I’m rather depressed this morning so thought I would try to ‘write it out’

and you, dear reader, whoever you are, are the unfortunate recipient!

This has been a week of meeting people and catching up: lovely but I find too much stimulation of this kind very tiring.  Just the way I am made.  I need silence and a certain amount of isolation to function.  Anyway.

During the week I have been with people as they deal with a lot of problems: so why should I enter into the equation?  It is they who are at the sharp end.  But it weighs heavily on my heart so to see people hurting.

A dear neighbour has had to have a much loved dog put down, and her daughter and family are dealing with some big problems at the moment: she is grieving and very worried.  Two friends have husbands who have cancer, one has had an apparently successful operation (:)) but the other is bravely helping her husband along the final part of his journey.  I spent a day with a close friend who has just come out hospital and is still recuperating: he had some sad stories of the people in the bay with him.  A very young member of my close family has Asberger’s and as puberty advances is struggling with emotional problems and feelings of suicide – very worrying and frightening.  And a shock from the blue when another friend announced that she has just been diagnosed with breast cancer of a very aggressive kind which has spread under one arm.  I have just been helping her buy her tiny little dream cottage in an idyllic spot and after New Year husband and I went over and spent a day with her taking out modern fireplaces to reveal the C18 original behind.  She was so happy and is now reeling with shock.  So I have been giving what immediate support I can and calling up medics. I know to arrange for supportive conversations to help her decide what path of treatment to follow.

So this morning I feel heavy, exhausted and tearful, full of worries for a lot of people.

But I expect it is just that I am very tired or that the usual annual bout of SAD is beginning to hit.

Because there have been happy events too.

Another friend has just become a grandmother for the first time and is in seventh heaven.

A dear blog friend is recovering wonderfully well from a tricky operation.

And yet another friend has just been invited to Buckingham Palace to have tea with the Queen.

Not a Garden Party full of people, but a small, intimate group of people, inside the Palace, for Afternoon Tea.  As some of you will know, this year celebrates, on 7th February, the two-hundreth birthday of Charles Dickens .

There are National celebrations planned for the whole year and a major new exhibition in London.  My friend is the Secretary of the Dickens Fellowship here in Sheffield: the secretaries of all the Fellowships around the country, about 30, have been invited by the Queen to tea.  Not the figurehead Chairmen, but the guys who do all the work, the secretaries.  But that is very typical of the Queen and Prince Charles, who have their feet on the ground.  Also invited are the celebrated actors Miriam Margolyes

  and Simon Callow (not to be confused with Simon Cowell the X-factor judge),

both famous Dickens exponents and of course the magnificent biographer, Claire Tomalin.

(Incidentally, one of my Christmas presents!)

It will be a memorable event and is happening soon, in February.  Of course she will not be able to take photographs but there should be an official photographer and we will be agog to see any photos.  What a lovely way to repay years of hard work!

For those of you who are not Royalists, well neither she nor I are ardent Royalists but we much prefer the British system to any alternative on offer, where power and money become mixed up in the election of a Head of State. And we both really appreciate the sacrifice of personal life and the dedication to Duty which our Queen represents.  So this invitation is really wonderful to us, in fact I am not sure that I am not more excited than she is.  She has picked out a new dress but does not like the neckline or belt and is having it altered: my friend knows a good tailor and often buys old clothes at charity shops and then has them slightly altered.  My friend is not tall and often the proportion of clothes is wrong if you are short.

There are exciting events all year in honour of Dickens so for those who like his work it is going to be a feast of delights.

(Incidentally, this year also marks the bicentenary of Edward Lear, that great British institution:

an artist, illustrator, author and poet, renowned today primarily for his literary nonsense  in poetry and prose, and especially his limericks,  a form that he popularised.  He figured most prominently in the childhood of many generations and I fear that he is eclipsed this year by Dickens.  Of course one cannot compare them, they are too different, but he deserves recognition too.)

Today the sky is grey, both literally and metaphorically, and rain is here, as it was yesterday.  There is much work to do and not enough time to do it in, but I feel apathetic and tired.  I want some fun.  How selfish that sounds.  Don’t we all.

So I will go and play my flute which always makes me feel better and then take a blustery, wet walk.  And perhaps do some baking with the goose eggs, they really make the most wonderful cakes!

Now, I hope I have not depressed you too by letting all this out.  That is always my worry when admitting to life not being absolutely fine.  Perhaps sad is a better way of describing my mood today, rather than depressed.

So, how about a pact?  Everyone who can, make sure you have some fun today.  OK?

It would turn on and I could hear the gas running: then a blank page with lots of numbers came up with a request to boot up in safe mode.  No matter what I did, or the advice I followed on screen, we always came back to the same set of numbers.

I assumed I had been hit by a virus.  Just as I was  about to send electronic cards, e-letters etc. etc.  And my address book was inaccessible of course.  No matter, I had downloaded everything on to an external hard drive for safety. Pat on the back.  Good ol’ me.

Open up the external hard drive and there indeed was stuff from last year but not the most recent: no photos or videos of the goslings, no address book or notes of those to whom I had already sent Seasons Greetings.  I spent hours trying to negotiate my way round the hard drive in case things were hiding.

Then I had to give up and concentrate on the task immediately in hand, Christmas.  Come New Year’s Day I decided to call my local and very friendly computer chappie who lives just over the valley from us.  He is an ex-physics teacher and has been reasonably priced, fast and helpful in the past.  I did have the sense to wait until January 2nd though and then rang in the morning.  He came round two hours later and plugged it all in to see what was what.

“No virus”, he said, “your hard drive is dying”.

He managed to get past the numbers page with a gadget of his and tried giving my laptop directions.  And the laptop tried to comply, it really did.  Every task took it an age and you could feel the poor thing on its last gasp, trying to give its all with its final breath.  He said that it needed more support than he could give it here in the sitting-room so he would have to take it home where he could hook it up to other things to give it every TLC whilst it gave up the stored information.  By this time I had tears running down my face.  You could sense its pain and its struggle as it was trying so manfully to keep on going.  The thought of it going away to intensive care and then dying was just too much for me.

If you had told me that I could ever cry tears of anything other than frustration and wrath at a computer or laptop I would have laughed at you: but there I was crying for my old faithful.  It is eight years old and has been through so much with me.  All my power point lectures have been written and delivered on this machine: all my lovely, moving images illustrating the carbon cycle, geological processes, peat development, vegetation succession, cycles of decomposition, etc. etc.  have been put together on my laptop.  My first ventures into blogland and digital photography – this old laptop.

My adviser said that this had been a very good laptop in its day and was not bad now, even for its age.   He said that you could tell it was quality because it was made from actual metal, not plastic, and all the clasps etc.  on the carrying bag were metal too!

With which, I bade a fond farewell and sent it off to its final resting place.

Not a lot of time for repining since I was off to London the next day for a final round of testing, at least for a few months.

But on my return from London there was a phone call: all the info. had been retrieved and was now safely on my external hard drives.

And if I wanted, a new hard drive

All this, plus the work already done for £130.00.  I said yes.  And last week my laptop came home.  Not the fastest in the world but it does exactly what I want it to do and when I want it to.  It has loads of RAM apparently and now contains both the old drive and the new one just in case and all the old info. has been installed too so old faithful is just the same.  I am writing on it now:))

NB The man who helped me out will never charge more than the computer is worth and will monitor his time accordingly.  A couple of years ago he came and spent an afternoon with my old PC but only charged £20.00 since the computer was worth no more.  He also gave it a Spring Clean and upgraded various software items.  But he always treats me as if I were an errant 14 year old from his class who has not done her homework properly or has not been paying attention.  But a little humble pie is not much to eat when help is given so generously!

I wondered why so many people were taking photos.

Then I realised that it was built entirely from Lego.

Even the decorative coloured baubles were lego.

Back home in South Yorkshire I was exploring some local woodland just after Christmas, late on a wet afternoon when I came across these:

My flash was reflecting off the rain drops which gives an odd appearance.

I reckon each bauble must have been at least six inches diameter, if not more.

The name on the plaque reads “Stoneface”, a name I know locally as belonging to a stone carver.

I just love the serendipity of life that showed me the two very different takes on Christmas decorations within a week:)

NB  Research has revealed to me that Stoneface has just purchased this piece of woodland where he used to play as a lad.  He has placed this plaque and statue (called No Remorse) to indicate the entrance to the woods, although closed to the public.

He began life as a drystone-waller and used to carve faces on the ends of the walls he built: there are a couple up our lane. Apparently,  he had a larger statue under this tree originally, called Remorse, which he carved whilst meditating on the theme of a War Memorial.  However he was asked to remove it by the local council and replaced it by the smaller No Remorse as a two finger salute to the Council!

His website is http://www.stonefacesculpture.com/

Having been away so much in the Autumn I had to prepare for Christmas in only one week.  We did it, just!  Although I have a lot of Christmas cards still to send – maybe they can be New Year cards.  No, too late for that.  Oh well, I will just write to friends instead.

Still we had some help – Theo (aged 11) decorated our Christmas cake for us this year:

Quite a busy scene!

We still have one corner left but it has gone fast and was really delicious.

On Christmas Day morning we had one present that we would never have thought of.  This is what we found when we went to feed the goslings: Chi sitting very comfortably indeed.

Tai was up and about but not Chi, she would not budge.  She turned round and got more settled, pulling straw over herself;

Finally she was DEEP in a straw nest:

We left her in peace and returned a little later to find that she had laid  . . . . .   her very first egg.  On Christmas Day:))))

I was so proud!!!

When we went over to the family for lunch they asked, hopefully, if it had been a golden one.  Honestly, a Christmas Day egg should be enough for anyone.

A couple of times I have collapsed during these tests with anaphylactic shock.  These are frightening and exhausting episodes which usually take a lot of ‘getting over’.

During the first week of testing, I decided after a particularly bad period of ana. shock, that I needed a load of sugar.  Not good from  health point of view, but very good from a shock point of view.  So we crossed the road from our Travel Lodge and went into the nearby shopping mall: we were faced by a stall with seats which sold home made cakes and muffins, tea, coffee and chocolate.  I asked for a large hot chocolate and a date slice: I mentioned to the girl who served me that it had been a very bad day and I needed a large sugar fix.  She laughed and asked what had happened.  I gave her a brief explanation and she gave me my snack, saying she had put extra everything on, as she thought I looked as if I needed it.  So I staggered over to our table with extra hot chocolate, extra cream, extra sprinkles and extra marshmallows.

The second week I went back down to the hospital I paid one visit to the stall again – after yet another anaphylactic shock.  They asked if I needed extras again and smilingly put them on!

On my last visit down I suffered a terrible migraine and had to cancel the last day of tests: husband went into the mall to buy food for the next day’s breakfast (the Travel Lodge does not serve food) and passed by the muffin stall on the way.  He decided to call in to buy a date slice for me in case I could eat the next day.  The kind chap who ran the stall asked where I was, and on learning that I was ill in bed he gave my husband two date slices and said they were a present for me, and would accept no payment.  How kind was that!!

He and his family who run the stall are Indian: whether that makes any difference or not I would hesitate to say.  But his kindness and hospitality definitely suggest the hospitality rules of the East.

Anyway, we are surrounded by all ages and nationalities: people in the hospital come from all over Europe and Australia and we rub shoulders with people from India, Pakistan and Poland whenever we walk into town.  It makes for wonderful food stores!!

Well, the next day I could hardly move and it was time to head back to the North of England.  We had pre-paid and pre-booked saver tickets from King Cross station: this serves the Eastern side of the country but involves a change of station late in the evening.  These tickets were the cheapest we could buy in advance and were good value.  But they were timed for a train leaving in the evening and if I was going to make it home at all, I had to get back fast.

So we took the local train into London, with me clutching sick bags and barely holding myself together: then a taxi for the short ride to the next mainline station, St. Pancras International from which trains go directly to Sheffield with no changes.  St. Pancras is  next door to King Cross where our tickets were booked from.  We queued in the Ticket Office at St. Pancras to see whether we could trade in our tickets for that evening from King’s Cross for immediate travel tickets direct to Sheffield.  The lady behind the desk looked at our tickets and said we would have to go to the other station to sort this out and also pay a handling fee and an extra £70.00 each per ticket.  At this I broke into tears, feeling too ill to walk a step further let alone cope with more sorting out of arrangements.  I apologised for the tears and explained that I always cry when I feel so ill, “not to worry” I said.

The ticket lady leant across the desk to me and whispered: she asked if I minded telling her what was wrong with me.  I explained that my balance had gone, I could barely see for the pain and felt sick all the time.  She said “I am not putting up with this”, came round from behind the desk, took my arm, walked me (with husband) through the station, up the escalator, through the ticket barrier and put me onto the first train due out to Sheffield.

She plonked me in First Class, drew the curtain, saw the Train Manager and asked him to keep an eye on me, and then wrote out Two Free First Class Travel Warrants for us, for that train, to get straight to Sheffield.

She said it was her responsibility to get me home safely.  I said “Thank You but actually it is not.  It is the train company’s responsibility to run safe trains which go where and when they say, but no more”.  She then said that she would worry about me if she thought I was not going to get home safely.  As far as I was concerned she was an angel in Uniform that day.  I gave her a huge hug of thanks and she left.

(We took her name and wrote to her Line Manager to say how wonderful she had been.  She told us that the train drivers called her Miss Whiplash, but we did not use that name!!)  (Once back home I was in bed for four days with this migraine, a bad one, the result of the several weeks of tests.)

I don’t think I will ever forget her.  I called in today to see if she was on duty to give her a bunch of flowers but she wasn’t: I will not give up trying though and hope to catch her next week.

Anyway, I have just been down at the hospital again for another week of tests.  I came home today but yesterday evening husband and I visited the Muffin Stall again for a drink and date slice.  When the chap saw us he came over and asked how I was.  Then he refused to let me pay for mine, and said that in future all I ate and drank at his stall was going to be free.  I said, no, it would decrease his profits.  He said yes, he was going to do it.

What is it with all these people?  How kind.  Passing strangers, with no axe to grind, nothing in it for them, but going out of their way to show me extra kindness and care.  It may sound sentimental, but I call that love in action, and will always remember them with great thankfulness.  They have all given me ‘moments’.

Next week when I go back, I shall be taking special little presents from here for them for Christmas.  Nothing huge: I am not wanting to belittle their generosity by giving it straight back to them, but I want to show them what their actions have meant to me.  At a really frightening, sometimes lonely and difficult time, these passers-by have stopped to help.

And lastly, but not least, the young people who have stopped: the girls who offered to carry my luggage up a long flight of stairs when they were going down: the young man rushing to catch a train who asked if I was going to the tube and would I like him to carry my case down to the train: the others who have given up their seats for me:  the older man who picked up my bag and just walked alongside me: I have been blessed, and this is not a word I usually use, by the people I have come into contact with this autumn.

Whatever happens with the hospital tests, the comradeship of people has demonstrated something more important.  When the chips are down, it is solidarity and support which carries us through.

After many years of ill health and various responsibilities I decided something had to be done.  So I signed on for an Adult Education Class in the evenings: only lasting one term.  It was a course designed to equip one to identify various fungi, with the object of collecting and eating them if so desired.  I assumed it would be other mature ladies like myself, in my forties with a gentle interest in Natural History.

(Husband is anxious that none of you actually think that Michael Palin in drag is me!!)

The back story is that my mother was partly Scandinavian and would unhesitatingly go out into the woods and fields collecting all kinds of odd looking fungi: strange colours and shapes.  She then made them into omelettes, soups, or just gently fried them in butter  to eat on toast.  To my shame I never quite believed that she knew what she was doing.  I had the English fear of eating fungi from the wild.  So, despite her urging, I watched her eat the goodies waiting with a mixture of anxiety and excitement to see what would happen to her.  And of course nothing ever did.  She just had fun and a good meal. So, eventually, I decided that it was time for me to take the plunge and continue the family tradition, despite my trepidation.

Well, I walked into the class room at the local University at seven o’clock one Autumn evening and looked around.  There were very few women there at all, much to my astonishment.  In fact the room was full of men, some rather hairy prophet-looking types, but mostly presentable young men, full-time students in the main.  A very pleasant surprise.  “This is a bit of ‘all-right’ “,  I thought.

Then a man in his thirties crawled into the room on hands and knees.  He crawled down the aisle between the tables, and under a chair, to then pull himself up and sit on it.   Odder and odder. The Lecturer came in with wild hair and a long very wild beard, a mixture of Beethoven and Moses.  I have to admit to feeling very out of my comfort zone but excited and full of anticipation.  This was not what I had expected.  What had I got myself into?

What followed was a serious lecture full of chemistry and botany: I took reams of notes and left two hours later with a befuddled mind full of Latin names and a general feeling of surreality about the whole evening.

The Lecturer had made arrangements for us all to meet the following Saturday for a field trip to begin to identity fungi in the field.  The weather was propitious, warm and damp, and he said there were many good examples to be seen.  We were to take collecting baskets or paper bags, nothing plastic or the samples would sweat.

So, at the correct time and place we met.  A local area surrounded by moorland, but low down beside a lake and a small National Trust Tea room.  These Lecturers always have a thought to our comfort!  We began by looking at various tree fungi, both those growing on living and dead tissue.  Lots of tough bracket and some delicate matchstick fungi. Then we walked across some short springy turf, closely cropped by sheep, in full sun, where we found some glorious parrot fungi, all bright colours and shiny surfaces.  Reds, oranges, luminous yellows and greens.  After a short stop for coffee we moved up onto higher ground with rougher grass.  As is my wont I wandered off slightly apart from the group searching for specimens.  I found a very small fungus on a long, thin, slightly wavy stem: I took it back to the Lecturer and asked for an identification.  There was some hesitation on his part and a slight feeling of excitement rose from the group.  I seemed to be the only one who did not share some secret.

“Well, I am not quite sure how to put this”, said our leader.  “But this is ….. ” (I cannot now remember the Latin name), ” often known as a’ Magic Mushroom’ because of its hallucinatory properties”.  He turned to someone else and a press of young men surrounded me.  The first one to grab my attention asked whether he could help me by carrying my collecting basket.  Rather flattered but surprised, it was a very small, very light basket, I agreed.  As we walked on he queried, just as a matter of interest, the whereabouts of the mushroom I had picked.  “Had there been any others?”  “If so, did I want them?”

Rather amazed (I was very naive), I replied that I did not want them, and then took him to where I had found the patch.  He proceeded to pick them and during the rest of the trip he explained to me how to process them and how many to use to get certain effects.  He suggested that I make a pot of tea with them if I was ever interested in trying them out and told me how many to use to make the carpet move, or to make the wall paper talk to me.  A very pleasant fresh-faced student quite openly teaching me about hallucinatory drug use.

There and then I decided that if this was what Higher Education was all about, I was going to continue.  Not at all the rather stuffy, ivory tower world I had imagined and feared.

I never looked back.  But that is another story.

As you may remember two young girls, Ellie and Emma, have been coming to us for a few months now, to help look after and ride the ponies.

This last week they suggested that we clean out the stables before the winter:

so they arrived at 10.30 am on Sunday morning and finally left at 5.45 pm.  Of course I spent the day working alongside them.  Perhaps this was a step too far at the moment:(

I swept the ceiling boards and beams to get rid of all the ancient hay dust hanging there from the hay stored above: then there were the cobwebs to remove and the spiders to rescue.  Since we have lots of cows and therefore cowflies around this area, the spiders are essential in keeping the stables comfortable for the ponies, apart from their own intrinsic worth.  We found two hibernating Tortoiseshell butterflies as well and carefully worked round them so as not to disturb. The girls followed me round sweeping the walls: then they washed the windows, the walls and scrubbed the bucket holders while I scrubbed the rubber mats on the floors.  While the girls washed the large broom cupboard I scrubbed the doors and then all buckets and water holders, and wet wiped everything that would be going back into the stable.  The only things that there was not time for was to brush out and clean the last two mangers, although I did the third.

The building is airing today and this afternoon husband and I will put things back tidily so all will be spick and span for the winter. There are the feed bins for horses, geese, badgers and wild birds which live in the third, vacant stall: plus feed bowls, garlic powder, supplements, tack boxes, bedding bales, scissors (for cutting the hay bale string), knives (for chopping apples and carrots), brushes for cleaning water buckets and food skips, etc. etc.  All the bits and pieces of stable work.

While we were working the girls chatted, of course.  It turns out that neither has had a stable to look after before, hence their excitement.  They asked me if they could ask their parents for name plaques for Christmas  for the ponies and then hang one in each pony’s stall: then they rather diffidently asked if they would be allowed to bring in an Advent Calendar for each horse for Christmas.  They have been looking up special recipes on the net to cook treats to put in the advent calendar pockets:)  The younger one who is just thirteen was literally jumping up and down with excitement during this conversation: then followed suggestions for decorating the tack room for Christmas and putting tinsel on the horses’ bridles when riding.

I explained what we do on Christmas Eve, which is to always bring the ponies in, give them a really good thick bed and a special warm mash to eat with fruit and vegetables in.  I said how lovely it was to stand in the dark in the stable on that night, looking out at the stars, listening in the quiet to the sound of contented beasts eating, while the warmth of the horses and their food permeated the stable, with smells of fresh hay and resin from the wood chip bedding percolating around.  Somehow, it seems the right place to be.

(Incidentally, the other animals are not left out, but more nearer the time.)

Recently I gathered several facts about the girls.  Both have suffered from bullying at school and the younger one has a problem withstanding peer group pressure to dress inappropriately and spend her time shopping.  Her mother told me that she was so pleased that she has this interest in horses and now this opportunity, to help her stay strong and focussed on something she loves.

The older one tried to kill herself a year ago because of the bullying and has been removed from her grandparents’ farm because of family disputes: this means that she has had to sell her own horse that she kept there (NB it was in the barn with the cows and did not have a stable of its own).  She always wanted to work with animals and hoped eventually to be able to run the farm.  That seems unlikely now. Her mother also thanked us and said how pleased they were that she has this retreat to come to, where there are no family problems and she can spend time with the horses. She has left the school now and is retaking her exams at a local college where she is much happier.

We need no thanks, it is lovely for the ponies to have this attention and more care than we could give them at the moment, and we love having the youngsters around, with their energy and enthusiasm.

Life is so strange.  Sometimes there is this happy serendipity, yet on other occasions such tragic occurrences.  I can’t make head or tail of it, just try to do my bit. But I am thrilled if we can make a difference just by living here and sharing it around a little.  I certainly would never have thought that these two horse-mad girls needed our ponies and this place so much.  We are very privileged to be able, unwittingly, to help.

There was also mad talk of Easter time, threading yellow ribbons in the horses’ manes, and putting little nests with chicks on the numnahs.  Goodness only knows what be suggested next!

So at the moment I am sitting in bed, aching all over, with laptop on knees, writing this post:) I go back down to the hospital in London tomorrow so really must rest today.

I wish I had had time to get my camera repaired because it would have been fun to add photos to this story.  But with being in London for the most part of each week at the moment, there has been no opportunity.  But I hope you get the picture.

I saw one of these videos on a facebook page and thought I would post several of these, as, fresh from spending some time with kind people trying to help me and getting such a greeting from the animals waiting at home, I was feeling a little emotional:)

Also, I find these, and similar stories, a good reminder of how we all on this planet are struggling to keep going one way or another.  A helping hand along the way does wonders!

There are two endings to the dog rescue of the other dog in Chile: in one we are told all was OK, in the other we have a different ending.  Since I have no idea which could be the truth, I have posted the more cheerful ending.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL98jIAk_3o]

I think any words of mine are fairly superfluous:)

I took a few photos of them from my prone position, a new perspective.

Tai tried to climb up on my stomach for a sit down but it was a step too high for him to reach!

“What’s that you’ve got there?”

“No good, its too high.  Lets both go for the pocket.”

“Nothing in there.  Let’s look at the head end”

“Hey, What have you got there?  Can I have a go?”

They then moved to my hair and sat and preened it for a while, just to tidy it up you know!  But I could not take any pictures of that, obviously.

Haven’t they become grown up.  But they still follow me everywhere, and chat madly when I come out of doors having been inside for a while.

Now, that is what I LIKE to do:)

After hearing all the medical opinions I have gone back to basics.  Although few medics. seem to prescribe dietary self-medication I find it works wonders with the animals, so have been trying it on myself.

Until all the allergy testing is complete I have taken myself off all dairy, wheat, most grains in fact, red meat, fats and sugar in all forms except for the sourer fruits.  I am feeling clearer headed (might just be hunger!), have more energy and no aches and pains.  But I am not a good or imaginative cook and am getting so bored already.  I am eating lots of oily fish, a few nuts, all veg. and taking extra supplements and omega 3 oil.  I will do whatever it takes for health, but oh for a dedicated, skilful cook to help me out.

Not only am I bored with the meals, I am bored with myself.  All this research, thinking, considering, and now writing, about me, is not what I find interesting.  Now if I were doing this for someone else it would be a project and I would enjoy it. Clearly this will not be the whole solution, but with some HRT (only a quarter of a patch at a time) this regime to support the immune system and the mitochondria, and whatever the medics finally suggest, perhaps there might be a way through. At least it gives me something to do and puts me in the driving seat, gives me some power. Personally I like to forget about myself and just dive into life.

Being me though, as soon as I felt at all better I threw myself with gusto into activities that I wanted to do since I had been so frustrated before.  Like spending four or five hours shifting prunings and weeds and having a bonfire on a windy day, when there was a chance that it might burn.  All through I held onto the stout, metal rake so that, given my current problems,  I did not inadvertently fall into the fire!!   It was a large bonfire, lots to burn, begun at three in the afternoon and continuing until eight in the evening, long after dark.

Firstly I moved everything to one side in case any animals had decided already to take up residence for winter.  As I did so lots of flying insects like ladybirds flew off into the warm afternoon and spiders scuttled for other shelter.  Then I burnt the material in fairly small ‘parcels’ so that if it got out of control the buckets of water standing by could safely dowse the flames.  I burnt on through the late afternoon with a strong wind blowing the smoke and flames in all directions: much to my surprise, the cows never turned a hair as they walked past coming in for milking.  Then on and on into early evening.  At which point husband took over for an hour or so and then I came back to it to finish off for the last couple of hours.

By then it was quite  dark and the sight of sparks blowing madly in the wind in the dark evening was wonderful.  I stood alone in the inky night and wind at the top of the hill as the flames spread, rushed, retreated, darted madly in all directions, and waved around, and sparks scattered, spewed, fired off like fireworks, chased each other along the damp ground and lodged like glowing fireflies in odd corners, where they settled and sparkled for a few seconds before dying away.  There was rain in the wind, just enough to make the grass and my hair very damp, but not really wet. The wind blew, the clouds rushed over, everything was on the move as the year turned.  It felt primeval, prehistoric, something that belonged to all ages and sorts  of men and a link with the elements – empowering, eternal.  I wanted to dance round the fire, to join in with something, but I did not know what.  So I worked, prodding, pushing, gathering and shaking each armful to give any other insects and snails a chance to escape before the fiery inferno devoured the offering.  Face burning, wind at my back, light rain scudding,  indigo night, neon-scarlet sparks, orange, yellow and brilliant red flames, light and dark twirling together.  It was wonderful.  It gave me lots of ‘moments’.

Now, that’s more like it!!!

So today is a rest day since I am exhausted. But at least I managed two half days this week of doing what I wanted before this.  I’m working hard on squeezing the best from the days. Like cooked fruit in a jelly bag, I am squeezing and squeezing.  Not a drop is going to be wasted if I can help it.