Welcome to the first Sunday Chat 🙂

It’s Sunday and the perfect time for a bit of a break and a chatty, probably overly-long post! Brew up and come and join me for a few moments as I type away. On my old blog I used to quite like doing these sort of chatty posts, I called them my ‘morning brews’. I think I’d quite like to carry that on here, as more of an off topic weekly ramble! So ramble on I will, haha! Please join in the comments…

It’s a blustery day, hot in the south apparently, from looking at Instagram stories. Here in Yorkshire it’s mild but with a slight chill in the wind. The newly flowering lilac dances in the breeze as blue tits chirp angrily at Agatha as she wanders about below the tree. It’s a lazy kind of day, the best kind. I’ve scoffed a Sunday treat of a pain au chocolat and am now sat in the conservatory next to a tray of plants, bouncing away in my freecycle Poang. Lovely!

I’ve spent the morning attempting to set up a new login for my laptop, to separate my blog from my uni work – I was beginning to dread turning on the laptop in case I spotted emails, or Teams started pinging away. I wasn’t enjoying having a visual reminder of all the work I have to do, when all I want is to log into my blog and type away happily!

After wading through two hours of Windows bloat, I’ve finally sorted out a nice, calm area with just the essentials for blogging. It’s really nice not getting distracted by a million things and having a separation between uni and blog. I’ve been swearing at the screen all morning as it kept putting loads of pop up news things, weird apps that have nothing to do with anything, and bizarre notifications, all of which you have to manually delete one after the other. So hopefully I’ve got them all now and nothing else annoying is going to sneak in and remind me of all the horrible things happening in the world without me asking it to.

It’s been a quiet week – I’ve just felt like hiding at home and doing small things. Repotting, sitting in the shed, getting lost in social media too many times, cooking, watching plants flower and leaves turn ever greener. I used to fight against weeks like this, but now I embrace them a little more. Everything comes in waves, after all, don’t you find? The slower weeks are just as important. A positive was that the new Permaculture mag plopped through the letterbox and I had plenty of time to immerse myself in it. I also sat down at my piano for the first time in ages and had a tentative hour or so playing my way rustily around some pieces I haven’t touched for a year.

After lockdown stopped my lessons and my teacher then retired, I gradually stopped playing as much, and then as other things filled my brain, little by little I found I’d stopped totally. Without an external structure I find it hard to keep going – but it was nice to sit back down in front of the keys. Kind of like a hello after a long time. I’m finding a lot of things are like that, at the moment. After lockdown, it feels we’re doing a lot of things for the first time again. Do you feel that? I’m finding it rather strange, a little excited and apprehensive in equal measures.

I feel like something is missing though, somehow – like we have this huge, shared experience, this shared trauma, and no-one is talking about it. We’re just ‘back to normal’ here in the UK, but of course, it isn’t normal. I wonder how long it will take to trickle out. How things will turn out in the coming years for people.

Back in the garden, I’ve been repotting ferociously, if you can do such a thing! (Image of wild ginger-haired woman flinging compost madly around the greenhouse, surrounded by 4000 seedlings and absolutely no medium-sized pots anywhere to be seen!).

It’s that time of year when I regret planting so many tomatoes. Does anyone else have the tomato regret? I don’t know how I ended up with so many, I’m sure I only planted 4 seeds. Even though one was a frankenseed and ended up producing five plants out of the one seed which I couldn’t separate, so it is now growing away happily in a single pot. I’m wondering if it will produce some exciting franken-matoes?!

We also popped into Scape Lodge’s NGS Open Garden last week and got loads of inspiration from their absolutely stunning garden high up in the hills. I took so many photos! There were tulips galore, exciting nooks and crannies and incredible trees making a beautiful scene every way we turned. Oh, an a cat-shaped topiary! They’re open again in June and I fully recommend a visit. (There was also a delicious selection of cakes!).

On that note, I think it’s time to finish my coffee and potter on. I think I’ll try and make these as regular as possible, and maybe get them up at a specific time each Sunday, like a proper cuppa and a chat?

Shine on,

Sal 🙂

This week I’m:

Listening – to The Scotland Yard Confidential podcast on Spotify – I’m not usually a podcast person but this new crime podcast kept my attention the whole way through, full of dastardly deeds, detective’s intuition and entertaining narration that made me giggle.

Buying – I finally began getting through a pile of free wax melt samples I’d amassed. Unfortunately the scents weren’t for me (bit headache-y, does anyone else get that with certain scents?) so I ordered A Slow Sunday’s Morning Coffee scented ones instead – I’ll report back once I’ve had the chance to try them out.

Refilling – my UpCircle face cream. On the third refill now, I think! The cream itself smells amazing and really helps to soften my dry skin up. I’m also a huge fan of the coffee eye cream (can you see a coffee-related pattern here) which I also use the refill scheme for. They come in glass jars with metal lids, so plastic free too.

Reading – Helen Lewis’s The Bluestocking newsletter – excellently written.