Everyone, me included, is going on about the continual rain. However, to be honest, here we have had grey days, occasional damp days and even some bright days. For once the wettest weather has circled around Greater Manchester, keeping the worst of the rain for the night time! Today rain is forecast but it’s not happened yet (early afternoon). Here is a link to an article by Guardian columnist Emma Brooks, telling us how preferable a wet winter is to a deep snow winter.
Tomorrow they are promising us snow. We shall see!
And here is a link to an article about exploding trees. Apparently when there is a severe drop in temperature, really severe, down to serious minus figures, the sap in some trees freezes. And the frozen sap expands. Just like frozen water in your domestic pipes expanding and breaking the pipes, the expanding frozen sap causes the tree to crack open. If it happens suddenly it can be quite noisy. We don’t seem to have that problem here.
Neither do we have the problem of bears moving into your house, as the writer of this article describes. Of course it’s all down to where you live - buying house, or building your own, at the edge of a forest where bears are known to live - and the kind of house - the sort with a fairly open-access basement area. The bears I have seen in reports of this kind of squatting are large, rather fierce-looking creatures that could just be shooed out. Someone also told me that when bears get used to ‘raiding’ people’s homes for food they grow so used to it that sometimes they have to be humanely put down as they will never re-adapt to foraging in wild for more bear-appropriate food. Think of Yogi Bear and his love of picnic / pickernick baskets!
I spent part of yesterday de-cluttering desk drawers, getting rid of ancient bank statements, out of date documents and such like. Most of these things we now deal with online, so it was time to purge and remove anything no longer needed. Quite cathartic in its way.
Guardian columnists Zoe Williams recently wrote about the hassle of moving house, swapping notes with a friend about the difficulty of dealing with all the clutter. Here’s s sample:
“My friend, clearing out a chest of drawers, found one filled entirely with different-coloured ribbon of unusable length. I stare at old Christmas cards and can’t figure out whether they’re from a person I’ve tragically forgotten, or if I just found them on the street and decided the right thing to do was to file them. I have spices that are older than my youngest child (16), so I must have moved house with them twice already. I have more defunct appliances than I could name, and fair enough, it is hard to bin a soup maker or an air fryer when you have no clue why they stopped working – if it’s that random, who’s to say they won’t start working again? But there is no excuse for a MiniDisc player.”
I fully understood the bit about the hoarded unusable ribbon. When my father died we sorted out his beautifully organised garden shed. There we found old tobacco tins filled with miscellaneous objects: rubber bands which had perished, assorted screws and nails, and, possibly best of all, pieces of string, all to short to be really useful for anything! But all neatly stored in tins!
And I too have ridiculously old jars of spices - usually bought for a specific recipe, used maybe three times and then stored in a kitchen cupboard!
So now I have resolved to do more decluttering, removing stuff that has been kept on the off-chance that it might be useful, photos of educational visits to unidentified places with now-forgotten former students, and so on. So much clutter to deal with! No time to be bored!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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