Maybe, just maybe, spring is coming

After what seems like an endless winter, although in reality it has only been a couple of months of freezing weather, punctuated by the occasional multi-day downpour of freezing sleety rain, there are signs that spring is coming.

While it’s still cold at night, the afternoons are beginning to actually feel warm, warm enough to sit out in the sun, even if sometimes you need a jacket to shield yourself from the chilly wind off the mountains.

And even though it's still chilly after dark, we managed a barbecue sitting under the stars, drinking wine and talking, even if we were wearing puffer jackets and beanies.

Certainly the magpies think spring is on the way, squabbling and fighting over nest material, and the parrots are beginning to cheep and squeak the way they do when they are feeling amorous.

Nothing much is happening in the garden yet, except that the broad bean plants have begun to poke their heads up and the kale plants I started off in early winter are beginning to come on.

Up at the Athenaeum, we are in limbo with the recataloguing project, it’s a big job, and we are investigating if we can get some museum or library interns to help.

As always we have no money, the Athenaeum runs on a shoestring, and being in a fairly remote rural area we don’t have that much of a talent pool to draw on, although I’m sure there must be some retired librarians or English teachers we can persuade to get involved.

Otherwise we took down our successful winter exhibition about apple growing in the region on Friday.

We had had a mystery object competition

no one guessed the correct answer, so we decided to give the prize to the funniest suggestion - a device to train snakes to perform circus tricks.

The actual answer is that they were bottle cutters - you heated up the ring and slipped it over a wine or beer bottle. When the ring cooled it compressed and cracked the bottle, leaving you the top section that could be used as a plant cloche, and the bottom could be filled with kerosene and a floating wick to protect delicate plants from frost.

The bottle cutters (and a few other objects to do with the early twentieth century apple trade) are not ours, and were borrowed from farmers in the region who found them at the back of various sheds.

We’ve made the decision to fully document them before returning them, and then perhaps work with the owners to find some local collecting institution - which we are not - to add them to their collection before the knowledge of their purpose and provenance is lost forever