reduce, recycle, reuse

We had a roast chicken last weekend.  The Systems Administrator bought the largest possible free range one, so it cost something over ten pounds.  It did two helpings of roast chicken, and then the rest of the breast meat made a chicken, leek and mushroom pie that lasted us for two meals.  The brown meat went into an English curry, one made with Schwartz mild curry powder, and the carcass was simmered overnight, yielding enough stock for two lunch's worth of soup, and a small pudding basin of scrap meat for the cats.  Eight main course's worth of meat, the basis of four helpings of soup and about fifty pence worth of cat food isn't bad for a tenner.

The stock was cooked overnight in the simmer oven of the Aga.  In fact I forgot all about it, and only remembered mid-morning when the smell of boiling chicken began to permeate the kitchen.  If you don't have a range of some sort and have to put the oven on specially then making stock is not a virtually cost free activity, something I think cookery writers who urge the poor to buy chickens and get multiple meals from them should acknowledge.  Though if you planned it right you could simmer a week's worth of stew and chile con carne at the same time.  I picked the carcass over carefully, since chicken bones are not good for cats, though probably not so lethal after they have been cooked for about sixteen hours.  The boiled flesh looked horrid, slimy and quite revolting, but the cats loved it.  They seem to like it better than the odd tiny scrap of roast chicken we have slipped them from time to time.  But who am I to say that slimy is bad?  Maybe when you evolved to eat raw meat, and have grown up eating tinned cat food, slimy is just what you fancy.

Today's soup was to be mushroom, after we both enjoyed the home made mushroom soup at my cousin's birthday lunch.  The only time I made mushroom soup previously, it came out a strange and off-putting shade of green, but looking at the professionally made soup in Aldeburgh I decided that that was what mushroom soup looked like, some of the time.  I compared recipes from The Good Housekeepers, Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book and a paperback book of soups published by Pan in 1967, and decided that the general principle was to include some onion for flavour, some flour for thickening, and to add some cream at the end, so that's what I did.  The Pan book suggested including two egg yolks and a shot of sherry, but that seemed a bit much for lunch, given it was already going to contain stock, butter and cream, and I didn't have any sherry and didn't want to be stuck with two egg whites.  I did try asking the Systems Administrator enthusiastically if the SA fancied learning to make mushroom soup, since it was a lovely morning and I'd really rather have been out in the garden than in the kitchen, but the SA just stared at me bitterly and said No, not this particular morning.  The effects of the dentist's novocaine have worn off, and the dying remnants of the nerve that the dentist couldn't reach to drill out are spectacularly painful.

I wouldn't say today's soup was as nice as the one in the hotel, though it was pretty good.  Perhaps it needed a slug of sherry.  For my next act I shall make leek and potato, since we've got a left over leek.  I was amused to see in last night's episode of The Sopranos that I have the same sort of blender as mafia boss Uncle Junior.

By the time you get to my age you are recycling fashion, as well as chicken remnants, if you have spent your life buying clothes on the basis of getting well made things that were never the outrageous height of fashion to start with.  Sometime back in the 1990s there was a craze for fake fur hats.  I bought a Gilly Forge number in Liberty, in a soft black with a deep yellow quilted lining.  It was cut like an enormous cloche, and you rolled up the hem according to how low over your forehead you wanted the hat to come.  The fashion passed after a couple of years, and Gilly Forge fur hats began to look distinctly last year.  Old hat, in fact.  I put it regretfully in a drawer.  Fast forward the best part of two decades, factor in the Downton effect and the film version of Anna Karenina, and gigantic fur cloche hats look entirely acceptable.  And I already have a vintage one, with the added advantage I know it has been on no head but my own.

the innocent ear

I went last night to a concert organised by the music society.  We had a young soprano and accompanying pianist, performing some lieder, a Handel oratorio and some Donizetti, before easing off the high culture in the second half with a Britten setting of a humorous poem by Auden, a little song from The Tempest arranged by Arne, some traditional Tyneside songs, and a few hits from the shows.  Given a straight choice between that and curling up in front of series three of The Sopranos with a bottle of red and a Chinese takeaway, I'd probably have given high culture a miss and saved myself a drive, but since I have a season ticket I have taken the view that I might as well sample everything on offer and broaden my musical horizons.  Besides, I had a hunch it wasn't going to be our best attended event of the year, and as a member of the committee felt a vague sense of obligation that I should go and try and make one row look a little fuller.  I did not take the Systems Administrator, who given the choice between an evening of lieder and another dose of root canal surgery would have found it a hard call.

The audience was on the sparse side.  I don't know whether that is because quite a few of our regulars share my general lack of enthusiasm for young sopranos, or just that the music society is competing with lots of other events in the run up to Christmas.  The act was comparatively cheap to book, since they are sponsored by a charitable scheme that supports young artists at the start of their careers, but against that we did have to hire a piano.  My guess is that the chairman and bookings secretary would have liked a few more bums on seats, but I'll find out at the next committee meeting.  Those that did come I mostly recognised as hard core, season ticket holders who support everything.  They were very polite, even clapping the person credited with doing the large floral arrangement on the stage, so it's difficult to tell how much they enjoyed it.

I struggle to judge lieder, and Handel arias, on two levels.  One is that they are so unfamiliar I'm really not sure whether I like them or not.  It's like being confronted with some elaborate piece of Chinese art in a museum, and not being able to say whether it is beautiful or ugly, because it is so far from my normal frames of reference.  And I know that I am utterly unequipped and incompetent to judge the performance, and say whether it is being done well or badly, because I have so little idea what it's supposed to be like.  It's a strange feeling.

When I go into a garden for the first time, I form a view pretty quickly whether I like it or not.  That's an aesthetic and emotional judgement.  At the same time, and without having to think about it consciously, I'm forming an idea of what the garden is about and how it works.  When it was made, by what sort of people, for what purpose, how space is organised, what plants are used, how they are trained, how the garden is maintained.  It exists in the context of many other gardens, and carries meanings about history, taste, fashion, status and wealth.  I've probably read about the garden before my visit, if it is a famous garden open to the public rather than a friend's private space.  I'll start analysing how it works, and why I like or don't like aspects of it, and take notes, and probably try and read more about it later on.

Faced with lieder I am like the garden visitor who doesn't know about gardens.  I might notice appreciatively that there are a lot of flowers, giving plenty of colour, and decide I don't much like the modern sculpture, and that would be about it.  And with the young soprano there was plenty of colour.  She acted more than singers of traditional folk generally do, smiling, grimacing and pouting as the plot dictated.  I still find the classically trained female soprano voice so alien that I couldn't say if it was beautiful, or ugly.  I certainly didn't instinctively respond to her the way I do to Dido's Lament when that comes up on the radio, or some counter tenors, but whether that was because I'm not familiar with or don't particularly like sopranos, or because she wasn't a great example of the type, I couldn't tell you.

I read an intriguing article in one of the papers a while back, about the truly innocent ear.  Sadly I didn't keep the reference, so can't give you the link.  Some psychologists asked musical experts to judge recordings of various classical musical performances, and gave them a photograph of the performer.  A given performance scored more highly when the performer was smartly dressed in their photo than when they were in jeans.  And Joshua Bell, who can fill the world's largest and grandest classical venues with his violin, played largely unnoticed when he went busking on the Washington Metro system.  The video recording of the passengers hurrying by showed that only 7 out of 107 people who passed stopped for more than a minute.  A little boy who tried to listen was dragged away by his accompanying adult.  Context shapes our perceptions of art.  Perhaps my judgement when visiting gardens is not as objective as I think.

reprieved

It looks as though Frating will not get a gravel quarry.  The draft report was published today, to be signed off by the council next week and then sent off to the Secretary of State for approval next year, and Frating's name was not on the list.  The Systems Administrator saw the news in the local paper while waiting at the dentist's.

It isn't time to put out the bunting and cheer in unalloyed joy just yet.  I've seen enough other parishes be told that quarrying applications were quashed, only for the applications to spring up again or the rejection be challenged.  I won't consider we're completely out of the firing line until the list of approved Essex sites has been finalised and authorised at the highest level, and the parish of Frating is not on it.

The SA was not utterly surprised to be left out.  Potential new quarrying locations under consideration were scored on various factors and ranked, and Frating came very near the bottom of the list, around thirtieth out of thirty.  The main point in our favour, as a site for gravel extraction, was that we are on the east side of Colchester and so handy for the Bathside Bay container port development.  Plans for that was recently kicked back into the long grass, but I don't know if it made a difference to the quarry decision, as a friend who has lived in these parts for longer than we have assures me that it has been rumbling around for the past forty years, and the life of the quarry was to have spanned twenty.

The quarry, had it gone ahead, would have removed ten per cent of the entire land area of the parish, taking out the centre, between the original Frating and the newer Frating Green, which is by degrees appropriating the name of Frating.  We should probably start calling ourselves Old Frating.  Or Frating Original.  Pretty much every property in the parish would have been affected by planning blight, to a greater or lesser extent.  Maybe that played a part in the final decision.  Extending existing quarries is rough on the people who live near them, but not as costly in terms of aggregate blight as hitting a whole new parish.

The quarry was due to operate for twenty years, once it started.  One of my anxieties was that if it had been approved, since this was a county wide long term minerals plan, work might not have begun for years, pending the reactivation of the port development plans.  While this would have been a relief on a day to day basis while we lived here, if we had needed to sell potential buyers would have imagined the worst about the noise, and the traffic, and the dust.  Plus the quarry was supposed to be turned into a nature reserve at the end of its life, but there would always have been a lingering fear that when it came to that point it might have been used as a landfill site instead, or to house some region wide recycling facility, as has been threatened at a neighbouring village.

Maybe our environmental objections played a part in getting our parish dropped off the list.  We warned of the risk to ancient woodland if the effect of keeping the new quarry pumped free of water was to cause the water table to drop.  Maybe the argument that this was farmland that ought to be used for growing food had some effect.  I very much doubt that those sorts of considerations made a blind bit of difference.  Assuming that Frating stays off the list and it is all signed and sealed next Tuesday, my guess is that we were saved by the fact that we are east of Colchester and most economic development in Essex isn't.  Location, location, location.

Sometimes I have worried we chose our house unwisely, and should have paid up for a smaller property somewhere more upmarket, within the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty along the Stour or in a village protected by listings and heritage value.  But nowadays nobody is safe.  High speed rail links, pylons, wind farms, solar farms, airport expansions.  You can be in the most remote part of Britain, or the commuter heartlands of the Chilterns, and still come under the cosh.

Meanwhile, the Systems Administrator's second visit to the dentist resulted in the tooth being pronounced dead and the nerve drilled out, to be packed with antibiotics and temporarily capped.  The SA is relieved to be making progress towards a diagnosis and solution, but otherwise rather sore, now the anaesthetic's worn off.

ice

I set the greenhouse and conservatory heaters last night for the first time this winter.  A hard overnight frost was forecast, and the remains of yesterday's snow looked pretty crunchy on the lawn when I peered out of the bathroom window this morning.  The cats were gathered in the hall waiting for their breakfast, watchful and alert, and the chickens' water had frozen.  We are certainly aware of the shifting seasons, living here.  Not for us the centrally heated, street-lit sameness of city life, where we might just about notice whether it was still light when we left the office, but no more.  Frost and snow alter the shapes of our days.

It took some time with a jug of hot water and some careful tapping to break the drinker lid free of the bottom half, so that I could refill it.  When we started keeping chickens I bought a plastic water dispenser, and one frosty morning I struck it absent mindedly, trying to get it to come apart, and the plastic fractured in the cold.  When I broke the base of the second plastic one, trying to knock ice out of it, I switched to galvanised iron.  The iron drinker cost approximately three times as much, but will outlast my chicken keeping days and still be going strong as an heirloom to pass to our nephews or great-nephews or nieces, should any of them choose to keep hens.

The postman brought our first Christmas card, another sign that the season of glad tidings and joy to all men is getting closer.  This was a real card from an actual person, not just some company we've done business with during the year, saying something like Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year from all at Buggins Bathrooms.  When I worked in the City we used to receive cards from the stockbrokers we dealt with, signed by all of the members of each team, or as many of them as were around on signing day, and some of the names would have us scratching our heads as to who on earth so-and-so was.  We in turn sent out piles of cards, some with multiple signatures.  I could never work out whether the whole exercise was cynically commercial and entirely pointless, or whether a tiny desire for human contact still clung on, amidst concerns about commissions, generous allocations in the next sure-fire new issue, and golf day invitations.

A friend was wondering to me whether it was still worth sending cards, with the price of stamps being so expensive, and when we use e-mail and text for almost everything else.  If I like somebody enough to want them in my life the rest of the year then I don't grudge them 80 pence or a quid at Christmas to show them that I'm thinking of them, and I have bought our cards.  And you can't put texts on the mantelpiece.  So if you know me and you get a card then it means something.  If you don't get a card it might mean that the post office has randomly delivered it to the wrong house.

We lit the stove in the study, but by lunchtime the thermometer still only read nineteen degrees.  That is three degrees more than the HSE suggests as the minimum for indoor workplaces where the work is not physical, so in theory warm enough, but in practice not very warm.  We were burning poplar, which is not proving the most flammable firewood, at least after only six months' seasoning.  It smoulders with a low, sulky flame, and is reluctant to get going, so after lunch the Systems Administrator put some pieces of old fence post on the fire. These got it to go so well that my legs began to prickle with heat sitting in my usual chair.

By the time it got dark there was still a lump of frozen snow on the rear windscreen of my car, although it is parked in full sun with the rear windscreen facing south.  The outside temperature had crawled up to two degrees.  It is supposed to rain hard this evening, which would get rid of the last of the snow, but there are no signs of it yet.

snow

It wasn't supposed to snow overnight.  Yesterday evening, as I was planning the week ahead, I warned the Systems Administrator that since overnight frost was forecast I might do a run to the dump first thing today, so if I'd disappeared when the SA got up, that was where I'd probably gone.  Instead, when I pulled up the bathroom blind to see how much frost there was on the lawn, I discovered it was covered with a thin layer of snow.  Reader, I cursed.

It is one of the signs of middle age.  I will still run if I'm in a hurry, or sit on the floor if there are no chairs, but I don't enjoy snow.  Particularly light dustings in North Essex.  Snow is ghastly stuff.  It breaks limbs off plants, squashes them out of shape, and kills or maims Southern hemisphere evergreens, that seem to detest snow sticking to their leaves.  It brings all useful work in the garden to a standstill, since you cannot do anything in snow.  You can't see the ground, or the weeds, can't see what you're treading on, can't see the shape of shrubs properly to prune them, can't do anything.  Melting snow is the wettest substance on the planet.  A centimetre thick layer of snow on an overcast, murky morning doesn't even have the saving grace of heart-stopping beauty, because it doesn't transform the landscape.

In places where it snows properly they must make themselves sick with laughter when they look at how we cope with it.  A trawl round the papers on-line while eating porridge showed that Stansted was shut.  Too snowy, you see.  They might have had as much as two centimetres further inland.  The A12 was shut by accidents close to where I work, another reason for customers who were thinking they might visit the plant centre to decide not to bother today.  There were traffic jams in Colchester, including near the main railway station, and reports of a bus sliding backwards into a parked car in Chelmsford.

I'd been thinking about going up to London at some stage, to catch various exhibitions.  There is Lely at the Courtauld, The Life and Death of Henry Stuart at the National Portrait Gallery, The Northern Renaissance at The Queen's Gallery, a small free exhibition about the family in art at Tate Britain, and a little display of recently acquired pictures at the Garden Museum.  Two or three of these would make up a very nice day out, and I'd like to get the Lely and Lost Prince in fairly soon, in case we do get real snow, since both close in mid-January.  And I could look at the Christmas lights and the window displays.  Heck, I could even do some shopping.

Trains from Colchester into London were still running normally, as far as I could tell from the internet, but experience teaches that going anywhere near Colchester railway station when it's snowing is a bad idea.  The station is reached via one of the most congested and potentially gridlocked roundabouts in Colchester, if not Essex, and the final approach route to the station car park, and two of the key roads off the roundabout, are quite steep.  In snow the whole area is a trap, one of those places where you could easily spend an hour or two not moving.  If, when you finally escaped, a bus had not yet slid into your car, you would count yourself lucky.  In the Systems Administrator's final years of commuting the SA took to travelling from Wivenhoe, despite the smaller number of trains and frequent need to change, after too many evenings when it took three quarters of an hour just to get out of the car park even when it wasn't snowing.  Anyway, I didn't trust the latest franchise holder not to screw the trains up at any minute, given a bit of snow as an excuse.

I did sort through and tidy up the piles of paper that had accumulated in the kitchen and on my desk like flotsam at the high water mark.  Garden magazines, begging letters from our former college and the SA's school, beekeeping magazines, little pieces of paper with notes of important things to do scribbled on them, clothing catalogues, gift catalogues, free fliers about kitchens and central heating, marketing literature from an American investment management group I don't much like, charity Christmas appeals, bank statements, dividend counterfoils and one ridiculous cheque for less than two pounds for a tiny shareholding acquired passively when it spun out of something else, old shopping lists, garden guides left over from our holiday awaiting filing since I always keep garden guides, a glossy guide to the Morpeth bagpipe museum, two copies of the Mercury's brochure because they did post me one after I'd picked one up in person, a postcard from my cousin, a pension scheme annual funding statement as required by statute, exhibition leaflets from my last couple of trips to London which I won't keep, notes for the music society marketing supper meeting, the report and accounts of a local horticultural society of which I am not a member, but they gave me a copy anyway when I spoke at their annual meeting and I kept it for future reference.  It shows how much they paid to have their silver trophies valued, something I am keen the beekeepers should do.

We accumulate a dreadful amount of paper, and that's after signing up to the direct marketing preference scheme.  Even when you opt out of receiving mail shots from new companies, that doesn't stop firms you've ever dealt with previously from sending you brochures, but just because I bought a pair of kilim covered pouffes two years ago doesn't mean I want to buy a furry hot water bottle cover or a scarf for £75 now.  I put aside the free magazine from Cheltenham Racecourse for the SA to have a look at, but that went straight in the bin.  I have to admit, though, that quite a lot of the paper was accounted for by things I had voluntarily picked up with my own hands, or even paid for.

Addendum  The Systems Administrator's tooth might be on the mend.  The SA was convinced it was a root canal problem, but the dentist thought it was probably just a lost filling.  The SA has a temporary filling, with an appointment to go back for a permanent one in two weeks, when the tooth has had time to settle down, or at once as an emergency if the toothache goes on getting worse.  Going outside in the cold aggravates things so that it is difficult to tell if it is getting worse or not, but on the basis that it didn't hurt at all first thing this morning when the SA woke up, I should say the dentist was right and a new filling might do the trick.  The SA is more hawkish, but the dentist did say the nerve could take a week to calm down.

collecting the tree

We fired up the truck this morning, and went to get the Christmas tree.  We even remembered to measure the height of the ceiling in the place where we want to put the tree, and take the tape measure with us so that we could measure the trees, which was extremely organised for us, since we have in the past been out to buy curtains without first having measured the window.  In the days when we both used to work in offices, and used to get given the sort of psychometric tests beloved by firms running executive training sessions, and which cause our friends who are professional academic psychologists to raise their eyebrows in a sceptical manner, we both scored rather lowly on what was termed the Completer-Finisher dimension.  The executive trainers described Completer Finishers as being the people who dot the i-s and cross the t-s.  And measure Christmas trees, and windows.

Other than my lack in the i dotting and t crossing department, I always had a remarkably balanced personality.  My highest score was for openness to new experiences, and I was moderately creative, although worryingly for my last City employers my creativity score fell during the period that I was working for them.  The Systems Administrator was pretty balanced as well, which is probably why we jog along so happily.

The heater in the truck has not worked since we've had it, having packed up at some point in the quarter of a million miles it covered before the Systems Administrator bought it umpteenth hand.  This is not a problem as long as you only drive it in the sort of weather where you are not going to need to defrost the windscreen during the journey, and as long as you wrap up warm.  It needed some welding done at its last MoT, as it has at every previous one, but apart from that is going fine, and the mechanic at the local garage told the SA that it was a much better bet than more recent models, since while the chassis is gradually being replaced weld by weld, the transmission and engine are good for another 250,000 miles.  The garage does of course have a vested interest in the truck coming in for an annual spot of welding.  The SA is a keen student of twentieth century history, including both World Wars and the Russian Revolution, so can imagine we are taking part in some campaign as we rattle across the countryside in our incredibly noisy vehicle, with its lack of heating and heavy, somewhat imprecise gear shift.  I enjoy sitting at height and being able to see over the hedges.  Today I saw two flocks of lapwings, one beside the A120 and another on the marshes by the river Stour.

We found a nice bushy tree without any bald patches, that would just fit in the space if we took the bottom 20 centimetres off the trunk, and which had its main branches starting more than 20 centimetres from the base so we wouldn't have to sacrifice half the tree.  I expected that by the time I got to the till to pay for the tree a scruffy neer-do-wells alert would have reached the staff via the bush telegraph.  My colleague in the shop was aware of the truck, but assumed it belonged to the local who normally cuts holly boughs for Christmas in the arboretum.

The tree is now safely tucked away out of the wind in the garage, carefully balanced on top of the lawn tractor, since the garage is rather full.  It is too early to put it up.  There was one year that we left the tree lying down in a shed which the cats liked to go and lie in, when they wanted to get out of the house and take a breather from the presence of the other cats, and when we came to put the tree up the smell of pine resin could not totally mask the fact that the cats must have taken offence at having a strange tree dumped in their shed, and had scent marked it.

Christmas trees and customers

What a difference a day makes, or rather, a change in direction of airflow.  Yesterday my car was iced by the time dusk fell, while this morning I woke to the sound of rain drumming on the roof.  The rain had eased off by the time I arrived at work, but water continued to ooze out the atmosphere through the morning, even in the odd moments when the sun looked as though it was thinking about trying to break through.

There was a mouse in the traps under the bird food, bringing the total up to eight including the one caught on Saturday, when my colleague who competes in triathlons in his spare time declared that it was disgusting and that I would have to deal with it.  I fixed him with my best Paddington Bear hard stare and said that I did not do dead mice, and our younger colleague got rid of the body.  I think he has formed an exaggerated notion of my decrepitude, since later on when I offered to load a medium sized shrub into the car of one of our regular customers who walks with a crutch, he asked whether I was OK doing that.  I was fairly sure he was being solicitous and not sarcastic, so reassured him that yes, I was fine, but didn't tell him that in my spare time I lift 20 kilo bags of chicken food.

There will be Christmas trees this year.  The gardeners went to cut them first thing, and the older gardener warned me to reserve mine soon, since there wouldn't be a second cutting.  There were quite a few trees in the first batch, mostly on the large side and rather odd shaped, but not noticeably worse than they have been for the past couple of years.  They are an absolute bargain at twelve pounds a pop, provided that you have a high ceilinged room to put them in, since the majority of them wouldn't fit into most modern houses.  The owner believes that this problem can be overcome by removing the top, but that ruins the shape of a tree.  You have to keep an eye on the base as well, since some have branches coming from so low down they would prevent you from fixing it into its stand, and if you removed them you would find you had lost half the canopy.  The gardeners had cut great hunks of mistletoe as well, and holly boughs, though there aren't many berries this year.  Either they never set due to the weather, or the birds have already eaten them.

The morning was very quiet.  I had a nice chat with a famous Suffolk based garden designer about which oaks and liquidambars we had in stock, and another with a charming old boy from Lavenham who wanted a clematis variety as a Christmas present for his daughter-in-law that we had never heard of and suspected didn't exist and that she had got her plant names in a muddle, and another with a second designer who sounded both elderly and posh, and was after a shrub we have been trying to obtain for her for months without success, and still can't get.  She knew Hugh Johnson of Tradescant column fame, and thought she might try and beg a couple of suckers from his specimen, so I mentally filed away the information that Maytenus boaria suckers when mature.  All of this scored highly on the quality of human interaction scale, while putting nothing through the till.

Later on things lot busier.  The older gardener, bringing holly into the shop, warned us that there were a couple of diddicoys in the car park.  Political correctness has not yet reached all parts of rural Suffolk.  They did have a very scruffy van, which they had parked in a stupid place, but they turned out to be French garden contractors who spent over three hundred pounds on plants.  They were followed by a not spectacular but steady stream of retail customers.  While the manager was at lunch a man arrived wanting to sell us fence posts, imported from Estonia.  He had brought in a specimen post, which he gave to me together with details of his business, but when he suggested that he could go out to his van and bring in samples of the other nine sizes of post as well, I persuaded him not to, saying that I thought we could get the general idea at this stage from the one.

The manager had had an unpleasant encounter with one of our customers when he was queuing for the checkout at Tesco with his wife and children.  She barged past them to get to the front of the queue to ask the man on the till whether they had any consomme, and was very reluctant to believe him when he said he didn't know, since he only worked on the checkout.  She did not recognise the manager, who nearly remonstrated with her for pushing his wife and daughter, but didn't in case she told the owners that he had been rude to a customer.  I pointed out to him that she would never admit to them that she had been shopping in Tesco, and not Waitrose.

one of our trees is missing

My drive to work through the back lanes of the Tendring peninsular and across Constable country was very beautiful, with brilliant winter light shining across the freshly ploughed fields, and birds silhouetted against a blue sky.  Winter can be a lovely season in the UK, when it is not raining, or foggy.

The day got off to a quiet start, cleaning up yet more trolleys of herbaceous plants which I had remembered to put under cover yesterday afternoon, so that they were not frozen.  In fact, the trolley load which had been in an unheated greenhouse was slightly frozen.  The irrigation system has been drained down for the winter, to avoid the risk of the pipes freezing and bursting, and a tub of water left in the polytunnel on the far side of the car park for dunking any stray dry pots was covered in a layer of ice.

The mood was only slightly soured by an outstanding till error from last Wednesday.  It was nothing to do with me, because I wasn't there, but preyed on the mind of my colleague who had been in that day, then not again until this morning.  We really ought to have modern tills that record which staff member processed each transaction, as nobody could remember or was owning up to this particular muddle.

Nerves became more jangled after the owner called over the radio to say that she had reserved two willow trees for somebody who was coming in today to collect them, so could we get them ready by the till.  My colleague who was already stressed about the till error went to get them, and came back saying she could only find one.  I went to have a look, as did my other colleague, and we too drew a blank.

The normal procedure with reserved plants is that they are taken off sale, unless they are large specimens too heavy to lift.  We used to put labels on reserved trees with the customer's name on, and leave them where they were, but too many reserved plants were found to have mysteriously vanished when people came to collect them, and we had to conclude that other customers, if that was the last specimen left, were not above removing the name tag and adding the reserved plant to their own shopping.  This was always embarrassing, and doubly so when it happened to people who had driven all the way from Romford or Norfolk.  However, the owner had left the reserved willows out for sale with the other trees instead of putting them in the special area for reserved trees.

The owner was first of all disbelieving, and then cross, that one of her reserved trees had vanished.  She found a couple of alternatives that her friend might accept instead of the second willow, and said that if not we would have to order another willow, and that we were to apologise profusely.  The three trees stood outside the back of the shop all day waiting for the owner's friend, who did not come to collect her willows after all.

Fellow members of the hunting, shooting, fishing and landowning fraternity do like to feel that they are getting a personal service from the proprietors, but it would be so much more efficient if they would just deal with the plant centre staff like all the other customers.  We know what we're doing.  Reserved plants are more likely to end up safely put aside, and an order placed in the normal way during working hours and written down on the main list with all the other orders is honestly much more likely to be met than one placed verbally at a chummy dinner party.

Later on the owner discovered that the dishwasher had not been working since last week, and that nobody had told her.  I'd got to the end of the list of herbaceous plants to clean up by that point, and had to go outside and deadhead pansies in the twilight until she'd gone, to escape from the escalating level of stress in the shop.

When I left to go home at a quarter past four I had to scrape a thin layer of ice off the car windscreen.  That's a record so far for this winter.

an unlikely story

It was cold this morning, and I went to work dressed for the weather.  A camisole, three long sleeved t-shirts, my uniform cambray shirt, fleece, thermal leggings, fleece trousers, fleece scarf, fleece hat.  I was glad of them as I picked fallen petals off the camellias in one of the polytunnels and snipped little dead twigs off the acers.  This is worth doing partly because the plants look fresher and nicer and so are more likely to sell, and also because the dead flower heads act as magnets for botrytis, while acers are vulnerable to coral spot, a fungal disease that starts as orange pustules on dead wood, but can then spread to living.  Actually, acers aren't above a bit of botrytis either.  It came as a surprise at around ten o'clock to hear rain drumming on the polytunnel roof.  I thought we were in for a cold, bright day, but evidently not.

The phone rang, and it was a woman calling about our advertisement in the East Anglian Daily Times.  Had I seen it?  I hadn't seen it, since I don't buy a paper before work, let alone have time to read one.  I expected her question to be a preamble to some underlying query about hedging, or fruit trees, but it turned out that she was calling to check that we knew that our advertisement for a Wreath Making Day had gone to press as Reef Making.  I presume that the owner dictated the wording of the advert over the phone to somebody who could neither spell nor was prepared to bring an iota of intelligence to the job of advertising sales.  I thanked my informant and promised to let the owner know, if she hadn't already found out.

Later on another woman rang wanting to speak to the manager, and then when I explained he didn't work at weekends, the person responsible for advertising.  I think she was looking forward to teasing the manager, and it rather took the wind out of her sails that I already knew about the error.  Later still the manager rang, having been told about the mistake and wanting to know whether anybody else had mentioned it.  We ought to get several free ads out of that cock-up, though looking on the bright side at least people might have noticed the advertisement.

The owners were shooting, and had left us only two radios between three members of staff, so that when I tried to call today's tea shop volunteer to make a hot drink for somebody he didn't reply, and while I was hunting for him she left.  My hands were filthy with compost from dibbling around in the camellias and acers, and cleaning up pots of herbaceous plants prior to tucking them away in a polytunnel for the winter, and I really didn't want to serve food.

Tonight I am heading out again for a friend's concert.  She sings with a local choir, and I said ages ago that I'd go to her concert.  Having not seen each other for a while we have ended up going out together two nights running, as yesterday we went to a jazz night.  It is held in a local hotel cum golf club and health club, and I knew we must be in Suffolk because the main function room was occupied by a black tie dinner for the Turkey Breeders Association.  It wasn't very good organisation to go for consecutive nights, but when we booked the jazz I didn't know when the concert was, and she only made the connection recently.  Jazz is not really my thing, so when the task of choosing which gig to go to fell to me, I resorted to searching for You Tube clips of all the bands on the programme, and went for the one that sounded least like jazz.  I chose Christine Tobin, an Irish singer touring her latest project, to put some of the poems of WB Yeats to music, with a line-up consisting of double bass, cello, piano, and guitar.  The guitarist was rather good, as far as I could tell, and she had a gutsy voice.  Odd sections passed me by, veering too far for my taste into Radiophonics Workshop territory, though I think at least one of those was accidental, because I could see the guitarist signalling frantically at the man on the sound desk.  It wasn't my normal sort of music, but I wasn't bored.  I am not at all sure where she ranks in the pantheon of jazz.

Tonight we get Mozarts's Requiem (I think).  I like that, though not normally enough to drive all the way to Frinton on a Saturday night in a working weekend.  But I said I'd go, and sometimes part of the function of friends is just to be there.  When it gets to the interval, and the performers spill forward to say hello to their friends and relations in the audience, it is nicer to have a friendly face or two in the pews than to be left chatting to your fellow choir members until they are suddenly claimed by their families.  At last year's concert a few of us from work made a party of it, but this time someone has a school concert to attend, and another was so scathing about the soloists last time that our friend didn't have the heart to invite her again.

I feel rather mean leaving the Systems Administrator for yet another evening, on the other hand if I stay in it will not make the toothache go away.  The SA proposes to watch War Horse while I'm out, which I don't want to see.

frost

Frost covered the grass when I pulled up the blind in the bathroom this morning and looked out over the back garden.  I wasn't surprised, since I'd had to defrost my car when I set out at half past six last night to go to the beekeepers' monthly meeting.  That went OK.  The turnout wasn't high, but those who did come made an effort to participate, though I think they'd rather have had the lecture about top-bar hives.  The beekeepers are generally kindly, curious and patient people, which is probably why I'm still involved in the society after thirteen or fourteen years.  The magazine of the British Beekeepers Association slightly took the wind out of our sails by publishing a one page crib guide to honey labels in the latest magazine, two days before our quiz and group discussion, but that couldn't be helped.

The frost meant that there was no great rush to get outside, since I couldn't walk on the grass to get access to any of the beds in the back garden, and you can't weed frozen ground.  If I were designing a garden for a keen gardener who was not at liberty to pick and choose their gardening weather, for example somebody with a full time job who wanted to garden at weekends, I would definitely think about providing all-weather access to most areas.  Sweeps of grass look great, and are cheap to construct compared to hard landscaping, but they render great chunks of the garden out of bounds for most of the morning in frosty weather.  The pattern of melting ice as the morning progressed illustrated which parts of the garden catch the sun, and which are permanently shaded at this time of year.  There is starting to be a little too much shade, and we need to reduce the height of the boundary hedge at some point this winter, and remove some low branches from the wild gean.

After lunch I let the chickens out for a run and went on cutting the Eleagnus hedge by the drive.  The hens decided en masse to cooperate less fully than they did yesterday, and disappeared behind the hedge where I couldn't see them, and the fox wouldn't be able to to see me.  I hoped the sound of human activity and the Radio 5 Live film programme would act as a deterrent.  They busied themselves fossicking under the little oak tree for a while, searching for things to eat among the dead leaves.  The rooster is not all that keen on the back garden, and sat on the gravel in the front where he could see me, looking peeved, until I gave him some sultanas.  Then one of the hens frightened herself and ran back to the chicken house, and the rest of them trooped round from the back and spent the rest of the afternoon foraging near the chicken house, where I could see them.

As I added to the pile of prunings along the side of the drive I began to worry that it would end up blocking the front door, which would be rather hard on the post man.  The Systems Administrator was going to have a session with the tractor moving prunings to the bonfire area, but has been struck down with toothache.  Cold air makes it much worse, as do cold and hot food.  Having Googled the symptoms, the SA assures me that these are the classic signs of root canal trouble, and has made a dentist's appointment, but could not get one until Monday afternoon.  In the meantime outside work is off limits, and the piles of prunings will have to remain until Tuesday.

working at height

I spent another morning squelching around the back garden, pruning, weeding, and picking fallen leaves out of gravel with my fingertips.  The sheer volume of material needing to be removed before spring is quite staggering, and shows what a bit of rain can do.  I can't tell you the year's rainfall total to date at this moment, since that's one of the pieces of data waiting to be retrieved from the Systems Administrator's hard disc, but from a recent chat with a friend who gardens locally I think we've already had over 700 mm, compared to average annual rainfall of around 500 mm.  And to think that back in the spring we were surrounded by hosepipe bans.

Despite the fact that parts of my back garden have turned into a swamp, and I can feel every footstep sink into the soil, 700 mm of rain is not very much by UK standards.  DEFRA and the Met Office are both rather coy about giving me a table of UK averages, at least within the amount of time I have to spare to look for the data, but in a slightly old Guardian article I found a table of UK annual rainfall for the past one hundred years.  I shouldn't rely on newspaper articles for that sort of information, otherwise I'll be caught out by statistics like The Daily Telegraph's shock revelation only 100 cod left in the North Sea (correct answer only forty three million cod left in the North Sea), but according to the Guardian there were only four years in the past century when the UK as a whole scored less than 900 mm.  OK, the year isn't over yet, but here am I thinking that over 700 mm is more than enough, thank you very much.  The UK average is inflated by places like Crib Goch in Snowdonia (thirty year annual average 4,473 mm), but it makes me wonder how people in other parts of the country ever manage to do any gardening at all, or alternatively how I manage to grow anything in a usual semi-arid year.  To put 900 mm of rainfall in context, that is what Beirut gets in an average year.

My feet got very cold kneeling or treading carefully in the borders, and after lunch I decided I'd let the chickens out for a run.  I saw them the other day trying to peck through the wire at the tussocks of grass outside their chicken run, and thought that they would enjoy the exercise, and some greenery would be good for them.  I was planning to combine guarding the chickens with cutting the Eleagnus x ebbingei hedge along the drive, as the Systems Administrator made a beautiful job of the lower half a while back, but hadn't got round to doing the upper part, leaving the hedge looking worrying top heavy and liable to be bashed by every parcel van.  I'd reminded the SA about the hedge a couple of times, to be told it was on the SA's list of things to do, and my general maxim is that if you remind someone about something more than twice, it ceases to be reminding and becomes nagging.  Sometimes you need to nag people, but not about a hedge.

The hedge always used to be my department anyway, before the SA retired.  I got the step ladder out, and began to realise that it had grown a lot since the last time I trimmed it.  The SA found me wobbling around on the top of the steps, and asked if I would prefer to use the Henchman.  I agreed that would probably be safer.  The Henchman is a wonderful thing, consisting of an aluminium platform with a safety rail round three sides of it, supported on four extremely stable flared legs, that bolt in place with cross braces so it can't wobble, collapse or tip in use.  The SA bought ours at the Chelsea Flower Show years ago, and it makes working at height a great deal safer.  It is light enough for one person to be able to drag it along level ground single handed, though two of you would be needed to manoeuvre it through a border.  It has flat, circular feet to spread the weight, which are hinged in all directions, so after moving it you need to check that these are flat on the ground.  Apart from that it is a doddle to use.

If I were ever asked to write a book about managing a large garden, for garden owners who have to do everything themselves rather than employing a gardener, one of the things I should stress is the value of investing at the outset in the right equipment.  Tractor, trailer, hedge cutting equipment.  You can waste a great deal of time and effort, and end up getting yourself into situations which are objectively speaking quite dangerous, trying to care for two acres with kit that would be perfectly adequate for a third of an acre suburban plot.  Our next purchase will probably be a post wacker, a heavy, hollow, metal cylinder with handles on each side that you put over the top of a fence or tree post and drop repeatedly, a process much less likely to result in serious injury or death than the alternative method of one person holding the post while the other person hits it with a sledge hammer

Alas, nobody has talent spotted me at a woodland talk and said I should be the new face of television gardening, and we don't go to the sort of dinner parties where one of us might be sitting next to the gardening editor of the Observer, or Frances Lincoln, who upon hearing about our delightful garden and my inimitable prose style would sign me up, so I probably won't be asked to write the book.  But you read it here first.  Buy the right kit, it's easier in the long run.

two gardens

The ground in the back garden is so wet, it squelches when I walk on it, which makes me feel guilty about treading on the borders.  It's an insoluble problem, since the only way that everything needing pruning, trimming, cutting down, tying in, leaf sweeping and weeding will get done at all is to keep at it through the winter.  There simply isn't time to wait for the borders to dry out.

The rambler roses that are covering the bank between the top and bottom lawns, and making a pretty good job of it, are also trying to spread forwards across the border along the top of the bank.  This contains some shrub roses, which are not strong enough to compete with the questing branches of the ramblers.  I've been working along the back of the bed, disentangling pieces of rambler and honeysuckle from poor old 'Buff Beauty' and 'Gloire de Dijon' to give the shrubs airspace.  Roses hate being shaded by other plants growing into them, and the shaded branches will often die.  It isn't always obvious which stem originates from which plant, so pruning out the unwanted growths of the ramblers isn't a job to be hurried, or done in bad light.  Dead stems have accumulated inside the bank, since the ramblers' growth habit is to pile new growth upon old, and I'm pulling those out where I come across them.  So far I have avoided spiking myself, poking myself in the eye, or cutting though a stem and then realising that it supported a great mass of growth that I wanted to keep.  I've been working into the bed from both ends, and have about a two metre section in the middle still to go.

I've started pruning the David Austin roses in that bed as I come to them.  I don't know when the exact optimum time is to do that, but in our garden roses get pruned at any point between November and February when I have time to do it and weather conditions are suitable for me to get outside.  I don't take the David Austin roses down hard, as I might with a floribunda or hybrid tea, but besides taking out the dead wood I reduce their height.  They can be prone to wind rock, when the effect of the plant thrashing around in strong winds is to create a depression in the soil all around the base of the stem.  This is liable to fill with water, and the water can easily freeze, none of which does the plant any good at all.  By the end of the morning piles of prunings were collecting all over the lawn, waiting for the Systems Administrator to cart them off to the bonfire.

As a change from pruning I did a stint trimming the fading leaves of the Brunnera macrophylla from the opposite bed, together with shabby Acanthus leaves and the brown remains of peonies.  I scraped up as many of the fallen rose leaves as I could without also scraping up all the straw mulch.  I don't spray for blackspot, reasoning that if a rose can't live healthily without doses of fungicide then I'll get rid of it and find something that can, but I do try to help garden hygiene along by collecting the fallen rose leaves and taking them to the tip rather than putting them in the compost bin at home.

The first snouts of bulbs are already appearing here and there, and seedlings with long, thin seedling leaves like an emerging carrot, which experience teaches are baby Orlaya grandiflora.  This is a delightful white umbellifer, used with great success by Tom Stuart Smith at Chelsea a few years ago, which does much better when allowed to self seed than if raised in pots and transplanted.  The drawback to using an effective mulch is that while it cuts down weeding, it also reduces the scope for successful self-seeding, so I was anxious not to waste any of the emerging Orlaya.  It is a desperately labour intensive form of gardening, doing the sort of hand weeding that requires you to be able to recognise plants and weeds at the seedling stage, but it is the only way of achieving a certain kind of garden effect.  As the great and gracious lady gardener with whom I am now on lunching terms said, it takes a lot of work to achieve a relaxed and natural looking garden.

In the afternoon I went to visit a gardening friend who has gone down the opposite route, of wildflowers and native trees.  She and her husband had the opportunity to buy the field next to their house a year ago, which has thrown their retirement plans into some disarray, but the opportunity was the flip side of a threat, since there was a risk that otherwise the land would be developed for housing.  The centre of the field is still rented to a neighbouring farmer, who is growing turnips on it this winter, but she is establishing a wide wildlife strip around the edge, which the farmer kindly offered to sow for her if she bought the seeds, and she has planted bulbs of bluebells, snowdrops and fritillaries.  There are some good oaks on the boundary, and she is planting further strips of hawthorn and yew in the corners.  They have seen barn owls, tawnies and little owls.  Plans are afoot to separate the field from the garden proper with a modern day ha-ha, the vertical face lined with sandbags instead of stonework, so that the view from the house will stretch unbroken to the horizon.  Clearing dead elm out of the hedge she accidentally wacked herself in the eye last week, when a branch she was dragging to the bonfire site sprung up and hit her in the face, so she is on two different antibiotics and unable to drive for a fortnight, but she is undeterred.  Once you have got the gardening bug then mud, rain, cold and the odd trip to accident and emergency are no reason to give up.

waiting

Most of my Christmas shopping arrived yesterday, in three separate deliveries.  Last week DPD sent an e-mail saying that one of the parcels would arrive on Friday, and would I ensure that somebody was there to sign for it.  On the morning of the due day they nailed the time slot down to between 11.32 and 12.32, which wasn't very convenient as I had a haircut booked in Colchester.  The Systems Administrator hung about, but nothing came, and when I checked the tracking information on-line at the end of the day it said that the parcel had gone back to the depot, because they couldn't find the address.  Given that the house has been in the same place since the 1950s, and we are regular internet shoppers, this seemed rather lame for a professional delivery company, but there you go.  The previous time that DPD delivered anything they took two goes, and after the second I found a scrunched-up piece of paper in the drive, which turned out to be a map of how to find our house.  You'd think they'd keep a crib book of hard-to-find addresses on each route.

When I got in from work yesterday I enquired how the SA's day had been, as sympathetic spouses and partners do.  The reply was that the SA had mended the stove in the study (an inspection plate fell out.  The SA can't see how it ever stayed put in the first place), watched some racing, and gone for a walk in the front garden waiting about for my parcels, with a warning that we were low on milk because the SA hadn't been out.  One package came at lunchtime and another late afternoon.  It seems rather hard to have to spend the day hanging around for your own Christmas present to be delivered, but that's the downside of internet shopping.  At about half past six there was the faint whisper of what could have been a distant train, or wheels on the gravel, and it was the third and final parcel, looking very lonely as it was the last box left in a long wheelbase transit.

Meanwhile the beekeepers committee won't decide what we are doing for Thursday's monthly meeting.  A couple have said that they won't be able to be there at all, which is fair enough, as people do have work and family commitments.  The others have mostly remained silent, and it has fallen to the membership secretary to try and chivvy them along, simply because she maintains the e-mail contacts list for members.  If ever a body of people was in urgent need of leadership, this one is.  I suppose I will feel duty-bound to go on Thursday, simply because I am an officer of the society by dint of being Treasurer, and it seems wrong for members to turn up and find nobody there, but at the current rate of progress there is going to be nothing going on.  They don't read cardunculus, by the way.

Nor do the committee members of the music society, where I am waiting for confirmation that tonight's get together to talk about publicity is on.  The Systems Administrator, trying to organise the day's meals, asked me whether I was going out tonight, and I had to confess that I didn't know, since I hadn't heard from my prospective hostess and felt rude chasing her.  In fact I have now chased her, and all I could suggest about supper was to make something with flexible portion sizes that would keep, so that if I went out this evening my share could be recycled as tomorrow's lunch.

There is something about being in limbo and not knowing what you are doing later that is peculiarly unsettling.   Should I start compiling a quiz?  The weather forecast was for rain, but it is not raining very much.  Should I go out into the garden?  The excellent Buddhist principle of mindfulness would say that I shouldn't worry about it.  Enjoy the rest of the morning, and the afternoon, and see what if anything turns up.  Excellent principles can be very hard to apply in practice.  I don't like waiting about in a state of uncertainty.  I suppose it is time to start practising, since the older I get the more of it I'll probably have to do, one way and another.

solo in the plant centre

I arrived at work to be greeted by the boss, who told me he had some bad news for me.  I wondered whether this was that I was going to be put on short time until March, but it turned out to be that I was going to be on my own in the plant centre, as both the manager and my colleague who normally works on Mondays had called in sick.  The owner asked hopefully whether one of the other part timers wouldn't be in, but since she was one of the people the manager was due to lay off until spring as of last week at the owner's instructions, the answer to that question was No.

When I opened up the shop I discovered a very tall, thin parcel at the back of it, which was obviously some tree packaged up and ready to go out by mail order.  I thought our normal height limit for parcels was four feet, but somebody must have been feeling lucky, or talked nicely to the delivery company.  The parcel had a name on it, but no address, and I sighed mentally and resigned myself to having to hunt around for the paperwork later on, so that I could work out what to do with it.  At about nine o'clock a smiling van driver in a luminous green vest appeared, saying that he had come to pick up a parcel but it wasn't in the usual place.  I showed him the package in the back of the shop, and the names tallied, but I had to dolefully confess that I didn't have an address label.  He said that he did, and produced one printed out with the address and consignment number, which he stuck on the box.  He left with my fervent thanks ringing in his ears, having done his Sir Galahad deed for the day.

By ten I'd picked up all the plants that had fallen over in the wind, and was starting to feel a little dull, when the phone began ringing.  The first call was from a woman, who from her voice I guessed was quite young, wanting to know whether we had Quercus x hispanica.  I went to see, and found we had one plant of a named variety, but none of the straight species.  It turned out that she wanted forty.  I guessed she was calling from a landscape company.  I don't know where you would go to buy forty Quercus x hispanica, but I don't think any retail plant centre would keep that number of them in stock, ready to sell just like that.  We normally sell around five a year.  Landscapers do tend to give impossible plant sourcing tasks to very young members of staff who don't understand the market or know what they're doing, and it wastes their time and ours.  The most entertaining request was from the man who rang, with no hope in his voice, asking whether we had around forty plants of Berberis 'Georgei' in seven and a half litre pots.  I explained that unfortunately we hadn't been able to obtain that one for some time, and indeed had a list of over twenty customers waiting for plants if only we could get them, so I rather doubted whether there were forty Berberis 'Georgei' for sale in the country at that moment.  He said he had begun to suspect as much, and in a way was grateful, as I'd given him ammunition to go back to the landscape architect and explain that they'd have to rethink that part of the planting plan.

A few customers looked as though they might have liked tea, but the owner had given me dispensation not to open the cafe.  Apart from the hygiene aspects, operating the till, and the telephone, and finding plants for people, and doling out advice on which plant to choose, is more than one person can do, without trying to do refreshments as well.  It was pretty quiet, and customers were very good about waiting to be served, and my friend in the office helped out with the phone, but you can't run an operation like that smoothly with just one person.  The owner came out in the late morning to cover while I had some lunch, but then had to be somewhere else by one o'clock, so I had one twenty minute break in a seven and three quarter hour day.  It felt like quite a long one.

a year of theatre

After the rain, the wind.  When I got up and looked out of the bathroom window, the birches in our neighbours' field and the bamboo in our back garden were bent over and thrashing wildly, a symphony of agitated yellow leaves and stems.  Trying to garden in that much wind tends to be a mistake.  It is thoroughly uncomfortable, and things get spilt, spoiled and smashed as you get flustered and make mistakes, or your bucket of prunings blows into the nearest border.

Instead I thought I would tell you about the forthcoming season at Colchester's Mercury Theatre, since I picked up the new brochure yesterday when I was in town.  Details are now up on their website, whereas they weren't the last time I checked, so it may yet be that a brochure is in the post and on its way to me, but since they dropped us off their mailing list a year ago for some reason I thought I'd grab one while I was there.

The Mercury has a new Artistic Director, and is trying a new marketing approach.  They are publicising their own company productions for a year ahead, instead of six months, and offering large savings if you sign up to eleven shows, or fairly large savings if you book six.  The savings are so large partly because if you only want to go to a couple of things then ticket prices have gone up.  Eleven Mercury performances in twelve months sounds like a lot.  I'm not sure the Systems Administrator is that keen on theatre.  I'm not sure I am.  Six might be doable, and of course I could hunt around among my friends and acquaintances for volunteers to accompany me to one or two of them.  Except that all tickets have to be booked at the same time.  Getting a firm commitment to a particular date nearly a year ahead and writing it on the hall calendar is just about manageable when you are negotiating with your partner.  Trying to bring friends into the equation as well begins to feel like hard work, all those e-mails flying about, and everyone being held up by the one person who always takes ages to reply to anything, or isn't sure when they are going on holiday, or when their daughter is getting married.

The first offering is about mid-life crisis.  I should say that mid-life crisis was a stage the average audience member at the Mercury had passed a while back, but they can always look back in fond reminiscence, if not anger.  Four middle-aged, middle-class misfits try to spark a punk revival in a funny, touching and distinctly loud new play.  Contains strong language and very loud music! says the brochure.  I don't have a problem with strong language, but I don't do loud.  It hurts my ears.  And this production is in the studio theatre, which I have never been to, but a friend who has warned me that the seats were very uncomfortable.  The SA doesn't do uncomfortable seats, so that seems to rule out Garage Band on two counts.

Next up we have Ayckbourn, not just one but four plays taken from a linked cycle of eight.  We like Ayckbourn.  Social comedy with an extremely sharp edge.  The Colchester audience likes Ayckbourn too, hence you can only count one Ayckbourn play towards your total of six performances if you are going for a Silver season ticket, though if you buy one you can then top up on Ayckbourns at a concessionary rate.  We might manage an Ayckbourn or two.  I'm not sure I want four in as many months.

Then comes a musical, The Hired Man by Melvyn Bragg and Howard Goodall, about struggling life on a Cumbrian hill farm.  This is a revival of a touring production from 2008 which reviewed well at the time, and is in the proper theatre with the comfy seats.  I could probably cope with The Hired Man.  That is followed by The History Boys, which I would happily go to see per se, being an admirer of Alan Bennett.  Unfortunately it isn't very long since we watched the film version, which rather diminishes my desire to see it again.  Why couldn't the Mercury have chosen an Alan Bennett that hasn't been made into a hit film with Richard Griffiths in it?  The History Boys is followed by a stage version of Quadrophenia.  I saw the film when I was a student (at a meeting of the Keble College film society, I think), but the SA, amazingly, hasn't.  If you have never seen Quadrophenia then surely the film is the place to start, rather than a stage version by a company of the region's most talented young performers.  Though the play will be directed by Tony Casement, who did a very good version of Journey's End.

My hopes of finding six plays that I wanted to see were diminishing by this stage, since I was up to one definite, one possible, and three thank-you-but-I'd-rather-nots.  The next offering in the brochure didn't help, since it is The Butterfly Lion based on a book by Michael Morpurgo.  It concerns a boy who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a white lion cub he rescues one day from the African Veldt, then the action somehow moves on to the bleeding heart of war-torn France.  Suitable for adults and families with children aged 7+ years.  I don't think we'll be going to see The Butterfly Lion.

I would like to go to The Good Person of Sichuan, as I like Bertold Brecht, or at least I like the Threepenny Opera and the Seven Deadly Sins (avoid opera singers with trained voices for that, go for the Marianne Faithfull recording).  The SA does not like Brecht, so I'll be looking for a companion for the evening.  Then we could see Man to Man by Manfred Karge, translated by Anthony Vivis, which is billed as an uncompromising contemporary counterpoint to Brecht's masterpiece.  It is a one-woman play about a young widow who assumes her husband's identity to survive under the Nazis, which catapulted Tidla Swinton to public attention at the Royal Court in the late 1980s.  I don't think we're going to get Tilda Swinton in the Mercury version.  Man to Man is in the studio theatre on the hard seats.

Last in the brochure before the pantomime is The Opinion Makers, a brand new musical comedy about incompetent 1960s market researchers.  Think Mad Men meets Carry On, says the brochure.  The SA did, and didn't like the idea.  I wasn't hugely enthused.  The pantomime is Sleeping Beauty, and is not included in the season ticket offers.

We won't be buying Gold season tickets, or Silver.  There isn't enough there that appeals.  The Gold ticket would be worth buying at £132 if you were sure you wanted to go to all four Ayckbourns plus a no more than a couple of other plays, since that gives you the best seats available, including on Saturdays, early booking so you should get good seats, and programmes.  You could afford to give more than half the performances a miss and still end up marginally ahead financially.  The Mercury gets a known amount of money early in the season, which is handy for them, though it could be demoralising for the performers at the less popular shows if the season ticket holders simply don't show up.  The Silver ticket gives you six productions for less than the price of four, but only one Ayckbourn, and there aren't five other productions that I want to watch, let alone five that I could drag the SA to.

The best seats on Monday and Tuesday evenings are now £19, compared to (as far as I can remember) around £13.50 when we started going to the Mercury in 2008, or £22 on Wednesdays and Thursdays, up from £17.50 for Arsenic and Old Lace on a Wednesday last month.  Given the squeeze on public funding to the arts it's only to be expected that ticket prices have gone up, and we can still enjoy an evening at our local theatre for less than the price of the train fare just to get to London's West End or the National Theatre.  It's a pity that in the coming year there isn't more that we want to watch.

the joy of tech

Wet days are for catching up with domestic stuff.  I went into Colchester for a haircut.  Admittedly that was booked in the middle of last week, so if it had been a lovely day for gardening I'd still have had to go, but it is always mildly satisfying to be able to catch up with things like that while feeling that the opportunity cost is pretty much nil.  I bought a 2013 East Coast Calender by Den Phillips as well, while I was at it, and went to the bank.  I parked behind in the car park behind the leisure complex in Cowdray Avenue, to avoid the aftermath of the water main that burst last night at the bottom of Balkerne Hill, and the sound of church bells ringing as I walked back across Castle Park in the light rain had a sort of melancholy charm.

By the afternoon the rain was seriously settling in, and the puddle in the drive that indicates we've had more than a sprinkling was beginning to form.  I decided it was time to do my ironing, which had been piling up on the spare bed for quite a time.  There was a lot of ironing, enough to last for the whole of Schubert's Death and the Maiden, and two Beethoven piano concertos.  Actually, I think my iPod was doing something peculiar with those, along the lines of playing all the right movements but not necessarily in the right order, and I have just scrubbed them off my iTunes library and reloaded them from the CD.

Meanwhile the Systems Administrator was wrestling with new replacement technology, in the form of a laptop and a stereo amplifier.  The SA's previous laptop failed spectacularly, or at least totally, two days ago.  It didn't start playing up and getting cranky about things, but simply stopped.  No lights, no action, no power, no nothing.  It is now with a professional firm in Colchester to retrieve the data off the hard disc.  By yesterday evening the new replacement laptop had wiped the SA's iPod, instead of reloading the SA's music library from the iPod to the laptop.  By this evening the SA had managed to find the file where the laptop had put the library.

The amp died by degrees a few weeks ago.  First one channel went, and then weird distortions started appearing on the other.  It had done us well, since the SA bought it not long after we moved into our previous house, which dates it to 1987 or 1988.  It was a Marantz, which came out well in hi-fi surveys in the late 1980s.  Twenty five years later it still does, so the SA replaced like with like.  The new amp comes with a remote control, and it is rather lux to be able to adjust the volume without getting up, going to the shelf under the stairs where the stereo lives, twiddling the knob and shouting to the person in the upstairs room to ask if that's OK, or if it needs to go up a bit or down a bit.  The stairs would get in the way of the remote signal, but an infra-red booster station that we already had gets round that.  As an added bonus it is possible to change tracks via the remote.  The SA can't work out quite how the stack does that, but says that the amp and CD player must be able to talk to each other, in which case well done Marantz for maintaining compatibility between pieces of equipment bought a quarter of a century apart.

Now I have a technological challenge of my own, to update my iPod after copying some more Chopin and Dvorak into my iTunes library on the laptop.  The iPod has been getting rather difficult about updating itself, so I hope that technological death is not going to come in threes.

clubs and associations

I went last night to hear Bob Flowerdew talk at a local garden club on the unlikely subject of Gardening by UFO light.  I'm not a member, but know a couple of people who are, and have lectured there myself a couple of times, so for the last two years when they've opened the booking to their annual celebrity lecture to non-members they've made sure I got a ticket.  They make a proper evening of it, with the village hall packed out, and home made sandwiches and cakes included in the price of the event (home made by members of the committee.  It seems to be a feature of village committee life that you help provide refreshments, and I get off rather lightly in that respect when it comes to the beekeepers).

My first and irrelevant thought was that he was shorter than I expected.  Given I've mainly heard him on the radio I don't know why I expected him to be any particular height, though I do have his Organic Bible and I suppose there are some photographs of him in there.  The talk was great fun, in a bonkers way.  His central thesis was that since science was complicated and there was a great deal we still didn't know, it was better to be open minded and curious about gardening problems and life in general than to dismiss or attack new or unfamiliar ideas.  Which sounds fair enough.  I am not inclined to start believing in healing crystals, or planting by the phases of the moon (planting when I have time and it is not pouring with rain is as much as I can manage), but look at the way that, for example, recent new understanding of how the expression of genes can be switched on and off by environmental factors has complicated notions of heredity.

The Systems Administrator spent the evening catching up with old work friends, which would have been a nicer evening overall if the 22.18 and 22.30 out of Liverpool Street hadn't been cancelled, and the 22.38 left ten minutes late, spent another ten minutes stopped outside Stratford and dawdled back to Colchester, so that the SA got home at five minutes past one.  The late running 22.38 had people standing as far as Colchester, since passengers for Norwich had been told to get that train and it was packed.  There was no information at Colchester about how they were supposed to get to Norwich.  Greater Anglia's apology after two days of chaos in this morning's East Angian Daily Times only covered the severe delays on Wednesday night (a friend's husband who left Liverpool Street at twenty to seven or thereabouts got home at gone eleven) and the daytime delays during Thursday, and didn't even mention that Thursday night was chaos as well.

Meanwhile, a dispute has broken out among the beekeepers committee, conducted mainly by e-mail with occasional telephone sorties, about whether or not you can move the venue of an advertised event at one week's notice.  You can't.  End of.  I thought I had the final say on that, as I was going to lend the projection equipment for the talk and could decide where I was taking it (to the advertised hall), but yesterday we discovered that our booked speaker was unable to make the date anyway, leaving us with one week to organise an alternative entertainment.  I've suggested a session on honey jar labelling regulations, presented as a light-hearted quiz and group discussion, but so far only one fellow committee member has replied.  They said it was a good idea (in fact, a brilliant idea) but a minefield.  Which seems a very good reason to have a teach-in on the subject.  Nobody else has suggested anything, apart from one volunteer to cover the original topic, which was brave of him, but seems hard on the booked speaker, who was very keen to do the talk and has got all his slides ready.  It is not his fault he can't make it, so we should try and reschedule him for next year.  I'm waiting for the rest of the committee to start showing more interest in the problem, as I volunteered to be Treasurer, not Entertainments Officer.

In the garden I continued to cut down herbaceous stems, and trim back the roses on the bank between the top and bottom lawns, which are sprawling out across the border at the top, engulfing an iron tripod and threatening to annihilate a tree peony.  Everything has made a phenomenal amount of growth (for north Essex) after the wet year.  I filled an entire trailer with stems and leaves bound for the compost heap, and there is masses more to come off.  In fact, I am going to run out of space in the compost bins fairly soon, despite the Systems Administrator building another one only recently.  The ground is absolutely saturated, so that I am breaking down the lawn at the edges of the beds as I kneel down to work, and I dread to think what damage I am doing to the soil structure walking on it.  But there isn't time to wait for it to dry out and do everything in March.  Work will continue right through the winter, unless it is pouring, freezing or snowing.

real bread

Most of us live with some significant gaps between the sort of person we imagine ourselves to be and the things we feel we ought to be doing, and the things we actually do.  For some this means living with the dream of being a footballer, or a pop star, or even just being a celebrity, famous for being famous, while continuing with the day job as an accountant.  For me it means imagining I am the sort of person who bakes their own bread.  I feel it goes with the beekeeping and gardening and general enthusiasm for baking.  I have the sort of short, strong, broad hands that were clearly made for kneading.  I have an Aga.  I like home made bread.  I like the idea of knowing what is in the loaf I eat and that it contains flour, yeast, salt, and water.  No enzymes, flour treatment agents, bleach, reducing agent, emulsifier, or preservatives.

There is one snag with this self-image, which is that I am not very good at making bread.  I've managed milk rolls over the years that weren't bad, in a slightly yeasty sort of way, and a Moroccan flatbread cooked in a hot frying pan, that was pretty good.  I even once, with enormous effort, produced a ciabatta that was quite nice, though not necessarily sufficiently nicer than the ones from Tesco to justify the time spent making it at home.  I made a soda bread the other day as a sort of preparatory move towards bread making.  But producing a proper wholemeal loaf that looked, felt and tasted like bread, rather than having all the texture and flavour of a brick, has eluded me.

It doesn't help my confidence that the books say that wholemeal bread tends to be denser than white.  I prefer wholemeal, for everyday use, but dense is not a good characteristic in the Systems Administrator's eyes when it comes to bread.  The SA would like bread to be fluffy.  Sliced brown bread from the farm shop or supermarket passes muster, but I don't think you can get brown, or rather wholemeal, to fluff up like that at home.  I think you need all the steam and additives the Chorleywood bread process can give you, and maybe a mix of wholemeal and white flour with a dollop of caramel to give that nice brown colour.  I have once or twice experimented with the Cranks recipe book Doris Grant no-knead brown loaf, and I think it came out right, or at least like the bread in Cranks, when there used to be a branch round the corner from my office in the early 90s, but it was much too brick-like for the SA's taste.  Cranks has now retrenched to one branch, in Totnes where they don't mind eating bricks, as long as they are wholefood.

Since yesterday it was raining I decided after we'd been shopping for the Significant Birthday present that I would make bread.  Originally I was thinking of a stollen.  I did make a stollen the Christmas before last, and it came out remarkably well, given my lack of expertise with yeast cookery.  But then I realised I didn't have any marzipan and hadn't soaked the fruit, and that the bag of wholemeal flour was on the elderly side, as was the tub of instant yeast.  The flour smelled all right, so I decided to practice using the most basic ingredients on a bog standard ordinary brown loaf.  If it wasn't very nice I could always feed it to the chickens, since they wouldn't be that fussy, and organic wholemeal flour certainly wasn't going to hurt them.

I decided to go with Andrew Whitely on this one.  His book is slightly ominously titled bread matters.  The state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own.  It was that or Richard Bertinet or Elizabeth David.  Bertinet's book is called Dough: Simple Contemporary Bread, and it leans towards oil enriched doughs made into fancy shapes.  Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery is simply wonderful, but more discursive than I wanted at that moment, since it starts with the history of grain before moving on to the history of milling, reaching different types of oven by page 155 and finally recipes on page 255.  The recipes are hedged around with enough anecdotes and alternative methods to not be entirely confidence inspiring to the nervous cook.  I wanted somebody bossy to tell me what to do.

Andrew Whitley includes a fair amount of pre-amble, including detailed descriptions of the ingredients and methods going into modern commercially produced bread that leave you not really wanting to eat it.  However, once you get on to the recipes on page 141 he does kick off with something called Basic Bread.  I thought that basic bread was what I wanted.  If I could get the hang of that I could start adding walnuts or olives or sundried tomatoes, once I was over the brick stage.  The recipe for one large or two small loaves told me to use 600g of wholemeal flour and 8g fresh yeast.  Now I did not have any fresh yeast, only some Allinson's Dried Active Yeast that was best before the end of July.  I vaguely recalled that to convert from fresh to dried yeast you halved the weight in the recipe, which was also what it said on the tin.  But the tin said to use 15g of dried yeast or one level tablespoon for 650g flour.  600g and 650g aren't so very different, not nearly as different as 4g versus 15g.  I had a nasty feeling the books all cautioned against using too much yeast, as the resulting bread would taste odd, keep badly and otherwise be a sad disappointment, on the other hand I didn't want to be sitting up until two in the morning waiting for the dough to rise if I used too little.

I followed the instructions on the tin.  After all, I don't even know if all dried yeast is the same.  The books tend to be rather sniffy about dried yeast, encouraging you to go and beg some from a local baker, or buy it in a health food shop.  No wonder making your own bread ends up sounding so off-puttingly complicated, if you have to trawl around the local health food shops and negotiate with bakery counter staff before you can even start.  The yeast frothed up gratifyingly in the jug of warm water with a teaspoon of sugar, so had not died since July.  I mixed it into the flour and salt, transferred the dough to a board once the liquid was absorbed as the book said, and kneaded for ten minutes by the clock, then left it to prove for something over two hours next to the Aga, the bowl covered with a damp tea towel.  After a slow start it rose until it was quite a lot bigger.  I shaped it into two loaves as the book told me, not because I especially wanted small loaves but because I only had small tins, and left them for a second proving for something over half an hour.  They did get larger, though not enough to reach the corners of the tins, and I thought that maybe I was heading for brick territory.  The books warn about the dangers of over-proving, which can cause the loaf to collapse, or taste odd, or something, so when they began to feel quite spongy I put them in the bottom of the top oven for ten minutes, then moved them to the top of the bottom for another twenty.

The cooking times in the book were amazingly vague, for a recipe that gave the total weight of ingredients as 1013g and not one kilogramme.  The instructions for telling whether your loaf was cooked weren't cut and dried either, warning that even if the bottom sounded hollow when tapped that didn't mean it was cooked all the way through.  Basically, if it looked cooked it was, and if you didn't know what cooked bread looked like then that was tough.  Keep practising.  I thought the loaves looked cooked after half an hour and decided to risk taking them out of the oven, since overcooked bread would be as nasty as undercooked, and if they were doughy in the middle the chickens would eat them anyway.

We didn't need any bread with supper, so I had to wait until breakfast time to cut a slice and see what they were like.  They were just like real bread.  The crumb was OK all the way through, not soggy in the middle, and it tasted like brown bread, not all weird and yeasty like some of my past efforts.  If I'd been given a slice with soup in a gastropub or restaurant that boasted home made bread I'd have thought it was perfectly fine.  Very nice, in fact.  The Systems Administrator had some for lunch and pronounced it to be good, though with some regret that it wasn't as fluffy as the farm shop sort.

It was pretty straightforward to make, and the washing up didn't take long, just one bowl and the pastry board, plus the tins and cooling rack.  I think the main obstacle to making bread regularly is working out when to do it, since after starting it off you have to come back to do more to it in a couple of hours, for which you need clean hands, and then hover around for the next hour while it proves and cooks.  If your ideal day at home consists of disappearing into the garden after breakfast and then not reappearing until lunchtime, happy and grubby, then making your own bread would disrupt the morning.  If you do it in the evening then unless you get started by six you won't be finished until after you might have liked to go to bed, unless you are by nature an owl rather than a lark.  The ideal might be to find a recipe that would work with the second proving overnight, in the fridge.  Then the initial kneading and shaping the loaves could be done in the evening, after I'd finished gardening for the day and cleaned my hands.  I'd even have fresh bread for breakfast, hot out of the oven, if I weren't in a tearing hurry to get going.

In the meantime they do sell bread in Tesco.

a time of gifts

As December approaches my thoughts are starting to turn to Christmas shopping.  I haven't got anything so far, apart from the pudding (hand made by barn owls, ho ho) and some new Christmas tree lights.  The Systems Administrator got those in Tesco a couple of weeks ago, because noticing the enormous display of them right inside the door reminded me that last year I fitted the last of the spare bulbs to our existing ones when a bulb blew, and had totally omitted to try and source any more bulbs in the intervening period, so if another went then the lights wouldn't work.  I also remembered that last year the shops seemed to sell out of tree lights quite a long time before Christmas.  I was baffled by the choice of lights, having no idea whether we wanted fairy lights or LEDs, so left that to the SA, who said the former because the light was warmer.  Two strings of one hundred lights apiece may be too many, but if it is we can cannibalise one to supply the other with spare bulbs and should never need to buy any more tree lights again, which at five pounds a box can't be bad.

I'm rather worried about the tree, because I'm not at all sure if the plant centre will be selling them this year, or if last year's crop of tall, thin trees represented the last scrapings of the barrel.  The plant centre trees were always extraordinarily cheap, an excellent bargain provided you had a very high ceiling and weren't fussed about the tree not being very bushy, and having to go to another garden centre or B&Q and buy a normal tree at the usual commercial rate is going to be a shock to the system.  I asked the SA if we could chop down an alder that has seeded itself by the wildlife pond where I don't want a full sized tree, and have a deciduous Christmas tree instead, but the SA said that while I could if I wanted it would look rather Blue Peter made out of coat-hangersish.  Which it probably would.  But it would be free, and incredibly green.

Anyway, I haven't got as far as Christmas presents.  Indeed, the SA and I went today and finally bought the last part of my present for my Significant Birthday, and that was over two months ago.  The SA said on the day that I could have a piece of jewellery but that it would be better if I chose it, and that we might see something on holiday, but we didn't, and I didn't find anything I especially liked in my favoured craft jewellers in Colchester.  A friend had told me that there was a talented designer and maker in Thorpe le Soken, and sported a very pretty necklace from her to prove it, so I'd been planning to go there on a wet day and when I was in the right mood for shopping.  I found a necklace of smoky quartz beads with a silver and gold leaf pendant (it is made in the shape of a leaf, and decorated with gold leaf) which I liked very much, so took the SA back with me after lunch to make the ceremonial purchase.  I could have bought it the first time I was there and presented the bill, but that isn't the same.  The jeweller made it into a beautiful package while we watched, which seemed a slight waste when I was going to unwrap it again as soon as I got home, but was fun.  The quartz beads are cut with facets so that they catch the light and sparkle gently, and the quartz seems to change colour from soft black to brown, and from opaque to translucent, depending on the light source.  The jeweller is called Marisa Arna, she has a shop in Thorpe le Soken High Street, sells her own off-the-peg designs or will work to commission.  You could get something simple but good in silver and have change from forty pounds, then prices go up from there.  Her style is more bohemian arty than Mappin and Webb.  I loved it.

But that doesn't solve the question of Christmas presents.  Martin Lewis has written an article in the Telegraph asking if it is time to ban Christmas presents.  He argues from an economist's perspective that the social requirement to reciprocate gifts distorts spending priorities, and that people end up spending money they can't afford in order to end up owning things that wouldn't have been their top choice of what to buy.  Gifts should be for children only.  This is moderately amusing, though somebody (possibly Martin Lewis) has certainly made the same point in an article in a previous year.  It contains a grain of truth but also a couple of fallacies.  Firstly, it is possible by mutual consent and without having to invest in a special app that sends out formal No Gifts requests to your friends and relations, to limit the circle of people with whom you exchange presents and the amount that you each spend.  Secondly, it is not necessarily the case that presents have to be Gifts, as in useless clutter that the recipient doesn't need or want.

I like presents, hence I am very pleased to be the possessor of a smoky quartz and silver and gold leaf necklace that until this afternoon was sitting in a showroom in Thorpe le Soken.  I am happy to be allowed to choose something I really like, though I enjoy surprises.  Provided they are something I want.  Another article in the Telegraph said that British women are the recipients of £100m of unwanted lingerie every year.  The Systems Administrator and I solve this problem by mostly giving each other books.  In fact, I give practically everybody books.  Admittedly, it is easier if you live with someone and can check the bookshelves to see what they've already got, but failing that if you stick to titles that were only recently published you're relatively safe.  The SA and I have pact about not buying books for ourselves within four to six weeks of birthdays and Christmas (except for really obscure titles that the other could never possibly think of) to make it easier, and I know at least one pair of friends who have a similar arrangement.

The Kindle makes it more difficult, without that row of spines to check out on the bookcase.  Looking at somebody else's Kindle feels vaguely intrusive, only one step away from looking at their mobile phone.  And I don't know why Amazon still haven't introduced the technology for making gift purchases of kindle titles in time for Christmas.  Another Amazon innovation I'd like to see is the ability to tag books bought as presents when you buy them, so that later on you could search by the name of the recipient and see what you'd previously bought for them.  At the moment you can only look up each order.  They go back an impressively long way, but it would be very handy to be able to check which detective stories I've already given to my mother, for example.

The most difficult aspect of present giving, and the reason why people end up giving and receiving Gifts, is when social convention dictates you have to give something to somebody you don't know that well.  You don't know enough about their tastes, or pet authors, or hobbies in the event that they don't like books, to be able to make a reasonable stab at choosing something that they might really like.  My default position is champagne and chocolate, but that's not foolproof.  Not everybody likes champagne, or chocolate.  We have a growing collection of bottles of port, given to us by people who meant kindly but didn't know that we don't drink the stuff.