The Restory Retreat Centre

We spent the last few days at Barrowfield, preparing for the final move in ten days' time. While George was busy fixing fences and having a crash course in windmill maintenance, I went treasure hunting with my camera. It felt like playing truant and even a little wrong to be having such fun, but then, while we don't have running water in the house, no thorough house cleaning is possible and therefore also not much unpacking can be done for now. Thus, I assigned myself to kitchen duty and scouting. Oh, the joys of uncharted land! Matilda

For some reason, after many, many years I read this nursery rhyme again this morning: Hey diddle diddle, The cat and the fiddle The cow jumped over the moon; The little dog laughed to see such fun, And the dish ran away with the spoon. Now what in the name of love...? Anyway, it made me think of Leonard Cohen’s Take this Waltz based on a poem by Frederico Carcia Lorca. Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry There's a lobby with nine hundred windows There's a tree where the doves go to die There's a piece that was torn from the morning And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay Take this waltz, take this waltz Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws Oh I want you, I want you, I want you On a chair with a dead magazine In the cave at the tip of the lily In some hallways where love's never been On a bed where the moon has been sweating In a cry

"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" - Henry David Thoreau