In the garden right now {February} ...

I am unbelievably tired tonight so i shall not hang around but will instead leave you with some photos of the garden right now. Plenty of greenery showing and growing, reaching out and up towards warm sun and fresh air. Obeying our creator and growing at his command. 

It reminds me of this song by Cat Stevens / Yusuf Islam. Such beautiful words and what a song!

xx

Inside and outside...

This weekend involved turning the dining room upside down and taking the garden from bland Winter to promising Spring. We knocked out our old fireplace (well, my husband did the hard work whilst me and D kept out of the way) and then moved furniture around to make the space work a little better for us. You can just about see the ghastly thing behind the table and firescreen, so gross.

Now its gone and the fireplace shaped hole needed covering up so we emptied out our big bookcase and moved it across the room. Its such a heavy piece of furniture and we're always having to move it around as it never quite works anywhere, but i really like it in its new home.

Fortunately id had a big clear out inside of the bookcase a few weeks ago so it was quite orderly to empty out and put back again. But for a couple of hours the room was totally upside down.

Its now really tidy and HUGE, I'm loving the new layout! I just have a couple of decoupage projects to undertake before i can show you how it looks now! I'm so excited about our big redecoration project for this Summer insha'Allah, hubby has given the go ahead and we just need to get past his super busy work period before we can fully contemplate it.

Meanwhile in the garden i have been trying to neaten the place up a little and crack on with projects out there. I bought new lawn edging and plant pots for the path i laid last year and have put together some arches for the jungle area.

The black iron fences panels at the entrance to the greenhouse are actually old table ends. The wooden table top was used to make a fireplace for our old house!

I bought the pair of big plant pots from Homebase as they were reduced from £19.99 to £8.50 each which is a very good buy. They have tulips planted in them now and i have used wire supports from an old ripped poly tunnel to help support the flowers when they are in droopy mode in a couple of months time.

The jungle is only slightly different to when i last showed it to you, the ground was frozen for a couple of weeks so i couldn't do anything out there. Eventually the arches will be covered in climbers and il make some fun child friendly paths and hiding places in there for D and his friends. Its all very exciting!

A taster of the Spring to come...

I will start by saying, "WOW", what a day, the weather has been beautiful here in middle England and it was hard to believe it is still February. We most certainly should have left our coats at home but instead we traipsed around Brocks Hill with them under my arm. It really was a warm, sunny and happy day for us today. I noticed how much the birds were singing, probably in high spirits feeling the warmth for the first time in a while. The birds are naturally intuitive and know when good times are around the corner.

Today was a Netmums meet up so we met new faces and enjoyed plenty of chatting. Lots of happy children and mums in conversation, and for me a chance to meet an on line friend in the flesh whilst appreciating the outdoors and all its little seasonal changes.

I loved the sky today, fresh blue with cirrus clouds and a sun so bright that i often held my hand to my brow to enable my sight. Shadows were long at around 3 in the afternoon as we were preparing to leave. We took our normal side route away from Brocks Hill, past the leisure centre towards the hole in hedge which borders the roadside.

The trees are all still so naked and I'm longing to see signs of leaf buds unfurling but i have checked, and nothing yet, i wait.

Dead borders have green shoots and leaves at their feet and we spotted blackbirds foraging behind them, these dead areas are perfect for gourmet eating if you are a bird. They do feel a little outdated with the sunny weather of the day though.

D wonders off and i notice that there is now two of me, both holding our cameras up towards D's hill. 

He comes down and we wave together, the four of us, just for you my dear blog friends. He has a hand, but his shadow seems to have lost his!

We squeeze through the hole in the hedge, back on the busy main road, D weary from all the hard playing and me looking forward to a little cup of tea back home. It was about half past three and lots of traffic moves slowly past us, and children and teenagers in black blazers and pumps are walking home from school, either headphones in and hair covering faces or chatty young teens at that awkward age but still naive enough to be happy on a day like today. We saw snowdrops so tiny and i was pleased that D spotted them first with his keen eye.

And then one of my favourite 'coming home' sights that i see every time i walk onto my street; the utility posts holding up wires in sharp contrast to the skies beyond. Simple life, simple pleasures!

Non-Stick cooking...

The new series of Waterloo Road  started this evening, don't know why I like that programme but i do, despite the silly story lines and below par acting. I just watched that and now I just wanted to share a few links with you before I sit down with a book and a cup of tea for the rest of the evening.

For ages ive been meaning to clear out a few of my old kitchen pans and buy new healthier and safer ones. Our saucepans are stainless steel (risk-free) and are perhaps 20 years old and still looking very good. I have two handi's (huge saucepans) for cooking soups, stews and curries which are both very dented and in need of replacing as they are pretty unstable. Looks like someone has been whacking them with a hammer, hmmmm.  I also have a Tefal non-stick frying pan  which is about 6 years old and looking awful, and its that pan which has been my main worry over the last few years. Non-stick coatings are toxic if not used with low heat. Who uses a frying pan with low heat?! There is some more information on the health hazards of non-stick coatings over here. They can cause cancer, high cholesterol, strokes, low birth weight, suppressed immune systems and flu symptoms labelled as 'Teflon Flu'. 

Cast iron is the best alternative to non-stick coatings. Cast iron is free of synthetic chemicals, has great heat retention, and is unlikely to break. Le Creuset are probably the most well known brand but beyond my budget, maybe one day insha'Allah! So ive been holding out for something a little better priced. This afternoon i nipped out for fruit and milk and found some great offers in Sainsburys. Some of their cast iron kitchenware supports the Breakthrough Breast Cancer campaign. And it is all marked at one third off the original price. I bought a 5 litre cast iron casserole dish for £26.66 reduced from £40. And a roasting dish for just over £5, reduced from £8. And two spotty mugs for £1.50 each rather than £3.00.

You can order them online, or find them in larger stores.

** This isnt a sponsored post, i just wanted to share this with you **

This is another really good article about the problems associated with non-stick coatings.

And now I'm off to make a cup of tea... 

Remembering the Mundane {Part 3} :: Our Neighbourhood...

We walk into Wigston town once or twice a week so i thought you may like to come with us for a change? Our neighbourhood is rather average with pockets of council estates or large almost half million pound homes sprinkled around. The houses in the streets around mine are all rather bland and boring but our roads are much wider, greener and cleaner than they were where we lived before. Here is one part of my street which is an L shape. Today we walked this way to town, avoiding the main road.

We are on a slight hill, so turning the corner of my street and onto the next, you can see over the rooftops and to the town beyond.

We walk through a little alleyway to the park beyond. I grew up in Yorkshire and we always called alleyways ginnels, but in Derbyshire where i lived aged 9 to 18 they were called jittys. Here in Leicestershire i think they are just called alleys. What do you call them?

Its great having this little park just around the corner from us, it can sometimes mean the difference between a day pulling my hair out at home, to me (and D) letting off steam in the fresh air! D spots all of the road signs and pictures on the sides of bins and things now. A bin is rather mundane but we are blessed enough to have a lot of them dotted about so i thought id take a snap to remind us of the blessing :-)    This is a 'Remembering the mundane' post after all! I have a lot of over-seas readers so this may be more interesting to you rather than those of us who see these every day. (I would love to see the mundane parts of life like this - and the police cars and ambulance coming up - in your country??? Please do share!?)

Leaving the park we walk past more of the semi-detached housing or ugly bungalows which are typical of this area, but there are now a few bits of character thrown in to add a little bit of interest.

Then we reach the end of the cul-de-sac and can either cut through to the main road or walk through the gap towards the church. We walked towards the Church, through a quiet little space, past yellow crocus wasteland and pavements bordered by lambs ears.

Theres a bungalow on the corner which has such an interesting small front garden wrapped around it on three sides. Its a rockery (which i dont normally like) but there is always so much going on between the rocks that its always lovely to walk by.

Finally we are back on the dual carriage way opposite the library and ready to walk right into the town centre. Our library is an ugly looking thing which was probably mighty fine and futuristic in its heyday but to be honest i rather think it to be a depressing sight. We still visit once or twice a week though as its a good little place to be.

Here's one of our British Ambulances outside some of the council housing behind the shops.

We walked past it and through the car-park to a little pocket of shops which i try and visit every week or two. The fishmongers, green grocers, florists, Wilko's and some charity shops are here.

We came out onto Long street which goes all the way through the town. The Records Office used to be the old school, and Peace Memorial Park used to be grazing land opposite a large country house which has now been demolished.

This rather masculine looking old church is very dominant on the roadside and today we walked down Chapel lane besides it which has retained much of its olde worlde charm. It runs alongside Peace Memorial Park on one side and the allotments on the other.

This dog was running up and down on the allotments alongside us barking excitedly. Luckily there was a hedge and this old iron gate to separate us!

At the end of the lane is the police station...

Currently being demolished. Another photographer on site told me that it had been there since 1972. Forty years is not a very long time for a building to remain standing, but i will say that im kind of glad such an ugly building is being knocked down. I have no idea what will be built in its place.

And then, we visited B&Q and Aldi which are just next door and that completed our day out. We walked home for hot chocolate and hot cross buns. 

I hope you enjoyed our walk today? Its easy to take these things for granted, but if we look around then even in the most boring of neighbourhoods there can be found things of interest or beauty. I often wish i could look back over photos of my own childhood neighbourhood, perhaps if blogging had been popular back then (not to mention the internet being invented) i may have been able to do that!

Please will you share a blog post with us of the mundane things where you live? If you do then please link to it in the comments section...