Auntie Kate's Clock

It had been silent for a couple of months - a failure to remember to wind it one Sunday had resulted in a two and a half hour discrepancy between clock and chime, so we stopped it - until Ron got round to the complicated procedure for setting it right a couple of days ago. I hadn't realised how much I had missed it, actually, but when it is ticking and chiming away on the wall life seems altogether more right, somehow...

'It' is a long case chiming wall clock with a pendulum, often called a grandmother clock to distinguish from the floor standing grandfather, but in this case it is a great-aunt clock, Great Aunt Kate to be exact.

Auntie Kate was somewhat eccentric for her time. She was born around 1880, never married, and was for many years a subpostmistress in Penarth, going out to work and looking after her elderly parents at the same time. She was my maternal grandmother's elder sister. Until she died, in her 100th year, she kept the crown of braids hairstyle that was fashionable in her youth. Pure white her hair was, and easily long enough to sit on, but seeing it unbraided was a very rare sight. She told me that she had been ill in her early twenties (glandular fever, I think, but my memory may be at fault) and that all her hair had fallen out. When it grew back it was straight and white instead of red and curly.

When my grandmother died she had already retired. She sold her house in Penarth and moved in with my grandfather in Birmingham. We saw a lot more of her, and her eccentricities were a little more noticeable. One thing which we could not understand at all was her food choices - she was very fussy about what she 'could' and 'could not' eat, but there didn't seem to be any logic to it. Finally, one Christmas Day, it came to me - she restricted herself to food items which were white or beige - white bread, chicken breast, weak coffee (she liked Camp coffee best!), marshmallow biscuits... It would seem that at the time she was recuperating from her serious illness her doctor had told her to stick to a 'light' diet. She has misinterpreted his words, but had kept faithfully to what she believed he had meant all those years. And she was fit and healthy right to the end.

For many years she also was part of the shopping monitor, writing down each week what food she bought in response for a small reward. I'm not sure how much good she did their statistics, though - in the early 1970s there was a sugar crisis, sugar could not be got for love nor money, and Auntie Kate revealed a cupboard full from top to bottom with bags of sugar - she had bought one a week for, well, years and hardly used any! The sugar was solid, the bags were yellow, but we did manage to persuade her to part with a few of them at a profit.

As well as her clock on my wall I also have her sewing machine - a Singer hand machine which she bought new in 1905 (price five guineas). She lent it to me back in 1970 when I was recently married and broke, making me promise to let her have it back when I upgraded to an electric one, but I've never bothered to upgrade as it still does everything I need it to do.

Restarting the clock has brought Auntie Kate back to mind more vividly than ever.

Mt Edgcumbe in midsummer

And here it is, midsummer. The shortest night was last night, and from now on it's all downhill to Christmas...

Doesn't seem like all downhill, though. In fact, it promises to be quite a good summer from the traditional point of view of nice weather for the beach and the bbq. Yesterday and again today there was a complete reversal of the normal Cornish morning. Normally we start with a cloudless blue dawn (winter as well as summer) which rapidly deteriorates into cloud at best. Overcast dawns like today's, however, sometimes give way to glorious sunshine...

Yesterday's overcast dawn turned into one of the hottest days of the year so far. Ty and I went walking at Mt Edgcumbe, a country park estate overlooking Plymouth Sound. There were four people and five dogs, as we were joined by the giant poodle and the hyper springer, back down here on holiday. We all had what we thought were ample supplies of water - about four litres between us - but that was all gone by the time we stopped for our picnic! The dogs especially got very thirsty, and there were no streams along our route, which is quite unusual for Cornwall. We stopped for lunch almost at the top of the valley that leads to Maker church and were treated first to the sight of a green woodpecker flying back and forth across the valley and then to a couple of fallow deer running across just below the top of the hill. They stopped and stared (or probably sniffed) at us in that classic alert pose for just long enough for Micheal to take a couple of pictures, then carried on running across the hill down to the trees.

I had never seen a woodpecker in flight across open country before - if we hadn't first seen it in classic profile against a tree trunk I wouldn't have been sure what it was, as its back shone golden in the sun in flight.

Good doggie, clever doggie...

I don’t like people who tell you how clever their dogs are. Dogs aren’t all that clever really, although it seems to me that they are manipulative. That’s not to say that they can’t think, or remember (somebody tried to tell me yesterday that they couldn’t, but what she meant was that they don’t/can’t reminisce, which is a different thing altogether). What is not so certain is whether they can anticipate and plan for the future...

One thing that dogs like is routine. Do the same thing at the same time two days running, and it becomes an unalterable habit and will cause the poor animal all sorts of unhappiness if it doesn’t happen on the third. In consequence, I am very careful not to do the same thing twice running, thus giving myself an edge and the opportunity to make my own mind up now and than when and where and what we shall do. Apart from bedtime – the bedtime routine is fairly similar, but not at the same time every day (edge, see!). I tidy the kitchen, then I take the dog out for his last walk, come back and put the babygate across the stairs so he can’t eat the post in the morning, then he usually has a late night snack and goes off to sleep, leaving me to go straight to sleep or stay up all night if I wish...

Last night we did all the above, then I went back in the living room while he went for a drink and a biscuit or two. Instead of going off to sleep he came back in and went into his ‘I need something’ routine – paw on knee, eyes boring into mine, etc. He only does this when a) he wants to go out, b) he wants to eat something (usually people food he thinks he has identified as abandoned, but daren’t touch without permission) or c) I am talking to someone else and he wishes to remind me that he is the most important being in my life. Well a) and c) were quickly ruled out as we had just been out and I wasn’t talking (Ron was watching TV). So – b)? When I stood up he led me straight into the kitchen and looked pointedly at his water bowl, which he had just emptied. I filled it. He watched me, then turned away and went off to sleep. He didn’t have a drink, obviously didn’t need to. So he must have been anticipating future thirst and preparing for it. Or am I just falling into the ‘What a clever dog I’ve got’ trap?