My daughter brought me a huge bag of rhubarb from her partner’s brother’s garden. So I now have the job of making rhubarb crumble, one for us and one for her or her partner to take to the aforementioned brother’s house. It seems that none of them knows how to make rhubarb crumble. Or how to do anything else with their copious supply of rhubarb.
She didn’t, however, bring me figs from her almost-brother-in-law’s garden. He has a fig tree laden with fruit. As with the rhubarb, he had nothing to do with the planting of this tree - it came with the house apparently. What a bonus! But when my daughter visited last week none of them knew whether the figs were ripe or not and so they just left them on the tree. Such a shame! I was unaware, however, that figs could be grown in this country.
I came across a news item about a man who took the decision to leave his job in London and go off to live in France, in the Vosges, where his daughter was growing up. The article didn’t say how he would earn a living. This was about 20 years ago but I suppose he might have been in a profession that allowed him to work from home, even before it became the new normal. He described his new home:
“Home was a draughty stone shack a couple of miles from the nearest village, down a dirt track flanked by spruces and silver birch. My nearest neighbour was a three-minute walk away, and when the birches were in leaf you couldn’t see another house. Indoors, I was plagued by dormice, and a shrew once dropped from the bedroom ceiling. Outside, there were red squirrels, buzzards and small animals that ran and squeaked in the undergrowth all day long. Sometimes I would open my front door to find a doe and her fawns cropping the lawn. I fell hard and fast for the Vosges.”
Presumably he had internet access! But you never know.
What struck me mostly was his fear of being murdered in his bed. The peace and quiet he loved during the day became a sort of nightmare to him once he retired to bed. His imagination ran riot.
“If you have spent most of your life in the city,” he wrote, “the countryside can be a noisy, spooky place. It takes while to work out what is making those noises, or to accept that you can ignore them. I would hear rustling in the bushes or footsteps in the lane and think of axe murderers and escaped lunatics.”
Surely London must be a more dangerous place, especially after dark, than a small isolated place in deepest France. I can’t help thinking he must have watched too many scary movies. Eventually the night came when he went off to bed and forgot to lock the door. Having slept perfectly well and managed not to be murdered in his sleep. He got over his fear and has been fine ever since.
I was reminded of our own open door incident. When we lived in one of a row of four quite isolated cottages in the valley between Delph and Denshaw, there was a fine summer morning when I wandered downstairs to make breakfast and wondered at how brightly lit the living room was. It was a large, rectangular room with one corner sectioned off by a glass door, providing a sort of entrance hall, albeit a very small one. The previous evening we had left to outer door open all through the fine evening but had closed the inner door to keep the bugs and moths outside. Darkness fell and it was not obvious that the outer door was open and so we had gone off the bed quite oblivious and carefree! No wandering axe murderers or indeed simple burglars had passed that way in the night but this was hardly deepest France after all. We never left it open again but I still wonder if maybe it would still be fine there to leave your door unlocked!
I wouldn’t risk it in our current house, on a busy main road, even though we are hardly on the middle of a huge conurbation. I am more concerned about wildlife and stray cats wandering into the kitchen if we left the back door open for any length of time and busied ourselves elsewhere in the house. After all, a blackbird had a go at hopping into kitchen only a few weeks ago.
My oldest granddaughter had a stray cat wander into her house yesterday. A large, sleek creature, he looked around, helped himself to a drink from her cat’s water bowl, clearly decided that, animal-friendly as the house is, there was nothing more he needed and wandered out again!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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