Springtime Inspiration and a new study

Back again blogging.  I seem to have been away for a long, long time.  Having spent the last few years doing a major maintenance makeover and building on an extension, life got in the way of my blogging.  Now I have a lovely study in which to sit and ponder and write.

My study was my Grandmother's kitchen, my Mother's Living/Family room.  When she passed away six years ago it became rather neglected.  It lost a lot of its furniture to woodworm when we moved in.  It was used as a storage room during the building work.   It became cold and damp and lonely.  Indeed OH used it on occasion to store his cans of Guinness...in a July heatwave.  The stout remained ice cold.

Today it is bright, warm with a new retro traditional style radiator that emits something called heat.  A new laminate vintage oak floor.  I have polished up my pine desk, added pictures and prints and photographs of family - generations of family. It is the room where every nook and cranny is proudly showing off my treasures.  Ornaments, mementos, my Father's books, my books and two very precious books belonging to my paternal Grandfather.  There is a smell of beeswax and roses permeating the room.  In the fireplace a cosy log fire is burning and the old smell of peat is gone.  Occasionally I get a whiff of it.  It is a smell I hate.  Mum had 3 litres of liquid removed from her lungs before she died and the smell of peat was strong.  Nowadays cherry wood, ash and oak blaze prettily.

Her terracotta carpet has been consigned to a skip.  In the three years that this room served as a storage place for furniture, Guinness cans, carpets and rugs, and oddly shaped boxes, the mice did a fandango on the carpet and started a chewing pool in the centre of it.  I'm sure I heard them singing at midnight!  Fortunately the cowhide rug I gave Mum for Christmas in 1989 remains intact.   It now graces the floor in front of the hearth.  A cosy Queen Anne chair takes its place with pride beside the window and it is here I now grab an hour or two to sit and read, crochet, jot down ideas for stories, and birdwatch.  When life gets too busy I put the Winnie the Pooh sign up on a pin beside the study door - it politely says "Do NOT disturb".

That, of course, is asking for too much.  OH barges in just as the Muse strokes the ideas pad in my brain.  "Have you seen my glasses", "Where's the manual for that bark shredder", "Did you feed the cat".  I smile sweetly and plot my revenge.  I shall await the next Hurling match when his favourite counties are playing; as he sits shouting at the tv, bouncing up and down on the settee, I shall sweetly ask him to come and change a light bulb for me.  Won't work though.  He knows I am quite capable of doing it myself.  ED will tap on the door and without waiting for a "come in" will bounce in to tell me of the days events.  Yes, I am always interested, but where did my "ME" time go?  Did anybody see it slip out the door and run down the hall?  Do tell it to come back if you see it.  YD will tap gently, await the "come in" x 5 and then beg pardon for disturbing me.  At least her visits here are rare.  She has set herself up very nicely in the new extension and knows the value of a little "me" time.  We shall meet up in the kitchen over a cuppa in the not too distant future.

Mme Pounce will sit sunning herself on the window after her breakfast.  She will thump the window just to remind me that she reigns supreme and can mess up any newly cleaned window at any time she wants.  She will be twelve in May.  I am considering taking a contract out on the nasty, bad tempered, foul mouthed beast.  She called me a waaaaaaiow yesterday.  With the look it accompanied, I don't think it boded well for me and she's probably already got a contract out on me.

We have a river of daffodils wending their way down the paddock; there are thousands of crocuses out, or should that be crocusii? and the garden is text book pretty.  It has taken six years to bring it back to life after Mum passed on.  Snow, frost and gales have taken their toll.  It is not the garden she left but I know she would love it.  We're off to Kerry on Saturday and I can't wait.  We, OH and I, celebrate 37 years together on Saturday and I'll hit the 60 mark during the week.  Growing older somewhat gracefully in spite of the arthritis, certainly growing older positively positive.  

Here's a hope that time will permit a return to my beloved blogging, and time to catch up on all those blogs I love but haven't had time to always add a comment to.

Spring!
Inspiring!

This fine chap arrived on one of our bird feeders during the summer and was captured on camera by YD.  Where he came from or where he went to, we never knew nor found out, but he stayed around for about two hours and then vanished as suddenly as he came.

A picture of our late lamented Check taken early in the summer.  She had been a big feature in the garden and of this blog for the past five years; always somewhere in the garden, sitting looking in, waiting patiently for her evening meal, as the summer wore on it became apparent she had cataracts and couldn't see much further than the end of her nose.  She became increasingly more tame and would wait at the foot of the steps for YD to throw out chicken carcases, leftover stale bread and her supreme favourite Mme Pounce's chewy sticks!  Check was addicted to Whiskas.

Dash, The Pretender, who succeeded to the position of Fox Favourite after poor Check was killed by a car, blinded by her cataracts, she never stood a chance.  Dash was "in moult" here, now he is a very fine fellow indeed.  The ladies are wowed by him, the neighbours love him for his agility as he hops on and consumes all manner of slugs etc., in the wet grass of a night.  The slug population has diminished, flowers and veg are safer and the  handsome chappie claims his reward of...Whiskas chewy bits and leftover food. Well, one good turn deserves another.

It was a bumper year for apples this year, even Mum's old apple tree which was put on the condemned list last year.  It lives to provide another crop again next year.  I made pots of apple and cinnamon, and a certain OH is still licking his lips.

Linnets were plentiful this summer and they made the lovely long summer evenings, during the heatwave, even more pleasureable.

Coming into land!

And so, as we look forward to Christmas in a few weeks, it's nice to look back on summer days and visitors to the garden.

All photographs in this blog are exclusively owned and declared to be the copyright property of KMSED 2013. (c)

Opening a new blog site

I have opened a new blog.  It's called

The Chat From Winnie's Corner

and I hope that you will come and join me there.  The View is reverting to what it originally was, a blog on wild life and country living.  Indeed that is where I first started off blogging on the old Country Living site.  The history of the move to the Purple Coo is well known and it gave me the courage to start blogging.

I remember very well, that first blog in December 2006...ok., maybe it was 2005, and I have made some lovely friends down through the years.  I wrote about what I knew best, what was going on outside my kitchen window.  Birds, more birds and animal life.  

Today, a different house, different birds and a different lifestyle.  My daughters have flown the nest...and thanks to the Recession...have returned.  OH has retired and I am semi retired.  The big 60 looms on the horizon come March.  That said, I am embracing the fact with relish.  A new decade, a new venture to follow.

So, I will still turn up here on The View...with tales of old and life as it was in Ireland, birds and squirrels that frequent my garden and the adventures of Mme Pounce.  The Chat from Winnie's corner will take in everyday life, a pinch of politics, a dash of comment on what the papers say; what's going on in Downton...and whatever takes your fancy as we say here.

thechatfromwinniescorner.blogspot.ie
thechatfromwinniescorner.blogspot.ie

Third generation Blue Tits

Third Generation Blue Tits

There is a new generation of birds flitting around the garden, and it proves a point I once read in a magazine on birds.  When winters are inclement, birds tend to produce more than one brood.  Usually two but a friend in Sligo who has a keen eye for bird life tells me sometimes a third brood is not unusual.  Well, we have had two generations of Robin this summer and three of blue tits; the last crew are still in moult and are tiny. 

By comparison to the spring brood, the Early Autumn gang are just that, gangsterish.  One little chap has earned the name Al Capbeak for the attacks he makes on any other visitor to his particular peanut feeder.  Fat balls are a big issue with him.   These days his stressed and worn out parents put beak under wing and you can almost hear an avian “Oh dear, why did I lay that third clutch of eggs?

Today the temperature is allegedly warmer than it is in France; balmy with a marvellous breeze fluttering the leaves of the sycamore tree. Wasps gather on the sycamore leaves to indulge in a sugar binge; they then fly tipsily across the garden and [gleeful smirk here] some become ensnared in the huge webs along the dry stone walls.

I hate wasps.  Hate with a capital H.  Their sting knocks me out cold.  I carry the needful with me everywhere to cope with their viciousness.  I read, recently, in Michael Viney’s column in the Saturday Irish Times that wasps are in short supply this year.  Oh dear! Yipee! Hooray!, Yahoo! Yippee Kiyay! Aw gee shucks!  I am soooooo worried, not! Not really.  As John Wayne might have said, “The only good wasp is a dead wasp”.  It’s the bees that worry me.

I have been busy putting out bee nests for them; Ladybirds are plentiful this year and they are being accommodated as well.  I was a wonderful summer with the garden filled with lacewings, dragonflies, of every hue, demoiselles, and grass hoppers chirping of an evening.  Warm summer evenings spent sitting out until dark watching the Pipistrelle bats fly and on one memorable Saturday night in early August, at Midnight, the lonely cry of the Curlew broke the night’s stillness. 

What my parents termed “Hunter’s Moon” is lighting up the garden these nights; its light makes a stroll in the garden before bed enchanting.  Foxes dance in its light in the garden by the Spirea, and our hedgehog trundles out across the lawn, intent upon his own business.

OH and I spent Thursday dismantling an old shed which was leaning at an angle of 85 degrees.  A former calving shed built by my Grandfather, it was my Uncles pigeon shed in his teen years, and my Father re-vamped it into a luxury dog house, complete with a mattress off an old divan bed, old blankets and insulated it with layers of cardboard.  There were winter nights in my childhood when Jeff the collies bed was warmer than mine.  Jeff passed away to the great bone pile in the sky in ’72 and the shed became a junk hold.  Ivy covered it until everyone forgot there was a shed there, except me, and on Thursday it gave up its treasures.

            One well rusted BSA bike circa 1960 which still had fully functioning brakes,

            the owner passed away two years ago having forgotten about it.

            8 boxes of jam jars

            A box of brown and cream cups

            Fourteen million spiders webs, two robins nests and four doors housing

            an entire continent of woodworm.

Also, in the midst all of this, we found my old cot.  Already twenty years old when I was born, it still retained its blue paint and a painted pig with Victorian jacket and hat and handkerchief tied to a stick over his shoulder.  Sound as could be and not more than forty wood worm holes.  OH treated them and my old play pen with something to deal with the wood worm and they now have a new home up on the walls of the old cow house.

Come the spring and a new glass house will stand there.  Beside it, hopefully, will be a new flower bed with Foxgloves, Monkshood, Poppies, Lupins, Michaelmas daisies, Crocosmia and Dahlias.  On the bank above it I hope to have masses of assorted daffodils, waving in the breeze that permanently enfolds our garden.

Have to say, it’s nice to be back!

It has been, to my amazement, nearly two years since I last blogged; well, in truth I did blog earlier this year, but my old computer, being of a fractious nature, refused to load the blogs.

For the first time in a very long time, this has been a summer of content.  All building work is finished, the garden looks like a garden. We even have a couple of ponds around the place.  To my husband’s delight the wan looking pond lily he received as a present two years ago has flourished.  We produced a family of frogs.  Not actually in the ponds, but in an old trough that had been cast aside and had filled with rain water and algae all on its own.  There is no accounting for frog tastes!

The heat wave brought mixed blessings, needless to remark.  On the one hand, flower seeds that had lain dormant because of the cold summers and bitter winters, suddenly discovered life.  It was interesting to discover plants that had shrivelled into themselves suddenly bursting with vibrant life.  The latest find is the Michaelmas daisy I planted that first summer of ’08.  A friend recently told me that I sound like something from the early part of the 20^th century with my “…back in ’08, and then again in ‘11”. Apparently, all I have to do is start with “I remember” and I have gained my free pass to Downton days.  Well, with 60 on next year’s horizon, I’ll allow myself that trip. The downside was the fear of gorse fires.  One raged on a nearby hill for nearly a month.  Reigniting itself because the grass underneath was tinder dry and winds whipped up a flame.

In five years we have lost our Greenfinches to that virus; gained a semi-tame fox who sits waiting patiently on the rocks above the ponds, secure in the knowledge that, despite his cataract, he will smell his way down to the food YD leaves out for him.  My neighbour, who keeps six hens, has lost four of them recently.  I was subjected to an angry tirade on the malpractice [sic] of feeding “…those dam vermin…” until he realised that the culprit was a very sleek and crafty eyed chap living under a thicket of gorse on his own land!

While out in the garden I have learned to tell the time by the arrival of the Long Tailed Tits at one of YD’s numerous feeding stations.  Seven a.m., eleven a.m., four p.m., and seven p.m., each day.  As the summer progresses the times change and by October four o’clock in the afternoon heralds the last arrival.

Mme. Pounce is now nine; geriatric? Don’t believe it.  She hobbles around the house mewing piteously to be let in.  Upon spotting a potential bird kill she sprints across the lawn with a speed that would allow her membership of the cheetah family. This year’s collection of baby rats down behind the cow house were exterminated with calm, lethal efficiency.  Mrs Rat did her best to replenish the stock, but fell victim to our Pounce.  She’s working on field mice and voles at the moment.  I hear a certain well-known brand of cat food is suffering from financial loss due to Madam’s self-harvested diet.

The battle for Fort Squirrel, The Pines, has been lost by our reds.  The grey has taken over.  A cute little chap has discovered a peanut holder on the cherry tree that he can raid with ease.  I miss the dainty red who used to call each September to November on a daily basis.  Mr Flashtail, although a handsome member of the grey breed, has the manners of a slob when grabbing peanuts from the holder.  Dainty is not a word in his vocabulary.

The autumn colours are early this year.  The garden is looking splendid, and as I look out the window in the room I earmarked as a study five years ago, there is a mellow harmony among the colours.  The study is almost there, a new floor will be laid in spring, and a log burning stove will be installed to keep the perma frost out of this room.  Beyond that, it is cosy, inviting with a healthy fire crackling in the fireplace and that’s in a July heat wave.

Gee! But it’s great to be back blogging!

The Great Snowball fight

The Great Snowball War of '63

When we were nine, my pals and I, we took part in the last Great Snowball War.  It had snowed all week end, from Friday until Monday morning.  Great was our joy when we awoke on Saturday morning to be told by our Mothers that there would be no school today.  Life couldn't get much better than this.

Monday morning dawned bitterly cold, and with deep snow drifts in the field next to our place.  Every child in the village headed for this field, because of its layout, it usually provided great drifts of snow for us to make huge snowmen.  We were experts in those days.  Marty Moore  provided a ladder, which  wound up getting lost in the snow and was retrieved when the thaw came, but not before his Dad had invested in another ladder.

We arrived on site, and before long, with much energy applied, we were up to the shoulders of our snowman.  Katie Riordan and Violet Dunne had provided the hat and scarf respectively.  Not that permission had been sought.  Most of us were nine that year, and it was a wonderful age to be.  Next year you would have two digits in your age, but this was your last year being a single digit age, and in those days that seemed to be powerfully important to us.

Work was going on apace when the Teddy Boys from the next village arrived.  Timsy Moore, Bartle Rourke, Mickey Finnerty and Toby Wade.  Shortly after that, their older brothers arrived.  Competition in snowman making was fierce between the two villages and the older lads were not above sabotage to make sure that their village had the best snowman.  There were no prizes for snowmen, just kudos.

Timsy Moore struck the first blow.  A well placed snowball caused Larry Burke to totter on the ladder as he attempted to place the snowmans head on snowy shoulders.  Larry hit the ground heavily taking the snowman with him.  That was it!  There was no other recourse to us.  War was declared.

It has always amazed me, in hindesight, how we all knew our jobs.  The girls made the snowballs and lined them up for the lads to throw.  We were quick and our frozen agile fingers [surely a contradiction in terms] quickly made the pile of snowballs grow and grow.

Larry, dignity assaulted, was the best shot and it wasn't long before the air was alive with snowballs flying backwards and forwards between "Them" and "Us".  They made a soft "thuft" sound as they found a target.  Things were very satisfactorily going our way until Thady Hanrahan decided to add a stone to his snowball.  Violet Dunne was the recipent of this devious weapon and she was lucky not to have lost an eye.  Violet left the battlefield howling loudly for her Mammy.  In those days we usually took our injuries silently and fought on. 

Big Teasy Dunne came up the lane like a battleship in full attack mode.  The Hood had nothing on her.  Wielding a mop about her, she laid into the other village lads.  Timsy Moore got it across the shoulders; Mickey Finnerty ran down the lane holding his nether regions and howling like a gibbon.  That he could walk straight after that whack and was not damaged for life was a miracle.

Hearing Teasy roar, other parents began to arrive on the scene, and it wasn't long before the war was over.  The other village lot ran off down the hill, and we roared and hooted with laughter at them. 

We slowly wended our way home, warm, damp and exhausted but Oh! it was a great war that war of '63.

There was never such a war since.  Snow didn't fall that heavily 'til last year.  By that time we had all reached our 50's and 60's and dignity and all that you know...

The field is now a housing estate, and todays little darlings sit snugly indoors in snow as they play with their playstations.  Oh what they miss out on.

Timsy Moore and I stood at the end of the lane last year and reminisced in the snow about the Great Snow War of '63.  He now lives in Dubai, and has done so for about ten years.  Last year he came home for six weeks...and a lifetime of memories.

Of village life...

Reading Maddie Griggs wonderful blog set me thinking about village life and the little things that go to make village life what it is.  The pub, [well this is Ireland], the village shop, the people, and the post office, if we had one that, and Dan.

I grew up in this village, as did my Mother, her Father, his Father before that and I suppose you could say "we belong".  The family have been here since after the Famine which wiped out that branch of the family and resulted in my GGF leaving Sligo on the west coast and taking to the road to emigrate to England, at the age of 13 in order to survive.  He got as far as the Wicklow/Wexford border, having been taken on by a cattle drover in Dublin, as he sought to earn the fare.  He took work, as we say here, with the farmer whose cattle he had brought down from the markets in Dublin, and five years later he eloped with that mans daughter.  Suffice it to say that he got away with the elopement insofar as her brother maintained family ties as did her Mother, his Father in law always greeted him, and the twelve children they went on to have, with a shotgun loosely held in his arm.  Time and space were good healers it appears.

In the heel of the hunt the descendents became dairy farmers here, and four years ago I became the next in line to take over the old homestead.  Almost before there was a village, our family have been here.  In my childhood we boasted two shops, one of which sold newspapers and I still lick my lips when I remember being told by Mrs Margaret, as she was called, that I could put my hand into the biscuit tin of my choice and pick a biscuit.  As a member of an old village family she allowed certain privileges to my peers and I.  Mikado was a major favourite with me, my friend always went for the gingery ones, and her brothers always went for the Rich Tea.  We never could figure out why they didn't go for the sticky ones until Raymond admitted you could get two RT's and even three with a bit of luck whereas the Mikado's were big and Mrs Margaret would spot you had more than one if you chanced your luck.

Miss Imelda ran the local post office and one of my memories entailed being sent down with 10/= to her and being told to invest 5/= and I could spend the other 5/=.  The large, wide, brass railed counter was approximately an inch over my head, and I stood up on the rail, shot the post office book across the counter to Miss Imelda  squeaking at her that "Mum says five in and five out and please Miss can I have it in change so I can buy a book".  I was 7 years old at the time.  She looked across her pince nez at me and told me I was a good girl and handed me back 2/6 and told me one book would do me just as good and was it Enid Blyton.  Taking her for a mind reader, I dumbly nodded and clutching the 2/6 in a probably grubby paw, I stalked out the door and roared my head off all the way home.

Our other pride and joy in the village was the other shop where meat and veg was available and for many years there was stiff competiton between Mrs Margaret and Mrs Foley for custom.  The newspapers were the deciding factor.  The pub was owned by a man from Leitrim, 6'5" if he was an inch and we were all terrified of him; he owned a gladstone bag and we were never quite sure if the local men seen going into the pub after work weren't going in for medicinal reasons.  But, sure isn't Guinness good for you anyway?

Maggie Twohig was an elderly widow who lived in what would, by todays standards, be called a slum.  Indeed we were always, my friends and I, very industrious in our manner of walking past her house on the opposite side of the road.  Maggie always had her hall door open and anything could come flying out.  Broom handles, chamber pots [with contents], her mangy dog Bosco, or Maggie herself to spit her chewing tobacco out into the gutter.

Legend has it that my Great Grandmother was passing the door when Maggie was a young "gel" of innocent years.  Appearing with a pot in her hand, filled to the brim with cabbage, Maggie hailed GGM and asked her what was wrong with the cabbage she was cooking for her Daddy.  Her Mammy was in bed producing infant #2,345 or thereabouts, and she was chef for the day.  Taking a small bit, GGM spat it out and said "It tastes appalling".  Taking a bite herself, Maggie then announced in an astonished voice, "So that's where me chewing tobacco went to".  GGM continued on her way to the post office to regale her close friend and confidante Miss Imelda of the latest of the Twohig's tales. Indeed there were many to tell.  Maggie never married and had six strapping sons of her own and two of them were even able to share the same father.

Maggie was 86 when I was a child and had cleaned her act up.  She lived with her Granddaughter and had a bath every month without an R in it, cut her tobacco chewing back to Sundays and never in Lent and was rarely invited to assist Grainne with cooking the dinner.  She outlived her own sons and Grainne was generally considered worthy of nomination to sainthood for putting up with her.

The Bull Maguire was another character of my childhood, of whom legends aplenty abounded.  His proud boast that he could drink any man under the table was only challenged, and beaten, when Larry Pullen [5'4 and ferret like in feature] punched him on the nose, knocked him out and, when he came to, had six pint glasses in front of him.  This lead to The Bull staggering out of the pub, never to return.  He took the pledge in '36 much to the publican of the day's dismay.  He was that mans best customer.  Larry the Pullet Pullen never drank the six pints.  It was a stunt thought up to try to get the Bull to curtail his alcoholic intake.  The Pullet was the Bulls brother in law.  It worked better beyond their wildest dreams. I remember the Bull standing at the village pump, handing out leaflets for the Sodality and Temperance group and he was well in his 70's at that stage.

Today we have the same pub that was always there.  However, it is now decorated in contemporary fashion by people who were considered to be blow-ins.  The locals drink in the next village and each week end a designat