The windmills of my mind....

This hot weather has not been good for blogging activity. It seems to have stifled all my writing inspiration which is very unusual. It's also the end of the school year and those that know me well understand that I generally enter a vegetative state for a couple of weeks at this point. 
I had the idea, the other day, of decorating the walls of the downstairs loo with lots of my favourite quotations and, during one sultry night when I couldn't sleep they were coming into my head thick and fast:

•  Dylan Thomas' Under Milkwood - "It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea"  
• My favourite book of all, my comfort read, Gerald Durrell's My Family And Other Animals - "Then suddenly the sun shifted over the horizon, and the sky turned the smooth enamelled blue of a jay's eye." 
• Seamus Heaney - too many to list but Blackberry Picking reminds me of going on walks with my Granny - "Our hands were peppered with thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's."
• Dickens, writing in Victorian times but so relevant today.  I can almost imagine Mr Gove coming out with the following: ‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. 
• And, of course, so many quotations from Shakespeare that I find it hard to pick one although the first that comes to mind is "I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine..." from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I suspect that I could cover the walls of the whole house if I were to get started on this, so have reluctantly decided to put it on hold for a while.  The more I read, the more quotes I could come up with.  On the subject of which, I've managed to re-read all of the Shardlake novels by C.J.Sansom which has fired up (once again) my interest in all things Tudor although still not sufficiently for me to have another go at Thomas Penn's The Winter King. I had it for Christmas (2011!) but it's such a weighty tome I still haven't managed to get very far with it.

Today it is persistently raining and much cooler and so this blog post is a displacement activity for all the projects I've started but not finished.  Magnus Magnusson would be ashamed of me!! I cut out the pattern pieces for a dress on Saturday and these are now all over the worktop in the study. A bridesmaid's Dorothy Bag has suffered the same fate and I fear I have temporarily lost my sewing mojo. 

The Gleiniant Brook at the back of the house had dried out to a trickle over the last few weeks and it was eerily quiet at night - usually we can always hear the stream. However, since the thunderstorm came on Sunday, it is now beginning to fill again.  it's amazing how quickly the water level rises and falls. The garden is growing like mad and we have had a glut of broccoli. The courgettes are now beginning to appear and the peas are delicious. 

The wedding plans are coming on apace and it's starting to feel very close now. I found my wedding shoes (LOVE them!) and am now searching for the perfect bag to match them. Thinking on, I've not been as idle as I thought as I have sewn lots of table centres, and have been working on many Secret Things which I have referred to before, so all is not lost.  

This post truly is a rambling so I hope you have managed to make some sense of it. Hopefully, normal service will, as they say on the BBC, be resumed as soon as possible!