Friday 13 June 2014

fripperies and finishing touches

Today I finally got round to hanging the blue glass danglers back up among the branches of a convenient tree in the gravel.  Garden ornaments that have to be brought in for the winter, or swaddled against the elements, are a fiddle, and it doesn't add anything to the wintry landscape to have it dotted with giant bundles of tarpaulin, as I've seen at more than one National Trust property where they've obviously decided they can't risk leaving stone statues and benches unprotected.  Our resin replicas take their chances with the ice and snow, and Whichford's terracotta is designed to be frost proof, but I do bring the glass leaves in.  They are suspended from metal rings embedded in the top edges, and I am afraid that if and when water penetrated around the metal, it would crack the glass at the first frost.  The chalk stone with a hole in it comes inside too, since we were warned by someone who ought to know that it was liable to disintegrate otherwise.

Putting the stone out was the work of moments.  All I had to do was navigate my way around the piles of beekeepers' library books in the spare bedroom, find the stone, wander to the bottom of the garden, and drop it into its specially designed holder.  Nowadays it even has a companion, a yin to its yang in the form of a large black pebble with a hole most of the way through it, that I picked up when weeding.  It doesn't get a holder, but lies on top of the telegraph pole plinth.  Putting the stone back out is like an extension of bringing the geraniums outside for the summer.

The glass danglers are more work, requiring a stepladder and some nylon fishing line.  I was all set to do them a couple of days ago, a mere fortnight after the geraniums took up their summer quarters, and could not find the fishing line.  It was not on the shelf in the garage where it should have been, which stumped me utterly.  If it wasn't in the right place, it could be practically anywhere.  We are not tidy people.  The Systems Administrator worked for about a decade on the basis that when the shed became so untidy we could not get into it, the easiest solution was to build a new shed.  I tried to remember when I had last had the nylon fishing line, and whether we had used it at Christmas to put up any decorations, and if so where I might have put it.  I looked in the bottom of my bucket of tools, but it was not lurking with the stapler, the three legged fishing stool and the spare lump hammer.

I decided that the easiest solution was to get new fishing line.  I bought the other reel from a fishing shop in Colchester High Street, but the last time I walked up the High Street, I noticed that it had ceased trading, and in any case I did not want to have to go into Colchester.  Instead, Amazon came to the rescue with a new level of cunning, or evil genius.  They do sell nylon fishing line.  They would, they sell everything.  The SA once bought a chainsaw on Amazon.  I'd assumed I'd probably have to go to an Amazon vendor, and was resigned to paying somebody's minimum £3.95 P&P on a reel of line that itself cost less than that, but Amazon have thought of a new and cunning way to get me to spend even more with them.  They will not send me just a reel of line for free, but they will as an add-on provided that I buy other products to bring the total order up to a minimum of ten pounds.  The extra items can themselves be small things that don't individually qualify for free delivery, though in fact I bought a paperback I'd had my eye on for ages.

It is very annoying that multinationals, including Amazon, manage to pay so little UK tax, though I'm inclined to put some of the blame on the UK authorities for not drafting our tax legislation more ingeniously and robustly.  But how beautiful is it, from the customer's point of view, to make it possible to obtain small items for next day delivery and without having to pay more than the value of the thing itself on post and packing?  Especially slightly obscure items like fishing line, which I wouldn't even have known where to go to buy, now that the only physical shop I did know is no longer there.

The blue glass danglers look nice, but a little sparse, and I am beginning to think that I could do with a few more.  I bought the first ones three years ago, if not four, and topped up the year after, but of course the tree has kept growing.

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