So what have we been doing? Well, the garden is not finished, but this has been the first week with a decent amount of good weather. Over the weekend we have been working on the soak-away next to the playhouse, which will hopefully drain away the roof water from the back of the house. It used to go into the pond, which was lost to the building project. A lovely builder who is building himself a bungalow in Larner's drift got his son to bring the digger round to dig the hole a couple of weeks ago, so yesterday I heaved a few tons of broken concrete into it and Dave cut a groove across the drive and installed the pipe. When we get our breath back we need to finish filling the hole and then pave the surrounding area. LAst week Dave put up some very superior fencing to hide the collection of refuse and coal bins now sited along the workshop wall. I moved all my clematis from the central path with the arches, so if they survive the late move they should look lovely by full summer. I had cucumbers and two kinds of tomato thriving in propagators in the greenhouse until yesterday, when we were so busy I forgot to take the tops off. They overheated and everything is dead!
My other interest in the lastt six months has been making books. First, the book about my Mum, which I had done by Blurb.com for sibling Christmas presents, followed by 'The Little Wooden House' for the children, to whet their appetites for the playhouse. I also made a book about the seaside mural on the blue-room wall, so Joe wouldn't be disturbed by the new decor. I made and bound this one by hand using a method learned at my scrapbooking class. Then Dave's Mum died and the funeral address was so beautiful I used the words on one side of the double spreads, with the story of her life as she told it to me on the other, together with a collection of photographs collected over the years. Blurb made this one as well, in the same format as the Trudie book.
During Advent I had gone to our local Christian bookshop for a nativity book for the boys, and wasn't over the moon about the only suitable one I found, so that was my next project. I worked with Mick on this, as he is running a successful printing workshop with a friend. He showed my how to set up my desk-top for 'full-bleed' printing, and to send it on to him as a pdf file. He has produced a sample which is wonderful - makes my water-colours look better than they really are! I gather my style is 'naive', although at first I took that as a criticism. I can't see how I can have a style with a proper name when I have had no training and don't entirely understand what I am producing. Well, maybe that's what naive means! Anyway, the nativity book is well underway, and Green Pastures has already agreed to have it on their shelves at Christmas.
Before I had seen the finished article I was already at work on a book about when Grandma and Gramps were little. I started writing down ideas for this in a hard-cover book I was given a year or two ago, but when I actually saw it as a book for little children I realised they would maintain interest for about two minutes! But making a picture book about things you remember mainly as concepts and negatives is not easy. There are lots of things we didn't have which our grandchildren take for granted, but how to draw the detail of what we did have! For instance, we didn't have supermarkets, self-service, pre-packed foods, freezers or electronic tills, but what was standing on the counter? What did the bins and barrels look like? I am not trying to make accurate pictures - the ones I have done are a combination of memory and imagination, and with a few exceptions are not representative of our family or our house. Mick thinks it will not be a book for children but for nostalgic adults of our age!
Today we took time off from both garden and books, and went to Pensthorpe, the waterfowl place near Fakenham. We had a lovely walk, not worrying too much about identifying the various ducks and geese, but enjoying the sunshine and blue sky which was reflected in the acres of water. We had lunch there, then home via Fakenham Garden Centre, where I failed to replace my Greenfingers cucumber seed, and Podmore, where the Quadlings were in the 1800s. It was disappointing, no line of labourers' cottages as I had expected from the census returns, just a few individual houses that looked rather expensive.
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