Twelfth embellished patchwork star (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Though lovely and sunny, it is really very cold – I would qualify that by saying ‘outside’ but at the moment it is also jolly cool inside our eco-vicarage as the Mitsubishi fan that feeds our air source heat pump has failed and we are waiting for a replacement. Last week we awoke to several heavy frosts and during the day we were subjected to furious hail stones so large and forceful that they hurt. Today, sitting by an open log fire, cosily swathed about with a voluminous scarf, I look out on to blue skies and bright sun. Oh warmth, where are you? We shall certainly not be casting any clouts till May is out, if this carries on – though the vicar says we have been promised a heatwave for the end of the week. Such are the vaguaries of British weather, anything is possible.

Detail of twelfth embellished patchwork star (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Packing was a great antidote to the cold, with all that heaving things off shelves, pulling bits of old hardware out from under beds and rushing around with boxes. For the moment I have very firmly confined myself to doing this for 3 and a half days, preferring to be manic for just half the week as there’s still plenty of sewing to be done in the other half of the week and the lure of reading books I shouldn’t be buying has the pulling power of a siren – especially as last week I added two more books – Anna Pavord’s Landskipping (the vicar is reading this to me out loud as I sew and we are already half way through) and John Lewis Semple’s Meadowland. As you can tell, about to leave the country for the town, I have been overdosing on bucolic themes.

Thirteenth embellished patchwork star (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

Coming late to Richard Mabey (The Times calls him ‘Britain’s greatest living nature writer’) I started on ‘A Brush with Nature’, a volume of essays from 2010. Remembering I had bought this book at the Eden Project when my curiosity about china clay began and bearing in mind Penny Cross’s story about emerging from the Cornish sea covered in a slip of white clay, I was much taken with the following passage,

“The March equinox is not like the other great hinges of the year.It doesn’t slip by imperceptibly, like midsummer or midwinter or drag out elegiacally like hallowtide. It’s a portal between the seasons, a stargate, a momentous rearrangements of the northern hemisphere’s air and water. And strange things can happen during it. Down in Cornwall a few years ago, I sat in the hanging oakwoods by the side of the Fal Estuary and watched the spring high tide, stained pure whit by kaolin from the old china clay works, rise up through the trees. It was a hallucinatory vision: ferns rippling under water, primroses flowering in a bath of milk.”  Beautiful writing.

Detail of thirteenth embellished patchwork star (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)