The Unscripted Carer – 11th February 2008
Spring seems to be very early and very determined this year. The last few days have been filled with glorious sunshine – and very cold nights!
Over the last 20 years we have been changing the garden to make it easier to look after, and to fetch different views of the garden to each window. As the garden is on three sides of the house we have North, South and East facing windows, and so each aspect of the garden is slightly different. We have gradually removed all the lawns, we had a number of reasons for doing this:
- It took ages to cut them, and the only time I had was at weekends, and one year we seemed to have 52 wet weekends!
- The nearby Lime trees are not conducive to a good lawn
- Almost as soon as we moved in, Nicola had problems with her knees, and was unable to help with the lawns
- Finally, I spent ages sweeping up leaves from the lawn – now I just sweep them onto the beds, and dig them in wherever possible
Over the years we have planted thousands of bulbs, nearly all have naturalised, and only a few have struggled (typically the tulips, that I adore, have struggled!), so now we have drifts of different snow drops; crocuses (crocii?); daffodils; lilies… with the colour starting about now and running through the year. We have also made the garden “wildlife friendly”, which became more and more important to Nicola as she became less mobile. Even on a bad day, she can see the birds and squirrels from the bedroom, and watch the squirrels bury monkey nuts under the eagle eye of a magpie, which unearths them as soon as the squirrel turns it back!
It was with some trepidation that we invited the Rugby Observer into our house to try and share our experience with a wider audience. We have all seen stories that are based upon “press spin”. However, we were put at our ease by a very professional reporter, who put together an article that we (myself, Nicola and the paper) all hope will help other people who find themselves where we were a few months ago – basically with no idea who to turn to!
We have already had people bumping into us and thanking us for highlighting the important role of carers, and hopefully the article will help people to contact the “right people”, bearing in mind that each carer has their own unique issues, and will need their own special “right people”.
I wonder if anyone out there can help? Walking the dogs the other night (9th) the moon looked really spectacular. There was a crescent moon, but you could see a very pale outline of the whole moon as well, and then a second crescent appeared under the whole pale moon. I think there is a special name for the moon (harvest moon? hunter’s moon?) but I can’t find out – any ideas? If you know, please let me know via the blog.
Bye for now
