I'm also late for February.

 And so to February as I try to catch up on my year and my blog posts.

 

We finally had a couple of sunny days, so I took advantage of working from home and headed out for a lunchtime walk. It really does do the soul good, well it does mine anyway, to get out into nature.

I was walking along the old disused railway line near our town when suddenly a load of birds shot out of the hedges just ahead of me.

I did have my purple waterproof on which is quite rustley, and my old brogue boots which for some reason clomp loudly when you walk (Himself calls them my Mr Noisy shoes!) 

so I did wonder if they had been startled by my approach, but the next minute a blackbird zoomed along the hedge line with a sparrowhawk in hot pursuit! 

That blackbird dipped and wove like the finest Spitfire pilot with a Messerschmitt on his tail and did escape to fly another day. It was over in seconds but breathtaking to watch.

 

On Saturday the 7th Soo came over and we decided to have a bus adventure. We caught one over to the nearby town of Wantage, which other than visiting the hospital for physio when I broke my shoulder 5 years ago, I haven’t been to in probably a decade. 

I have no idea why and it turned out to be not only bigger than I remembered, but really rather lovely. It was meant to poor with rain but instead the day was sunny and we had a lovely time. 

As seems to have been the theme for this year I forgot my camera so I don’t have any pictures to share, I really must go back and rectify that.  

We mooched the streets looking at all the lovely old buildings and looked round all the shops. I must say it was lovely to see many independent stores and hardly any chains. 

It was also the first time I had stepped into a charity shop, other than to drop of donations, since we moved house. I bought a mug, a plant pot with a crab on it and a cook book, pretty restrained even if I do say so myself! 

By now we were hungry and after looking at the menus outside various places settled on Marmalade a lovely café in the market square. 

It was packed but we managed to snag a table and had a delicious lunch. 

After we had eaten we had a mooch past the church and a bit of a walk by the stream that runs nearby, it was beautiful but very muddy so we decided that is somewhere to visit on another day. I need to look out our OS map and see what walks there are around and about the town centre.

 

The middle of February was super busy workwise. 

Himself and I went out for a walk on Valentine’s Day. I chose the route which got very muddy at one point, but we did see a beautiful deer, so I felt it was well worth it even if Himself was not so happy with the mud.

We also managed to get out for some fresh air the following Sunday too. It had been so wet we had been pretty much sticking to the old railway line as it is tarmacked, it’s a good 2.5 miles from end to end so you do get to feel like you have had a decent walk. At one point I was taking a picture of some early blossom in a hedgerow when I had this overwhelming feeling I was being watched. I stepped back and looking between the trees met the eyes of my observer. 

I cannot lie it was a tad unnerving!

 

On Wednesday the 25th we attended a Seed Talk. I had seen various adverts coming up on my time line for a while now, when I spotted one called ‘Folklore and Women’ by Dr Joan Passey that was actually taking place in the main lecture theatre at my place of work!

 I messaged Charlotte to see if she fancied going and she relied almost immediately to say yes. I mentioned in passing to Himself that I was going, and he surprisingly announced he would also like to go so I ended up buying three tickets. 

Charlotte and I met in Oxford for a drink at The Grapes and then pizza at Franca Manca before heading to meet Himself outside my work. 

The talk was pleasingly busy, and I even saw a couple of our students there. Overall, I did very much enjoy it, but I feel it might have benefitted from focusing on a specific genre, or era of folklore and or storytelling. It was a huge subject to cover in a couple of hours, so it felt like a somewhat frustrating skim over the surface rather than a deep dive. I am keeping an eye on their future offerings and will definitely go to another. Himself was pondering why the name sounded familiar and on getting home realised he has a couple of Dr Passey’s books!

 

On Friday 27th I met my friend’s Simon, Carole and Liz for lunch and to celebrate Carole’s 80th birthday. We had arranged to have a couple of roses for her garden delivered the day before which she was delighted with.

It was fairly quiet in the pub, but we clearly made up for that I think because the landlady came over with our bill at the end and said it had been lovely to hear all the laughter from our table!

That evening Himself and I were off into Oxford again to see ‘2:22 - A Ghost Story’ at the New Theatre. As mentioned here before I am a fan of the Uncanny podcast and Danny Robins the presenter wrote the play which was partly why I wanted to go, it had also had rave reviews when it was on in the Werst End. Indeed, we had had the tickets for 18 months.

We had a drink in The Grapes before going in, a good job really because my small glass of wine in the theatre was an eyewatering £10 and tasted like paint stripper!  

 

Sadly, the play did not live up to expectations, and we ended up going back to The Grapes for a post theatre drink and to dissect it in detail. 

The main issue was the actors were not wearing mics, so they were literally bellowing at each other to make sure they were heard by the whole audience. We both found this incredibly distracting, and it really, really detracted from the atmosphere. It’s almost impossible to have nuance and emotion when you are roaring across a stage at one another. 

I spoke to a couple of friends afterwards who also saw the play, and when I mentioned the shouting they both said it was a problem for them too, and that they couldn’t always understand what the actors were saying. Having said that in both their cases though they enjoyed the play and didn’t guess the ending.

As a lifelong fan of ghost stories, I guess for me the other thing that bugged me was literally every classic ghost story trope had been shoehorned into the script somehow, which made it feel a bit cliched. I had also figured out the plot twist well before the end. Funnily enough so had Himself, but for a completely different reason to me!

 

I may have done a tiny bit of sale shopping. I bought a dress from Kharibu which is lovely but a much lighter weight that I was anticipating for the cost. 

I also did a bit of brooch buying. 

Erstwilder did a Hanna Barbara release and when I saw the Scooby Doo ones, well it had to be done!

 

So that was February. 

I’ll try and do March before the end of April so I am just about caught up. I can’t promise anything though as I am off to Germany on Thursday for a family wedding among other things...