Our hay meadows

I'm never quite sure if I should be embarrassed or proud of our hay meadows. In fact it's probably true to say that I used to be embarrassed, but I'm getting increasingly proud.

You see, there's not a lot of grass here. Not in June anyway when other farmers are mowing fields of silage or hay. We don't have grass at this time of year and yes we have worried in previous years that there won't be enough to make hay with and the weather won't be right and, well, etc.

We've got flowers. Oodles of flowers. White clover, red clover, yellow rattle, eyebright, whorled caraway, ribwort plantain, sorrel, bluebells, buttercups, orchids...

and lots of bees of all sizes, moths, butterflies, beetles...

There are more orchids every year.

Who needs grass? Actually we do, and this field and it's similar neighbour produced 35 big bales of lovely hay last September, which is more than enough for our needs. It's an absolute privilege to be able to allow the fields to be proper hay meadows, and the tapestry of colour in June is, quite simply, wonderful.

Art therapy

I think it was in 2012, perhaps before, that I accidentally stumbled across Tammy's Daisy Yellow blog about art journals.

www.daisyyellowart.com

I'd always enjoyed art at school, but didn't pursue it beyond GCSE. I used to sketch and have still got a few of my old sketchbooks, full of horses mainly, and my pencils and paints. But things happened. On a college trip I was ridiculed for my delight in finding and buying a tin of Caran d'Ache aquarelle coloured pencils and made to feel a fool and childish. So drawing was 'not cool'  and something that I should hide and not tell people about. In the meantime writing took over. For my writing I got heaps of praise at university and then a job as a journalist and a short story I wrote got published.

So writing was my 'thing' apart from a brief dalliance with pottery, which I very much enjoyed, with a brilliant teacher who had an art degree and was happy to share tips about sketching and art in general.

My art materials lurked in a cupboard, along with tins and boxes of pens, and coloured pencils and pastel pencils that my husband had acquired while working for Schwan Stabilo. I had children and art became something they enjoyed while I watched and encouraged and supplied art materials.

Then there was sewing, which I had always enjoyed and was such a normal part of my life I took it completely for granted, but quilts are art too, and gardening, which is undeniably art, using plants as paint. But my own efforts (and I still drew, all over the place) remained secret.

Koi 2013, thread sketch

And then, on Pinterest I think, I started seeing pictures of art journals, beautiful pages of swirling colour and exciting texture alongside inspirational quotes. I googled 'art journal' and found Daisy Yellow. I devoured the pages of her blog and discovered a thing called 'altered books' too. Adults, grown-up women like me, were doing art. I didn't need telling twice! I dusted off all my art materials and, to cut a long story short, I now draw all the time, everywhere. I paint, I collage, I make pictures with my sewing machine too, I sketch on holiday instead of just taking photographs, I fill lovely Moleskines with all kinds of arty messes, I alter books and now I paint on canvasses too.

Bullseye

 Last year, when H13 faced her Big Operation, I knew art would help me through, just as music helped H13. Tammy of Daisy Yellow also runs a yearly art challenge, ICAD - a challenge to make art on an index card every day between June 1st and July 31st. This last year neatly covered the period from signing the consent form for the operation, to having it, staying in hospital, and recovering at home.

Hospital 3

During the very worst times, when my brain was in full panic mode, I just filled in patterns on a squared index card, creating fantasy quilt patterns in black and white. It's amazing how such a simple, repetitive thing, just making marks with a pen on a 5"x3" card, can quiet the mind and pass difficult time. I'm delighted to say that I finished the challenge and of course I'm doing it again this year.

July 27th 2014 Carousel

All of my ICAD2014 pictures:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/50009188@N04/sets/72157645162979766/show

Created with flickr badge.

The trials and tribulations of rural broadband

Rural broadband is fraught with slow speeds and unexpected outages following wind and weather or unexpected birds or leaves on the line or whatever. It leaves us at the mercy of BT Openreach and, like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, you never know which engineer you're going to get.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/556616835167868168/

Over the years we've had the know-it-all one, the tirelessly-climbing-each-pole-between-us-and-the-exchange-in-the-snow one, the one-the-dog-jumped-on one, the I'm-the-boss-and-this-has-all-been-done-wrong-by-idiot-underlings one, the really grumpy one (who left bits of equipment behind) and last, and probably most important of all, the I'm-going-to-give-you-sensible-advice-so-it-doesn't-cost-you-an-arm-and-a-leg one.

He was an interesting chap, from the valleys, and he liked to pop outside for a fag while the machinery did its calculations. He checked the line, measured it between where it comes in, via the socket in Mum's part of the house, scratched his head, had another fag, fixed the fault and told Brian part of his life story and then related the rest to Mum while he discovered what and where the fault was and that it wasn't yet terminal but soon would be.

As he was leaving, he explained there was a conflict between our phone and broadband, exacerbated by the 8.9m of wire between the line entering the house, splitting (we have two lines) and then wandering around the room to our PC. Basically, it shouldn't work and it won't for much longer and we should think about getting it fixed or face big bills.

Via Pinterest

Which is when the penny dropped. We hardly use our landline; we mainly use mobiles like the rest of the population. Mum does use her line and wanted to keep it, so hers would be useful in emergency for us. The broadband now comes in that way (she gets much faster speeds on her line) and then to our PC and wifi router via ethernet cable. I've just speedchecked it and it's faster.

So today it was goodbye Plusnet and thank you. They seemed miffed that we were leaving, but let us go with good grace and a disconnection fee of just under a tenner. That's a small price to pay to say goodbye to all the calls from Indian call centres (one famously called me 'fatty' to my answerphone because I didn't pick up!) No more Swansea call centres offering to sell us solar panels (we've got those) and double glazing (ditto) or a new boiler (they haven't yet laid a gas main in the Preseli Hills, so, no.) And no more PPI calls! Yippee! Now I've just got to keep my mobile number a secret....

So much has happened...

It's so long since I last blogged here and so much has happened. In my last post we were nervous about a trip to Cardiff to see the consultant about H13's spine.

We were right to be nervous. That was October 2013 and trips to Llandough Hospital soon became the norm. X-rays showed that H13's back was forming itself into an S-curve - a severe scoliosis. Surgery was inevitable and eventually last year we found ourselves in University Hospital Wales for H13 to have a quite massive operation.

For one so young H13 faced so many challenges. She had the operation aged just 12. She had to consent to it herself and confirm she understood that a complication of surgery could be - unlikely, but could be - paralysis, but when your spine is tightening at both curves of an S, you can't really say no.

The operation itself took five and a half hours, plus a further three hours to come round from the general anesthetic and the massive amount of morphine required to relax the spine enough to allow the surgeons (there were at least three of them, plus two anesthetists and various nurses) to straighten out the spinal kinks. The surgeons installed a rail and a rod, the full length of the spine, plus 19 titanium screws (which cost a mind-boggling £550 each. I'm glad we didn't have to pay).

There there was a stay in the high dependency unit - just overnight, H13 is made of really tough stuff - and four days in a separate room on the children's ward. I stayed with her 24/7, sleeping on a sort of rock hard armchair bed thing alongside her hospital bed and smuggling coffee onto the ward (or I'd have gone nuts!)

My sketch of H in her hospital bed - I sketched to pass the time while she slept.

The nurses were amazing, astonishingly so. Ditto the physios, who had H13 up and walking in three days, then measured her to find she'd grown in height by two and a half inches. There were fun bits (the pre-med which made her laugh constantly, then afterwards standing up for the first time and finding that a) she was nearly as tall as me and b) that she looked 'normal' now) and there were awful times - the eerie screams of sick children in the dead of night, the tiny baby fighting for life in the HDU, the removal of the two wound drains.

We went home on the Friday, a record time for recovery considering the operation had only been on the Monday; scoliosis patients normally stay in hospital seven to ten days. Brian drove between Pembrokeshire and Cardiff almost every day which cost a fortune in petrol. It was much easier back at home (I could get food to eat, that was a good thing!) H13 started eating again too (it took two weeks, but her appetite came back eventually). We spent the summer watching films, including a binge-watch of the entire Twilight saga. We managed occasional trips out and spent a weekend in Devon with friends, but it was tough as H13 tired easily.

H13 went back to school in September, part-time at first, but she sometimes didn't survive a full day. Once I had to rescue her after she was knocked into the wall by a couple of boys having a mock-fight in the corridor. But she got stronger and missing days of school didn't affect her as she proved by getting excellent results in her Christmas exams, including 100% in both parts of her science exam, and over 90% in pretty much all of the others too. We're really fortunate in that her teachers allowed her to decide what she could cope with, didn't panic when she missed lessons and trusted her to keep up with the work.

The day before the operation H12 (as she then was) ran the Race for Life in Haverfordwest. She plans to run it again in June this year, as a sort of full stop to a difficult 12 months and to demonstrate her return to fitness.

* This post has been read and approved by H13.

Already Autumn!

Honestly there never seems to be time to blog these days - it all has to do with starting a business, of course, so my energies tend to be focussed in that direction. I've just written it a blog, so click here to catch up on all things Magatha Bagatha.

Meanwhile life continues on its relentless rush. Christmas is looming on the horizon (did I hear someone say it was something like 10 Saturdays away? It doesn't seem enough!)

Itsy and H11

In a nutshell, summer happened, we've been riding Itsy (H11 and I), Bullseye has been very poorly but thankfully pulled through and we lost a beloved guinea pig (Patchy) so had to obtain two more (Tufty and Shadow) to keep Fudge company.

Bullseye

Fudge (centre) with Tufty (left) and Shadow

In sadder news we lost Brian's lovely Uncle Mel last week. We called him Uncle Honey (as mel is Welsh for honey). He was such a lovely, big-hearted man, devoted to his family and his garden (and he had the best lawn my bare toes have ever had the pleasure of wriggling in). We will miss him. The funeral is on Wednesday, so Brian is making the journey over to Whittlesey to help give him a good send off.

Then on Thursday it's back to the hospital again, but this time in Cardiff, for the next level of consultant to have a look at H11's spine. This was an unexpected summons (our previous local appointment had been more reassuring) so we're all rather nervous.

In all it's a busy week and I'm looking forward to the weekend which is the start of half term and (hopefully) the pace of life will ease off, just a little.

Website, sewing, sheep and baby fish

Gosh poor blog, I've neglected it. But with good reason, I'm now mostly over at my new business website Magatha Bagatha  - please pop along and take a look (and you can sign up for the newsletter too, if you'd like to stay in touch.)

I'm so pleased with my website and very grateful to Lindsay, of LJ Computers, who designed, built and hosts it. I didn't know there was so much involved with setting one up and it's been lovely to have a calm, guiding hand throughout the process. Those who follow Lins' blog Multi generational living and life in Wales will know she's been through a tough time recently. She refused to stop work on the website while she went through her treatment and used it to take her mind off things. She's amazing. Get well soon Lins.

My business is still very much a baby business but it's definitely taking up a lot of my time. There's a lot of sewing to be done, of course. At the moment I'm working on a baby heirloom quilt for a client....

Cornish fishing boats

..and a large Doctor Who quilt-along quilt which I envisage to be the one we hide under while watching the TV on Saturday evenings. This is a big task with two paper-pieced blocks per month, with the final one due next February.

My Tardis

Meanwhile the sheep having been taking up a lot of time too - first shearing, then giving the lambs Soil Association-approved anthelmintic medicine (I so much prefer that word!) and then treating them against fly strike. This involves bringing the flock down and into the yard and when they don't want to go there, they won't. You can coax, shoo, shout and bribe and it won't work (until they're ready). It definitely brings out the shouty redhead side of me, which is usually well hidden!

Squished up waiting their turn

In other news, I dug a pond in the garden. Brian acquired a rigid pond liner from Freecycle ages ago and I finally found time to install it. It "just" took a two feet deep pond-shaped hole, a few bags of sand and some found bits of slate to hide the edges. It took a day and cost just under £8. I stocked with with plants from our other wildlife ponds - marsh buttercups, yellow flag iris, water forget-me-not and water crowfoot - and inoculated it thanks to a big trug full of pond weed from Lins' pond.

The weed came with passengers...

Tiny baby koi carp

... baby koi carp, which caused much joy and excitement when we spotted them. The pond's a real time-waster - we spend ages staring into its depths. It's astonishing just how quickly wildlife has occupied it in the two weeks it's been there. Pond skaters were there almost immediately, followed by great diving beetles and other swimming beetles. Damsel flies have visited it to oviposit and there are all kinds of larvae wiggling about. I've stacked slates around the shelves at the edges because our families of sparrows think I've dug them an extra large bathtub.

Spring gets a little springier

It has been so cold this year. Winter seems to be finally losing its grip though. We had one day this week when the wind dropped, the sun shone and it was glorious - proper 'sit in the garden in a t-shirt' weather.

It seemed almost an insult when succeeding days dawned grey and gloomy. Especially Saturday which needed to be sunny as we had planned to join a guided walk on the Pembrokeshire Coast Path from Solva to Newgale. I had to abandon my plans to go though, as I am recovering from Slapped Cheek Syndrome - a virus which is relatively mild in children but fells adults like trees. It starts with flu-like symptoms, continues with an alarming meningitis-type rash and then attacks your joints - particularly hands, wrists, knees and feet - like sudden and acute arthritis. The only thing to do is sit it out with ibuprofen and rest, but it lasts for weeks at the very least with some suffering joint pain and stiffness for months or years.

So a strenuous coastal walk was out of the question (stairs being enough of a challenge at the moment). Instead H11 joined her friends G11 and her Mum Lins and other friends from school and guides with associated jolly dogs. It made for a happy group of walkers and the sun beamed on them for the entire trip. Meanwhile, the rest of us, Brian, R9 and I, joined G11's dad Jon to wait at Newgale for the intrepid walkers.

A cruel onshore wind slapped at our cheeks but undeterred, sausages were barbecued, coffee and hot chocolate were made, and we had a lovely picnic in the sunshine. The hardier types then continued their walk on to Broad Haven while the children stayed behind for a spot of body boarding. The tide came right in and lapped at our toes while Atlantic waves foamed and crashed - perfect conditions, if a little cold and windy for the spectators.

But it was a lovely afternoon. My opinion of beach trips is that they are pretty much camping but without the need for tents and sleeping bags. So I do pack a kettle, stove, jars of coffee, hot chocolate, milk, water and proper mugs. There's nothing finer for the soul than sitting with friends on a beach, cuddling a mug of hot coffee, warmly snuggled under a cosy quilt with a dachshund for added warmth.

Body boarding children need hot chocolate at this time of year too. That's also a fact that should be law! As is not changing at the beach - wrap aforementioned children in towels and picnic blankets and head directly home. Throw straight in shower until rewarmed.

Hopefully that is the first of many beach trips this year - 2012 was the 'year we watched the Olympics (while it rained every blinking day)'. Perhaps 2013 can be 'the year we went body boarding all the time'. Time will tell!

Quilty pleasures

As the Kaffe Fassett Quilts exhibition was so lovely and as I took soooooo many photographs, I thought I'd make them into a quick video. I was very keen to show how the quilts had been hung (as if they had been flung into the air like a pack of cards) and the clever juxtaposition of colours.

The exhibition is a delight and thoroughly inspirational. I'd seen Kaffe Fassett fabrics, of course, and I'd seen his books but there's no substitute to seeing his designs made up as he intended them to look. It's a master class of colour and pattern combination. I've tended to err on the side of simplicity in the quilts I have made so far - I think I may be more daring in future.

One thing I would love to do though is to make a whole cloth quilt in some sunshiny yellow fabric like some of the traditional Welsh quilts that are hung on the walls. These are all hand-stitched and how cheerful they must have looked on cold grey Welsh days. These Welsh Quilts often have a story attached - one made as a thank you to a farmer who gave the quilter some butter when it was on ration, others made for weddings.

The exhibition is at the Welsh Quilt Centre in Lampeter until November. It's right next door to the Calico Kate shop which conveniently sells Kaffe Fassett fabrics (and every possible other thing the keen sewist could desire!)

Inspiration

We've just reached the end of the two week Easter school holidays. In some ways time has flown, in others it has meandered along in an aimless sort of way.

I'm still struggling with my inner demons, as I said before. I've had two successive dental abscesses which haven't helped. A first one, simple and common enough, which took a short break and then turned into a bit of an emergency. I didn't really realise what a pickle I was in, which was probably a good thing. I had exemplary NHS dental care though and am on the road to recovery, thanks to antibiotics and enough painkillers to euthanase a hippopotamus.

In the middle of it all we managed a trip (all of us as a family - how rare!) to Lampeter to see the exhibition of Kaffe Fassett quilts at the Welsh Quilt Centre. Well worth the trip, so inspirational and full of vivid, happy, soul-lifting colour. The exhibition is on until November 2nd.

I also managed to recover enough for a trip to Lawrenny with lovely Jo, her noisy boys and R9 (H11 being over at a friend's house). The sun shone in quite a spring like way for a change. We did the walk from the boat yard to Garron Pill and back round via the village.

 Of course we ended up at the Quayside tearoom and found a sheltered spot for cakes and Elderflower spritzer in the sun.

Meanwhile, back on the farm, lambing has been happening and has mostly been going well. The ewes seem to be producing colossal lambs this year (we've got a new ram). These are great big things on stilts. This one (number nine to be born) can easily suckle whilst lying down. I don't think the ewes are as amused by this as we are! Lambs with such long legs seem to get them tucked up during the birthing process, so there have been a few needing a bit of a pull. We're more than half way through now though.

Back to school tomorrow, with all the extra little things that brings. The day is already packed with orthodontist visits, sheepy things and guides -  somehow I've got to fit in the cleaning, and maybe something (anything) to progress my little business - really it needs to be a 48-hour day!

Motivation

Not really motivation, more a lack of it. For months we have trudged through mire and murk as the sky has cried rain on us. After a while you stop looking at it; the reality is so demoralising your eyes stop seeing it. It makes me turn inwards, I know it's a lack of sunlight, too little vitamin D. It causes a lack of energy, crumbling nails, dry hair and skin. The endless sucking mud saps at your energy.

Running is normally my antidote to this, the exhilaration of it even on the rainiest of days is a mood-lifter, but tendinitis put paid to running this winter. Three months was the received wisdom, which sounded like a life sentence at the beginning, but now I'm at the end of it and I can't seem to get motivated into my trainers again. Perhaps after Easter the day will come when I want to and I'll go and it will be fine again.

In the meantime I'm vacillating between weeks so ridiculously busy I don't get anything done and periods of such intense loneliness it seems as if the rest of the world is out there having fun and I'm left out of it.

But this morning the sun is out again. The world is crisp and cold and bright. I have to use the old horseshoe to smash the ice in the dogs' water bowl. This stream, which has spent the winter months angrily carving out a new, deeper trench for itself, is now pretty and trickling again with diamond sparkling ice. The ground underfoot is hard and dry and the birds have struck up their orchestra again.

Inside we're blooming!

The UK isn't quite all covered in snow at the moment - despite how it might appear from the news reports! We've got sunshine today, although it's still pretty cold outside - and a houseful of yellow pot mums. Mum took advantage of an offer to give a good home to a bargain quantity of beautiful blooms from Wiggly Wigglers and a spectacularly huge boxful of blooms arrived on Friday. There are tulips, alstomeria, smoke bush and seven bunches of chrysanthemums. The only vessel suitable for conditioning the flowers was the bath and they filled it with their loveliness while I dug vases out of cupboards. Every room now has a burst of sunny yellow and the house smells like a florists. It's lovely. Spring may not quite have sprung outdoors just yet, but inside we're blooming!

NOTE: Just wanted to add a link to Wiggly Wigglers: http://www.wigglywigglers.co.uk/ and to mention the fact that their flowers are British - direct from the farm in Herefordshire. They sell their own home grown bird food too which our lucky Pembrokeshire birds are busily scoffing.

Bathing piggies and eating a very Beau Bunny

Spring sprung briefly last week and it was lovely (if a little cold) to be back out in the garden again. The puddles and awful sucking mud we've endured over the past months have dried and walking around is a much easier affair again. The garden isn't terribly photogenic yet though, so instead here are the piggies having a bath.

Guinea pigs are prone to itchy little skin infections so the occasional bath (in T-Gel, as recommended by Rodents with Attitude) helps to keep them healthy.

Meanwhile, another 'pet' appeared only this one was very edible indeed! The lovely people at Hotel Chocolat offered me the chance to review one of their Easter Eggs. How could I refuse?!

This is the handsome Beau Bunny egg, in all its wrapped glory.

Beau himself adorns the eggs, cleverly printed on in chocolate. 

 He's accompanied by six tasty little eggs. The gold ones are salted caramel:

And the dark brown ones are praline:

What can I tell you? We shared this between three - one adult (me) and H11 and R9. We're already fans of Hotel Chocolat but as there are no shops in Pembrokeshire, we regard our local branches as the ones in Taunton and Exeter. They're a reliable source of thank-you-for-looking-after-our-dog-presents along with never-mind-it's-raining-on-our-holiday treats.

Beau Bunny is lovely. A nice thick egg of creamy milk chocolate, which requires a good thwack to get into it, and the little eggs are, as you'd expect, absolutely divine. The salted caramel filling was definitely the favourite with H11 and R9, in fact I think they'd have liked the main egg to be full of it too! The egg retails at £15 and for that you're getting 190g of chocolate, so it's not cheap, but it's probably one of the better quality, tastier eggs. We all loved it.

Aftermath

I suppose some level of destruction was inevitable; snow is heavy, two falls of snow, both four inches deep, are extra heavy.

It was too much for the roof over the hayloft.

Oh well, at least it saved us the job of taking it down, and it needed to be taken down so it can be repaired (when we have the cash). In the meantime a little tidying and making safe is required and that's a job for the spring.

The snow left more speedily than it arrived turning overnight into torrents of water that rushed across our concrete farmyard. On they way the thaw lifted a myriad of stones and mud, which it left behind on the yard, and it swept the bottoms of our gravelly streams clean. Grass and reeds were left flattened by the speed of the water; all stems pointing downhill towards the river which roared and growled at full capacity.

Then there were gales and hailstorms which ripped through our young Merryweather damson like a madman with an axe. The roof was whipped off the hen house and two of the occupants had a breezy night being blown about the garden (the third must have had a much tighter grip on the perch...)

We've had almost daily power cuts; intermittent things which mean all electronic clocks (on the cooker and the heating) must be repeatedly reset. There is still water, water everywhere, and mud, mud (not very) glorious mud.

On the bright side the polytunnel is intact and full of salad and we've had some bright crisp clear nights rich with stars. Sitting here now, at the computer, I look out of the window and sigh at the state of the garden but even through the gloom of dusk I can see the glimmer of a bud; a hellebore, tough as old boots and a sure sign of better things to come.

What a difference a week makes!

Life WAS better when the sun shone but then it became, um..., interesting!

And very white!

It's between four and six inches deep mostly, but other bits are as much as a foot deep (or an arm in this case!) School has been shut, open (briefly) and shut again.

We've been tobogganing...

...we've been silly...

...we've played and wrestled...

...we've icicled...

...and it's showing no signs of leaving.

Life is better when the sun shines

It was feeling almost springlike today as I was giving Pippin her extra food. The poor old thing's still going strong despite having a list of ailments as long as her tail. She loves her extra treats.

We could do with more dry days like today because it's like this pretty much all over the farm - worse in some places. The land just cannot take any more rain. At least it is sloping so the worst of the wet runs off, but put your boot down on even the greenest-looking bit and the answer is squelch.

I love it when the sheep are obedient. Who needs a sheepdog when you can just open the gate and call them? We used the international sheep call sign of here sheepy sheep sheeps and (for once) in they came. The rattling of a feed sack helped, as did the fact that they knew a cosy barn is theirs until after lambing and sheep like nothing better than loafing about indoors with unlimited food. 

Dylan the new ram seems to be quite the charmer and has settled happily into the flock. He had sore feet but a bit of appropriate medicine and the company of his new ladies took his mind off his sore hooves and he's sound again.

Everything we do has spectators. This is Mitch, the bossiest of the cat pack. And no, don't laugh at the "door". It'll get fixed one day. So what if it doesn't quite reach to the floor?! It saves the need for a cat flap.