Rather a hot week! So much so that I found a peanut growing in one pot – probably planted by the squirrels.
There do seem to have been a lot of butterflies around too – mostly seen on my walks but also the large (cabbage) white in my garden. I have identified large and small tortoiseshells and red admirals but there have been others which don’t stay still or open their wings so I can attempt to identify them.
I said I would do something different so I got my sewing machine out – no, not to make face masks like everyone else.
And no, it is not exactly new! In fact it was my grandmother’s so is probably about 100 years old but being a hand one it goes at about the speed I can cope with. It has a long shuttle, which is not often seen today, I think – not that I have looked at modern machines. It does work perfectly well for all I am likely to need.
I have had a piece of material which was destined to be a tablecloth but needed the ends hemmed. I have had it for several years – at least 3 but could be as many as 7 or 8 – but until now I haven’t got round to doing it. It took no more than half an hour to sew, but threading the machine and the needle probably took as long. Fortunately I have a needle threader – also either my grandmother’s or my mother’s – so I did manage to get the needle threaded. It was almost as hard to see the threader and get it through the hole as it was to try to thread the needle by without it!
Also different, I have continued reading my father’s letters to his mother written during the war. Having had a holiday in Alexandria, when he did little but sleep, read, eat and people watch, he was in a tented camp on sand and working quite hard during the first battle of El Alamein. He has then been posted somewhere else – not sure where yet – and is on a journey of several hundred miles. It would be so much easier if his writing was better and if he hadn’t written in ink on both sides of airmail paper….
I did manage to finish the sky on my jigsaw – apart from the one piece that seems to be missing. Now I am struggling with the actual building of the Houses of Parliament – too many windows all the same.
As a single person living alone I was allowed to form a “support bubble” with another family so asked my niece as I thought it would be nice to go somewhere other than Salisbury, even if it was just Swindon. It would also be good to see them, having exchanged letters (yes, “snail mail”) with my great-niece. Then we were told that the rules were changing from July 4th so I would be able to go and see them anyway so we cancelled that and I offered to form a bubble with a friend who wants to go somewhere a bit further than she can walk (which isn’t far) and I will be able to take her in my car.
Have you noticed our new vocabulary? “Lockdown”, everything is “unprecedented”, “social distancing”, “support bubble” “shielding”…..
Well, things (might) change from next Saturday….