Droplets

Chun Quoit,  West Penwith

               It has been a while since I last wrote a blog.  Social media, with its immediacy and easy accessibility, seduced me away from my happy place at the keyboard, away to the world of memes and clickbait. I made some friends and lost some too...they say 93% of communication is nonverbal; 7% being verbal, 38% vocal and 55% visual...this leaves far too much margin for error in my humble opinion.  Of course I'm still addicted to the thing and spend far too much time reading stuff in which I have no particular interest or which makes me bristle with annoyance and naturally I hope that sometimes folk find my posts amusing or informative.  I'm opinionated to the point of bigotry sometimes and find myself hopping with frustration at other people's perfectly appropriate differences...over a cup of tea or a little smackerel of something..much would be be intuited  by our body language and tone of voice....and I'd have to let them get a word in edgeways from time to time!  So let's get ourselves a cuppa and I'll rabbit on a bit about my days and ways on the edge of the land. West Penwith will feature strongly as I never leave the place if I can help it - certainly not at this time of year when the roads are troubled by people with a death wish. My gardens will come up for discussion too, the herbs and flowers, vegetables and fruit that we grow.  The moon and stars, winds and weathers and all of the beautiful and terrifying world beyond the safety of the village..they'll come in for praise and blame on my pages. And then there's the past..that long ago time,sometimes golden,often not but always flickering like an old home movie just out of reach.                 This morning I'm hiding in the spare room at the desktop, surrounded by an  assortment of random articles evacuated from the sitting room where two very nice gentlemen are pulling the hell out of our fireplace ready for a new stove.  I'm trying to be positive about this as it's actually a very good thing.  The sweep found problems in the chimney..two hundred or so years have passed since the rough old lumps of granite were  put up and the bricks at the top have begun to collapse so it has been deemed necessary to put a liner in and a multi fuel burner and to that end scaffolders descended like a hoard of Vikings yesterday and spun a steel web above my precious herbs and tomatoes the three stories to the chimney top.The old broken up hearth is going...it's an ugly old thing but after some years of fireplace deprivation I have loved making fires in it.   And I will love the new stove too..the shocking east winds will no longer howl down the chimney in February and June, leaving us freezing if we drop off and let the fire die down...we will be warm and clean and I cannot be grateful enough to our landlady who could have blocked it off and put an electric fire in as indeed happened in our last house leaving it damp and unlivable. Well, that's today's ramble, it's noisy and a miasma of soot and granite dust  pervades the house. I've just seen the new stove through the dusty fog for the first time though and it's love at first sight!     (Today's photo apropos of nothing is of Chun Quoit which we visited last week..I'm still getting to grips with uploading photos to blogger which seems far more complicated than I remember...)  More soon.