mugging up

I was relieved, when I woke briefly in the small hours, to hear rain drumming loudly on the roof, and pleased when it was still raining when I got up, and raining really hard (bouncing off the roof of the car parked outside the kitchen window) by mid-morning.  I checked quickly on the Met Office website that it was still supposed to be raining at Kew until four o'clock (though I did notice that the yellow rain warning for London had been withdrawn).  Logically, the fact that it is pouring on the Essex-Suffolk borders does not mean that it is raining at Kew, but it makes it much easier to believe, and to accept that cancelling the day out was a sensible decision, when the evidence of your own eyes is of nature chucking it down.

I thought I'd better spend part of my unexpected free day mugging up on next week's presentations. Tuesday sees another gardening talk, then on Wednesday it's the turn of the woodland conservation charity.  The garden club talk, on Colour and Interest in the autumn garden, will be based on whatever I can borrow from the plant centre that looks either colourful or interesting, supplemented with twigs and sprays from my own garden.  The fact that I never know until the day what will be available does add a certain adrenaline-fuelled spontaneity to the talk.  People like the real plants, or perhaps they like my enthusiastic reaction to them, or maybe the fact that the lights are on makes it easier for them to stay awake.  Last week's carefully prepared bulb talk went OK, but didn't seem as much fun as the ones with live plants, for anybody involved.

The woodland conservation charity sent me a new set of slides a few months back, and Wednesday will be only the second time I've talked from them.  The new presentation is passable.  The previous one, as sent out to volunteers, was a muddle.  I'm sure it was written from the heart, but not apparently by anyone who had received any presentation training, and it went round and round in circles.  You were supposed to tell the audience how important it was to involve children in woodland planting, and then, four slides later, just as you thought you'd covered the topic of children and were on to the next point, there the children were again.  I ended up writing my own script, and cannibalising the slides to fit.

The new one is better than that, but it is still a challenge to memory to remember what I am supposed to say about each slide, and the re-stated three part aims (I'm sure there used to be four) of Create, Protect, Restore, don't cover human interaction with trees, which is definitely supposed to be there somewhere.  The script goes rather wildly off track as well at the point where it is supposed to be covering what the charity is doing in response to the threat from new imported tree diseases, presumably because there is very little they can do (standing wringing your hands and weeping does not count).

After lunch I made some banana bread, since the Systems Administrator rather overbought on bananas for my lunch box last week, and we had a bagful going squidgy in the cupboard.  I will report back on whether it is too sweet.  Some recipes are, but as I couldn't remember which one I used last time that didn't help.

I highly recommend Claudia Roden's lamb with okra.  You cook some onion and garlic quite gently, until it is golden, add the cubed lamb and cook until the lamb is brown, add the okra and cook some more, add a tin of tomatoes, and simmer until it's tender.  True one pot cooking.  I expected the lamb to weep instead of browning, but it didn't.  Ground coriander at the onion frying stage is optional, as is the final squeeze of lemon.  I included both.  If, like Simon Hopkinson, you hate imprecise recipes, then you will hate that recipe.  Sorry about that.