Just picture it… We have just pulled up outside a tyre shop on a small industrial estate. Chris gets out, leaving Mum and me in the car, and he goes into the office; a minute or two later he comes out closely followed by a very short-haired lady dressed like a mechanic and wearing big boots; and they talk beside the car but we can’t hear very well because Mum and I are inside and Chris’s window is down only a couple of inches.

“Is that a man?” whispers Mum, which is quite uncommon for her because she is a little deaf.

“No,” I answer normally because the lady has gone back inside.

“I didn’t think so after hearing her talk – she sounded like a woman – but she looked like a man. Didn’t she?” says Mum.

“Yes, a bit,” I reply. For a moment I wonder what she would have made of the recent winner of the Eurovision Song Contest – the bearded man who sang like a lady and dressed in an evening dress.

Chris gets back in the car.

“We have to wait a few minutes until the car ahead of us has been done,” Chris offers.

In a short while a middle-aged man comes out to see what kind of tyre we need. Chris gets out to tell him.

“Just bring the car over there,” the man points; he smiles at me through the window and he disappears.

Chris gets in the car again and moves it into the correct position for tyre removal and replacement. But it isn’t on a ramp – they are going to do it on the tarmac. I can see a young man bringing out a jack.

“Should we get out?” I ask Chris before he leaps out of the car again.

“No, I think it’s alright, the chap didn’t say anything about getting out,” says Chris.

The older man joins the lad and puts the jack into place. He looks at me and smiles.

“Are we light enough to stay in the car while you jack it up?” I ask amazed (especially as I can remember some the occasions when my Dad swore at lousy jacks).

“This one will take up to eight tons,” the man chuckles.

I laugh too and then, like Calamity Jane, I think to myself, “Hey that ain’t quite so funny!”

The new tyre is on, and Chris is about to pay at the office, when the older man comes out from the dark of the garage again.

“Hold on,” he says concerned, “I think we’ve got the size wrong. Is it a sixty or a sixty-five?”

“Sixty-five,” answers Chris, already stood and waiting to pay.

The lad comes out with the big, strong, eight-ton weight-bearing jack in his arms. I can’t bear the thought of sitting in the stuffy car and being jacked up and down again, so I get out and adjust my clothes.

I’m wearing green harem trousers trimmed with black and a new cream-coloured gypsy top with black embroidery on it; obviously, I’ve never worn the combined outfit before because the top is new. When I glanced in the mirror during the morning rush I had thought that it looked okay but now I’m not so confident; I wonder if the ample gathers around the middle are a bit bulky and unflattering (normally, I prefer close-fitting clothes to show my good points). Chris walks over to me while I’m considering this matter.

“Darling, do you think this outfit is fattening?” I ask.

“Rather!” Chris responds with enthusiasm and a sexy look in his eyes.

“Ooh!” I say wounded yet also perplexed at his strange reaction.

“The outfit is fascinating!” he says, noting the wound and making sure that I know he had misheard in a good way. (Chris is a tad deaf, as I may have told you before.)

“Not fattening then?” I ask.

“Nonsense,” he says, “I could as easily have heard it as ‘flat …erring’ ”

He is a bit of a wit (as I may have told you before).

What spare tyre?

Nearly finished my canal painting. Not sure whether or not to add some human life into the painting. Yes or no?  What do you suggest? I will wait until the weekend and decide when I haven’t got a headache!

My Mum thinks I should enter our garden in the Dawlish in Bloom 2014 gardening competition – well, I must admit it does look pretty. I’ll take some photo’s for you when the sun comes out again, if the sun comes out (it is still so chilly and wintry here). Instead of procrastinating, I went along to the Manor House, our council offices, to pick up an application form. I was delighted to find that the form takes up one half of the centre pages of our Spring Newsletter of Dawlish Town Council. The glossy, eight page production is called “The Town Crier” – what a lovely name!

On the inside page of “The Town Crier” our mayor has written a piece entitled “My Mayoral Year”. There is a photo’ of the mayor and his wife; he has a kind face and smile. He must be a modest man because I had to search the whole booklet for his name, which was right at the back, on the last page. Councillor Terry Lowther (my spell-check wanted to call him Loather!), our Mayor, comes across as a very nice, down-to-earth gentleman; after a brief summation of the high-lights of his year thus far he wrote of “a sobering moment”….

In our mayor’s words:

One of our grandsons – a six year old – asked me about this Mayor business. He said “How do you get to be Mayor, Gramps? Is it sort of in the family (no doubt looking to his future) or do they just give it to some random old person?” That certainly put me in my place!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Unfortunately, the “Chairwoman’s Address” featured in last year’s Dawlish Carnival Programme did not paint such a happy picture. The scanned article is below.

People often tell me how lucky I am to have Chris for my husband. “Yes, I know,” I usually answer, and I sometimes want to add, “I’m such a poor fish myself,” but I don’t because that would be churlish of me. After all, they probably say it as a compliment to my good taste in choosing such a nice husband, or perhaps they are well aware I’m of a flirtatious nature and therefore they think a little reassurance on their part will keep me grounded. If the latter is the case, they ought to realise that flirts are often the most innocent of creatures, yet not so naive as to be unable to appreciate when they have found near perfection.

Anyway, none of this is really what I want to blog about today; I just wanted to begin by telling you that I’m lucky because Chris helps me make the bed each morning – then, of course, I got to thinking about everybody saying how lucky I am!

So, there we were a few hours ago, making our bed; of the three pillows apiece only one matches the duvet cover of white patterned with pretty pink roses and green leaves; and for some strange reason Chris put one of the non-matching pillows on top.

Incidentally, have you ever wondered why people require so many pillows and cushions nowadays? We have six on our bed but, when I was at the doctor’s surgery the other day and I picked up a House and Gardens magazine, I noticed that nearly all the display beds had upwards of eight pillows, bolsters and cushions – there was practically no room on top of the beds to sit! And what do we do with them when we get into bed? Do we arrange them prettily for our comfort and pleasure? No, at least Chris and I don’t, we throw them onto the carpet. Sorry about this little aside – just thought I’d air my ponderings on this modern obsessions with pillows and cushions.

So Chris had put the odd choice of a non-matching pillow on top and he hadn’t pulled the duvet up quite far enough to match my side; not only was the symmetry wrong but also there were wrinkles and folds in the duvet cover.

“You’ve put the wrong pillow on top,” I informed like a hospital matron (lucky Chris).

“Which is the right one?” he asked.

“Can’t you see that the pink rosebuds with the bit of green match the cover?”

“Not really.”

(Now in truth, it wasn’t a perfect match because the duvet had been a present and didn’t come with pillow cases. However, the pillow cases that I had ear-marked for the job were as good a match as I could find, especially in colour if not design and size of roses.)

Chris swapped over the positions of the pillows and pulled the duvet back to the same weird, lop-sided height as he had left it before; pulled awkwardly at odds with the side of preference – my side – the same wrinkles and folds appeared again, as before.

“Would you mind pulling up the duvet a little?” I asked.

Chris obliged with a certain finesse and lightness of touch that looked very much like blatant, albeit mute, sarcasm.

“All ready for inspection,” he couldn’t resist saying.

“Good,” I burst out laughing.

A short while later I was thinking in the shower; it was a long shower (hair wash) so I thought a lot. I got to wondering how and when I had become so petty. It seemed to me that when I was young and smaller there was so much to learn, and so much growing and living to do, that I would not have worried about making the bed, let alone the order of the stupid pillows. Now I am bigger (in every sense) and travelled, and know so much more, how come I am bothered by the small things? Does this mean that small is big when we are growing, and conversely, that when we are big and bloated with self-confidence we are actually becoming small-minded.

My Big Small Theory probably has as many holes in it as a shower head, after all it was devised in only the length of time it takes to have a long shower; nevertheless, I have decided that tomorrow I shall bite my tongue when Chris puts his pillows at odds with my own. I promise that the wrinkles will not rankle with me. There will be no war over roses, big or small, in our house. Lucky Chris.

A lot of people are glad to see me painting again, not that I have ever stopped (as you will know if you are a regular to my blog), but the trouble is… that I don’t have much time to write my blog or my new book.

At least, whilst painting today, I have made great inroads into another book, “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak, which we will be discussing at Bookworm club next Sunday. And if you’re wondering how I manage to read and paint at the same time – well, thank goodness for modern technology and Kindle reader. Okay, the female voice of my reader is American and doesn’t do a fantastic job with German accents but I quite like her clarity, and her pauses and inflections as she follows punctuation perfectly. If she can’t understand a word she spells it out, which is a little worrying at first but you get used to it after a while.

As for the book itself? I love it. It’s touching, thoughtful and brilliantly written. I can hardly wait till tomorrow for my gal to finish reading it to me.

Meanwhile, here is another photograph of my painting, now rapidly reaching the final stages.

“It’s too cold to work in the garden on the sea side of the house,” warned Chris, opening the door for me as my hands were full with trays of plants. “There’s a terrific wind this side.”

The wind nearly tore the door off and my long hair whipped my face. I wished I had put my hair in a ponytail but it was too late – my hands were already covered in soil and I wasn’t going to make yet another trip back up and down stairs. I would manage.

The digging was hard work, not so much because of the hard earth (in fact, owing to all the rain it was softer than I had expected) but more to do with the tough couch-grass that had grown over the flower beds during the past nine months; the clumps of couch, three or four inches thick (including the network of knotted roots), resisted any half-hearted efforts with the spade aimed straight down and all my weight on the top. It required a certain knack and strength, and ability to bend at the knees and strike almost horizontally in order for the grass to yield. Before long, in spite of the cold wind and no sleeves, I was quite hot, and Chris’s words made me smile.

The wind tossed my hair forwards, sidewards, this way and that, into a tangled mass that sometimes made it hard for me to see what I was doing; I waved my hair back with a forearm, uselessly, because the wind was relentless. After a while I became accustomed to the wind and it no longer bothered me; in fact, it was exhilarating.

The first bed had been turned over and freed of the grass and roots when suddenly it struck me how lucky I am to have my own bit of earth (and our house).

“Thank you God,” I said aloud.

Then I laughed because I don’t often give thanks to God, aloud or otherwise. I thought of the poem you often see on plaques in garden centres – “You’re closer to God’s heart in a garden than any place else on earth…” – and I found myself agreeing with it. I’m not a religious person but since my father died… well, a part of me cannot accept the finality. As I watched my hands and feet work with the spade I remembered Dad teaching me how to dig the soil on my allotment – our allotments were side by side – and how to rake it to level the ground and make the soil fine.

My father would not have called himself a religious man. His favourite poem was Abou Ben Adhem by James Henry Leigh Hunt (which I shall paste below). It suited him well.

I heard someone say recently that a love of gardening is a sign of getting older; others laughed in agreement because it has a true ring to it. I thought about it while I was planting my flowers in their fresh beds and I can’t agree. My mother and father weren’t old when they worked on our garden at Gumdale; my sister was only four years old when she was given “The Seven Dwarfs” as a present for being “the little gardener” of the family; I was twenty when I had my first garden plot; and nearly all professional gardeners were young when they started out.

I came inside and the door blew shut behind me. My hands and feet were frozen and filthy so I rushed upstairs and had a nice warm shower; and while I de-tangled my hair with conditioner and a comb, I still had the nice warm inner glow from being in the garden and thinking pleasant thoughts.

Abou Ben Adhem – James Henry Leigh Hunt

;

This poem comes to you from my brother, Rob, who probably didn’t write it himself, but guessed, rightly, that I might find it amusing.

The English Plural  according to….

It may still be a bit cold when the wind is up but there is no denying that England in May is breathtakingly beautiful. The hedges and fields are bursting with the joys of spring. The only trouble is that, when out on my bicycle, I have to keep stopping to take photo’s of the different wonderful spectacles of nature before me. Here are some shots taken a few days ago; I include the one of the new speed limit sign erected on our cycle track – I had to put my brakes on!

What are you to do when you’ve had a shower, just applied your “Summer Glow”, all over fake tan and moisturiser (to give the illusion of a slimmer you), and your husband calls you to breakfast? Do you throw on some underwear and chance the prospect of the “Summer glow” turning your white bra and panties a “natural” golden brown? Or do you ruin your favourite pink towel by wrapping it around your still shimmering, highly moisturised body? Or do you brazen it out?

So this morning I breezed into the kitchen in a somewhat nonchalant manner designed not to draw any attention to myself. As you might have guessed, I was quite as naked as the day I was born (just rather a lot bigger and heavier, but nice and glowing), and I sat down at the table in my usual chair opposite Chris. Without saying anything, he looked me over in an exaggerated fashion and smiled like the cat who got the cream.

“What’s up?” I challenged.

“I like it,” he said, then he laughed heartily. “You know, I thought you might say, ‘I haven’t had any objections so far’, and then I wondered about that sentence. Who are the people who would dare to object? And where would they go to register their objections?”

Incidentally, Chris confirmed that he’s in favour of a nice fake tan. And why wouldn’t he? I haven’t had any objections so far!