Hamamelis Mollis

My parents keep around 20 chickens, and so we sell the eggs to neighbours. One of our neighbours has a big Chinese Witch Hazel bush in their front garden that smells amazing and when we were kids, on the way to school, mum would always say: "Oooh, smell that hamamelis mollis!".

Earlier, mum asked me to take some eggs round to one of the houses and when neither of us could find an identifying feature (or remember the number), I asked "Hamamelis mollis?" and when she confirmed, I knew exactly which house!

I just asked my little brother to take the eggs round to the family, he asks which house, I reply hamamelis mollis, he goes OK, see you later!

Ook, ek het 'n nuwe fiets! Dit is baie blou en lekker.

Kernow

I've had a wonderful little holiday in Cornwall with my maternal grandparents. I didn't actually do much while I was there-just relaxed-sort of! I went to choir with my Nana and discovered that a choir who's members are of the slightly older generation like to sing: "I want gin and tonic now" down the scale as a warm up!

I was also reminded, yet again, how short I am-but in a good way! My ancestors were all Cornish miners and would have been quite short from working down the mines all their lives. We went to Wheal Martyn, a clay museum where you can walk around the old site, see the quarry and observe all the waterwheels (and what a lot there were!) but there was also a lovely little tunnel with "MIND YOUR HEAD" signs all round it...so me and Nana walked through it, stretched as tall as we could (albeit tentatively!), and we did not hit the roof once!

Talking of ancestors: My grandad took me on a very interesting trip to St Clements. But first, a bit of background. I have my mother's surname - Tregaskis, not my father's. My grandad has done a fair amount of name-tracing/family-tree-gathering to the extent that I reckon knows most of the Tregaskis' in England and most if not all of them going back at least 600 years! So one day when we'd dropped Nana off at her embroidery workshop, Grandad took me to a church in St Clements. In the entrance arch of said church, there where 3 headstones that had fallen over or cracked so were now pinned to the wall to help preserve them. One of them had the year 1795 and the name Betsy Tregaskis. She was 19 years old, same age as I am now. And when we went into the church, on the list of vicars we found one John Tregascour-1489! My Grandad thinks Tregaskis is a misspelling of Tregascour as one generation is listed as Tregascour and his son is listed as Tregaskis. If you say Tregascour's it does sound remarkably like Tregaskis!

We also popped into the Eden Project as they have lots of butterflies in the tropical biome - lots of BIG butterflies, that gently glide along because when you're that big, who needs to flap!? And while we were there we wandered into the Mediterranean biome where there is always a story teller . Now when I was at choir with Nana, one of the alto's in the front row had an amazing pair of patchwork trousers, so after the rehearsal, we wandered into Truro to see if we could find the shop she'd bought them from. Alas, it had shut down. But there was new hope with the story teller. He did not have patchwork trousers but a wonderful knee length patchwork waistcoat. Trousers are (according to my Nana) fiendishly difficult to make-what with all the measurements and what-not, but a waistcoat it simple. So I am in the process of making myself a patchwork waistcoat. So far I've sewn the main patches on and I'm filling it out a little. It already looks incredible!

In other news, I got myself a nice Cornish flag to take back to South Africa with me!

Dankie Driver!

I've been in Nottingham with Sarah for the last few days-it's the first time we've spoken without the aid of electronics. I'm so glad I have Sarah in England, She's the perfect person to compare notes with: for example, is she struggling to adjust back to having parents that nag? Yes, yes she is! Or making sure I'm not the only one who doesn't seem to connect to my friends any more. It's also great fun to chat about the differences and first-since-getting-backs i.e first time we went outside alone in the dark (we both felt a ridiculous concoction of terrified and paranoia!), or what children/volunteers we have seen since we got back, followed quickly with how long it took us to realise that it wasn't said child/volunteer!

We had a great time on the double-decker bus. Especially when the bus driver got lost! We could hear him downstairs shouting for directions-and so followed many jokes about having used his '50/50' (wrongly at the junction), he'd used his 'ask the audience' to get back on track so he'd have to save his 'phone a friend' for taking the bus back to the station!

All things exciting!

R.E the moving my blog to wix: I couldn't move the blog there so I made the website and embedded the blog into it. so you can see the website here.

And Marks and Sparks phoned me today to say I got the job-I was very surprised! They left a message for me but didn't say I got it, just to ring them back so I presumed they hadn't left bad new on my answer phone.

And for your daily dose of demented: I'm helping my mum make a poster for the school where she teaches music sometimes. We have around 20 chickens and we sell their eggs, so mum wants to make a poster to explain what people should do if they want to buy eggs and how it all works. One of the steps is to write the child's name on the egg box so we were thinking of the eggiest names we could. this is what we came up with. We are maybe a little bit too proud of ourselves!

Hehehe

Moving.

I know, I'm hopeless! But I'm currently in the process of moving my blog to a wix based domain-I can edit and change more things and make it more my own. As soon as it's up and running I'll put a link on here. I will leave this as it is though so anyone that checks irregularly will be left a nice trail to follow to make it to my new one :)

Notes on English Babysitting.

Tonight is the first night I've babysat for a family in England since I left for SA. I've done quite a lot of child-care work but it was either with very young kids or one child on their own. This evening, the older child called the younger child to come upstairs, stating that the younger had to go immediately but wouldn't say why. I had to stop myself from either calling the older child downstairs, or stopping the younger one from going up. It was a very weird sensation. In the house, I would have found out the reason for one child calling another upstairs before allowing it, not to be controlling, but to make sure that either they weren't going to be messing around and therefore getting in trouble with the CCW, but also, on a very extreme-I didn't expect this to happen but it's something you have to be prepared for and aware of-making sure there were no shenanigans going on.

So it was very odd to have that reaction for 2 totally healthy, non-abused, 'normal' children.



In more sane news, you can tell I've been doing a lot of cycling recently because all the freckles on the backs of my hands have made a sudden appearance!

Blackberrying.

We went blackberrying today on the Fallowfield loop. The Fallowfield loop is an old train track that has been covered over and made into a brilliant cycle route. It's about 6 or 7 miles long and you can go from Debdale to Chorlton and if you can find it again, you can go straight into Manchester and only having to navigate the smallest sections of road. When Mum cycled into Chorlton the other day she noticed loads of blackberries ripe for picking and seeing as we both weren't working today, I cycled down and Mum drove Granny and we picked as many as we could. Unfortunately a lot of people had got there before us on other days and there wasn't much to get where we could reach, but I thought if we had a ladder we could rest it on the brambles and reach the plentiful supply higher up. So mum drove back to the house to fetch the ladder! We got at least 3 yogurt pots full, maybe a little more and I only got stung by nettles 5 or 6 times and the brambles only ripped my legs a few times (for some reason, I seemed to think that shorts were a good idea for shimmying up ladders set in bramble patches). There was one slightly terrifying moment where I thought I was going to fall straight through the bush: The ladder was resting on the knotted bramble branches and the actual ground was at least a meter below what the rungs were resting on and all of a sudden without me moving things began cracking and splintering, so I tried my very hardest not to fall down to the bottom of the ladder in my haste to get off!

But needless to say we got a good haul, my hands were good and stained and several people commented on our idea of bringing a ladder!

UPDATE: There's quite a lot of graffiti on the bridges and such on the loop, but all of what we saw was greatly child-friendly! "Only people who are ---------- don't put their dogs on leads" was seen (the ---- was where someone had spray-painted over a swearword) along with "so and so is a muppet" no word of a lie! We were wondering if people deliberately tried to keep it child friendly or whether someone had gone along and edited it. I love the idea of a sinister, threatening looking teenager walking down with a can of paint "oh no, that's not right that. You can't be putting swear words on the wall in front of the little kids" and painting over them. Or maybe a parent sneaking down to protect their kid, making sure there's nothing that might ruin their innocence!

Trying very hard not to fall!

Proud...either of the ladder or the berries...

Lovely juicy fingers!