bunn

I feel I've done a bunch of things and already forgotten many of them, so here's a disordered list of things before they fall out of my head entirely

Went to the opening of a new tiny games cafe in town. A nice space and lovely people, I hope they make a success of it, there are SO many empty shops. The name 'Stormborn Games' along with the red lightning on black is a bold branding choice, but perhaps Warhammer teens will consider it pleasingly edgy.

Went for a swim in the glorious sunshine off our little beach- the first this year with no gloves. Thought that was a mistake to start with, but my hands adjusted OK though I'm pretty sure the water can't have been more than 8 degrees, it makes a huge difference to have no wind and the sun shining. Bit weird for April in Wales, but I'm resolved to enjoy it.

Still struggling with very annoying eczema. It started with a bunch of horsefly bites last year, and just will. not. quit. Currently covering myself practically hourly in oat based lotions after another run of steroids and trying very hard not to scratch. I did take several months off swimming, thinking that was making it worse, or at least an infection risk - but if anything the cold salty water seems to make my skin happier, so I might as well enjoy the swims.

Theo Hound finished his scentwork course on Saturday morning.
He is pretty good at finding the things we've been working on finding (we started with Kong dog toys, and worked from whole toys, to finding chunks of Kong in a magnetic tin, to tiny slivers of Kong in a vial.) I am less skilled at directing and rewarding him than he is at finding things.

There were only two dogs left at the end of the course (mystified by dropping out of a course you've paid for up front, which conflicts with ALL my instincts, but hey.) The other dog that stuck it to the end was Bertie the cockerpoo. They spent a reasonably amount of the last two sessions play-chasing, wrestling and growling loudly, and both very much enjoying it.

Went down to visit my mother in Devon, where we visited Rosemoor RHS garden to see the spring flowers (mostly seas of daffodils but also a mysterious, beautiful pale blue fluffy squill for which we could find no ID, and therefore suspect someone at Rosemoor has decided is Undesirable), and went to Wembury beach, where the sun shone and we had a delightful picnic. The steps down to the beach were steeper and more irregular than I remembered, but Mum made it down them - fortunately there is a level walk back up from the beach into the village, so we did that rather than try to clamber back up the steps then I left her by the road admiring the view while I walked back to collect the car. Saw my first Peacock butterfly of the year on the way.

I have more or less decided that adopting more dogs when I'm travelling so regularly to Devon wouldn't be the wisest move. Theo is great in the car, can be left for a few hours, and can go pretty much anywhere - pubs, cafes, motorway services, around Pudding my Mum's cat - but it's not reasonable to expect that from another rescue dog, at least not immediately. I am still in a number of dog rescue Facebook groups, so I keep seeing so many hopeful appeals for home for delightful dogs: the pandemic adoption wave is over, and homes are once again hard to find. But you can't adopt ALL the dogs...

None the less, I keep looking mournfully at the local greyhound rescues. I would love to have another ex-racer around and I think Theo would enjoy the company too. Maybe in the autumn...

I'm reading my way through the Laundry Files books by Charles Stross - British technospy fiction spiced with horrifying tentacular Things From The Beyond. They are pacy, fun and don't take themselves seriously. I'm surprised that I'm enjoying reading so many words in present tense: normally I have a definite preference for past tense for novels. But here it works. Had never previously come across the phrase 'hairy eyeball' and don't like it. :-D

Brief visit to Devon to see my mother.

( Read more... )Oh, and I completed my founding of the Shire story: There and Back Again (to Norbury of the Kings)

We whizzed down briefly to Devon before Christmas to see my mother, Pp's goddaughter and her parents and distribute presents.

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My Sunday drive down to Devon went very smoothly. Empty, dark and rainy roads. Theo slept happily all the way, having had a good run on a wet beach before we set off.

On Monday, we went and had a rummage in the Luckett woods, where I had cause to remember just how many foxes and deer there are in these woods, something that my memory had previously managed to optimistically dull.

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First, the most important news!  Our little grey cat Fankil went missing back in April.  Now we have him back! 
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Two weeks ago, I saw on a lost pet group on Facebook a post about a grey cat that had been haunting the workshop of a holiday complex about ten miles away. He had been caught and brought to the local animal rescue, which had pronounced him un-microchipped and feral. Fankil was microchipped, and not at all feral but microchips do fail, and he had been missing for many months, so we arranged to go and see the found cat anyway. 
When we got there, the cat was in a pen with an enclosed kennel bit, jammed behind the bed. He peed himself in terror when the door opened and growled savagely at us. We thought surely this isn't our cat.  His ears looked wrong, his eyes were a bit too yellow and we couldn't see the white hairs on his chest, and his feet were not plain purple but dotted with pink.  He was the right size, colour and sex, but ten miles is a long walk for a cat. 
But we went and sat with him for a bit, and he really warmed up to Pp — way more than he had to the rescue volunteer who had trapped him, or the guy who found him in the workshop and had been feeding him for weeks.  It was hard to tell, but it really seemed like this cat knew Pp.  And the rescue was very clear that with his behaviour, nobody else was likely to take this terrified stinky skinny cat home. 
So we agreed to take him home for a few days.  Worst case scenario: free cat! 
 
But I really wasn't sure he was our cat, until Theo wandered up, sniffed and totally ignored him.  Theo is pretty excitable around strange cats, and it was clear that he didn't consider this cat to fall into that group. 
Since then, the cat has eaten a number of huge meals, has purred hugely, has come over for strokes and cuddles, and in fact has absolutely not behaved in any way like a scared feral cat, or even a cat in a new home.  He behaves like a cat that IS home, and even his ears have changed shape now he's not trying to pretend he's invisible.  And he DOES have a few white hairs on his chest.  We just couldn't see them properly in the poor light.  I haven't yet tried properly checking his feet, but I suspect the pink speckles might be scar tissue from the long walk.  
We have him back! 

What else happened?  Oh yes, Christmas.  We went down to stay with my mother for a few days.  She had a cold (had tested negative for Covid a couple times before we went down and the cold was improving)  so decided to mask up to contain the sniffles. 
I got Pp a roman-style gladius as a present (I suspect the beautiful damascus steel leaf-shaped blade is not very authentic but it is very pretty).  He was pleased, and importantly, nobody has yet been slain. 
Those socks are on the radiator because we took the hounds out over Dartmoor on Christmas morning and it absolutely POURED on us and we became very very wet . It then continued to pour all day. Possibly wettest Christmas in years?
This is a postcard that my Mum received recently, via an ex-neighbour in Swansea.  We moved away from Swansea when I was 13 — and the postcard wasn't even sent to Swansea.  It was sent from London to my father at an address in Birkenhead, where they lived, I think, before they moved to Leicester, which is where they lived before Swansea. 
It's post-marked 1966!  I am torn between being amazed that it finally reached my Mum at all, and being amazed that it took so long to get there.  Who 'Jackie' was has been lost in the mists of time. 
Back to Pembrokeshire, and the hounds and the Christmas tree.  I am thinking I may not make a Christmas decoration this year.  I can't remember what I did with last year's tree, or whether I kept a bit to carve.  I might have to start over with a chunk of this tree next year. 
Random photo of a lurcher posing on the beach after we got back. 
Oh!I forgot to say that on the way driving home from Devon on Boxing day, the exhaust fell off the Volvo.  Or, at least, it sort of fell off and was bouncing on the road as we drove, and we looked at a large Volvo stuffed with Stuff and Dogs, and concluded that our chances of getting all that rescued on Boxing Day were slim, so we turned off the motorway and found a very pot-holey lane and drove on that, feeling rather like we were in an episode of Top Gear in till the exhaust actually fell off and could be wrapped in dog towels and shoved inside the car.)
After that the drive home was Very Loud, but at least it wasn't likely to slay a following driver on the motorway, which would have been an unfestive thing to do on a Boxing Day.
On that Volvo the sunroof doesn't work, the driver's side window doesn't work, the drivers door is a different colour to the car, the passenger side has a big bash in it, the back bumper is semi-detached from the exhaust pothole operation, and the aircon needs regassing. And we bought it as an emergency replacement for 1500 quid about five years ago, hoping it would last a year. So I feel the moment has probably come to replace it. I just can't decide yet with what. 

Excuse me, I am trying to add a cut but struggling.

Having realised that at some point we are probably not going to be up to lugging piles of books up and down stairs, we are futureproofing and getting a lift. But I felt that probably Theo would be very enthusiastic about Helping With The Lift, and that this might not be the fastest way for the work to get done, so I collected the hounds and invited myself to visit my mother for a week.

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Seems ages since I posted photos of just randomly wandering about, so here are a couple of photos of my walk along the Tavistock Canal. It's an astonishingly shallow canal nowadays, only about 2-3 inches deep, and I think this bridge and gate is more decorative than functional. It's a pleasant walk, though, and you can park by the pet shop which is much appreciated by Theo. He likes both the dried sausages, and the chance to go around saying hello to the staff.

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We went to town for the first time since the Before Times, wandered around the park with the hounds, then went and found a cafe that was doing socially-distanced takeaway-with-tables. Felt slightly guilty afterwards because it seemed so wasteful to have all those bags and boxes for one meal. It was all paper / compostibles, though the environmental impact of making & transporting all that card & paper must be significant. The hounds had a sausage each, which pleased them greatly, and it was so warm that even though it drizzled, even Rosie didn't seem to mind.

The car park was nearly empty, and the park and footpaths quiet for a Saturday. Many of the shops were open, but only the food shops seemed to have many people around them. I had to queue for a while for the green-grocer, since only two people in at a time.

Theo found the excursion madly exciting and yanked Pp all over the place, woozeling loudly. He really needs more practice in busier places, seeing more people and dogs, the months of walking in quiet spots have not been ideal. Still, as long as there's no return of the plague, we can deal with that.

Went to the cheese shop and the greengrocer, dressed like bandits with scarves over our faces (still haven't done anything about masks, but scarves are acceptable, apparently.) None of the staff in the shops were masked-up, though the lady at the garage did when I stopped for petrol.

Oh, my new-old Ebay camera came! VERY exciting.

Wow, my car, my camera, my phone and my laptop are all currently in a state of entirely not-broken*! Pity the oven, the microwave and the extractor fan are all currently knackered. We'll get to them eventually.

In other news, I have now re-painted the bathroom, and the front door is no longer chipped-red, but a brilliant bright blue.

*well, nearly. The car check engine light is on, but it's been on for ages, I'm nearly sure that whatever it's complaining about isn't serious.

Ulmo, Lord of Waters, with dolphins, an orca (not an orc) a Horn, and a little ship for a hat.

Yesterday we had a lazy outdoor lunch, and I drew/painted this copper beech tree from life. Not sure about the figures, but then I was drawing in intervals between absorbing a large slice of cake.

Today I did a long walk through pine woods with Rosie Roo: a new walk, from Scrubtor, which is Across the Tamar. The scent of the pine trees in the sunlight was truly beautiful: richer than the scent often is later in the year, with a sort of roundness to it that reminded me of ripe blackberries: I think that may have been the smell of the wet soil drying out, since we have had a good deal of rain.

I met these two yesterday. Their feud was so fierce that they barely spared me a glance. Tragically, the social pressure of the impatient white car in the distance prevented me from getting a picture of them furiously duelling in mid-air right in front of me, because I had to put the camera down and look for a layby to reverse into. They broke it off just barely in time that the impatient white car failed to hit them, which shows that pheasants are daft, but not quite that daft.

This time, a ghostly barge-horse and bargeman.

They are walking along the Tavistock Canal, under the railway viaduct. I walked this way in early spring a couple of years ago and tried to take a picture of the white wood-anemones and yellow celandine flowers along the banks, but they didn't really show up at all in the photo, so I thought I'd try painting them. Then I added a pair of ghosts, because, as my art class says 'you always put in something weird, what is it this time???'

The canal was built in the early 19th century, to carry goods, and particularly the products of the mines, down to the Tamar River and on to Plymouth. As so often with mining projects, it ran into difficulty at the point where the builders had to drill a tunnel through some unexpectedly hard rock, and by the time the tunnel was completed, the price of the copper that it was designed to carry was already falling. It was built to have an unusually high flow rate, the idea being that this could power water wheels used by industry along the canal, creating further products for the canal-boats to carry, and also power the inclined plane rail to transport goods from the canal down to the river 72 feet below it.

The canal is still not just decorative even now. It powers a hydro-electric power station, and has done with quiet efficiency since 1933.

The railway that runs over the viaduct above was completed in 1859, and quickly killed off the canal as a working waterway. Now the railway is gone too.

I took my Scottish scene along to art class, because something about the composition bugged me and I couldn't quite work out what it was.

Colin the Art suggested moving the figures left and making them slightly larger, so that they would be outlined against the and the pier would draw the attention along to the skyline. And also that the figures should be wearing brown, not black, because that would 'bring them forward'. So I did that:
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On Wednesday I went out to lunch with my Mum, and we found a tunnel we had never visited before, which is odd, because it runs very nearly under one of our favorite cafes. It was originally built by Brunel as a railway tunnel and opened in 1859, and that's approaching the height of the mining boom, so I'm going to tag this as 'mining' on the grounds that no doubt it was the mines that made a railway up to Tavistock seem a good idea.

No railway to Tavistock any more though, so it has been left to moss, stalactites, and cyclists and walkers on the new Drake's Trail which runs into Plymouth along the old railway route. When you stand at one end, the other end seems Very Far Away. There's a good echo, too.

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We have adopted our third cat! After extremely long negotiations, she has been named Nenya. Fankil, obviously, hissed at her, despite their closeness last time they saw each other... Cats! She has retreated under the sofa for now, but she does seem like a friendly and confident girl. She's met Rosie, who behaved impeccably, and Gothmog, who was a little alarmed, but not for long.

Elizabeth the Pink Elephant has returned!

Facebook post

The Pink Elephant of Hatherleigh has been stolen!

I am torn between 'honestly, that really sucks, how mean', guilty amusement and overwhelming bafflement at how someone steals a life-size pink elephant, and what on earth they plan to do with it.

Now, I thought this was just another mine when I came across it the other day near West Down on the river Tavy. It looks like an adit to me, though it seemed a bit odd that there was no fencing and no grill to stop unwary tourists wandering into it. (It's quite big enough to get inside, Pp almost did, as he was wearing wellies & it was a wet day he ventured in to take the photos.)

But I just looked it up on the Heritage Gateway*, and there's no mine or adit marked there.

There are a few mines a short distance away: Wheal Bedford, a nineteenth-century coppermine, Tavy Consols, across the river, the Lady Bertha Mine, Walkham United mine, and the closest, the excellently named 'Virtuous Lady Mine' apparently named in honour of Elizabeth I, which was worked from 1588 to 1807. It reopened in the 1830s before finally closing in the 1870s, and was apparently 'once famed for the siderite crystals with curved faces.' I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds brilliant.

So, possibly this is one of the undocumented adits, or possibly it's not an adit at all but some other... thing.

*I'm a bit worried about Heritage Gateway. They have so much brilliant data in there, and it must have been a huge faff to assemble, but the interface is looking very aged now, the maps are still in beta and don't work with https... I do hope it won't just fall off the web one day, that would be a great waste of so much carefully-compiled information.

Today my mother needed some help getting Christmas decorations out of the space above her garage, so I wandered out to Dartmoor to walk Rosie. It was a beautiful day as I walked up Gallows Hill (so called, I'm told, because there was a gallows on it. I haven't researched this, I don't know if it's true. )

Then I looked up ahead, and THIS was coming towards me over the hilltop...

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Every year, Plymouth hosts the British Fireworks Championship, in which six professional firework companies compete over two days. You can go and watch for free from lots of places all around the city : a couple of times, Pp and I have sat on Plymouth Hoe to watch, which gives a pretty good view. But from the Hoe, you can't help noticing that the best vantage point of all for seeing the fireworks is from a boat on the waters of Plymouth Sound... So this year we arranged to do that. It sounded like a great idea, up to a few days beforehand, when the weather forecast for that day went to 'rain, possibly thunderstorms'.

But how wrong could it go, right?( Read more... )

The Man Engine is a monstrous Cornish Miner, created in puppet form, and riding like some vast god-figure on the back of a monstrous Volvo lorry. We went to see him unveiled in Tavistock a few weeks ago, at the start of his trek westward through Cornwall. I just unearthed some photos. We took the hounds with us: I might not have done that if I had realised how busy it would be, but Brythen feels quite safe when he has Pp to lean on, and Rosie seems untroubled by crowds (so strange. This is the dog that was terrified of a falling pencil on the other side of the room).

( Waiting for the Man Engine )

To get the Man Engine to stand up, you are supposed to sing to him : Sten Sten Sten! which is Cornish for tin, and there was quite a long song in Cornish to go with it. But this was in Tavistock, and while Tavistock is certainly the most easterly of the Mining World Heritage site, it is also quite undeniably just over the border in Devon. Nobody speaks Cornish! Some people sang (I think the town council had arranged a choir) but most of the surprisingly-huge crowd just watched, while the little orange guy you can see below told us partially-audible tales of mining past, then the choir sang and the Man Engine stood up!
( .... And here he is! )

I just randomly inflicted a video of April and June the Devon Ladies on

topum and then it occurred to me that possibly, the fame of April and June might not have spread to all corners of my LJ friends list, and therefore I should inflict them on the rest of you too. So here they are. Topum's idea of turning on the automatic captioning on this video made me laugh, although I'm impressed that the autocaption did at least guess the right language....

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bunn

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Page generated Jun. 15th, 2025 10:13 am

Entries tagged with devon

Another Walrus-post (of many things)

To Devon & back

So that was 2024

Trip to Devon

The cat came back! And other news

To Devon and back

Tavistock Wanderings

A Brief Excursion.

This week in art class...

Duelling pheasants

Rain on Dartmoor

I paint more ghosts

Repaint, A Large Hole, A Cat.

Important Pink Elephant Update

Sad news

Mystery mine of (last) week. Or possibly just a very large hole.

Dartmoor wanderings

Fireworks!

We went to See the Man Engine

April and June

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May 2025

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