Desperately Seeking Springtime

I thought my holiday timing would mean arriving home just as spring was springing…..Here we are April 11^th and still no spring. Hmmm. Not to worry it’ll be here this weekend apparently and good job too as this lack of green is very dispiriting. Although not quite as depressing as the sight of more snow. I’ve never known so much snow – not the actual amounts but the frequency of flurries.

Normally getting the garden ready for spring is like running for a train – I just about make it in time and flop into my seat and soak up the gorgeousness as it all sets off on its summer journey. This year, the train was delayed and I’ve had time to sweep the platform, polish the rails and have a long conversation with the station master. The garden is so ready to go it actually looks like a proper ‘open to the public’ sort of garden. (This will never happen again.)

In the meantime in this cold long winter I leap on beauty where I find it – artworks by a friend, immersing myself in music, reading stunningly written books and enjoying clever design. Art, music, literature. Have I finally grown up or has the lack of spring forced me to focus on other things? Maybe this is a new sort of happiness? For years I believed in true and pure happiness, but it doesn’t exist does it? Or at least it ceases to exist the older you get. You can’t reach middle age without having experienced or at least noticed pain, suffering, injustice and loss. These things make me unhappy – whether they are my losses, my pain, or the suffering of others. How do we live with it all? We do what we can perhaps through action groups and charities and tea and sympathy and maybe, hopefully, as a race we humans are becoming ‘better’. But in the meantime beauty in its various forms is our solace and spring, when it comes with its sunlight and colour it is always a mood booster.

Our garden is now in its tenth year. Shrubs that I couldn’t imagine being more than a few weedy twigs are now gregariously filling more space than I had allowed, the tree peonies may well take over the whole garden and I am giving away plants like people gave me plants at the beginning when I couldn’t believe I would ever be able to spare such precious space-fillers. This year more than ever I can’t wait to see how the garden looks in its summer clothes. But this year more than ever I am having to wait, so my ABC of music (Albinoni, Bach, Correlli) accompany me while I read or write or make some little gift for my guests to take home. Beauty gets me through. I try not to listen to the news.

And if the arts and crafts fail to cheer and the skies stay cold and grey we can always turn to humour - to laugh at it all – the insanity of life and human behaviour - and thank goodness as a race the British are particularly good at humour.

So here I am, just turned 48, focussing on beauty and humour and I will leave you with my favourite joke of the winter …What did one snowman say to the other? ……”Can you smell carrots?” And that is absolutely the last I will hear about snow this year.

Dragonflies in the Desert Part Three

While in Dahab we, well I, make a decision to take a camel ride to Ras Ab Galoum, a Bedouin camp along the coast from where we are staying. Camels turn out to not be as uncomfortable as I had imagined, (though a couple of hours is more than enough) and I am really impressed with the way they can negotiate the rocky outcrops along the shoreline. They just keep on plodding on with their massive padded plate sized feet over rocks I could barely see a path through. When we arrive at the camp we are the only three there. Our guide disappears and lunch arrives from nowhere and is delicious – fried fish with rice. On the way back my nephew’s camel decides he’s had enough and takes off at an alarming pace. I am stuck on top of a less energetic animal and can do nothing. I yell at Willy who is a little way ahead of me looking at the rock pools, to “DO something” but he just turns to me and says “Huh? What? What?” totally oblivious to what is happening. Being in loco parentis turns out not for the last time to be nerve fraying, but it all ends well when the camel stops on reaching another group further along the way.

Climbing Mount Sinai a few days later we are offered camels to take the strain off the 4km hike up the mountain. “No thank you” say the three of us in absolute certain unison, each nursing our own individual sores. What a climb though! Doing it alone I can imagine could be a very spiritual experience and I half wished I was doing that, but we had such a lovely group of fellow climbers that I was happy to walk and chat for the three hours it took to reach the top. This is the mountain where God handed Moses the ten commandments and is the highest in Egypt. At the bottom is Saint Catherine’s, the oldest monastery in the world and an incredibly welcome site on the journey back down when the temperature dropped so much that we were hugging each other for warmth and even a camel would have been welcome if he was prepared to cuddle.

Back to every day life in Dahab and we venture a short way along the beach to ‘Happy Village’ where apparently the snorkelling is good. New friends Barry and Tracey come along and we flop down onto the cushions in the beach side café for a spot of lunch before our swim.

I order vegetable rice and so does Barry. When it arrives we discuss what the vegetable might be and agree it must be carrot lying on top of a huge pile of rice lying next to a huge pile of chips. We taste it and find that it is coloured potato. So rice topped with potato and chips on the side. My carb free diet is now firmly postponed til we return to England.

As everyone squeezes and pulls themselves into their wet suits (what a palaver) our host comes to clear the plates away with his lovely big smile. He looks for a compliment and I oblige. “That was lovely – thank you so much” and it was lovely because we are sitting on well used mismatched cushions on a concrete floor covered in assortged rugs, under a bamboo roof on a sheltered Sinai beach, with friends we have just made and sweet sweet Egyptian tea with camels strolling past, the sun shining and the sea sparkling. It is very lovely indeed.

Ah the sea, the sea. I have agreed nine days in to our holiday to go out with everyone else to gaze through a plastic mask at the many and beautiful fish. Up ‘til now I have been perfectly happy to stroll along the shoreline while the others are immersed in the blue and I have met many happy little creatures scuttling, crawling, flitting around the rocks and dead coral. I am so taken by their separate universe and their tiny lives that I resolve not to eat seafood any more. Previously I’ve been sanguine about consuming prawns and the like as I argued, they, having such small brains and therefore awareness, barely know they’re alive anyway. This has been an excellent excuse for eating prawns, whitebait, clams, mussels - basically all the things I like to eat anyway. No more. It seems to me as I watch them that yanking them out of their universe and eating them is doubly selfish and that eating chicken might in fact be a better option. I am slightly annoyed with myself for reaching this conclusion.

Anyhow, I have agreed to join the others in the sea – or at least on the sea and am the only woman in Sinai to be found on a bright blue lilo. I am very aware I am uncool, but at 47 coolness is well on the way out of the question and self-preservation and keeping water out of my ears is way more important. Though it must be said that scuba divers don’t rate much in the cool stakes either – they look as ridiculous as men in jodphurs to me - and more frightening, immerging like black Cybermen out of the shallows where I am quietly paddling. Still whatever floats your boat I suppose. I last roughly twelve minutes in the water and declare “Well that’s all jolly lovely, can I go back now?” Apparently it‘s not that easy. I thought I could just head for the shore but I have to be tugged inelegantly, lilo sagging, back several hundred yards along the reef to a gap where I won’t do any damage to the coral while heaving my bulk to the beach. As I said, what a palaver.

Safely beached I return to my book and my daydreaming and my daydreams turn to my garden. I make the mistake of thinking England might at least be as sunny if not as warm as Egypt when I return and I am filled with excitement at the coming season in our garden. I have some ideas and I scribble them down on the back of a boarding pass and then I fall asleep in the sun in Egypt thinking of my nice little place in the country in England and I feel very lucky.

Dragonflies in the Desert – Part Two

I totally LOVE the Middle Eastern dispensation with chairs. Shack after tearoom after beach bar after café simply scatters big comfy cushions on the floor – perhaps leaning up against short concrete divisions – divisions that hold at least twelve people for a gregarious lunch on locally caught fish and rice (lots of rice), or for a gentle afternoon spent with people you’ve just met sipping Egyptian tea- which, after only two days in the area, you pour sugar in from the bowl like a native rather than spooning a carefully measured “Just a half for me” teaspoon.

Lazing around on these cushions with tea and a book is turning out to be my favourite holiday pastime. While the others push themselves into their wetsuits and head off for the coral my mind flits between the Egyptian sun-baked shore where I am anchored and South Africa, Norfolk, France – wherever my literary companions are taking me. Is there any better way to spend a day? I am full of ideas of making the same sort of colourful den at home for guests to lounge around in during their stays. Of course the Egyptians have the advantage of the ground being mostly dry, which cannot in truth be said about Brook Farm, but I am considering a raised decking area outside the old 1950s caravan which will give me a fabulous cushion buying opportunity. Months of rain will not put me off the cushion buying.

The restaurants in Dahab, perched on jetties sticking out over the gentle waves raise you slightly off the ground with huge chunky wide benches – the sort I would pay over £300 for in a shabby chic secondhand shop in England but which here must be two a penny given all the restaurants have them in great numbers. Bright coloured drifts of fabric drape the make shift ceilings and wrap around the supporting poles. A massive variety of pretty lanterns hang with red, green, blue and orange bulb, hubba bubba pipes adorn the tables of the ageing hippies stranded here since the 70s and the young twenty-somethings trying to recreate the vibe. At another table a group of young British girls, presumably blissfully unaware (or uncaring) of the Muslim preference, have dressed in tiny shorts and tight revealing tops and are giggling and flirting with the good looking waiters.

Near the pool at the Dahab Paradise is a large Bedouin tent for lounging. In front of the tent a very successful ground covering succulent sprinkles little pink flowers across its front and attracts more butterflies than I saw in our English garden all last summer. (There is more than one sort of Painted Lady attracted to Egypt at this time of year.) Dragonflies flit over the swimming pool and we wonder how on earth they came to survive here – surely dragonflies need freshwater? We ponder lazily about this as we sunbathe attempting to google the answer, but the connection was too poor so we promise ourselves to look it up when we get home. I still haven’t. Procrastination has always been one my strongest attributes but the Egyptians are world leaders. Absolutely nothing is done in a hurry, perhaps it is the only way to cope with the heat. Maybe we rush around like mad things in Britain simply as a way of keeping warm.

It’s a pity then that they expect so much of their animals – though worshipped as Gods in ancient history, animals here today have a tough life. I knew that the hardest part of this trip for me was going to be seeing abuse of horses and donkeys and I travelled armed with a list of contact numbers and addresses for the Brooke Hospital (www.brooke.org.uk) so that in the event I could actually contact someone who would do something. How relieved I was then to find that most of the animals I saw were in reasonably good nick. Just as pleasing was the very prominent presence of the Brooke in Luxor in the form of long rows of palm leaf shelters providing shade and posters around the town and even at the airport. The Brooke welcomes visitors so we went to visit the office and hospital seeing a horse who had been in an accident with some scaffolding that morning nicely stitched up and resting in a cool box. Two other horses and three donkeys were also being cared for there and we were told that the vets go out to other towns and villages every month. They offer a totally free veterinary and education service. What worries me now is the effect the huge reduction in number of tourists is going to have on these animals. If their owners aren’t getting paid to drive tourists around town, how are they going to afford to feed them?

I leave you for now with this worry in the hope you will visit the Brooke website and send support!!

End of Part Two…

#bitesizeblogchunks

Dragonflies in the Desert

DRAGONFLIES IN THE DESERT
By Sarah Wint

Few places can beat Egypt for sun-starved Brits at this time of year. Being in the UK tourism trade February is the best time of year for me to leave home and emboldened by a well-travelled husband I happily ignore the Foreign Office warnings not to travel to Egypt and head off for some warmth. And warmth is what I get – not least from the Egyptians themselves. A more welcoming race I think I have not yet met, though the Turks come very close. (Indeed this must be a friendly neighbourhood)

Fourteen days on the shores of the beautiful Red Sea and three days in Luxor to end with a mind-boggling tour of 4000 year old temples and tombs. At the beginning of our second week, my sister rings to check we have not altered our programme and found ourselves on the doomed air balloon flight in Luxor. We are safely sitting on the beach at Dahab, but my heart lurches at the fate of those poor people and our own proximity to a similar one. A hot air balloon flight over the Valley of the Kings comes highly recommended and is perhaps something I would have eagerly undertaken.

When we arrive in Luxor the place is unbelievably quiet. We walk to the Museum of Luxor along the new promenade by the side of the Nile – a new area planned and started before the revolution ready for the perennial masses of tourists. Since the revolution work has stopped on the promenade and as we are three of maybe a dozen people using it, there seems little point in it continuing for now. Tourism is down 80% and the horrible accident in Luxor is not going to help, not to mention stories of kidnappings, however brief.

As we’re travelling with my 14 year old nephew we’ve decided to avoid Cairo on this trip – more for the peace of mind of his parents than our own – but we meet other travellers who report it being entirely peaceful. It saddens us more and more as we tour this country that people are being warned against travel, seriously hampering the high hopes of a new democratic prosperity. On a personal level however, I feel bold and intrepid - like a proper traveller, not just a tourist. I feel quite pleased with myself and then immediately ashamed.

To my eyes this is a tough and chaotic place to live, but apparent poverty here is actually just normal life. The difference between the residents of Tenbury and the people of Luxor is mirrored in the difference between my fat spoilt donkeys and the working animals in these streets.

In Luxor I have found us a nice little B&B La Maison Pythagore – I like to support other BnBers - and from the website the Pythagore looks authentic and pretty. The owner kindly arranges a pick up from the airport and after speeding through the outskirts we eventually bump down the broken back streets of Luxor to a point where the driver can go no further, so we drag our cases down the narrow bumpy sandy back alley towards our temporary home. Children are playing and shouting hello to us as we pass donkeys and carts laden with vegetables or building supplies. Luckily we stop at a door just before a vast hole in the ground where several builders are working and our guide rings a doorbell. At this point, even after our experiences in Bedouin desert camps and make-shift mountain ‘cafes’ (with make-shift lavatories), I think I may finally have to say “I’m sorry – I can’t stay here”. I am a fish out of water – I actually feel a little scared but I give myself a notional slap and the door opens and a short man with a friendly face says welcome so we step in. Inside I immediately relax. The vibrant colours of the walls the welcoming sofas and cushions and a garden! A garden! At last some green! Now I feel at home. A lovely patio garden with bougainvillea and frangipane and lemons and bananas, more sofas….and a cat. Our host Mosin (who turns out not to be so short –it’s just that there’s a big step down from the alley into the house) brings us tea. A garden, a sofa, some tea, a cat. I’ll stay….

End of Part One

(I don't like long blogs!)

Reconnection!

Following my recent blog in which I bemoaned the modern condition of ‘Being Sooo Busy”- the words “busy lives” being used by everyone, repeated again and again in the media like a mantra so that it has, I believe, become a kind of affirmation. We say it and hear it so much that we believe it must be true and if everyone is saying it then we all must unquestionably be it and if we’re not then we must surely be some sort of loser or slacker.

Perhaps it’s just me but I think this is not sitting well with a lot of people. I think some of us might be saying “Um hang on – is this really necessary? – must I travel as fast as possible to my grave?” Some of us might, without even knowing it, be physically uncomfortable with this modern way of living and becoming ill or depressed as we move further away from our instinctive roots and natural habitats.

But it is a hard habit to kick. Even those of us who grew up happily making our own entertainment with Barbie and Action Man will now turn needlessly regularly to our smart phones to check on the latest communication from outside. I will quite normally watch television, read a magazine and keep an eye on my email and twitter accounts of an evening. To not do so feels, well a bit isolating, uncaring and even unprofessional somehow. It seems just one occupation of an evening is not sufficient any more.

But I am tired and I might often have a headache and though I know that constantly doing stuff without rest is not good for me, if I stop briefly it is such an odd sensation of inaction that I am not sure I like it. William and I went on a boating holiday on the Norfolk Broads a while ago and I well remember the strange feeling of coming to an absolute halt. All we had to do for the next week was steer a very slow moving boat. We were forced to slow down and we loved it.

I live in a pretty little valley with a bit of woodland and meadow and a brook and our unruly but heartfelt garden. I am lucky. I spend a lot of time outside and every day I have enough time, if I take it, to stop and lean on a tree and just be in my space for five minutes. It is enough to check back in with myself, reconnect with my place, the season and what is happening around me.

My friend Penny and I, thinking along these same lines, have come up with the idea of offering other people this same ‘reconnection’ opportunity. We’ve teamed up with Jackie Thorne and Kayte Thompson-Dixon who specialise in Dru Yoga (a gentle form of yoga that anyone can do) and Mindfulness (also something we can all do but need reminding how) I’m looking forward to learning more about both of these disciplines. We will be running four Reconnection weekends a year – one in each season….A time for folk to simply get back in touch with nature and themselves.

This is of course something anyone can do at any time of their choosing in their locality but it seems fewer and fewer people actually do it and moreover don’t realise how much better they can feel if they did. Using simple mind and body exercises combined with beautiful surroundings and hospitality, we hope we can help people slow down and get back in touch with themselves and their natural environment. Quite simply to experience their own Reconnection.

 

Our first weekend will be 1^st to 3^rd February. There will be log fires and candles, gentle music and good food, a cosy kitchen for friendly chat & laughter and plenty of private corners for solitary reflection. I hope it will be a magical weekend of peace and reconnection for the busy, hardworking, preoccupied, utterly exhausted folk of this land! Come along whether you can spare the time or not!  You will be very welcome.

xx Happy Christmas xx

I’m on a roll

There’s quite a lot happening in my life at the moment. Well quite a lot happening in my head anyway. I’m on a roll. My little book is at the printers and about to become a real beautiful touchy feely thing. In the meantime people are actually buying and reading it on kindle and even more wonderful they write and tell me they like it too! I suppose there may be some people that have bought it and don’t like it but at least they are polite enough to keep quiet J

It’s funny how self-publishing is kind of embarrassing – like you simply will not be told you have written a load of rubbish and stubbornly forge ahead anyway. I had some nice feedback from the agent Darley Anderson and the publishers Frances Lincoln but neither wanted to take it on – it is in no way a bestseller. But now I am so glad that I’ve gone it alone because my whole heart and soul is in this book and I feel happier – safer really– having it quietly available to people who want or need to find it. It will remain something special and personal but to be shared with the right special people.

From the book came the idea to set up The Honeysuckle Trust a charity that intends to provide gardening breaks for people coping with bereavement or depression. And from the creation of the charity came the idea of offering Ecotherapy Weekends here for absolutely anyone who wants to come.

In the meantime, I have been helping a friend set up the Herefordshire Horticultural Hub and meeting all sorts of fabulous horticultural types that aren’t at all haughty-culturals. I think many friendships will be made through the Hub.

It feels as though life has been patiently waiting for me to open the right door and it is now welcoming me in and ushering me through to meet more exciting ideas and even more wonderful new people who appear to be in the same room. Synchronicity is happening all over the place!

But possibly the most exciting thing is that I have discovered a new way to instantly improve areas of the garden. I did this while standing in the Blue Garden trying to find some blue. I renamed it The Square Garden. It instantly improved no end! I think this is something that might work elsewhere. The wiggly borders could become the floppy beds. The spring garden could become the snowdrop patch. Like I said, I’m on a roll.

Anyway, lots of good things happening but life will undoubtedly chuck a spanner or two at me soon enough, And lo – I have just remembered that I put some mushrooms on the stove when I started typing this. Burnt mushrooms for supper then.

A little piece about a little peace

What busy lives we all have. We all know that and we're always being told that too. It seems to be accepted that modern life is to be lived at as fast a pace as possible, keeping in touch with as many people as possible, networking, sharing, liking, blogging, following and being pinteresting simultaneously twenty four seven. But I can't do it. I am a failure! What a relief to admit it! I think for me, it is just too much of a conflict with the life I have chosen to live, given the absence of children. A country life of gardening and housekeeping, welcoming guests, having a moment or two to chat to visitors, looking after our animals and caretaking our little piece of England. It sounds like a simple life doesn't it - so why isn't it? I suppose because running a successful B&B and holiday cottages and now having a garden people appear to like to visit, we have created more and more work for ourselves. Being a success is great and we don't mind the work either, but something has to give and it's not going to be the business or the garden so it has to be ....um....my blog? So, is this just a long-winded excuse for not having blogged for so long? Maybe, but it is also a heartfelt plea for a little peace in life. There are so many blogs that I would love to read, so many people I would enjoy chatting with on Twitter and no doubt all sorts of cool things I am missing out on on pinterest, but for now I would just like some peace and quiet please. All those virtual voices can be quite deafening sometimes. Is it OK to pick these things up and put them down again when it suits you? Or does that make me amateur, not really playing the game properly? Does anyone even notice if I don't contribute for a while? OK so enough excuses for the gap between blogs.... Sadly my desire for calm has even affected simple pleasures like visiting gardens. I find myself irritated if I can't go around a garden in a logical way, taking in all that is to be seen and instead have to double back or go in and out of garden rooms the same way. And mazes! Surely life is complicated enough without people going around making mazes. I'm not the only one that's after some silence. Yesterday morning about 4am I heard a tiny little bird voice start his morning song, followed by another sharper older? tweet. It was very much as though mother had said "Not yet you fool, go back to sleep" And there was silence again for a while. Maybe I've become so obsessed with making a relaxed and peaceful country retreat here that I can't see the good in a faster more varied way of life. Maybe in fact I am just becoming very very boring. Perhaps I'd better ask my Twitter friends which it is ........