Skywatch Friday. Up in the air!

We've been doing quite a lot of sky watching for the last week or so. The scaffolding has been with us for a fortnight and now it is higher than ever.

What a palaver!

We've had 'weather' - high winds and lashing rain, but happily the chimney stack stayed up on the roof!

HOPEFULLY everything will be sorted sometime next week, so here's a more promising bit of sky for Skywatch Friday!

Down at ground level the garden has really appreciated the deluge.

Plants that were looking rather pathetic have revived and are giving a good display of late summer colour.

Phlox are among my favourites.

This everlasting sweet pea has no perfume at all but it makes a very good cutting flower. It is not as robust as the deep-coloured version that rampages through parts of the garden.

I've put the 'Meyer' lemon back in the greenhouse while there are workmen moving about. I like it to be outside in the summer months because under glass it is very susceptible to scale insect damage. It's a mass of scented blossom and small fruits and the perfume wafts round the house, but blow me, it's only been back inside for a couple of weeks and the scale insects are in action!

There is plenty to eat from the garden. Today a simple lunch of vegetables with pearled spelt and toasted seeds and nuts.

Vegetables, chopped chicken and halloumi cheese fried in coconut oil, add the cooked spelt,

top with the seeds and nuts, torn basil leaves and a good drizzle of lemon. Mmm.

Windy!

Tail end of a hurricane, the wind is getting up. What are we to do? Well, fortunately Himself was a boy scout and rather good at knots. Up the ladder he went (dear little wife steadying the bottom rung)  lassoed the errant liner and anchored it firmly to the foot scraper.

The man's a marvel! (There are a few things in the veg garden that are in need of similar treatment.)
Wee One and Roman were home for the weekend and we went to the farm to buy free-range eggs. British summer, you'll note the appropriate clothing of wellie boots and macs. The hens know that the grain is kept in the shed and always try to come inside when the door is opened.

A handful of corn keeps them diverted.

Scrambled eggs for breakfast - delicious!

Murphy's Law!

Do you know Murphy's Law? It's the principle that if you drop a piece of bread and butter with jam on it then it's sure to land jam side down. We've had two jobs lined up for the house requiring several workmen and a day each of labour. That was the general idea. One week later and the scaffolding is still up, because the wrong part meant that the solar panel work could not be completed.

That was last week. This week the two charming workmen who adapted our Aga returned to line the chimney that serves the wood burning stove in the sitting room. We had sheeted everything up, the weather was good, it would soon be done.  I would have a good tidy-up before family came home at the weekend.
Stove out.

Ladder up. The liner ready to be fed down the chimney.

"Can you pull a bit harder?"

It's stuck!

And now the chimney pot is loose.

And that's the current state of play!

Sometime next week, hopefully, the scaffolding is going to be moved round the house, the chimney cleaned with chains(!!) and the chimney pot re-set. Murphy's Law!

The scaffolding gives me the opportunity to have a bird's eye view of the garden. This wall looks very bare now that the dead tree has been cut down and you can see how parched the lawn looks with week after week of glorious warm, dry weather.

The fir tree in the foreground is looking rather sickly.

'Stop moaning' says Vanilla, 'just enjoy the sunshine.'

Okay.

We are eating well from the garden with rather a lot of courgettes. I took a peep under the leaves of my squash plants and discovered - courgettes!

Only one squash growing so far.

The onions are small and have folded their stems and stopped growing, the 'Blue Lake' beans are cropping well

and the coriander is setting seed. It smells wonderful when you brush past it.

I've cut our wisteria hard back. It's a disgrace, not one flower this year. Walking down the road to the fields I passed my neighbour's wisteria giving a second burst of colour.

After weeks of sunshine the fields are golden, the crops cut and ready to be baled.

A balloon floated overhead as we walked back home.

And tonight. just in time for Friday Skywatch, the most amazing sunset!

The tail end of Hurricane Bertha is supposed to be arriving at the weekend - I hope the chimney stack stays up on the roof!

Candlelit vigil

We went into Bath last night as we had tickets for the candlelit vigil at the Abbey to mark one hundred years since the start of the First World War.

Everyone lit a candle at the start of the vigil but they were gradually extinguished throughout the hour until one remaining candle was blown out at 11.00pm, the moment that war began on  4th August 1914.

The music was very moving, from Vaughan Williams', 'Kyrie from mass in G minor' to the thundering anthem of 1914, 'For lo, I raise up' by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. We were sitting beyond the choir stalls and were simply overwhelmed and uplifted by the sound of organ and choir. The programme was an excellent, and sobering, selection of words and music. At the end of the service the male members of the choir stood up and walked from the Abbey singing, 'It's a long way to Tipperary" their voices gradually fading into the distance. The female members of the choir remained in the choir stalls singing in counterpoint, 'Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag'.

We left the Abbey in silence into a beautiful, warm, still night.

My relative, William Leishman, was just one of the 880,000 British servicemen who died in the First World War.

There is a statue in London at Paddington railway station dedicated to an unknown soldier. The soldier is reading a letter and people have been asked to put their own words on his blank pages.

The letter that I would write would be to William.

Dear William,

Perhaps you think that now, so long after your death, no one will remember you, but I'm writing to say that it's not the case. It's true that I know only a very little about you, the details that I've found online of your war record and the story that my mother told me of your last journey home. 

When your mother Helen Stuart Leishman, my great-grandmother, was dying,  you were given compassionate leave to visit her. You traveled straight from the battlefields of France to Glasgow but were too late to see your mother. She had died on the 4th of September 1915. The men of the family were at the funeral and, as was the custom of the time, the women remained at home. They washed and fed you and you returned to France and the Battle of Loos where you were killed on the 25th of September.

During the Second World War my mother's elder brother, Robert Leishman, my much-loved Uncle Bob, served as a naval doctor. He also was given compassionate leave to visit his dying mother, Isabella, after whom I am named. But, once again, he arrived too late. Everyone in the family feared that a pattern was to be repeated but happily he returned home safely at the end of the war.

Last night I attended a candlelit vigil at Bath Abbey and I lit my candle in remembrance of you. The choir sang, 'Expectans expectavi'  by Charles Wood, with words by C.H. Sorley. He, like you, was killed at the Battle of Loos, shot in the head by a sniper on the 13th October 1915. He is among 15 other Great War poets commemorated on a stone in the poets' corner of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on the stone has words from Wilfred Owen,

"My subject is War,

and the pity of War. 

The poetry is in the pity."

Your name is on the Scottish roll of honour as a permanent reminder of our loss.

With love,

Rosemary Isabella.

More solar

We're getting ready for winter! This week we had a delivery of good, dry hardwood, just the thing to throw out plenty of heat from the wood burner come the winter months. Yesterday scaffolding was erected along the south side of the house and six more solar panels were added. We thought that we might need to boost our electricity supply for the recently converted Aga in the dull, dark depths of winter.

You'll notice that the day already looks a bit overcast.

Well, hurray, we've had a decent rainfall. It started just as the lads came down the ladder.

Things are cropping quite well from the garden but I'm sure they'll crop a whole lot better now that they've had a good drink.

Next week someone is coming to line the chimney, a job that is long overdue. Do you find that a whole raft of tasks come along all at the same time? We shall feel quite organised for a while, no doubt while another load of jobs-to-do silently musters!

Connie came round to say 'hello' and did a lovely drawing of Himself.

Doesn't he look fine!