Posted in Events, Personal life

All Change!

photo of window with teddies on the windowsill and blossom tree outside
My thoughts on lockdown – and the view from my bedroom window this morning

My column for the April 2020 issue of our community magazine, Hawkesbury Parish News, was written about a week after lockdown started and so included  my initial impressions of the positive changes it might bring to our lives.

As ever, I tried to keep my column lighthearted and upbeat. Now in the fourth week of lockdown, all that I wrote still rings true for me – although I’m not sending anything out in the post, as our precautionary self-isolation due to various health vulnerabilities in our household are precluding the short walk up to the post box at the centre of the village.

Our heroic village post office remains open, however, thanks to Dick, our selfless postmaster, as is the Hawkesbury Stores, our community village shop, aided by dozens of volunteers.

The other difference is that I gave my stash of fancy soaps and hand lotions to an appeal for toiletries for nurses in our local hospital – but the jewel-like blue of my cheap-and-cheerful Pears soap lifts my spirits every time I use it. 

Whatever is changing for you during lockdown, I send you my very best wishes.


The current restrictions, courtesy of Covid-19, are radically changing our lives. Much of these changes may linger post-virus, but, ever the optimist, I can see some good may come of it.

We will have learned to cherish luxury soap. Fancy bars that once ranked as unwanted Christmas gifts are coming into their own as we wash our hands many times a day. So much nicer than the usual squirt of washing-up liquid before I cook tea.

What’s not to love about the translucent glow of Pears’ soap?

We will have nothing but praise for delivery men, from old faithfuls like the milkman and the postman to the anonymous man in a white van. Forget the odd package or pinta left at the wrong house in the past. All will be forgiven. We’ll be happy to see a delivery man at all.

Our houses will be immaculate. With so much time at home, we’re sorting dusty shoeboxes of old photos and alphabetising our CD collections. We’re rearranging our books by author, by size, by topic or by colour – or all four, in turn. When charity shops reopen post-virus, they’ll be swamped with our discarded clutter.

interior shot of tidy walk-in larder
My larder has never been so tidy.

We’ll all have turned into vegetable gardeners. Our natural instinct to Dig for Victory is kicking in. This summer, we’ll no longer complain about a surplus of marrows. We won’t want to waste a speck of food after seeing so many empty supermarket shelves. The Hawkesbury Show 2020 will receive a record number of entries. We might even start our craft entries early, rather than finishing in a frenzy the night before Show Day.

Photo of crab apple tree in full blossom
The promise of apples to come – well, crab apples, anyway, from the most spectacular blossom tree in my back garden. (Plum and apple trees are behind it.)

The old-fashioned habit of sending letters and postcards will enjoy a lasting revival, despite the cost of postage. While the internet helps us connect with our loved ones, it’s much more special to receive a tangible show of affection from afar – well worth the price of a stamp. Bonus point: while we’re writing traditional letters and cards, we’re not frightening ourselves with misinformation online.

Photo of antique post office sign
Funnily enough, my house was once the village post office. (I found this sign in my back garden when I moved in and have since given it pride of place on my kitchen wall.)

With regard to correspondence, the soulless modern sign-offs “Kind regards” and “Best wishes”, or “Best” or even “BW” in abbreviation, will disappear. The evidence in my inbox this week suggests that in future emails and letters will end “Take care and stay well” – a sentiment sent from the sender’s heart.

And that is how I’d like to end this month’s column. Confined to my house as a vulnerable person for health reasons, I’m frustrated not to be out helping fellow villagers, as so many kind parishioners are doing now. I pledge to make up for it once I’m allowed out. You have been warned!

So for now, take care and stay well. This too will pass.

 

 


Special Offers on Escapist Reads to Lift Your Spirits

cover of Best Murder in Show
A fun story set in high summer in a classic English village
cover of Secrets at St Bride's
Mystery and mayhem in an eccentric English boarding school for girls

If you fancy a bit of escapist reading from life under lockdown, you might like to take advantage of two special offers currently running on the ebook editions of the first books in my two series of novels throughout the month of April.

 

The first in my Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries, Best Murder in Show, is currently free to download on all ebook platforms worldwide.
Click here to nab your free copy.

My first St Bride’s School story, Secrets at St Bride’s, is currently reduced to 99p in most stores, including Amazon UK, Kobo, Apple Books and Barnes and Noble. (With apologies to Amazon readers outside of the UK – this promotion is being run by Amazon and is only on my home turf!)
Click here to buy your bargain copy.

Posted in Events, Personal life, Writing

Village Show Cluedo

photo of giant vegetables next to model house
For vegetables bigger than your house, visit Hawkesbury Horticultural Show *

My column for the August 2017 edition of Hawkesbury Parish News

A few years ago, an old school friend from abroad came to visit me here in Hawkesbury and was keen to learn about village life. He took a special interest in our famous Hawkesbury Horticultural Show.

At that point, I was a member of the Show Committee, and I was responsible for producing the schedule each year. Although the next Show was some months away, I was able to show him the draft schedule, and his eyes widened at the huge range of entry classes and trophies.

photo of the 2017 schedule
Our copy of this year’s schedule, slightly dog-eared after much use

“Wow, this sounds just like the sort of thing you see in Midsomer Murders,” he enthused. (They watch a lot of British television in the Netherlands.) “Is there a prize for Best Murder in Show?”

Reluctantly I had to disappoint him, but I squirrelled away his suggestion for future use, and earlier this year I published a novel by the same name, the first in a series of classic cosy mysteries set in the fictitious village of Wendlebury Barrow.

It now occurs to me that our Horticultural Show would also make a cracking setting for a localised game of Cluedo: “Entries Secretary, in the Produce Tent, with a Prize Marrow” or “Show Chairman, in the Village Hall, with some Celery”. The possibilities are endless.

Here’s to another inspiring Show Day for us all – and may we all live to tell the tale.

*Actually, that house in the photo above is really a tea cosy – which I turned into a doorstop by stuffing it with a house brick and some of my husband’s old socks, and covering the base with a piece of his old corduroy trousers. Result: second prize in Class 471 – “a functional object made from all recycled material” 

cover of Best Murder in Showcover of Trick or Murder?
If you’d like to find out more about Best Murder in Showand its new sequel, Trick or Murder? click hereBoth are available in paperback and ebook.

Posted in Personal life

I’m Jamming

Spot the subliminal message on the discarded ice cream box behind the jar...
Spot the subliminal message on the discarded ice cream box behind the jar…

(This post was originally written for the October issue of the Hawkesbury Parish News)

No, not in the Bob Marley and the Wailers sense (much as I love them), but in terms of preserving fruit.

I hadn’t made jam for years, but when I ran out of jam on a Sunday after the village shop had closed, I decided to bite the bullet – or rather the gooseberry – not least because I still had last year’s fruit in my freezer. I’d been lapped by the seasons.

Before dusting off my old jam kettle, hanging redundant in the larder for years, I consulted my book of jam recipes. Its pages bear so many splodges that it almost counts as scratch-and-sniff. The book reminded me what a gloriously simple process jam-making is. It’s more like chemistry than cooking, and when it goes well, with the kettle full and fragrantly bubbling, it’s as exciting as discovering the secret of alchemy.

When my first batch produced the perfect set, I was glad I hadn’t forgotten how to do it. Jam-making is thus rather like riding a bicycle, only stickier.

The Joy of Jam

And what a difference there is in the taste! Home-made jam is to factory jam as swimming in the sea is to a dip in Yate pool. It’s like seeing an Old Master in a gallery rather than in a picture book, or viewing a landscape with the naked eye rather than through a camera lens. It’s a genuine, all-round sensory experience.

My first taste of this batch of gleaming red gooseberry and apple jam, a tantalising medley of colour, sharpness and sweetness, put me in mind of the moment when I got my first prescription glasses and looked out of the window at the woodland on the hill beyond the garden.

“My goodness, have those trees always had so many separate leaves?” I wondered, used to seeing just a large green blur.

My biggest problem now will be to make these jars last. After all, it’s never too early to start planning for the Hawkesbury Show…

You might enjoy some of my previous posts about the village show:

It’s Show Time!

Hawkesbury Show and Tell

East, West, Our Village Show’s Best

Posted in Family, Personal life

It’s Show Time! (Hawkesbury Horticultural Show, that is…)

This post was written for this month’s edition of the Hawkesbury Parish News, in anticipation of the Village Show at the end of this month. Looking back at the photos of our float last year, I am wishing hard that we’ll have such blue skies for this year’s show!

Photo of Pandamonium float with children dressed as pandas
Our float for last year’s Show (I was the Chinese Ambassador, Gordon was the Scottish zookeeper)

Close up of panda reading "Panda Baby Names" bookI hadn’t lived in Hawkesbury Upton very long before I realised the importance of the annual Horticultural Show in the village calendar. Since I moved here in 1991, I haven’t missed a single Show, and I always arrange my summer holidays to make sure I’m back in time to prepare for it.

I’ve put plenty of entries into the Show over the years and won a handful of prizes in categories as diverse as crochet, hen’s eggs, jam, wine and – my favourite prize of all – the oddly-shaped vegetable (sadly no longer in the schedule).

I’ve been on many floats, from Youth Club’s Global Warming in the 1990s (Arctic scene at one end, tropical island at the other) and St Trinian’s, to more recently The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe with After-School Club, and Edinburgh Zoo’s Giant Pandas with my daughter and her friends last year.

Close up of children in Pandamonium float

It’s always exciting to win a prize, even third in a category in which there are only two other entries, but you don’t need to win prizes to enjoy the Village Show. The most satisfaction comes simply from feeling like you’re part of a huge, traditional act of community.

It’s also rewarding to serve on the Committee, which I did for 13 years. I’ll never forget seeing at one meeting an elderly judge demonstrate his set of brass shallot-measuring rings, as used by his father before him. The Hawkesbury Show is living history.

But the most unexpected buzz relating to the show struck me only recently, when, at my daughter’s 11th birthday party, I was chatting to her friends’ mums in our garden. One of them, relatively new to the village, was taking photos of the children’s antics.

“You ought to enter that into the Village Show,” I remarked, admiring a particularly good one.

“Spoken like a true Hawkesbury villager!” said another mum, whose family has been in Hawkesbury for generations.

23 years after moving here, I’ve finally arrived.

Happy Show Day, everyone!

The 2014 Show will take place on Saturday 30th August. For more information, visit its website: www.hawkesburyshow.org.

Pandomonium float seen from other side showing sign saying "all the way from Edinburgh"