bunn

This Stick Man was erected last year in the first wave of enthusiasm during lockdown when lots of people put up banners and flags and so on supporting key workers, particularly NHS workers who might be passing.  This was a bit of an odd outlier from the first, because it's down a very minor lane with very few people passing, but gained popularity because it's on the route of a circular walk from the nearest large village, and the owners of Stick Man left out slices of tree-trunk and encouraged people to pick them up, paint them, then bring them back and hang them on the gate.


After a damp winter, both Stick Man and his votive offerings are now starting to develop all sorts of interesting fungi.
If you know the local story of him, he's benign enough, but I imagine if you are far from home, (as, for example, a visiting NHS ambulance driver might be) and stumble across this randomly by the roadside, he would be rather disturbing :-D 

 Yesterday I was a bit worried because Theo reacted to several dogs we saw. Lockdown fever again.  He's still getting walks, but because of the need to stay very close to home, the walks are not so varied at the mometand have fewer dog and people encounters, so when he does meet a dog he wants to fling himself at it yapping joyfully, which looks terrifying, so I have to haul him away, which leaves him even more frustrated.  Then we get home and he's all mournful and bored and whiney.

Anyway, I decided this wouldn't do, so I have signed him up for Online Dog School, and decided to make an effort to walk further, while still sticking to the immediate area. 
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Still no news on house move, which still seems to be tangled in an immoveable knot of paperwork and solicitors, though at least the knot is showing some signs of wishing to eventually become untied now.

In the meanwhile, our dishwasher has given up the ghost and can't be repaired, which is annoying, since it will have to be replaced to sell the place, and dishwashers are currently like hen's teeth due to 'supply issues' so we had to buy a new and reasonably good one because there are no cheap ones.  Oh well. Perhaps someone will buy the house for its dishwasher. 

Well, this is interesting.  Cornwall, for its low levels of plague, has been awarded Plague Tier 1 (Medium Alert) from 2nd Dec: pubs, cafes, cinemas and shops will re-open, people can meet indoors.

Devon, just across the river from us, is Tier 2 (High Alert). There is no Low Alert.  So far as I can see, Tier 2 and Tier 1 are more or less the same, except that people aren't allowed to meet indoors in  groups of up to six in Tier 2.  I think.

I have now officially lost my ability to remember the changing rules and regulations of the Plague year.  I had more or less kept up, till now, but now?  Nope.  It's gone.

Today we went for a paddle between Devon & Cornwall, so I'm not sure whether we were in Tier 1 or 2 at that point, or would be, if the tier thing was happening yet which it is not.  This was because Western Power had told us we'd have no electricity today, so we planned to go out and walk / paddle about briskly rather than sit in the unelectric house. Then they came and told us this morning that they'd worked out a way to do their works without cutting off the power after all, but by that time we had carefully arranged things so we had a day off, and it seemed a pity to waste it.

I can report that we saw a kingfisher, some frigates, a destroyer and a very nice and friendly police boat which came scooting over to warn us that we were about to be in the way of the destroyer leaving on manoevers, and suggest we might like to move.  Which we did. :-D

Getting back to the shore, we shared a slipway with three people who were extracting a relatively large and recalcitrant motorboat from the water. Two of them were stout middle-aged men, who were frowning earnestly at Equipment, and one was a cheerful woman in late middle-age who had cheerily stripped her bottom half down to her black lacy thong in order to shepherd the boat onto its trailer.  Her legs went the most interesting colour when exposed to late-November seawater.  BRRRR. 

The last few weeks as summer faded into definite autumn, almost felt normal.  We went to Calstock, had icecream.  These are all phone-photos.  I could have taken my camera... but I did not.

admired this bold cat, hanging out with the giant menacing ducks.
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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.

Suddenly the skies are clear and very blue, and the ground thick with frost in the mornings.  The areas in the shade don't melt at all, so a lot of our Northern side of the hill is now covered in long sparkling crystals of ice over all the grass that get longer every freezing night.

But at mid-day on the river, it's beautiful. The sun as it touches the icy grass releases streams of mist that flow across the river from the shady to the sunny side, and the river at high tide was so still it was almost a mirror.

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We did consider taking Theo with us, but in the end decided that it was a bit cold, and we would risk leaving him at home.  The risk paid off, he only tore up a tissue before we got back! 

Some years ago in a fit of enthusiasm, I made elderberry wine.  The enthusiasm lasted long enough to get it into a demijohn, and then faded away, so in the demijohn it had sat ever since.

Today we attacked the Things that had built up in the library, one of which was the 'wine'.  I almost poured it away untasted, but then that seemed wussish, so I drank some.  To me at least, it actually seemed quite palatable, though it's bloody heavy on the alcohol.  Sadly I cannot drink a whole demijohn of it at once...  Am off to the village show shortly, where I have a vague memory last year someone was flogging off old bottles cheap.  Fingers crossed!

I decided to try to paint a black and white postcard from 1906 using light stolen from Claude Lorrain, and add a lurcher.

This was the light I tried to steal: 'Sunrise' and this was the postcard that I used for reference: Weir Head, 1906.

I feel slightly guilty not so much at having added a tree (other references suggest that you probably could find a tree at that time and position it like that) but more at having added a sunrise which is a bit more North than East.   But you know.  Artistic effects, etc.

Clearly I have a long way to go on getting the detail and river-reflections right, though I suspect the original is larger than A3, which does help.