Well life is a conundrum. You spend nearly 18 months tucked away in your own home with just the daily hour of exercise to take you into the wide world and then suddenly there’s a rent in the fabric of life and it’s all stations go. Kind friends from Ipsden drove over the Cotswolds to Cheltenham, swooped us into their capacious vehicle and took us into the bosom of their home to complete work on the quilt. For most of our home confinement the altar frontal had lain on our spare bed carefully folded as in its entirety it would easily cover two double beds placed side to side. When daughter No 2 came to stay, an origami of further folding with bubblewrap between the layers to prevent creasing reduced the quilt’s bulk to a package which could fit on top of our wardrobe where, swathed in an old linen sheet it remained almost invisible. And where it almost stayed, so invisible it was. It was only when our gallant chauffeur was loading his car with our luggage that he paused, looked quizzically at a hand held steamer and set my thoughts in motion. The steamer was for the quilt … the quilt … the quilt …then where was the quilt? Still on top of the wardrobe!!!  Only now, a week later is it amusingly to look back on but it’s still dreadful to contemplate how very near we were to arriving at our friends’ house while the very raison d’être for our visit languished undisturbed in its domestic eyrie.

Strips of fabric for binding the quilt

The next few days were all a bit Rumpelstiltskinish, if you don’t count good company, fine food, a bed of unsurpassed comfort and a house with some of the finest views in South Oxfordshire. Settled in the Ping Pong Room rather than confined in a tower, at times my mission nevertheless felt not a million miles away from trying to spin gold out of base straw, especially where the straw was as long as a piece of string. The quilt is so huge, it was quite unwieldy to handle and even a comparatively simple task like binding the edge became a battle between woman and an object which though insentient clearly had a will of its own. Machining together 12 centimetre blocks for the border, then machining border to quilt and zig zagging the raw edge took three refillings of the bottom spool of my sewing machine and a heck of a lot of contemplating of that little machine needle as it bobbed up and down on what seemed an interminable path.  I was going to turn the binding and then stitch it by machine but I just couldn’t bear another session of pushing and shoving the fabric through the needle, especially as I wanted the stitches to be in the ditch between binding and quilt so as to be almost unseen. Instead I settled myself far more comfortably on a handy sofa  and sewed the turned edge by hand. We had been due to stay 2 days. It took 3. After 2 days, my husband went home by train. On the evening of the third day, my hosts had friends round for supper and to play Bridge. We ate together and I withdrew for the final push. The last stitch went in and weary but euphoric  I sought out the card players to share my triumph. And there they all sat not with a pack of cards in the middle, but spaced apart and each with an iPad in front of their faces – how their children would have laughed!

While I sewed, country life whirred round me. Lawns were mowed, bees were tended (disaster averted as a bee found a way into the beekeeper’s protective suit), eggs were collected, plants were put into the earth, people went off to ride horses and others came to play tennis. Dogs barked at the red Royal Mail van, muntjac barked their unmelodious cry somewhere nearby, while above the red kites circled and mewed (one having nested in an oak just up from the tennis court). Roses of every shade peeped in through windows and around doors while those most insignificant of blossoms on the 13 lollipop lime trees lining the drive worked overtime to scent the air with unbottleable perfection. I’ve never noticed whitebeam trees before and though past flowering, I’ve quite fallen in love with them. I shall  not forget finishing the quilt on such a splendid June day.

Having finished the quilt at night, I left the next morning, so as yet there are no photographs to mark a task completed. These will come later. Home and a few days to gather myself together and then I came to London. Daughter No 1 has torn her Achilles tendon playing tennis. It’s a problematic injury as there’s no plaster cast just a very large boot to hold the foot in a pointy toed position which is presumably the best way to help the severed fibres grow towards each other. After a few weeks as healing occurs the angle of the foot will be changed. She’s working from home for goodness knows how long but in the interest of getting mended as quickly as possible I want to be with her and help keep the leg rested as much as possible. It’s so easy to discover you’ve left your phone on the top floor of a 4 storey house when you’ve just settled with your leg comfortable in the kitchen, 3 floors below. Working as spokeswoman for the British Government who are hosting COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Glasgow later this year, she’s having Zoom meetings with people sitting in all sorts of elegant and glamorous places. (One of her fellow zoomers sat throughout a meeting with a jackdaw sitting on his shoulder! ) Slumped awkwardly on her kitchen sofa with a background of kettles boiling, water gushing from taps into a stainless steel sink and cats mewing to be fed or let out, she soldiers on.

Altar Frontal as seen at the quilters before binding added