A Garden, A House and the Life Between

Mum’s been to visit before but just for a day or two whereas this time she came for 2 nights, 3 days. I picked her up and we enjoyed a beautiful drive back together with the sun shining and the traffic behaving itself. Mum’s not confident enough to make the car journey herself and also is a little nervous about the train journey with potential changes. So I offered to collect her and then husband and I shared the driving on the way back Sunday, which I was pleased about as 4 hours of driving picking her up and taking her to Cumbria gave my sciatica something to think about and boy did that flare up worse than I’ve ever hard it. Weirdly for me, doing exercise and gardening etc although it causes my degenerative back plus hip and back arthritis a serious amount of pain, being static in a seat or laid position for long periods makes it even worse.

Anyway no sooner did we reach our house and do a quick tour of the garden and paddock, the cloud started to arrive and the day turned out to be slightly cooler and cloudier than originally forecast. I had already considered this however and decided to switch our plans from Saturday to Friday and vice versa.

So with that said we set off to Glenridding for a mooch around that end of Ullswater Lake, lunch at the Helvellyn Cafe, and then a drive up to Lowther Castle for a tour of the castle and gardens. It’s a little early for the flowers right now but it’s still worth a visit if you’re up this way. Here’s a small selection of the photos I took:

Sunday was a quick trip to Larch Cottage garden centre and then a steady drive back to mums in the rain. I think she enjoyed her visit with us and we certainly loved having her here so all in all, a good time was had. The weather didn’t behave itself, but when does it, but I think we focused on what we could do and not what we couldn’t.

I work away in London quite a bit and of course I miss home like crazy while I’m away. It also means less time to play in the garden or paddock or on the house, but we have a week off coming up in the middle of May to strip out our kitchen and dining room of everything to start renovations in there. I’m super excited, and a little nervous as I’m a control freak, but it’s going to look amazing when it’s done. So the next blog might be some ‘before’ pictures of the space and then 6-8 weeks later, hopefully no longer, some ‘after’ photos. Watch this space.

It’s now time to welcome a friend to our house over the weekend to go walking near Ullswater. The rain is forecast unfortunately so I’m not sure just how that walk will go but we’ll see; the intention right now is to do it so let’s see how things evolve. Then next weekend it’s my birthday and hopefully we have more friends visiting. They have quite a lot going on however so they may not be able to make it and to be honest, knowing what we know, we just send them love and hugs as we know things are very rough. If they can make it we’ll have a lot of fun but if not, we understand.

And yes, our home is like a B&B at times as we get lots of visits from friends, especially in the Summer, but it’s nice to see people and spend time with them showing them our favourite place in the world.

Enjoy the weekend everyone.