New moon, new broom

At 4.44pm on Wednesday the 13^th, the moon was new. I know this because of our moon calendar.

I get one every year by post from Mystery Arts in Brighton. It’s lovely to look at and, as well as keeping us up to date with what the moon is doing and telling us about eclipses and astrological signs, it helps me with my veg garden. I sew and plant out when the moon is new and waxing. This does make a difference. They’ve proved it on ‘Gardeners’ World’! (For more on this fascinating subject, you could do worse than investigate ‘biodynamic agriculture’.)

 
And if the moon affects plants, it might also affect us, which might account for my recent flurry of cleaning and gardening. Other factors of course are the new year, the lockdown, a few fine days and the fact that I don’t have a big writing project on at the moment (for various reasons which I might go into another time) and so am twiddling my thumbs looking for things to do.
 
First up (as they say) was my workroom. I can’t remember when I last cleaned it and the floor was beginning to scrunch underfoot with a mixture of shredded paper, sewing debris and dead flies.

Dust covered the surfaces.

Ropes of cobwebs decorated the ceiling.

The filing tray overflowed and the storage system under my desk had descended into chaos.

The only neat area was my collection of reference books.

Two bin bags of paper for recycling, several buckets of dirty water, a rattling vacuum cleaner, one visit to the tip and three days later and my room shone with order and cleanliness.

 

Next on the list was the garden. I tore Frog away from the Mini kit car he’s rebuilding (also another story) . . .

Frog's 'Hustler' in 1985 decorated with records for Exeter University Rag Week

 
. . . and we tackled what we call ‘the big bed’, a shrubbery which had become infested with brambles  and grown so tall it obscured our view. (There were no blackberries left so it was a good time to make some changes: we wouldn't be depriving the birds.) Frog wielded chain-saw and bill-hook and I pulled with my new bramble-proof gloves. Two days' work later and we had three large piles on the lawn.

What we do with them now we haven’t yet decided. The birds are loving them, using them as a waiting area for the bird table and investigating them as sources of nest material.

We can now see what we actually have left in the bed and through to slices of our lovely view. . . 

 
We left this leggy mahonia . . .

. . . because the flowers were turning into berries and apparently (I checked) the birds love them. (Humans can eat mahonia berries too, but I’m not sure I’ll try.)

 
Likewise this ivy on a dead apple tree (left).

The spindly trees you can see in the centre of the picture above and in this one below . . .

. . . are elms, which have grown as suckers from a tree which used to live here until it got too tall, contracted Dutch elm disease and died (the beetle which spreads the disease only flying above a certain height). We've since cut their tops off, both so that they survive and in the hope that they will bush out and help fill our now rather sparse shrubbery. I'm all for native species.*

 
I wanted to do this post last weekend for Kate’s blog link-up party on the theme of ‘new’ but it wasn’t ready. Instead I’m doing it in advance for this weekend's (22nd to 24th) on the theme ‘moon’, and sneaking in the ‘newness’ that should have been there last week. Do take a look the party and maybe even upload something of your own - it's very easy.

*I had a feeling elm wasn't native so I checked and here's what I discovered (from various sources). There are two sorts of elm - Wych elm and English elm. Wych elm is the only true native, but grows naturally only in the northern half of the UK. The English elm is thought to have been introduced by Bronze Age people from southern Europe, and this is the version in our garden. I find these elms easy to distinguish from other trees by their ultra-knobbly bark and the strange thickness at the bottom of small branches. (Wych elms on the other hand have smooth bark.)

The ultra-knobbly bark of English elm

The strange branches of English elm

Rolf Lidberg and his trolls

Two years ago Frog (with a little help from me) knocked down the wall between our bathroom and the smallest bedroom in our house. A year later the builders began work on our new, expanded bathroom. Now, two years later, the new bathroom is finished and I have begun sorting the debris that resulted from the building work and from emptying a bedroom.

Two years ago the bathroom and adjoining bedroom became one . . .

Because the bedroom was so small, it was used mostly by visiting children, with the pictures on the wall reflecting this. Among the debris I rediscovered these enchanting troll paintings, which last saw the light of day a year ago as illustrations for my series of blog posts on the visit Frog and I paid to Norway, the land of my mother’s mother. 

I have researched (and blogged here about) a Scandinavian print of my mother’s of which I have only a copy as all five of us children wanted to give it a home after my mother's death. I hoped to find an original print of my own but unfortunately I haven’t yet done so. 

'Happy families', a Scandinavian print of my mother's

The troll pictures are small posters which Frog and I found in an Exeter shop about thirty years ago. Now, after our visit to Norway and with my new-found enthusiasm for that part of the world – so beautiful, wild and uncommercialised - I wondered if we could do some research on these pictures too.
 

‘D’you think we could find original prints of these?’ I asked Frog last week, and the next day through the magic of the internet he came up with the name of the artist, Rolf Lidberg.

I then did some research of my own and discovered from Wikipedia that he was Swedish and lived from 1930 to 2005. He illustrated five children’s books, whose English titles are: Trolls (1984), A Troll Wedding (1992), The elf book (1995), The Troll Valley (2001) and The trolls go fishing (2001). We think our pictures probably come from the last one. Cards of the illustrations and secondhand copies of the books are available but again, as yet, we haven’t found any prints.

My mother did read Norwegian books to us when we were children, translating them as she went, including a mysterious one about a Mrs Green, a Mrs Brown and a Mrs White, but the Rolf Lidberg books are too recent seeing as I was born in the 1950s so I never came across them. I also have vague memories of carved wooden trolls appearing on the table at Christmas, as well as small gnomes which my mother called 'nisse’ (pronounced 'nisser'). (It’s only recently that I've discovered that 'nisse' is a Norwegian word and that ‘Nissen Huts’ are prefabricated barrack-type buildings designed by a Colonel Nissen, not log cabins at the bottom of the garden suitable for little people as I had always imagined.)

According to Scandinavian folklore, trolls are scary human-sized creatures who live in the woods, but what could be more adorable than Lidberg’s trolls, with their patched clothes and sweet smiles? Lidberg himself, according to Wikipedia, was hunchbacked and sported a bushy beard. Was he modelling the trolls on himself and if so isn’t that a wonderful example of celebrating ourselves as we are and not worrying about conforming to conventional ideas of beauty?

It’s a shame that the word ‘troll’ has now come to mean something quite different.

. . . and here as it looks today is the same part of the bathroom as that in the picture above

The Mad Englishwoman is completely fine

If you’ve been following my novel as serialised in this blog, you might notice that I haven’t posted any extracts for over a fortnight. There are two reasons for this.

The first is that The Builders have left. There are one or two jobs still to do when items arrive which they’ll come back for and there are several plumbing jobs that Frog is busy doing. The bathroom is however usable and I’m no longer marooned in my study trying to keep out of the way. Consequently, I’m not tied to my computer and have found lots of things to do in the rest of the house and in the garden, and writing has been abandoned.

One end of our new bathroom. Note makeshift curtains.

The other end of our new bathroom. Note absence of basin mirror and shower screen (and door).

The second reason for lack of posting is that I’m approaching some dark areas of the novel and am busy telling myself that I’ve delved into them more than enough and don’t need to do it any more. Like the heroine of this delightful book which I’m reading at the moment, I’m telling myself I'm ‘completely fine’. Which no doubt means that I’m not.

The internet is probably not the best place to read a novel. You need to curl up in bed with it, take your time and shut out the rest of the world. So if you’ve stuck with The Banker’s Niece so far, many many thanks. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

    It’s been fantastically helpful writing for real people and not just to appeal to agents and publishers. It’s made the novel come alive for me and honed my writing (I hope).

    So I’d better get back to it.

Sometimes I imagine . . .

Sometimes I imagine myself as a famous writer on a chat show being asked why I write, and each time I give a different answer. Today’s answer is – because it empowers me.

Recently I’ve been feeling disempowered. This is, I think, for lots of reasons, the main one being building work, the debris from which taken over the entire house and half the garden.

The conservatory

The front door

The kitchen

The spare bedroom

Outside the back door

The garden (with raindrops on the lens)

I have nowhere to go. I can’t even hide in my ‘den’ as the door to the loft, where pipes and electricity cables are being worked on, is right behind my desk.

My desk and the door to the loft

It’s not the builders’ fault (the debris is ours) and they are embarrassed to be intruding, and for that reason I want to keep out of the way. I don’t want to embarrass them. I slink around like a ghost, a non-person.

    Frog, who is helping the builders, doesn’t want me around either. He doesn’t want me getting in a tizz about the mess or schedules or whether the work’s being done as we would want. He wants me to leave all the worry to him. But that’s disempowering too.

Being a writer (Phew! Can I say that?), I take everything to extremes. I imagine what it would be like to be truly disempowered, as women used to be – without money, education, jobs, control over their fertility and their sex life, a vote, respect. How did they survive? Why did they not just curl up in a corner and die?

Which brings me back to writing. That is my secret outlet, my way of proving to myself that I exist. Even if it’s only an inadequate blog post, like this one.

The new bathroom, the tidiest room in the house