Month: September 2022
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There’s nothing like a nice fire to warm us up . . .
Doubtless it’s primeval, going back to the ancient legends of fire and its control. Otherwise, we might venture into Greek mythology and thank Prometheus for bringing fire back to earth, for the comfort of us mortals. Certainly in Allendale, home of the annual Tar Bar’l parade and New Year’s Eve bonfire, fire has played an…
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This too shall pass . . . the joy of foreknowledge
Feeling just that extra bit stiff and sore this morning — my joints and muscles don’t really want to move around very much. We had our fourth Covid jab yesterday afternoon, the Moderna bi-valent one. I reckon our immune response to the immunological challenge is mobilising, from the lymph nodes draining the injection site, where…
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While we can, the joys of mobility . . .
One of the things about ageing is that easy mobility becomes compromised. Sometimes the ability to drive goes first, while often knees, hips, hamstrings, joints become compromised and a simple thing like a gentle walk becomes challenging. A reasonable expectation that our personal mobility is increasingly at risk is one of the primary factors in…
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The season’s change brings joy
Finally, as the end of September clambers into reach, it feels like autumn here high up in these North Pennines. The sun still shines with warmth, and the sky is still blue, even though the winds have started up again after the prolonged respite during the hot summer. It’s the beginning of the end for…
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The gleaming in the gloaming
My beloved tells me that ‘gloaming’ is dusk, to those of a Scottish persuasion, but the Oxford English dictionary suggests that twilight is also gloaming, and astronomical twilight is either just before dawn or just after sundown. So I hope today’s joyful title makes reasonable etymological sense, anyway. There are so many metaphors for that…
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With age, mellowness?
I took a call the other day from an old neighbour. We’d had a falling out over some promotion deal gone wrong, well over a decade ago, and I never expected to hear from him again. And yet there he was, on the other end of the line, chatting away as if . . .…
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A helping hand
When our big kitchen dining table broke the other day, I wasn’t sure it could be fixed. But after I’d squished under with our son and we looked at the broken culprit, a piece of wood stay that had sheared in half, I thought maybe we might be in with a chance. The screws holding…
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Camaraderie in commiseration
It’s not often, we find, that we meet someone who’s had a similar catering experience to the years in the hospitality sector that we’ve had. But yesterday we were privileged to chat with the owner of a local cake shop which had become what she called ‘a destination tea room’ to which people from a…
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Family togetherness . . .
We had a full house over the weekend: blow-up mattress, camping cushions in the living room, and three sets of familiars to accommodate in separate quarters. Kali cat lived in the conservatory from whence she could escape to the great outdoors; growing-up kittens Maui and Leo roamed from lounge to bedroom, enjoying their sequestered eating…
Roads to Joy 