Month: Aug 2024

An Erinaceous Update 🦔

I’ve always been delighted by how much wildlife there is in our urban garden from bees and hover flies to sparrows and blue tits, but nothing causes quite as much excitement as spotting a hedgehog. Just over a week ago, we drew the living room curtains to find a little hedgehog hastily gathering leaves to make a nest under the pallet woodshed.

The very same day, I took the girls to the pet shop to buy some hedgehog food and my husband built a little hedgehog house out of spare bricks and a paving slab, and we were delighted to see the hedgehog shuffle inside just as dawn broke the next day. We also set up a little motion sensor camera to watch him without disturbing him, and spotted the mouse that also lives in the woodshed nabbing some food.

Our hedgehog house

Small, shy and very skittish, catching a glimpse of our little Tiggywinks has been the highlight of my evening every night for the last week. We think it’s a male and probably born this year judging by his size, so I’m hoping between the food we leave out and all the insects in our garden, he’ll put on enough weight to survive the winter. Given the decline in hedgehog numbers across Britain, I’m happy to help any that find their way into our garden, but we try not to disturb him too much.

Leaving food and water for the hedgehog has quickly become part of our little daughters’ bedtime routine even though they’re both fast asleep by the time he emerges, and he’s usually in his own bed just before our early risers wake.

View from the window and night camera

I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of watching hedgehogs snuffle and shuffle around the garden, perhaps because they’re nocturnal and increasingly rare, there is almost something magical about them. Have a lovely week. X

Summer of Sand and Sea

There’s been a slight crisp coldness sneaking into our mornings foreshadowing autumn, and after a very overcast and rainy summer, I’m ready for the change of season. Despite the weather, the highlight of my summer was our family holiday, when we returned to East Lothian again though a different caravan park this time around, right beside the seaside.

There’s something so wholesome and nostalgic about the simplicity of spending days at the beach paddling in the sea and filling our pockets full of shells then returning to a cosy caravan in the evening.

The weather was patchy with the best days on the days we arrived and departed, and mostly overcast with showers in between but it didn’t stop us from doing everything we had planned. We are none of us very good at relaxing and usually squeeze a lot of activities and sightseeing into our holidays, and this trip was no exception.

We enjoyed a morning in Edinburgh visiting the Camera Obscura and World of Illusions, which exceeded all expectations and was really fun with so many interactive displays that the kids loved. Our favourite parts were feeling (and bumping) our way through the mirror maze and the Vortex, which is an optical illusion with a bridge through a revolving tunnel that had us all clinging to the barrier convinced we were going to be tilted and turned upside down.

We also returned to one of the beautiful beaches we’d discovered on our holiday last year. Coldingham Bay is a beautiful beach with colourful beach huts and crashing waves favoured by surfers and bodyboarders. My husband and our oldest daughter went splashing in the waves while I built sandcastles for our youngest to smash. We all took a wander along the hill and found a rocky little shingle where the kids entertained themselves stacking pebbles, before returning to the main sandy beach for one last splash in the sea before heading home. It was definitely one of my favourite parts of our holiday.

As much as I love our little family holidays and look forward to so many more as our girls grow, after a few days living in close quarters in a caravan, it’s always good to return home to be reunited with our cat Mara who stayed home with my dad pet-sitting while we were away. Now we’re looking forward to autumn and another wee break away. X

July Reading Wrapup

It’s been a busy summer and I’ve been struggling to find time to blog, but July was a great month for reading with a couple of books that will definitely be in my end of year favourites.

Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa

This is such a hard book to describe, it’s a love story but also a story of survival and resistance. Against the Loveless World follows Nahr reflecting on her life up to the present where she is serving a sentence in an Israeli prison for acts of terrorism, and looking back at all the twists and turns through life that brought her there. It is dark in places with descriptions of rape and prostitution as Nahr struggles to survive in the Palestinian diaspora scattered around the middle East before she eventually found her way back to the West Bank. Against the Loveless World is such a powerful story, and one that was surprisingly uplifting and inspiring about family, friendship, love, survival, ordinary and revolutionary acts of resistance.

Keedie by Elle McNicoll

Set five years before A Kind of Spark, the prequel focuses on Addie’s bold, impulsive and forthright autistic sister, Keedie. I didn’t love this quite as much as A Kind Of Spark because in some ways Keedie is a bit more prickly, uncompromising and impulsive than Addie but it’s still a captivating story that I thoroughly enjoyed full of friendships and bullying, family dynamics, self-acceptance and disability-positivity, and the claustrophobia of small Scottish towns that reminded me so much of my own adolescence.

They Called Me A Lioness by Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri

This is the short autobiography of a 16 year old Palestinian girl, Ahed Tamimi, who was arrested and imprisoned for 8 months for slapping an Israeli soldier. It offers such a fascinating insight into the reality of life under occupation from the checkpoints, separate roads, walls carving up the West Bank to the military raids, arrests and beatings. Despite everything she endures, this is such a hopeful book with the writer imagining a future where Muslims, Christians and Jews can all live together peacefully as equals in one whole country. What really shines is that beyond the organised forms of protest like weekly marches in her village or the violent clashes between protesters and soldiers, so much of the resistance is just refusing to give up and continuing to find joy, love and carrying on with ordinary life under the brutal military occupation.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

This has been on my TBR for a while but this summer seemed like the perfect time to read it as the story starts in July 2024. Published in 1993, Parable of the Sower describes a nightmarish, dystopian future where climate change has ravaged the world causing droughts, wildfires and mass migration as people attempt to flee further and further north to find safety. The story is narrated by Lauren who lives in a small walled off community in Southern California as her family tries to stay safe behind their walls fending off incursions from burglars, rapists and arsonists, she frets about what will happen when their safety is breached, and how she reacts when her worst fears come true. I was absolutely captivated by this story of survival, resilience, friendship and community against the odds and this is easily one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Have a lovely week. X