Fresh air

I’ve known for a very long time that being out in the fresh air is the best thing for you – it’s good for your physical health and your mental health, you meet people to say hello to, see things outside your own four walls – fresh air really is magic.  Having said that, on those days of endless rain it can sometimes feel like too much of an effort to drag yourself away from whatever you’re doing to experience the weather … but this week, it was easy!

Oh, look at the sky!

I think I say, “Look at that sky!” quite a lot in my blog posts, but as we seem to go for days with nothing but grey clouds sometimes, I get a bit overexcited when it turns blue!

It’s so lovely to see everywhere springing into life – there’s a fuzz of green wherever you walk; there are early crops in the farmers’ fields (the oilseed rape is flowering, vast yellow swathes of it across the landscape around Winwick), the bumble bees have come out of hibernation and have started buzzing around the borders, and we’re waking to the sound of birdsong which we missed all over the winter.

I saw my first bluebells this week when we were out.  I couldn’t actually get close to the blue ones, so here are some pink ones … I am sure that it won’t be long before I’m showing you blue flowers too!

On one of the walks that the dog and I did this week around a familiar path (which, strangely, felt unfamiliar because the shadows were on the other side as we walked later in the day), we passed an apple tree that was bursting with blossom.  This tree was out in a field and that always surprises me as I expect fruit trees to be cultivated in gardens or orchards.

The blossom was really low to the ground which made me wonder how many apples would manage to grow to a decent size without being knocked off – I’ll have to go back later in the year to see!

I also took this photo of one of the dog’s favourite ponds (oh, he does love a pond!) because it makes me laugh every time we go past it.  Yes, it has got an orange tinge to it.  Yes, you can see muddy trails blooming across the water as the dog walks through it.  Yes, it is stinky (and so is my car) … but the dog loves it so much!  His joy at seeing it makes me smile every time, even though I know I’m going to regret it on the drive home 🙂

I went up to see my friend Lucy in Skipton this week.  It’s been a while since I’ve had photos to show you from my visits to Skipton, mostly because over the winter we’ve sat chatting in coffee shops rather than going out and about anywhere.  The closest “out and about” for us once I get over to Skipton is Bolton Abbey – there had been a few incidents on the motorways on the way so I was later getting there than I’d expected and I was really ready to get out of the car and stretch my legs.  If you’re a regular reader of Lucy’s blog, you’ll know that she’s got worries about her Dad’s health so she was also glad to get outside into the sunshine for a few hours.

We did a loop that took us up high through the trees to look down on the River Wharfe …

There was a bench at this viewpoint and we sat for a while looking at the river.  Lucy had been there with her husband a few days earlier and said the water level had dropped considerably since then – funny how a few days can make such a difference to what you see.

From that high point, the path drops back down through the trees towards the ruins of Bolton Abbey and there’s a point where it’s beautifully framed by the trees …

It doesn’t look particularly sunny in these photos but the sun was in and out of the clouds which were scudding past at high speed as the wind had got up. The path we took went up this side of the Abbey between the building and the river, and then round to the right before going down some steps and across another field where the wind made our hair stand on end so that we looked like we’d both been dragged through a hedge backwards by the time we got back to the cafe.  Ah, the magic of fresh air!

Before we did that, though, we sat on the pebbly river beach – you can see it in front of the abbey next to the grass – listening to the water rippling past and watching the ducks.  The ducks aren’t shy at all; Lucy said they have often sat here and the ducks will come right up to you in case you need any help with any sandwiches you might be eating (I wonder if they’re related to my dog, he likes to do that too!) and sure enough, it wasn’t long before we had a visitor.

Mallards are very handsome ducks, particularly Mr Mallards who have beautiful shiny greeny-purple heads.  I like the way they have the little curly feathers on their tails, too.

We didn’t have any sandwiches so Mr Mallard made a show of checking through the pebbles just in case another kind visitor had remembered to bring food for him and dropped some of it somewhere, and then he wandered off.

We wandered off too, back along the path towards the abbey and then up and round for a brew.  It was lovely, a walk and a brew, just what we needed!

 

Thank you for all your comments on last week’s post about sayings that we have inherited.  I thought it was really interesting that lots of you have heard of Betty Martin (as opposed to my late mother-in-law’s saying about Peggy Martin), and I did wonder if they were the same person … and then I ended up musing about “Peggy” being short for “Margaret” and “Betty” being short for “Elizabeth” and maybe they weren’t anything to do with each other after all.  Caz wrote in the comments that she had discovered that “Peggy Martin” is a knitting stitch which is a funny thing, isn’t it – although I turned the TV on the other day and the programme that came on was a quiz show: the question was all about knitting stitches and I hadn’t heard of any of them!

I did enjoy reading about the other sayings that you have in your families; I think we tend to think that sayings we might use regularly are something that everybody uses but in fact they are something that is very peculiar to our own (sometimes very  peculiar!) families.  We call the TV remote control the “oofer doofer”, for example – I used to think that everybody did that but apparently not! 🙂

One thing I definitely don’t have any peculiar names for is my sock knitting.  I’ve got a new sock on the needles … what’s that you say?  I’ve got lots of WIPs that I should finish off first?  I can’t hear you, I’ve still got the wind in my ears from Bolton Abbey … and it’s a sort of WIP because it’s a pair of socks for my husband using the rest of the yarn from a skein of Marine Rainbow that I bought from The Yarn Badger ages and ages ago.  Anyway, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!

This is the last pair that I made – they look completely different with the blue cuff and with the rainbow stripes starting at a different colour …

I’m thinking I might try out a Fish Lips Kiss heel with this new pair of socks.  I’ve never actually used it before – if I’ve been designing, I’ve kept to the heel flap and gusset so that anyone wanting help can use the Sockalong tutorials, and the only other time I’d use this sort of heel would be for my husband’s socks.  I’ve been quite happy with the no wrap, no gap short row heel I’ve been using for years – but I’m often telling people that it never hurts to learn a new technique so I’m going to give FLK a go!

If you’ve never heard of it before, it’s a paid-for pattern available from Ravelry which produces a heel that looks like the one in the photo above but created in a different way.  It’s a hugely popular heel style and I think it’s time I had a proper look at how it works.  I will keep you posted! 🙂

 

Before I go, a heads up about something exciting that is coming along very soon … the Winwick Mum Sockalong’s 8th birthday!  Wow, 8 years, isn’t that amazing?  It’s on 3 May so there’ll be a mid-week post that week and if you’re on the email list, you’ll be getting an email about it on the day too.There’s going to be a giveaway as always, and I’ll be asking you to count up the number of pairs of Basic 4ply Socks you’ve knitted since May last year for our annual today – we’re on 17,235 pairs of socks so far* and it will be great to see how many more pairs we can add this year.

 

OK, I think that’s all my news for this weekend so I’ll leave you to get on with yours, and hope that you have a lovely one.  See you next week! xx

 

 

*  This can only ever be an estimate based on who’s reading the blog at the time, but isn’t a fab number? 🙂