Monday, Monday . . .

Hmmm - I am singing the words to the old song in my head, and looking out on blackness still. There is the slightest lightening of the sky but only noticable through one of the Velux roof windows in the attic . . . A tractor has just driven into the farmyard over the wall. They have a milking herd so have been working for a couple of hours already.

Many thanks to all those of my friends who left comments. I have now just managed to enable them! GTM - a codlin is a type of apple, but Codlins and Cream is the country name for the Greater Willow Herb (which I have growing in my garden in totally the wrong place, but it is so pretty I allow it to stay - even when 4 feet high in an alpine bed looks a bit out of place!) WHEN I can work out how to, I want a photo of it at the top of my blog.

Well, our trip to the Car Boot Sale yesterday wasn’t wasted, as I got two little books to add to my collection. I always feel so disappointed if there isn’t a single book that I would like. I bought “Timothy Towser and 19 other Cornish Tales in prose and verse”, dated 1906. These stories had originally been published in Netherton’s Cornish Almanacks . . . I couldn’t resist it as the language (dialect) used inside is so archaic and needed saving for posterity. Some of the words I recognize, as they seem to be used across the West Country, but some took the greatest working out and some still remain a mystery! There was also a dialect poem from a 1963 copy of the West somethingorother and Royal Cornwall Gazette. All for 50 pence.

The other book was “Over the Farmyard Gate” – Country Life in the 1930’s, by G K Nelson. It has wonderful illustrations and harks back to a time when horses were still working the land. I shall indulge myself with sharing little excerpts now and again on here.

They are both fascinating windows on the past. Now I know that fal-tha-rals are useless things; that mahogany is gin sweetened with treacle; “okum-sniffy” (!) was a hot and sweet little glass of grog; that a missment is a mistake or error; that a "reg’lar quilter" is not to do with patchwork but being in a flutter or flurry . . . Or it was a hundred and odd years ago . . . Here’s a little verse to get you pondering the meaning:

“Knackt oal athurt, I petched to ren –

He coosed me down tha road –

I heerd un tarving arter me:

Aw! How he pank’d an’ blaw’d!”