A rambling we will go....

For the first time in a couple of days, it was dry enough to go for a ramble around the garden. I'd gone out quickly yesterday to pull up a few carrots, heard this rustling noise and out from my little would-be (or should that be 'wood'-be) woodland area (under a laburnum and a HUGE hebe which measures about ten foot across and high) scuttled a young black and white cat. You get used to rustlings in this garden, hedgehogs, birds of all sorts, the occasional cat, and often you walk out there when it's quiet, half-listening out for any surprise noises. (There was an interesting debate on LOOSE WOMEN today about 'listening', how much we actually listen. There is a subtle difference between hearing and listening, isn't there?) Today when I went out, the same scuttling and half expecting a small black and white furry creature to emerge at a fast rate of knots, instead out dashed a pheasant. He ran down the path and stopped. Not sure if I had seen a pheasant or not, it happened so fast and I had the wrong glasses on, I stopped too, and then slowly edged my way along the path. But it's hard to be quiet on shingle paths, and with a whoosh of his wings, he was off, startling the wood pigeons as well as me. I did try shouting that he'd be safer in our garden than out in the open, with all these trigger happy hunters and poachers about the place. My lovely friend Grace used to have a tame pheasant came to her cottage garden, and she would leave food out for him... he seemed to have quite an appetite for things out of the ordinary, and would have made a tasty roast one day perhaps. Grace should have been known as 'the bird lady' for she had blackbirds and a robin who used to hop onto the bottom half of her stable back door, when the top was open, and chirrup or whistle for food! The blackbird even had the nerve to wander onto the worktop, to the corner where she kept a container of cheese and dried fruit specially for the tamer birds.
Anyway, I took some photos of the autumn foliage, just before the skies went slightly greyer and the mizzle began again. There are some lovely colours, from the maple and mixed hedging below, to the cherry tree and dying peonies, and still so many flowers in bloom.

I've found myself in a funny old mood this past week or two, which has culminated in my leaving the only forum I belonged to, and I won't bother naming it, those female friends who know me, will know the name anyway. I had never been happy, never felt I belonged, to this forum. I felt a bit like the new kid on the block, despite having been in it for over a year. Like being at a new school, being a bit too needy trying to fit in, please people, make all the right noises, compliment them on something just to be nice. Agreeing sometimes with things because I wanted to fit in. This happened with the forum, with every other forum I have looked at over the last couple of years, which only amounts to about four. It never happened at school, I went to one school from aged four and three quarters to fifteen and three quarters, and never tried to fit in there anyway, happy with my little group of two close friends. It was all I needed and wanted.

As an adult, I still couldn't get on with women en masse, or en group of more than three! And I am annoyed at myself for trying to fit in with the rest on this forum. For projecting an image of someone who wasn't really me, partly because I wanted some semblance of anonymity, but also because I thought it might make me more interesting, more acceptable. But as others have said, if you don't fit, you don't fit and why bother trying? And to be honest, it's not like me to be anything other than who/what I am, so why did I stray from this I wonder? Many times comments or threads I made were ignored, and it felt like I was banging my head on a brick wall, wasting my time. In the end, I just left, told the people who ran it I was going, changed the email contact address I had used on there, and that's it. No more forums, no more trying to get on with women in a group like that. Just as I can't get on with women in a group in real life, so that also applies to the virtual world it seems. I don't feel any sense of loss, in fact, in some respects, it's a relief.

But the antsy mood which I have been in still hasn't lifted properly. I feel as if I want to do something, but don't know what. It's like when you want to read and can't settle into a book... do any of you readers know that feeling? You pick up book after book, nothing holds or even grabs your attention for more than a few pages. So you discard it and turn to the next on your pile, and the same thing happens. In the end, in situations like this, I often find myself returning to old favourites, classics often, or earlier novels by favourite writers, whose earlier works might not be their best, several of them taking a few novels and years to really hit their writing stride.

Crafts which I was enjoying now seem to be dragging on, taking forever to finish. Knitting a scarf using just three balls of wool, which are only 50g balls but which seem to be neverending. I am knitting until the wool runs out, but it's taking longer than expected and I am now fed up with the pattern and the knitting and want to move onto something else.

A time for regretting, to a degree, some decisions made in the past. A very introspective time, is it to do with the seasons, the shortening days? I don't think so, because I am not someone who is depressed by lack of natural daylight, or who hates this time of year because of the dark dreariness often associated with it, the long winter with the light of spring at the end of a very long tunnel, so long you can't even begin to think about seeing the end of it for many a month yet.

A time for planning as well, not just the new layout of a small organic vegetable garden, but thoughts too, about extending the kitchen. When we bought this house there was a small back room extension, which had been the original kitchen when the house was built in the early 1930s, the huge fireplace, minus range, was still there. The previous owner of the house was an acupuncturist, and this small room was his surgery. For years we would find little needles in the oddest of places, whilst we had it as a small office/craft room. Then one boozy Christmas I drew up plans for extending the space into two brick outhouses at the back of it, and turning it into a kitchen, which is about sixteen feet long by nine across. I designed it with units down the two long sides, the original back door then leading into a lean to, now into the conservatory, one window already looked over the the paved area, and I added another at the far end to overlook the garden, which is where I like to lean on the sill and look out at the pond, the birds on the feeders in the trees, the geese flying over... not to mention the odd pheasant! The plans were drawn for my own amusement, I love drawing room layouts, houses and so on. But we decided to go ahead, and so I got a new kitchen and the rest of the downstairs rooms were changed in their purpose, to suit our needs.... a cosy sitting room was made out of the old dining/kitchen at the back of the house away from the road at the front and overlooking our lovely back garden, and at the front, where we had the original sitting room, a dining room cum library.

Now I am thinking I would like to extend the kitchen again.... Himself has always regretted that we didn't double the size of the original extension, but knowing me, I would still probably be thinking about extending again! I want a bigger, lower window with a table and chairs in front of it, a door to the back garden to save walking through the conservatory, a larder cupboard to save my back and neck as I scrabble about on my knees looking for something in the cupboard under the worktop. And even as I carry on with my ruler and pencils, coloured pencils too, graph paper, tape measure, I know this will remain a pipe dream, unlike the last time I dreamt up an extension.

Still, it pleases me to play around like this, and what does it matter if the drawings get used as fodder for lighting the fire? My mind is wandering, drifting from one scheme, one idea, one plan to another, not settling for long on anything, like a nervous butterfly flittering and fluttering about. If any of you stayed with me this long, and this won't include The Crap Blog Detective I know, thank you. Oh, and before I go... the pinkfairygran@yahoo.co.uk email address no longer exists; it is now maggiegray59@yahoo.com just in case any of you had tried emailing me.