from the Slade to Mexico

I went to London today, keen to catch Nash, Nevinson, Spencer, Gertler, Carrington, Bomberg: a Crisis of Brilliance, 1908 - 1922 at The Dulwich Picture Gallery.  As exhibition titles go it's not the snappiest, but it has reviewed well, and concerns the early work of those six artists, united by the fact that they were all students at The Slade, and were to various degrees friends.  It closes on 22 September, and we are on holiday next week, so if I didn't go this week I wasn't going to go at all.

I tried to persuade a friend to come with me a while back, but while she professed interest in the artists, and a desire to see the gallery which she had never visited, we failed to finalise a date, and then she said she couldn't leave her dog for the entire day.  It is an elderly dog, and not all that well, but I think that in truth she just wasn't that keen.  I'd have liked her to come, if she'd been up for it, but going alone has its definite compensations.  I don't have to worry about how far or fast the other person is willing or able to walk, or whether they are enjoying the pictures or secretly bored rigid.  There is no-one fret about the traffic and the glacial speed of the bus, or set off randomly in the wrong direction because other people are going that way, or because it is less crowded than the way we ought to be going, or demand to stop for tea when there is only enough time to see the exhibition before the gallery closes.  If the exhibition is dull or stupid, lunch is horrid and the trains are shot to pieces, it is only my problem, and I am not responsible for someone else's disastrous day.

The Slade before the Great War had its own way of doing things.  Tutors laid a great deal of emphasis on life drawing, and would rather that their students had not gone to see the exhibition of the still new Impressionists, which might corrupt their views.  The students did, of course.  I am all in favour of artists being able to draw, but it shows a sad lack of confidence to try and prevent them from being exposed to new ideas.

The Slade six met with mixed fortunes.  Nevinson was advised by his tutor in 1910 to give up ideas of being a professional artist, before shooting to fame as a war artist, though never again enjoying that level of success after the war.  He died in obscurity, as did Bomberg.  Carrington and Gertler committed suicide, while Paul Nash became a famous and successful landscape painter and official artist of the Second World War, and Stanley Spencer ended his days as Sir Stanley.  Death or glory. I wanted to go because I love Nash's landscapes, and admire his war art, and was curious to see some of his early works, and because I am intrigued by Spencer's mystical portrayals of Cookham.  And because I am curious about the whole Bloomsbury and bohemian strand of society in the 1920s and 1930s.

The only disappointment of that part of the trip was that the cafe at the gallery is under new management and no longer does bagels with smoked salmon.  I used to like those.

A morning trip to Dulwich combines surprisingly well with an afternoon in the West End, because of course once you are back at London Bridge you can hop straight on to the Jubilee line.  Since I was in London I thought I'd go and see the Royal Academy's exhibition Mexico: A Revolution in Art 1910-1940.  It closes on 29 September, so I thought that if I didn't go today I probably wouldn't go at all.  The art critics in the papers have been rather muted about this, apart from grumbles that there are no murals, apparently the most quintessential form of Mexican art from the first half of the last century.  Well, there wouldn't be.  There are photographs of people, buildings and objects, including a bullet-riddled corpse described as being the first casualty of election day, and there are paintings, but only one teeny tiny one by Frida Kahlo.  I really liked some of the photographs, the paintings not much so.  Quite a few of them were by overseas visiting artists rather than Mexicans, and it was striking how many captions ended with the words 'He (or she) never returned to Mexico'. DH Lawrence bobbed up everywhere today, since he had his portrait painted in Mexico, and was a close friend of Mark Gertler.

I walked back to Liverpool Street, and toyed with the idea of calling at the Guildhall Art Gallery, which has just opened a new show in which contemporary artists reinterpret Victorian aesthetics, which sounds great fun, but I decided that two exhibitions were as much as my brain could take in one day.  I felt a little stiff after the walk, proof that I've been pretty sedentary through the hot summer.  Once we're back from holiday it will be a new regime of activity and fitness, if it doesn't rain all the time.

making more plants

My cuttings of the perennial wallflower Erysimum 'Bowles Mauve' have rooted.  I'm pleased about that, for it is a great plant.  Mid purple flowers with the four petals characteristic of the cabbage family keep opening for months at a time on gradually elongating vertical stems, and are hugely attractive to bees and butterflies.  The foliage is an agreeable bluish green.  But it is not long lived, five years tops on free draining soil, and maybe just the one season on heavy soil or given a cold winter, and the flowers are sterile.  I knew that it was propagated from cuttings, and have joked a few times to customers in search of it that while the traditional method of propagation was cuttings, nowadays the usual method of getting more plants seems to be to go to a garden centre.

However, I was a guilty of that as anyone else, and had never previously tried my hand at cuttings. This summer I did, they rooted easily, and today I moved my four new plants into individual pots, reluctant to leave it until our return from holiday given the rate at which the tops were growing.  If they now keel over and die then I'll know I should have left them longer before disturbing them. Christopher Lloyd cautioned against pricking out things like hydrangea cuttings in the autumn, saying that it was safer to leave them until the spring when they were naturally starting back into growth, but 'Bowles Mauve' already seemed to be in full growth.

'Bowles Mauve' is named after EA Bowles of Myddleton House, who was born in 1865 and died just a week short of his ninetieth birthday.  He was a great and famous gardener, botanist, botanical artist and plant collector, who was awarded the RHS Victoria Medal of Honour, served on fifteen RHS committees, and was a Council member for thirty six years.  His wallflower holds the Award of Garden Merit.  And yet it may not be so old as I originally assumed it was.  Chosen at this year's Chelsea Flower Show to represent plant introductions between 1973 and 1982, it was first exhibited at Chelsea in 1982.

Most of my first batch of Penstemon cuttings rooted as well.  Those that failed were nearest to the glass of the greenhouse, caught too much sun, and wilted before they could root despite the protection of a plastic propagating case.  I went about making more penstemons quite systematically, buying one each of three varieties I liked in one litre pots, potting them on in the greenhouse into two litre pots to encourage them to grow, and using them as stock plants to provide cuttings.  Again, Penstemon are not the longest lived inhabitants of the borders, especially given a cold winter, though those with narrow leaves and slender flowers are hardier than the bigger and blowsier types.  Fortunately they are the ones I prefer, and I thought a ready supply of young plants to fill any gaps next year could be handy.

The perennial wallflower and the penstemons were both stuck into normal multi-purpose compost, the penstemons trimmed just below a leaf node and the wallflowers pulled off as side-shoots with a little heel of main stem,  all with a tiny dab of hormone rooting powder on their cut ends.  I bought the powder fresh this summer, since it is supposed to lose its potency with age, though the manufacturers very annoyingly do not put a best before date on the pot, and so I have no way of knowing if it was actually fresh powder, or if the stock had been sitting around in the garden centre since last year, or even longer.

The Teucrium and Sedum cuttings I took using the same method look hopeful, though I can't yet see any roots through the drainage holes of the pots, and am not going to disturb them yet.  I struggled in both cases to find non-flowering shoots to use as cuttings, so simply cut the flowers off.  One tray of determined Sedum cuttings made new ones from the leaf axils, which I have removed as well, to try and focus its mind on rooting.  I didn't use a plastic case for the Sedum, or my shrubby Salvia cuttings, for fear of them rotting in the moist air.

The Dianthus cuttings are not looking good, despite my best efforts to pull off pipings like I saw on Gardeners World.  Perhaps I can't get away with normal multi-purpose for those.  Salvia lavandulifolia seems undecided whether to live or not.  Pity, I'd like some more, having started with one from the plant centre to see how it went, and because they were expensive, only available in three litre pots at nearly ten pounds a pop.  I may not be the only person to experience iffy cuttings, since this year the manager never managed to source any and we didn't stock them.  Salvia lavandulifolia has much smaller leaves than the common culinary sage, which smell strongly of lavender when touched.

I was so pleased with my results that I took some more cuttings.  They may not root so readily now it is so much cooler, but it seems worth a try, since it's still only the first half of September.  I sowed some seeds of Primula florindae out of the bog bed while I was at it, as they seemed ripe and ready, and I had a feeling that primulas were much easier from fresh seed than dried.  Last year I left the seed heads to shed their load in situ, but got no primula seedlings at all, and most of my experiments with bought seed of any kind of primrose have drawn a blank, but it's worth a try.

rainy monday

What a difference four days make.  It has turned decidedly cold, so much so that I abandoned my Tilley hat in favour of my fleece beanie, while the woman who works in the office had to go home to get an extra layer.  That's comparatively easy for her, as she lives in the village.  If I forget anything it's a round trip of virtually an hour to go and get it, so I have to manage without.  I try to make sure I don't forget my work coat by keeping it in the car on the days when I'm not working, and in ten years I have only once forgotten my lunch and had to go and buy something in the village shop.

I felt the first light drops of rain fairly early on, as I carried on where I'd left off at the lupins, working my way through Myrtus, Nandina and Neillia.  By mid morning the spots had developed into proper, serious rain, and so I wasn't as upset as I'd have been otherwise to be left in charge of the tea room and tills, while the manager disappeared to do whatever it is that he does on Monday mornings.  My extreme antipathy to the idea of combining serving tea and cake with cleaning up pots of plants between cafe customers seems to have registered, and I was left in peace to read up on shrubs and FERA's latest leaflet on Phytophthera ramorum in between serving customers and washing up.  The washing up meant that after a while I had reasonably clean hands, although my trousers were another matter.

The owner is interviewing for someone to run the cafe and shop, and I heard her tell today's candidate that the manager and I couldn't operate the cappuccino machine, so I am cautiously optimistic on the tea room front.  It needs a welcoming, enthusiastic face permanently behind the counter to give customers an encouraging smile as they walk into the shop, not somebody hired for their plant knowledge who would patently rather be out in the plant centre, either looking after the plants or talking to customers about them.

My phone calls yesterday bore modest fruit.  Someone rang up and did want the two Pennisetum 'Hameln' I'd put aside for him in a spirit of some doubt, given he asked for them in May (it took me a while before the penny dropped that 'Hameln' was the German name for the city which we have anglicised as Hamelin.  Not such a bad mistake as an RAF driver my father came across during his national service, who drove a very long way across Germany looking for Cologne, leaving the signs to Koln far behind).  The second successful message was for someone who had been identified on the customer wish list by their surname only.  I wish that particular colleague wouldn't do that. Ringing up and having to say that you have a message for Bloggs feels crass.  Mr, Mrs, Miss, Doctor, The Reverend, Joe Bloggs, I don't mind which, whatever the customer is comfortable with, but not just Bloggs.  Today's customer turned out to be Lady so-an-so, which I didn't guess correctly in my phone message, but she was pleased to get her plant anyway.  She had the shrewd face and twinkle in the eye of someone who probably didn't take offence easily.

Someone rang from one of our suppliers wanting to apologise to the boss for sending an invoice for Hibiscus at £75 each instead of £7.50.  The boss wasn't answering his radio, so I got the full benefit of the apology and promised to pass it on.  The yellow book organiser rang to chivvy the owner because the deadline for inclusion in 2014 was fast approaching.  One of our regular elderly customers, who gives the impression of being terribly lonely (which of course puts people off) came in to ask if she could change a Buddleia she had bought which wasn't right for her garden, although she had lost the receipt.  One of the pea chicks died.  Sales were rather quiet, but the rain didn't help.

lavatera to lupinus

It's a mystery what makes people come out and shop for plants.  Yesterday was hectically busy, today dreadfully quiet.  There were a few light showers, but nothing more, and it's not as though there'd been a bad weather forecast to put people off.  There were no other major things going on, that I know of.  The A12 wasn't blocked.  I don't think it's been reported that scientists have discovered that gardening gives you cancer or Altzheimers.  But whatever the reason, they didn't come.  I'm not sure the cafe takings even covered the tea shop girl's wages, which is bad news for me, since the owner won't want her in tomorrow and I'll be stuck with teas.

The quiet gave me time to make some decent progress sweeping down most of a shrub bed.  I got from Lavatera to Lupinus, via Leptospermum, Lespedeza, Leucothoe, Leycesteria, Ligustrum and Lonicera.  The prize for the most derelict looking plant in a pot goes to Leycesteria, or pheasant berry.  Well grown in the garden this shrub is a delight, with smooth, glaucous green stems a little like bamboo, and pendant clusters of white flowers with red bracts, followed by red berries.  In a pot it forms a most wretched specimen.  The leaves scrunch up, then the small side shoots die back.  All I could do was pick off the worst of the brown leaves, since I didn't like to cut them right down without the manager's say so.  You are only supposed to remove a third of the stems at one go anyway.  I had one in my previous garden and cut it hard to the ground, thinking that I was doing the right thing.  It died.

The prize for the plant that's soddiest and most difficult to keep alive in a pot goes to Leptospermum.  They are bastards in pots, becoming root bound in no time.  If you over water them, they die, likewise if you under water them they die too.  Once planted they are not all that drought tolerant, despite coming mostly from Australia, which one thinks of as a hot, dry place.  I had one in the garden, which died to the ground a couple of times following droughts, only to shoot again from the roots.  Finally it died, the victim of a cold winter or one drought too many.  The fabled Manuka honey is gathered from the flowers of certain species of Leptospermum, though recent reports suggest that much of what is marketed as Manuka honey is in fact no such thing.

Lespedeza is nice.  It's a member of the pea family, which produces long arching shoots with mid green foliage that produce purple (rarely white) clusters of pea-like flowers in the autumn, and are generally killed by the winter.  Not to worry, clear them away as if it was a herbaceous plant and not a shrub, and it will start again in the spring.  You don't see Lespedeza very often, which is a shame, since they are very little trouble and burst forth into bloom at a useful time of year.  The RHS says that its one disadvantage is that it is late into leaf in the spring, but I can't say that has ever troubled me.

During my stints on the till I went through the list of plants we are supposed to be getting for customers, which were out of stock at the point when they asked.  I found several things that had been on the list for some months, and to judge from the appearance of the plants some of them had been in stock almost equally long.  I left some answerphone messages, but the customers I spoke to had all sourced the plants elsewhere in the meantime, though none were cross about being disturbed.  Other plants on the list I knew had come and gone since the customer left their details, without anyone making the connection.  The trouble is, there is no system for matching the list of wants to incoming stock, or to plants that we've potted up becoming rooted and ready for sale.  It depends on someone going through the list, and remembering that they've seen so-and-so in the plant centre, which is about as hit and miss as it sounds.  Though I was gratified to see yesterday that the owner has adopted my suggestion (made several months ago) that we should record voucher sales on pre-numbered sheets, so that it will not be possible for staff to re-use voucher numbers that have been allocated once already.

mists and mellow fruitfulness

Autumn is almost here.  If I were in any doubt, given the blood red hips on the Rosa glauca, and the generous crop of ripe crabs on the 'John Downie', I had confirmation this morning when my car was fogged up.  I got as far as the farmyard, and had to wait with the screen blower on maximum until it had made some peepholes in the misted windscreen, because with the low September sun in my eyes I couldn't see a thing.  An articulated lorry or a fleet of tractors could have been driving up to the farmyard, and I wouldn't have seen them.  Luckily the traffic was really light, and I was not late to work.

The autumn stock is arriving.  Container grown hedging yew has come in since the last time I was there, while all of the herbaceous peonies have disappeared from sale.  We might have sold them all in the last four days, but I presume they have been put away in the tunnel on The Other Side, to prevent them from getting too wet.  The manager's opening instructions for the weekend were all to do with watering, how we must not over-water things now that the weather was cooler (shame it wasn't cooler on Thursday).

The manager's list of jobs to do said to sweep and tidy the shrub beds, but also said that my colleague should treat the gravel paths with weedkiller if it wasn't too windy.  After he had walked around the edges of all the beds with the sprayer, I thought I did not fancy kneeling in wet weedkiller to tackle the shrubs, and that I would find something else to do until it had dried.  I weeded the irises and pulled dead leaves off them, one of those perennial tasks that always seems to need doing again as soon as you've done it.

The turkeys spent the morning hanging around the plant centre.  Seeing them side by side, it was quite clear which was the cock and which the hen.  She is large, but he is enormous.  He held his tail up in the display position some of the time, which made the difference even more obvious, and he has bigger and more elaborate wattles.  They were standing outside the back door to the shop when the tea shop girl arrived, and I saw her give them an anxious glance before venturing to approach the door.  Later on a small toddling child began to run at them, then realised how big they were, thought better of it, and sat down very abruptly at his father's feet.  I do get the impression that not everyone is entirely happy with the turkeys.  They are huge, and I can see that if you weren't comfortable around strange animals, two gigantic black birds with bald faces decorated with what look like old men's scrotums could be off-putting.  In fact they are as gentle as anything, and toddled away meekly each time I shooed them away from the back door of the shop.  They are presumably not daft, and have worked out that there is food in there.

Following the season of mists, the mellow fruitfulness came at lunchtime when I had a home grown apple and three figs from our 'Brown Turkey'.

cleaning

Today was a toss-up between cleaning the house, and going to catch Vermeer and Music at the National Gallery before it closes on Sunday.  The cleaning won.  Shame, I'd have liked to see the Vermeer, but sometimes there just isn't time to do everything, especially in a hot summer when every action seems to take twice as long and require twice the effort, and I dread the trains.  I must try and get to Dulwich before we go away, to see the early twentieth century British artists, Nash, Nevinson, Spencer et al, as they only run until 22 September, if the cleaning is under control by the middle of the week.

I made quite good progress this time on the hall, which missed out last time.  I washed the pottery on the hall dresser, and wiped the glass partitions, and scrubbed the floor, and took everything off the hall table and wiped that, and washed the door stops.  I wiped the ceiling and the wall where snails had walked across them, leaving slime trails, and wondered whether other people had snails walking up their walls, and what happened if you had wallpaper.  I fitted a new light bulb to replace one that went ages ago, but hasn't seemed to matter while the evenings were so light, and discovered that we were running out of 60W bayonet fitting light bulbs.  I put down clean newspaper under the cats' dishes (thank you Liz) on the clean floor, and set the blankets from the cats' baskets to wash, and afterwards the Systems Administrator showed me how to check the filter on the washing machine.

I progressed to the downstairs sitting room or hall extension, depending on how you look at it, and removed a broken shoelace the System Administrator left on the table in front of the TV some weeks ago, and separated out the one booklet from Sky which we needed to keep, because it contained vital instructions, from the three other booklets that were merely marketing gumph and could go in the bin.  I emptied the waste paper baskets, and replaced the plastic light pull in the cupboard with a wooden one which had been sitting on my dressing table for about two years.  I polished my wooden shaker sewing and jewellery boxes, both slightly rain spotted since the window got left open in a storm, and gave my little box of earrings a shine for good measure.  The SA managed to find some Brasso in the workshop, and I polished the pair of brass candlesticks we bought in the Netherlands on a sailing holiday.

I banished the SA's trouser press from the bedroom, since I can't see the SA ever pressing another pair of trousers, having left office life.  A vintage stereo stack that got relegated to the bedroom some years ago was sent in turn to the garage.  Technology has rendered it virtually obsolescent, now we both have iPods and portable digital radios, so we almost never used it.  The thing was a dust magnet, and if I jig the furniture round a little I can make room for a small chest of drawers, though a woman I spoke to in the second hand furniture shop round the corner from the poultry feed merchant said that competition for small chests was fierce.  In the meantime the table that did hold the stereo makes a useful home for my pile of as-yet unread books.  I had better check with the SA before finally disposing of the trouser press, otherwise a friend thought she had found a home for it with a local charity.  I'm not sure anyone would want the stereo.

I moved a rug which was forever rucking up and threatening to trip me on the way to the loo at night, and put it in front of my dressing table where it might not ruck up, and would hide the dents in the carpet from the trouser press, and the grubby patch by my dressing table stool, which I am afraid is a legacy of my rubbing beeswax hand cream into my feet every morning, and found a bath mat on which to anoint my feet in future.  It is a shame about the carpet, but I haven't had cracked heels in years.  I would rather like the SA to replace the carpet with oak planks, but the SA was very downbeat about how we would get the planks round the corner at the top of the stairs, and it isn't honestly worth spending the money.

The SA offered to do the vacuuming, and I said that was very kind, although the SA did not have to, since my efforts were not intended to guilt-trip anybody else into doing anything.  The SA vacuumed, then I had to vacuum again where the rug had been, as a fair amount of debris, mostly plant-based, had accumulated underneath.

I wiped the downstairs cloak room, and treated the obstinate lime stains with some vile chemical that dissolves them, and changed the hand towel, and the one in the kitchen.  I washed the kitchen floor, having remembered to vacuum it before lunch so that I could listen to the Radio 5 Live film programme in peace after lunch.

I don't like cleaning.

to the lighthouse

We went to Orford Ness today, our second visit.  We visited this time last year, thought it was extraordinary, and suggested to friends that they might like it.  Thursday 5 September ended up being pencilled into the diary, subject to weather and random events, as fitting in with everybody's holidays and other commitments.  And I thought it wouldn't be so hot by September.  There is no shade on the Ness, except in those disused military buildings you are allowed to enter.

You reach the Ness by National Trust ferry.  It runs every twenty minutes at this time of year, with a break for lunch, and holds a maximum of a dozen people including the ferryman, which acts as a natural cap on the number of visitors.  In October it drops back to Saturdays only, another reason to go in September given that I work every other Saturday.  What happens in high season if more than thirty three would-be visitors have arrived in the hour I don't know.  Does the ferryman make an extra trip, or are some unlucky tourists told they'll have to content themselves with the delights of Orford?

The experience of buying the ferry tickets (half price to NT members) was just plain odd.  I thought it was peculiar when the woman behind the counter asked the two men ahead of us in the queue whether they were friends.  As opposed to what?  Complete strangers who had simply fallen to chatting in the (slow moving) queue?  Civil partners?  (I think she meant to ask whether they were travelling together and wished to be on the same ferry sailing).  They thought it was odd too, as they replied in puzzled voices that they were brothers.  You have to give the surname of someone in your party when you buy your ferry ticket, as your docket forms part of the National Trust system for ensuring that nobody is left behind on the Ness overnight, and the ticket lady then commented on their surname, and how there was somebody with that name in the village.

It got to our turn.  The Systems Administrator and I both put our membership cards down on the counter and asked for four tickets, two members and two not.  The ticket lady looked at our cards, and demanded to know how it was that Mr unusual-name and Mrs unusual-name had different renewal dates for their membership.  We were nonplussed, while one of our friends missed it because by that stage he had fled from the room.  What are you supposed to say?  The tickets are forgeries, but we are very careless.  We are brother and sister.  It's terribly romantic, we only got married last week and haven't got round to synchronising our memberships yet.  We have been married for nearly thirty years but can't be arsed to synchronise our memberships.  You should be grateful, the National Trust gets more money that way.

The Ness was looking as marvellous as I remembered it.  The day was hazy, the outline of the lighthouse slightly blurred seen from the river.  As our boat load of visitors began to fan out from the landing stage, a hare broke cover and ran briskly up the road away from us, before ducking back into the long grass.  Heading for the lighthouse, metalled road and waving grass with scrapes for water birds gave way to shingle scooped into long ridges topped with sea campion and lichen, and studded with lumps of concrete and shattered metal.  Much of the unexploded ordnance on the Ness has been cleared since the military stopped using it in 1987, but not all.  You are told to keep to the marked paths, and in truth I can't think many people feel the urge to stray.  The threat of unexploded bombs is of course a great way of protecting the rare shingle flora from the damage that tramping feet would do.

We took the red path, which led us past the lighthouse, now decommissioned and fated to fall into the North Sea in a few decades, and along the beach, then back via some of the bomb testing buildings.  Photography of derelict industrial buildings has become fashionable in the past few years, so much so that the term ruin porn has been coined for it (I hesitated a moment before googling to check that term, in case something very unsavoury came up, but it was all bona fide to do with photographing decayed buildings, at least on the first page).  It is faintly irritating when something you have always liked becomes trendy, but I've long had a soft spot for atmospheric industrial decay, and haunting reminders of the cold war.  The ruins on Orford Ness are extremely atmospheric.

Unfortunately signs began to appear on the walk back to the landing stage that all was not well with the SA, who had gone very quiet, and begun to pour quite alarmingly with sweat.  The retreat out of the sun into the shade of a pub did not do the trick, nor did the pint of chilled lager (not the SA's usual tipple), and after two mouthfuls of lunch the SA had to go and sit in the car with the air conditioning full on, to cool down.  I knew the SA was not good in hot weather, but have never seen things that bad.

The pub was rather chaotic.  A mystery electrical fault made the lights go out every few minutes, so half the staff were wandering about playing hunt the fault, and the stress had got to them.  The sweet girl behind the bar when we arrived had forgotten one of the specials, her young colleague charged me for a pint when serving me a half, and was then incapable of either calculating the right change, or correcting the till error, the hot food arrived before the cold and all of it arrived before the cutlery.  They were very nice about putting the SA's uneaten lunch in a little box (the ploughman's lunches were gratuitously enormous.  I ate as much of my cheese as I could, and wrapped the rest in my paper napkin as it seemed a waste to leave it.  I have just weighed it and it tips the scales at four and three quarter ounces).

The cool of the air con revived the SA to the point of being able to drive, which was just as well since none of the rest of us know how to drive the jaguar or are insured to do so.  Once safely home the SA sat in the shade and drank a great deal of water, and began to look much better.  The car thermometer peaked at thirty two degrees C on the way back.  So it was a mixed day out, good in parts, shame about the weather.  You don't reckon on being hit by incipient heatstroke on the Suffolk coast in September.

regeneration

The Hydrangea paniculata 'Limelight' that I cut down hard in March has responded magnificently. Any doubts I had about whether it was indeed 'Limelight' were quashed the moment the flowers opened fully in a beautiful, vivid shade of lime green.  And what flowers.  The domed panicles are huge, much larger than in the last couple of years and pre-pruning.  Not all hydrangeas flower on the current year's growth, and the spring chop only works for those that do, but for 'Limelight', and I presume the other paniculatas, fairly hard spring pruning seems the way ahead.  The flowers fade to white after a few days, so I was not entirely mad to wonder whether I had the real article. Looking at it now, you wouldn't know.

The other success is with my B&Q bargain cycad.  It lives in the conservatory, and I've had it for ages.  One year they had a great stock of cycads, nice big ones, which I eyed covetously, but was reluctant to pay whatever large sum it was that B&Q were asking for them.  Suddenly the last few were reduced.  There was nothing at all wrong with them, it was simply that the management had decided that that was enough cycads, Ed.  I brought my bargain home in triumph, and for several years it lived happily in the dimmest corner of the conservatory, and threw out two or three new rows of leaves.  I preened myself about that, having read that they were not the easiest plants to keep, and could easily stop growing.

Pride cometh before a fall, and self-congratulation in gardening is generally fatal.  I reorganised the conservatory at some point, and moved the cycad to the sunnier side of the room.  It never thrived, and the ends of each leathery leaf on its long fronds went brown.  I didn't seem to be able to get the watering regime right, and began to wonder if it disliked that much light, though given they grow outdoors in warmer areas that seemed unlikely.  Even so, I moved it back to the corner where it used to be happy, trimmed off the brown ends, which gave the leaves a ragged appearance, and cut off the outer rings of leaves as they yellowed and died, until the cycad was down to only one circle of foliage perched on top of its scaly, pineapple-like brown body.  Last year it sent up a single leaf, which promptly went brown at the ends.

I thought the cycad was doomed, consoling myself with the fact that I'd read they were difficult to grow.  I turfed it out of its pot when I was tidying the conservatory a few weeks ago, intending to consign it to the bonfire.  The compost was filled with dead roots, but no signs of vine weevil.  I cleared away the old compost and the roots, intending to learn what I could from its demise, and found a few white, fat, healthy roots, only a few centimetres long, emerging from the chunky central core.

I repotted the cycad in a pot barely large enough to hold the base of the trunk, one which looked ridiculously small underneath the remaining single ring of tattered leaves, and left it in what used to be its favourite corner.  I only watered it when the compost looked dry.  As the weeks passed I thought there was a sort of incipient tuft on top of the body, and probed gently with my fingertips for any hint of green.  The incipient tuft developed into a tiny topknot a couple of centimetres tall. When I went down to water the conservatory today, the tuft had shot up and is fully fifteen centimetres high, the leaves still held tightly together in a vertical column, each with serrated edges where the leaflets will develop, like the snouts of tiny alligators stuck in the air.

I think that's cracked it.  Now it has come back into growth, with any luck it will continue.  At some point I must have over-watered it so that most of its root system rotted, and after that it was stuck sitting in more compost than it could use, and probably over-wet at times.  What I must do now is pot it on very cautiously, maybe up one pot size next spring.  And not move it around the conservatory.

In the garden I am pruning the box hedge, quite hard.  By tradition I should have done that on Derby Day, and it has been on my list of things to do since then.  I just haven't had time to do it.

Addendum  'Requiem for the Croppies' is a cracking poem, which I forgot about yesterday.  That's one more in the bag for Heaney.

death of a poet

I came downstairs this morning and switched on the radio to hear a series of voices on the Today programme being nice about someone in the tone of voice that told me that somebody had died, but I couldn't work out who it was.  They didn't say at the end of the feature, either, but went straight on into Thought for the Day, and I had to check on the BBC website.  Veteran broadcaster David Jacobs, 87.  I didn't know him at all.  Still, fair enough, the BBC honouring one of their own.

I was sorry the other day when I heard that Seamus Heaney had died.  I like Seamus Heaney.  I actually had my copy of his translation of Beowulf by the bed at the time.  I was rather shocked to read in yesterday's Telegraph Sean Thomas' iconoclastic view that Seamus Heaney wasn't that good, and on the very day of his funeral too.  Who is Sean Thomas, anyway?  I haven't heard of him any more than I have heard of David Jacobs, and I don't suppose he has translated Beowulf. Sean Thomas compared Heaney unfavourably to Philip Larkin and threw out the question, how much Heaney can you remember?  Everyone knows some Larkin, if only 'They f***k you up, your mum and dad', but Heaney?

That was the killer.  I thought hard, and could remember the concluding line of one poem 'I heard the steel stop in the bone of the brow'.  That certainly prefigures the rhythmic structure and internal rhyme scheme of Beowulf.  I recalled one I liked about freeing a frozen pump handle, and girls bathing in Galway (was it Galway?), 'So Venus comes, matter of fact', but I couldn't honestly remember very much.

I love Larkin.  I even have the whole of a four line poem from The North Ship indented into a sort of flattened terracotta egg, by the entrance to the alder wood:

This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.

Out of curiosity I looked to see what books I had by them, and they came in even at two slim volumes each.  The very first page of Door into the Dark has a school plate stuck to it with my name, 'A' level prize, and both of the Larkins have my maiden name written on the front page, which dates them.  I must have had them all for thirty years or more, and still haven't completed the set.  As I leafed through the pages I began to think that the iconoclastic Mr Thomas was right.  I could recite the whole of 'This be the Verse', beyond the famous first line, which is more than I can do for any of Heaney's poems, and overall more of Larkin has stuck.  The greenness of newly budded trees is a kind of grief, looking at them, and when I have omitted to write up my gardening diary and am struggling to recall what exactly I was doing last Friday, my internal soundtrack intones 'Forget What Did', Stopping the diary was a stun to memory.  Hearing news of military cutbacks and whether we are to intervene or not in the latest overseas troubles I find myself thinking that next year we are to bring the soldiers back for lack of money.  Places they guarded and kept orderly must guard themselves.  And so on and so on.  There are times when I try not to think about 'The Old Fools', because it is too bleak and terrifying.

I suppose Larkin made the error of being a librarian (boring) at the University of Hull (v. boring), and liking jazz (louche and pretentious).  And he was very close to Kinsley Amis (unpleasant to his wives and generally rackety) and acquired a reputation for misanthropy (though he was a good friend to Barbara Pym).  I haven't read his collected letters or any biography, and am not entirely sure I want to know.  I read about the lives of Bruce Chatwin and Laurie Lee on the strength of liking their work, and was disillusioned in both cases.

The iconoclastic Mr Thomas predicts that Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, will be forgotten within fifteen years.  It's a bold claim.  Still, when did you last settle down with a novel by Doris Lessing (2007) or Nadine Gordimer (1991).  And hands up who has heard of Sinclair Lewis?

the reluctant tea lady

There were only two of us in today to cover the plant centre, me and the manager.  Both gardeners were in, instructed by the boss to do shifts on the hedge cutter so that all the yew will be cut by Thursday when the tamoxifen collectors come for the clippings.  I presume the hedge trimmer is too heavy and the vibrations too much for anyone to use it solidly for three days running.  The immensely dignified and perennially good natured woman from the village, who lives in what must be England's most upmarket commune, made it, but while she will help with the watering first thing, she does not do tills or telephones.  My absent colleague who was due to leave at the end of the month was not in, and by now I have given up expecting her.

As we went out to start on the watering the manager said he supposed that meant we were doing the tea room again.  I supposed it did, too.  He appeared just before ten carrying a lemon drizzle cake and saying that it looked like that and scones, since he didn't think we could serve the rest of the Victoria sponge.  He showed the sponge to me, and the top had slid right off the bottom half.  I said we could definitely not serve the Victoria sponge to the public, but it made its way to the staff room, and by close of play half of it had been eaten.  He put a notice on the cappucino machine saying Out of Order, which it was in the sense that neither of us knew how to use it.  I ended up having to make several pots of tea and cafetieres of coffee, telling customers politely but firmly that those were the only things I knew how to do, but I was mightily relieved when the phone rang mid-morning and it was one of the tea shop girls saying she could come in at noon.

The manager said that interviews for someone to do the tea room and shop had started.  In the meantime I suppose I should be glad that nobody has suggested training me to use the cappucino machine, otherwise I would be afraid that my tenure as tea lady was intended to be permanent.  In fact, if I were paid to read Graham Stuart Thomas' dictionary of shrubs and climbers in between doling out the odd pot, that wouldn't be a bad job, especially on wet days.  Not as good as a holiday job my uncle had in his student days, when he was paid to sit in a van.  He had a full driving licence, the delivery driver hadn't and required nominal supervision.  My uncle sat in the passenger seat swotting up on physics while the van driver, duly supervised, did the deliveries.  However, the tea shop girl was not allowed to get away with studying her sixth form subjects but was set to work wiping the sacks of compost in front of the shop.

Things got rather frantic just before lunch, and I don't think the manager made it through a meal break without being interrupted, but we coped.  Things are quiet, partly because the end of summer always is, and partly because the soil is so dry that it is not good planting weather.  Once we get some rain, and people get back from their holidays, we won't be able to do it with two, not if trade rises again to the level the owners would like it to be.

film with subtitles

I went along this afternoon to support the Village Film Festival in Dedham.  I know a couple of the organisers, and it seemed like a good idea when I booked the tickets.  Dedham is a pretty village, and I couldn't see the Systems Administrator settling down on a Friday evening to enjoy a French-Belgian film based on the true story of a French working class woman who became a painter, with subtitles.

I tried to persuade a couple of friends to come, but without success.  One was on holiday, while the other hummed and hawed about it, and suggested I might like to go to a music festival instead. The music festival was last weekend, not this, and tickets cost forty pounds, not four, so I left it with her.  I don't like other people trying to hustle me into doing things I don't really want to do, so I wasn't going to chivvy her, and since there was no booking fee and seats weren't reserved, she was at liberty to join me if she wished.  She said she did, then last week sent an apologetic text saying that she'd just tried to get a ticket and it was sold out.  I think if she'd really wanted to go she'd have tried to book earlier.  For my part, I am perfectly happy to get extra tickets when I'm booking mine, but I'm not holding back while the other person makes their mind up until the show sells out without me.

The venue was a small, picturesque barn next to the playing fields, now used for community purposes.  The seats were not very comfortable, and I was glad I'd followed the advice on the website to take a cushion.  The barn only held thirty chairs, so it promised to be an intimate viewing experience, but there was in fact a vacant row behind me.  Still, who knows.  Perhaps some film festival goers had booked their tickets by the yard in advance, and then when the crunch came the prospect of another pint in the Sun Inn or a leisurely coffee after their lunch outweighed the attractions of French-Belgian culture.

The film was Seraphine.  I should have told you that before.  It stars a Belgian comedienne, actress and film director (whom I had never heard of) and a German actor and musician (ditto).  It won the Cesar Award for Best Film in 2009 (sorry, I still haven't discovered how to do accents.  There should be an acute over the e of Cesar and the first e of Seraphine).  It's a good film.  I'm glad I saw it. Whether it is a better film than David Cronenberg's 2011 A Dangerous Method I am not honestly sure.  There is less spanking, and the run time is stretched out to two hours to allow for all those mood shots of the French countryside and stone streets.  The barn was not the ideal viewing space because with no rake the bottom of the screen was obscured about three quarters of the way across to the right by the back of somebody else's head.  This was not merely aesthetically annoying, but got in the way of the subtitles.

Perhaps I am being unfairly lukewarm about Seraphine because a headache that's been brewing for a couple of days got worse as the film went on.  After all, I was less than enthusiastic about Hyde Hall as well.  There's nothing like a headache for taking the gloss off experiences.  I had got a ticket for the five o'clock showing of a documentary about the photojournalist Don McCullin, but decided to write the four quid for that off as collateral damage of the headache, and go home at the end of Seraphine before it could get any worse.

autumn feeding

The bees had taken down their sugar syrup in twenty four hours, when I went to check on them after breakfast.  The feeders were empty, and I brought them back to the kitchen to refill them.  There are so many wasps around now, I don't want to risk pouring out syrup in the apiary.  They were particularly interested in the back of one hive, and when I looked more closely I saw that I hadn't quite lined up the eke with the crown board beneath, and there was an almost-wasp sized hole, with the face of a guard bee on the far side of it.  I carefully shifted the eke by a centimetre to close the gap.

An eke is an empty box that you put on top of the brood box, when you are feeding using bucket feeders, to support the roof.  If you don't have one, the roof won't even make contact with the rest of the beehive, but will be left wobbling around on top of the plastic bucket.  I have used spare brood boxes in the past, but don't always have that much unused equipment.  A couple of years ago the Systems Administrator made me some extra boxes out of recycled decking, that are pretty much the same size as the brood box.  They wouldn't do as part of the permanent beehive with frames of comb in, as that has to be accurately sized down to the last couple of millimetres, to allow the bees to move freely within the hive without encouraging them to build random bits of comb in the spaces they consider unacceptably large, while if it is too small you risk rolling and crushing bees trying to get the frames out.  But they are perfect for feeding.

I made more syrup yesterday, to give it time to cool down for today.  The trouble is, the stock pot does not hold nearly enough.  Yesterday I pressed the pasta saucepan into service as well.  The jam pan would hold more, but doesn't have a lid, and leaving an uncovered pan of syrup lying around would be asking for trouble with all the wasps.  There were never fewer than six buzzing around the kitchen as I made up another batch of syrup, but they were not at all aggressive.  I should not tempt fate, since I'll probably be stung tomorrow, but it seems to me that they aren't, on the whole.  If you don't flap and swat at them, they seem happy to ignore you, and just buzz around looking for anything sweet.  It is still a nuisance, having endless bags of sugar in the kitchen, which always seem to leak a few grains, and pans of sugar syrup, which always drips, and the wasps, and I can see the appeal of buying my syrup ready-made, if I knew where to get any locally.

Apparently earlier in the season when they are raising young the adult wasps feed on a sugary excretion produced by the larvae.  That seems quite odd, viewed from a human perspective, since you could argue about whether they are tending their young or farming them  The adult wasps only start attacking fruit, beehives, and anywhere else they can find sweet stuff late in the summer when the queen wasp has stopped laying and there are no more larvae to tend (or farm).  They feed the larvae on flesh, a key difference between wasps and bees.

I have to go on offering the bees syrup until they won't move any more down into the hive.  This could take some time.

new and improved

The Systems Administrator ordered the new telephones, but I got the job of setting them up.  The SA said that if I did it then I'd know how they worked, which is true.  I set the last ones up, and they were among the few items of technology in the house that I was confident of working.  Indeed, I used to have to explain the incoming call register to the SA, which was a rare role reversal, along with my comparative mastery of the washing machine.  Otherwise, the integrated blue ray TV, the old flat screen TV with Sky box (which the SA bought years ago to convalesce in front of after knee surgery), the setting for the boiler (which it is difficult not to accidentally rotate while cleaning the kitchen), the timer for the AGA, the other timer for the central heating, and what to do when broadband goes down, my laptop crashes, or the printer won't print, are all more or less baffling.

The base station and charger for the two new phones both come with ridiculously long cords.  I dislike power cables and their capacity to wrap themselves around everything.  It's one of the main reasons why I loathe vacuuming, although I will happily spend hours painstakingly unwinding the stems of clematis leaves that have fastened themselves in the wrong place.  It took quite a long time to extract the old phones, as their cords seemed randomly wound round the flexes to various reading lights plus the cable to the Sky box. I dislodged disheartening quantities of cat fur in the process poking around behind the furniture in the hall, and had to cut through the electrical tape holding the cables from the old base station into a neat bundle.  The cord from the new phone is still a straggling mess, because I didn't have any tape to redo it.

The new phones have one very useful extra feature, as you can set them to send international and number withheld calls straight to answer phone.  If it is a real person calling, like the broker who invited the SA to the retirement dinner the other week from a withheld office number, they can still leave a message, as the broker did, simply because we were both out when he rang.  Cold callers with dodgy sales pitches probably won't bother.  It is annoying in the middle of cooking to have quickly washed your hands and rushed out to answer the phone, or galloped across the front garden to get there in time, only to find it is somebody with a spurious line about compensation for PPI mis-selling.

The other improvement is that now the phones share their contacts list, so I only had to type it in once.  With the old phones I had to enter it separately into each handset.  Our landline contacts list is short, since we are both more email and text people.  Apart from our relatives it has more of my friends in than the SA's, because several of them do call from time to time about beekeeping business, while the SA seldom bothers to even write people's landline numbers in our phone book. Going through the phone book is a thought-provoking process, normally experienced once a year when doing the Christmas cards.  There are some new names, people I've met through the music society, like, and have started to see independently of the concerts and committee meetings. That's encouraging, but  the former colleague who died three years after her cancer diagnosis is depressing, as is the current colleague who has vanished without leaving any contact details.  One friendship failed to develop, and a few names from my City days have reduced to such nominal presences in my life that they probably don't justify a stamp, come this Christmas.

The new phone has already intercepted one international call.  I was disappointed that it did it while we were out, so we didn't hear it.  The SA objected that the whole point was that I wouldn't hear it anyway, but that's not what I meant.  I wanted to have been in the room at the time I subsequently saw the call had been, so that I knew it hadn't rung then, like Ivor Cutler demanding to know who was not knocking at his door.

All I have to do now is set up our greeting on the answer machine.  I've put off doing it, because I always dislike hearing my own voice, too much like a cross between Mrs Thatcher and Fergie, while I currently have either hay fever or a slight cold, which has made it even huskier and more nasal than usual.

Addendum  I suppose the real question is why we still want a landline.  Age.  Habit.  Because it is the number in the telephone directory.  The one that club organisers wanting a lecture on woodland conservation or gardening use.  The public number available to anybody, unlike our mobile numbers, which are private.  In case the mobile signal is bad.  For long calls (when your grandfather died of a brain tumour it makes you cautious about putting radiation sources close to your head for too long). But mainly because we both grew up in the days when houses had one telephone fixed to the wall, in the hall, and the idea that a proper house has a telephone number attached to it is irredeemably rooted in both of our minds.  Under-thirties probably won't understand.

honey jars and a garden

This morning I drove down to Stock, south of Chelmsford, to collect a gross of honey jars.  The Essex Beekeepers organise a county-wide bulk purchase, for orders placed by mid-August, with a two day window in which to go and get them from the central drop-off point, a shed on a turkey farm.  It felt slightly strange driving down the farm lane, guided by the odd cryptic notice with a little arrow and Jars hand-written on it.  The shed was vast and cavernous, though empty of turkeys, with brown cardboard boxes piled up down both sides, and I could almost pretend I had entered a Guy Ritchie film, apart from the fact that I recognised one of the organisers from the annual conference as a many times honey prize winner, while the other had a round, kindly face and did not look a bit like Vinny Jones.  They lifted my boxes into my car for me, saying that they were very heavy, though when I unloaded them at the other end they turned out to weigh less than a full super of honey.  Their really hard work had come yesterday, when they had to take delivery of twenty pallets of boxes and break them all down, removing the plastic wrapping, checking for breakages, matching different sizes of jar and lid type to who had ordered what, and writing names on them.

It takes the best part of an hour to drive to Stock from this side of Colchester, and around eight quid's worth of petrol in my car, give or take.  It is still worth it.  Honey jars from the beekeeping catalogues are phenomenally expensive.  Thorne, one of the biggest suppliers, charge £78.73 including delivery for a gross of one pound jars with metal lids, versus the Essex Beekeepers at £35.35 for delivery to central Essex.  That's a decent saving, even allowing for the petrol and charging my time at the rate I would earn doing an extra couple of hours in the plant centre instead of driving up and down the A12.  (And you can see why, at twenty-five pence per jar ex-delivery, beekeepers get so irritated at the idea of them being limited to single use).

As I arrived I passed the chairman of my local division, just leaving.  He was immensely embarrassed that he was collecting jars on behalf of several other people and not me, but I assured him that if I'd wanted someone else to pick them up, I'd have asked around.  As it was I'd been planning to combine the trip with a visit to Hyde Hall.  I haven't been there for years, and was curious to see what they'd been doing in my absence.

It seemed further away from the A12 than I remembered it from my first visit, and when I finally arrived and looked at my map I saw the reason for that, as the official brown signposted route now takes you down the A130 Southend road  virtually to Battlesbridge, before sending you east along another main road, and only then sending you back north to enter the garden from the eastern side. The car park has been relocated so that it is now screened from the garden, and there is a big new entrance with cafe and shop since I last visited.  The cafe smelt powerfully of cooking, not in an entirely good way, and I took my latte outside and sat under an umbrella, considering the entrance planting.  Rivers of echinacea, grass and gaura, leading to clipped cylinders (or possibly square columns) of Quercus ilex, still rather immature, and thin in some places while whiskery in others. So far, so conventional early twenty-first century design, a sort of sub-Scampston, sub-Tom Stuart-Smith.

I still don't warm to Hyde Hall.  I have been there a few times, and never warmed to it, which is probably why I haven't been oftener.  Today it took ages to get in, as while all I needed to do was show my membership card, the people ahead of me in the queue weren't members, and both members of staff on the ticket desk were plugging the benefits of membership to them at great length.  Behind them two volunteers stood, not obviously doing anything, and I thought one of them could usefully have manned the RHS members desk, which was closed, and operated fast track admissions.

The RHS have made a lot of changes.  The Australian and New Zealand garden has been substantially replanted following losses in the three bad winters, and while all neatly mulched with dark stone is still very much a work in progress.  Planting in long strips was very much in evidence. That's extremely turn of the century.  Think of Chelsea show gardens from a few years back, or the plantings outside expensive City offices.

I was keen to see the dry garden, to garner ideas for my own.  It looks very fine, with great clumps of Perovskia, Parahebe, Eryngium, and the usual familiar palette of drought tolerant plants, topped off with a truly lavish quantity of pebbles and shingle, and some nice driftwood sculptures, as well as some less nice metal ones, yours for large amounts of money.  It is on a windswept hillside, the converse of good views out across the countryside being the scope for wind damage within a garden.  I almost liked it, but something didn't ring true, and my guess it was the soil.  If I'd dug down below the pebbles I bet I'd have found Essex clay.  There is no way that Perovskia grows to those luxuriant heights in my garden, or the Chatto gravel garden.  Hyde Hall is in a low rainfall area, and clay does not necessarily hold much water in summer in a form available for plant growth. It is a bona fide dry garden, but I felt faintly uneasy at the mismatch between the surface image of arid stoniness, and the ground conditions I imagined beneath.  If someone from the RHS wants to put me right and say no, those stones and pebbles really do run twenty feet deep and are indicative of the conditions the plants are living in then I apologise now, but I don't think they do.

A hollowed out arena in the side of the hill, that was a building site of raw gabions on my last visit, is now planted up with moisture loving plants like hostas, plus tree ferns.  The paths are designed as wooden duck boards, and while you can see evidence of irrigation systems if you look carefully, the overall effect is convincing.  I liked that bit, even though I'd missed many of the flowers.  The original garden at the top of the hill, dating from when Hyde Hall was a private home and before the RHS, retains its traditional mid twentieth century air, with ponds, clipped yew, roses (flowering much better than mine), a small sunken garden, some nice trees, and some rather well done sub-tropical bedding, including several truly enormous terracotta pots holding tender plants.

It is a popular garden.  There were lots of cars in the car park, and many people in the garden, including lots of children.  It is doing a good job.  I just don't like it.  Late August is not the easiest time of the year, but even so.  They still haven't solved the original problems of the layout at the core of the garden, merely grafted outer layers on to it, and it has the atmosphere of a garden owned and managed by a corporation.  It is correct, tidy, educational, but soulless.  Oh well, I was almost passing by anyway.

who knows where the time goes

I gave the Systems Administrator a lift to the station this morning, since the SA was planning to spend the day at the cricket before going to a retirement dinner for an old broking contact, a charismatic Scot fondly known among some of his friends as the large chairman of a medium sized public company.  Driving home from the station after a City retirement dinner didn't seem like a good idea, and anyway, I needed to go out to go to the bank, after last week's failed attempt.  It was a nasty crash, last Friday's accident.  A nine month old baby was killed, and her mother is in hospital with serious injuries.

It's amazing how all the little jobs add up to a full morning's worth.  Going to the bank is not such a big deal, but driving there, and waiting while the cashier counts the money, and popping into the greengrocer's to buy a sweetcorn cob for lunch, and driving home, starts eating into the morning. Then, while I thought I'd mostly finished the honey extracting, the odd tidying up and finishing off mounts up.  I had to pot up the honey that dripped off the cappings overnight, about two thirds of a jar, no good for sale or as a gift but certainly fit to cook with.  Or pour on yogurt.  People pay a premium for cut comb honey, so why be sniffy about honey which has a little bit of broken wax mixed up with it?  After bagging up the cappings in case I ever decide to melt them and make a candle, that left the colander, the bowl, the spoon, and the jam funnel to wash.

The two jars of honey I jarred up yesterday when I was extracting, so that I emptied a bucket and could use it again, had begun to crystallise slightly in the bucket, and I'd left them on the edge of the cool side of the Aga to liquefy overnight.  They needed labelling, which meant getting out and then putting away the box of labels again.  The extractor needed reassembling, a slightly fiddly task getting all the bits to line up, and carrying upstairs.  All little jobs, but adding up to a surprising amount of time for something you thought you'd basically finished yesterday.

I need to start feeding the bees so made some sugar syrup, two pounds of cane sugar per pint of water for autumn feeding.  You end up needing gallons of the stuff, but in a domestic kitchen you can't make it all at once.  Experience has taught me to measure out each two pounds of sugar and pint of water, then tip one after the other into the stock pot, and repeat until the pot is as full as I can manage.  Without a system it is only too easy to chuck another pint of water into the mix, then be left trying to remember whether you have already added the sugar for that one.  You can't dissolve a sugar solution that strong at room temperature, but have to heat it gently and stir it from time to time.  One of the bags of sugar was leaking slightly from a corner, which meant more wiping up.

Then I had to write out cheques for everyone who had sold produce at the wildlife fair, and thought I'd better prepare a Treasurer's report for the committee.  The cheque writing and report ran into a minor and ridiculous snag, in the form a problem with reimbursements for raffle prizes.  The person who runs the raffle had been religiously, albeit intermittently, giving me extracts from her supermarket receipts, showing what she paid for the bottle of wine (not enough to buy a decent bottle, but it is a fund raising exercise).  I had been equally religiously sticking these into my accounts file.  I now know that if you sellotape over a printed Sainsbury's receipt, the glue on the tape dissolves the print on the receipt, and all the little slivers of paper were completely illegible.

The bank lets me view the accounts on line, after going through what seems a quite massive amount of security, given that I can't move the money, just look at it.  I have to type in my name, and our membership number, and the last four digits on my beekeepers internet banking card, and then generate an eight digit verification code using a PIN number which I am supposed to remember, and type that in.  If I don't interact with the on line account for more than ten minutes, it logs me out and I have to go through the whole palaver again.  I got logged out twice, so one way and another preparing the Treasurer's report took longer than I was anticipating.

After lunch I managed to get some gardening in.  The SA parked the trailer by the dustbin bed, after I'd asked for it to be moved enough times that it might have counted as nagging, if I ever did such a thing, which of course I don't, so it seemed churlish not to at least start filling it up with prunings.  I made a good start, attacking the ornamental quince under the kitchen window which has grown so much it is becoming difficult to see out or shut the window without trapping twigs in it, the Viburnum tinus in the dustbin bed which has grown hugely in all directions, including over the path and into a neighbouring holly, and a gigantic bramble which shouldn't be there at all.  The more I pulled at this bramble the more of it there seemed to be, sprawling its way through a camellia, a cotoneaster, and back into the wood.  I hadn't finished by the time I had to go out again, but I'd done enough to show that moving the trailer was not a waste of time.

snakes and honey

As I was walking back up from the garage with my hive tool, bee brush and a spare crown board, in preparation for taking the honey off the bees, I met a grass snake on the steps.  It froze, and regarded me impassively, forked tongue flickering.  I knew we had them in the garden, since I saw one in almost the same place a few years back, and once found a writhing mass of babies in the compost heap, along with the strange, leathery, discarded egg mass, like see-through bladderwrack.  I watched it for a while, it watched me, and then I went back by another route, to leave it in peace.  The next time I went round the corner of the house it had vanished.

They are slender snakes, with a bright yellow flash at the back of the head, and without an obvious zigzag pattern down the back like adders have.  You could not easily confuse the two, unless you were frightened of snakes and ran away without stopping to have a look.  The Systems Administrator is phobic about them, but luckily hasn't encountered one so far.  They eat toads, unfortunately, but it still feels a privilege to have them in the garden.  According to the BBC Nature website they are the only UK snake to lay eggs, and if the strategy of playing dead when confronted by a predator doesn't work, they spray a noxious substance from their anus.  Just as well I didn't aggravate this one.  They are protected in the UK under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and are a Priority Species in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan, but the Peoples' Trust for Endangered Species doesn't want to know if you find one, not like a stag beetle.

There were a fair few wasps in the apiary, and a hornet, and I knew I was going to have to be fast getting the supers off and away, and the roof back on the hive.  Wasps are a plague to bees at this time of year.  My beekeeping friend, the retired dentist, has just lost an entire colony to wasp attack.  As I feared, there were quite a lot of bees in the two supers I wanted to take off.  I put the clearer board on last Thursday, then had to go to work, and I remember my beekeeping tutor warning me that given more than a couple of days the bees were capable of finding their way back through the one-way passages in the clearer board and up into the honey.

I put both supers into the wheelbarrow, covered them with newspaper, got the lid straight back on the hive to keep the wasps out, and hurried away from the apiary.  The bees didn't really follow me, apart from those accompanying the wheelbarrow.  The golden bees are a good natured lot, and I hadn't opened up the brood box where the queen lives, so had barely triggered their defensive instincts.  Once out of the immediate reach of the apiary I stopped, and shook each frame as hard as I could to dislodge some of the bees on it.  Back at the house there were still plenty of bees, more than I would have liked, and I had to take the frames inside one at a time, after shaking them again.  I piled the frames out of the top super on to baking trays, dumped three empty frames temporarily in the wheelbarrow, then shook the empty super vigorously, took it into the kitchen, transferred the second lot of frames into it, and retrieved the second super to hold the frames out of the first.  After grabbing the last frames out of the wheelbarrow I quickly wheeled it to the other side of the garden, away from the front door.

There were a good fifteen or twenty bees in the kitchen.  Honey bees are not too difficult to catch in a room during the day, since they are strongly attracted to the window.  Put a glass over them, slide a stiff card in underneath, gently so that the bee can step over the moving edge, and only release the card once the glass is at the mouth of an open window.  It was made more difficult today by the fact that I had to keep the window closed, only opening it very briefly to put the captive bees out, because otherwise more bees came in.  I was left with one final bee that wouldn't land anywhere for very long, and on closer inspection turned out to be a wasp.  I knocked that down with a towel, and squashed it.  I kept my bee suit on for this stage, which may have been over-cautious, but I didn't know whether the bees would be getting irritated by then.  By the time I'd got rid of the wasp I was extremely hot, what with the Aga churning away, and nowhere for the heat to go except the hall.  I'd shut the door to the study because that had wasps in it, the sitting room because the SA had the door open for air, and the outer hall because that had bees in.

There were a lot more than fifteen or twenty bees outside the front door, and the SA looked genuinely anxious to see them all through the glass.  Initially I thought they'd dissipate fairly quickly, but some drops of honey had spilt on the gravel, and the smell of it was keeping them swirling around.  I became concerned in case they'd go back to the hive for reinforcements, and ended up suiting up again and going to play the hose over the gravel and doorstep for several minutes, to reduce the smell.  I felt unkind watering the bees, but it was a hot day, so they'll have dried off again.

After all that I was ready to go through the normal process of cutting the cappings off, spinning the combs in the centrifuge, pouring the honey through a plastic filter into food buckets, and snapping the lids safely closed.  None of the honey had set in the combs this time.  I didn't think they'd be bringing in ultra-fast granulating honey at this stage of the year, but you never know, and having pans of mixed honey and wax melting on the Aga with so many wasps around would have been very tricky.  By now the equipment is all washed up, the floor has been mopped, the worktops and table have been wiped (as have the doorknobs, chairs, and anything else I think I have touched).  I have even rinsed some dribbles of honey off my wellington boots.  We'll still be finding sticky places for days.

a working holiday

My absent colleague did not come in again today.  She didn't reply to the owner's messages either, and we are left with the feeling that we won't see her again.  Certainly the owner was lining up tea shop girls for the rest of the week.  Last Tuesday, when she didn't turn up, that left only the manager on duty.  He was fretting that if he'd known this person was not going to come in, he could have asked someone else, but in truth he is running out of people to ask.  One of the part-timers, who is eligible for her pension and normally does one or two days a week, stepping down in the winter, has been working four day weeks to help out, and the only way he could arrange cover for my holiday was to persuade the other to do three consecutive days next month.  She is a fit and active woman, but as she says, at the age of sixty eight she's not sure she still wants to be lugging trees around.

The August bank holiday Monday is generally quiet in the plant trade, and so we coped quite nicely with the two of us, and the teashop girl, plus the owner coming out to help in the afternoon.  The teashop girl is a godsend.  In between customers in the teashop she is revising quadratic equations. It was quiet enough that I managed to finish sweeping and tidying my second shrub bed, Fuschsia to Enkianthus, early on and in the late afternoon.  I was disgusted to see that the viburnums, which I did yesterday, are already dropping more leaves on to the clean mypex fabric.

The credit card machine was as slow as ever.  Roll on fast rural broadband, that's what I say, but meanwhile we are still on ultra slow dial-up.  Some kind hearted customers attributed its slowness to the bank holiday, but it is always that slow.  If it were the middle of the football world cup, and ninety per cent of the population were watching it because England was unaccountably in the final, the credit card machine would still be slow.  I had my first contactless card transactions this weekend, the same chap who came in on Saturday and Sunday, and each time waved his wallet over the card reader without touching it.  I didn't even know that we had contactless terminals, and he had to tell me that I was supposed to keep the slip.  The customer doesn't get one.  Which is fair enough for small transactions.  Hands up who ever reads again most of the credit card slips that they stuff in their handbags, wallets and pockets.  Or expects to get a receipt from the Oyster card reader when they travel.

And that was about it, really.  Now I am going to go and have a tiny piece of bank holiday myself, and sit out on the veranda.

things fall apart

My young colleague who is nominally working out her notice after resigning several weeks ago did not turn up to work this morning, and did not call to say when or whether she was coming in.  The owner tried ringing her several times and left messages, but got no response.  That left us with two people to run the plant centre for the day.  The owner could have cancelled her Sunday lunch with the boss's parents, but didn't.  At least we had a teashop girl, and there was virtually no watering to do, what with last night's torrential rain, and humidity so high that the plants could scarcely transpire if they'd wanted to.

It is hard work coping with two, when it's busy.  After a slow start the sun came out, and so did the customers.  It was just as well the phones scarcely rang, otherwise we wouldn't have coped.  As it was we just about managed, my colleague only had to answer one phone call during her unpaid lunch break, and the queues at the till weren't too bad, though I felt mean sending people off to look for plants by themselves, because I couldn't leave the shop to go with them and show them where things were.  A young woman left to fend for herself trying to find either the rose 'Ruby Wedding' or the camellia of the same name looked particularly doleful as she left empty handed, though I'm pretty sure that we didn't have either, even if a member of staff had been available to help her.

The prize for the silliest (and rudest) customer goes to the elderly party who decided to get her credit card out of her purse while walking up the wooden ramp to the shop, and dropped it so that it fell through the gaps between the planks.  She wasn't at all steady on her feet, and why she couldn't have stuck to doing one thing at a time beats me.  She arrived at the till flanked by relatives, whose expressions suggested they were having a fun day out with Mrs Soprano, grumbled about the construction of the ramp, and demanded to know whether there was anybody able-bodied to lift or dismantle it to retrieve her card.

I forbore to ask her how much more able-bodied she would like me to be, given that I could lift twenty kilos, and walked twelve miles in an afternoon for fun, and replied that there was nobody there but myself and my sixty-eight year old pensioner colleague who was having lunch.  I forgot to count the tea shop girl, but she wouldn't have made any difference.  The relatives chorused decisively that it would be impossible to lift the ramp, and had to pay for Mrs Soprano's plants, while she brushed aside my suggestion that we might be able to retrieve the card on Tuesday when there were more people here, saying that was no good and unless she could have it now she would have to cancel it.  She was probably right, but I got the feeling she suspected that as soon as she had gone, we would be fishing for it through the gaps with a wire coat hanger.

I got home to find the Systems Administrator sitting outside the front door watching the chickens and looking harassed.  In response to my kindly enquiry whether the SA had had a nice day I was told that the saga of domestic collapse continued.  It had taken half the morning to mend the veranda door, which came off its runners last night, but not in the way that the SA thought it had, and took ages to fix.  Then, just as the SA sat down to watch the chickens, there was a loud crash from my greenhouse as a pane of glass slid out of the roof.  The SA had spent the next two hours picking up pieces of toughened glass with pliers.  I didn't bother asking whether the SA had had time to order a new telephone, which is one of the other things that broke last week.  Looking on the bright side, the reassembled vacuum cleaner worked, and the SA sucked up eight boxes of cat fur from the sitting room floor.

encounter with a non-gardener

When I got to work there was an impressive, large, new padlock on the gate.  I didn't know the combination number, and had to wait until someone else arrived who did.  I suppose the boss has come round to the idea.  His initial response after the second burglary was that he did not want a padlock, it was pointless because they would just cut through the chain, or else smash the gate off its hinges.  I suppose they might, but all these things take time, and make you look quite suspicious, in full view of the road.  Our experience trying to cut through anchor chains with bolt croppers for entirely legitimate purposes is that it is not a quick or easy job, and we had very good quality bolt croppers, not for cutting chains, but for cutting loose the rigging, if the mast had ever come down at sea and we had needed to cut the wreckage free in a hurry before it could smash a hole in the hull.

It drizzled all morning, except when it rained.  The main task that the manager really wanted us to do was to sweep through and tidy the shrub beds.  In the brief gaps between showers I managed to get approximately three quarters of the way down one bed.  I counted them and there are fifteen in total, which leaves some way to go.  In the afternoon it rained a lot, though it seemed to be foggy at the same time, and the air felt as though I was breathing soup.  I dreaded to think what effect it was having on the Systems Administrator, who really does not do humidity at all well, especially when combined with the requirement for either movement or thought.

We weren't as busy as we might have been if it hadn't been simultaneously foggy and raining, but there was a steady trickle of customers.  One, a man at the older end of middle age wearing a stockman's coat and leather hat, said he wanted some information, though he was a complete townie, more used to concrete.  He had a slightly ponderous manner that put me in mind of Geoffrey Whitehead in character as master of an Oxford college (who turns out to be a murderer). He said he wanted to know about trees.  This was music to my ears, as a tree lover.  Townies who have seen the light and now wish to plant trees are to be applauded.  I explained that he would find trees in two places in the plant centre, rare trees at the back of the shop, which were all fairly small the the moment, and larger specimens on the far side of the plant centre,tied to racks so that they could not blow over.

My customer did not wish to come outside and look at the rare trees, on the basis that his tea would get cold.  I thought that since he was standing talking to me rather than sitting with his wife drinking his tea, it was getting cold anyway, but that was up to him.  He said that he had been thinking of planting something called Prunus autumnalis, and I said that was a variety we listed, though I didn't know if we had any currently, but that he would find them with the larger specimens.  He asked whether prunus were not rare, and I began to sense that I was talking to someone who had started doing research on the basis of such profound ignorance that they didn't understand the import of what they had read.

He wanted to buy his trees small and bare root.  Again, his researches were correct, in that many woody plants transplant better as small specimens, and bare root can be better than planting out things with spiralling roots from life spent in a pot.  I had to explain that the commercial reality was that most trees were only available as container grown plants, and often only as larger ones, because the majority of customers wanted something they could see in their garden, now.  His complaint against planting older and larger trees turned out not to be concerned with their root structure and how easily they would transplant, as because he disliked the way that the lower branches had been cut off the main stem, leaving ugly marks.  I had to explain that even if one planted a small, young tree, it would naturally tend to produce branches low down, which would have to be cut off as it grew, or else would be shaded out in time by the crown developing above them. He seemed to have visions of a tree shooting up to six or eight feet before branching out, then sprouting a full head of branches at the top of a perfectly straight and unmarked trunk, without any human intervention.

Then he wanted to know about his rose hedge.  He had planted a hedge of 'Roseraie de l'Hay', which is a popular, well-regarded double rose in the Rugosa group.  It had grown very well, and got too large for him.  Not knowing how to prune it, he had removed it entirely, gone to all the trouble of replacing the soil, and replanted with fresh 'Roseraie de l'Hay', most of which had thrown out stems with small, miserable white flowers on it.  He had heard that roses were sometimes grown on other roots.  Could it be that these roots had sent up stems.  I agreed that was extremely likely.  He was not happy with the idea of grafted roses, and did not see why an old English variety like 'Roseraie de l'Hay' had to be grafted, since if it had been around for a long time it ought to be able to manage without.  I did not follow his logic, and as it happens (and you might guess from the name) 'Roseraie de l'Hay' is not an old English rose, but a French one dating from the very early twentieth century. All I could do was tell him that while roses would strike from cuttings, and that was how amateur gardeners generally made more, propagation on a commercial scale was almost entirely by grafting.

He was worried about a red thing he had found on his one plant that did have red flowers, a red thing the size of a tomato, and was afraid it might be some disease.  I said that roses in the Rugosa group did have large round hips, though I couldn't think offhand exactly what those on 'Roseraie d l'Hay' looked like, since I didn't grow it myself, and in the plant centre we tended to cut them back after flowering so lost the hips.  He sent his wife to the car to fetch the large red thing, while he went to look at trees.  I nipped off to get our David Austin book of old and shrub roses, and she came back with a perfect hip, glossy and shining, still with the withered remains of the petals on it.  I confirmed it was a hip, and produced the photograph in the book as corroborative evidence. She denied having ever seen a flower, but was convinced by the photograph.

I felt quite drained by the end of it, as though I had been trying to communicate with members of an alien species.  Ignorance of names, or specific facts, or techniques, is entirely understandable, but how can people, even townies, have so completely lost any empathy with living plants that they they will grub out an entire hedge rather than find out how to prune it, and mistake a fruit for a diseased growth?

the machine stops

Maureen Lipman gets a great line in Daytona.  'Are you the angel of death?' she asks her unexpected visitor.  Today I seem to be the angel of death when it comes to domestic appliances.  The Systems Administrator had disappeared to the Oval, and I decided it was time to start cleaning the house, which has got to a state of fluffiness and dustiness that even I find unacceptable.  In a normal British summer this fits into the odd wet day, but as 2013 has been short of those, and I spent the last one (yesterday) engaged in charitable labours, I thought I'd just have to sacrifice a dry one.

I managed to sabotage the kitchen radio almost immediately.  It is an early DAB digital radio with a sticky on-off switch which is intensely annoying, but used to work if you tried enough times.  I picked the radio up to wipe the kitchen work top and put it down again, quite gently, about six inches from where it was previously.  It stopped working.  I fiddled with the button, which no longer clicked, and I thought irritably that the wretched thing had finally died, and that it was a pity it had done that after I spent ten minutes wiping the sticky smears off it.

It is a fact that anything in a working kitchen will very slowly collect a thin layer of grease.  Or at least, if all you do in the kitchen is boil eggs and make toast, I suppose it won't, but if you ever do anything involving frying, or roasting meat, tiny particles of fat will make their way into the air and land on every surface in the kitchen.  You don't have to be deep frying, even browning onions for a stew, or cooking a healthy, vegetable based stir fry will do it.  I am baffled by the lifestyle articles in the Sunday magazines showing kitchens with chandeliers in them.  The owners either have servants to clean their elegant and wildly inappropriate light fittings, one glass drop at a time, or else never cook.

By lunchtime I was getting bored of cleaning, and thought I'd go to the bank at Brightlingsea to pay in the beekeepers' money.  I was congratulating myself that I didn't go yesterday, since last night I was handed the tea money, the raffle money, and the surplus from the summer barbecue to bank as well, so I'd only have had to go again.  Traffic was moving unexpectedly slowly on the stretch of road running down to the railway crossing, and I could see cars ahead of me turning round and giving up.  I thought there was maybe some problem with the crossing, and followed suit as I was opposite a handy gate, intending to go the other (longer) was round the block.  I reached another solid line of virtually stationary traffic at Arlesford, and decided to turn round again while I had the opportunity and go home.  Thirty one minutes after setting out, I arrived back, money still un-banked.  I had a look at the local paper on-line and discovered that there had been a five car accident at Thorrington, one person airlifted to hospital.  Poor them.  And annoying for everyone else stuck in the jam, and me with half an hour of my life spent driving around pointlessly.

After lunch I returned to the cleaning, and picked vast amounts of cat hair off the door mats in the hall with my fingers, then quite a lot more fur with the aid of the vacuum cleaner.  I kept an eye on it, just in case, but the red light to warn it was full or blocked never came on.  Then it stopped, abruptly.  I tried plugging it into a different socket, but got the same result, one vacuum cleaner apparently well and truly visited by the angel of death.  Unless the SA can fix it we need another, and quickly.

I was going to go and take the supers off the beehive, which was one reason I needed a scrupulously fur free kitchen, but after an invasion by seven wasps I began to think I had better leave it until after my working weekend, when I would be around to see the job through.  If any of the honey has set in the comb then I'll have to melt it out instead of spinning it in the centrifuge, and it seemed unfair to leave the SA with a giant wasp bait in the kitchen for three days.  Plus last time I kept the kitchen door shut and the window closed almost constantly for twenty-four hours, the fridge-freezer almost broke down from the strain as the heat built up, and given I had already sabotaged the radio and the vacuum cleaner I didn't want to be responsible for breaking them as well.

I had a final happy thought about the radio, after I'd written a note for the SA explaining that it had given up the ghost (this does not presage a breakdown in communications, simply that I'll have probably gone to bed before the SA gets back, and will definitely have gone to work before the SA surfaces in the morning).  I checked whether the power lead jack had slipped partially out of its socket in the back of the radio when I lifted it up, and it had.  I pressed it home and lo, like Lazarus arising from the dead to amaze you all, it worked again.  I beamed at the shiny volume knob I'd polished so painstakingly, and tore off the part of my note to the SA dealing with the death of the radio.  It was embarrassing enough last time, when I couldn't get the printer to work, and the SA had to ask me very kindly if I'd actually remembered to plug my laptop into the printer, as well as plugging the printer in to the mains socket.

an active role in the community

Today seems to have been entirely taken up with Community Involvement.  I thought that I could finish counting up the cash from the wildlife fair and take it to the bank on the way home from the music society committee meeting and envelope stuffing fest, but ran out of time, and had to bundle it into a pile in a corner of the kitchen to be finished later.  Because I was concentrating on my bee treasurer role, I failed to read the time on the music society agenda when I printed it out, and so didn't notice that the meeting was for ten and not half past until it was ten to.  I had firmly believed it was at half past ten, a particularly embarrassing mistake given that I was supposed to be taking the minutes.

The sticking of  inserts inside leaflets had begun without me, as had the meeting, but the chairman gave me a brief resume of what had been discussed so far.  I scribble rapidly in meetings as the talk goes, a legacy of thirty years' of note taking at work and university.  My city notebooks were legendary, and the Systems Administrator tells me that one senior broker he sometimes sees still mentions them.  As I wrote it did seem to me that we were jumping around all over the place, and when I sat down later at the kitchen table to type up the scribbles, I realised that I was going to have to substantially reorder the sequence in which things were discussed if I wanted the minutes to have any relationship to the agenda at all.  We definitely didn't agree a date for the next meeting, and the Treasurer's Report seems to have been skipped over entirely.

I couldn't do the minutes until I'd finished counting the beekeepers' money, which took absolutely ages.  Yesterday I counted and double counted the contents both cash boxes, the tin containing tea money, and the two plastic bags of raffle proceeds, wrote down the totals and added them up, several times.  I even checked the contents of the cash boxes putting the amount of every type of note and coin into a spreadsheet.  I was as sure as you could be about what each individual container held and how much they added up to.  Today, when I tried to fill in the paying in slip and extract my float, they would not add up at all, but were ten pounds something out, and then twenty, while my eyes began to glaze over and I became thoroughly confused about how much was in the individual piles of coins.  Finally I got there, and my float was not twenty pounds short after all, but by then it was getting late to go to the bank.

Tonight brings more Community Involvement, as it's the beekeepers' monthly club meeting, which this month is about American twentieth century music.  As one of the long-standing members says, when you've been keeping bees for over forty years, it gets a bit dull listening to your umpteenth lecture on feeding for winter.  Twentieth century American music is a vast subject, and while I like quite a lot of it (Missisippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, Hedy West, Chicago blues, Philip Glass, Lyle Lovett, Roberta Flack, Nina Simone, the Second South Carolina String Band, and Glenn Miller but only on barbecue nights), I suspect that tonight's lecture is not going to be on any of those.  Like I said, it's a vast subject.