Toft and Helpston

Today is Mothers 88th birthday. What do you give an octogenarian. We all had the same dilemma. I finally decided on a beautiful apricot azalea pot plant and one of my paintings. Its a water colour of the Corbier Lighthouse in Jersey. I did the painting from a photograph I took when I took Mother to Jersey for a holiday so the painting had some significant. Especially as my father died on the Island in 1980.

My sister and I decided to take Mother out to lunch and we decided on the Toft House Hotel at Toft. We couldn't manage today so it had to be yesterday. Toft is a small village west of Bourne on the edge of the Wolds. (The name Toft comes from the Old Scandinavian or Viking language and means Homestead.) The hotel itself is a converted 300 year old farm house and the lounge has an impressive inglenook fireplace. Its a Golf hotel and boasts a large golf course across the road from the hotel.

There were several parties already booked into the restaurant for lunch so we had to be content with a meal in the bar. The food was simple but well cooked and plenty of it.

On the way home later that afternoon I had to take a detour because a lorry had crashed into one of the ancient bridges once more and I went through the little village of Helpston. (Old English. Farmstead of a man named Help) Normally I skirt around its edge. In the center of the village is this small thatched cottage where the Poet John Clare was born.

John Clare was known as the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet. Born to farm labourers in July 1793 he would have been a contemporary and certainly known to Dave's Great x4 grandparents, William and Rebecca Bloodworth, who were also born and lived in the village.
John Clare is now considered to be one of the most important of the 19th century poets.

Winter Walk

The holly bush, a sober lump of green,

Shines through the leafless shrubs all brown and gray,

And smiles at winter be it eer so keen

With all the leafy luxury of May.

And O it is delicious, when the day

In winter's loaded garment keenly blows

And turns her back on sudden falling snows,

To go where gravel pathways creep between

Arches of evergreen that scarce let through

A single feather of the driving storm;

And in the bitterest day that ever blew

The walk will find some places still and warm

Where dead leaves rustle sweet and give alarm

To little birds that flirt and start away.

I am
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.