New Year's Eve 2010...

As we release the lanterns to wish each other Happy New Year, it's hard to believe 2010 has gone... when I look at my list from 1st January to see what I have done (and not!) 
I can see that it might have taken a year to even contemplate starting, let alone completing it. I have done some of it :-) &
it's been good! Happily we haven't lost anyone in our family this year. I have seen more of my brother than in previous years. My only nephew has announced his engagement at the ripe old age of 28. My cousins keep watch over their mum who will be 100 in 2011. 
So, retirement huh? I have been 'working towards' stopping working, and I seem to be seeing the other side of life a little bit more. The trick appears to stay being "me" and to do these other things with as much gusto and concentration, as much dedication as I gave to Work! Booking on courses, meeting with friends - I put them into the diary - it looks just-as-busy-as-ever! That way I have Garden House-gardened, allotmented, played music on my own anglo-concertina, taken a chair apart and half-reupholstered it, seen lovely old friends from over 30 years ago, gone to exhibitions, concerts, taken short breaks... celebrated as much retirement as necessary (yes, sneaked in a bit of paid work too!) Being supported in it by Michael has been great, so when he planned the 5 week trip to France & Spain down to the very last B&B, I felt the buzz of the "busy-ness" and the security of the blanket. Yes, Little Miss Busy's story has been mine. 

• I succeeded in taking 2 days during the week to play as well as the weekends.
• I did have Wednesday as a French day - I finished the French Diploma from the University of Brighton, and I went to the Jeudi Matin music session in the morning, n-e-a-r-l-y every week.
• I started to learn to play the anglo-concertina!
• I've got quotes for new windows on the ground floor
• I've been a bit creative - drawing, sewing, mainly
• I kept a cloud diary of sorts - an unlabelled photo collection!
• I am booked on the Community Cookery Leader course, preparing for a work opportunity related to cookery. The rest are hobbies!

Things not done as completely as planned:

• I took weekly photos that were linked to my retirement activities, but I didn't necessarily make links between permaculture design and life course theory! Maybe that was too complex a connection to attempt, to help the theoretical side of retirement make sense... I have been living it! So it will need a redesign - you could say I have used this blog as a year's "observation log" and now I start the analysis towards a design... maybe a book about retirement and its distractions?
• Ooops, no, I didn't take a long walk out in the fresh air once a week, although I did accompany Mandy on some of her walks... but not enough! It's on the list for 2011, and that will include having lunch too.
• Well, it's a constant task, to clear the garden, so no surprises it doesn't look its best now. A greenhouse would need a complete reshape of the space  :-(
• Now there is an incentive to declutter the house as we need to squeeze two of us into it! Luckily arch-declutterer Mandy has offered to help, so we can get on with going through and listing what needs to go from each room... then get it to a boot sale.
• House maintenance is becoming a priority, so linking it to other things will be more efficient. The back wall needs repointing because of damage caused by next door's broken guttering - if getting that sorted can be tied in with the windows, that'd be the most useful plan for this year.
• I don't think I want to develop my dance career! French dance is my passion and I want to do more of it but not much more of anything else... though there's a plan for a small circle dance ensemble ;-)

Things done instead, or as well as:

• Le Grand Tour de la Retraite! 5 weeks of bliss (apart from the head cold) in France and Spain, seeing wonderful things, staying in great places (from a YHA to a 5* hotel), meeting lovely people in the Basque country, Cordoba, Orihuela, Melle (though we missed Benoit Guerbigny by a day)... 
• Beginning to upload my own Portfolio for the Permaculture Diploma, which was awarded in 2004!
• The Garden House Friday Group has helped me to think systematically about the garden, and to consider the greenhouse idea... it might be easier to move and get a bigger garden with an existing greenhouse!
• Plans have been done to convert the loft into a room...
• Sour Dough breadmaking - a real success, with culture from my own living space!

Well, I'm off to dance the New Year in ... what will I do in 2011? 


See my new blog... Boundaries of Home

Escape to Spain...

Christmas sunset 

After our cold Christmas, Yannick le technicien came on Monday and fixed the bruleur on the furnace... but we'd already decided to go to Spain for our last two days. The saints in aran sweaters are in the mountains just south of the border; the sunset is Roses, where we spent the night looking over the sea. We ate at La Gallega de Roses, a seashell encrusted Galician restaurant where - at last! - I had seiche à la planxa (my usual last-night-of-the-holidays meal in Prades). 

St Pierre de Rodes

Shell encrusted Galician restaurant

Tango lessons

On our way back to the hotel we heard the strains of exotic music, and snuck a look into the tango lesson!
There's something a bit more lively about northern Spain at Christmas, compared with that southern bit of France. A lovely peaceful & quiet time can be had in the PO, the Muscat de Noel is made especially in September and the local food is great. People spend time on family visits, we do sunny walks up gently hillsides (because Canigo is not really open to climbers in winter). It's very quiet, few restaurants are open even at the seaside - one year we nipped over to Spain just for a cup of coffee, and realised the difference in ambiance! 

Empuries

Greek sandals!

   Now, flying to Girona means there's an excuse for visiting Figueras (the Dali museum), Cadaquès (Dali again & Picasso), mountain villages, and even as far as Barcelona! And the hot chocolate is fantastic! (Food's good in Girona airport departure lounge as well.) This time we ticked the Greek and Roman archeological sites at Empuriès off the list too.

Greek bird

Mosaic pavement from Roman city

Boxing Day at Canet Plage...

Looks lovely doesn't it, but... it was very windy as well as being sunny, the tops of waves whipping ... people bent over against the elements! We'd gone to Perpignan - no shops open! Wot, no Boxing Day sales?????

Bonne Fête de Noël...

25th December 2010 
Prades, PO, FRANCE


Blue sky and sunshine, the wind whipping powdery snow from the top of Canigó, the Catalan sacred mountain. A trip to see the Romanesque churches of the hills & valley - St Michel de Cuxa, Taurinya, Corneilla. Christmas dinner was Muscat de Noel, paté campagne, sea bream en croute de sel, and homemade Xmas pud, stuffed with a candied clementine and soaked in Armagnac, Blanquette de Limoux à boire. 

Pastorets de Mosset Pessebre Vivante...

Grumpy Angel (Arnaud) was tired after two hours on stage at Mosset's Pessebre Vivante last night. He brought Baby Jesus on, delivered him to Mary (not so much Virgin Birth as Voices Off), then had to sit listening to old people singing the nativity story (again!) for ages. The French Catalan version is set in the hilly Roussillon landscape and the Chorus of Bergers sing French and Catalan folksongs (Pastorets Alerta! & Salten i Ballen) and church carols (Joia en el Mon & Santa Nit, Silent Night) as the story unfolds. Local colour enters, in the shape of the Fisherfolk, a Sabotmaker, a bell ringing KnifeGrinder, Las Gitanas (castanets & a live chicken), the Woodsman & his rabbit, the Porcier and his pig, Les Etrangers (Dutch and Welsh in this production) and the Sardana dancers, who all bring their crafts and rustic gifts instead of the Wise Men's gold, frankincense and myrrh. At a suitable point the Devil roars in, all red lycra and black horns, poking his fork and lots of fun at the piousness of the shepherds. He is surrounded, vanquished, and then stamped into the earth with a circle dance by the little children singing Fum Fum Fum! All finished off with the Song of the Birds and a Russian carol: lovely! We then wound our way down the mountain road in the dark...

Winter morning moon over the Fenouilledes...

The morning of winter solstice saw an eclipse of the moon visible over Europe; the next morning this was the full moon rising at 8.41 GMT+1, taken through an open window, not through a glass darkly! The 'promise' of a rainy day did not materialise, for local shepherds nor for us.
A man that looks on glass, on it may stay his eye, or, if he pleaseth, through it pass, and then the heaven espy is the 2nd verse of a hymn written by mystical poet George Herbert in 1630 or so. Did he forsee the modern predeliction for taking pictures and not seeing the view beyond?
I've been playing from a little book of Christmas carol tunes, published in what looks like the 1950s, by Eleanor Franklin Pike. She wrote a couple of carols herself and slipped them into the book, and wasn't averse to nicking a hymn tune to put to other carols. I didn't recognise the words but one of the tunes (Sandys) was familiar and stayed in my head; eventually some words seeped forward 50 years into my consciousness to go with it... "makes that, and the action, fine". Googling, of course, brought it to screen in less than x seconds, and the original poem is a mystical piece by G Herbert which scarcely looks like a celebration of higher things. Rather the signifying of lowly things as higher level thought. The verse that escaped me is Herbert's 4th: A servant with this clause makes drudgery divine: who sweeps a room, as for Thy sake, makes that and the action fine. Hmmm, is this the excuse for sacred housework?  It got tampered with by John Wesley however, and the sweet poetry in this verse vanished.

Not to be opened til 25th December...

Cool yule, sweet solstice and merry christmas everybody...

The Garden House Brighton Christmas Lights

Save your *Cape Gooseberry 'lanterns' and dry them. Find some small christmas garland lights, and slip the lanterns over each little bulb... string up and switch on!


*Physalis alkekengi 

Time and Talents...

187 Bermondsey Street

Last week I stayed in London for a conference and opposite the apartment-hotel (get 'er!) near London Bridge there was this Art Nouveau-style building Time and Talents Settlement. Fascinated with what it might be and with a bit of websearching I found that it was a social movement where "ladies" with a bit of time on their hands keen to use their talents to look after the welfare of working women, in 1887. 
The Time & Talents charity has a modern version, which supports lots of women in the docks area of London, more likely to be young mothers and elderly groups now, of course. However more interesting might be the Visible in Stone website (English Heritage) which celebrates buildings associated with women's rights and suffrage and other historical matters around the country. (to be completd)

Brighton lights...

Dolphin fountain in Market Square

 Brighton does a nice line in Christmas lights, especially in the little places off the main shopping street. I found these two last week, the Boy & Dolphin fountain looking like the spray had frozen, in the air... In fact the spray had frozen on the ground and it was quite slippy underfoot.  It's quite hard to work out the perspective on this one, isn't it? 
The Pavilion lit in blue is a lovely feature of the town's display. It's the first time an ice rink has been put up in the grounds of the Pav, and people seem to be really enjoying it.

Ice Rink at Brighton Pavilion

There are a few houses lit up in the outlying districts, puffing trains carrying Santa, deer and sleighbells trotting across the front walls... I'll take a few pix and add to this entry as they appear...

Primetime Permaculture...

A few years ago I used a little bit of Gardener's World to create a teaching session about permaculture on TV... Monty Don was talking about and showing where permaculture principles were in use in a garden, but didn't actually use the P word - the game was for the watcher to Spot The Principle! Now, Alan Titchmarsh's Garden Secrets featured nearly 5 minutes of it! Thanks to Maddy & Tim for the clip...



Meanwhile in my garden, the American Land Cress survived the -10 frost last night...  

Oh, so .... snowy!

Another 10 cms overnight if the hat on the lantern is anything to go by ... certainly the snow was over the boot-tops. 
And another retirement milestone passed today: the letter to say I get a Winter Fuel Allowance!


David & Felix made an igloo in the street... it was cosy inside, very quiet, and the light was more a blue colour than what has come out in this photo. For a while the gap in the wall looked like the famous photo from inside an iceberg...

igloo outside

Stanmer Street Slide

from the inside

Twingo-on-Ice

igloo doorway

Oh, so .... scary!

The QE2 Bridge, at the Dartford Crossing, 1st December at about noon... dark skies, snow at about 15 cms on the ground apart from this bit of road, which had been warmed up by lorries! A bit of a scary sandwich, but everyone was very courteous, lots of waving into lanes, etc. I lost 50p in the toll tho - can't throw accurately enough from the left-hand driver's seat of my Twingo! So, a four hour homeward trek from Essex... the M25 was like a wasteland - brownish scummy slush underwheel, a few bobbly icy bits, hardly anything on the road apart from the odd speedy 4x4. Still, that was better than the 10 hour sleeping-on-the-motorway I might have endured, thanks to my brother & sister-in-law's spare bedroom. Brighton looked better when I got back, though the hills render it as dangerous as the M25-on-Ice!

Rather different from the sunny scene the afternoon before in Lambourne End.

The Garden House Friday Group...

Retirement Project 4: Gardening Course at The Garden House... 

Even in winter smashing times are had when the sun shines and the task is enjoyable... a lovely bunch of women working and learning at the same time, preparing the garden for charity openings, and all led by the marvellous Bridge! 

Today Marion and I had to plant  a new climbing rose on a trellis, but in doing so we realised that the path to it was a bit slopey and slippery. One thing led to... 4 others! A new wooden step, backfilling and levelling the path, edging it with rustic logs. Then we saw another one was needed, outside the door, so designed and built a terracotta-tiled, brick-edged step, with gravel infills. Sooo satisfying! 

I'm looking forward to the mosaicking next week, as I've not done that before.
My Flickr set The Garden House Friday Group

Charca de la Suarez - a birthday treat

This is one of my favourite places in southern Spain. A small and hidden wetland or humedal project, very near the busy port of Motríl, and just a few kilometres from the touristy beaches of Andalucía, so you can imagine you are not on the same planet, let alone near the bright and noisy towns. The silence is profound, disturbed only by the humming of insects, rustling reeds, beating of wings and squeaks and squawks from the birds themselves. You are always reminded that you must keep quiet all the time, and the merest whisper can sometimes set a duck off its nest, or scuttling along the surface of the water.
We try to visit each time we are in the area, observing how the seasons change and the bird life comes and goes.
In spring the migratory birds drop in on their way back north. Summer has pink flamingos, herons and other waders doing their ballets in the sun. 
In early winter there were coots, coots and ... well, a gull or two, maybe that was a reed warbler.. coots... we spent half an hour watching wagtails, trying to get a photo of them either in flight or standing somewhere where they were not so well-camouflaged that it was impossible to tell the difference between a bird and a reed! (Didn't really succeed in that...)
Winter hours are 16h-18h daily, and really it is the best time to go! It was my birthday treat this year, and these photos were taken at about 5 o'clock on 3rd November, with the sun starting to drop, gilding the grass and giving deep shadows to the ripples of a coot dipping its beak in the small section not covered by the winter coating of pondweed.

The site includes a bit of the old sugar cane plantation that used to spread all along this coast, from which a local Rum was made in Motríl, and in Salobreña to the west. It's still made here, though not with homegrown cane. New planting of trees happens year-round, and they have made a feature of new parents sponsoring a tree in their baby's name, over the last 10 years. Children have grown up with their own willows and other native trees, though not at the same annual rate, one hopes! Bullrush, reeds, tall grasses and bamboos protect the edges and give homes to wildlife, and when you look up it's a bit of a shock to see the pylons and gantries of the industrial estate surrounding the site.
It's quite difficult to find an official website - the closest seems to be a Granada Province page but this Waste Magazine website (in Spanish) has the best photos and lists of flora and fauna I've found, and little videos of the coots! Some birdwatchers blogs in English are also good, Mick Richardson's Loja Wildlife and Bob Wright's Birding Axarquia.

Universal sentiments...

A feature of the Miguel Hernandez centenary celebrations in Orihuela was a 100 metre long poem space on the footpath in the parque for people to add responses to his poems, their own poems, comments, drawings and other ephemera. This is a lovely "mis-hearing" of the Bob Marley song.... it's true, there really only is one love to share, one hearth to warm ourselves at, and many, many rights to be felt...
More photos in my Flickr Set Falla de MH

Why does the horizon always tilt...?

Salobreña Beach at about 4 o'clock on 4th November; I swam in the sea for about 5 minutes, thinking it should really be warmer than it was! Men were fishing off the beach, but caught nothing... was it the presence in the water of mad British women thinking they could swim in November !!!
I s'pose the benefit of (semi)-retirement is the chance to travel out of school holiday times. The plane going over to Alicante was so empty we had to spread ourselves around the cabin, to give balance for the plane to take off - especially the gaggle of beefy young chaps who had colonised the rear few rows...
It was full coming back on 5th - all us retirees heading home from Malaga after a spot of winter sun, in time to do the Christmas shopping!

the first explosion

armatures aflame

We didn't miss going to Bonfire in Lewes though- we'd already had our fireworks at Orihuela's "Experimental Falla" for Miguel Hernandez... for more info about the poems, read Michael Shade's site There are Nightingales that Sing...

Bombers waterbombing!

Falla for Miguel Hernandez

Happy Birthday to me ...

 Yes, it says 25 degrees Celsius and later the mercury went to 31... from the terrace the Sierra Nevada shows its snowdusted tops, even on the south side... this is what I like on my birthday, blue sky, relaxing heat, blindingly white houses! Gracías, mi compañero del alma...
Thanks everybody else for good wishes via Facebook and texting - O, this Modern World is wonderful!

... and afterwards... Zarzuela por dos at Casa Emilio on Salobreña seafront, cracking open a spider crab, and a lovely bottle of Rioja Reserva Baron de Ley

Random Album Cover 1...

Thanks to Graham B: 
1. Go tohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2. Then to http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album...
3. Follow this with www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days The third picture (no matter what it is) will be your album cover. (This bit didn't work for me at first, but a random photostream from the Swedish Heritage Board came up...)
4. Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.
(then put it in Facebook....)

OK, it really is Autumn now...

Two things that mean Autumn to me are spiders' webs and evening classes!
It rained overnight, so the web hanging from garden shrubs (with pink leaves, notice) was dripping with moisture, pulling the strands into a necklace of tiny scalloped-edged beads. Since the end of August I've had that 'caught' sensation when making my way down the garden in the mornings - spider weavings over the doorframe, from bushes either side of the steps. So, OK now I will admit it is getting chilly!
"Retirement Project 3" chair is now de-webbed, uncovered, foamless and stripped of most of the staples stretching the 1970s cover. From tomorrow  evening I can start building it up again, hessian, springs, horsehair, porridge wadding... oh, the tangy language of upholstery! (Fr: rembourrage, Sp. tapicería)

Skolvan...

Sunday 3 October
A trip to Nieppe, in the Nord département, near the Belgian border, to a Fest Deiz with Skolvan, one of the top Breton dance bands. 
I couldn't resist this picture, as we were driving towards Dover. The sun was hidden behind a huge cotton-wool effect cloud, and the lens of my sunglasses made it look spectacular, so i took the photo through them. 
The rest of the day fulfilled the promise... 22 deg C as we emerged from the boat at Calais, sun all the way. Lunch at Cassel (Porc Terrine au Maroilles) and then to La Cabanne Accordeon's afternoon dance; a bit like finding that the Stones are playing in your local village hall in terms of their longevity, their energy, fantastic tunes and pazzaz. 
Grace à 'Stine and Selwyn for the notice of the session (swinging their partners in the pic on the left). 
It was the full 'gamme' - andro, laridé à six, suite plinn, kost a'r 'hoed, loads of suites de gavottes des montagnes, a four-part Loudeac, a cercle circassienne to which these two intrepid dancers below did a chapelloise à deux, the Breton dance of choice when a band calls 'Cercle!' I find... a gentle hanterdro to finish. Just as well they stopped at 1930, as we had to belt up the A25 for the last useful Calais crossing...
the Quartet is 3/4 of the band as formed in ?1989...  Gilles le Bigot, Youenn le Bihan, Bernard le Dréau, and "young" Regis Huiban on accordeon... even J-F (Jeff) Dantin was there, taking pix... expect to see them on his blog soon!
A short film of the last gavotte is on my Facebook entry for today.

Gilles le Bigot + Bernard le Dréau + dancers