Spring depart

At last it feels springlike on my walks.  Plenty of people out in their fiercely manicured garden with lawnmowers, hedge cutters and leaf blowers, de rigour in this affluent town.  I have mixed feelings about these overly tended gardens. They do have beautiful specimen trees and shrubs, we are well stocked with showy magnolias, camellias and the like but to me they speak as much of wealth as gardening skill or enthusiasm.

I was delighted to see the woods are full of bluebells, they are particularly spectacular this year and lovely hawthorn hedges are in full flower.  I much prefer this kind of wildlife friendly hedge to the knife edged sterile evergreen pruned versions.

Maybe I am being unkind. I expect the owners get a lot of pleasure from their immaculate gardens and it’s good they work in them. I prefer something a bit more blousy and untamed, something more like me. 

So now that spring is here we are leaving.  On Monday we catch a not too early ferry and will spend a few days in France and one in northern Italy before reaching our house next Thursday. I have some anxiety about the fuel situation and really hope that if awful the war continues we don’t get stuck in Italy.  We hope to be back in Ilkley late June.

New books

It’s very rare for me to buy new books. My local library is a delight when we are in Yorkshire and I always stock up on charity paperbacks to take to Italy, returning them read to pass on to friends or back to the charity shop.  The many books we have in the penthouse are mostly non fiction. 

However recently I’ve had two new book experiences.  Firstly I reserved a library book which when I went to collect was a pristine brand new hardback.  I told the librarian that it was a lot of pressure for me to be the first to read it and also to take care of it, I did manage not to damage it.  Not always the case.  When I worked in Edinburgh I used the glorious central library which wasn’t too far from my office. I had taken out a sizeable brand new tome on organic gardening.  One morning I put it in my work bag to return, tucked in beside my packed lunch.  Sadly the latter had attempted an escape and a ripe peach squashed itself against the fore edge, the opening edge that isn’t the spine, of the book.  Of course I owned up at the returns desk, it really wasn’t that bad but they made me pay the full purchase price of the book then handed it back to me.  Lesson learnt.

Secondly this week I received as a gift a brand new book, below. My lovely neighbour had left it gift wrapped on my door step as a thank you for a bit of knitting I did for her.  It was such a nice surprise, a beautiful looking book with great reviews and best of all brand new but without responsibility. This is such a special treat for me and I will look after it.

This is not an April fool post

Some days I feel my latest decluttering exercise is making little progress. Charity donations have been made and I sold a few items on eBay but three Emma Bridgewater mini mugs and a Scottish pottery tartan cup and saucer haven’t released a lot of shelf space. 

MrFF has been regularly badgered to sort through the collection of 200+ CDs that we have not had the means to play for the last 11 years.  His modus operandi so far is to take 30 off the storage rack, put them in various piles round the office and think about them.  12 have so far been released to the charity shop. I mentioned how pleased they were to have them, sadly that didn’t motivate him to send more.

This week our hardly used now vintage arctic grade sleeping bags were brought down from the loft, photographed and offered for sale.  That’s great except they are now in the lounge awaiting a buyer, please consider them if you are venturing into the frozen wastes any time soon, they are lovely.

However this week my mindset has been completely changed.  I was browsing property for sale in our Italian village which you might think is an interesting and possibly inspiring thing to do, you’d be wrong.  These are two of the sales photos from a detached semi rural property with a reasonable asking price. 

I cannot comprehend how the vendors expect to sell their over cluttered hardly visible house looking like this or why the estate agents don’t explain the bit about putting personal stuff out of sight.  Either way I feel a whole lot better.