Ten years ago

In a throwaway line at the end of my blog post about rubber stamps, I gaily mentioned in passing that I was off to join a focus group to discuss food packaging with Marks and Spencer in Gloucester that Friday morning.

What happened later that day became the stuff of history, recorded by the women of Gloucestershire in a best-selling book with my name on the cover.  I didn’t want it to be so, but we were advised that Amazon needed an author’s name and “The Women of Gloucestershire” wouldn’t do.  I was uncomfortable to be seen taking the credit for anything more than the original idea but at least got to share it with my colleague Sue, who did the editing.

So what happened?

Well, it had been raining as we’d arrived that morning and we’d had to run into M&S to pick up our sandwich lunch platters on the way into the office.  We sat and noticed the rain falling, but thought no more of it until the time came to leave, when the puddles in the car park had joined together to form more of a pond than a puddle. It was still raining hard.  Very hard indeed.

The M&S staff who’d led the discussion had come from London, so they hopped in my car and I took them to the station to catch their train home.  Dressed in heeled sandals and totally unprepared for the weather, they were last seen disappearing into the station buildings where we had the first inkling that all was not well.  Delayed trains meant they might have more of a wait than they thought.

We were all blissfully unaware of what was going on beyond the city.  But having cleared up and gathered our things together, we all agreed, we needed to set off home as soon as we could.  The weather was not improving and from what we could tell, there might be tricky driving conditions to challenge us.

The focus group had been organised by NFWI in London, and their young Public Affairs Officer Noelle had come to Gloucester for the day to participate.  Rather than take her to Gloucester station, where as we already knew, there were delays and disruption, I offered to take her to Stroud instead. 

It certainly wasn’t an easy journey and as we drove, it was becoming clear from radio reports that she was unlikely to find a train at Stroud either.   We made several last minute route changes, finding flooded roads in the most unexpected places and manhole covers moved by water spouts. 

It was still raining, too.

So we carried on home.  We were having work done on our bathroom and I knew there were tilers from a company in Reading working there today.  Maybe they would take Noelle to the station along the way?  The last I saw of her was sitting in the middle of the front seats of a white transit van, entrusted to the care of two young men who had no idea of the scale of the problem but who didn’t mind being advised to go home early.  Noelle told the story of the rest of her difficult journey home in our book.  Suffice to say it was nearly midnight when she arrived home, having thought at one point that she’d be sleeping on Swindon station!

For those of us safely at home, we counted our blessings and thanked goodness we live on a hill.  Having said that, stories of those who had water running through their homes made us realise that even being on a hillside is no guarantee against rushing water.

It was actually Tuesday before the next challenge came, documented in my blog post here.

Later we were to learn how close we’d come to disaster management.  That rising water levels had become so critically close to the major electricity station for the county that plans were afoot to evacuate everyone.  That water supplies were running dangerously low, giving further cause for concern and I understand that we were within 30 minutes of an emergency situation being declared.

Thankfully, we were blissfully unaware of all of that and simply did what we could to manage our own situation and help those around us who were not as fit/able as we were.

Our kitchen became the water bank.  We collected drinking water from the sports club in the village and filled as many containers as we had with water from wherever we could for washing up, to be used later for flushing the loo.

And I joined my WI friends and colleagues at the local supermarket, distributing water as fast as it arrived.

I see from my blog that it was August 8th before our water supply returned to normal!

Since there was only one topic of conversation for quite some time in this part of the world, I thought it would be a good idea to capture the stories and contacted a local publisher who agreed.  We set to immediately and later that year, our book was published.    As we worked on the details, word came through from one of our members.  Her son worked for Google in the USA, in the books division and he sought our permission to make our stories amongst the first titles to be digitised.  Since the principal aim was to record history (all profits went to the flood relief fund), we were happy to grant that permission.

You can read parts of it here.

Who jumps first?

Just recently when my Hero has gone into the garden store for something, he’s surprised a small frog who appears to have taken up residence there.  Though I’m as jumpy as they are when close to such things, I was interested to see it and assess the size of the challenge.

Through a window, maybe

But by the time I’ve gone for my camera, peered down into that bit of the garden (which is sheltered but always damp, so probably a perfect habitat for our little friend) to try to see him, he’s always disappeared.

This morning, collecting one or two stray bits and pieces which were littering the garden, providing playthings for the five little foxes who come to chase about the place each evening, I trod very carefully down the steps to that area.  I don’t know who needed the surprise least – I had a preference for it not being me.

There, sitting quietly on the step was a small, pale coloured frog.  I stopped, turned around and went inside for my camera but by the time I returned, he’d gone.

Or had he?

I took the photograph above “just in case” and looked a little more closely at the “leaf” on the edge of the pot.

 

Hello!

I won’t trouble him if he agrees not to trouble me.  I like what he does in the garden and am happy to entertain him for as many meals as he and his family can eat.

But can we agree boundaries please?

Well-travelled socks

Socks #25 are done and finished.  They’ve been hanging around the house since we returned home and I knew that it’d only take a couple of hours to finish them off, but somehow, it took more than a week to get round to it.  They are knitted in a Swiss Froehlich sock yarn which provides pretty good camouflage on a Cotswold stone wall.

They are a conventional pattern, developed over quite some time to fit my Hero’s feet perfectly.  They also bear no close inspection – or maybe they would make a great resource for WI Craft Judge training – because there are dropped stitches (and compensations), yarn inconsistencies and some other weird features that I didn’t spot until too late.

No, I don’t intend to point them out, because they’re only cosmetic and my Hero doesn’t care about such things one jot.

It looked like I was about to run out of yarn though, so I chose a contrast yarn for the toes.  It might prove a talking point when he takes his shoes off!

Whilst out in the garden, I couldn’t resist taking photographs of one or two favourites

and the pesky wild strawberries, which are taking over the kitchen border.

In other news around here, someone is enjoying his birthday present very much indeed.

Life is good.

The scent of Summer

How lovely to enjoy a relaxed Bank Holiday weekend at home and not in a 16-mile traffic jam: yes, southbound on the M5 yesterday….thankfully we were heading northbound.  Last evening, whilst sitting exploring the hidden tricks of my new camera, I spotted this chap taking a break on the garden room window and couldn’t resist a photo.  I’d have liked to have caught the other side too, but I disturbed him and he flew off.

This morning, I’ve been out in the garden, pottering about.  The philadelphus smells so sweet, I’m hoping the rain forecast for later today doesn’t wash it all away.  Time to make the most of it now.

We’ve a few roses in bloom, so with a bowl in hand, I went collecting rose petals for a sweet friend whose daughter is getting married in a couple of weeks.  Around here, we do what we can for our friends and during our book group discussion last week all agreed, we’d collect and dry as many petals as we could for her confetti.

If only the colours would stay so bright!

If only the scent would stay too.  Instead, you’ll have to imagine how sweet our airing cupboard smells with trays of rose petals drying in there right now.

We’re still having probs with our pond and rill, so I took the opportunity to top it up, noticing the beautiful iris as I did.

I’m still waiting for our peonies to open though.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the elderflowers too, noticing them coming into bloom a good week or more earlier than usual.  Time to (not) find the packet of citric acid powder then and get the stocks of lemons and sugar in, ready to get the cordial factory going.  Who knows where we had put that citric acid though?  Thankfully, Intralabs offer a super quick delivery, so this morning I had no excuses.  Could I find the recipe though?  Yes, of course I could!

The blooms this year are enormous and extraordinarily plentiful and I think this could be the earliest Elderflower Cordial post ever.

With an airing cupboard smelling of roses, a kitchen filled with lemon and elderflower, can there be any better scent of summer?

The bowl of fruit I just prepared for lunch, maybe?  (No pavlova today!)

Friday morning shopping

With “click and collect” a Friday morning shop can be quite interesting.  There in the trolley with the weekend fruit and veg, bin liners and washing powder there’s a pack of hoover bags and a new camera.

I last wrote about cameras in February 2015.  Regular readers might remember that the new camera almost came a cropper on Boracay beach when we were in the Philippines shortly afterwards, when I dropped it in the sand?  Though it’s been mostly ok, there are still times when it crunches as it comes to life (presumably caused by a few grains of sand in the mechanism which opens the lens cover?) and there are still the irritating grains which appear inside the lens from time to time.

Can you see one in the top corner?  Whilst it stays there, it’ll be fine, but it might just find its way to somewhere in the middle, when it’s a pain in the neck!

I’ve muttered about the build quality of cameras before, because usually it’s that which propels me into buying a replacement.  It’s my own fault really – I don’t “treasure” such things, but throw them into my bag with everything else, cart them around the world without a case and generally use them – and love them – to bits.  I’ve taken tens of thousands of photographs with this one and don’t really feel it owes me anything, but recently, the battery cover has begun to spring open of its own accord.

Then, when we were in St Petersburg, I was trying to review a couple of photos, using the round dial to navigate through them when that too came loose and wouldn’t work properly.  Though neither was mission-critical, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I was looking for a replacement.

And then my textile friends began chatting about cameras and I researched the current equivalent of this one.  You’ll guess what happened next.

The new one, another Sony Cybershot is slightly smaller than the one it’s replacing, but is packed with the same features and a few new ones.

This one has a pop-up viewfinder, for those days when the sun makes it really tricky to see the screen.  I have been known to take “blind” pictures, just guessing how they’ll work out, so although I probably won’t use the viewfinder that often, it’s good to have the choice.

It also has a tilt-out screen which will also go some way to resolving those issues too.  Might be good when we do the old self timer shots as well?

It has inbuilt wifi which seems a more useful feature than I’ve found it to be so far – or maybe I’ve just not taken the time to really explore how best to utilise it?  It’s so easy to connect be cable or remove the SD card, the wifi option hasn’t sold itself to me yet, particularly since I haven’t worked out a means of sending straight to Dropbox (as I can do on my phone, for example).

But yesterday, I was out taking a few photographs with my old camera, which as you can see, is still working beautifully.

I’d looked out over the valley, wondering what that blot on the landscape was – surely someone wasn’t starting to build there?

Huh.  Using the super 30x zoom, I could see that someone has been fly tipping.  Just what makes people do such things?

So I thought I’d take another look this afternoon and took this photograph with my new camera.  Of course, the light is different today, but even so, I think the detail is sharper?

Still can’t see any fingerprints  though

Anyway, having turned off the artificial “click” sound on the new one, there was just one last custom fitting required: The little bear charm on the wrist strap