I went last night to hear Bob Flowerdew talk at a local garden club on the unlikely subject of Gardening by UFO light. I'm not a member, but know a couple of people who are, and have lectured there myself a couple of times, so for the last two years when they've opened the booking to their annual celebrity lecture to non-members they've made sure I got a ticket. They make a proper evening of it, with the village hall packed out, and home made sandwiches and cakes included in the price of the event (home made by members of the committee. It seems to be a feature of village committee life that you help provide refreshments, and I get off rather lightly in that respect when it comes to the beekeepers).
My first and irrelevant thought was that he was shorter than I expected. Given I've mainly heard him on the radio I don't know why I expected him to be any particular height, though I do have his Organic Bible and I suppose there are some photographs of him in there. The talk was great fun, in a bonkers way. His central thesis was that since science was complicated and there was a great deal we still didn't know, it was better to be open minded and curious about gardening problems and life in general than to dismiss or attack new or unfamiliar ideas. Which sounds fair enough. I am not inclined to start believing in healing crystals, or planting by the phases of the moon (planting when I have time and it is not pouring with rain is as much as I can manage), but look at the way that, for example, recent new understanding of how the expression of genes can be switched on and off by environmental factors has complicated notions of heredity.
The Systems Administrator spent the evening catching up with old work friends, which would have been a nicer evening overall if the 22.18 and 22.30 out of Liverpool Street hadn't been cancelled, and the 22.38 left ten minutes late, spent another ten minutes stopped outside Stratford and dawdled back to Colchester, so that the SA got home at five minutes past one. The late running 22.38 had people standing as far as Colchester, since passengers for Norwich had been told to get that train and it was packed. There was no information at Colchester about how they were supposed to get to Norwich. Greater Anglia's apology after two days of chaos in this morning's East Angian Daily Times only covered the severe delays on Wednesday night (a friend's husband who left Liverpool Street at twenty to seven or thereabouts got home at gone eleven) and the daytime delays during Thursday, and didn't even mention that Thursday night was chaos as well.
Meanwhile, a dispute has broken out among the beekeepers committee, conducted mainly by e-mail with occasional telephone sorties, about whether or not you can move the venue of an advertised event at one week's notice. You can't. End of. I thought I had the final say on that, as I was going to lend the projection equipment for the talk and could decide where I was taking it (to the advertised hall), but yesterday we discovered that our booked speaker was unable to make the date anyway, leaving us with one week to organise an alternative entertainment. I've suggested a session on honey jar labelling regulations, presented as a light-hearted quiz and group discussion, but so far only one fellow committee member has replied. They said it was a good idea (in fact, a brilliant idea) but a minefield. Which seems a very good reason to have a teach-in on the subject. Nobody else has suggested anything, apart from one volunteer to cover the original topic, which was brave of him, but seems hard on the booked speaker, who was very keen to do the talk and has got all his slides ready. It is not his fault he can't make it, so we should try and reschedule him for next year. I'm waiting for the rest of the committee to start showing more interest in the problem, as I volunteered to be Treasurer, not Entertainments Officer.
In the garden I continued to cut down herbaceous stems, and trim back the roses on the bank between the top and bottom lawns, which are sprawling out across the border at the top, engulfing an iron tripod and threatening to annihilate a tree peony. Everything has made a phenomenal amount of growth (for north Essex) after the wet year. I filled an entire trailer with stems and leaves bound for the compost heap, and there is masses more to come off. In fact, I am going to run out of space in the compost bins fairly soon, despite the Systems Administrator building another one only recently. The ground is absolutely saturated, so that I am breaking down the lawn at the edges of the beds as I kneel down to work, and I dread to think what damage I am doing to the soil structure walking on it. But there isn't time to wait for it to dry out and do everything in March. Work will continue right through the winter, unless it is pouring, freezing or snowing.
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