Update - very boring really. Busy but boring.

got a note from a friend on the west coast (I suppose I have to specify now; I don't mean Wales. I meant BC) asking me if I was still alive. Well, anyone reading Orwell's Picnic can see that I've not been gored by a bull or arrested and thrown into a Labour Party re-education camp yet, but I can see it's time for an update.

So, with apologies to Vic, I'm putting most of my email to her up here for the rest of y'all. As ye can see, the news is mostly pretty good. I continue to accumulate pictures but for reasons given below, am not yet ready to post them. There will be more...some day soon.


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I'm looking into a second job so I can continue to pay the rent on my cottage.

I spent the first half of the day there today, just working on the computer and pushing bigger and bigger bits of oak tree into the fire and ladling more and more coal until I had a blast furnace in the living room mean enough to make horseshoes. Took a picture of my feet up on the grate melting my shoes in front of the fire.

The heating system works just great.

The British Telecom guy came today, "between eight and one". Actually, by some miracle, he actually showed up at nine. He pulled a little box out of his kit and clipped it to the phone line. He waved a magic box over it a couple of times and it made a little noise. He went outside for five minutes and came back, plugged in my phone. Tested it with his industrial cell phone, and said, there ya go.

For this service, I will be charged 125 pounds. In Canadian, that's roughly the equivalent of a month's rent. Work is going to be helping me with more than half of it though, so I won't have to sell one of my cousins to pay for it.

Now I have to wait 48 hours before "making a request for a broadband order". (Sort of like waiting 24 hours to wash your hair after a perm? Will the phone line not "take" if I try earlier?). That will take a minimum of five working days. But the last time we tried this, we were told it would take six weeks because this village doesn't have the right kind of internet mojo boxes or squirrels or something.

I'm in blogging withdrawl agony. The only thing keeping me going is the vague hope that it will be over soon, much like the Christian martyrs of old waiting for the fire to die down and go to heaven. But, as C.S. Lewis said, all times are soon to Aslan.

I've had many adventures, including the one with the bull.

I was menaced by a bull, did I mention? While I was out collecting rosehips. It was very scary and cool. They say there aren't any thugs in the country, but they never met this bull.

All my stuff arrived in good order, and there was not a single hitch. We just got in the van and drove to Manchester and picked it up. (Can't find my gloves though and the weather has just gone chilly in the last couple of days.) And they didn't break so much as a single tea cup.

We spent a couple of hours one day and put my bike back together. Uncle Mike said that when he was young, the bomb sites in Manchester were used as dumps and there were always bike bits in them. He said he learned to repair bikes by going around and collecting the bits and building bikes. We reassembled the gear shift and only had two washers left over! An engineering triumph!

I took a ride around the village one night after finishing work. Beautiful. Clean, clear air, smelling of burning leaves, bright bright moon and totally still. The country lanes would be absolutely black without the moonlight; I'm sure I wouldn't be able to ride on them on a dark night. I'm constantly worried that we're going to be killed on the very narrow lanes because you can't see more than a few yards ahead, even in daylight, because of the hedgerows and the extreme windeyness with a lot of very sharp blind corners. VERY large tractors take up the entire lane.

Nothing whatever like Toronto, and the loud bangs you hear are never never gunshots. Just fireworks. The other night, I was told that there is "quite a rising rate of crime in the village." I smiled but didn't say anything about the prostitute who used to work out of the bus shelter across from my bedroom window, the condoms and spent heroin needles littering the sidewalks, the murders, the open drug dealing on the streets, the shootings... Just smiled.

There are actually a few shops in the village. There's the post office, the butcher, the greengrocer/gift shop, the vet's, the newsagents, three pubs, two hairdressers, one cafe that's open in the mornings, the Indian restaurant and a posh thing that used to be a pub but is now "fine dining." That's it. There are a few offices of various things, like the tree-related thing that is somehow connected with the National Trust...I dunno. There are about a thousand people and no one knows how old the village is. There is a natural spring here, and there is evidence that there has been a parish church here since about the fifth century. Some Roman coins were found once when someone was digging out a cellar. The local castle, Beeston, was first fortified in the bronze age. the current Beeston castle ruins date to the 13th century. So it's anyone's guess.

The cottage is coming along. Mike and I are rebuilding the kitchen (he's rebuilding, and I'm mostly handing him nails and holding the end of the tape measure, but I did do a bit on my own yesterday afternoon.) Tonight, he is going over to measure it so we know how many tiles to buy. The landlady, is paying to have the kitchen redone. Apart from that, I'm getting the false ceiling down and going to expose and repaint the beams and re-finish the sawn pine plank floors upstairs. I spent about a week chipping hundred year-old tar paper and six layers of linoleum off the stone tiles on the sitting room floor. The tiles are beautiful, fired from a mixture of the local red sandstone and flint. They have to be at least 150 years old. I was on my knees with a steel scraper, a wire brush, a hammer and chisel and a tin of industrial solvent. But it was worth it.

I have magically acquired almost a house full of stuff mostly donated from the fam, including a pair of big upholstered armchairs and a matching two-seater settee, a "welsh dresser" for china and assorted kitchen gear and an antique drop-leaf table.

I bought some nice rose curtains at the village jumble sale and a low pine coffee table that I'm going to make into a bench for under the window. We got an antique cast iron four-poster bed with brass knobs from the Buy n' Sell for 50 pounds. No mattress though, and it turns out that a Victorian single bed is ten inches wider than a modern single, so we are going to have a bit of trouble finding one to fit. The Poor Clare nuns in Wales I went to visit gave me a pile of stuff too, including a nice little antique chest of drawers and a toaster. The landlady even chipped in and left an electric kettle for me the other day. She's promised to bring round a load of firewood from her estate.

I am impressed with how nice everyone is. and what good manners people have, even in Chester. It is not at all like Tranna, and I would say even better than Halifax. I'm training myself to go around smiling and saying hello and good morning to everyone I meet in the village and in town. Working hard at losing that old Canadian/Big City standoffishness, which would not go down well in a tiny rural village. Results thus far have been quite positive.

It is so frustrating not to be able to post my pictures, of which I have a very large number. I've been working on photo essays of the various things I've seen. Lots and lots of canals. I've really fallen for the canals.

Everywhere I've gone, I've been giving imaginary tours to my friends. I keep looking at things, like the Roman amphitheatre and the 11th century churches and the canals and thinking, "oooo Vicky will love that!" "I must remember to show Ann that."

I took the bus into Chester the other day and it was a double-decker. I sat on the top and it was like riding on the mast of a ship in high sea! I had to hang on very tightly. I loved it but I understood by the end of it why the little old ladies always sit downstairs. And even with the incredible windeyness and narrrowness of the lanes, the bus drivers really careen around the place at top speed. As if the sheep are going to be impressed,. Anyway, it was amazing fun and a really cheap thrill at a paltry three pounds 40 return.

You are not going to believe the cottage though. The entire thing looks like it was built for hobbits. The doorway to the kitchen is probably only five feet three inches high; doesn't quite come up to my chin. I can't get in without bending and Mike, who is fairly tall nearly doubles. In fact, all the older part of Tattenhall looks like it was built by hobbits, abandoned 2 hundred years ago, and then the humans moved in (I think the oldest cottage in the village is the half-timbered one across the street from us that has a sign on it saying "1601").

The church, Anglican of course, isn't one of ours but one of theirs built after the revolution, but only just. The original 16th century tower survives and the rest was rebuilt in the 19th century in typical Enlglish gothic style and it's beautiful. The minister is a really nice man from Zimbabwe, who was a police inspector before becoming a minister. All the best Anglicans are from Africa.

I've met and made friends with the local Traditionalist/homeschooling family and they've started taking me along to the local Latin Mass gigs and are introducing me to the local Trads. Very nice and friendly and fun.

I've been taking long walks along the hedgerows, climbing over stiles and bothering cows, as well as the tow paths for the canals. I walked ten miles to Beeston and back (got great pics!) The place is one vast supermarket, if you know what to look for. On my walk to Beeston, I found a crab apple tree and filled a bag with them. Carried them all the way back. Made rose hip syrup and crab apple jelly and am thinking of joining the Country Market Association.

Someone we know knows the local gamekeeper at the Bolesworth estate who might be looking for beaters during the shooting season. Which means free game. Pheasant and duck season next. You can join shooting clubs, but you've got to have a gun and, this being Blair's New Communist Britain, that's hard to manage. Still, people do go shooting so it has to be possible. Mike said I could have his old Norfolk jacket and I've already bought my first tweed skirt (3 pounds in a charity shop) and I got a pair of Wellies so I'm ready to stomp about and fulfill my life's ambition and become an eccentric old lady.

Got to get to work now because I'm off to London tomorrow for Important Meetings with some anti-choice extremists I know who owe me a pint.

I like London. It makes me happier than ever that I live in Cheshire.