1 – In my personal Springwatch – the bulbs in the garden continue to flourish – the Daffodils are out, including some Soleil D’Ors and somewhere in the middle of this picture, a shy, Snakeshead Fritillary is about to open…
2 – on the subject of flowers, the local florist has a nice sign and a well-dressed shop..
3 – but not a patch on the wedding dress shop whose windows are framed by a mass of flowers on the outside and a cornucopia of ornamentation inside, between the wedding dresses…
4 – I have completed 10 out of 26 A to Z entries but I shall have some time this week to get seriously stuck in – I want to be free on holiday to read other peoples posts and not be writing mine lol!
5 – Barbara was finally persuaded that we should buy her a mobility scooter – as she said to her daughter, half the problem was not being able to accept that she was actually 79 years old, and such a device is entirely appropriate! I shall be picking it up tomorrow…
6 – Only 3 full working days before the holiday!
7 – It is my local town ‘s- Keighley Library live poetry group meeting tonight…
8 – I will make homemade Corned -Beef Hash when I get home – a new favourite of both of us…
9 – Planning to do some painting in the Netherlands…
1 – There is an organisation that runs “Repair Shops” at various local towns hereabouts, and today was Silsden’s turn so I went to investigate and see whether any of my skills might be usefully offered. It is only 3 1/2 hours once a month, and I’m not sure yet whether my specialist painting skills, wood-graining, marbling ets, will be required but first I would have to do a session of shadowing followed by some H & S training – so we shall see…
2 – On my walk down to the Methodist Church where the Repair Shop is held, I saw some signs of Spring advancing…
Daffodils already “swan-necked” at the duck pond…
Nature will force it’s way – Snowdrops coming through a pile of rocks…
3 – See if you can guess what the source this texture shot is…
This is the white stripe of a Zebra Crossing – it’s eroded nature is a reflection of the fact that local councils cannot afford to keep road markings up to scratch…
4 – This is my favourite gravestone amongst all those of our quiet neighbours at the back of our house (upper right) – must have been a musician…
5 – Not sure whether this is a grat or not, on the one hand it shows the resilience of nature, on the other, the roots of this tree might affect our house foundations and the top of the tree is now growing across the view from our kithchen window. When we came back from Crete in 2021 after Covid, we found that someone had taken it upon themselves to cut off the top of this Christmas Tree (originally planted by a neighbour post-Christmas) at the edge of the graveyard behind the house. The truncation did not stop the tree growing and it has put out a new crown which grew 4 feet in just the last year!
6 – On Thursday, I had a major Annual(ish) check by the Environmental Health Officers from Bradford Council which went off okay and afterwards, I went to Skipton which has the nearest Wholefood Shop – to stock up on seeds for the low-carb diet and baking I am on at present. Walking through an area of Skipton I was not familiar with, I took a few snaps…
We have so much history here in Britain, that we are so blasé that this building, embellished with a Royal Crest, does not even have a plaque to say what the building was…
Skipton has many reminders of the importance of the wool trade in the past – some more quirky than others…
7 – The sheep is outside a craft/gallery/antique shop and in the window, was this treadle printing machine which took me back to school where we used a somewhat bigger treadle Heidelberg machine to print school event programmes. This one is still used by the proprietor for a similar purpose.
A side view of the printer with another old printer behind it – also used by the proprietor to make reduction Lino prints…
Also in the shop was a Jones brand antique sewing machine which has a swinging arm bobbin which apparently was a better design than the rotating bobbin promulgated by Singer, however, Singer was more successful as a company so we became stuck with their bobbin design – just saying…
8 – I have almost finished “E” (for Embroidered fabric decoration) in my A to Z – I need to get a move on to be ready for April.
9 – Our rapper grandson is staying for the weekend whilst he does some studio recording in Leeds. Last night we watched the first half of Martin Scorsese’s documentary about Bob Dylan – excellent…
10 – Starting to think about a holiday – possibly to take a car ferry from Hull to Rotterdam and stay in a couple of AiBnB’s in Gouda and perhaps in the coastal lowlands – although it is only a nine hour drive to Copenhagen, hmmm…
Frequently the wood sare pink wrote Emily Dickinson, fairly described as transcendental romantic, I think was she referencing blossom-time when gaudy pinks and whites to win the bees attention fight that time when we remember trees are but giant flowering plants dependent on the tiny pollinator to close life’s circle with their aerial dance flowers followed in short order by the clichéd thousand shades of green my own favourite time to see the thin veil delicately drawn across the Winter-wakened trees and as the leaves thicken and take on Summer shades each tree can be read from a distance picked out from its companions in the glade
But wait – in Winter too a palette of subtle colours also distinguish each species one from another colours hard to pin down from mauves and greys to blues and nearly brown and never black except in solitary silhouette and frequently the woods are pink
