A postcard from Jamestown

Hello

 

I spent a couple of hours solo-shopping in Jamestown yesterday while J occupied the Smalls. I went into all the shops I have never been in before, either because they have too many steps for the buggy or too much touch-temptation for the Smalls. I didn't buy anything very exciting - some bananas and a bread bin but I did do some thing I have been wanting to do for weeks...

I went into the Consulate Hotel, purchased a cold beverage, then sat on the terrace at the front of the hotel watching the world go by for half an hour. It was bliss! Several people stopped to chat and lots more waved as they went past. People wave here - a lot.

I took these two snaps so you could come with me for a virtual sit. Imagine yourself with a lovely cold drink, (I had ginger beer but you can have anything you like, except sparkling water. For some reason that delicacy has not reached the south atlantic which is a shame), sitting in the shade of the balcony above looking out at the row of shops and up to the semi-desert hillside above. If you crane your neck a little bit as you look down the street you can almost see the ocean at the bottom.

You will probably be engaged in conversation by someone you have never met - what are you doing here? do you like it? how are you settling in? or someone you feel you probably have met but can't remember where because you have met so many new people recently - on your own today? where are the Smalls? how are they doing?

Well, cheers, enjoy your drink and your sit. Then take your new-found restedness back with you to reality.

xx

Waffle Cushion Ta-Da!

So, I finished the back of the waffle cushion before we left the UK but had already sent the inner on ahead. Finally they are united!

The waffliness has diminished somewhat by being stuffed with a slightly too big cushion filler.

But I love the way the squares stretch more than the joins giving a sort of puffiness.

Oh, and look look look! Tiny basil shoots. I am totally excited! Some of the sweet peas and snap dragons are germinating too. I always think it is completely magic when tiny gritty seeds turn into little soft green shoots.

Lets hope the tomatoes grow soon too so that we have something to eat the basil with!

xx

My favourite ever Christmas make

We went to the Smalls' nativity play last night, we have put up our tree (uncharacteristically a gold plastic one which I secretly love), St Helena Radio is playing every country and western Christmas song ever recorded back to back, and I am starting to believe that it might be nearly Christmas even though it is warm and sunny.

I had a happy afternoon yesterday choosing which of the decorations we are going to use this year. With no fireplace or staircase to decorate we don't need everything. One of the must haves was the stoneware nativity figures that I made when I was pregnant with Tall Girl at the pottery class I used to go to.

  

I am ridiculously proud of them. I made lots of things in that class - some ok and some pretty terrible but I think these are the best thing I ever made.

I loved the process of simplifying the shapes so they would be robust. Some of the scales are a bit dodgy - like the amazing giant sheep!

Choosing the glaze colours was fun. Before they are fired the colours are nothing like how they will finally turn out and you just have to trust that it will be ok.

When Tall girl was wee she dropped Mary and her head broke off. I was pretty upset but some clever gluing and you can't tell.

 What's your favourite Christmas make?

xx

Some seeds and some stitches

Hello!

I thought today we would get back to some of what this blog was intended to be about. It seems we have been all at sea (literally) for ages and very little creating has been done but today we remedied that and made a small start on our garden.

 

 

Several of the houses around us have recently been vacated and their ex-tenants let it be known that we were welcome to what was left in their patches so J and the Smalls went hunting and came back with some strawberry plants and some fennel, sage and chives.



 

We also planted lots of the seeds that we shipped over so hopefully will have lots of little seedlings of melons, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, courgettes, sweet peas, snapdragons and lots more very soon.

Tomorrow I plan to make a start on direct sewing peas, beans and some leeks and kale. I figured the Tuscan kale that Monty Don is always raving about should like it here so fingers crossed!

Tall Girl and Tiny Boy loved the seed sewing. Their little fingers can pick up tiny seeds one at a time and they love poking holes for the seeds, popping them in the holes then gently tucking them in.

The wind can still be a little cool here so I thought we'd protect the seeds a wee bit as they get going.

So on to the stitches. I have begun a few little test pieces for my blanket project. I have been experimenting with hook size and colour placement. Here is the pallet of colours I have chosen. I am holding off doing too much designing because I am hoping that my in-laws have sent some new crochet books this way for Christmas, and I want to fully absorb them before I begin!

But I couldn't resist a little bit of fiddling about.

I have also made progress with a couple of other projects which I am going to save for next time...

xx

Settling in

We were met by some of John’s colleagues who drove us the 15 minutes or so to our house. My first impression of the landscape was that it reminds me very much of Cornwall. Narrow twisting lanes are bordered by high banks and subtropical plants. Almost all the houses are single story with corrugated metal roofs but both the walls and the roofs are painted in bright colours. Some have veg and flower gardens and lots have several vehicles in various states of disrepair littered about the drive.

Our house is on an estate of widely spaced bungalows surrounded by lots of grass and the odd bush of geranium, marguerite and hibiscus. It is a pre-fab bungalow with three bedrooms, a big lounge-diner and a pretty 1970s style kitchen with white painted cupboards and blue formica work tops. I love it. It is completely different to our period house at home but it is filled with solid 60s and 70s furniture and the most uncomfy three piece suit imaginable. I can’t wait for all our stuff to arrive so I can make it feel like ours. A few cushions and blankets should sort out the sofa and arm chairs. The kitchen is going to look great with the pretty utensils we have bought in bright candy colours and the nasty dining table will be much improved by the addition of an oilcloth tablecloth.

We have lovely views. In one direction we can see the ocean between the houses and the other we can see two of the island’s land marks – Flagstaff, a cone shaped hill covered in grass and trees, and the Barn, a large rocky hill, sparsely covered in scrub and shaped like a huge dutch barn.

J has had a week at work now and seems to be doing ok, although most of his colleagues are out of the office on study leave at the moment. He has joined a cricket team and played (and won) his first match. The Smalls have started school and are settling in ok. They have been doing lots of fun activities in the lead up to Christmas and are both involved in the Christmas production next week. Giant Baby has started with a gorgeous child minder a couple of mornings a week. She is one of those people who was just born to work with little ones. She has a room set aside at the end of the house full of toys and books and paint, and a garden with ride-ons and a slide.  When I arrived to pick him up today they were both on the trampoline giggling wildly as they pretended to fall over accidentally-on-purpose.

After Christmas I am going to use some of my Small-free time to learn some new crafts. There is a lady on the town who runs a tailoring and upholstery business and also runs craft classes, so I am going to start with flax weaving – making things out of New Zealand flax which used to be cultivated to make mail bags but now is an invasive weed all over the island. Then I think we are going to do some quilting which I have never done and I am very excited about.

We have met some lovely new friends. The expat community is very welcoming and we have been immediately integrated, but we have met lovely locals too through the cricket team and through the Smalls. We have a lady who is going to do some baby sitting and is coming to get to know the Smalls later in the week.

It is amazing, we have been here less than two weeks and have already built the beginnings of a new life for ourselves. Our container of goods and chattels is on the RMS which has just arrived back in port from Capetown. Once we have unpacked everything we will feel like we really belong.

xx

RMS St Helena

Our journey on the RMS was supposed to be two nights and three days but there was something wrong with one of the engines so it ended up being four nights. Thankfully we had a box of bits and pieces to amuse the kids from a forward thinking and generous friend and there was a laundry on board. The timetable of activities on board went something like this:

Breakfast, Morning coffee, Deck cricket/quoits, lunch, movie/swim/read, afternoon tea, dinner.

It was impossible not to be permanently full. Giant Baby and Tiny Boy did their best though, refusing to eat anything but jam sandwiches and yoghurt.

Finally on the morning of the fifth day J and I got up before dawn, left the Smalls in their beds and climbed up on deck to see the lights of St Helena in the distance. Along with a few other hardy/crazy souls we watched the lights get closer and then go out as the sun came up and the mass of the island solidified into cliffs and valleys.

After a hurried breakfast we were on the first launch to shore and were very glad to step onto dry land.

J had suffered a little from sea sickness on the ship, but that was nothing compared to what I felt once we were back on dry land. Every time I moved my head or caught a glimpse of the trees moving in the wind I got a wave of nausea. This came and went for the whole first week. Now that was very wierd!

xx

Ascension Island

We stayed in George Town – the capital of Ascension. It seemed to us the epitome of a one horse town, but without the horse. We hired a car, or rather a long wheel-base five seat pick-up truck, which was quite an experience to drive, and explored as much of the island as we could in the time we had.

Many of the roads were lined with warnings not to stop or to stray off the road because much of Ascension is occupied by an RAF/USAF base and they have a huge amount of communications equipment and also firing ranges. I just tried not to think about it!

We wound down a long and twisting path towards the coast in the hopes of finding the blow hole which we had read about – a place where the sea goes under the rock and then is forced up through a small hole. The road ran out by some buildings owned by the European Space Agency. Not really having a clue where to go next, I went and knocked on the door. A very helpful chap pointed us down a rough path that appeared to go straight over the cliff. In reality it followed a narrow gully through what was clearly an ancient lava field. The cliffs sort of disintegrated when rubbed because they were made of ash. After a bit of a scramble we came out onto a beautiful beach made of crushed shells. There were gorgeous shells everywhere and the Smalls and I filled our pockets. J spent a long time photographing the crabs which were scuttling all over the rocks. We spotted the blow hole a little way along the beach and made our way towards it, getting sprayed with water every time it went off. By circling round to the other side we could get quite close without getting wet as the strong wind whipped the spray away. The hole was about a foot across, and had been created by the erosion of the softer ash-rock in amongst the harder lava. It really was spectacular, the water went about twenty feet into the air.

We explored Ascension’s second community – Two Boats and had dip in the swimming pool at the ‘club’. Then we sought out the only two beaches that are ever safe for swimming, English Bay and Comfortless Cove. The water was very rough at both but we managed a paddle. English Bay is surrounded by miles of aerials, overhead cables and satellite dishes which all power the BBC World Service transmissions.

The highlight of our couple of days on Ascension was visiting Green Mountain. In the centre of the island the highest peak is very often swathed in thick cloud. As we approached it the vegetation became less sparse and a wider variety of plants grew. As we climbed the twisting road it looked more like the countryside at home. I failed to take in any of this because I was driving. The road was a single lane with a very sharp hairpin bend every hundred yards or so. As we went up the road became steeper and the bends closer together. The long wheel-base of the truck meant that it had a huge turning circle, so after a while I had to take every bend in a three point turn. At one point I just couldn’t make it round. The nose of the truck was rising up above us as the curve went steeply up hill and we just kept slipping backwards. Not exactly the ideal situation for having to work out how to engage four-wheel drive and then how to drive with it on!

 

Eventually the tarmac ran out and the last few bends were on muddy track before that ran out too. I parked up as best I could and tried to ignore the horrible burning smell coming from the engine. When we consulted the map it became clear that we had somehow missed the car park which we had been aiming for and had come much further up the hill than we had intended. As it happened it was a good thing too because the Smalls would never have managed to walk all the way up.

 

We followed a marked path further up and into the clouds. There was ginger planted each side of the path to act as a wind break. We passed bananas, palms and trees dripping with moss and creepers before being swallowed up by a grove of bamboo. We passed canes as thick as my arm. It felt very surreal, unable to see more than a few yards in the mist and expecting at any moment to reach the glass of the greenhouse I felt we must be in. In the middle of the bamboo we found the dew pond – until the desalination plant was built this was a very necessary emergency water supply for the island. We also found the highest point. Marked, weirdly I thought, by an anchor chain.

Carefully inching our way back down the track we found the car park and a lovely picnic site, complete with playground and banana plants which we took full advantage of.

Our stay on Ascension was disconcertingly surreal but by no means unpleasant, but we were anxious to be off and spent a couple of hours watching the crane lower containers off the quay onto barges that were then taken out to the RMS St Helena where her crane pulled them aboard, very aware that we had to do the same thing ourselves when we were to board later in the day.

xx