in the yellow book

Today was practically a re-run of yesterday, but with the added excitement of the garden opening for The National Gardens Scheme in the afternoon.  Yellow book openings always seem to bring some extra visitors, who have failed to grasp that at times of the year when we are open for the scheme, we are open anyway, seven days a week.  Today both gardeners came to work to marshal the car park in the afternoon, which at one point hit capacity, with no space for any more cars at all.  Tomorrow it will probably be possible to stroll round the garden without meeting another soul, though the cafe may not be doing cream teas by then.

Many of the customers commented to us on how busy it was, and how pleased we must be, and how nice it was to see the place so crowded.  I think that's partly why some of them come on a Yellow Book day.  Far from preferring the solitude of the birds and the fritillaries, they seem to enjoy the company, and the buzz, and the chance to see what other people are buying.

We took a convoluted phone call from one public-spirited and enterprising person who had found a purse.  She didn't say where, but I gathered not in the plant centre, and that the purse did not include a contact number for its owner, but did contain one of our receipts, dated today.  Working on the basis that the purse's owner was likely to call the places she had visited recently, its finder called us too.  It is truly a very small world, since I recognised the name of the purse's owner as a fellow mature student at Writtle, whom I still know to chat to, though not to the extent of having her address or phone number.  She'll probably be in touch.

I said yesterday that time spent on the till tended to even out, and so it was that today I did some long stints in the shop.  Award for the most competent customer of the day goes to the man who had spotted that a lot of the plants he was buying were priced at £3.95, and had lined them all up in a neat row so that I could see instantly how many there were.  He was in the minority.  There were also several from the 'There are five lupins' brigade.  Yes, madam, but three are in square pots and cost £3.95, while two are in circular pots from a different supplier and only cost £3.75.  Also the 'There are three delphiniums, five sedums and two foxgloves' squad was out in force.  I don't need to know whether they are delphiniums, sedums, foxgloves or a new species previously unknown to science.  They are all in square black pots costing £3.95 and there are ten of them.

The man who started boxing up the plants in his trolley while I was still putting them through the till was a nuisance too.  He thought I had done all of his pink scabious.  I had not done all of his pink scabious, because the way I make sure I charge for everything once and once only is to work my way systematically across and down the trolley.  I could try and pull off the trick that waitresses in Thai restaurants seem to manage so well, of remembering the entire customer order without writing any of it down, but I don't have that good a memory, so I don't trust myself to come to the end of the trolley and remember that I've already charged for the pink scabious.  I just work through the contents of the trolley systematically, row by row.  The only thing I want to know at that moment is where the plant is, how much it is, and what till category it goes through.

I was able to use my horticultural skill and knowledge to suggest that a shrub with small, pink, pea shaped flowers and delicate leaves that a customer had lost, after trying to move it without success, was probably an indigofera of some sort.  I showed her the photographs in Phillips and Rix's illustrated book of shrubs (which is a very useful book, though some of the blues come out pink) and she thought that was probably it.  Poor woman, she had even grown on some seedlings before digging the shrub up, but her gardener had weeded them out by mistake.  I couldn't think of any other likely candidate.  She was sure the shrub had been in the pea family, but she would have recognised a broom.  The pea family is amazingly large, including all the tropical species.  The boss lent me a book about it once, written by a friend of his and published by Kew.  I don't think it made the best-seller lists.

the plant centre springs into life

There was a frost this morning, but a very light one.  When I went to let the chickens into their run I saw the ice on the car windscreen and thought that I must remember to switch it on to defrost five minutes before I wanted to leave for work.  When I went out to start the car, the morning sun had already melted the ice on the front windscreen.

At work I discovered the pea hens sitting happily in the middle of the herbs.  I shooed them off. Later in the day I caught them eating the leaves of some rhubarb plants that were waiting on a red trolley to be put out for sale.  I thought that rhubarb leaves contained oxalic acid and were toxic. Not to pea fowl, obviously, or else the pea hens are too stupid to realise.  They never give the impression of being the brightest birds.

There were some nice plants on the red trolleys, and I put aside a Geranium clarkei 'Kashmir White' for myself.  I probably ought to plant in groups of at least three, given the size of the garden, but am indulging myself in adding odd specimens of the less rampant hardy geraniums when I fall for them, and I fell heavily for 'Kashmir White' last year, only we had sold out before I got round to buying one.  It has fairly large flowers, as geraniums go, which are white but delicately veined with lilac.  I see on the Beth Chatto website that it comes originally from Nepal.  If it likes me I can always get some more later.

We were very busy, so much so that I thought there had to be a definite element of catch-up, as people who were finally able to get into their gardens bought some of the things they would have bought at Easter, if it hadn't been snowing.  Thank goodness for that.  However much we told ourselves that the slack start to the year was down to the truly appalling weather, the nagging doubt remained that maybe it was down to the squeeze on consumer incomes, or gardening having fallen out of fashion (to be replaced by baking, perhaps), and that trade wouldn't recover even when the weather did.

Most of the customers were sensible and nice.  It's just as well that the majority of them were able and willing to locate their plants for themselves, since with three of us on duty, plus the owner for parts of the day, but also the tea room to contend with, there was no way we could help all of them fill their trolleys.  If things had got any busier I suppose I would have had to explain the principles of the plant centre layout to a couple of them, and leave them to get on with it, instead of patiently walking them around the lines of shrubs and herbaceous plants with their lists.  If a customer is sparky and enthusiastic then it is quite fun acting as their personal shopper, but the utterly passive ones who evince no interest at all in understanding where anything might be do leave me wishing they would show a bit of gumption.  It isn't so hard to grasp that when we are standing surrounded by tables covered in herbaceous plants, we might finish finding the herbaceous plants on the list before going to look for rose 'Darcey Bussell'.

I didn't manage to finish offloading the red trolleys, though I did seem to manage to spend a lot of the day outdoors, instead of being stuck on the till.  Which is fair enough, swings and roundabouts and luck of the draw.  I've been on the till most of the day often enough.  It was very beautiful outside, the sky a clear blue, the daffodils around the car park bursting into bloom, the birds singing.  Much nicer than being in an office.  I think there'll be a fair bit of watering to do in the morning.

a mixed bag

Yesterday's thunderstorm was bad.  Lightning hit a house in Shotley Gate and set the roof on fire, while the bang was heard five miles away.  Today wasn't much better for gardening, as the morning started with a spatter of rain, and got steadily wetter, until by mid afternoon huge raindrops were bouncing off the roof of my car, and the benchmark puddle in the drive had spread from one side to the other.

I went into Colchester.  Normally a trip every six or seven weeks suffices, when I need a haircut, but one of the bee committee members wanted to borrow a book from the library (by the gloriously named Beowulf Cooper) and I had a couple of cheques to pay into the bank.  As I won't be at the next club meeting to loan out the book, I thought I might as well make a round trip of it.  The point at which garden clubs and townswomens' guilds finally embrace electronic fund transfers will mark yet another stage in the demise of Britain's High Streets, as one more reason for ever visiting a town centre disappears.

The expedition was a mixed success in commercial terms.  I started by calling at the local farm equipment cum lawnmower supplier as I was going past and needed a post whacker (hollow cylinder with a heavy base and a handle on each side, that you put over a fence post and drop repeatedly to drive the post in.  So much safer and more comfortable than wielding a sledge hammer at head height).  They were out of stock, but if they had had one in stock would have charged me fifty pounds plus VAT for it, which sounded more than the Systems Administrator had told me post whackers costed.

I found our Technical Secretary's house without getting lost (he is developing a vacuum cleaner for collecting bees out of hard to reach wall cavities, which I will tell you more about if I manage to see it in action).  Then I managed to buy two reels of button thread, one black and one white, in the remnant shop at the top of the High Street.I had a look in Colchester's smartest department store to see if they had kitchen string or a seven inch cake tin in their kitchenware department, but they hadn't.  I needed a small cosmetics bag to go in my work bag, to keep my nail scissors and supplies of aspirin and elastoplast together, but Marks and Spencer no longer seem to stock toiletries bags at all, and none of the little bags in Accessorize were really suitable.  I thought that Boots must sell cosmetics bags, but couldn't find them, and when I asked for help was shown a choice between three of the ugliest bags you could imagine.

The tourist information centre did have my preferred brand of hand cream in stock.  The tourist office seems an odd place to buy hand cream, especially when you are also visiting Boots, M&S, and Colchester's smartest department store, but they have a policy of stocking products by local firms, and my brand of choice is Stour Valley Organic Lavender Company.  They make extremely good hand cream, and the recommended retail price for 100 grammes of the stuff is six quid.  (You might feel you would rather not take any notice of hand cream recommendations from somebody whose finger spontaneously split during the course of normal use, but the length of time this winter lasted was enough to have split anybody's hands, even if they were bathed constantly in asses' milk).

I considered buying some vegetables in the street market, but there was no celery, and I wanted celery, and milk, and didn't have a shopping bag, and the red peppers cost exactly the same as they did in Tesco.  Parking for this mini-expedition cost me £2.70.

I had a look on the internet while eating my lunch.  The John Lewis website runs to four pages of toiletry and cosmetics bags, and I can have one delivered to Waitrose, where parking is free, and I can buy some upmarket olive oil while I'm at it.  Lakeland sell kitchen string, which is apparently very hard to find nowadays, hence the customer comments on their site imploring them never to stop doing the string.  They have already dropped the stainless steel holder for which the string is theoretically a refill, though I was planning just to keep my string in a drawer anyway.  They sell 7 inch cake tins too (or rather 18 cm, plus 15 cm, 20 cm and 23 cm).  Compete with that, High Street.

The Systems Administrator returned by the afternoon train, having had a very nice time in Cheltenham, and within the hour had tracked down a supplier of fence posts, a post whacker for twenty-five pounds instead of the fifty that Ernest Doe wanted, and a poultry forum that suggested strongly that the chickens were short of calcium and that the egg eating issue might be solved by tweaking their diet.  We also learned that they can't actually taste chilli powder, but that mustard works if you want to go down the baited egg route, though alternatively you can give them a golf ball to peck, until they get fed up with pecking egg-shaped things.  The SA has also promised to clad the hive stand legs with old aluminium cans, if the problem is rats eating them and they don't stop now it's warmer, provided that I move the hives off the stands.  A problem shared is a problem halved.

wind

The wind blew all day, a battering, insistent force that was an obstacle to thought and practical work outside.  The wind and sunshine had stripped the moisture out of the pots outside the greenhouse again, and I decided it was time to uncoil the long hose that has hung up by the dustbins all winter and dig the spray attachment out of the garage.  In the cold months the greenhouse needs no more water than it is comfortable to carry in cans, while the spray head splits and rusts if left outside in the frost, but now the watering requirements have risen sharply.

I really don't like wind.  It is tedious enough not to be able to put down a bucket of prunings, or an empty pot, or finished compost bag, without it being sent tumbling across the garden, crushing new growth and breaking flower stems as it goes.  But my dislike of the wind goes deeper than that.  My nerves are permanently on edge and the solutions to everyday problems and questions don't come quickly.  Indeed, my fingers are stumbling over the keyboard now, as the words refuse to come into my mind.

I weeded the long bed, trying not to squash the emerging plants and sighing over how thin the soil was looking, despite last year's applications of compost, and planted out pots of daffodils, but I felt indecisive about where they should go, and by next week I may feel I have done it badly.  Once the bulbs are in the ground I can follow on with 6X, bone meal, and yet more Strulch.  I wanted to trim straggling stems emerging from the ivy hedge, and tidy up the last remaining fennel stalks, but knew that the big builders' bucket would never stay put for me to collect the debris, so left that for another day.  I also wanted to apply glyphosate to the tufts of grass I recognised as being attached to a running rootstock rather than clump formers I could dig out, but it was far too windy for that as well.  Wind really slows you down.

Suddenly I spotted one of the recently planted cherries thrashing about in the wind, its stake waving next to it.  Upon investigation I found the stake had rotted off at ground level.  Tree stakes are intended to rot eventually, so that if the original planter doesn't come back to remove the stake, it will give way of its own accord, but I don't think they are meant to go that quickly.  Of course, the auto-destruct stake does not solve the problem of the tree tie being left around the trunk and strangling it as it grows.  Fortunately I had a spare stake, and was able to find a lump hammer fairly quickly and re-stake it.  It is a nice, sturdy, little tree, but some of the gusts later on were so violent that I think they might have broken it otherwise.

By mid-afternoon it was spitting with rain, and the sky had gone ominously dark.  I ignored the first rumbles of thunder, but as they got louder I collected my tools and beat a retreat to the house. Minutes later came the most violent downpour, with squalls of lashing rain of almost tropical intensity, that I could hear beating against the windows from the other end of the house.  Do you expect thunderstorms in April?  I always associate them more with high and late summer.

The chickens are still intent on egg eating.  I have collected two eggs today, both still warm.  The second had already been turfed out of the nest box into the main part of the hen house, and it was the noise of hammering on wood that alerted me to go and see what they were up to.  Telltale smears of egg on the house floor make me thing they got at least one.  They would probably like to be let out for a run, now that the weather is nicer, and that might help absorb some of their surplus energies, but they can't come out tonight, since I need to go out to a bee committee meeting before they would have gone in again.  And anyway, I don't feel like spending the first part of the evening following chickens around the garden in half a gale.

bees, hens and mystery flowers

I scraped the weeds out of the cracks between the paving slabs in the Italian garden, and fetched the pots of blue hyacinths from outside the greenhouse, and the cafe table and chairs from the garage.  I fear that to keep the paving clear of weeds I will need to go along the gaps with glyphosate every now and then, if it doesn't blow a perpetual half gale all summer.  I'd prefer not to use chemicals, but weeding it takes quite a long time.  Glyphosate breaks down quickly on contact with soil, and is not so bad as some of the others.  The hyacinths are the variety 'Minos', and are slightly bi-coloured, being a strong mid-blue with more than a hint of violet towards the tip of each petal, and a paler blue near the base.  They have a good scent.  A couple are starting to flop over, maybe because I left them under the greenhouse staging for slightly too long, and I might stake them tomorrow to help them last.

I was surprised to see two pots of tulips about to break bud, since the tulip pots normally come after the hyacinths.  They were a touch on the short side for the pots, and when I looked at the labels I saw they were the variety 'Concerto'.  That would explain why I seemed to have lost the bulbs that were intended to go in four small pots on the terrace: I absent mindedly planted them in two of the larger pots that go in the Italian garden.  When I placed my bulb order with Peter Nyssen last summer I made a list of what I had ordered, with careful notes of what colour it was, and where in the garden I intended to put it.  By the time the bulbs arrived I had lost the list.  'Concerto' as supplied by Peter Nyssen is a beautiful pale yellow.  Different sources on the internet attribute it variously to the fosteriana, greigii and kaufmanniana groups, and it is described as pale yellow, white and (in one case) peach coloured.  Broadleigh Bulbs, whom I normally regard as being utterly reliable, say that 'Concerto' is pure white, and these are definitely a soft yellow.  I have just been outside to check.  So I am not at all sure what they are, but they are very nice, and probably worth planting out into a border when they've finished, since the small hybrids often seem to last for a few years in the ground.

By mid afternoon it was warm enough to inspect the bees.  The wind was stronger than I would have liked, and I didn't keep them open for long, but I did want to know whether they were queen-right and what they were up to.  The colony that swarmed late last year was small, but healthy and producing eggs.  The ones that took ages to get going last year were doing very well, with lots of eggs and brood, and I gave them a super.  Their neighbours were not really doing anything, but I thought I'd give them a week of warm weather just to check, before messing around with frames containing eggs.  The final colony had brood, but looked slightly messy.  I couldn't put my finger on anything that was definitely wrong, but I didn't like the look of them as much as second hive, although the flying bees were bringing in a lot of bright yellow pollen.  I was able to move the frames out of the two boxes that had been chewed by some animal into new boxes, which I fitted this morning with reinforcing metal corner strips to prevent them suffering the same fate. Whatever it is that was eating the corners of the hives has been chewing at the stands.  Some of the damage was fresh, and I think we had better put the night camera on them and try and find out what it is.  I had blamed badgers, but badgers are big animals, and I'm not sure they could wriggle in under the stands without simply toppling the whole lot over.  Rats?  I have never heard of rats attacking beehives out in the field.

The chickens are still eating eggs.  I bagged two today, one still warm, but they ate at least one, and I suspect two.  The question is whether one or more of them are laying soft shelled eggs for some reason, or whether they are making determined assaults on perfectly good eggs.  I wondered whether putting something soft in the bottom of the nest box would help.  If they laid their eggs on the hen house equivalent of a bunk cushion instead of sawdust, that would prevent them from kicking the sawdust out of the way and hammering down on the wooden bottom of the nest box, as they are doing at the moment.

The Systems Administrator has disappeared to the April race meeting at Cheltenham.  I feel as though I could do with some practical and moral support regarding egg eating, and whatever it is that is gnawing at my hive stands.  The question of what exactly the yellow tulips are is my problem.

the egg thieves

Spiers and Boden were very, very good.  They are at the top of their game musically, and by now are considerable showmen.  The Systems Administrator's enthusiasm for morris tunes and jigs, played straight, is not unbounded, and by the interval had more or less been satisfied.  Spiers and Boden ramped up the act in the second half, with more of their Bellowhead-honed panache, flavoured with klezmer, steam driven fairground organs, and I know not what world music influences, and we all went home happy.  Spiers and Boden at full clatter are exhilarating, while still maintaining incredibly tight and precise timing, and when Jon Boden sings you can hear the words. Rare talent.

They are following a punishing touring system.  I gather that Colchester was the third leg of the tour, and tonight they are playing Uffington in Oxfordshire, then they have a gig every night up to and including 28th April, finishing in Amsterdam.  After a short break they are on the road again with a concert each evening from 9th to 25th May.  Jon Boden has won more Radio 2 folk awards than any other musician, taking into account his wins as solo singer and as part of Bellowhead, as well as Spiers and Boden.  He is a great singer, mean fiddler and accomplished guitarist, but some of his success must also be down to phenomenal drive and energy.  John Spiers is a fine squeezebox player too, and always looks so happy to be on stage that you feel happy in sympathy just watching him.

(I noticed the straps on his concertina this time round, and it has loops he puts his hands through, so the weight is being taken by his whole hand and not just two digits.  I couldn't see what make it was, though.)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the chickens have taken up egg eating.  So much for my scruples about not feeding them left over egg fried rice as being a form of cannibalism.  I don't know if they are all equally guilty, or if there is a ring leader.  The first egg may have been broken accidentally, but this lunchtime I heard loud thumping from the nesting box, and found a couple of them hammering at a recently laid egg with their beaks.  It was still unbroken.  Eggs are designed to be easy to pierce from the inside, not the outside.  I don't even know if they only eat their own eggs, or if the guilty parties are lurking in wait for the others to lay and stealing their eggs.  I first noticed it a couple of days ago, when I went to collect an egg that had been there earlier and it had gone, leaving suspicious residues on the sawdust.  The Systems Administrator was under instructions yesterday to check the egg box at frequent intervals, while I was at work, and managed to collect two, so we may have lost one or two yesterday, and they had at least one today.

I think the textbook instruction to put a stop to it is to inject an egg with chilli powder and give it back to them.  I suspect that is one of those bits of advice that are easier to write than to do.  How exactly do you inject an egg with chilli, without smashing it?  And is chilli powder good for chickens? What happens if they get it in their eyes?  For now I changed the sawdust in the nesting box, and am hoping that if we remove the eggs promptly they will get out of the habit again.  Giving a treat of sultanas or similar when unbroken eggs are collected might help reinforce a connection between not smashing eggs, and nice things to eat, but it is difficult to be sure about the cognitive capabilities of a chicken.  Of course, from their point of view it is we who are the egg thieves, and since the eggs are now unfertilised they are pointless anyway, and might as well be eaten.

out later

This could be all the blog there is today.  I have to go to work, and this evening we have tickets for Spiers and Boden at the Colchester Arts Centre.  It's sold out (so there's no point in getting excited if you live around Colchester and read this before tonight but don't already have a ticket) and the doors open at 7.45 pm.  We therefore need to be there by quarter to eight at the latest, or we'll find ourselves sitting behind a pillar.  I shall have to hope that there isn't too much watering to be done after the last customers have more or less left, and ask the manager nicely if I can knock off half an hour early, since at this time of the year we are supposed to finish at six.  Getting home at half past six, or even six, with filthy fingernails and needing something to eat, won't leave any time for blogging before we have to go out again.

I could have written something generic yesterday and copied it on to the blog now, but I didn't.  Everything is composed on the day.

I imagine the atmosphere at work will be subdued, since on Friday the dog was run over.  She was a very nice little dog.

sustainable planting

At last, a warm day.  An actually warm day, when I had to take off first my hat, and then my fleece as I gardened.  A day when we opened the door on to the veranda to let some air into the house.  A day when the birds sang fit to burst, and I saw a queen bumble bee hunting along the bank by the daffodil lawn for a good mouse hole to nest in.  It was a pity it was blowing half a gale, but you can't have everything.

In the long bed in the front garden, the pasque flowers have suddenly come into bloom, as has a pink flowered cherry.  I can't remember its name, although I only planted it the season before last, and it makes me think I must go through my garden notebook and update my spreadsheet of things planted in the garden.  There will be some deletions to do at the same time.  Today I dug out the rootball of Pittosporum 'Silver Queen', which was a thing of great beauty and delight before being clobbered by two successive hard winters.  Even now it was not quite dead, but not alive enough to be of any use.

My tally of Pittosporum and Corokia is considerably reduced from what it was three years ago, and I'm not currently inclined to increase it.  Sir Peter Smithers wrote how a garden should be designed so that as the gardener grows older, the work required diminishes, and I embrace his view entirely. My current applications of Strulch are intended to be a short to medium term anti-weed measure, the job of the Strulch being taken over in due course by plant cover.  I don't have the time, the physical energy, the money or the enthusiasm to keep replacing dead shrubs, or the inclination to spend whole seasons living with half dead ones while they decide whether they are going to recover. Or to keep endlessly applying Strulch, for that matter.

Sir Peter Smithers was aiming at a woodland ecosytem, the top storey being provided by magnolias and other exotics.  The understorey sounded pretty glamorous as well.  He said that growth rates achieved in the Swiss lakes were about twice what you could expect in England, and that after fifteen years his ecosystem was fully developed, self-sustaining and low maintenance.  That's rather what I'm hoping to achieve, albeit with a more prosaic plant palette of things that will grow in our peculiar mix of soils, and survive the drought and winters of East Anglia.  I am a little puzzled why Sir Peter's Swiss ecosystem did not contain seedling ivy, brambles, and hawthorn, plus evil running grasses, ash seedlings, nettles, or local equivalents to all the lusty native wild plants that seem happy to take hold in mine.  I think he must have had one or two Swiss gardeners working about the place to edit the developing ecosystem, and help keep it on the straight and narrow even at maturity.

Quite what would like to form a self-sustaining ecosystem in the bed by the entrance is a moot point.  I expect brambles would, given the way they are rampaging on the opposite side of the drive, attempting to engulf a tamarisk, the sea buckthorn, and the dustbin.  Although, curiously, I haven't found many of their seedlings in the entrance bed.  The combination of unutterably light and infertile soil, competition from the boundary hedge and exposure to the full blast of the south westerly gales has killed quite a comprehensive range of plants.  I'm going to try a Pinus mugo, which has been sitting patiently in its pot for a long time waiting for me to clear the weeds and the dead remains of previous planting schemes.  I know the wind and sand hold no fears for the pine, but the root competition from the hedge is an unknown quantity.  Beyond that I'm stuck for ideas. I'd quite like more evergreens, to help screen the garden from the farm.  Maybe box.  Or just buy more pines.

A plain green, moderately fastigiate form of Euonymus japonicus has done nothing since I planted it more years ago than I care to remember, despite applications at various times of 6X, fish blood and bone, and spent mushroom compost, and I'm beginning to think that it is never going to do anything.  A couple of swings of the pickaxe and I could be free of it.  Leaving room for what?  A buddleia?  A purple leaved form of hazel?  That might do, given the way the plain green ones seed themselves around, but you are supposed to plant them somewhere where the sun can shine through their leaves.  And neither buddleia nor hazel are evergreen.  Something to ponder, while I pull out as much as I can of the evil running roots of the invading weed grass, and hope for some calm, dry days so that I can keep hitting the regrowth with glyphosate.

a good read

Today I have drunk coffee with my parents, bought two bales of compost and a piece of aluminium section in B&Q, and done some weeding.  That's not much on which to hang a blog entry.  Instead, I will have to turn to what I have been reading.

I have got two books on the go.  The first is Queen Anne: The politics of Passion (as I told you, it is a misleading title).  Having leapt ahead to 1708 and the death of Prince George, it has backtracked to 1702 and the early days of Anne's reign.  We are now just about solidly up to Marlborough's victory over the French and the Bavarians near Blenheim in 1704, though popular history books nowadays seem to take a non-linear approach to the passage of time, so we may yet regress, or jump forwards again.

Anne sounds a thoroughly decent, dull, and obstinate person.  She had almost no small talk, preferred to live quietly, which is fair enough since she was generally ill, pregnant or both, enjoyed playing cards and lost some money at it, though by the later standards of the Georgians she was incredibly frugal.  She used to like dancing until ill-health and obesity overcame her, enjoyed driving her two wheeled carriage in the hunt at Windsor, cared somewhat about her clothes, adored her husband and the Church of England, and spoke French.  She was kind to her staff, and desperate to be liked by her friend, Sarah Churchill, eventually Duchess of Marlborough, who was generally fairly horrid to her.  She took a conscientious interest in affairs of state, and was either lucky or shrewd in placing the confidence she did in the military abilities of the future Duke of Marlborough.

The Whigs and Tories in Parliament were still loose groupings rather than formal political parties. Anne's sympathies lay more naturally with the Tories, partly because they had a more deferential attitude to the established Church.  The Tories were hostile to non-conformists, the Whigs more tolerant, and there were periodic spats over Tory attempts to legislate against Occasional Conformity, the practice whereby non-conformists took sacrament once a year to appear nominally practising members of the Church of England and so eligible for positions which needed one to be so.  Poor old Prince George, a Danish Lutheran, was an Occasional Conformist but found himself bullied into voting against it in the House of Lords.

Once, the supporters of the move against Occasional Conformity tacked the legislation against it on to a vital finance bill, in the hope that the Lords would not risk rejecting the bill and so casting the country's finances into chaos.  There are few new tricks in politics, hence just weeks ago we saw libel reform legislation, for which there was cross-party consensus and whose supporters had been working towards it for years, imperilled by the decision to tack legislation relating to the Leveson enquiry on to the libel bill, in the hope that supporters of libel reform would not risk losing their bill at such a late stage.

Even once the English parliament had voted that Anne's successor should be Sophia of Hanover or her heirs, as being the next in line who were not Catholic, it did not automatically follow that the Hanoverians would succeed to the Scottish throne.  An awful lot of people had a better claim than Sophia, apart from the fact that they were all Catholic, and the spectre of Jacobinism stalked England.  Charges of Jacobinism were lobbed at the Tories by their more rabid opponents, including the dreadful Sarah, which seems odd, given that the Tories were for the Church of England and not particularly pro-Catholic.

It is all great fun, and while the past is a foreign country where they do things differently, the modern age has recognisably begun.  In many ways it was still very archaic.  Queen Anne was the last English monarch to practice the laying-on of hands for the King's Evil, and two of her children died of smallpox, as did the Marlborough's heir.  She sat in cabinet, as was her right.  But compared to what I've read of the intrigues of the Tudor court, it suddenly feels a great deal closer to the politics of 2013.

The other book on the go is Adventures of a Gardener by Sir Peter Smithers.  He was born in 1918, and after public school, war service with Ian Fleming in the branch of the navy that would evolve into MI6, and a career as a politician and diplomat, he managed to retire to Switzerland in his fifties, where he devoted himself to making a fabulous woodland garden on an old vinyard above a lake.  Oh, and he married an American heiress, which helped.  One of his friends told him to his face that with his upbringing it was amazing he was not more spoilt, and he comes across as a delightful man.  Passionate about plants since childhood, he was a distinguished plant hybridist as well as a gardener.

His book, written when he was eighty, is an account of his gardening life, with odd anecdotes about his war and diplomatic life thrown in, and I had it on my Amazon wishlist for years, and was starting to think I'd missed the boat, as it's out of print, and prices were climbing into the tens of pounds region, which is a lot for a set of second hand gardening memoirs.  When I saw that a clean copy was on offer at £2.88 (plus postage) rather than £30 or £50 I jumped at it.  It turned out to have an inscription on the title page, which I don't think the vendor's description mentioned, but at £5.68 including delivery for an otherwise unmarked copy I'm not grumbling.  There is also an Italian edition, still in print, but of no use unless you read Italian.  I don't.

bulbs

In the garden, the hyacinths are finally coming into bloom.  Every year I plant up four pots of them, at five bulbs per pot, to stand by the formal pond.  When they have finished they are planted out into the borders, where they prove remarkably long-lived.  I went for dark blue in this year's pots, though seeing how pretty the pale blue tinged with pink 'City of Bradford' is in the long bed I might do that again sometime.  I'm very fond of 'Woodstock' as well, a purple hyacinth that glows psychedelically in the evening light on those days when you get gleams of sun between rain showers. I haven't noticed any of them out yet, so they must come later than 'City of Bradford'.

The pots are started off under the greenhouse staging, since the sad year when the basal plates of almost every bulb rotted in the wet and the cold, standing outside.  Once the buds were starting to show colour I moved them out, mainly so that they would get more light, and tomorrow I must move them to stand by the pond in the Italian garden, as there is no point in their flowering away outside the greenhouse.

In the gravel the pink Chionodoxa are flowering vigorously.  I grow the variety 'Pink Giant'.  They are larger than the species, but still fairly small, standing no more than fifteen centimetres high.  I have found them long lived and persistent in our light and impoverished soil, and recommend them as good doers to anyone who wants easy dwarf bulbs for such conditions.  In the Chatto Gardens I have seen the gardeners renovating areas of the gravel garden, scraping back the gravel and adding generous quantities of compost before replanting and top dressing with fresh gravel.  I add a little compost and bonemeal around individual pots when planting anything in the gravel, but don't go in for wholesale replenishment, so the ground must be pretty meagre by now.

The bright blue Scilla siberica are putting on a lively show as well.  A colleague spoke warmly of them as a good plant for dry places, and they seem quite happy in the gravel.  It's still too early for the dwarf tulips.  In the back garden, the buds and flowers of most of the little kaufmanniana hybrid tulips were grazed out by muntjac.  Pheasants may have helped, but I'm pretty sure that muntjac were involved because the leaves were taken as well, stalk and leaves cut clean across as if in one bite.

The Iris unguicularis, which do not grow from bulbs, are putting on a splendid display.  The twelfth of April is very late for them, but most things are late this year, and they were slow to get going. They flowered so poorly last year that I worried they might be congested and need lifting and dividing.  I never got round to it, partly because last year was so wet that I didn't get round to all sorts of things, and partly out of nervousness at disturbing them, because they are notoriously slow and tricky to establish.  I killed several plants before ending up with a full row of them, although with hindsight that was a blessing in disguise, since I was originally trying to mess around with different forms, and ended up with a uniform row of the straight species, which works much better in design terms.  I have not done anything to the Iris to make them flower so much better this year, and am at a loss to explain it, except that something about the growing conditions over the past twelve months must have suited them.

The daffodils are grudgingly opening as well.  The Systems Administrator picked a bunch from a clump by the compost heap, that I don't remember planting.  We won't get the benefit of them tonight, because they are still in bud, and have been banished to the mantelpiece in the sitting room as being the only place we can stand a vase without risk of the cats knocking it over, while we are back in the study.  It isn't that warm, even if it is mid April.

bread and silk

First, to deal with the bread.  I set my alarm for seven so that I'd have time to cook it before going out, or if it could not be detached from the tea towel leave a note for the Systems Administrator promising to sort out the wreckage when I got back.  The bread had not risen any more in the night, but neither had it collapsed.  The top had formed a very slight dry crust, which had developed a faintly crackled appearance.  When I moved the bowl containing the dough in its improvised proving basket it quivered very faintly, like the surface of a bog warning you not to walk further in that direction.

I spread a piece of baking parchment on a heavy tray and tipped the bread out, then peeled away the tea towel.  Reader, it parted company from the dough with no resistance.  I had been expecting to have to prise it loose with the spatula.  I am therefore glad I reconsidered my initial rash, theatrical impulse to offer to eat the tea towel.

The bread spread out somewhat on the parchment, like a toad crouching down.  I was fairly sure it wasn't supposed to do that, but having come this far I was going to cook it, and gave it twenty minutes in the middle of the top oven, since the book said to start it at 220 degrees C.  Twenty minutes was too long and it caught, but reading the book again I see it should have had only ten minutes before I reduced the heat.  When I moved it down in the oven I turned it upside down at the same time, to give the bottom a chance to catch up with the top.

The bread spread out more during cooking, and then distorted after being turned over, so I ended up with a roughly lens shaped loaf that had burnt slightly on one side, heavily dusted with flour, also slightly burnt in places.  The Systems Administrator on inspecting it this evening said that it looked very artisanal, which it does, but not in a good way.  I would not pay £3.50 for it in Borough Market.

Having eaten a slice I can report the following.  The flavour of the rye starter comes through quite strongly, more so than the book led me to expect, and if I persist with sourdough I shall need a wheat based leaven.  The dough was definitely too wet, hence my difficulties in handling and the poor shape of the loaf.  The crust was too tough, which may be down to the wet dough, or the night spent uncooked in the fridge, or both.  However, the taste was quite good, albeit distinctly rye flavoured, and the inside of the loaf had the big, irregular holes you would expect with a sourdough. If I had read the cooking instructions properly I needn't have burned it, and having seen the size of the dough last night and this morning and the holiness of the cooked loaf, I reckon it was ready to cook last night.  The improvised proving basket works fine, so I don't have to buy one.

Preliminary conclusions: This loaf will probably end up being eaten largely by the chickens, and I will probably switch to a wheat based starter.  Sourdough does seem more trouble than yeast based bread, not least because the stages in total take so much longer that it would be more difficult to fit into a busy day.  But it is potentially interesting, especially if I could learn to make bread like they serve in Moro, instead of a burnt inflated rye-flavoured frisbee.

Now to the silk.  Months ago I bought a couple of tickets for an Art Fund trip to see Braintree's silk museum.  This area used to have a big textile industry, indeed Courtaulds hails from these parts. Warner and Sons in Braintree produced mostly furnishing fabrics for the top end of the market, weaving silk and later printing on cotton.  Their archives have fortunately survived, and ended up as part of Braintree museum.  Once a week, on a Wednesday, you can go and visit a small silk museum, and by special arrangement as part of an organised group you can get access to the archives as well.  I've been determined to see the archive ever since discovering it existed.  I didn't think any group I belonged to was at all likely to organise a trip, so when I saw that the Suffolk supporters of the Art Fund were doing one I jumped at it.  For good measure I invited a friend who is a skilled craftswoman, and I thought would like to see a textile archive.

The museum and archive live in a fine, early nineteenth century mill which fortunately escaped being demolished to create an inner bypass, as was seriously considered at one point in the latter part of the last century.  The museum is not very big, but the displays tell of the history of the firm, and some samples of fabric are on show, together with some of the company's collection of tribal artefacts, collected to provide inspiration to their designers.  In the twentieth century some unexpected people worked for them.  Edward Bawden I can understand, since he worked as a designer as well as a fine artist, lived nearby, and was indeed born in Braintree.  But I was surprised to find a design of very conventional roses by Graham Sutherland.  The rent must have been due.  I wished for a moment that they could get a grant to digitise the whole archive and put it on line, then realised that since their future financial survival will depend on their success in licencing designs in the archive commercially, they will never do that, because of piracy.  As it is you are forbidden to take photos in the museum, though they do sell an extremely nice range of cards.

The tour of the archive was in fact a lecture in the archive.  Tall, enticing stacks were filled with hundreds of cardboard boxes, but we were forbidden to touch anything.  Instead two knowledgeable and enthusiastic volunteers, one of whom had once worked in the factory, showed us printed and woven fabrics from the past hundred and fifty years, plus printing blocks.  It was all extremely interesting, though I would have liked to see more samples of the actual fabrics.  We were only ever going to see a tiny proportion of what they have, because it is the second largest collection of flat textiles in Europe.

After lunch, which was not laid on as part of the trip, we went to the Braintree museum.  This is more focused than some small museums, with an emphasis on local history, including the firms of Courtauld and Crittall windows as well as Warners, plus John Ray, the seventeenth century naturalist, and of course the Great Bardfield artists. It was quite educational.  I have something of a weakness for the arbitrary collections of donated stuff you get in some small regional museums, where military trophies, tortoiseshell fans, childrens' shoes, cuttings from local newspapers about disasters of fifty years ago, milk churns, menus from retirement dinners held before the war and a vintage bicycle mingle cheek by jowl, but they are very much a dying breed, and apart from reminding you how odd and various human existence is they don't tell you very much. I would put Braintree museum on a par with Wymondham, sound and informative, though lacking the bonkers charm of Whitby (apart from the booklet in the museum shop on Crittall Bus Shelters of Braintree and Bocking.  You can't get much more bonkers and charming than that).

dough

The bread project is moving on to the next stage.  Sourdough is on the agenda.  Sourdough is the aristocrat of the artisanal bread world.  It is the high status loaf towards which my bread making books are trying to lead me.  Make your simple, yeast raised bread if you must, they say, but the real deal, the true, digestible, trophy loaf to which you should aspire is sourdough, bread leavened only by the natural organisms found in the grain.

For four days I had a bowl of rye sourdough starter tucked in the corner on top of the Aga.  On Day One I added 25 grammes of rye flour and 50 grammes of water.  The Systems Administrator looked at it doubtfully and asked whether I had anything that needed flour-and-water-pasting.  On Day Two I fed it with another 25 grammes of flour and more water.  On Day Three I forgot about it until really late in the evening before feeding it.  On Day Four I fed it again.  It was like having another pet, albeit a small, unresponsive one that didn't do much, like a hamster that spends all its time hidden under its bedding or asleep.  Then the rye starter went into the fridge while I finished my weekend's work, and stayed there yesterday because I had to be in Chelmsford by half past seven for a woodland talk, and was reluctant to have an unfamiliar bread recipe in mid-flow at the point where I needed to go out.

It's not that I like rye bread particularly.  I find the taste rather strong and the dense texture rather heavy going.  One small, thin slice spread with smoked salmon about two or three times a year more or less satisfies my desire for rye bread.  But I had a vague feeling that I'd read that rye starter was easier to manage than wheat, and the book (I'm still with Andrew Whitley on this one) said that it could be used to start a wheat based loaf.

Today was the day ordained for bread making.  In a way it was a wasted opportunity, what with it being sunny and not raining (I fed the bees again before starting on the bread, and all four boxes still had bees in them).  However, I'm out tomorrow, and wanted to try doing something with the starter before it had lingered too long in the fridge.  I decided to embark on what Andrew Whitley calls a Cromarty Cob, which contains a mixture of wholemeal flour, strong white flour and some plain white.  He first came up with the recipe while running a bread making course in Cromarty. Stage one is to make a production leaven.  You add more water and more flour to some of your starter, and leave it for several hours, during which time it is supposed to increase noticeably in size.

I weighed the ingredients carefully, so unless I misread the scales or turned over two pages of the book at once (which has been known) I was following instructions.  The production leaven was sticky.  Very sticky.  Elasticated gloops of bread stuck to both hands and the bowl.  I realised I needed a spatula, and got smears of raw dough on the drawer handle pulling one out, then more streaks of dough on the handle of the spatula, then used the spatula to try and clean gloop off the sides of the bowl and my hands.  Once it had got as close to a reasonably firm dough (sic) as it seemed willing to do, I stopped stirring it about  The surface was puckered and glistening.  I covered it with clingfilm and left in on a cooling rack over the Aga warming plate to start rising.  It gradually spread out into a puddle that filled the bottom of the bowl.

The book said I was to use the production leaven before it began to sink again.  I was not even sure whether it had risen as much as it was supposed to, but after it had been fermenting for the entire morning I thought it was time to move on to the next stage.  Make the dough using all the ingredients except the production leaven, the book said, knead it and then add the leaven.  Oh good, I now had two bowls on the go.  Sourdough is obviously calculated to appeal to washing-up fetishists.  I weighed the ingredients for the dough carefully, was surprised by the instruction to use 300 grammes of water for a total of only 400 grammes of flour, but went with the book.  The dough was wet.  Really seriously, stickily wet.  Much stickier than the production leaven had been.  I stirred it around with my hands, wondering whether the flour would gradually absorb the water, as I had a vague memory of the dough doing during kneading the only time I tried ciabatta.  It didn't, not so you'd notice.  I tried to follow the instruction to knead it until I could feel the gluten structure developing.  I wondered whether to add more flour, but the books all caution against doing that just because you don't like having sticky hands.  I was sure that one of them even said Wet is Good.  I repeated this mantra to myself for several minutes while clawing at the mass of flour and water, then decided that the gluten was developed enough, and mixed the dough with the production leaven.  The combination was slightly silky, but still very sticky.

The next instruction was to leave the dough on a wet work surface for an hour, covered by a bowl with a wet rim, to allow the gluten to relax.  I thought that the gluten might be relaxing, but I wasn't.  I used the pastry board and a third bowl, scraping as much of the dough out of the second bowl with the spatula as I could.  A lot remained behind.  While the gluten was relaxing I started trying to clean the first two bowls, remembering to use my hands and not the washing up brush. Picking the slimy gobbets of wet dough out of a washing up brush that has been used to scrub a bowl containing flour and water paste is not to be recommended.  The dough spread itself out inside the upturned bowl, and pressed against the sides like a slug on a window pane.

After the hour was up I was supposed to stretch the dough, then fold in back on itself, and do this along each side of the dough.  The dough would stretch and fold, up to a point, and did end up somewhat taller and less flattened and pancake-like than before, but it was quite unwilling to part company with the pastry board.  It was so soft that when I tried to pick it up, bits spilled over the sides of my hands while other bits stayed stuck to the work surface.  I decided it was a moot point which side of the dough was the least rough, and dumped the squishy lump in the proving basket. Not that I have a proving basket.  It was only when I read in the middle of the recipe that from this point I should follow the instructions for a French country loaf on page 184 that I realised that I needed one.  The books was discouraging about using a colander lined with a tea towel, saying that condensation from the dough was likely to make it stick.  I thought that a colander was about as good as it was going to get, then remembered the large plastic sieve I use for filtering honey.  It is shaped like a hollow bowl, and if the perforations allow honey to drip through then I'm sure condensation can do likewise.

I was supposed to have dipped my loaf in a bowl of wholemeal flour, but since I couldn't pick it up I had to sprinkle the tea towel liberally with flour, plop the dough on it, and then sprinkle the rest of the dough.  If it has not stuck to the tea towel I shall be amazed.  I was about to offer to eat the tea towel, but remembered the SA's story of an overheard conversation between some Irishman at Cheltenham.  As the horse that one of them had backed came charging up to the home straight in the lead, its backer swore that if it didn't win he would eat his hat.  It was overtaken in the final furlongs.  The Irishman's friend turned to him and enquired 'Would you be wanting sauce with that?'.

The bread seemed to take a long time to rise.  I wasn't sure how large it should look when it had risen as much as it was going to.  With a loaf in a tin you have a benchmark, and if the proving dough reaches the top of the tin you have an idea of how much it's expanded.  A lump of gloop in a tea towel in a plastic sieve is more difficult to judge.

By eight it looked larger than it had been, but I had no idea whether it had done enough.  However, I had done enough for one day, and was ready to serve dinner.  I put the in the fridge, where it sat in a quivering, faintly oppressive mass, and will inspect it in the morning.  I once left some non-doing milk rolls overnight in the fridge to see what would happen, and they rose beautifully in the night.

TO BE CONTINUED.

glorious mud

Spring still doesn't feel fully sprung.  At least it is not raining, which is better than the forecast. Over the weekend the Met Office were predicting heavy rain all day on Tuesday for Colchester, and as recently as this morning they were still saying showers.  There was a light sprinkling of rain around ten this morning, and that was it, but the air feels slightly raw, without that balmy softness that would encourage plants to grow.

I'm still weeding and mulching the big sloping border in the back garden, though by way of a change and to celebrate having new wellington boots that don't leak I weeded the bog bed while I was at it. The Primula bulleyana that I planted last year have begun to make some leaves.  They are still only at the small rosette stage, but at least I can see that several of them are alive and doing something.  The Primula florindae are still invisible under the mud.  They might have made it through the winter, and merely be biding their time, which is possible as they flower later than most candelabra primula, or perhaps they have quietly rotted and died.  Time will tell.

There are small, wispy,  mauvish-green fronds that tell me that the Filipendula live on, but they have not started to grow yet.  The skunk cabbage has produced a tiny funnel of green leaves, that you would not see unless you were looking very closely.  Fortunately I saw it before I stepped on it. The Rheum by the deck has made some big, fat red buds, but has decided to leave it at that for now.  I have not waded through the mud to see what, if anything, the gunnera is up to.  The area where it was planted ended up wetter than I was expecting, as the water table continued to rise inexorably, and it may be that the crown has rotted.  Or it may be about to leap into glorious life.

Customers at work ask me for evergreens that will live in constantly wet situations, or even places that are intermittently very wet, and I struggle to think of anything.  For the past five or six months our bog bed has consisted of a small sea of mud, over which a layer of bright green slime gradually developed, the only vegetative interest provided by some tufts of weed grass that is apparently adapted to swamp conditions, some hopeful patches of lawn buttercup, some aquatic nettles (which don't look very well.  I don't think they've quite got bog life sussed yet) and rosettes of willowherb.

The yellow berried Viburnum opulus that I planted in the mud, while wondering whether the boss's label saying it would tolerate boggy soil could really be true, has got fat, round, pale pistachio green leaf buds on it, so that's alive and fairly well.  The next unknown is whether it will berry for me, or if it is too shady at the back of the bog bed.  Viburnum opulus berries are beautiful, almost translucent.  The surprise survivor among the shrubs that were there before the water table rose so dramatically to the surface is Itea viginica 'Henry's Garnet'.  The species hails from North America, and makes a lowish, suckering bush whose leaves colour to a good shade of red in the autumn, and hang on for a long time.  It is helping itself by partly perching on the root plate of a self-seeded pussy willow, but the parts that are growing in the bog seem to be doing quite well.  I have been impressed enough by it to start recommending it to customers who want a shrub for a damp and intermittently wet spot, but I don't think I've clinched a sale so far.

We had the night camera set up to try and catch whatever is eating plants, and in particular flowers, in the back garden.  I'm convinced it's muntjac, and want to know where they are coming in and how often, but all the camera caught this time round was some pheasants, and black and white Alsatian killer cat.  The SA thinks the batteries ran down.  The camera belongs to the Systems Administrator, who seems to need frequent reinforcement in the form of interesting night photos of something to retain enthusiasm for the night shot project.  I want to know what is eating my plants and how it gets in, so nights where we draw a blank and nothing comes into the garden still yield valuable information from my point of view.  However, a nil score tells me nothing if the reason for it is that the camera battery was flat.

A buzzard flew low out of the wood yesterday, straight towards the house.  We know that without the aid of a wildlife camera, because the SA saw it out of the bedroom window.

cracking up

The older gardener had a bad cold, which kept him off work last Friday with coughing.  The manager had a thick cold that has lasted five days so far without abating, and was booked to do a talk to a garden club tonight, and another at work tomorrow.  The wind had developed an evil chill, despite the wan sunshine.

The day was slow to develop momentum, then built up until it was quite busy.  I stuck labels on pots, put plants out for sale, answered the phone (a lot) and did my stint on the till.  Customers ranged from the delightful to the frankly annoying.  Top marks for charm go the local resident who correctly identified me by voice on the phone, and as well as chatting pleasantly about some plants she wanted, remembered to tell me that in her capacity as webmaster of one the local U3As she had put a link to the music society on their website, something I'd asked if she might be able to arrange when I discovered at the fundraising supper concert that she was the webmaster.

In pole position for sheer annoyance factor was the man who moved his things around in his trolley while I was trying to put them through the till, asked me questions about how a hose spray attachment worked while I was still operating the till, and insisted on counting his plants for me, announcing portentously that there were three of those as my hand hovered above one of three large Fritillaria imperialis.  Thank you, they are in your trolley right in front of my face where I can see them clearly, and although I work in a shop I can count to three.  Flavia, quamquam est femina. Flavia, although she was a woman (and a shop assistant) was not an idiot.

The young gardener had been on a visit over the weekend with the professional gardeners' guild to Wakehurst Place, where he enjoyed a tour of the Millennium Seedbank and a two hour trip round only one third of the garden.  He said that they could have done with six hours just to look at the garden.  You can tell that gardening is a vocation in that almost everybody who works with plants spends their spare time gardening or garden visiting.  I'm not sure how many actuaries play with life insurance tables at weekends.

The garden designer I reserved ten Iris 'Black Swan' for yesterday came to collect them, and bought a lot of other things as well, spending over three hundred and sixty pounds in total.  I was slightly relieved once she'd taken the iris without any repercussions, plus another five that the manager found for her, since that left us with only five, and after I'd told her she could have the the original ten I began to have horrible doubts in case they were already earmarked for another customer.  In principle we ought to try and boost sales by looking to see what else is stashed away behind the scenes, to make up the numbers for customers who need to source plants in quantity.  However, there's always the slight risk taking anything from the herbaceous tunnel, even if it has a price label on it, that perhaps it was intended for an existing order, or the manager was planning to split it.

Working on the till mid-afternoon I felt a sharp stab of pain in my left forefinger, and looking down saw a smear of blood.  I wondered whether I'd pricked myself on a loose staple, and managed to finish the transaction using the other hand, while keeping the bloody finger discreetly out of view. Investigating it afterwards I found it had split along the crease of the first joint.  I rub copious amounts of hand cream into my hands, morning and night, but they are terribly dry after this everlasting winter.  The second joint looks a bit fragile too.  The manager asked whether I was all right, and I waved my cracked and filthy hand at him and hissed that we really did need to get somebody to work the cafe.  Food service and nursery work do not mix.

Addendum  The only news on the radio on the way home was the death of Margaret Thatcher.  I was a fan.  When I went to university it was only the second year that my college had admitted women, and the recently elected Mrs Thatcher was our first female Prime Minister.  As a young woman embarking into the world I found it very encouraging.  The miners and workers in some traditional manufacturing industries did have a very thin time of it.  I profoundly disagree with her attitude to General Pinochet and several other things.  But I grew up against the background of the British disease.  We had scheduled power cuts because we couldn't organise ourselves to produce enough electricity, for goodness sake.  The Systems Administrator and I did well out of Big Bang, so it would be hypocritical not to be a fan, but I look at the choice of providers I had last month when I bought my new phone, and I wouldn't go back to the era of the three day week.  And Margaret Thatcher was by all accounts always considerate and polite to the junior people that worked around her.  I heard an interview on Radio 4 quite recently with one of her former protection officers, who was not a fan at the point when he was posted to Number Ten.  He had to work on Christmas day, and in the little room allocated to him to sit in while he waited to do any protecting needed, he found tinsel, a miniature bottle of spirits, and a card from Mrs T thanking him for his work and apologising that he was called away from his family on such a day.  He said in the interview that from that point onwards he would have taken a bullet for her.

a trying day

When I started the car this morning the display on the dashboard read minus 2.5 degrees.  That was colder than I'd expected last night, and caused us problems when we tried to start work.  The first thing we needed to do was the watering, and the hoses were blocked by ice.  Two of us spent over an hour and a half dragging them into the sun to try and defrost them, then periodically testing them with the lances, and without the lances in case it was just the heads that were blocked, switching the taps on and off in the hope that the pressure might dislodge the blockages, but without success.  There were hard lumps of ice inside the hoses themselves, and as the sun went in again and a thin sea mist slid over the plant centre, we realised that they were not going to have defrosted in time for us to do any watering before we opened at ten.

A couple wandered into the plant centre at only ten past nine, and I had to warn them to be careful of the hoses, while apologising for pointing out the blindingly obvious, since they are bright yellow and you can scarcely miss them.  They promised they would be careful, but I thought the man was unwise in the nonchalance with which he strolled past the open ends of hose pipes we were struggling to persuade to run.  If the ice blocking  them had suddenly shifted a considerable amount of water would have shot out, and while we tried to make sure they were turned off when he was nearby, frankly he was in the way.

After the bad start with the watering the day never really got on to an even keel.  The boss eventually ran off the labels for some of a delivery of herbaceous plants that were sitting behind the scenes.  To attach the labels to the pots we needed to staple them, since none of the plants had more than a few centimetres of growth, and certainly no leaves or branches you could tie a label to. One of the staplers in the shop contained approximately six staples, while the others were all completely empty.  I looked in the stationery cupboard by the owner's desk but could only see staples for the staple gun, which is a different and altogether heavier beast.  In the end I went and robbed what looked like the last supplies on the potting bench over in the herbaceous tunnel on the far side of the car park.

The last time I noticed we were running out of staples I left a note for the owner asking if we could have a box for the shop, but all that happened was that she scrawled on the note in spiky handwriting that she had just given a box to the manager and left the annotated note for me to find the next day.  She may well have already given the manager some staples, but I didn't know that, and he hadn't left them in the shop.  In fact, it turned out he had taken them over to the herbaceous tunnel.  In the light of how it turned out last time I did not leave another note about the shortage of staples.

There were three of us on duty, and one was fairly fully occupied with the tea room from mid-morning onwards.  Two people are not really enough to operate the till, help customers find plants, advise on their gardening questions and answer the phones.  The boss picked up a couple of calls, including one that he only left to ring twice before taking it.  It can take longer than two rings to get your gloves off and extract the phone from your pocket, added to which the phone starts making a noise in the office before the roaming handsets outside start ringing, so he had a head start on us.  The boss asked irritably over the radio whether the phones were working out there, which is boss speak for Why aren't you answering the phones as included in your job description? The roaming handsets don't always roam as far as the herbaceous tunnel on The Other Side, and in fact for one of the missed calls my phone hadn't rung.

Bookings for the talk on herbs are not good.  There is a received wisdom, or at least if not received it gets trotted out in the broadsheet newspapers and on Radio 4, that one of the ways that retail businesses are supposed to beat the downturn is by offering more than just products.  We are supposed to offer Events and Experiences.  Hence bookshops are supposed to host book clubs, invite authors to do evening talks, create coffee areas and all the rest of it.  Merely selling books will not cut the mustard in the days of Amazon.  We are trying to offer Events and Experiences, but they aren't bringing people thronging in through the doors.  The owner discovered that the number of people coming to the herb day, and in particular the number of people requiring lunch, had been overstated.  She had consequently ordered too much food and was cross.  The names and phone numbers of the people booked on the course are clearly written down in a file, so goodness knows how anybody managed to overstate them.

By the afternoon the hoses had defrosted, and at four I started watering in the tunnels, as most customers had left by then.  Then I watered outside, which entailed dragging another hose out of storage and persuading a different tap to work.  That arm of the irrigation system had collected a small amount of mud and pebbles, which blocked the lance twice, meaning that each time I had to turn off the hose, go back to the tap and turn it off, turn the hose on again to release the pressure, and hold the lance as far from my body as I could while disconnecting it from the hose, following which it spat brown water over my fleece and my glasses.  By quarter to six my hands were getting jolly cold.

spring is slightly sprung

The car was frosted this morning, as was the chickens' water container.  The latter was frozen together more solidly than I expected, and I had to boil a kettle of water to melt the ice in the base before I could remove the top half and refill it.  This led to my setting off for work slightly later than I would have liked, but fortunately it was a morning with practically no traffic.  Arriving at work I met the dogs standing by the front entrance looking speculatively out into the road.  I thought they really shouldn't be there, since cars come hammering along that road at well over the speed limit, so I parked and went back to call them in.  To my great relief they came, and consented to follow me up to the house, where I was able to shut them in.

The sun shone.  It shone out of a rather hazy sky, and as the day went on the wind got up, though not as bad as yesterday (which was a day when empty compost bags blew across the garden unless weighted down).  It was not exactly a gentle and balmy spring day, but it was sunny (at home the thermometer reached a whole nine degrees in the middle of the day.  That's still a couple of degrees colder than the average maximum daytime temperature for April in this part of the world, but still a big improvement on last Thursday, when at lunchtime my car thermometer was reading half a degree).

Our first instruction for the day on the manager's list of tasks was to check the watering.  Some of the evergreen shrubs in the shade tunnel were dry, and I pulled out the hose ready to start my fireman Sam act.  I enjoy watering, though it can get physically hard work in hot weather when we're doing four hours of it every day.  I have seen a Freudian interpretation of female satisfaction at spraying water around with a big hose, though I don't look at it that way myself.  This morning's pleasure was short-lived, as after an initial spurt of water the hose stopped working.  That normally means there is a kink in the hosepipe, but if  there isn't, it usually means the nozzle is blocked. There was no kink, but when I managed with some difficulty to uncouple the lance from the hose, it was blocked with ice.

I went and defrosted the ice in hot water in the cafe sink, and for good measure warmed the spray head end as well, but it didn't improve matters, and when I tried the hose without the lance (standing at a safe distance), no water came out.  I tested the tap at the wall (keeping well clear) and that had a normal water supply under pressure, so I decided that the problem was that the hose was frozen.  I left the watering for an hour, until the day had begun to warm up, and when I tried the hose again a gout of slush burst out of it, discoloured with earth where the irrigation system has leaked slightly in the winter.  Sometimes the lance heads get blocked because a piece of gravel has got into the hose, and once, when a garden hose stopped working at home and I investigated the spray head, I found the squashed remains of an enormous slug.

Customers were a little slow to arrive, and by mid-morning my young colleague was faintly restive and anxious.  I thought they'd be along later.  People tend not to dash out to buy plants first thing on a Saturday, but seem to take their time to get going.  Lie-in, breakfast, grocery shopping, I don't know how they occupy themselves in the first part of their day, but plants generally fit in later on.  I was right, and in the end we were busy.  Total takings through the tills were helped by the couple who spent over eight hundred pounds on pots and trees.  My young colleague served them, but overhearing parts of the conversation I gathered that they were slightly anxious to be buying things without their gardeners' permission.  Their gardeners were apparently lovely people, but the owners weren't always allowed to have their own way.

The turkeys have found their way into the car park.  The cock turkey is an enormous creature, and he is feeling the joys of spring.  He was displaying to Mrs Turkey, fanning his tail, dropping his outspread wings to the ground, and shuffling along with rapid steps while making the most extraordinary gobbling noise.  She seemed utterly indifferent.  My young colleague managed to herd them out of the car park, as he was concerned that they were so large they could be intimidating. In fact, he said, they intimidated him.  I don't mind them myself, but I think I would if Mr Turkey showed signs of going for me.  He is a big bird.

two histories

When I came to carve the nameless joint of frozen half pig, I was disappointed that underneath the skin there seemed to be almost nothing except an enormous bone.  I needn't have been, since the small amount of meat there was tasted inedible, as did the sauce.  Sometimes you speculate to accumulate, and sometimes you waste a tin of tomatoes and three small red onions.

This morning's loaf of bread was back to one hundred per cent wholemeal, without any old dough.  It rose faster than all my previous efforts, for reasons unknown to me, as I didn't consciously deviate from the exact same method I followed before.  The wind is not quite so cold as it was, so perhaps the house is fractionally warmer.  When I got it out of the oven the top was not quite rounded and taut, but had fallen in very slightly at one end.  It tasted perfectly nice when we had some for lunch, and the crumb was acceptably open, so it hadn't collapsed to a degree that you'd notice while eating it.  I still want to know what happened, though, in the interests of learning by doing.

Aside from the experimental cookery I have been occupying myself in this interminable winter by reading.  I recently finished Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum.  You would expect any book subtitled The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944 to 1956 to make sombre reading, and so it does, but still gripping.  I don't know why I'd expected it to be organised on a country-by-country basis, with a chapter on East Germany, one on Hungary, and so on, but I did.  It isn't.  Instead each chapter covers a theme, Policemen, Youth, Ethnic Cleansing or Radio.  I had not realised how gradually the Soviet fist tightened around its Eastern bloc satellites after the end of the war, vaguely assuming that Communist power was total from 1945 onwards.  The mechanics of how Soviet influence established itself turned out to be more complex, and grimly fascinating.  You hold elections.  You are hurt and surprised when the people do not vote for Communist power.  You falsify the results of the elections, or take power anyway.

Practically nothing I do would have been allowed.  Never mind being a bourgeois capitalist and property owner, or being educated at an elite university.  The music society and the beekeepers association would not have been allowed, because forms of social organisation that existed independently of the Communist party were forbidden, in the end if not at the start.  Most of my tastes in music, art and literature would not have been tolerated.  In fact, I wouldn't rate my chances of survival at all highly.

Oh, and the command economies of Eastern Europe didn't work.  In 1950, Poland and Spain had similar sized economies.  By 1988, Poland's had increased by two and a half times, Spain's by thirteen.  Something to remember, the next time you hear any politician claiming that under their party's policies economic growth will suddenly resume.

After Anne Applebaum I moved on to the monarch unkindly referred to The Dead Queen Anne in 1066 and All That.  Anne Somerset has gone for the more neutral Queen Anne.  The publishers have hopefully added the subtitle The politics of passion, but that's misleading.  It's a very readable account of the events leading up to James II's departure from the throne, which is about where my knowledge of English political history takes a break for the next century and a bit, then covers the reign of William and Mary, and Anne's own reign following William's death in 1702.  Poor Queen Anne, she gave birth to 17 children, only three of which survived at all and they died in infancy.  The current medical theory is that she suffered from a form of lupus.  Her consort, the Danish prince George, emerges as one of English history's unsung noble figures, and Sarah Churchill, later Duchess of Marlborough, as a most spectacularly unpleasant woman.  Anne adored her, or still does so far, since I'm only up to about 1708.  I'll let you know how it ends.

cabined, cribbed, confined

The weather forecasters have been promising us warmer weather by the weekend, so I was sceptical yesterday when the Systems Administrator warned me that today, Thursday, it was forecast to snow.  Today is 4th April.  The tax year ends tomorrow and the vernal equinox was two weeks ago.  How can it snow?  It snowed.

I went to Tesco, since the Systems Administrator had volunteered me to do this evening's supper. On that basis we are having part of a half pig that has been in the freezer for rather a long time. We bought it from a friend who was living with a farmer at the time, who had gone into small scale pig production.  Our pig was from the first batch, and he had not realised how far in advance he would need to book the abattoir, so the pig went on fattening for a fortnight longer than it was intended to.  The half pig was consequently heavier and more expensive than anticipated, the excess weight unfortunately being almost entirely fat.  It arrived jointed in unlabelled plastic bags, so that matching cuts to any of the recipes in our books was hit and miss, especially once the bags iced up.  The Systems Administrator became bored of the pig, and started buying pork even though we still had several nameless pieces in the freezer.  One of my missions for 2013 is to eat or throw away as uneatable everything in the freezer.  I am sure the half pig is not poisonous, but it may be that the fat has oxidized and it is not very nice.  I have promised the SA that if supper is disgusting I will go and get us a Chinese takeaway instead.

On the basis of experience I should say that buying half of any animal larger than a rabbit for your deep freeze was not a good idea for two people.  I know it is a lovely idea to have seen the corner of the field where the animal lived, and feel a personal connection with the farmer who sold it to you, but they sell very nice, locally produced pork in the farm shop, in manageable quantities and identifiable cuts.

The farm shop also sells locally produced flour.  A 1.5 kilo bag of organic stoneground strong wholemeal flour milled in Chelmsford will set you back £2.15.  The same quantity of non-organic stoneground strong wholemeal costs £1.39 in Tesco, and they are currently doing a 3 for 2 on baking ingredients, so you could bring that down to 93 pence per bag if you bake regularly.  Do you want to support a local shop selling local food, or shop organically, so much that you want to pay over twice as much?

I got a small bag of rye flour in Tesco, to make a sourdough starter.  I've a feeling I've read that rye starters are relatively easy to manage.  You mix some flour and some warm water, and keep the mixture warm, and carry on adding flour and water each day for another three days.  On day 5 you should have a usable starter, powered entirely by the natural yeasts on the flour.  No organic grapes, no potato peelings.  That is what Andrew Whitley says, and he adds that if your starter develops a layer of greyish liquid on top, don't worry about it but just stir it in.  He is very strict that the initial water should be at 40 degrees C, and the starter kept at 30 degrees, but I just used warm water, and the starter will be at whatever temperature it is on top of the Aga.  If after five days nothing seems to have happened there is further advice on page 181.  It all sounds potentially fraught, though not as bad as Jane Grigson's advice on salting your own beef (if green scum appears on the surface of the beef just wipe it off.  I haven't tried that one yet).

Then I took all the ingredients out of the store cupboard, which was in a muddle.  I take a fairly relaxed attitude to expiry dates for dry goods, but I was afraid that semolina that was best before November 2011 had probably gone off, and I didn't think the SA should be eating peanut butter that theoretically expired three years ago.  I don't understand why we have three jars of Frank Cooper's Oxford Marmalade, each one almost untouched.  I wonder if the SA buys a new one each year for Cheltenham week, and then doesn't eat marmalade for the rest of the year.  I know I have a recipe somewhere for cake that includes marmalade as an ingredient, so might make one sometime for the staff room at work.

I knocked the eyes off some potatoes that the SA had rejected because they were sprouting, and boiled them in their skins for the chickens.  They really like cooked potato.  They are pretty keen on cooked pasta as well, so the odd remains of three bags of conchiglie and macaroni could go the same way.

a small attack

I was going to go to London today with my mother, to take my artistic nephew to the National Gallery.  We didn't go, because yesterday evening I got a phone call from my mother saying that my father had had a suspected small stroke, and was being kept in Colchester General stroke unit overnight for observation and tests.  By three this afternoon they'd finished the tests, and confirmed that he'd suffered a transient ischaemic attack.  Beyond adding aspirin to the panoply of drugs he takes daily and telling him to take it very easy for a few weeks, there wasn't a lot they could do about that, and my mother was told he was ready to come home.

Ready to come home in the sense used by hospitals means medically fit to be discharged, not booted, suited, signed off and ready to go, and we sat for half an hour in a side ward until a very cheerful male nurse came and gave my father his discharge letter and bag of pills.  He addressed my father as 'Sir' and spoke to him rather than talking to my mother, which more or less made up for the NHS's cavalier attitude to everyone else's time.

However, it is a mystery to me why Colchester General is laid out without any short stay parking bays near the hospital doors for people collecting frail or elderly patients.  I was parked in the furthest part of the main car park, a long walk from the stroke unit for an eighty-two year old who is supposed to be taking it easy.  The wind was bitingly cold, which apart from the discomfort makes the platelets in your blood stick together, the last thing you want when you've just had a very small stroke already.  We found a side door which visitors collecting patients were permitted to hover by, though not right by the door in case an ambulance needed access, and my parents managed to find me before anyone came and told me to move on.  We had the same problem the night I collected them from A&E, but with the prospect of ambulances looming even larger.  I grumbled about the lack of pick-up facilities to the Systems Administrator when I got home, who said unkindly that it was Colchester General, so they weren't expecting anyone to leave except in a box.

Meanwhile, the rooster died.  He'd been poorly for several weeks, and we were hoping that if some warmer weather came he might pull round.  Yesterday he found a little patch of sun to stand in, out of the wind, but by lunchtime today he had quietly died in his chicken house.  Poor creature, he was an ineffectual rooster, but he had a kindly nature.  We don't know what did for him.  The hens have all been in bouncing good health throughout, so it was presumably not any virulent avian infection. We tend to keep very quiet if a chicken is ill, since people are generally not so sympathetic as they would be if were a cat or a dog, but make unfunny jokes about bird flu while inwardly panicking.

bread and circuses

My experiments in bread making are coming on by leaps and bounds.  Or at least, I have made several edible loaves in a row, and no inedible ones, or even lumps of bread that you could could eat at a pinch but would really be more use as ballast.  This morning's loaf was bread made with old dough, which does what it says on the tin, really.  You keep a bit of dough back when you make a loaf, store it in the fridge, and add it to the next lot of dough when you make bread again.  The idea is that the acids and yeasts in the old dough add flavour to the new, and help it develop a good structure.  The recipe comes from Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley, and for those of you who want to try it at home, you make a dough with 330 grammes of water and 500 grammes of flour, and after kneading it for five minutes add 160 grammes of old dough.  It isn't a true sourdough, because you still use yeast in the new dough.  Today's loaf was made with a roughly fifty-fifty mix of wholemeal and white flour, just because I ran out of wholemeal, and the old dough was one hundred per cent stoneground wholemeal.

It made a very nice loaf, though I say so myself.  I think that when I started off I was overly cautious due to the dire warnings in the books about the ill effects of using too much heat.  Water that was too hot would kill the yeast or inhibit its action, the books said, and proving at too warm a temperature would produce crumbly, funny tasting bread that didn't keep.  Heeding their advice, I was trying to make bread at temperatures that would have needed about twenty-four hours to produce a fully risen loaf.  Cranking up the heat a few degrees seems to have got things moving at a pace that fits in better with a desire to make bread, but not spend the entire day keeping an eye on the wretched stuff to see if it is finally ready to move on to the next stage.

Picking up the concertina after a gap of so many years is proving an education in learning and memory as well as music.  I'm sure I've read that athletes in training can continue to improve on days when they don't actually do any running around or physical activity at all, as their brains process the movements they were making the previous day.  Admittedly I read this thirty years ago, and I may have muddled the details in the interim, or science may now have proved the opposite. It is certainly the case that a tune I was struggling to learn, finding each time I listened to it and tried to play it through that I was missing a beat somewhere in the middle, suddenly popped into my head fully formed the next day.  The missing bar wasn't very interesting, the musical equivalent of hopping on one foot and going la-la for the duration, but it filled in the shape.

On the other hand, recalling tunes is horribly difficult.  I have worked out the fingerings for Walsh's Hornpipe, and once I've heard the first three notes of it I could play the rest of it.  At this stage 'play' means stumble through in a rather horrible and halting fashion, but I know the tune.  And yet I have whole hours when I try to remember how Walsh's Hornpipe starts, and nothing comes into my head, not one note, phrase or scintilla.  Suddenly it will bob up in odd moments and I'll run through it in my head several times.  An hour later it's gone again.  Clearly I have to practice not just playing tunes, but remembering them when I want them.  I've never had that problem with songs, and it is most peculiar.

I suppose that with songs you have the words to act as a cue.  The words also help me remember the title, something I have always struggled with when it comes to tunes.  Song titles tend to be self-explanatory.  A song about a girl cruelly betrayed by a blacksmith who marries someone else is called A Blacksmith Courted Me or The Blacksmith.  But Walsh's Hornpipe could be anything. It is a hornpipe, obviously, but it could just as well be called Robson's Fancy, or Buckets and Brooms (traditional songs often have names like that), or The Honiton Bypass because somebody wrote it while stuck in a traffic jam on the Honiton bypass.

If you went to the sort of school where morning assembly was daily and compulsory, complete with dirge-like hymn to piano accompaniment, then you almost certainly know some British folk tunes, even if you don't think you do.  Many share the same basic construction, starting with a phrase of eight bars, which is repeated with variations, then the whole sixteen bar phrase is repeated again. When I was young that was generally referred to as the 'a music', if it was called anything, though I don't know if the term is used nowadays.  Then came a second eight bar phrase, generally developing the first phrase in some way and often higher pitched, followed by a second eight bar phrase that was generally a reprise of the 'a music'.  This second sixteen bar construction was also repeated, and that was the 'b music'.  The hymn I heard the voice of Jesus say follows this pattern. When it is not doing duty as a hymn tune it serves for the traditional song Dives and Lazarus, and as a traditional tune when it is often called the Star of the County Down.

You will see that a traditional tune isn't very long, so to spin the proceedings out to a decent length and make them more interesting it's customary to string two or three tunes together into a set, which is played through with no pauses between movements (if you are a player of pure genius, such as Martin Hayes, you will go off into sets of multiple tunes lasting a full half hour, while your trusted accompanist begins to look a trifle anxious as to how you are both going to get out of this or when you are ever going to stop).  To form a set you pick tunes that sound right together, which creates another challenge for the novice musician, to avoid following the first half of one tune with the second half of a different one.  At one level I suppose that wouldn't matter, but it would irritate anyone in the audience who knew them.

I am sure that the mental effort in grappling with this at my age will be extremely good for me, probably helping ward off dementia and all sorts of things.  In the meantime, at this particular moment, I still can't think how Walsh's Hornpipe starts.

tiny signs of life

The trouble with working on Easter Monday when the clocks have just changed is that you have to get up at what your body is telling you is five o'clock in the morning.  I had remembered to reset the time on my bedside clock yesterday, and the kitchen clock switches to the new time automatically, so I knew what the time now theoretically was, it just didn't feel like that.

I was expecting another depressingly quiet day at work, since it was still cold, but as the sun came out so did the customers.  They were wearing scarves, woolly hats and thermal gloves, and some vowed to return to buy more plants when it was warmer, but they did come, and they bought things. We had some big trolleys go through, and it was nice to see some familiar faces of regular customers, returning like swallows.

I thought on Tuesday that I saw one of them at the RHS show in Vincent Square, so as he was paying for his plants I ventured to ask whether he had a doppelganger or whether I had indeed seen him at the show.  It turned out that I had.  He divided his time between London and Suffolk and often went to the shows, though the RHS didn't run so many as they used to.  I said that I didn't often get to them, but it had so happened that I'd had a ticket for a lunchtime concert on Tuesday and went to see the flowers afterwards.  He turned out to be familiar with the London lunchtime concert scene as well as the flower show scene, and remarked that next time we should go for a drink.  This week was the first time in a decade I've seen him without his regular male companion, so we are on very safe ground with a shared enthusiasm for plants and classical music.

It was a pity that the electric bar heater in the staff room broke.  The manager came to tell me not to switch it on any more, since a shower of sparks had suddenly poured out of it while he was sitting drinking his mid-morning mug of tea.  You will be able to form an impression of the approximate age of the heater when I tell you that it has a fabric covered flex.  I hope the owners will get us a new one, hard times and terrible cash flow notwithstanding.  Otherwise we will have to do what we usually do, and fall back on whatever domestic appliance a member of staff is turfing out of their house to make room for something newer and shinier.  We have kept ourselves in kettles for years by that method.

Now that it is April our official working hours are eight until six, but at half past five the manager suggested that as it was so quiet we could all bunk off early, and while we were tilling up the owner came over the radio telling us not to hang around if there were no more customers, as it was so cold.  The last feature on the R4 PM programme before the weather forecast was about the travails of the garden centre industry and their suppliers.  I'm glad somebody's noticed.