Friday Smiles 2026 # Week 22

Well folks you may be wondering where I have disappeared to these past few weeks. The fact is that the work to renovate our bathroom, which we expected to take a week or so, turned out taking four weeks, and while at my son's I only had my tablet, (normally only used for puzzles), and I did not feel up to writing and editing a blog post on it. Also I had a lovely relaxing break up in Cheshire with Ben, and spent most of my time, reading, crocheting and doing afore-mentioned puzzles.

And more surprisingly I learnt to solve that old fun game, a Rubik's cube. From a random shuffle, I can now solve it in just under five minutes. I might add that Ben can solve it in under 40 seconds! but I don't have his dexterity. My hands struggle to get the right grip and I cannot flick two rounds at a time like he can. I was just quite pleased to have mastered it.

It was also a time of rest and recouperation for Chris who a month after his operation, is now much stronger and well on the mend. There is still a way to go, but we are pleased with the progress he has made.

It will be our last visit to Cheshire as Ben will be moving before the end of the summer, to live in Hereford, at the old railway station he and his partner bought last year. Their renovations are almost done and they hope to be there by August.

His current house has a lovely 'garden room', and that is where I spent most of my time. Sitting on a very comfortable recliner chair I could look through the open door onto their lovely garden. 

On warm days the whole front wall concertinered open and zooming out I could see this to the right.....

..... and this to the left.

His partner Ant is a keen gardener and he loves bearded iris. During the first week these all opened and were quite beautiful. By the time we left, blue, purple and white ones were open too.

I don't have any of these in my own garden but when we popped back mid-way in our stay for a hospital appointment, I found my flag iris were all in flower.

One day at Ben's we went for a walk round a very pleasant park and he took this photo with his mini-drone. 

It hovered in front of us and he controlled it with his phone. I found it a bit unnearving but it took a good photo.

I have been contemplating replacing my phone for a while, and I thought it might be a good idea to buy a new one while I was with Ben as he was able to easily transfer all my files and show me some of the finer settings that I would have missed. It is an Oppo Find 9 pro and has a super camera which I was keen to try out. One night I used full zoom to take this picture of the moon and I was very impressed at how it came out.

We have now been home for almost a week and we are very pleased with our bathroom so it was worth the wait. We have a big walk in 'rainfall' shower, an almost silent flushing toilet, and a modern wash basin with drawers under it. The morror above lights up if you wave your hand under it! There is now a nice wooden floor instead of the aweful carpet that was there. The builder is on holiday this week but he is coming back on Monday to build a tall slim cupboard in the small alcove beside the basin, and then it will just need a bit of decorating.

I think in my last post I showed the ground cover companular just coming into bud. Well when we came home it was a mass of purple bell flowers, all over the walls, steps and borders. It has spread to the neighbour's gardens too. 

The whole of the front garden is looking very colourful with a big patch of yellow rock roses, a red berberis bush, and geranium and petunias in my three tubs at the top.

And today the first of the new roses we put in in the autumn, is in flower and it is a beauty! It is called tequila sunrise.

We also found that the front, decorative part of the park has been planted up with begonias, silver leaf, and african marigolds. It will be a riot of colour again soon, just in time for the Britain in Bloom judges to come to town. There will be somrthing around the standard poles too very soon I am sure.

I must say the council do their best to put on good events for the town's folk and when we walked by on Friday night we saw they were fencing off the central plaza, which is normally a car park surrounded by shops and cafés. By the next morning it was a beach with a thick layer of sand that had buckets and spades across it, and stripey deckchairs all round it. The parents were enjoying sitting in the sun and their children were having a whale of a time in the sand. It was a really fun idea.

I think I have just about caught up now. Next week it will be back to a more normal post.

Friday Smiles 2026 # Week 17

A little while ago we all enjoyed seeing swathes of little white snowdrops everywhere. Then we had a season of yellow as daffodils burst into flower. Last month we has a spectacuar display of pink cherry blossom on the trees. (This seems to have been an exceptional year for blossom). Now we are greeted by all things blue.

When walking through the park I always stop to enjoy the flower bed that runs just inside the railings along the back of the park. This week the first thing I saw was bluebells. They are at their best when they run wild around the trees. There are far more here than my photo suggests. They remind me of childhood days when my older sister Dorothy would take me for walks through the bluebell woods. In those days you were free to pick a few and I remember at the age of seven being so dissapointed when the bunch I proudly presented to my teacher was put on a windowsill at the back of the room. It turned out she suffered badly from hayfever but didn't want to upset me by refusing them!

Dotted amongst the bluebells were some taller spires of star-like flowers, These are Carmassia; not a native to England but seemingly quite happy here.

Next came Alkanet, which many folk see as a weed, but it is the truest blue of all the flowers and deserves a place in the flower bed. Again they triggered a memory. As a child I had a clear 'carrying' voice, which came in useful when I became a teacher. Because of it, and the fact I had a good memory for 'parrot' learning, I was often chosen to learn a poem to recite at the church anniversary service, and one year my poem mentioned Speedwell, which is a very sweet little pale blue, rather insignificant flower. So instead I clutched a bunch of Alkanet picked from the rough ground around the church, while I did my recitation.

And lastly as I walked along the park railings, I came to this amazing clutch of forget-me-nots. And yes, they have a meaning for me too. For most of my life I have loved the Flower Fairy books by Cicely Mary Barker. She wrote botanically correct poems about every common wild flower and cultivated one, as well as some berry and blossom trees. And every poem was illustrated with a fairy whose clothes and wings matched the flowers the poem was about. She took inspiration for the fairy faces from the faces of the children in her sister's nursery. I always loved the sweet pea fairy which shows an older fairy fitting a sweet pea bonnet on her baby sister. But the poem that has always stayed with me is the poem for the Forget-me-not fairy.

"Where do baby fairies lie until they're old enough to fly, 

Here's a likely place I think, 'mid these flowers blue and pink.

Pink for girls and blue for boys, pretty things for baby toys..........

O how glad I am I found you, with forget-me-nots around you,

Blue, the colour of the sky, Fairy baby, Hushaby.

So what a nostalgic walk I had, and how lovely are the blue flowers this week.

I even have some in my garden. There were some little anemone bulbs in a box of mixed spring flowers that  planted back in the Autumn, and now I have a pot of pretty daisies.

And at this house I have inherited a mass of the little ground cover companulas. They grow out of the walls, up the steps, over the paths and anywhere there is a patch of ground. And right now they are smothered in buds with the first few showing their purple-blue colour. 

I have actually had to dig some of them up as I have started to clear the side border in the back garden. I have cut down and dug up the roots of two shrubs so that I can make a flower border. It is rather shady so I have to choose wisely what I plant there. So far I have a cowslip and some lily-of-the-valley (a real favourite of mine), plus an ox-eye daisy and a geum in the first section. Then beyond the pink bergenia there are two foxgloves, a lupin and a helebore. 

I have also moved the pots that have been emptied and replanted, over to the gravel, and as yet untamed area, so that our patio is clear. The builders will be back in next week to start on the new bathroom, and they will need somewhere to put their rubbish until we get another skip. 

I hope you have enjoyed my moment of nostalgia, and that you have flowers that evoke special moments for you too.

Here, to finish, are my two faithful friends who come to see me every day. They watched my digging with eyes like hawks and hopped straight in for anything tasty that they spotted. They both look black here but the one on the right is quite brown, and I am sure they are a mating pair.

I may not post next week as we are going to stay in Cheshire with our son Ben while the bathroom renovation is done, but I will visit you anyway.