Ms Potter would approve: garden update

This cheeky little chap visits us every day, and is getting cheekier and more daring in his approaches to the house. Beatrix Potter gave them an undeservedly good press, but I have to confess I do find this one rather cute. He may be living a charmed life at the moment, so long as he sticks to eating grass, but he had better not start on our lettuces!

In the meantime, we are enjoying the novel pleasure of eating our own home-grown veg. Am I a very sad person to get excited at the sight of a cauliflower?

Freshly cut!

Swallow production line

Our original swallow wasn't too daunted by the intruder who built on his old nest: he simply started building a new one- on top of the seive! So, I had to buy a new one- sheltering wildlife gets expensive! The rather tatty nest in the eaves of the cabin from last summer fell down during the winter, but the swallows were still determined to rebuild, so we made it easier for them by nailing up a rough shelf. They kept up a constant shrill attack while we were doing it- a four syllable shout which sounds like "Get out the way!" They still do it now, whenever anyone goes into the cabin or the carport. However- they have good reason, as there are at least four babies in the carport nest, and three in the cabin, and so many mouths need a lot of stuffing!

Garden in Gear for Summer- just revving up

First swallow of the season

His nest has been built on by somebody else

Our first swallow arrived today, only to find that his nest has been taken over by squatters. I wonder what he's going to do?

Avril has been here today and started our new vegetable beds.  Can't wait to start planting cabbages and things!

Flowers are bursting out all over, and Daisy the dog does her best to distract us all and get us to throw her ball.

...and the fun continues!

 Avril made a "bug hotel" for the boys when she was here. Today they started to fill the compartments with different materials they found around the garden.

In the afternoon, we went to see the Snow Queen at Up Front Gallery Puppet Theatre. The boys loved it, but so did Gran, Grandad and Auntie Kate.

The Boys Are Here!

Ted and Daisy play football; Shay plays badminton

  

Ted and Seamus are enjoying a short stay at the Red House with Granny, Grandad and Auntie Kate. They had a great day playing football and badminton with Avril's dog, and another day admiring the horses at the lakeland Heavy Horse Centre.

Auntie Kate and Ted at the back of the carriage

Men and Women at Work II (+ dog)

Easter Sunday: cold but bright. A diminished family party meet at the Red House for what has become a traditional gathering of Wards and Jensens. This year, Anna and family were at a wedding, and Kate is due to come tonight with Ted and Shay while Anna and Martin fly to Tokyo for another wedding. Geoff and Amanda arrived on Friday with Ryan and Evie, Daniel working in a pub over the weekend.

Avril came, and everybody weighed in to help. Signs were put up (Ryan's ambition is to be the man who puts out the cones on the motorway), stones and logs were moved, with only a small amount of swearing, and various bits of anatomy were revealed!

Meanwhile, Evie was determined to read outside, despite the cold, and Amanda did a heroic job untangling a total scrow of wool I intend to knit (I did a bit too). If we paid ourselves the minimum wage for it, it would have beed cheaper to have chucked it in the bin and taken a first class train to London to buy some wool from the Queen's knitting shop! But once you start, it becomes obsessive, and Amanda's excitement as she wound the last few strands up was truly moving.

JAFMHT- Just Another Medieval Hill Town

I like things to be on a human scale. When I enter a magnificent church, I am not reminded of the glory of God (well I wouldn't be would I?), and of the insignificence of human life. Quite the opposite: I marvel at human endeavour and ingenuity throughout the ages. Why do people ask "Is this all there is?" What more do they want? The amazingly rich variety of human life and culture over the millennia since we started to think and talk, plus the wonders of the rest of the universe, should be enough for anyone methinks.

So what is this all about? I am trying to analyse why I hated the Sistine Chapel (artistic as well as religious blasphemy I fear), St Peter's Basilica, and the vast and vulgar piazza outside it, where a funny little man comes out every so often and thousands of people fall to their knees in awe. And on the other hand, why did I love the original Benedictine monastery at Subiaco, and all these charming little hill towns we have been visiting?

It's partly to do with scale- it's a lot easier to appreciate something that is your sort of size, but it is also to do with intent. I believe that much of Renaissance architecture and art was intended and designed to aggrandise both the rich and powerful and the Church which in turn bolstered and legitimised their power. At the same time it is meant to make ordinary people feel little and insignificant.

Anyway, be that as it may, here are some pics of some of the lovely little towns we have encountered in our travels, so many and so picturesque that they tend to merg in the mind, hence the title of this blog.
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Better than the Sistine Chapel- reflections on Italy

We visited the Vatican- St Peter's and the Sistine Chapel etc- the first time for me. I was impressed, but not, I suspect in the way I was meant to be. It was impressively big, overpoweringly powerful and ultimately ugly. Designed I think to make the viewer (worshipper) feel small and worthless. I have no doubt that Michelangelo's paintings are extremely wonderful works of art, but they were so far away that they were difficult to see. Add to the distance the fact that you need to dislocate your neck to see them at all and the result is somewhat over-awing. Bossy papal officials shushing everybody didn't help me to feel respectful! What I did get a sense of, was the technical difficulties and skill of painting at such a height and flat on one's back- and all into wet plaster in a limited amount of time. I now want to find more about it. (Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus is an interesting take on the subject which I will now re-read.)

However, the Monastery of Saint Benedict at Subiaco was altogether different. It was quite simply the most beautiful and interesting church I have ever seen.







Clinging to the hillside like the swallow's nest that an early visiting pope called it, the building is difficult to fix in your mind. You enter by a corridor which skirts the side of the mountain and overhangs a small rose garden which sticks out from one of the caves. Staircases wind up and down, and chamber clings to chamber like an accretion of limpets on the side of a boat. Rock and building often merge, and frescos of great humanity and narrative power cover every surface.

Men and Women at Work

Our gardening angel, Avril, has been sawing down branches and trimming hedges; work that has been desperately needed now for several years. In the photos above, you can see her cutting off two huge branches that stuck out a long way into the garden and overshadowed one of the beds. She left the fork with two stumps sticking out as a comfortable perch for small boys! I might try to carve the ends into faces! Look out for more on the story of the tree seat.





While Avril worked on the hedge bordering the lonning, Mike cut some huge overhanging sections from the multi-stemmed cherry by the roadside. He kept having nightmares that it would fall across the road one day and cause an accident. While he chopped up the resulting logs, I stacked them on the veranda of the cabin- an ideal place for a proper woodpile. Hopefully by next winter, it will be stacked full, and should make us self- sufficient in wood.





Yesterday was a perfect winter's day, blue and warm with a slight haze, lulling you into a false sense that spring was almost here, but as the shadows lengthened, the cold found ingenious ways to bypass our defenses and remind us that winter is far from over, and there will be cold and wet days a plenty to come.