Eccentric Amblings and Ramblings From Gnat Bottomed Towers

  Belgravia always seems like a place that takes itself rather seriously. At least one soul apparently doesn't thank goodness👀😁 Thank you for all my birthday wishes....lovely day. Short of time again....after this weekend is done and dusted things should settle. I always knew this past three weeks was going to be manic and so it has proved to be. Arilx

 I went to a belated Mabon celebration with my friends S & A last Friday...what I didn't anticipate was being presented with a massive birthday cake A had made me the day before🎂😊 I'm usually the one doing the surprising so this is rather new territory for me, but in a good way you understand. Here I am today another year older and no doubt not another year wiser! Arilx

Much as I loved my old job the one thing that always irked me was the shortage of time. Every weekend was a mad dash just to try and keep all the plates spinning [even worse if I was working on a Saturday morning]. When I was made redundant I went part time and promised myself that I would ensure that we would try to do something non work related at some point over every weekend even if it was something very small. During the past ten years I have pretty much achieved that. This weekend was a short jaunt up the road to visit the mill at Ifield which opens for a few hours once a month over the summer months and is free to see, so we decided to nip in for its last one this year. This one is a water mill and that pond was completely dug by hand! Shamelessly parroting from the info provided the records of a mill on this site go back to 1274, but between 1500-1700 the mill that stood here [an earlier incarnation] was actually a finery forge and part of the iron industry. I was getting a bit

 .....new life goes on despite what others might want us to believe.  A lovely Egyptian goose and its goslings. It was good to see these little souls dibbling about at the water's edge on our walk yesterday. The Repair Cafe reopened on Saturday for the first time since February 2020 [we have had to postpone it a couple of times] and we're now in a much bigger venue. Alongside it Sussex Green Living's latest initiative "The Green Hub" was launched. This brings together all the different green projects that have been set up in the district into a central space once a month to raise their profile and so people can get a feel for what's going already going on. After all the continuous doom mongering that goes on it was great to see so many good things happening and lots of positivity going forwards.  I definitely benefitted from being able to resume my volunteering with the team. My Mum was there lending a hand too wearing her Community Fridge helper hat...like Mo

If you fancy a coffee from this particular gaff it looks like you're going to need to don your flat cap to get served😉 Sorry about the ghastly picture quality...we were waiting at the junction to turn right onto Kensington High Street....never an easy thing to achieve at the best of times and certainly not during the rush hour....I had plenty of time to snap this whilst we waited our turn [I wasn't the one driving]. Have a great weekend. Arilx

I came across this rather charming sculpture of a cat called Czar on one of our evening walks in Tewkesbury when we were there for the weekend back in the summer. It's the work of Diane Gorvin. At the time I noticed a mention of "Project Alleycat" on sign that went with it and I meant to look it up. I've finally got round to it. The aim of the project is to create permanent and temporary art works in some of the many alleys that fork off the main roads through the town. Had I realised this at the time I might have taken more detours, but as luck would have it I had already captured a couple simply because their folkart nature appealed to me and of course they feature moggies! The good news is that it will give me something new to pursue when I'm dancing there next summer [hopefully that is]. Arilx

Last Friday I finally got to see my dear friend Arty L...it's been two years and although we've spoken regularly in the intervening period it's just not the same as physically being with someone. I knew I needed to stay close to where we were working, so after a bit of head scratching I suggested that we meet here...the free Kyoto Garden. It was a beautifully warm day and turned out to be the perfect choice. One thing London does exceptionally well is splendid green public spaces. L lives in the capital, but she'd never visited either so it was a truly shared experience. It might be small, but it has a calming zen like quality the minute you go in. We smiled at each other as we realised that we had automatically dropped our voices to a whisper to not avoid disturbing others. People were quietly walking around or sitting on benches watching the world go by. The garden was built in 1991and features Japanese Maple trees and a pond full of the most enormous Koi carp. We did

Mr GBT and I do our best to do something if we find we have a day without any commitments at the weekend. What we do varies according to time of year, weather, budget etc, but walking is always a favourite. The Fancy Free site of straightforward walks has already come up trumps on a myriad of occasions and has become my go-to if I'm lacking inspiration/ideas. On our last most recent free Sunday we opted for one of the Surrey walks around two villages. We live very close to the border so it was no distance for us to get to the starting point and to the best of my knowledge I've never been to either! Newdigate and Capel. Within spitting distance of one another, but both with a completely different feel. Both have churches that have been "restored" [for want of a better word] by the rather meddlesome Victorians. Newdigate's was shut, but Capel's was open and welcoming. Newdigate seemed a much quieter place. It doesn't have the stampede of visitors and is the

There are many worse places I could think of spending my lunchbreak last Friday😉... Pleased to report that the show went well and that from my personal perspective I greatly enjoyed seeing Sir Tony Robinson [he of Baldrick and Timeteam fame] from afar. He was there in the capacity of a visitor, so people were respectful and didn't trouble him. Arilx

  A daft one for today! Have a great weekend. Arilx

Back in 1977 the villagers of Capel in Surrey decided to celebrate their yew's 1000th birthday by holding a dedicated pageant. Attaining that great age was certainly something to mark, except that when it was reassessed in 1993 its age was recalculated to be 1700 years old! It's thought that originally it was one of six trees forming a sacred grove around a pond [now filled in]. The local legend has it that if you walk around it 100 times at midnight a ghost of some description will appear, but it's a little light on the specifics! While we were there I couldn't stop but stand back and admire the scarlet berries with their waxy coats....how many generations stretching back before me have stood there and done just the same I wonder!  Arilx  

 Yesterday I touched upon my penchant for investigating notices....some really do turn out to be as dull as ditchwater as was this one in Henfield. This one in Tewkesbury proved to be worth the effort though. From the pavement all I could read was "Stonemason's Yard" so I expected to be told something about the building. Wrong! It provided me with a much more interesting story about Glennie Nos. If you double click the image it will enlarge and you can read it for yourself if you wish to. Looming up at the end of this week is our first show in two years which means I will be technically working with Mr GBT. I say "working"....nattering with all our loyal customers and meeting new dollshouse enthusiasts. However, I might just have a small plan up my sleeve for a couple of hours away playing hooky. This won't provide me with a lot of blogging material for next week, but the plan [famous last words] is that I'll travel back to the summer and write a bit mor

Henfield is by rights a large village midway betwixt here and the coast. To my mind it's more of  a small bustling market town with an excellent high street full of independent shops and good community facilities. Please allow me to offer up a selection of photos and accompanying snippets and perhaps you'll get a flavour of why I was rather taken with it.  These two mosaics were made by Creative Waves and installed as part of the 2019 Horsham Year of Culture [it's within the Horsham District]. The first one recalls the violets which were grown locally and the link they had to the suffragette movement which I wrote about here  http://gnatbottomedtowers.blogspot.com/search?q=henfield+violets . Since then I have learnt about a local actor and another suffragist called Elizabeth Robins who's shown in the panel below. She used her 15th century farmhouse to shelter the women who had been on hunger strike after the 1913 Cat and Mouse act. She offered them not only refuge, but