was shining, we went for a short drive over to Castle Kennedy Gardens to have a wander on their snowdrop trail. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was…fresh air, sunshine and nature – it lifts the spirits like nothing else…forget retail therapy (I am not a shopper anyway) being outdoors after such a wet and dismal winter is like a good dose of medicine or perhaps I should say vitamins.

And now we are homeward bound after a lovely restful week. I feel ready to take on the house again when we get home; I have even been planning in my head what I will be decluttering next. There are many items that I just do not use taking up valuable shelf space and I know that I will probably not get around to using them this year either. Many of them are quite inexpensive; some of them will have been given to me in the first place, so cost me nothing. My idea is to empty a cupboard completely of its contents and then only put back the things that I actually use or have used in the last 6 months and then review whatever is left.

We stay in the Premier Inn overnight at Carlisle to break the journey home and rest my back but we will no longer be having the breakfasts there. We only have Continental breakfast anyway – I know how much people love their full cooked breakfast but they are not for me I have never had a liking for fried food. I usually choose yoghurt with a spoonful of the fresh berries on top and then have 2 slices of toast and a cup of tea and it costs £7.95, DH has museli and a croissant and a coffee for the same price. You can, for the price, eat all you want but I can’t eat more so I feel it is all a bit wasted on us and over time the breakfast menu is becoming more limited – decaff tea is no longer available, the yoghurts on offer are now down to two types 0% fat greek yoghurt or strawberry, both by Yeo Valley but in smaller tubs than you buy at the supermarket. Last week they had taken off the brown wholemeal bread and replaced it with what looks like the 50:50 type and it is that awful squidgy steam baked Mother’s Pride type (goodness knows why any mother would be proud of that). I expect I could complain to the powers that be that run the Premier Inn chain but I doubt they would be the least bit bothered…their priorities these days, like many other businesses, is a nice big profit over customer care and welfare. I presume if they keep limiting the menu bit by bit they can save a fortune over time.

So all in all it is not worth us paying out to have breakfast there. Instead we are going to take a bowl of our museli and buy a pint of milk and a yoghurt from the garage just down the road. I can cut up a Kiwi or banana to have with it. We can eat that in the hotel room and make a drink – I will take my own decaff teabag and then later when we are back on the road we will stop at Booths in Penrith or a Costa who both sell a better slice of toast with nice thick wholemeal slices.

Well must go now I have a little packing and cleaning to do before we go. I like to leave the caravan tidy and clean for the next visit and we switch off our fridge because there are often numerous power cuts here (one lasted 3 days) so it has to be emptied and wiped out each time. We have just about managed to eat down all the food we brought and bought – one of the drawbacks to staying in the hotel overnight is trying to keep any chilled foods cool so it is useful for us to finish off any cheese or butter by the end of our visit.

I thought whilst I am talking about the Premier Inn you might like to hear a funny story.

We always stay in the same Premier Inn just off Junction 42 on the M6 at Carlisle (you may know it), and we have over the course of the last 18 months had various different rooms some better than others but never the same one twice – we have had rooms with a very smelly shower curtain, hand soap with a faulty pump, lamps that don’t work, very large spiders, no heating and no toilet tissue but have never experienced the room with no window until our previous stay last December. It was a winter’s evening so when we opened the door to room 101 we were not surprised to see the curtains already closed. However, the first thing I always do when we go into a room is open the window. Imagine my surprise when I pulled back the curtain to be greeted by a blank wall!

Well, I actually fibbed a bit here because when I looked up there was a window but it was way up at the top of the wall near the ceiling, just a long slit really and impossible to see out of or reach to open. This is the window from the outside of the building just above the reception area below.

DH reckoned it had perhaps been a store room at one time and then converted. It felt too claustrophobic for me so we had to ask to be moved. ‘People either love it or hate it’ reception said – you can guess which camp I am in.

Have a great day x

February 23, 2024

dear diary ~ time is going quickly now…

We are almost at the end of our time here and winding down on the task list. There has been rain but mainly overnight and the weather looks set to hold although I think the temperature has dropped a few degrees.

Today I really must prune the apple tree – a job I have kept putting off as I confess I really do not know what I am doing. I have read up on plenty of pruning advice and watched one or two videos but none of the trees in their pictures look quite like mine and I feel rather daunted by it all. It is a Braeburn and I have no idea how it is getting pollinated as ideally it says they need two other apple trees and all we have is the large Bramley apple tree nearby. Surprisingly then, we had a lovely little crop last year. Now I am worried I might prune off the wrong branches and be left with a framework that produces fewer apples.

We managed the tip run yesterday and the lovely men that work there helped us with unloading the old plasterboard from the kitchen ceiling and then even swept out the trailer – we would not have had that service at home. They keep the place swept and clean and carefully signed so you know that you are not going to risk getting a puncture there from old nails and broken glass. Our tip down at home is quite badly run and by people that really couldn’t care less – I am not sure they ever sweep up.

Thankfully, now we have the brown garden waste bin at home to take the stuff we can’t compost we don’t have to visit our tip very often. When I can I always find homes for any unwanted items rather than take them to the tip, even bits of wood and old tools – there is often a charity that will take odd things or Freecycle. It makes me feel quite ill to see people unloading some quite good stuff from their car into the skips. It seems criminal to me to see bikes, toys, cabinets etc. being thrown away. I even saw someone throw away a large plastic dog basket….what would have been wrong about washing it well and passing it on? In Stranraer you can take all these items to the big shed next to the tip where they will sell them on (I believe they repair bikes too).

The snowdrops are spreading around the woodland walk quite nicely now but not as quickly as I would like so I will be transplanting some of them to places new as they are just on the turn and will be over by the time we come again.

We have noticed this week that we seem to have acquired a flock of crows at the cottage – they are being fed indirectly by someone in the village who believes he is feeding the smaller garden birds but the crows are muscling in on the food he puts out and steadily growing in number. At the moment they are just using our tall trees in the wood to perch on when they are circling overhead but I am a bit worried about them starting to nest there and take up residence. One of the villages not too far from here suffer with a rather large nesting crow colony and the continual noise they make gets to quite a pitch… and it goes on all day like the Chinese water torture.

I made a large pan of lentil and leek stew yesterday so there is still plenty for today’s evening meal and it means we can garden for that bit longer ……and we certainly need to….I can hear the weeds growing!

Have a great day x

February 22, 2024February 22, 2024

dear diary ~ rest, relax…repeat

At last some good weather – though it is odd that I have to come all the way to Scotland for it.

There have been changes whilst we have been away we expected it of course as the new owner of the pub, restaurant and caravan site is continually making changes even for change sake, unfortunately, most of them involve planning or licensing applications and he has obviously not applied for any otherwise we would have received notification of them in case we wanted to object. It appears he has no time to abide by any rules.

The last few days have been so nice we had breakfast and then went straight out into the garden…..whilst the sun shines, make….. full use of it!

I usually start by going over this little border outside our garden gate that runs along by the upper part of the lane. I removed a rather large overgrown clump of wild yellow irises to make way for some ground covering plants like geranium and valerian. The hollies, which are all self-seeded and then transplanted, are doing well now and filling out quite nicely – I don’t want huge trees but will keep them pruned to a nice rounded shrub sized plant. It is so easy at this time of year to dig up some of the dormant plants along with the weeds so I have to take extra care. DH tackled the Rosa rugosa hedge that runs down along the lane side from the gate – the one that the new owner of the pub and caravan site massacred a couple of years ago – luckily it is hard to kill and has regenerated quite nicely but we always make sure nothing is growing out into the lane so he doesn’t feel he has the need to chop it down again.

We had a rest day yesterday to protect our backs or else we will get little else done for the week. Instead I used the time to stay indoors and do a little more planning and some digital detox on my computer.

Of course it was too much to hope that mum would be OK during the time both me and my sister are away and we wouldn’t have a crisis on our hands. It was only a small drama really but to her a major crisis and I wasn’t able to help very much only be on the other end of the phone. It happened on Sunday evening. She was waiting for her carers to go and put her to bed. Her time slot is for 6pm, their previous visit ends at 4 pm so before they put her to bed for the night they usually make her some toast for her tea/supper and a final hot drink. At 6.45pm she rang me to say they had not come and she couldn’t get through to the office as the answer phone was on. She was clearly agitated as she does not like to go out of routine. She said she would ring them again to make sure someone was coming. At 7pm, 7.15pm, 7.30pm, 7.45pm, 8pm, 8.15pm, 8.30pm she rang me again and again to say they still had not shown. She had spoken to someone at the office, quite aggressively as she does now, and they said a carer was on their way but no explanation was offered as to why they were so late. Finally at 8.45pm someone arrived – of course mum was hungry, thirsty but most of all cold as she cannot switch the fire on by herself now and the flat had got quite chilly. She was also dog tired and very angry – I didn’t know whether to feel sorrier for the poor carer or my mum!

Needless to say they have been on time for the last two days.

We had a lovely walk to the village yesterday afternoon, called at the pub by the harbour for a hot chocolate and took a few photos.

We spotted quite a few new painted rocks along the low road from the village. It is lovely that anyone in the community can add to this – the idea began when one of the residents secretly placed a few painted rocks along the path one night and it has snowballed over the years to the point where the coaches heading for the Mull often stop for their passengers to get off and go and look at them.

Whilst the light was good I managed to complete the last bit of knitting on the little jacket for baby Chocolate. Try as I might to make it neat I do struggle with edges and picking up stitches but no doubt I just need more practise. Knitting patterns, I find, often leave you high and dry – I am sure for experienced knitters it is not a problem but I need more instructions. The pattern says to pick up and knit the contrasting band around the hood and then down the front of the jacket which I have done. It does not say to do both sides….not knowing if I should or not I decided I would and did in fact knit the band on both edges.

I am not sure of the weather today so have no definite plans. There is always plenty to do in the garden but we also need a trip into town for a bottle of gas and to take in a trailer full of old plasterboard from the kitchen ceiling of the cottage. Luckily, the tip here accepts rubble and stuff as not everywhere does. At home you have to get a skip even if you only have a bucketful.

I am starting to feel a litle more relaxed now and am finding the time to sort out one or two tasks off my list which has also helped – things that seem to have been on there for ever and keep getting rolled over each week – you know the ones. It is quite odd that when we are here at the cottage I think about all the jobs I need to do at home and when I am at home I have my mind on what needs doing at the cottage – well mainly in the garden. Perhaps having the distance somehow makes my mind clearer and I feel less overwhelmed. I am sure that life is getting so much busier these days and more stressful and it is not just a matter of being older. Technology was supposed to make things quicker and easier but I find just the opposite…. that you are forever in a queue on the phone or you come up against an answerphone or you get through to some voice telling you to go to their Q&A on their website (don’t they ever think that you have already done that and the answer is not there!

Hope your day is full of promise. x