Kitchen bookcase and The Useful Cupboard

A year or so ago I tidied the kitchen bookcase. This old shelf unit came with us from Oxfordshire. It had been built by the father of the previous owners of the house we lived in. Old but solid. None of your shelves bowing under the weight of books here! It actually stayed relatively tidy until I emptied it and moved it to another part of the kitchen so that I could paint the wall behind it. We had a sort out of cookery books. I say we because most of them, especially the glossy ones, are Toad's. He likes cooking in theory ;)

In the usual way of one thing leading to another, bookcase sorting and moving morphed into also sorting out The Useful Box that lives in one of the kitchen cupboards, which led to my emptying an old Yorkhire Tea tin of magazine recipe cutouts, chucking most of them out and putting them in a different tin so that I could use the Yorkshire Tea tin for all the glues. I've no idea how I got onto glues! Oh, wait! I know. I'd bought some wood glue for some loose chair joints. Anyway, the whole Useful Cupboard in which The Useful Box lives got a clean out. It's a when-in-doubt-shove-it-in-(or look for it in)-the-Useful-Cupboard-place. Every household has one of those places, right?

I found some stuff to put aside for the grandsons, who are coming on a visit later this month...

This is me making progress!

...and a Japanese lunch tin of Toad's:

Then I got on with cutting away some loose plaster board and my thumb with a Stanley knife. My very old and tiny pocket penknife, once resharpened, was a nuch more effective tool (well, it was less effective at slicing my thumb being easier to use in awkward spaces!)

there's a plaster under that bandage;
it was a tiny cut!

And then, wearing some leather gardening gloves, I ripped up an old pan scrub and stuffed it into some holes in the corner behind the bookcase before fixing it in with Polyfilla.

I discovered why the kitchen telephone port that we'd ignored for ten years wasn't working: it wasn't even connected. When I told Toad this he said he'd presumed as much. Hadn't presumed to fix it though (he would have if I'd asked him to but I didn't ask so... 🙄 😉). Anyway, we even have an orange telephone, one that doesn't need a power supply, that we acquired soon after coming here because of numerous power cuts. Local power lines have been put underground now so they aren't going to get blown down in every storm or pulled down by falling trees.

Chimney Honey

Four years ago today we were collecting sooty honey from the bedroom fireplace above this stove in the front room. In the summer of 2011 a swarm of bees had settled in my bedroom chimney. The fireplace in that room is boarded up and the terracotta chimney has a lid (also terracotta; it's not a separate cowl) but with some side air holes for ventilation. The bees used one of these as their entrance.

At the time, I called a beekeeper friend to ask what to do because hundreds of bees were getting into the house and although I helped as many as I could to get outside again, in the hope that they'd find their way back to the chimney, a lot of them died.  He said that since the swarm was inaccessible it was best to just leave them alone and they would also leave us alone.

After a day or two, the swarm apparently settled down and made a hive, presumably attached to the inside of the chimney. We would hear a lot of buzzing during the day but they'd go quiet at night. And, as Bee Person had said, they stopped coming into the bedroom (by crawling under the skirting boards) and only used the outdoor chimney entrance.

One night some weeks later, I heard a loud 'kerflump' from the chimney just as I was going to sleep.  There was no subsequent buzzing. I thought no more about it until Hogmanay when I found a blob of shiny, sticky stuff on top of the stove and some underneath it. Shining a torch up this chimney, which is 'stoppered' except for the stove flue, I saw that the stuff was dripping not down the chimney but seeping down inside the wall! A taste test confirmed that it was honey and looking at a blob in the microscope confirmed that there were soot particles in it. There was not very much honey in the end but it showed that the bees had made a nest and had begun to make honey before they died.

There's interesting stuff inside the walls of the Boggy Brae house!

This morning's light

From near the top of the field near my home
(click photos to enlarge)

The lower two photos were taken from near the bottom of my garden, which is level with the bottom of the field.