It’s gone cold…all of you will have noticed, I have no doubt about that. For me, I have cracked open the warm jumper cupboard but have yet to be seen in a coat. We have a wood burning stove in the kitchen and all the animals are wearing it as a scarf, apart from Dilys…this is the great advantage of being a short-legged sausage dog with a long-legged wood burning stove. She can fit underneath it! The stove is old but a really good one. If you look after it, it can stay lit for ages, chugging out a decent amount of heat day and night for weeks.

As the winter wears on and the stove has been lit for longer, Dilys’s fur goes thinner and thinner on the top of her head until she is pretty much bald. She gets hotter and hotter and with the heat the fur on her tummy wears off…mostly not a pretty sight at all. We all say that she looks a bit like a doberpig…the top half of a Doberman, the bottom half of a pig! This week you will just have to believe me on that because there will be no photos along with this newsletter…I will explain why later.

It’s been such a good year for berries, fruit and nuts in the hedgerows. The trees are fully-dressed in red berries and there are huge amounts of nuts on the hazelnut tree. I think I’ve told you before that there is an old farmer’s saying that if there are lots of berries on the trees that its going to be a cold winter. I think we are about to find that out! I always feed the birds outside the big window in my kitchen but in the winter, as well as the usual food, I bake them potatoes whenever I put the oven on and fill them with cheese and water-soaked raisins and watch the blackbirds and robins feasting on them.

This year I have to ask my son to fill the feeders for me because I asked him in the spring to put some hooks up for me for the feeders. I suppose I wasn’t specific enough…What I should have said is ‘put some hooks up so I can hang the feeders up’. He is 6 foot 5. I am not. He has now got the job of hanging the feeders up.

This week there has been lots of preparations going on. There is a Christmas tractor run at the weekend and our old tractor is being dragged into service and dressed up ready. It’s had Christmas lights, tinsel and…a new air horn! It’s been well-tested by most of our spare teenagers and I’m sure anybody in the same postcode as us is saying very rude things about us.

The thing that is worrying me about this is that this tractor run goes on for 5 hours. I’m not sure that the old boy (the tractor) still has 5 hours worth of drive in him…and some of the hills on the route are a bit steep. I’m just wondering where along the route I’m going to have to rescue my son and Mali from. At least Mali will be shut in the tractor cab…she can’t get into mischief and need a bath from there, can she?

So, no pictures this week. My chief technical advisor and printer of Blitherings, my husband Pete, has got shingles. He’s not feeling very good at all but has to go stay away from home because my eldest daughter hasn’t had chicken pox and it could be really bad for her system. So he and his dog Anya (for those of you that remember her, she’s the half-kangaroo, half-dog one) have had to go stay with relatives. The printer and I are not friends. We don’t even have any kind of mutual respect or working relationship. So you will only get this if I can persuade someone nice in Chaplaincy, who manages a better relationship with technical stuff, to print this out.

Blessings,

Elizabeth