The radio controlled clock in the kitchen has suddenly lost it. I had just started typing when I heard a strange noise and after peering about in confusion tracked it down to the clock, whose hands were racing madly around the face. After a couple of minutes all went quiet, and the time was safely back at two minutes past four where it should be, so the clock must have advanced itself by twelve hours. My laptop is still working, and I don't see aeroplanes falling out of the sky, so I presume this is a small local problem and not the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it, but it's rather odd.
Meanwhile, back in the non-paranormal world, I visited the Chatto gardens this morning with a friend. We started by walking round the gardens, or rather, we started by her buying a small jug painted with snowdrops as a present for her sister, after one of the staff had kindly filled it with water so that she could check it poured cleanly. It did. Apparently she has a coffee pot which was a wedding present but dribbled so much that she and her husband only used it once. It is now a collector's item, so as I pointed out it's quite handy they didn't use it, otherwise it might have got broken.
The borders at the Chatto gardens and especially the little woodland area were thick with snowdrops, and there were big patches of variegated leaf arum and some drifts of winter aconites. The first hellebores were coming out, but we were a little early for those. A huge and very healthy camellia 'Donation' was studded with flowers in that strong but clean middling dark pink, and the Cornus mas were out. The wind was biting. My friend's verdict was that she preferred the smaller kind of snowdrops, plain Galanthus nivalis, and I agree with her. The big ones at the Chatto gardens are more showy, and certainly the gardens are very nice and worth a visit (especially if you can get in free with your RHS membership card until the end of the month), but the daintier wild kind of snowdrop has more charm.
Then we went for coffee and cake, having worked out that if we looked at the gardens first then we'd feel we'd earned cake after walking about in the cold. And then we had a quick look in the nursery to see if they had any Cyclamen coum, but there were only three or four very sorry looking pots. We kept bumping into one of my former colleagues, who was there on a similar mission to ours with a galanthophile friend, and she told us that they had them in stock at the plant centre where I used to work, but I'm not sure my friend wanted one badly enough to drive that far.
The wind was still raw when I got home, and rain was forecast by mid afternoon (and arrived by half past two) so I gave up on the idea of gardening, and made a cake instead. I need to check the oven in fourteen seconds.
She checks the oven
The cake looks on track. Digital kitchen timers are a wonderful thing. That and not allowing myself to leave something cooking and then nip out into the garden. I destroyed a Le Creuset saucepan that way, years ago, losing track of time.
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