When a bee stings you, it leaves a chemical marker which attracts other bees to sting at the same spot. Which is yet another good reason not to get stung by a bee if at all possible. The same thing seems to happen with spam comments on the blog. There is one entry, months old now, that is picking up a steady stream of spurious comments. They don't get published, because Blogspot's spam filter identifies them as likely junk, and sends them to a holding box, where I get the chance to inspect and if necessary delete them. As part of the service, Blogspot sends me an email to alert me that someone has posted a comment. It is not a big problem, but it's disappointing on coming downstairs first thing in the morning to see that I've got six emails, and find when I open my inbox that four of them are about Anonymous comments, and then when I open the blog that all are spam (especially when the only other emails are the Daily Telegraph's morning summary and another advertisement for the Toast winter sale).
The spam comments are not offensive: some are simply gibberish, and others platitudes about how wonderful the blog is (I particularly appreciate the ones praising the quality of my artwork and videos). All contain links to the senders' own blogs, which are not even for anything exciting or obscene but things like vitamin supplements (as far as I can tell, having never clicked on one). I delete them, while wishing that Blogspot would go one further and enable me to send off a pithy response or long garbled comment of my own with a single click. Though it's never a good idea to escalate an argument gratuitously.
There was a frost first thing, and I was relieved I'd bothered to go outside last night after watching the weather forecast on the TV and shut the greenhouse and conservatory doors. I did have them open to get the air moving through, because some of the plants were suffering from fungal attack, especially in the greenhouse. It is a very good idea to be able to keep the floor dry in the winter months if you plan to overwinter plants under glass. Alas, I had my greenhouse erected on one corner of a large concrete slab with grooves running across it for grip. In wet weather water runs along the grooves and straight under the walls across the greenhouse floor, and I have lost several rooted Teucrium cuttings to the current outbreak of botrytis. I cannot see any way of solving the problem, short of taking a pneumatic drill to that corner of the concrete.
It was not a deep frost, and once it had melted I was able to weed the beds in the back garden, and cut last year's leaves off the smart Ashwood hellebores. Some of them were showing the black spots of fungal infection, while the leaves of one plant had gone entirely brown and collapsed. The buds appear sound, so with any luck we'll get a display of flowers this year. The hybrid hellebores in the garden have generally been pretty healthy (though H. foetidus in one bed has been looking very ropey for the past year, its seedlings blackening and dying before they come to anything), but is has been such a wet winter. The old leaves will go in a bag to the dump and not on the compost bin, to reduce the chances of recycling infection in the garden. The flower buds are still held close to the ground, and were not awfully visible without their surrounding leaves, and I had to be very careful not to tread on any of the plants.
The Systems Administrator stayed indoors, a plan I heartily concurred with. The air felt raw, and not the thing at all for anyone trying to cast off a chest infection, though it turned out the SA was more concerned with setting back the recovery of the cracked rib before a forthcoming trip over to Cheltenham. However, the SA did very kindly do the vacuuming, while I was weeding. It was kind, because gardening is my hobby and scarcely counts as housework, while the cat fur and general filth were our joint problem, and the SA would not put down vacuum cleaning if suddenly promoted to inclusion in Who's Who, and asked for a list of interests.
I was truly grateful, because I loathe vacuum cleaning. I always get the flex wound round the furniture, and am enraged by the red light coming on again when I've only just emptied the blessed thing. And as I don't like wearing headphones I can't even listen to music while I'm doing it. The SA listens to podcasts, while wearing the yellow plastic ear defenders also used for lawn mowing and chain sawing over his iPod earphones, which looks slightly eccentric, but there's nobody else to see it, and I am too grateful to care. I am very happy that the SA does the bulk of the vacuum cleaning, and hope it does not challenge his masculinity. I contribute in other ways, such as having taken sole charge of mucking out the hen house and sourcing small bales since we got the chickens nearly a decade ago. So to whoever it was worrying in the Telegraph or the Guardian about whether ironing her husband's shirts was compatible with feminism, I would say it's absolutely fine, as long as she doesn't mind ironing and he does something else useful, like vacuuming.
Addendum Or cooking. I can hear the clatter of pans from the kitchen as I type this.
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