Tag: Memories

The Ponds of Childhood TWTW # 148

On By tontowilliamsIn books, Dogs, Garden / Allotment, Memories, The Week That Was, work

This week has been focused around work. Client work, an evening and a Saturday workshop. I visited my Mum, dropped into the vets to pick some tablets up and went for a short walk around a pond. These are all the things I did in addition to the routine things.

I started writing this during a gap in my diary, and finished it on Sunday morning after I got back from the allotment.

During weeks like this routine is important to me. Whether it’s the time walking the dogs or stopping to cook dinner the rest of my day is built around those things. Or is it? Evening meetings can mean that dinner has to be earlier or later depending on the timings, but they’re still keystones in my day, even if the rest of it feels a bit like a treadmill.

I had to pick some pills up from the vets on Saturday afternoon. At the weekends only the main practice is open and not the satellite one that we normally visit. On the way back I took the opportunity to stop somewhere I’ve not been since I was a kid.

As a kid this was a popular spot that I used to go with my friends. Taken there by one of our parents we used to spend ages (or at least it felt like it to our young brains), messing about in boats – you could hire canoes or rowing boats – wandering around the pond or on the adjacent heathland, playing in the playground or eating ice cream.

I was pleased to see that not a lot has changed, you could still do all of the above things there to this day if you wanted to. After 40+ years there have been some improvements – there’s a proper cafe now instead of a window from a room between the toilets, and the range of watercraft has increased.

I didn’t indulge my inner child by going out in a boat, as I had one of the dogs with me, but we did enjoy a good walk around the pond. I was pleased to see it was quite busy, although I’m not sure with covid numbers on the rise again that this is necessarily a good thing.

My Mum used to take me here a lot during school holidays, I doubt she would remember that now. When I visited her this week, she wasn’t convinced that I was who I said I was. Partly due to having to wear a mask, but also I think due to her Alzheimer’s progressing a bit.

Reading

I read another Brother Cadfael this week – “The Heretic’s Apprentice” by Ellis Peters and then moved on to a Len Deighton – “Horse Under Water”. I enjoyed the former, although it felt like it was dragging a bit. After last weeks experience with reading Brothers In Arms by James Holland where I had no trouble reading late into the night, I’m not sure it’s all a function of how busy or tired I am. I was just as busy / tired last week as this but I struggled to stay awake reading Brother Cadfael’s adventures. I think it’s a function more of how engaging the material is rather than a physiological state in me.

Work

As mentioned above it’s been a busy week. I’ve been plugging away on some client work and starting to write up their final report. For another client I’ve been involved in preparing for and delivering some online workshops. One on Friday evening and the second on Saturday morning. Not my ideal choice, but also something that I’m used to doing as my allotment talks are often evening events. Work for this second client will probably drop off a bit for the time being while other things that I’m not involved in happen in the background.

Allotment

Because I had to work on Saturday morning I went to the allotment this morning (Sunday). I was there early, before it was properly light. I managed to get my garlic, onions and some broad beans in. I seem to have slightly underestimated the number of broad beans in the packet I bought (our allotment shop has stopped selling seeds, and they were my benchmark), so I think I’ll sow some more in the spring rather than get some more to plant now. There’s still time to do so, but I’ll be hedging my bets against a hard winter by splitting the sowing like this.

Links

The Daily Rituals and Routines of a Working Adventurer

Would you rather eat at the local kebab house or blow a small fortune with Salt Bae?

How to grow happy garlic

Well that’s all I have for this week. Next week is looking slightly quieter on the work front, but I still have a report to write and some information for it to chase.

Whatever you’re up to or have planned, take care and stay safe.

The Weeks To Come 2021

On By tontowilliamsIn books, Garden / Allotment, The Week That Was, tv4 Comments

I had planned to write and publish this yesterday, but I really didn’t feel up to it. Mentally I lurch from frustration to fear about the world outside my front door. I think that I am becoming more of a hermit each day.

I guess 2020 won’t be a hard act to follow, but then again 2021 probably has a lot to live up to. I’m not expecting much real change until at least the summer and honestly I am expecting our government to totally mess-up the vaccination programme or at the very least turn them into super-spreader events, particularly with the rise of a new variant.

This isn’t going to be a regular post, as not much has changed in the last week. I’ve been doing nothing of much consequence, although thinking a lot about the coming year and what I want from it. I talked about this a little in my end of year post and haven’t much to add to that.

Reading. I’ve read a couple of books this last week. Raven Black by Ann Cleeves (if you’ve watched the BBC’s Shetland series, it’s based on these books, and this one a story in one of the early seasons). It took me over the new year period and meant that I have already hit my GoodReads target so absolutely no pressure now to read books. Of course that isn’t going to stop me and I’ve read Grace Dent’s memoir Hungry which I will say is very honest, at times very funny and at others completely heartbreaking. It covers Dent’s fathers dementia, and honestly was a little too close to some of my experiences, so was at time very hard going, but I did finish it.

Watching. We’ve been catching up on a lot of Christmas specials, but also watching series 2 of Endeavor as it’s been repeated in the week between Christmas and New Year. Despite being a fan of Inspector Morse and Lewis this has passed us by until quite recently. Enjoyable but has an annoying cliffhanger ending to the series, which doesn’t look like we’ll see the resolution to anytime soon as the next series doesn’t appear to be in the schedules yet.

Allotment. I went down to the allotment yesterday. It really is my happy place in terms of being able to clear my head. I did a little bit of digging and some weeding and had a good think about the coming seasons and what I’m going to plant where. I came away feeling much more level.

I’ve sown some sweet peas this week. They’re seeds that I saved from the plants in my Mum’s garden. They’re a very constant memory of growing up in that house. They were always there, on a particular wall, just along from a passion flower bush. Mum used to describe them as everlasting sweet peas. I’m not sure whether that’s because they are a particular variety (there are plenty of varieties with that name) or whether it’s simply because she just used to let them self-seed in the same place each year.

Well that’s it for now. I’m not sure whether I’m going back to posting weekly or not, so there may or may not be something coming in a weeks time. In the meantime, however long that might be; Take Care and Stay Safe.

Learning To Swim

On By tontowilliamsIn Life, Memories3 Comments

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Memories are a funny thing, I’m not sure how accurate mine are and whether or not the sequence of events is actually the way it happened sometimes, but I have been reading “Turning: Lessons from Swimming Berlin’s Lakes” by Jessica J. Lee, this week and she writes about learning to swim. This got me to thinking about how I learnt.

I learnt to swim when I was at primary school, so between the ages of 5 and 11. Once a week we’d be taken by bus to the swimming pool in the nearest city. It probably took us longer to get there and back than it did actually at the pool and so it took up all of a morning for our lessons. If you were unfortunate to have a verruca then you weren’t allowed to go, and had to stay at school. We had our feet checked at the start of each term, lining up and having to lift each foot in turn like a horse being shod so that the instructors could check.

If you couldn’t already swim then you started in the shallow end of the pool, and as you got more confident and able you got to progress along the length of the pool into deeper water. We learnt “doggy-paddle” at first moving on to breast-stroke later. We undertook our distance badges (starting at 10m and working up to miles upon miles), and also learn’t personal survival (swimming in our pyjamas and making floats out of the legs of the trousers) – I always thought that we used pyjamas because what else would you be wearing when your luxury liner sank at night? The highlight of my school memories was coming third in the breast-stroke heats at the County swimming gala (unfortunately only the first two got to progress to the quarter finals).

Neither of my parents could swim and I used to pester my Mum to take me swimming, so in the end I used to go with friends to the seaside or the local pool, until my Mum learnt (probably to stop me whining about wanting to go swimming). As a result we used to go swimming off of the shore at Emsworth and the seafront at Hayling Island, West Wittering and Bracklesham Bay in the school holidays.

My Mum continued to swim, going to classes one night a week, with a friend. When I was old enough (you had to be over 16 for insurance reasons) I joined them. 9 to 10 pm on a Monday night, which meant we didn’t get home until 11 pm and then still got up for college on Tuesdays. I had a lot of fun with those lessons, and ended up with a trophy (I think for best improved technique), and some life-saving certificates.

I don’t seem to swim as much anymore, a bit at Emsworth still (in the summer with the dogs), but that’s about it. I must admit though that reading a book about wild swimming (and not the first one btw), maybe I’ll start again. Who knows.

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