bunn

There seemed to be a brief hope that we might see progress on the house move this week. But there was no progress.  Pants.

Instead we continue into a seemingly-endless November of rain and mist. I usually like Novembers, but this one is definitely dragging a bit.  I had good intentions in Spring, and lost a certain amount of weight, but I have now lost interest and put it back on.  It just doesn't seem significant enough to bother over, somehow.

At least people continue to buy roleplaying games.

I have been experimenting with a few different arty stuff styles.  Here's a fox in a blue-bell wood, made with inktense pencil and salt. Oh, and a black ink pen for the trees.

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A while ago, someone posted on a group that I am a member of a question about this painting : 

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We have put many things in boxes in the spare space of kindly relatives! We have decluttered as if our lives depended on it, and also scrubbed for days, and painted things if the scrubbing wore the paint off. The house may possibly have been this clean in the past, but not for a very long time.

The result may not be perfect, but it's a damn sight better than it was. Our house is now for sale on the various property sales portals that operate in the UK, and now we wait and hope! I made a website for it too, since I can easily do that, and you get more photos on a website than you can on a portal. It's here, if you'd like a look: https://moorlandbutts.clareassoc.com/

We did wonder if we would love the house and not want to leave once all the tidying, scrubbing etc was done, but no. We have been here 20 years, it's enough.

WELL. It has been a rather frantic few weeks. The Shop on the Borderlands has been growing like a particularly enthusiastic weed, and, already pushed for space, we decided that we were really going to have to look at Doing Something. We now have stock in all the bedrooms, tucked under beds and packed onto shelves, and getting stuff up and down the stairs was starting to be a major chore.

We'd started to look vaguely at other houses, and then it occurred to me that I knew a few people who had moved to South Wales recently, so we started to look via the internet at that area too, particularly Pembrokeshire, which is rather like Cornwall in many ways, and before long we had a shortlist, and were starting to work on decluttering and painting the house to make it saleable...

Anyway, we'd got to that point when lockdown restrictions were eased, and since Pp was off to Bristol to pick up some more second hand games, we thought, why not pop over and take a look at a few areas, and actually, why not take a look at a house while he's there....

And then of course, I had to go and have a look too...

And now we have had an offer accepted on this house and suddenly everything is moving very very fast! The photography really doesn't do that house justice. In fact, this was a bit of a theme of many places we looked at, the photography was often AWFUL and left a lot of questions open, which is just what you don't want in the land of Covid19. I'm thinking I probably would like to do the photography myself rather than rely on an estate agent to do it, since frankly most of them seem to be less good with a camera than I am.

We've had assorted shysters and pessimists of the Estate Agent variety to look at our Cornwall house, and we've been working flat out on rendering it relatively clean and neat inside and out. Am kicking myself for not having it painted back in June, when the painter I got to quote had lots of availability: I booked him for August, and now he's saying he can't do it till the second week in Sept, and since the outside of the house has big black seams where we had the render fixed, all the estate agents agree that painting the place is absolutely essential, sigh. And I *really* don't want to DIY that.

On the plus side, apparently people are fleeing the cities in the time of plague in the traditional manner, so our hopes are high that someone will want to flee to the Tamar Valley, where they can work from home.

What else has happened? Oh yes, further to my hip problems, I decided to do a course of https://www.secondnature.io/ which is a sort of diet-and-lifestyle-change program, to try to relieve the weight on the hips. One of the key things is cutting right back on sugar and eating only smaller amounts of whole-grain carbohydrates and a lot more veg. I must say, I am somewhat amazed by how much of a change this has made to my energy levels, and my hips also have improved vastly. I've lost about 6 pounds in six weeks, which is not exactly a mountain of blubber, but it feels like a lot more. I no longer feel like I need to nap every afternoon, my hips are much happier, and I can both walk and garden energetically without feeling too zonked by it! So yes. Sugar. Delightful but better eaten rarely. Which I suppose is somewhat obvious, but still.

I have bought a Tile for Theo. It's a Bluetooth device that hangs from his collar and allows me to use an app to track him by showing him on a map. In theory, it's also supposed to send me an alert if he goes too far from the phone, but so far the only time this has happened has been the time I went out in the car without him. It seems that the range of the alerts is several miles, which is annoying, because it clearly shows on the phone when he's out of Bluetooth connection range. But you have to be looking at it to see that.

Still, it has allowed me to keep an eye on him in the garden while not standing right over him, and I think my ability to suddenly pop out and call him back just as he was making the decision to leave is having some impact.

VE day yesterday, and coincidentally, also my mother's birthday. I popped over for the first time in almost 2 months to take a card & present (at a suitable distance). As an official Old Person Of The Village, she had been given a VE day cupcake, a drawing of a rainbow to show in her window, and a VE day button. This seemed to amuse her.

In our village, I don't think we had cupcakes for the elderly, but we did have a scarecrow competition. This was slightly eyebrow-raising, since it was impromptu, and everyone had to use stuff already in their house. Several people chose to make soldiers, but since they had no uniform, the effect was often somewhat... terroristic. But other people did more peaceful scarecrows, like the one of a woman welcoming her lover home, and the pub (closed, of course), which rather mysteriously decided to put up an effigy of the landlord celebrating VE day, which of course he was not.

We wandered up to have a look at the efforts late in the evening, and while we were doing that, someone let off what was apparently a genuine WWII air raid siren. It made a very strange and eery sound echoing up the river valley, with almost no other sound to be heard and the scent of blossom on the air, and almost no moving people, but still scarecrows all around. Then, even more surreal, it segued into the oddly-familiar crackly sound of Vera Lynn singing 'We'll meet again'. What a strange time this is.

What a terrifically cool object, and what a strange story!  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk

Grrr at the metal detectorists who found a Bronze Age hoard of such importance, dug it up secretly (damaging the stuff with their spade) and sold it for cash, But hurray that it could be confirmed as from the Bronze Age,  (1600 BC!) and traced to the excavation location. 

I must have missed previous news stories about this, and oddly, I only came across it today because it was mentioned in a local Cornwall facebook group, because the original tin and gold used to make it in the first places came from Cornwall (and the copper came from Austria).  It's always interesting to see evidence of relatively long-distance trade in the very distant past. 

These have just appeared outside the pub. Weirdly, I would be happier if someone in the village had grown the pumpkins, but they have not.  I saw the sticker before the pumpkin people were built: they are from Tesco.  I am not sure why this matters. 

So we DID go to the village show, which after migrating from field to field around the village for some years, now seems to have settled conveniently in a field just up the road from us so it's easy to walk to.  It is tradition that our village show should occur on the one really wet weekend in July, but not this time.  The sun shone, the sky was dotted with small attractive clouds, and there was a pleasant cool breeze.  Perfect Village Show weather.

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This week I went down to the Minack theatre with my mother on what proved to be a VERY windy day, to see Pericles, a play written probably-mostly-maybe by Shakespeare.  The wind was loud and wild and the plot fast-moving, so I'm not sure I caught all the intricacies, but we enjoyed the play anyway.   I have some more photos, which I may dig out later, but in the meanwhile have a video of the wild waves on the beach at Porthcurno, where we stopped afterwards to give the outbound traffic a chance to clear. 

It was my birthday...  goodness, it was ten days ago!  Anyway, we bunked off and went to the seaside, even though the forecast said it was going to be 100% humidity with 16% rain.  The seaside with the least rain was at Seaton, where the beach is an unfestive grey, although somehow, mysteriously, the sea managed to be more or less blue despite the refusal of both sky and sand to collaborate.


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