Bring me sunshine

Friday the thirteenth wasn't a good day for me - blogging wise. I logged in, found only a handful of friends had posted, checked Recent Posts and out of a 100 posts counted 51 trying to flog things and another 10 in a foreign language, then I read several posts of the kind that wind me up the most. So I decided that blogging was the waste of a perfectly good life and did other things.

Naturally, however, there was a drawback to this fine plan; I realised that I hadn't recorded all the exciting things that have happened to me this past week for posterity, for the grandchildren that I would surely have had if only I'd had children, for the legions of readers, if only there weren't more of them when I didn't blog than when I did ... anyway, this week:

First the 100 mph winds off The Needles. Pah! That didn't stop me hanging out a load of washing. But since there is nothing between our house and The Needles except one forlorn coastguard house and miles of flat countryside, if anyone finds my stripey tea-towels, I'd appreciate their return. And, not content with my tea-towels, the wind tried to snatch the garden benches. One, a Victorian-style metal thing that is heavier than me was flung 2 metres down the hill. Thank God, I held on firmly to the washing line, is what I say.

Naturally, this was the week that we chose to have a chimney lining installed. The Chimney Man was coolness personified - he was perfectly willing to climb up a ladder IF the wind dropped below 60 mph. Alas, his wife and I were in perfect agreement - go up that ladder and you die, we chorused, like a Greek tragedy. So, no fire until the weekend, though he came back yesterday and finished the job when the wind was a mere 46 mph.

But as the wind was thwarted of attempts to fling him from his ladder, it evidently decided to shove me down the stairs; which is bad timing, because I'd finished my indoor jobs of curtain-making and lunch for 12 people planning, and need to get out there and plant an orchard. The orchard I've always dreamed of having, though I hadn't imagined it being located on a windy hill.

But thanks to a swollen ankle and the neighbour who has just told me that adders live on the hill and used to enter the back room of the house when the last but one owners lived here, I don't want to go outdoors ever again.

So it looks like I'll just be left with blogging. Except I've just signed up for an art course. And I start theatre duty next week. And ... and ... and ...

Another of those amazing days when the intensity and quality of light on the island makes colours so vivid; bright blue sea, dazzling white chalk cliffs, emerald-green emerging barley and fresh grass, golden-brown bracken and inky purple clouds.

I found myself wondering, on the dog walk this morning, why rain isn't purple or grey or black, given the colour of rain clouds. But I didn't have to ponder for very long why the puddles were golden - the cattle were watching out for the approach of the tractor, loaded with a giant hay bale. They started mooing loudly, Dog panicked and tried to bolt, dragging me through the puddles in the tracks left by the tractor, then compounded her crime by lunging at a black lab, knocking me into the fence.

"Are you all right?" asked its owner, belatedly, as I picked bracken out of my hair and surveyed the golden toffee splodges that had been my feet a few minutes previously.

I said I'd get back to her.

When we moved here in August, we anticipated problems with rabbits. And we were right - though our current problem isn't one we envisaged; Dog has succeeded in catching them. And when she catches them, she regards them as lunch. Or dinner. Or both.

When she caught her first one, we didn't have the heart to take it from her because it seemed such a miracle. A year ago, she had a stroke, then four months ago she was diagnosed with a ruptured ligament in her knee and partial blindness and deafness. So when she stumbled over the rabbit crouching in a furrow beside a field of emerging barley, we could only watch in amazement as she set off in hot pursuit.

The rabbit tried to double back when it reached the middle of the field, so Dog managed to grab it. But the rabbit set off again, with Dog still in pursuit. This went on for a couple of minutes, with both of them getting slower and slower as though their clockwork mechanisms were winding down. When Dog caught it, she stood there so shattered we thought we'd have to carry her home. But when we approached her (or her rabbit) she rallied and set off home ahead of us at a determined trot. By the time we got home, she had half eaten it.

But that wasn't enough. She then managed to catch a second one. And ate that too. Then lay comatose, happily burping (and worse) for 24 nearly hours, because her belly was so full. Yet, she still wanted to have her dog biscuit dinner and our left-overs, so clearly a full stomach isn't a message to dogs to stop eating.

So now we have a dilemma. Do we let her wander off and hunt and eat to her heart's content? On the one hand, this would help keep the rabbit population down. On the other hand, our central heating bill would go up as we would be forced to live with the doors and windows permanently open. Or do we confine her to barracks and live out the rest of her life on a dreary, but unsmelly, diet of dog biscuits, whilst the bunnies continue to play havoc with the garden.

Oh, decisions, decisions

Two people. One house.

One downstairs, working with his laptop; the other upstairs, playing on her computer.

Both disturbed by the radio being suddenly switched on and loud news flooding the house;

Both slammed doors to respective rooms with irritated sighs and mutterings about their spouse's deafness;

Both lose it and rush out of room, colliding on stairs, to accuse the other of being 'bleeding deaf';

Both deny listening to the radio;

Both peer cautiously into bedroom and behold radio alarm belting out the news!

And the weird thing is ... it is set to operate as an alarm only, not a radio.

Gulp ... not The Creatures Who Live In The Loft up to new tricks?

I remember when I was a kid that time mattered. Really mattered.

"Hurry up and eat your dinner" meant "Time you cleared off to bed"

Which meant stretching out time to infinite proportions. Bet none of you could have beaten me in the challenge to delay dinner by dissecting peas with Heart Consultant precision, so that they could be eaten an eighth at a time.

Anyway, this morning I had to resort to such time-stretching tactics again. Despite entreaties to 'hurry or you'll be late' I manage to delay coming downstairs until my tea was just the right temperature and the OH had finished his toast and was thus free to make mine.

Because this morning was check-up day and I was full of worry about flossed teeth and what to wear for a physio appointment.

First the dentist, where despite my worries and memories of the volume of sweets I had eaten recently, the magic words 'no problems and see you in six months' saw me in and out of the door in ten minutes flat.

Then the physio to find out what the problem is with my left knee and the right-hand side of my back - and instead of being told it was age and I couldn't expect much else, I heard the magic words "we can repair you" and "my, aren't you flexible".

And so I'm home, celebrating with a Chelsea Bun and coffee, and the only worry I now still have is whether I was wearing the right sort of pants.

... but tornadoes do. And the rain in Spain falls mainly on the Isle of Wight. At least, I think I'm still on the Isle of Wight. I could be mistaken and be on a trans-Atlantic liner battling through the waves instead, such is the ferocity of the sheets of rain lashing the window. No. Thought not. Definitely still on the Isle of Wight. Not a cocktail waiter in sight and the sea has merged with the grey sky.

Anyway, just the thing to get me in the mood to make a draught excluder for the back door, I thought, flushed with the success of a hop pillow that may or may not do its job.

But I want a dog, not a snake. And I can't find a pattern. So I've drawn one. And it looks like a rabbit's head stuck on a snake's body with a shark's fin on its back. And it's cross-eyed.

I keep telling myself to get a life - it doesn't matter what it looks like as long as it excludes the draught.

But it does .... so there goes my afternoon.

I can't seem to find the clicky tabs that lead you to The Buzz, Featured Blogs, Latest Posts and Something Else That I've Forgotten (I Think).

Is it me/my computer?

Or have they been given a terminal squirt of virtual fly spray?

When I was a kid, my mate and I were convinced that the old couple at the end of the road were spies (we were addicted to Enid Blyton's Secret Seven and Famous Five Books) or nosy neighbours (we had indiscreet parents). The sole grounds for our suspicions (other than their kindly (but to us, sinister) greetings and enquiries about our well-being and activities) was that they had a pair of binoculars by their backdoor.

We often saw these binoculars because they also had a bowl of sweets for the children who held them in such low esteem, and we were quick to think of ingenious ways to knock on the door in the hope of getting a sweet.

Now I realise that I am A Nosy Neighbour myself.

For I have a pair of binoculars by my desk. And I whip them out at the slightest movement, despite the lack of neighbours in my line of vision. And thus I have been rewarded today by a gang of partridges scuttling across the field; and a brown blob on a telephone wire that miraculously turned into a buzzard doing a clever trapeze act in the gale.

But should anyone think of lobbing a ball into the garden and knocking on the door - don't bother. I've eaten the last Fizzy Fish.

A month or so ago, a friend told me that she had picked some wild hops, dried them and made a pillow with them as a cure for insomnia.

So being unable to resist being a copycat, I did the same. Mainly because I just loved the garlands or bines. But I couldn't leave them festooned across the potting bench forever, so I got my sewing box out. Here it is, ready for bed.

I'll let you know how ...... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

For the last couple of months, I've been spending a couple of evenings per week in the arms of another man; cuddling up on a sofa, kissing noisily and having regular confrontations with his ex-girlfriend.

It's been two months of dizzying excitement; intense emotional highs when the course of love ran smooth and we envisaged a life of luxury together on the proceeds of his world-famous works of art. Of course there were occasional lows - how could there not be when you are skulking around in the dark - when we've argued and I threw things at him, only to miss and hit someone else. And uncomfortable moments when my father disapproved and said so plainly. And the even more nerve-wracking occasion when my husband was observing us.

Now it's all over. I've put my wedding ring back on and am trying to re-adjust to my old life.

But I long for the next time; the adrenaline rush is completely addictive.