Breathing

Hello again, sorry about the loooooooong gap between my posts of late, I feel like I can finally breathe again..it's just like we have been holding our breath for one whole month waiting to see what will happen with jobs, the house and all that horrid boring, scary stuff. Then of course there was the snow too, that really threw a spanner in the works...

looks like someone went mad with a foam fire extinguisher!

Pete has just this week, started a job doing something he was doing when we first met 20 years ago and has interviews lined up this month for better ones he'll hopefully be doing in 20 years from now. I can't tell you how many application forms have been filled in and phone calls made.It has been one long nightmare. I've always said it's better to have a couple of strings to your bow so that there's at least another skill to fall back on when you need to...and believe me, as much as he didn't really want to do that job again, he needed to.
Apart from holding my breath and turning blue and my brain trying to escape daily from my head, (and the horrid hospital visits as well) some nice things have been happening too.

I'll let you in on a secret....

My lovely Grannie who passed away last February left me a bit of money and it took nearly a whole year to arrive at my door but boy, was the timing perfect. The mortgage was paid just one day late, the bills were paid and the scary telephone calls I was going to have to make were put off just in the nick of time. It was like she had waited until we really needed it, until we had no more doors to go through and no more answers.She allowed us to breathe again. Big deeeeeep breaths of relief.
I felt sad at the thought of not being able to have something to remember my Grannie by, I have the memories and the photos, but I really would have liked something to look at every day and know that my Grannie had given me the pennies to buy it with. I had known for some time about the money and had months to think of things to spend it on.
I'm not a posh jewelery person, I dont wear a wedding or engagement ring and the necklaces and the rings that I do own are like those huge big chunky ones like Trinny wears (gardeners hands..I'll never be dainty, see) so it got me thinking of other things, a vintage caravan, some some vintage pretties, a trip to the seaside...oooh the possibilities of flittering away pennies on pretty things were almost endless!
Then the shit hit the fan when Pete lost his job and all these fantasies were gone in a flash.

I did however have enough left for one thing and it only came to me whilst staring out the window across the garden whilst wondering how we would ever have got out of this mess if it hadn't been for her thinking of us and the perfect timing that made it all be ok.

summer 2008

The rose arbour at the bottom of the garden had completely got out of hand, huge 15' whips of evil thorny lengths were dangling half way across the neighbours garden and it became so big that it had broken through the roof of the arbour, the fence and the wooden rail that it rested on.It became somewhere we no longer sat under without getting scratched or bits landing on you from above. Beautiful as it was with its little pompoms of pink and white, it was just too big for the space. Such a shame, but this garden is always evolving, so out it came.The poor, now rotten arbour that Pete had built came with it and made some very welcome firewood.


I am now the proud owner of a summerhouse.
Put up by Harry and Pete on the coldest day ever inbetween flurries of yet more snow (I made tea and supervised the doings)

Harry in his mad hat and his Dad's boots

It was something Grannie always had at each house, something we often got told off for mucking about in, or spinning around in the case of the Victorian one at her beautiful Manor House and something she had once bought as a present for my mum too.

It still needs quite a lot more work, we will 'vintagey-fy' it and put proper slate tiles on the roof like we did with the chicken house, paint it green and cream and I have a garage full of spare furniture to decorate it with.The garden will be rejigged, the awkward to cut hedge has gone, the pond will be moved and a trellis-topped (and honeysuckle covered) wall will be built out of old bricks (by Stinky George if he ever stirs from that permanent teenage sleep) but at the moment in the constant rain, it all looks rather awful and very muddy.
I can't wait. Roll on Spring, roll on Summer.
I'll sit there with my cup of tea,with no doubt a few creatures around me listening to radio 2 on my Roberts radio in my vintagey-fied summerhouse with its bunting up and be in utter bliss.

Thankyou Grannie. Thankyou so much.