One of my new year’s resolutions was to start a walks journal. My idea was to make a sort of scrapbook of our family walks through the year by collecting maps and leaflets, and making notes of the weather, café and loo stops, and potential detours for next time. But January has not got me off to a good start. It has been such a wet and windy beginning to the year down our way. The novelty of winter has thoroughly worn off. I have only managed to put one walk in my journal!
I am also straining at the bit to get to work on the garden and the allotment. I have been noting the bare patches and hatching plans to fill them in. I have one last foxglove plant to try in the foxglove graveyard under the Japanese maple and if that doesn’t take I will give up and plant snowdrops.
It absolutely poured on Saturday so Little Owl and I took ourselves off to our local garden centre to spend my birthday money on a tree for the garden. We selected a Flagpole Cherry which grows in a column shape so hopefully won’t overshadow the garden too much while providing beautiful blossom for the bees and us. I expressed my frustration at not being able to get digging and was given some sage advice by the staff member who helped us out to the car with the tree. “Be patient! You’ll do more harm than good by stomping around all over the earth while it’s so wet.” Oh dear. It’s back to my seed catalogues and my gardening daydreams then! Patience is not my best virtue!
Anyway, I got out on my bike early this morning, for perhaps only the third time this year so far, and there were so many birds singing! It was wonderful to hear. The days are getting lighter. We’re not out of the woods yet but hang on everyone, we’re nearly there!
Another of my drypoint prints of Wren above.
Have you ever heard the term homunculus? If you Google it you get images of a funny-looking human with enormous lips and enormous hands. The homunculus is a visual representation of what our body looks like to our brains. In our culture we tend to separate out the brain and the body but they are intricately connected. All through our bodies there are sensory receptors that send information about the world to our brains via a complicated system of nerves. In parts of our bodies, such as our hands and our mouths, we have a lot more of these sensory receptors than other parts of our bodies, say your thigh for instance. Hence, to the brain our hands and mouths seem much bigger on a sensory level than they are in reality. There are two versions of this cortical homunculus: a sensory and a motor form.
I’m back at my desk and my mind is full of festive images…Christmas sing-a-longs, snow-covered hill-tops, purple clouds over a golden sunset, hoicking our friend out of a muddy puddle on a country walk (we nearly had to sacrifice his wellies!). Good times.
Merry Christmas everyone! Thanks for all your wonderful support and for following my adventures on this blog. Lots of love to you and yours x
The other day Finch broke my necklace. It wasn’t just any old necklace. It was the necklace Big Dreamer gave me when Wren was born. It has five little stars on it, one for each of us. I wear it all the time, never take it off. Finch was play-fighting, made a grab for me and accidentally snapped it.
It is my last visit of the year to Margaret Erskine Wilson’s book 
It poured on the school run this morning. The rain dripped off my hood, onto the end of my nose, and from there bounced off alternate knees. Wren screamed her head off when I put the rain cover on the pushchair, she hates it. Honestly, what I wouldn’t give for someone to be pushing me round in a cosy pushchair in a downpour!
