Strong winds in The View from the Terrace

There was a heck of a storm last night. My little pot plants were all over the garden and, when listening to the gusts in the night, I was feeling rather relieved that the boys finally cut down that tree, though, I suppose, compared to the storm on the other side of the Atlantic, it was just a light breeze. This was the first of the late summer/autumn storms and it reminds me that summer is coming to an end. The leaves are already beginning to turn and I am feeling a little sad.

We often go away this week. It is the first week of the school term, so it is cheaper, but the weather is usually still quite good. I remember one year, 29 years ago when we were in Cornwall and decided to go on a boat trip to Looe Island. This is an island just off the coast of Looe. At that time, it was owned by 2 ladies, then in their 70s, who lived there alone. It was very windy on the day of that trip and when we were on the boat just leaving the estuary of the Looe River someone mentioned that it was the tail end of Hurricane Gilbert. I remember thinking ‘and here are we with our 3 children out in a small boat on the sea!’ Of course it was safe or the boats wouldn’t have been running. Tony was not quite 4 months at the time, I still had him in a baby sling. The ladies told us that he was the youngest baby ever to visit the island. Those 2 ladies were amazing. They lived there alone and they told us how sometimes in the winter they were cut off for days because of the weather.

We are not going away this year. We did have plans to visit Italy but with one thing and another, mainly my various health issues, we postponed and hope to go next year. Maybe that is why I am feeling a little down. We did go away for a few days in June but that wasn’t meant to be our main holiday or we would have stayed longer. Also the weather or my health or both haven’t been good enough to go out anywhere for 2 weeks. Apart from my voluntary job and the opticians I have been home every day.

At my last eye test I was told that I have the beginnings of cataracts. At the time it didn’t bother me so much. They said they could take many years to develop and there is a simple operation to sort them out when they do get bad, but I have been doing some research and it seems they won’t operate on the NHS until they are really bad so I am worrying about how I will cope. Hubby is so unbelievably untidy, it is hard enough to find things now. I have a memory of speaking to a lady who’s husband had ADD like hubby and whose sight was very bad. Her man had changed a light bulb on the landing and forgotten to put the stepladder away and she had fallen over it and gone down the stairs. I remember thinking then it must be a nightmare to live with an ADD husband and to have very bad sight, and now I am going to be in that position.

My knees are also getting worse. The left one gave way two days ago when I tried to climb over something in the garden to reach one of my plants that needed watering, Hubby had put it in a really inaccessible place. Of course, I should have left it and spoken to Hubby later but I was afraid I would forget, at the time he was helping out a neighbour in the garden, who has bad knees and hips, when I told him later he didn’t see the irony of this. He is always doing work for other people while I struggle with the chaos he has left behind. I guess I need to live more for today and stop thinking about the future, after all it may not ever happen, I may get run over by a bus next week! My mother was always saying that, ‘Always be sure you are wearing clean underwear in case you get run over by a bus.’ I used to say that if I did it was doubtful they would be able to tell if my underwear had been clean before it happened! Poor Mum, a lady did once get knocked over by a bus outside our pub in the 30s. They carried her into the bar and asked for some whiskey. They didn’t know in those days about not moving people. I think Mum had a thing about buses after that.

We did go to a lovely garden 2 weeks ago. It was only a few miles from here up in the Black Mountains. It was called The Garden of the Winds because it’s position means it catches the prevailing winds and being high up they are quite strong. There wasn’t any wind that day though it was a beautiful hot summer’s day. This is me in the car park, well the overflow field, just before we went in.

They had masses of cosmos, mine always gets eaten by snails so I have to grow it in tubs, I love the feathery foilage.

The dahlias were beautiful

A view of The Skirrid Mountain

The formal gardens

The Black Mountains. We have a view of these from our house but much more distant.