Cat mania feline folly

While I am in this warm and fuzzy mood I may as well wax lyrical about our beloved feline friends!
Luna the mother of Sofie, black and toffee, Myles, grey and white, and Fergus, red and white. She came to live with me as a kitten the first year I lived here and we bonded immediately on the way home in the car. The kittens were born a day after my fiftieth birthday and what a gift they were! Are! They are a lovely family. Living here altogether sharing Sheep Cottage is a privilege.
Noah bonded very closely with Sofie and she lives with him now in Hexham.
We are a family all of us and love to be together cosy, reading, napping, eating, and cuddling. They also sleep with us! Can be challenging because I wake up when there is activity around the bed.
I have never been this connected before and I love this interspecies relationship experience. So does Noah. This is the first time we have been able to live with animals, before we lived in urban settings in apartments.

Day in Hexham

The Frith Chair


Greg Bureau owner of Bouchon

Thanks to Noah I spent a lovely day and eve in Hexham our closest market town. There was a Christmas Fayre on all around the Abbey with two reindeer in a small paddock with hay on the Abbey green, lots of stalls; food stalls, craft stalls, organic meat stalls, game and wild fowl, local cheeses, chutneys galore, organic vegetables, smoked fish, olives and feta, handwoven baskets, leather goods,local pottery, you name it...
We did some shopping and got very excited about our upcoming supper of pheasant and oak smoked Scottish salmon,mmm... yummy.
Although it was pouring rain throughout people were milling about and we even saw some people we knew. That is a great thing here in the UK that weather does not really come into the picture as much of a deterrent. People still ramble the country side go out to markets and spend time in their gardens working.
I bought a green wreath for the cottage door, and I will tie a red ribbon around it to hang it up with, some tissue wrapping paper and a couple of gifts.
We went into the Abbey which was also full of stalls and a cafe! We also shared some of our favourite things there with eachother. The Frith chair for one.
Then we went home down the hill of Gilesgate, where Noah's favourite restaurant Bouchon lies, and had a lovely hot cuppa tea with Sofie back home at Noah's.
I was knitting while we watched the last episodes of Little Dorritt that I had recorded and we had such a cosy fun afternoon although we cried our eyes out
over some very sad events in the story. I felt like a real granny with Sofie on my lap and knitting away!
Then we had a most delicious supper together. Noah is a great cook he really is.
Pheasant cooked with vegetables in a Schlemmertopf, roast potatoes and I drank soy milk of all things! The salmon was out of this world! Afterwards we drank jasmine tea and talked for ages about topics like making films. He has this idea for a film he has wanted to make for a while now and is going ahead with! Power to him! We had a truely wonderful time together it was too bad I had to go back home early but the weather was getting worse with the rain turning to sleet and even snow by the time I got home.

Sancta Lucia

Every year on December 13th Sancta Lucia is celebrated in Sweden. When I was a child every girl wanted to be Lucia or at least I think they did. It was usually the tallest and the one with long hair.
I was Lucia once in the laundry room of our apartment block! A big deal for me!
They sing songs in their heavenly voices and it is all about bringing light into the darkness and to fill us with hope again.
My sister sang beautifully and she was usually in the school choir and they would be the other girls dressed in white as well walking behind the Lucia and then surrounding her when they arrived.
After we would get saffron buns, ginger snaps and hot beverages.
It brings tears to my eyes. Lucia IS Christmas to me.

More nostalgia

Scandinavians have an emotional connection to snow and the fact that it keeps on returning year after year to blanket everything in white fluffy white.
The world transforms and for a while one sees it all differently. Tree silhouettes dark against white, homes with caps and coats, and it is all soft and may be wet too and cold but soft. The edges are softened.
It is that which we connect with, the soft and the light. During the darkest months of the year the snow falls and the world becomes a lighter place.
I get excited whenever it snows and my mood lightens and I feel a child stirring within.

Advent

This time of every year I get this longing inside. With Advent, Lucia and the Solstice
I get a serious case of nostalgia.
I remember the Swedish winters of my childhood.
Making snow angels especially with the first big snowfall. Snowball lanterns with candles to light up the dark. Having hot cocoa with whipped cream and saffron buns.
Lighting the Advent candles. Opening the Advent calendar, one window each day.
Stars shining in the windows of people's homes. Candles lit in every home.
Then Lucia the big event of Dec! It is so beautiful the songs and the young women dressed in white with candles.
They really make the most of Christmas/Jul in Scandinavia. The whole month of Dec is practically filled with celebration. It is all about LIGHT and bringing it back.

Volatile times

The calm before the storm, Mumbai

Listening or looking at the news on a daily basis leaves me in a state of flux.
These are volatile times. Cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe and riots in Greece for instance.
The chaos in the world reflects the state of the planet in terms of its over all health. On pretty much every front we need to respond and change our way of life.
Change is a common denominator in the solution area. We have problems to deal with and we need to soon or it could be too late.
Change and evolution is the axiom of our existence.
I personally am confused and overwhelmed. I feel bombarded with information and not enough sense of appropriate action to take.
"Stop talking, start doing" is a motto banded about however how do we make intelligent and informed decisions in our own lives where change ultimately starts.
Trust is an important issue in this situation. Trusting the source, trusting the research, trusting the solutions offered...
The news is something that really gets me down. It is almost exclusively "bad" news.
Murder, disasters, war news, illness,...it leaves me feeling so sad.
There is "good" news out there too I know. I wish we could have time spent on the positive events that take place also. People helping each other, all the voluntary work done in the world, simple random acts of kindness, love of animals, major discoveries that can help with eco problems...
This kind of news can make us feel inspired and hopeful!
I wish for a dose of good news every day!

The colour Red

School children in Taiwan.