Verona Strauss.comjust because life is fun! …

My cat, Bagpuss

Dear everyone, Mummy found lots of horrible spam comments on my site and most of the ‘real’ comments from the past 5 weeks have been deleted along with the rude ones. I’m sad that they are not all here any more and I’m sorry that you took time to leave lovely comments and now they have gone.

I think spam is very sad, but I can remember most of what you said and I hope you will keep leaving nice comments for me to read.

Today I have an exciting day planned. It’s Mummy’s Birthday weekend and Mummy says that although her Birthday is not until Sunday, she is going to start celebrating tonight! I love Birthdays and making lots of cards.

This afternoon I’m going to Poppys farm, then I’m going trampolining. After that we are going to meet up with some of Mummy’s friends and there will be lots of children for me to play with. They are all coming to stay for 3 days! I think there will be about 22 children all together!

We’ve been getting a big bag ready of things to take with us. We like passing things on to friends that we don’t want or need any more. We have some clothes, toys, craft kits, hand cream that Mummy made and even a baby’s sling to take with us. We hope that some of the children and Mummy’s and Daddy’s will like these things and be able to give them a new home.

The photo is of one of my cats, Bagpuss. She was one of my favourites but she died on Christmas Eve two years ago. She still comes to see me in my dreams and now she has grown into a big patch of grass by the hedge. She was an enormous cat who talked all the time.

My other cat is now a squirrel and she comes to see us most days and sits on top of Bagpuss’s grass.

patrins - from the Romanes word for leaf

This week I asked Mummy if she had ever used Patrins. She didn’t know what I was talking about!

She asked me to spell it, so I did.

Then she asked me to say what patrins was. I explained that you find patrins to solve mysteries.

She asked me where I heard it and I told her it was in a Famous Five book by Enid Blyton.

Mummy still didn’t know and thought I had spelled it wrong. I knew I hadn’t.

When we got home I showed her the book and she read through the chapter. She STILL hadn’t heard of it!

I thought Mummy knew everything!

She said it sounded like a track of clues like Hanzel and Gretel leave behind themselves on the way to the house, but we could investigate, like Mystery solvers and see what we could find.

We found it hard to discover much, but it looks like Patrins is a collection of links that creates a story or forms a picture. Not really a story or a picture you can see or read, but one in your mind that helps you figure things out. A bit like a map or your sixth sense.

It is from the Romanes word for ‘leaf’ and patrins are markers are used by travelling Roma to tell others of directions or to share news. So maybe they are like Mother nature’s version of books and the internet or like flags used for SOS signals.

We found some information on a website about Romany Gypsies. I would like to be a gypsy.

Maybe someone else can tell me more about Patrins and we can see if Mummy has it right.

I told Mummy I hadn’t been doing much school work recently and she answered ‘You learn all the time Verona, you don’t need to sit at a desk to learn. Have a think through all the new things you have learned today.’

Well I guess I know a bit about Patrins and I don’t expect many people do! Also, I learned that if I scrape my elbow against the garage door it hurts. I learned that we can grow nice lettuces in the greenhouse; better than the ones outside and that slugs like kale - a lot. And I learned that when you press flowers, the colours look completely different when you take them out.

Be nice to nettles week

This week is be nice to nettles week. Mummy sat with me yesterday and we thought about all the ways nettles are a good thing.

Most people don’t like them because they sting, but it’s not their fault. Our neighbour has just sprayed hers with chemicals to kill them. We let ours grow though because they mind their own business down by the fence and we know that they are good plants, not bad ones.

Here are some good things about nettles

• They are free food with lots of vitamins and minerals. They have lots of iron which is for healthy blood and lots of calcium for bones and teeth. You can put them in soup or use them like spinach. They are good for arthritis too.
• They make nice tea!
• Birds like them and they eat the seeds
• Ladybirds like them and if you have ladybirds in the garden, they eat all your aphids. Ladybirds look pretty too.
• Some people use nettles to make fibre, like linen for clothes. And you can use nettle juice to colour clothes too; as a natural dye.
• You can put them in the compost heap to help it rot down quicker
• You can make nettle tea and use it like a cup of tea for your plants. That saves you having to buy fertilisers and other chemicals and the plants like it - it makes them healthy.
• Butterflies like nettles and butterflies are pretty