Tuesday 24 June 2014

Winter howls in

How beautifully blue the sky
The grass is rising very high
Continue fine I hope it may
And yet it rained but yesterday.
Tomorrow it may pour again
I hear the country wants some rain,
Yet people say, I know not why
That we shall have a warm July...

I hope I got that right...Mostly, I think.

This is not quite accurate, but it has been a very mild autumn and early winter, with warm and sunny weather. Suddenly that is over. It is cold. Snow is falling in the high parts of Australia, winds howl, trees  fall, the Yarra River in Melbourne overflowed its banks. And suddenly it is very cold. I needed two hot water bottles last night. The windows are rattling. As I sit crocheting the border of an almost completed blanket, using crab stitch, which, like the crab, goes backwards, and which makes the hand feel quite sore, I am glad of the warmth of the whole blanket.

It takes quite a long time to get all the way around the blanket, and so as not to get RSI, or to aggravate the lymphoedema, I take it slowly and carefully. It is a bit of a bore. But doing this handiwork is a way of filling the time, which, when you live alone, needs to be done from. Tuesdays are my quiet days, without any particular or regular commitments or activities.

One of the knitting group came by today to get copies of all my photos of the Knitting and Crochet group, as we like to document all the blankets and things we make, and I somehow became the general photographer. Not that I inherited my daughter's talent, alas, and the camera has been playing up. Perhaps it was the memory card, as the colours of the photos taken several weeks ago were unpleasantly washed out and insipid. So I now use a new memory card, and also the iPad, which I must say does take good photos. I think perhaps my camera is a bit sick, and I may have to get the shop to take a look at it. Perhaps I need a new one?

Last week was very busy with choir. We had several rehearsals and two performances. It all went well, and I came to appreciate the music - Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette - more than I thought I would. And last night I went to a dress rehearsal of the opera - Rigoletto - which I did enjoy, and, as it started at 6 pm, allowed me to get back home at a reasonable hour. There was no possibility of sleeping in, as across the road, where there are large numbers of expensive apartments surrounded by extensive landscaping, the men arrived early to do the pruning.

Naturally they do not use ordinary secateurs, but instead nasty petrol operated chain saw thingies, which are VERY noisy, unpleasantly so. It seems, the council tells me, that they can operate after 7 am. Well, they were still going until about 10 am, and all that unpleasant loud, unrelenting noise makes me somewhat cranky. Once they have trimmed it all in a very military precise way, then they use blowers, also very noisy, to sweep up all the prunings. Perhaps such techniques are also used to torture political prisoners?

Rigidly uniform pruning does not appeal to my aesthetic sensibilities, which are both pronounced and exaggerated (yes, I am a delicate little flower). I don't like all this hacking and pruning. Although, this very moderate climate does make things grow like billy-ho, and I do have to take the secateurs to the plants in my own tiny garden. The bay tree grows like the proverbial, as does the curry leaf tree.

Anyway, the perfectly horrid and unrelenting noise of the chain saws put me into something of a grumpy and evil mood, and thus tonight I ended my week of abstaining from wine, and have been enjoying some red wine. Ah, that's better. Back to the crab stitch. And all the bad news from far far away.

1 comment:

Haddock said...

I can imagine the irritation of the continuous noise, but trimming and pruning will help in the long run I suppose.