Have we let our hair down too early?
Sally Bromley is principal of The College of Richard Collyer in Horsham. Her column will sometimes be about educational matters but more often a random ramble about house moves, house renovations, beach huts, Morris Minors, boxer dogs and keeping chickens.
The Government has given the go-ahead for the country to unlock itself and enjoy new freedoms but like the luxuriant locks of Rapunzel, perhaps we have been guilty of letting down our hair too much or too early. Photographs of beaches like Bournemouth are certainly more reminiscent of the Mediterranean in the 1970s and hopefully not the new normal. To extend the metaphor – thank goodness hairdressers and barbers are able to reopen from this weekend – although as a teenager in the 1970s I confess to a fondness for the more hirsute look. Perhaps Covid-19 will also have stimulated a new fashion for loose casual clothes ( in cheesecloth of course) and less makeup and obsession with eyebrows.
In my first column I wrote about falling in love with the cottage and finally moving in with the first frosts of January. There is much to delight us such as a derelict dairy at the rear of the cottage which we’ve now cleared and many other renovation challenges that had to be put frustratingly on hold. As businesses are starting to get back on track, we are looking forward to bringing our 18th century cottage into the 21st century without compromising on the beauty of the natural aging process and all her cracks and crevices. We’re becoming armchair experts in lime plaster and paint and restorative brick processes and the differences in chimney pots.
Sitting in the garden with a glass of chilled wine and watching the midges dance we have also discovered we have bats! Eek! And we seem to have adopted a cat, or rather it has adopted us much to our boxer’s excitement. There’s no way she’ll let it in the house but we’ve been feeding it and making sure it has enough water and we think it has been sleeping in the barn. The local cat protection group has been notified and so hopefully it will be rescued and given a new home soon. We’ve played detective with the help of neighbours and Homeless Cat was from a rented flat nearby and its owners moved on leaving no forwarding address. Homeless Cat is chipped but the contact details are no longer current. I thought we were supposed to be a nation of animal lovers. Abandoned pets really get me hot and bothered – far more than crowded beaches and careless litter. You can’t casually mislay a pet.
But we’re staying cool and calm. We’ve been out for a few jaunts in Doris our Morris Minor in the lazy summer haze of dwindling evening light. The weather has been so fine it’s a little cooler then and the roads less frenetic. Doris goes at a particular pace and there is no hurrying her which suits us fine.
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