birds and beasties

Now that winter is properly here, we're feeding the birds.  There was a spotted woodpecker on the table a couple of days ago, tucking into the lard with porridge oats.  I can't tell the difference between Greater and Lesser, but think it's fair to assume that it was whichever is the more common.  They seem to have had a good year, and when it was warm enough to sit outside watching the chickens, the Systems Administrator used to see them quite regularly around the garden.  The main visitors to the table are blue and great tits, robins, chaffinches, and hedge sparrows, plus a few goldfinches and on one or two occasions the long tailed tits.  Last winter when it got really cold the blackbirds came, but there are still lots of berries in the wood and garden, and they don't generally bother with our offerings until they've stripped the shrubs.  The coal tits are shy, and will only feed on the table if things get really tough in the wild.

The cats are keen to lick the lard with porridge oats, given half a chance, and I found the big tabby with his face in the bowl of bird food on the kitchen worktop.  The first time we saw his mother, she was sitting up on a kitchen unit with her long snout in a bowl of fruit while her doting owner enquired whether she had eaten that waspie, so we knew then what to expect.  Some of the larger birds would like to take a big piece of lard and porridge oats away, to eat later, but it breaks up, and I found a lump on the steps down to the conservatory, where the black cat was licking at it.  I put it back on the bird table.  I do not believe that lard with porridge oats is good for cats.

To try and stop the cats from gulping their food, in case that is what was making them sick, we have been doling out tins in small spoonfuls, and making them wait between courses while they work out whether they are actually still hungry.  I've read accounts by people who grew up in large families of how they learnt to gulp their food, so as to be in the running for seconds before their siblings had eaten everything, and I think the same thing can happen when you have five cats.  The new feeding regime is working in the sense that there haven't been any more pools of cat sick for several days, but it means that feline breakfast stretches over an hour and a half, and throughout the day whichever of us comes within reach of the food dishes is likely to be met by at least one furry accuser, staring meaningfully at the empty plates, or the door of the cat food cupboard.

There was ice on the pond yesterday morning, real ice that hadn't melted completely by the end of the day.  The trouble with ice is that the grey tabby, who appears to believe that she ought to be able to walk on water and that it is only by some quirk or error that this ability has been denied to her, likes to sit in the middle of the pond when it's frozen.  With ice like we had last winter this isn't an issue, as I could have sat on the pond myself if I'd wanted to (I didn't) but with thin ice who knows?  When she gets an idea in her head she is the most obstinate creature I know, but I have no idea how good her judgement is as to whether ice will bear her weight, which is something under 5kg.  She is now 12, desperately skinny and perpetually hungry, and we never expected her to make old bones, but though she seems to have a frail constitution she has a will of iron.  It would be a pity if she drowned or froze to death falling through the ice on the pond.

As it was drizzling and cold I thought I would go and see if I could get some cheap camellia pots at one of the local garden centres, that used to be good for cheap pots.  They didn't have any suitable pots, or even any space in the car park, and I had to go and park round the corner and walk up the road.  What they did have was a grotto with Father Christmas and his Reindeer, with a very long queue of parents and small children trailing back from it through the shop.  Poor reindeer.  There seem to be more and more of these reindeer experiences about at Christmas, but I'm not sure it is a very nice experience for the reindeer, being kept in a sort of shed in a garden centre and gawped at by an endless stream of unfamiliar people.

Brightlingsea All Saints

We went to see the Brightlingsea Christmas Tree Festival in the town's All Saints church.  This is the ninth time they've held the festival, and the first time I've been.  Last year the weather was lousy, and some years I've been working, and one way and another we never got round to it.

The Christmas trees were about the mixture of traditional and conceptual that you'd expect, and I wasn't too fussed about them, though I don't mind that sort of thing as long as it's presented as a harmless community activity and not cluttering up the Tate.  You could vote for your favourite tree (we didn't) and there was a stall selling Christmas decorations, where I bought a star made out of rose hips for our tree for 75p.  There were refreshments, and a little girl playing carol tunes on a piano, and lots of people exuded happy Christmas vibes, and the event was in aid of the hospice.  It was a nice thing to go to.

The main reason I wanted to go, apart from supporting the local community, was to get inside All Saints.  When we passed it on a walk once it was locked, and I'm not sure how often it's open.  You can appreciate much of the beauty of the church from the outside.  Simon Jenkins gives it one star, and says the tower is one of the finest in the county.  It is very fine, built of knapped flint in the Perp style, and visible from miles around.  The attraction inside is the frieze of Victorian tiles commemorating Brightlingsea parishoners lost at sea.  There are 213 of them, 15cm square, running as a dado around the walls.  They get an entry in my Tile Gazetteer (yes, I do possess such a thing.  I bought it at the Tile Museum at the Ironbridge gorge museums complex, and have been known to take it on holiday with me) of more than half a page.

Starting at random near the base of the tower, and dodging around a woman who was intent on photographing the Christmas trees, it became apparent that there must have been a very bad storm on 6 March 1883.  Six men were lost with the smack Recruit, and six more on the Conquest.  The lugger Misrotte was lost with five men, and there was a tile to someone washed overboard from another boat.  Most losses seemed to have involved entire crews.  Six drowned in the North Sea with the smack Glance in January 1891.  When the Gemina was lost off Dover with her crew of four, the Master was aged 55 and the youngest victim 15.  He shared a surname with one of the other crew members, suggesting a double loss for one family.

We couldn't see some of the tiles, because they were hidden behind Christmas trees.  Sidney Conrad Siebert, aged 30, perished in the wreck of SS Titanic.  There were tiles for yachtsmen who'd drowned, people who'd died and been buried at sea, and Brightlingsea sailors lost on the opposite coast of England and the far side of the world.  From 1914 onwards tiles start appearing for sailors killed in the Great War.  Eventually we came to a poster that explained that the tiles were the inspiration of the vicar, the Reverend Arthur Pertwee.  Nineteen people in total were lost in the storm of March 1883, which was the disaster that triggered him into action.  He researched earlier losses from the parish, and others kept the tradition up after him.  As well as commemorating the dead, he assisted the living by climbing the Perp tower to light a lamp on dark nights, to act as a beacon for the sailors.

The Christmas tree festival is on today and tomorrow from 10.0am until 6.00pm and is worth a visit, and worth getting there early because this morning it was heaving by the time we left.  You can see pictures of the tiles on this website, and the Systems Administrator and I thought we would try and find a time when the church was open to have a detailed look at them without Christmas trees in the way.

Addendum  They were giving away copies of the East Anglian Daily Times last night at Colchester station.  Most of page 3 was taken up with a story about how the council is considering closing the public lavatories at Lavenham to save money.  As I read the story I felt myself coming all over Philip Larkin (I'd skip this bit if you aren't interested in poetry).

Homage to Babergh District Council

Next year we are to shut the public loos
for lack of money, and it is all right.
Old boys who need to crap, or take a pee,
Must cross their legs and cut back on the tea.
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working.  And this is all right.

It's hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it's been decided nobody minds.
Their bursting bladders are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The incontinent toddlers only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a county
That shut its public loos for lack of money.
The guildhall will be standing in the same
Timber-framed street, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope is to cut the deficit.

2011

watching pictures and people

I abandoned the garden, and went to look at Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern.  It's good to go and be cosmopolitan for the day, once in a while.  I still love the City, though it is less and less my place.  Buildings I knew are demolished and new ones erupt, and restaurants and wine bars where I was once wined and dined by stockbrokers, or met friends, or went out for after-work drinks with my esteemed colleagues, cease to be or are transmuted into something else.  I don't wear the uniform any more.  I used to have a briefcase, blue leather, handmade in Ireland and bought in Liberty, and was allowed into the offices and the livery halls, when I had an appointment or was on the list of names for the meeting.  Nowadays I look at it from the outside.

I love the Members' Room at Tate Britain.  It is right at the top of the building, with a fabulous view over the river to Saint Pauls, and is not generally full.  It appeals to cultured solitaries like me, young mothers with toddlers, friends on a day out, and people with laptops doing some sort of work, or filling in the time between meetings.  Two elderly ladies behind me in the queue for coffee (staff a bit slow today noticing that they had customers) were having a stately argument as one tried to pick up the whole tab, and the other insisted that she was paying for herself, and threatened her friend that 'otherwise I won't come out with you again'.  A young chap with a laptop called someone up as he waited for his 1.00pm business meeting.  He already had a bottle of beer on the go, and proposed meeting them at 3.30pm for draught prosecco.  'I love prosecco' he told them.  He was upset that somebody else had sent him a clumsily worded e-mail, and said it might sound odd, but he really preferred not to do business with people like that.  I thought that in these hard times his business must be going well for him to be able to be so picky.  He tried to tell the person on the phone about Winston Churchill's remark that he didn't have time to write a short letter, and was obliged to send a long one, but the line can't have been very good, because he had to repeat it about four times, and I don't think they had heard of Winston Churchill, and he forgot the punchline about the long letter.

Gerhard Richter is a major German artist.  He addresses serious themes including Germany's wartime past, and the nature of perception.  Some of his pictures are large soft focus painted versions of photographs, which I find physically difficult to look at, and would be fascinated to know if they have a similar effect on other people.  As the crystalline lenses of my eyes have lost elasticity (middle age), I need separate glasses for reading and seeing, which is fine when I settle down to either read or see, but cumbersome in situations where I need to switch between the two.  Looking at Gerhard Richter's out-of-focus pictures I had the uneasy sensation that I was wearing the wrong glasses, and my eyes struggled to compensate.

It's a big exhibition.  There are some abstracts, and some messing about with sheets of glass (regular readers will know what I think about that sort of thing).  I don't grudge spending the morning there, instead of weeding, but I didn't emerge loving Gerhard Richter.  Viewed as a sensory experience, his palette didn't do it for me.  That is a matter of subjective, personal taste, but there it is.  When Paul Klee painted a little square canvas only about 30cm by 30cm, made up of tiny coloured squares, Klee's colours made me so happy that I wanted to laugh, and then steal the painting so that I could look at it every day for the rest of my life.  When Gerhard Richter painted a large square canvas made of lots of coloured squares, it didn't make me any happier than the paint chart said to have inspired it.  Wrong colours (personally speaking).  The political paintings were interesting, but if you really want to explore those sorts of ideas, words are better.  (I'm reading Robert Fisk's history of the Middle East at the moment, The Great War for Civilisation.  It is grim but fascinating.  I'm up to page 657, and conveying the same range of facts and emotions using pictures would require an art gallery the size of Tokyo).

I had thought I might look at Rothko's Seagram murals, but they have been put into storage to make way for the forthcoming Damian Hirst show, and won't be on display again until that's over, which isn't until next September.  Apparently some of the works are so heavy the Tate is having to reinforce the floor.  Rothko displaced by a charlatan shark-pickler.  How depressing.

Then I went to see The First Actresses at The National Portrait Gallery, which was great fun.  The National Portrait Gallery does these small exhibitions very well, placing the pictures in an historic context, and so while gazing at the Gainsboroughs I learnt odd snippets of social history.  The romantic and sex lives of the most popular eighteenth century actresses were scrutinised every bit as keenly as Sienna Miller's is today, and their dresses were copied.  Some actresses on retiring from the stage succeeded as novelists and playwrights.  Others married into the aristocracy.  Richard Brinsley Sheridan forbade his wife to have any further involvement with the stage following their marriage, and her portrait gives no clue as to her past profession.  Sarah Siddons looks a forbidding creature, but I suppose she was a tragic actress.

I'd been wondering whether I even wanted to see the Leonardo exhibition, on the grounds that the ratio of visitors to paintings would be too high, but the question has been taken out of my hands, as I read in the papers days ago that all advance tickets were sold for the entire run of the show, and today there were no buy-on-the-day tickets available.  Never mind.  I remember the Vermeer exhibition several years ago, where the main thing I saw was the backs of other people's necks, or the corners of paintings with other people's faces in front of most of the canvas.  When the Systems Administrator and I were on holiday in The Netherlands we made a special trip to den Hague, to visit the excellent Mauritshuis, where we had Vermeer's View of Delft all to ourselves.  Not even the security guard could be bothered to come and join us.

picture this

Well, that's three stumps out.  The Hebe 'Great Orme', a Corokia and a Pittosporum.  They were all dead, and had been since last winter, which made the job much easier.  I watch with some incredulity when in Gardeners' World they make it look so simple to dig out the rootballs of large shrubs which are still alive.  Like on Blue Peter, with their 'Here's one I made before the programme', a trench has already been dug around the plant.  Rachel and the head gardener of whatever garden they are visiting that week give it one heave, and it plops out of the hole.  There is no clue to the blood, sweat, tears, skinned knuckles, bruised knees, wrenched backs and cursing that went into digging that trench, not to mention the impossible-to-get at taproot in the very centre of the rootball, which prevents you from tipping the thing more than 10cm either way, and doesn't give you a big enough gap to reach in and cut the final root.

I had the roots of a couple of self-sown roses out while I was at it.  Hips make splendid food for wild birds, as you can tell by the abandon with which rose seedlings spring up all over the garden.  I have left a few, where they aren't in the way, but these were growing up into other shrubs.

The other project of the day was to take a photograph of ourselves.  This is a rare event, and was only done by special request.  I am camera shy, so much so that if I had disappeared before this afternoon's photographic session, the only portrait photographs of me the Systems Administrator would have had to give to the police would have been ten years old.  I think we have a couple somewhere of me wearing a bee suit, which would not be any use since I am indistinguishable from all the other beekeepers, and one or two of me leading a group of people around the garden, taken only about three years ago.  They don't look as though they want to be led, and I look worried.  I don't really like taking photographs either, and the SA isn't keen on being snapped, so our pictures of the SA are about equally few and as out of date.

The need for a photograph came about because we have been asked to a wedding, and the request to RSVP included the instructions that we must send pictures of ourselves, and name our favourite dance music.  I suppose that to the Facebook generation, who have cameras on their phones and document their lives on-line, the idea that their middle aged relatives might not possess any pictures of themselves would not even occur.  It would seem as unlikely as that we lived without electricity, and communicated with the outside world by letters written with a quill pen.

As officer in charge of replying to invitations, the need to get hold of a photo and reply to the wedding invitation had been praying on my mind, but not being photographically minded, the last time we had friends around we completely forgot to ask whether they minded taking a quick snap.  Since then I have been reminding (or nagging, depending on your point of view) the SA about it, and we had got as far as the SA charging a camera up.  Then the SA had a cold, and looked like death barely warmed up, so the project was deferred again.  Anyway, today was the day.  The SA read up on how the camera timer worked and found a tripod in the spare bedroom wardrobe and I began to get quite excited that this was all very high tech, then the SA could not find the bit that is supposed to fit on top of the tripod to hold the camera, so we had to balance it on a wall and hope it wouldn't blow off.  Today was a grey day, and it took a lot of manipulation on photoshop to get us looking like two visible human beings, and not amorphous dark blobs.

They didn't tell us what they wanted the photos for, so we wimped out and are standing close together smiling and looking faintly bashful, like two people unaccustomed to being photographed.  I thought it might have been fun to take inspiration from art, and lie head to head on the ground as if it were a record sleeve, or stand side by side bolt upright and looking very serious like Gilbert and George, or hold up bits of cardboard under our chins with our names on, but we have stayed with conventional sheepish grins.  It's probably safer.

They haven't a hope with the favourite dance music.  The SA has never, ever been seen on the dance floor in the thirty-one years we have known each other, and I should be amazed if the habits of a lifetime were broken now, even for our nephew's wedding.

in the teeth of the gale

Today I got on with weeding the bed on the way in to the garden, which is what I was doing yesterday.  I've never really got the planting in this corner to work.  When I started off I planted a couple of crab apples, wanting to link the edge of the garden visually to the residual apple orchard beyond.  I still believe it can help anchor a garden in its landscape to copy or echo plants from the broader view inside the garden.  Around them I planted epimediums and Vinca minor and other shade tolerant ground cover plants, having an idea of a little woodland planting.  I had overlooked the fact that until the trees grew the bed was nothing like a woodland, but sunny, windy, and with thin, sandy soil quite unlike the leaf mould enriched earth found in woodland.  Then rabbits ate the bark of one of the trees one cold winter, and I had to start again with a new tree.

The bed is backed by a mixed field hedge, which we had planted when we moved in.  It was a condition of the sale that we would mark our boundary within three months.  The hedge is a useful hiding place for birds, and breaks the force of the wind a little, but sends questing roots out far into the bed, making the problem of the dry, thin soil even worse.  I experimented with Phormium and dahlias, thinking that it would be fun as you drove in through the entrance to be greeted by a blaze of colour, and know that you had arrived, but it was too dry for the dahlias, and the Phormium weren't a great success either.  The group of three 'Jester' functioned as snail hotels, and one of them began to revert from drooping and pink stripey to upright, more vigorous and plain green.  I've seen other pink striped Phormium do this, and am now suspicious of them as a breed, though I've never read about it as a widespread problem.  'Jester' was removed, leaving one upright form which is going to have to come out as well, since the drought, rootiness and two cold winters have destroyed whatever charms it ever possessed.

A portugese laurel, Prunus lusitanicus, that the birds brought, is doing well, as is a bird sown holly.  A fine variegated holly that I planted is handsome, but desperately slow growing.  There is a mystery berberis, which I think is the rootstock of a very early planting of B. dictophylla dating from my commuting days.  A Viburmum tinus finds it too dry.  Olearia nummulifolia grows solidly, but incredibly slowly.  The moroccan broom, Cytisus battandieri, is a triumph.  I've fiddled around with bulbs in the past.  Two cold winters put paid to a couple of pittosporums and a restio, and the meagre soil and root competition from the hedge have pretty much finished off a Cornus kousa.  Lonicera tatarica, a shrubby honeysuckle with red flowers, no refinement but a cast iron constitution, battles along.  A colleague with a very dry garden says it does well for her.  A large Weigela florida 'Variegata' does OK, and a Philadelphus.  Due to poor record keeping I am not entirely sure which one.  One Scotch rose did well, as they are supposed to on sand, while the other died.  A yellow berried shrubby ivy was damaged by snow, but the propped up remains are sort of OK, though it isn't luxuriant, and a chunk of the ivy hedge is half dead.  The supposedly tender Ribes speciosa lives on, though on the small side, and a dwarf lilac close to the hedge does surprisingly well, as do a couple of old fashioned peonies.

In summary, it is a dog's dinner.  A mess.  A memorial to unrealistic ideas, changing plans, and general lack of coherent thought.  It is a peripheral part of the garden, in the sense that one isn't going to go and sit by it, but it is part of the garden that everybody who comes in or out sees.  What it needs is some ground covering, weed smothering, possibly evergreen planting, so that it looks like a well-furnished background to the rest of the garden and I don't spend too much time on it.  My current aim is to remove every dead shrub (I didn't mention Hebe 'Great Orme', another martyr to cold) including the roots (oh goody, more work with the pickaxe) and pick out all the weeds I can find.  Then I will apply a thick coat of mushroom compost and a topping of strulch.  Then I'll wait for the roots of grass I missed to reshoot, and zap them with glyphosate.  Next spring I'll replant.  That's the plan.

Today was extremely windy.  One reason for getting on with the entrance bed, apart from the fact that it needs doing and I hadn't touched it so far this autumn, was that I didn't fancy being under any of the trees, in case bits fell off.  It was a cold wind.  I was wearing a cotton vest.  Then two thermal vests designed to be the base layer of a multi-layered outdoor clothing system, one with a polo neck and the other inherited from the Systems Administrator when it got too small.  Then three cotton t-shirts, one with a collar.  Then the new Millets fleece, with a funnel neck.  Also a fleece neck scarf with drawstring top, and fleece hat.  On my lower half I had cotton trousers over thermal leggings.  Customers who (kindly) ask me at work if I don't get cold have no idea how many layers you can wear, and still move.  But it was very, very windy.  The whizzer stopped turning for a while in the middle of the day.  Presumably it had to be turned off, in case it whizzed too vigorously and broke itself.

I went to the dump first thing, and saw a pied wagtail.  I only ever seem to see them on roads and in car parks.  When I was a child I used to see them on the porch roof.  I am convinced they must eat asphalt.

cold winds

The wind had a chill edge today.  The chickens gave up mid morning, and just went and sat in their house instead of their usual corner of the run.  I feel sorry for them.  It isn't very interesting being a chicken in bleak December, but there isn't much I can do about it.

I set out to make a homemade lard cake for the birds, done by melting a block of lard in the simmer oven, then pouring porridge oats into it until all the lard is soaked up.  Unfortunately the first time I checked the lard it hadn't finished melting, and then I forgot all about it, and the Systems Administrator shoved the soup for lunch into the oven without looking, and molten lard slopped over the edge of the basin and on to the oven shelf, transferred itself to the bottom of the soup saucepan and so the oven hob, and dripped to the base of the cool oven.  It turns out that the simmer oven shelf can be removed for cleaning.  I've managed to get by without knowing that for the past five years, not being especially keen on oven cleaning and not having spilt lard on it before.

The SA filled up the peanut feeder for the first time this winter, and within a very short space of time there were fifteen tits on it and clustering around it.  Even the long tailed tits came, and we haven't seen them near the bird table before all season.  It was amazing how quickly word got around that there was something good to eat in that red wire cage, and that it was safe to go in.  How do they know?  Especially the ones that hatched this year and may never have seen peanuts before.  Though birds can be cleverer than we expect.  I heard on Radio 4 that members of the crow family that hide food when other birds are observing them will return later and move their stash to a new hiding place, but don't bother if they don't think they were seen hiding the food the first time.  That puts their theory of mind ahead of the human nine and ten year old autistic children I heard about on Radio 4 this morning.

The heating oil arrived, and we now have a full tank, having been down to the last bar on the electronic gauge.  The SA ordered the delivery more than a week ago, and we were starting to get slightly twitchy.  The central heating hasn't been turned on yet, but we might now venture to run the radiator in the bedroom.  Probably just that one for now, and maybe the small one in the sitting room whose valve has broken, if the SA can't work out how to turn it off.  The Aga heats the kitchen and the study is heated by a log burner.  Indeed, so deeply ingrained is the habit of never running the radiator in the study that it has a bookshelf in front of it with the TV on top.  The oil delivery was 1925 litres and will last us a year or slightly longer.  I am dismayed that we use such a lot, but the SA tells me that compared to friends also living in detached country houses our consumption is about 40% of the norm.  We have put insulation into the loft space we have, all 15cm of it, and installed double glazing, and a super efficient condensing boiler, and there isn't anything else cost-effective we can do, short of deciding that cold showers are really bracing and healthy and improve your immune system.  The best thing to do with this house when we trundle off to the retirement home would be to demolish it and start again.  It is just a gigantic shed.  There are no cavities to insulate.

Addendum  One of the cats has been being sick.  I had to clear up a mess from the stairs this morning, and the SA had to clear up in the hall over the weekend.  This evening, just as I was browsing through the Guardian arts pages on-line, I heard cat sick noises from the hall, and found the grey tabby throwing up on the hall chair.  She managed to puke into my wellington boots which had been left (bad move) in front of the chair.  Sometimes my Franciscan love of animals almost deserts me.

a quiet day

We are finally going to have a computer out in the shop, so that we will be able to send e-mails about the availability of plants and suchlike without having to go up to the office.  They are going to lay a cable when they dig a trench for the drains for the new tea room.  Next spring.  Still, it's something to look forward to.

Somebody rang wanting advice about retaining moisture around the hundreds of trees she had planted this spring, and we had a long conversation about whether she could use the chippings from a large horse chestnut she'd had removed (undesirable, better to let them compost down first) and whether a mulch of mushroom compost would help (yes, brilliant stuff, use it myself, just don't pile it in contact with the trunks, and best to apply when the soil is less dry).  She has a bowser, and watered all the trees every week this summer, and couldn't face doing it again.  We got on to the properties of clay soil (some of the water in it is bound so tightly to the tiny soil particles that it isn't available for plants to take up, so they aren't necessarily all that drought resistant.  Mushroom compost will help over time) and how severe and widespread the drought was.  She went away sounding happy and said our chat had been very useful.  Unfortunately it won't result in a single extra penny through the till, at least in the immediate future.

Somebody else rang asking if we had any liquidambars, and I spent a long time describing what we had, and how big they were now, and how much money, and what colour their leaves went in the autumn.  Then he asked if we could send one, because he lived in Lincolnshire, and I had to explain that we could send the small plants by mail order, but not the ten foot trees.  He wanted a ten foot tree, because he said he didn't have that many years left, and that he was on dialysis, and getting to us would be difficult.  I felt very sorry that he had kidney failure, which I know is life-limiting even with dialysis, and leaves you feeling grotty, but I couldn't help him with the large trees.  They are too big to send by mail order.  The parcel company wouldn't and couldn't do it.

Somebody else rang asking if we could keep some reserved plants for longer, because she couldn't get over to collect them because her husband was ill.  It turned out that he was in hospital with pneumonia.  I promised I would make a note on the plants that she still definitely wanted them, but might be delayed collecting them, and told her that she had other things to worry about and should not worry about the plants.

I rang a woman who was down as wanting a fan trained apricot.  She sounded slightly surprised that she could have wanted such a thing, and explained that she wasn't well, and hadn't been for fourteen months because she'd had a bad fall, and she'd had to get somebody in to Do the garden, and the garden was a mess.  I suddenly realised that it was The Woman Who Wanted 16 Lavenders.  Then she told me how difficult the soil in her garden was, and how all the trees she planted in it died, and I thought she should probably not have a fan trained apricot.  I have seen the roots on these fan trained fruit trees, which we potted up ourselves, and they are teeny-tiny, not at all suitable for an elderly and ill lady with rubbish soil and dubious garden help, so I had to talk her out of having an apricot, at least this year.  It turned out that she was very pleased with the lavenders and believes that our plant centre is wonderful, which was nice.

A cheerful-sounding woman who lives near York was delighted that we could send her a crab apple whip by post.  She was one of the people I rang yesterday to let them know that their plants had arrived, and it hadn't been recorded on the paperwork that she lived at the other end of the country, although I had thought that I didn't recognise the dialling code.  Another person I rang yesterday came in today to collect her plant, but it was a Cornus that only cost £8.95.  And unfortunately not enough people thought we were wonderful, and we didn't take much through the till, despite our best efforts telephoning people.

The gardeners and the owner spent the morning cutting Christmas trees.  Due to past management, or lack of it, the trees grown on the estate are mostly rather tall and skinny.  This year some of them have grown a fine crop of cones, the first time I've seen them do that.  Because our house is split level (very 1960s) the sitting room rises to one and a half storeys high, so we like a tall tree, and the price of the trees at work is very reasonable, maybe reflecting the limited local demand for trees 4m high.  This leaves us with a nice decision to make, which I will put to the Systems Administrator, though maybe not this evening as the rich fruity cold, which had been showing signs of abating, has returned with a vengeance.  It is a bit earlier than I would like a tree, as they will have been cut for 20 days already by Christmas Day, and a fresh one nearer the time would be better.  The gardeners cut 30 trees today, more than we usually harvest.  If they sell well they may cut some more, and I can have one that was chopped down closer to Christmas.  If they don't cut more then we'll end up with one from this batch anyway, but the nicest ones will have gone and we'll be left with the oddly shaped, weird, and mutilated ones to choose from.  Games Theory is right up the Systems Administrator's street, so we could be in for a prolonged discussion of tactics.

The manager looked at the dead damson tree and said he thought it had been hit by a strimmer, judging by the horizontal line of damage in the bark.  The owner told me that I had done the right thing to stick to procedures.  They are going to give the horrible woman a free replacement tree anyway.  I knew they would.  I suggested to the manager that maybe we could have a list of customers to whom the normal rules don't apply, because they have spent a lot of money, or are friends with the owners, or big influential cheeses on the East Anglian dinner party circuit.  If they are going to get no-questions-asked replacement plants anyway, the staff might as well not bother trying to apply the normal procedure for returns, and be saved a distressing encounter.  The manager said that was a good idea.  It won't happen.

a considerable improvement

What a difference a day makes.  Today's customers were all perfectly polite and reasonable people.  Some of them were rather jolly.  The most cheerful of all were an elderly couple from north Norfolk.  She was bent almost through ninety degrees with some, presumably age-related, spinal problem, but her appetite for life and looking at plants appeared undiminished.  They were accompanied by two friendly dogs, which had not appreciated the drive from Norfolk, especially the delays on the A14, and now wanted to trundle about and smell as many interesting things as possible to alleviate the tedium of their day so far.  They were on extendable leads, of which they took full advantage.  One of them managed to wind its lead 360 degrees around my legs and a pillar in the shop.  The couple bought three trees, including a birch that was tall by our standards, and I was not entirely sure how I was going to get them into their car, but given they'd come all the way from Norfolk we agreed we'd find a way.  They opted to have the branches at the front end, so as to leave room for the wife's legs in the passenger footwell, which seemed the right choice given the state of her spine, and I was able to tie the branches of the birch together with string so that the husband didn't have to drive home with birch twigs covering half the windscreen.  One of the other trees was a ferociously spiny Crataegus, and I was worried about the dogs, which were going to have to share the back of the car with it.  The owners were far more sanguine, saying that they were sensible dogs and would keep clear.  The wife told me that in her younger days she had driven down the A12 with nine trees crammed into a Mini, branches poking out of every window.

Another couple had driven all the way from Sussex to collect half a dozen Pyrus calleryana 'Chanticleer'.  This is a handsome ornamental pear, making a fairly upright tree if left to its own devices, and carrying white flowers in spring and splendid leaf colours in autumn.  The species is from north America, though I have read accounts of planning officers whose dogmatic enthusiasm for native plants outstripped their plant knowledge, allowing planning applicants to plant 'Chanticleer', the Chaucerian name deceiving them into thinking that it must be an English tree.

A young girl called in to collect a Cedrus libani that she had been patiently waiting months for.  She was amazed that I could remember her name and what plant she had come to collect, so I didn't explain that this was partly because so few of our customers are under 35.  Actually, I doubt she's more than 30.  She has a beautiful smile, always looks cheerful, and is rather pretty, which are other reasons to remember her.  She is a florist, and wants the tree to supply greenery for flower arrangements, though she'll have to wait a few years before she can start harvesting, given that at the moment it's barely 45cm tall.

Everybody I rang to tell them that plants had now arrived that they had asked for, sometimes months ago, was either really pleased to be called because they still wanted the plant, or at least didn't mind being called.  A couple wanted time to think about whether they did still want the plant, which is fair enough but pushing the envelope of our information management system to the limit.  A colleague rang someone who'd been after Rubus odoratus, and they were with us that same afternoon.  It is disheartening when everyone you call has found the plant elsewhere, or substituted something else.  One woman I spoke to couldn't remember ordering a Ptelea trifoliata, or even remember what the plant was and what it did, but once I'd described it she said she'd have it anyway.  She must have a large garden, to be able spontaneously to fit in a 7m tall shrub.  Ptelea trifoliata is the hop tree, a pretty thing with greenish, hop-like scented flowers, and interesting fruits.  I have one myself I grew from seed, though it is not very happy in the lean sand along the edge of the wood, and I really ought to keep it free of weeds and generously mulched with mushroom compost to try and persuade it to grow a bit faster.

The owner rang the rude woman with the dead tree yesterday evening, and pacified her, though not to the extent of promising to replace the tree until the manager had seen it.  Faced with the choice between angering high spending customers and becoming a soft touch for giving out replacements, she came down on the side of firmness, but got her call in early, before the woman could go out that evening and blacken our reputation over the dinner tables of Suffolk.  Apparently she took the line that I could not have been expected to know that the customer had spent a lot of money, and explained our returns policy.  I tried to do that, but people like yesterday's awful woman probably listen harder when they are speaking to someone they identify as People Like Us, and not a shop assistant they have written off as a social inferior.  It remains to be seen whether the manager gives her a new tree anyway, even if he thinks the old one failed due to poor cultivation, and not through any fault of ours.  I wouldn't be surprised if he does, as a 'goodwill gesture'.  Pish to goodwill.  I've spent more than £500 with the Whichford Pottery in the past year, but I wouldn't expect a free replacement if I was stupid enough to break one of their pots shortly after purchase.

The owners were interviewing a shortlisted candidate for the plant centre job, and introduced him to those staff who were around.  He currently works in a garden centre, and would like to improve his plant knowledge, which he would certainly do working with us.  He told us some hair raising stories about their customers.  They get people bringing back dead plants bought from other nurseries and trying to claim a refund, even to the point of swiping labels from the stock in that garden centre and putting them on the plants from elsewhere.  Staff can spot this when it isn't the right label for that style or size of pot or plant.  Allegedly, some customers will even damage plants of the same variety as the ones they are buying, leave them there on the garden centre bed, then come back ten days later, pick up the wilted plants, and present them at the till with their receipt, claiming these are the ones they bought, as a scam to get free extras.  Thinking about it afterwards I wondered how the garden centre staff knew that was what customers were doing, and if it happened regularly or only the once.  I don't think most of our customers are that devious.  Loud shouty sense of entitlement is more their style.

I told the Systems Administrator about the awful woman with the dead tree, who said that she was probably married to the sort of person the SA used to work for.  'Dickhead fund manager working in Fixed Interest' was the exact phrase.

one bad apple

Most of the customers were perfectly nice today, and one was vile.  She had brought back a greengage that she said had never thrived.  She had planted an orchard, and in total spent around £500.  She wondered if the owner could tell her why her tree had died, naming the wife of the partnership by name.  She handed me the tree, and said it had been out of the ground for a bit.

Customers who choose to flag early in a conversation that they know the owners tend to be difficult.  I looked at the roots of the tree, and the customer's phone rang.  She answered it, and had a long conversation about (I dedeuced) the performance of some children in some competitive arena or other.  A long conversation.  Not a 'hi darling, I'm just with someone in the garden centre, call you in five minutes' sort of conversation.  I finished looking at her tree, and waited for her to finish her phone call.

I explained that the manager rather than the owner was the person to help with dead plants, and authorise replacements, and he would be in on Monday, if I could keep the tree and get him to look at it then.  I asked how the tree had been planted.  She said it had been planted the same as all the others, which were all fine.  She hadn't planted it herself.  I said that the manager was the expert, but to me the roots looked in good condition, while the bark had rotted at the base of the trunk, and looking at the soil marks on the stem, which seemed to go all the way up to the graft point, I wondered whether it had been planted too deeply.  She got very aggressive and very rude.  She didn't want to know why her tree had died at all.  She had spent five hundred pounds and wanted me to give her a new tree, no questions asked, and she was very disappointed by my attitude.

I stuck to my guns.  The rule of the business is that I am not authorised to give out replacements.  I am supposed to use my discretion if I think the customer has a genuine case, as we don't want to upset good customers, but I am not supposed to dole out free trees willy nilly to people who have managed to kill plants that were perfectly good when they left our nursery.  And she was very, very unpleasant.  Advice to any of you who haven't worked in the front line of a service industry, or are more accustomed to calling the shots than receiving them.  Try charm.  Try getting the staff on your side.  They will feel so much more inclined to bend the rules on your behalf than if you come at them like the cook bawling out the thirteen year old scullery maid.

Being offensive to shop staff or waiters who haven't been rude to you is one of the most pathetic forms of social interaction there is.  I once told a fellow (first class) commuter who was being gratuitously horrible to the guard on the intercity out of Liverpool Street about a broken carriage door to leave the man alone, since it wasn't the guard's fault the door was opening and shutting randomly.  The door was very irritating, but the guard was not responsible for maintenance of the train, and there was nothing he could do about it at that moment.  This did actually make the grumbler shut up, though I suppose in other circumstances it might have resulted in my being punched on the nose.  Picking on people who are not responsible for the problem and are not in a position to retaliate in kind is such a low form of behaviour.  Don't do it.  If any of your friends do it then rethink the friendship.  You don't want people like that in your life.  Social generalisations can be dangerous things, but I'm afraid that the rudest and most horrible customers do seem to come predominantly from the upper end of the middle classes.

All the other customers were pleasant to downright delightful, but one nasty person negates the beneficial psychic impact of twenty good, and I went home with a headache and neuralgia.  Tomorrow I'll find out if I should have just given the horrible woman a free tree.

visit to the golden banana

I went into Colchester to have my hair cut, and do a few other bits and bobs, so I went and had a look at the new visual arts centre, on a day when I wasn't viewing against the clock while the remaining minutes on my car park ticket ticked away.  I'm afraid I'm still not convinced.  I've been struggling to be open minded and enthusiastic about it, but, well, oh dear.  Dearie me.

The skateboarders have gone from outside the entrance, and a notice from the council says that regretfully, they have been banished as they were causing too much damage to the seating.  This suggests a failure at the outset to investigate what skateboarders do, what forces their boards might exert on the built environment, and what the seating would need to be like to cope.  A slalom has been set up with little bright green cones, around which one solitary youth was roller skating with skill, earphones in place.  Bowling alone.  It wasn't exactly the happy picture of interactive, intergenerational community activity the designers probably had in mind.

Once inside, my initial impression that there was a lot of corridor was reinforced.  It could be a nice venue for a party, with lots of people talking and eating and drinking, and maybe some music, but today there was no music or food or drink, and not many people.  Due to failure of forward planning I'd already been to Millets and bought a new gardening fleece and some thermal leggings before getting as far as firstsite, and as I advanced across the (large and almost deserted) lobby a member of staff rushed forward and pushed a gallery guide into my hand.  I thanked her and put it in the Millets bag.  The lobby, while short of people, was by no means empty because there is a one-to-one scale replica of one of the Statue of Liberty's hands in there.  It's very large.

Down the long curving corridor (windows at ground level, sloping white walls unfortunately already picking up scuff marks) lie the exhibition rooms, after the Roman pavement.  This is a mosaic originally found in that same spot, then exhibited in Colchester castle for years, and now back where it was originally.  It is set below floor level with glass plates over it.  The glass was rather smeary this morning and could have done with a good wipe.  It is a perfectly nice mosaic, as Roman mosaics go.

There is a room hosting part of the University of Essex's collection of Latin American art.  I don't know why the university has such a collection, even after going to the museum, but the ones on show were twentieth century prints.  I liked some and not others, as is the way with most collections of prints.  If I spoke Spanish and knew more Latin American history I'd probably have got more out of some of them.

The other exhibition rooms mostly contained the sort of contemporary art that annoys me at the Tate and the Royal Academy.  The title of the show is Camulodunum, and it is meant to make us think about Colchester's history, and the relationship between past and present.

There was a series of pictures of people connected with Colchester, all with captions in an incredibly tiny font.  There were Stuart kings, which is fair enough, given that Colchester was besieged in the civil war, but also Victoria and Albert, who as far as I know were only connected with Colchester to the extent that Victoria was queen for 63 years and performed a lot of royal engagements in that time.  There were modern photographs of Damon Albarn (fair enough, Blur is a Colchester band) and his family, and the Courtauld family (also fair dibs, I think they helped fund the place) and pictures of babies with their parents and grandparents.  Now I have looked at my booklet I see that the artwork covers a broad spectrum of imagery, supporting the simple thesis that we are all connected.

Then there were two shiny bicycles with milk churns on them, by an Indian artist.  The booklet says that these copies bear the imperfections of the original, translating functional things into highly crafted objects that appear to serve a more sacred or monumental purpose.  You don't say.  I saw lots of bicycles in Cambridge.  Some were chained to lamp-posts.  Some were missing their front wheels, stolen or removed by the owners for security?  Some were being ridden.  Some of the cyclists were wearing helmets and had prepared for their journey.  Others weren't and hadn't.  I'm sure that can be laden with loads of symbolic meaning if we just stop and think about it for a few minutes.

There were some pieces of scrap car leaning against a wall, with a Roman helmet made out of scrap.  There were some wavy lumps of coloured concrete stuck to another wall.  There were clear resin lumps with rubbish cast inside them, reminding me vaguely of a craft kit I had as a child.  The aim then was not to get air bubbles around your encapsulated flower or whatever it was, but I'm sure the rubbish represented something, although the booklet doesn't attempt to explain what.  There was a pile of crushed white stones divided by mirrors.  And some more things, but I'm beginning to get upset thinking about them.

There was a really nice piece of flint, with holes in it.  That had belonged to Henry Moore.  It was a good flint.  I liked that.

I didn't stop for a cup of coffee in the cafe, or look at the shop, because, frankly, I wasn't in the mood.  It was a lovely sunny day outside, and I couldn't shake off the feeling that I had other stuff to do, and was paying to park, and would rather go and get on with everything else.  Anyone who has read Cardunculus for a while will know that I don't like or get most conceptual art, so don't be too influenced by what I say, but go to firstsite and judge for yourself.

I know what it reminded me of.  The other night we watched Barton Fink on DVD.  This is an early Coen Brothers film, about a young playwright who is persuaded to go to Hollywood on the strength of having achieved one Broadway success.  Things do not go well for him in Hollywood, and I won't say more than that to avoid plot spoiling.  Barton Fink's big idea as a playwright is that he wants to portray the struggles, hopes, feelings and ambitions of the common people.  The joke is that he knows practically nothing about the common people, and is incredibly patronising towards them.  I felt as though too many of the artists represented in this exhibition were Barton Finks, who having been to art school were telling common people like me things which as common people we would never manage to work out for ourselves.  Like that people are connected to other people by birth and social ties.  Like that some objects are made to be thrown away, and some objects last for a long time.  Like that when you are presented with a sculpture you want to look at the other side as well as the side facing you.  Thanks a bunch, guys.  As soon as I've manage to drag my knuckles off the floor I'll have a think about what you say.

Barton Fink is a very good film, by the way, and Millets have 40% off, if you need a new fleece.

down at the doctors

We had a music society committee meeting last night.  Consensus was that the brass quintet at the last concert had talked too much, and it was agreed that our guidance notes to performers would be amended, so that talking was only permitted to expand on the already ample programme notes (the chairman is very proud of the programme notes) or to explain technical features of the instruments.  This was great fun, the nearest I've got for ages in real life to playing the When I'm Dictator game.  (You must play that.  Charlie Brooker is going to execute people who talk in cinemas after the film has started.  When I'm Dictator there will be adequate rainfall, but only at night, and people wearing ugly shoes will be sent to re-education camps.)

The programme for the winter of 2012-2013 is taking shape.  The bookings secretary had narrowed down the dates when we could potentially have a well-regarded and moderately expensive string quartet, which at extra cost could be expanded into a quintet, with clarinet, viola or horn.  The chairman wanted to know what was with the horn, and the secretary explained that a modern composer had written a horn piece especially for the quartet, who had given its world premiere.  'What sort of music is it?' enquired the chairman 'Is it very modern?'  The bookings secretary, looking weary and chosing her words carefully, said that the quartet's agent said that it was very rhythmic, but without much in the way of melody.  'How long is it?' demanded the chairman 'Our lot can stand ten minutes of that sort of thing, but not half an hour'.  I must have looked especially agonised, because she then looked at me and asked if I wished to say something.  I said that I was just imagining spending half an hour listening to a horn piece with no discernable tune, and thinking how lovely clarinet quintets were.  Everyone agreed that the Mozart clarinet quintet was indeed lovely, as was the Brahms, and we agreed to forget about the horn.  Sometimes it is good for arts groups to have someone who doesn't mind being the voice of middlebrow conservatism.  I'm sure the others were all secretly relieved to be let off having to pretend to be that musically adventurous, even the bookings secretary, and we'll sell more tickets with the clarinet.

I took my hand to the doctor this afternoon.  I thought I'd better on Monday, when my knuckle turned purple and my entire hand throbbed, though with hindsight I think that was the cold.  I rang the doctor's surgery, who said they did not have any appointments for Wednesday.  I asked if I could have an appointment for Thursday, and was told that they had not yet released the diary for Thursday, and I would have to ring in the morning.  I really thought the NHS had been told to stop playing that sort of silly buggers.  I made sure I was up on Tuesday morning in time to hit the phone at 8.00am, and managed to get through and get an appointment, but not everybody is well placed to call their GP surgery at eight on the dot.  If you are travelling to work then, or getting the children to school, or have just walked into the office, sitting with the phone in your hand and hitting the repeat dial button until you manage to catch the moment when a line is free could be tricky.

There was good news and bad news about the hand.  The good news is that it's not infected, the joint and tendons seem fine, and the problem seems to be in the overlying tissue.  This means that using it, while painful, probably isn't making anything worse.  The other good news is that the doctor agreed that there was an issue, and said that she would refer me to the hand clinic if there was no improvement in two to three weeks.  She thought that something must still be lodged in there, that my hand was busily encysting, and would in due course expel.  The bad news is that, if it doesn't fix itself, she wasn't sure what the hand clinic could do.  They don't like digging around in hands, all full of nerves and tendons, looking for tiny objects.  Two to three weeks puts it so close to Christmas that in practice that means go back if things aren't better by the New Year.  Come back before then if it gets worse, she said kindly.

I spent the day doing gentle, surface, non-knuckle threatening weeding, and cutting down the stems of Helianthus salicifolius, an excellent perennial sunflower, that runs about a bit and makes tall, wavy stems clothed in willow-like (naturally) leaves.  In autumn it has little yellow flowers, but the leaves are the point.  It was beloved of Christopher Lloyd, and I first encountered it in his books.  It isn't the easiest thing to get hold of.  I've suggested we should list it at work, but the boss doesn't seem keen.  There were mutterings about it not doing well in a pot, but I'm not sure that's the real reason.  They had it at Langthorn's, the last time I was there.

The Systems Administrator has a sore throat and a rich and fruity cold.  This is a house of wrecks.

troubled times for the church

The parish magazine arrived today, with a flier about the restoration fund for the church.  The church has been known for months to be in a bad way, since part of the ceiling fell in and the rest was judged to be unsafe, and Sunday services have been held in the village hall since the accident.  What we hadn't known, until we got the leaflet about the appeal, is that the tower needs substantial work as well, and the estimated cost of repairs has been put at £120,000.

The church serves two parishes.  The church in our parish was deconsecrated and turned into a dwelling back in the 1970s, though the churchyard is still open and kept in a rather delightful state of controlled decay by the council.  In late winter it is a sheet of snowdrops.  The building makes a stylish house.  Our village is extremely spread out (there is a theory that this is characteristic of settlements on light and easily cultivatable soil) and the former church is not at all close to about 99% of the houses in the parish, and is small with no car parking facilities whatsoever.  I presume that is one reason why it was selected for the chop when the parishes were merged.  The merged parishes, as well as sharing the remaining church, share the vicar with a third local parish, as is normal nowadays.

Now £120,000 is a substantial amount of money to find.  It equates to around £75 for every man, woman and child living in the two parishes.  If the appeal can raise some funds locally, the organisers will then be eligible to apply for grants, but there is no guarantee that they will be successful.  A couple of people organised an accordian concert a couple of months back to raise money, but you need an awful lot of concerts, and jumble sales, and sponsored walks, and quiz nights, and coffee mornings, and sponsored hair-growing or head-shaving, and all the other fund raising staples of provincial England, to make much of a dent in £120,000, or even £60,000.  The two parishes are middling sorts of places, not deprived but without many rich households, and there aren't many big local businesses to tap.  And goodness knows how much per head £120,000 equates to for those people who actually go to church.  Most don't.

The painful question is whether society needs so many churches, and can afford to keep them up, or at least is willing to find the money to do so.  What exactly are churches for, in an era of declining church attendance?  We are not practising Anglicans, and have never been to a service in our church in the 18 years we've lived in the parish, nor are we likely to do so if they ever manage to get it back in commission.  We're not originally from the area, so none of our families were married or christened there, and none of our relatives lie buried in the churchyard.  It has no resonance for us at all, except as an historic building.

Unfortunately it isn't a very distinguished church.  Much of it dates from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it is Grade II* listed, so I shouldn't be too sniffy about it, but it doesn't make it into Simon Jenkins' Thousand Best Churches, or get a mention in my County Guide to English Churches.  The flint tower is nice, but it's not an outstanding building, and it doesn't occupy a key commanding position in the landscape, being set back from the road, outside the main body of the village, and behind some farm buildings (admittedly compared to the age of the church they should be viewed as temporary structures).

There are so many church buildings that need funds for repairs.  A couple of years ago, English Heritage estimated that six cathedrals needed a total of £60m spent on them over the next decade, which includes Canterbury, York, Lincoln, Salisbury, Winchester and Chichester.  The pot of money available from English Heritage for cathedrals is shrinking as government funding declines.  The Church of England is struggling to balance the need to maintain its historic buildings with the cost of providing clergy wages and pensions and carrying out the actual work of the church.  Which is more urgent, to conserve York and Lincoln, which are great world-class buildings that make my heart sing when I enter them, or to repair my village church?

I'm afraid our church missed a trick in not reinventing itself for more secular times.  When we arrived in the village, knowing nobody and quite keen to fit in, subject to the rigours of commuting, we did not get a welcome from the vicar, or an invitation to a monthly meal where we might have met people from our new community, or any other kind of church led social introduction and inclusion.  If we didn't want to go to church services, the church didn't want us.  Indeed, all we got was a fair amount of grief from our new neighbours who wanted us to construct a separate access road to our property, at considerable expense, so that we would not drive past their house.  They were, you guessed it, leading lights of the local church.

The fund raising letter that came with the parish magazine ends optimistically, saying that any monies left in the fund after work on the ceiling and tower will be used on other repairs needed.  In the circumstances I'm afraid it might have been more apt to say what would happen to funds raised should the appeal never reach its target, and work on the ceiling and tower not take place.

non-stop culture

Well, that was a cultured 24 hours.  I took my dad last night to hear a folk-jazz guitarist and an Irish harper at the Colchester Arts Centre.  They are called Chris Newman and Maire ni Chathasaigh, except that there ought to be some accents over the Irish gaelic name that Blogspot's compose a post page won't do.  They are very good, and my dad likes them.  He had them as visitors to the folk club he used to run in Wales for his seventieth birthday celebration, in lieu of a party.  Chris Newman is a great fan of 1930s swing jazz, and Maire is a traditional musician from West Cork, and they play some pure Irish folk, some jazz, and a lot that is somewhere in between.  To get the accidentals on the Irish harp you have to flick a lever at the top, and whereas in a traditional folk piece the same settings would probably last you all the way through, to play jazz you have to flick the levers in mid flow.  Frequently.  As Chris Newman says, it's fun to watch.  The harp seems to take a lot of tuning mid-concert, a process that involves various giant allen keys, and leaves Chris with some time to fill in, but he is a genial chap.  He comes from Watford, he told us, one of the best towns in England to come from.

Today the Systems Administrator and I went to Cambridge to visit the exhibition Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence at the Fitzwilliam Museum.  This brings together four pictures by Vermeer of women in a domestic setting with pictures by other Netherlands artists of the same era, and has reviewed very well (Telegraph, Observer, Independent).  As I looked at one of the pictures in the first section I heard a woman standing next to me say to her companion 'Oh, I see, they're not all Vermeers'.  Well, no, they wouldn't be.  Four is pretty good going, and includes one loaned from the Louvre and on display in the UK for the first time ever.  They are wonderful paintings.  Go and see them.  You have until Sunday 15th January.  Entrance is free, though you are invited to make a donation, and if only I lived nearer to Cambridge I'd drop in often.

We had lunch first in an excellent side street pub which I'd heard get a plug recently on, of all places, The Today Programme.  It is called The Cambridge Blue, and it says something about the organisation of human memory that when I was trying to remember the name of the road I couldn't recall Gwydir Street, but knew that it was something Welsh sounding.  It is CAMRA's Cambridgeshire pub of the year for 2011, and why it came to be featured on the Today programme I really can't remember, but the beer was excellent and the food was nice.  My carrot and coriander soup had a generous amount of coriander in it, and the SA says the sausage was good.  There was no music, and the staff were cheerful.  There were two partly used sacks of coal just inside the door, and packs of tonic all over one of the tables in the other front bar, behind which a little old boy was sitting impeturbably reading, but I don't mind an amount of clutter myself (the coal and the mixers.  I don't mean the old boy was clutter).

A group of men of mature years were waiting for the last of their party to arrive, then all piled into a large taxi.  They were happy and excited, and you could tell they were going somewhere special because they'd put on their tidy trousers (mustard coloured cords etc).  The landlord told us they were going to a Michelin two starred restaurant for the £100 a head taster menu.  'They'll be drunk as lords by the time they get back' he proclaimed joyfully. 'A hundred quid a head.  They might have put ties on'.

I had made a pencil sketch from Google maps of where the pub was, not having a working printer at the time.  It had enough information on it that we would have found it (left hand turning off Mill Road).  The SA has a pocket sized Garmin electronic navigator, which I find impossible to use, since by the time you are zoomed in close enough to see the street names, you can't see more than one stretch of about one road at a time, but the SA likes it and seems to understand it.  Each to their own.

a quiet day

The car was properly iced this morning, so I left it running in the drive to defrost.  We have no passers by, being a dead end beyond the farmyard with no public footpath running past the property, so the chances of someone arriving in the garden just as I'm defrosting the car and driving it away are vanishingly low.  When I got in I was disconcerted to see a red warning light shaped like a thermometer flashing on the dashboard.  That never happened before.  I tried the Skoda equivalent of switching it off and switching it on again, and the warning light disappeared.  This little piece of extra fiddling about, plus the fact that while I'd allowed extra time for the roads being icy I hadn't allowed quite enough, made me almost but not quite late for work.

There were only two of us in, as the manager had the day off, and we didn't make much of an impact on the great jumble of plants that arrived from Italy last week.  In fact, as a delivery of trees arrived mid-morning from Norfolk we ended the day with more plants on the grass at the back of the plant centre than when we started.  I was still avoiding using my left hand for lifting, and my colleague had a bad cold, so we made a feeble pair unloading the Norfolk consignment, and as the delivery driver helped us he asked if we were short staffed.  Yes, we were.  I have no idea why someone booked the tree delivery for a day when there would only be two people in.  Some of the Norfolk trees were bare root, their nether regions swaddled in black plastic sacks.  My colleague made noises about maybe heeling some of them in later, which looking at the state of her cold I doubted was going to happen.  I was certainly not going to volunteer to dig holes, and thought that if the manager had wanted them got into the ground he could have left instructions for the gardener.  I did find some fleece, and cover the black plastic bags with that, in case tonight was another frosty one.

It was very quiet.  The weekend was apparently quite busy, but people weren't coming to buy plants on a Monday morning in late November.  My colleague said she was willing to stay late, as she likes being able to come in later, not being a morning person, so I left before she tilled up, but we won't have taken much.  A couple of people came to collect plants on behalf of other people, but they were already paid for.

And that really was that.  Back at home the boiler man came, could find no reason for the boiler to have cut out, and serviced it.  It is running at 92% efficiency, which is one per cent down from last year.  This is apparently normal.  I don't know if it loses a percentage point every year.  The Systems Administrator installed my new printer (the old one was very cheap, a false economy, and never worked very well and then didn't work at all) and spruced up my laptop with downloads and a sort-out.  A programme called Turbo Chickens had got in somehow.  I have no idea what that is.  I didn't put it there.  Further investigations on the net revealed that the new component in the upstairs loo had a flow restrictor that you are supposed to remove if you have low water pressure.  We have, so the SA (who now wishes to be known as the Cistern Administrator) removed it, and the tank now refills in less than twenty minutes.  It still makes a faint squawk when it's finished filling, like the dying exhalation of Monty Python's parrot, but the annoying low hum has stopped.

accept no cheap imitation

The concert was very good.  It turned out that the Dvorak was his cello concerto, with Natalie Clein.  I love Dvorak's cello concerto, and I've never seen Natalie Clein before, so that was an unexpected treat to happen on a Saturday night in Ipswich.  In the second half we got Tchaikovsky's first symphony, which the conductor assured us was very rarely performed, and it was delightful.

There will not be any pick axing today, or any gardening at all.  I think the joint of my left middle knuckle is inflamed, though not infected.  At any rate, it is sore, worse today than yesterday, but before taking it to the doctor I probably should try resting it.  I can't imagine the GP would bother referring it to a specialist (I believe Chelmsford is rather good at hands) when I hadn't even tried giving it a day off to see if that improved matters.

In the meantime, let us add the salutary story of the new bedside clock to the saga of the plumbing.  The radio part of the Systems Administrator's clock-radio stopped working, so the SA went to a shop and bought a replacement, incorporating a digital DAB radio.  It was quite cheap.  After it was installed on the bedside table I noticed a bright unearthly gleam shining on the side of the pillows, when I went into the bedroom after dark with both hands full of a basket of laundry which prevented me switching on the light at once.  This turned out to be the new clock.  The old one had those red LED strips that fit together to make clunky rectangular digits.  Old fashioned and inelegant, but casting very little light.  The new one had a liquid crystal display, able to spell out much more information about what the digital radio was doing, but casting so much light in the process that you could see to match up pairs of socks by it.  The SA has cut down the amount of light by sticking tape over most of the display, so that you can just see the time in the middle.  I don't know who made the wretched thing, but it doesn't appear to have occurred to them to test it in an actual darkened room.  One advantage of buying domestic electrical goods on-line is that you can read the users' reviews first, since we won't be the first people to have noticed this design defect.

It doesn't only happen to cheap clock-radios.  The SA's brother used to work for a small British manufacturing company that made electrical components for the Eurofighter (or Typhoon, or whatever they call it nowadays).  They received an order for some LEDs to go on the cockpit control panel.  In upmarket manufacturing circles the brightness of these things is accurately measured in lumens, and they queried the technical specification because the LEDs seemed rather bright, but they were told to stop questioning the customer's requirements and get on with it, so they did.  So did lots of other suppliers, as it transpired.

Everybody shipped off their components and a demonstration control panel was built and installed in a flight simulator, and a military pilot came along to test it.  Tested it in daylight conditions, all fine and dandy.  Tested it under night conditions, great.  Then the poor test pilot put on his night vision goggles, and they switched on the test rig, and his eyeballs nearly exploded as the unbearable brightness of dozens of wrongly specified LEDs burst upon him, magnified to intolerable luminosity by the night goggles.  Told you so.

Addendum  The SA has fitted the new component to the upstairs loo and turned the water to the cistern back on.  When the tank finishes filling it now makes a small, strange wailing noise, as if a seal were giving birth in the bathroom.

music and plumbing problems

Mitch Benn was very good.  He sang Everything sounds like Coldplay now, which is a parody of mean genius that makes me glad I spent some time watching the TV coverage of Glastonbury, so can appreciate the cruel beauty of his Chris Martin impersonation.  And he sang the heavy metal song about Ikea, though not Happy Birthday War and Size Zero, which are a couple of my favourites.  You have not truly experienced music until you have seen the three minute rock opera adaptation of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  A baroque element was added by the black helium balloons that occasionally descended from the ceiling.  Nothing to do with Mitch Benn's show, they were left over from a Goth event the previous day.

Our only gripe was that the Arts Centre printed on the tickets that the doors would open at 7.30pm and the performance start at 8.00pm, whereas the queue (which we had expected to miss by arriving ten minutes after doors open) didn't start moving until twenty to eight, and the show didn't begin until half past.  I wish they wouldn't do that.  I mean, I really, really wish they would just tell the truth about when things start, and then stick to it.  The Mercury Theatre manages it, as has every classical music venue I've ever been to (apart from The Royal Opera House about 25 years ago).  I don't want to spend five minutes standing on the pavement in the cold and then another forty minutes sitting on a not especially comfortable chair, nursing half a pint because I'm driving.

At home the plumbing is slowly disintegrating.  I had been hearing a strange, worrying, deep sort of rumbling hum for some time, and initially blamed the lettuce farm for acquiring some infernal new engine or generator and running it it at anti-social hours.  However, as the noise grew worse the source of it became apparent, and it was not from the farm at all, but emanated from above the upstairs bathroom.  The Systems Administrator thought that a slow leak from the lavatory cistern was causing it to refill equally slowly, and triggering vibrations at the resonant frequency of the pipework.  I was horribly reminded of the episode of Steptoe and Son in which Harold installs central heating.  Fortunately one can get instructions for practically anything nowadays on the net, and spare parts for lavatories, so we have a new seal in a box in the kitchen, awaiting installation.  In the meantime the water inflow to the cistern has been turned off, and in order to refill the tank after flushing you have to temporarily turn it on again, using a screwdriver kept by the loo for that purpose.  The SA was going to fix it, but first of all ran out of the right sort of plumbing tape, and then wrenched one ankle putting it down a rabbit hole and didn't fancy crawling around the bathroom.  The current method of flushing is sufficiently inconvenient that it probably will get fixed, and not join the spare bedroom door which has been held shut with a piece of bent coat hanger since 2003, when the catch broke.

Meanwhile our boiler engineer left a cheerful message on the answerphone reminding us that the boiler was due for a service.  This followed on the from message he left for us in July letting us know that it was time for the annual check.  Then the boiler failed to come on one morning, so I had to leave a message on his answerphone admitting that he was dead right that the boiler needed servicing, as it now wasn't working at all.  He is coming on Monday.  He is a very cheerful engineer, who doesn't do that demoralising thing that so many builders do of tutting about the state of your property, the dreadful job of installation and maintenance done by all previous artisans, and your own poor choice of make and model.  He was fully booked last week when I rang him, but would have squeezed us in on Friday or over the weekend if it had been cold.  We said we'd last until Monday.  We have an immersion heater, and weren't running the radiators yet anyway, though it is a nuisance losing the heated towel rails (which are effectively radiators).  I keep festooning my towel and bathmat in front of the Aga to dry, and then it gets to mealtime and the SA tidies them away.

I have worked in the garden all this week, but there is a limit to how many times you can talk about weeding and picking up leaves.  After a morning spent on the gravel in the front, I moved this afternoon to the back.  A white Rosa rugosa, which has been dying back in parts for a couple of years, is really not looking good, and I think it is time for that to come out, along with assorted seedling trees which have sprung up.  Tomorrow could be time to get out the pick axe, and tackle another big clearance job.  Though the knuckle of my left hand is still tender, so I'll have to see if it's up to pick axing.

I'm off for some more music tonight, as a friend came by some concert tickets at the last minute, from another friend who is ill.  Dvorak and Brahms (I think).  Pizza and The Sopranos has been rolled forward to Monday.

an evening with Pippa

No, not the future queen's socially upwardly mobile little sister, but the considerably more entertaining (from my point of view) Pippa Greenwood.  I think that Pippa is wonderful.  When presented with some diseased piece of vegetation on Gardeners' Question Time she always sounds so genuinely happy and excited, and she really knows her stuff.  I thought it was a great shame when she ceased to appear on Gardeners' World.  I like to feel that my TV gardening experts know a lot more than I do, and I admire Pippa's zest for life.

She was talking at one of the local garden clubs.  I've talked there myself this year, twice.  Once booked well in advance to talk about the woodland charity, and also to talk about gardening, which was booked at slightly short notice after I'd already signed up to do the other.  I think they must have had a problem with another speaker, and been keen to find someone to complete the programme, and I was local.  Fortunately both talks went well, though I can't think they'd normally choose to have the same speaker twice in one year.  When I saw that Pippa Greenwood was due to appear I asked if the meeting was open to non-members, and they said it was, and then sent me a complimentary ticket.  I'd been fully expecting to buy a ticket in the normal way, and was very touched by the gesture.

I arrived at the village hall with a quarter of an hour to spare, and found the car park was already full.  We'd thought the capacity of the hall might be greater than that of the car park, so that wasn't a total surprise.  I parked down the lane, found myself a seat towards the back but with a perfectly good view, and was sitting there happily when the committee member who books speakers told me that there was space at the front, and so I found myself with a front row ringside seat tucked between two members of the committee.

Pippa made plant diseases sound very entertaining, and told me some things I didn't know or had forgotten about diseases I'd heard of, as well as introducing me to a couple of diseases I hadn't come across at all.  Camellia gall looks exciting, producing large swellings on the shoots, the size of a human hand, which apparently feel cold, damp and unpleasantly yielding to the touch.  It doesn't harm the plant, and probably won't recur the following year, so is not the worst thing you could get in your garden.  Azalea gall is similar but slightly less revolting.

I'm not good at treating most plant diseases, disliking using chemicals and tending towards the low intervention method of trying to grow the plant well in the first place, removing the damaged bits if it succumbs, and binning the whole thing if it doesn't recover.  I sometimes feel inadequate at work when customers ask for advice on buying chemicals.  Pippa's approach turned out to be similar to mine, so naturally I felt that she was even more wonderful than I had thought.  She suggested using crushed oyster shells as a mulch to discourage slugs and snails from pots, and advised us that the cheapest place to get them was from a poultry feed supplier, not a garden centre.  That's a tip I'll bear in mind, though not for acid lovers. (I once found an identifiable piece of oyster shell in the mushroom compost, so that must be what they use to sweeten the mix).

I was interested to note that Pippa still uses acetate slides, not digital ones.  Some of the images dated from her time (eleven years and three days, as she told us) working as a plant pathologist at Wisley, and I guess they might be difficult to replace now that she isn't working there, though I'd have thought the RHS would be happy to help her out in the interests of public education.  It made me appreciate that my woodland charity digital projector running off a memory stick is still quite advanced.  Pippa's lecturing technique is to pile in a lot of information, arranged clearly, on how to identify each disease, what to do about it, and how serious it is in terms of its effect of plant health and persistence in the garden, interposed with breathing spaces in which she told some genuinely funny stories still pertaining to the subject of plant disease.  It was a skilled performance, all the more so for managing to look natural.

It was a gala evening for the garden club.  The club officer presiding over the proceedings had put on heels and a smart skirt, and there were nibbles afterwards.  What with my having done my own talks there, plus meeting people through work when they're shopping at the plant centre, plus knowing the beekeeper who introduced me to the club in the first place, I found I had lots of people to talk to, despite not being a member of the club or living in the village.  All in all it was great fun.

I don't suppose I am likely to ever meet the other Pippa, which is just as well, since I can't imagine what we'd find in common to talk about, but I remain a devoted fan of the gardening Pippa.

working and not working

When I read the headline that David Cameron said people should take their children to work with them on the strike day, I thought what a gift for the scriptwriters of The Now Show.  Given that this morning even the Today programme was taking a poke at it, they may feel that by Friday night it will have been done to death.  We'll see (or rather, hear), though the Systems Administrator and I may not until Saturday lunchtime.  On Friday evening we're going to see a Now Show stalwart live, as Mitch Benn is appearing at The Colchester Arts Centre.  ADVANCE NOTICE  Mitch Benn and the Distractions are performing tomorrow night at The Colchester Arts Centre, and as of this moment tickets are still available.

Apparently children will be allowed into Number 10 next Wednesday.  This slightly makes me think that the government machine is not running as tight a ship as it could be.  At my place of work it would be difficult to take children in for the entire day, supposing you had any.  The staff room is honestly rather insanitary, and rather cold, and smells rather mouldy, for it to be a suitable place to park a child for the day.  They would get chilly and possibly wet wandering around outside, and it is not exactly a hazard free environment for a small child.  The owners probably believe that while they are paying their staff, we should be concentrating on doing our jobs, not on preventing our children from ingesting chemicals, drowning in the ponds, messing up the tills, or otherwise causing injury to themselves or disruption to the business.

As a customer I'd like to feel that staff I was dealing with were concentrating on the job.  I don't want to go for a haircut and find that the hairdresser's attention is mostly on what four year old Tristan has got up to now, and whether he is safe, while she absent mindedly tonsures me.  Nor do I want to have my septic hand examined by the nurse while her bored 14 year old in the corner checks out Facebook on her mobile.  Not all places of work have a spare room and a more or less free member of staff to run an impromtu creche for mixed ages.

A friend of ours was recently made redundant by one of the big banks.  The bank is cutting 20,000 worldwide, with 250 to come out of the division our friend used to work in until the week before last.  Staff set off to work for business as usual on Monday morning.  On Wednesday rumours were circulating.  On Thursday the people being laid off were told, handed in their laptops and passes and went home.  On Friday they didn't go in.  Employment finished.  Our friend was the last person in his department to get the call, and by 4.30pm he was thinking he'd missed out.  He is close to retirement age, has lots of hobbies, and was really keen to be allowed to spend more time pursuing them.  Not everybody was in the same fortunate position.  I was surprised the bank had bothered to make him redundant, given he'd have soon gone anyway, but the SA pointed out that under new age discrimination legislation he might not have chosen to leave at 60, plus getting rid of one person who wanted to go saved the job of somebody else who didn't.  Thus our lives in big organisations hang by an arbitrary thread.  A divisonal head has to get rid of 250 people.  Are you number 250 or number 251 in the queue?

Meanwhile, back in the world of unpaid work, I have finished weeding the gravel by the entrance.  It's as good as it's going to be, at any rate.  The creeping sorrel will come up again, as it is impossible to get every scrap of root out, so the improvement is transient and somewhat illusory, but then so is the effect of mowing the lawn.  I topped up thin patches in the gravel, taking some from the bag of new gravel, and some from the edges of the drive where it gets spun out by vehicle wheels.  I want to use up the bag because then I won't have a bright green bag taking centre stage just inside the entrance, but I grudge running out of the supply of clean, weed-free gravel.  The garden layout does not work well for bulky deliveries, but that's one of the things you only discover after the event.  I would know next time, but there isn't supposed to be a next time.

Gravel gardening is quite fun, and you can achieve some interesting dynamic effects with self seeding, but it is not low maintenance.  It took over two days (admittedly short ones at this time of the year) to weed the entrance gravel, which is a very small part of the whole garden.  OK, if you laid a thick layer of gravel and blasted the entire area with weedkiller a few times a year and raked the leaves off in autumn it would be low maintenance, but if you want plants growing in gravel you will spend a long time weeding,  picking leaves out from among them, and topping up the bald patches that appear.  As for plants growing through holes cut in a membrane mulched with gravel, I wouldn't touch them.  The membrane will show at the edges of the holes, and you lose the attractive elements of self seeding.  Plants you want won't be able to grow to flowering size sitting on top of the membrane, but hairy bittercress will still find a foothold.

geese

The geese are flying.  That sounds as though it could be a secret password, akin to Masefield's The Wolves are Running, but it is simply a statement of fact.  Opening the front door just after dark this afternoon, we heard a wild cacophony from beyond the other side of the field hedge, then a great flock of geese, flying in V formation, appeared charging overhead, low and fast, heading south.  A couple of mini-formations straggled behind, their individual harsh honks failing to blend with the rest of the chorus.

A friend of ours is a wildfowler.  That is a demanding sport.  You have to be able to shoot, and you have to be able to identify what species you're aiming at before you pull the trigger.  You don't always have long to think about it.  There are stiff legal penalties for killing protected species.  If you are going to eat meat then wildfowl, killed cleanly with an accurate shot, and living freely until that moment, eating wild forage, has to be one of the most ethical meat sources there is.  More ethical than intensively reared animals living in crowded conditions, in groups larger than their social instincts evolved to cope with, travelling for many hours when they are sent to slaughter.

It's tough for farmers when wild forage includes their crops.  A couple of weeks ago, for a couple of days, there was a big flock of geese grazing on one of the fields just up the road, which has been sown with some sort of cereal that's now showing a few centimetres high.  I'd never seen geese there before, and on the third morning they were gone.  They had orange bills, but when I looked at a goose identification article in an old RSPB magazine, that didn't narrow it down much.

In European history, The Wild Geese were Irish soldiers fighting on the Continent.  Regiments were raised over three centuries for many countries and in many wars, driven by a complex mixture of Catholic anti-English sentiment, and commercial mercenary considerations.

The Barnacle Goose was held to be a fish during the Middle Ages, meaning that it could be eaten on Fridays without offending the tenets of the church.

Goosey Goosey Gander wandered upstairs and downstairs and in my lady's chamber, but I can't find a reliable explanation of where the rhyme comes from, and whether it was originally a reference to something else.  There is a popular idea among Internet users that it refers to the persecution of Catholic priests, but no evidence that I'd care to use in a degree level essay, even at Level One.

The small city of Goes in Zeeland in the south-western Netherlands has a goose in its coat of arms, and the gift shops sell wooden cut-outs of a white goose with a ribbon around its neck.  It is a pleasant place, with a tiny marina at the end of a long canal like a fairy grotto (or at least there used to be one) and an enormously tall TV tower.

Rome was saved from attack by the Gauls when the noise made by geese awoke the sleeping inhabitants.  According to current Internet mythology they were a flock of sacred geese.  When I was at school and first heard the story they were just geese.

And of course if you can find the right sort of goose it will lay golden eggs.