I was not supposed to be at home today, tapping away at my keyboard at ten to three. It is half term week, and I was booked to go with my mother and nephew to the National Gallery, to visit Facing the Modern: the portrait in Vienna 1900. My nephew is seven, and keen on art, or rather, keen on traditional painting. I don't know what his instinctive and untutored seven year old's innocent eye would make of Damian Hirst's perspex box of rotting meat and flies, or even the found industrial assemblages of the late Sir Anthony Caro.
However, by yesterday the London forecast for Friday was heavy rain, with a yellow warning of severe weather, and my mother rang up expressing a strong personal preference for not getting soaked. Whether to postpone was really up to her and my nephew. For myself, I can cope in London in the rain, but I didn't want to be responsible for a draggled old age pensioner and a drenched seven year old. She decided to reschedule.
By this morning, the forecast was for light rain in north Essex, and light showers in London, though rather confusingly with a yellow rain warning still in force for both. I headed out into the garden, thinking I'd get something done before the rain started. By mid morning the forecast was for no rain at all. At lunchtime it started to rain. I know the Met Office warned us correctly about Monday's big storm, and well done them, but their efforts in the past twenty four hours have not been helpful. I suppose they have some excuse, in that the Systems Administrator looked at the rain radar, and there has been heavy rain to the north and south of us, just not here (or in London). If I'd been in Southend, or thirty miles west of London, I'd have been soaked, but the clouds broke up or dissipated before reaching this corner of the southeast.
Unexpected free mornings to work on the garden are a delicious bonus. The garden is never as well-tended as I'd like, not as weed-free, or expertly pruned at the appropriate time, or staked where needed. I didn't do vegetables again this year. But it is not bad, and the answer to people who say that they don't know how I do it is that I put the hours in. And I know it is horribly mean of me, and I don't deserve to have any friends, to feel a twinge of regret at the opportunity cost, when I arrange to meet people on what turns out to be the one dry day of the week, but it's a big project and it needs time.
The SA is very good about things like holding lunch until two o'clock, if I'm working outside and rain is approaching, so that I can make the most of the last hour until the showers arrive, but in general you can't call people up and ask whether they are free for coffee now, at this minute, because rain has stopped play and you've got time. Or at least, you could, but what happens when they say they are busy right now, but are free next Tuesday? It would be gratingly rude to say that it might not be raining on Tuesday, so you'd rather not commit.
Since it was still drizzling after lunch, I nipped up the road to the Chatto Gardens, to buy a couple of plants I noticed when I was there for coffee. One was the lovely old chrysanthemum variety 'Emperor of China', which has large, very double flowers of soft pink. Some of the outer petals are quilled, and it looks just like a chrysanthemum from a Chinese painting. I did have it at one time, but I'm not sure if a tall and straggly chrysanthemum that's been rather overgrown by other things is that, or something else, and for four pounds twenty I thought I'd take out an insurance policy and buy another while I saw it. There are lots of nice fat shoots showing across the width of the pot, and in the spring, if I remember, I should be able to chisel a couple off and make more plants. My other purchase was a late flowering umbellifer with extremely finely divided leaves that we saw at Trentham Park during our holiday, covered in foraging insects, which one of the gardeners kindly identified for me as Selinum wallichianum. The name fitted the descriptions in the books, and I'm going to try one and see how it does. If it is happy it might set seed next year, or I could lash out and buy a couple more.
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