Beauty and the beast

 The people who lived in our house before us (they were our rental tenants) chose the front door when we renewed all the windows. 

The door has a glass panel with stylised roses on it, which would not have been our choice, but we wanted the house to feel properly like their home — they rented it from us for about a decade.

On that glass panel they attached one of those sticky wall hooks, so they could put up a wreath at Christmas.

I like that idea but a) I'm too mean to shell out for a wreath, and b) all the wreaths I saw in the shops when I looked at Christmas seemed very heavy to me. I thought they might pull the hook off, and then what?

So since last summer when we moved in, we've had a front door with a glass panel and a hook but never hung anything on it.

That all changed this spring when Grace (my daughter) and Iceni (her daughter) called in after their home-ed gathering where they'd been making spring wreaths.

They brought this.

Brilliant! Perfect! It's pretty, it's seasonal, and because it's made of simple and natural materials, it isn't too heavy. I love it. An Easter wreath, right there.

So that's one thing from our house. Here's another.

My memory isn't completely shot — I know who I am and the name of the Prime Minister and the post code for my house, all that kind of thing. I can remember the words to the Salve Regina and the Hail Mary, and I remember odd things like that the London train that goes through Saffron Walden continues on to Liverpool Lime Street, which is not intuitive in my opinion. 

But I do quite often forget to take my pills and unplug my phone after it's charged so it doesn't stress the battery and take my distance glasses on the rare occasions I go to the cinema.

Most of the time, especially when I am writing, my mind is in 14th century Yorkshire even though my body is on the south coast in 2026. So sometimes my body does things by itself that seem to bypass my mind altogether and surprise it later on.

This happened today.

I went upstairs to retrieve something or other (I've forgotten what, now), looked across my room and saw this thing on the table under the window.

What the hey? Jeepers! What the ever-loving heck is that lump of extreme weirdness? — I thought.

After a short while my mind caught up with my body and I knew what I was looking at — a chicken I'd got out of the freezer to defrost. I should explain it was in my bedroom because I have two massive inbuilt wardrobes and not that many clothes, so in one wardrobe I keep a freezer. There is arguably room for it downstairs in the pantry, but that's where we stash the water from the spring and the hoover and our clogs for the garden.

So my life is full of surprises and I know what I'm doing a lot less of the time than I should, but on the bright side I did write two-and-a-half thousand words this morning, which is not bad going even if I did inadvertently leave my consciousness behind at St Alcuins.