I finally finished one gardening task on the list, cutting the old leaves off the hellebores. It seemed a waste to let them blush unseen, when they have only one season of interest, starting now. Not that they waste their fragrance on the desert air. Hellebores are highly attractive to bees, but I have never detected any scent from them.
The hybrid hellebores, that used to be called Helleborus orientalis, carry their flowers on separate flowering stems. First of all clusters of fat buds appear at ground level, then the stem gradually elongates. Most of mine are still at the ground level bud stage, though a few flower stems have started to lengthen. The mature stems are fairly leathery and tough, but the newly emerged buds are fragile and perilously easy to snap off, and it would have been much better to have done this whole project a month ago, but there you are.
Most of the plants are not very easy to get at. The ones in the front garden by the oil tank live under the canopies of a large Mahonia, a Chaenomeles, and assorted dogwoods. There is not a lot of space even for a small and nimble gardener. I am pretty small, and flexible if not nimble, and can just about crawl and shuffle in there. The key is to never touch the ground, not with foot nor knee nor steadying hand, without looking where you are going and making sure you are not about to step, kneel on or crush any of the emerging buds. They are not very brightly coloured at this stage, and don't show up especially well. The same principle applies in the back garden where those hellebores that are not nestling under the canopies of shrubs are surrounded by snowdrops, which by now are tall enough to be spoiled by treading on them.
I pulled up a lot of goose grass seedlings while I was at it. Every year I pull up seedlings and then more seedlings and then rip at the mature goose grasses that have slipped through the net, and hope that I am beginning to make inroads into the goose grass seed bank, but every year more come up. It seems the supply of goose grass seed is inexhaustible. I also cleared a mixture of Mahonia leaves and fallen flowers off the hellebores in the front garden, none too soon, since a few buds had started to rot under their smothering cover, not the black hellebore disease rot but the white fluffy rot of poor ventilation. I nipped off the diseased buds and binned them along with the old leaves and the goose grass.
At least the buds have not been eaten by voles or mice this year. A few years ago as I was walking around the back garden in late January or early February, looking to see how things were getting along, I discovered a strange litter of pink and white fragments in the ditch bed that on closer inspection turned out to be the remains of the emerging hellebore flowers. I was annoyed, and at a loss what to do about it. Either that year was a boom year for the vole or mouse population, or the new cats' patrols are having a salutary effect, but this winter things seem OK.
Monday, 6 February 2017
Sunday, 5 February 2017
problem corner
I really thought I was going to finish tidying the messy corner just inside the gate today. It has never been a very good corner. It sits on top of part of what used to be the drive to the integral garage and a sort of stony track between the edge of the previous owners' lawn and the apple orchard. Then we used the space to dump some builder's sand, and there was some left over, so the soil is even more thin and miserable than in most of the rest of the top of the garden. The Systems Administrator did not want me to plant any long term trees or shrubs in the gap, in case we ever needed to get a digger or other heavy machinery round to the back of the house. I compromised with sea buckthorn, thinking that if we ever did need to get anything down the old track (we haven't so far) it wouldn't break my heart to coppice the sea buckthorn and it would probably regenerate afterwards.
One of the sea buckthorn has just died, for no particular reason I can discover, and another has tipped over in the prevailing wind which may not be a good sign. I thought the clue would be in the name and something called sea buckthorn would be able to cope with sand and the full blast of the south westerly gales. Meanwhile brambles keep growing in from the other side of the rabbit fence. Just in case the corner was not horticulturally challenging enough it is heavily shaded at ground level, since the old track slopes to fully two feet below the level of the drive to the front garden, so is largely in the shadow of the bank up to the drive as well as the sea buckthorn and the invading brambles.
I have chopped out all the brambles and most of the dead sea buckthorn branches, and dug out most of the brambles that had taken root on this side of the rabbit fence with a pick axe. I have scooped up buckets and buckets of dead leaves, twigs, grass stems and goose grass, pulled up more buckets of wild ivy stems that were setting out across the ground, and grubbed out the self seeded clumps of weed grasses. I have extracted the dead remains of a rather weedy cotoneaster that seeds itself in that part of the garden, one of the only plants left to us by the previous owners, together with several young plants of it that were encroaching out into the bed. The only useful plants at ground level are a self seeding euphorbia and I tried to leave those intact. There used to be some common foxgloves, but they died after flowering and have not left many seedlings.
The rabbit fence used to be hidden by some rather smart willow and hazel hurdles, but they have rotted away. I'm still musing on whether to get a roll of some cheaper brushwood cladding, or if that would simply draw attention to the area. And I need to think of a ground cover plant that will grow in shade and almost pure sand and is not too expensive, since it is quite a large corner when you come to express it in square metres and then think of a number of plants per square metre where the number is more than one. Evergreen would be nice. Ivy will not do because it climbs into everything else and strangles it.
There is a tamarisk, which I thought would be happy there, based on memories of family holidays in Cornwall where they used to grow practically on the beach. It is not happy. Maybe by the time you got to the tamarisks from the beach the sand had stopped. Maybe I should try a columnar juniper to replace the dead sea buckthorn. They take drought pretty well. It would be nice to screen the view of the neighbour's field and the lettuce farm a little more, since the former currently houses a small but brilliant white portable football goal and a large black container that they said they were going to clad and turn into a summerhouse. They have not got round to cladding it yet, and in the meantime it coordinates with the two more distant containers in the field behind the packing shed on the lettuce farm. I don't know what it is about farms that they always collect debris around the farm buildings.
I really thought when I began this morning that I'd finish the corner today. That I could tick it off the list of Things To Do and order a couple of bags of gravel to be delivered to the newly de-brambled space at the edge of the drive. Why is it that jobs always take longer than you expect?
One of the sea buckthorn has just died, for no particular reason I can discover, and another has tipped over in the prevailing wind which may not be a good sign. I thought the clue would be in the name and something called sea buckthorn would be able to cope with sand and the full blast of the south westerly gales. Meanwhile brambles keep growing in from the other side of the rabbit fence. Just in case the corner was not horticulturally challenging enough it is heavily shaded at ground level, since the old track slopes to fully two feet below the level of the drive to the front garden, so is largely in the shadow of the bank up to the drive as well as the sea buckthorn and the invading brambles.
I have chopped out all the brambles and most of the dead sea buckthorn branches, and dug out most of the brambles that had taken root on this side of the rabbit fence with a pick axe. I have scooped up buckets and buckets of dead leaves, twigs, grass stems and goose grass, pulled up more buckets of wild ivy stems that were setting out across the ground, and grubbed out the self seeded clumps of weed grasses. I have extracted the dead remains of a rather weedy cotoneaster that seeds itself in that part of the garden, one of the only plants left to us by the previous owners, together with several young plants of it that were encroaching out into the bed. The only useful plants at ground level are a self seeding euphorbia and I tried to leave those intact. There used to be some common foxgloves, but they died after flowering and have not left many seedlings.
The rabbit fence used to be hidden by some rather smart willow and hazel hurdles, but they have rotted away. I'm still musing on whether to get a roll of some cheaper brushwood cladding, or if that would simply draw attention to the area. And I need to think of a ground cover plant that will grow in shade and almost pure sand and is not too expensive, since it is quite a large corner when you come to express it in square metres and then think of a number of plants per square metre where the number is more than one. Evergreen would be nice. Ivy will not do because it climbs into everything else and strangles it.
There is a tamarisk, which I thought would be happy there, based on memories of family holidays in Cornwall where they used to grow practically on the beach. It is not happy. Maybe by the time you got to the tamarisks from the beach the sand had stopped. Maybe I should try a columnar juniper to replace the dead sea buckthorn. They take drought pretty well. It would be nice to screen the view of the neighbour's field and the lettuce farm a little more, since the former currently houses a small but brilliant white portable football goal and a large black container that they said they were going to clad and turn into a summerhouse. They have not got round to cladding it yet, and in the meantime it coordinates with the two more distant containers in the field behind the packing shed on the lettuce farm. I don't know what it is about farms that they always collect debris around the farm buildings.
I really thought when I began this morning that I'd finish the corner today. That I could tick it off the list of Things To Do and order a couple of bags of gravel to be delivered to the newly de-brambled space at the edge of the drive. Why is it that jobs always take longer than you expect?
Saturday, 4 February 2017
playing catchup
I have been planting tulips. They are left over from last year's pots. I let them die down in their containers after flowering, watered them and even fed them once or twice, then picked over the contents, throwing out the tiny offsets that would take years to get to flowering size if they ever did, and saving the big bulbs. It was a good harvest and I planned to use them in a corner of a bed I'm revamping in the back garden. They should have been planted in November. November slipped to December, which would have been OK, but then I went down with flu and then the chest infection and it just never happened, along with lots of other jobs in the garden.
I wasn't sure whether by this stage it was worth planting them, or if I would simply be wasting a couple of hours of my time in addition to wasting the bulbs. They hadn't shrivelled and looked fat and healthy enough, but would they be hopelessly confused by the mismatch between the temperature and daylength they must be primed for as spring flowering bulbs and the growing conditions they would experience if planted now in early February? But then at the Plant Heritage meeting last weekend they were selling bags of tulips cheaply that had been donated by a local bulb merchant, being left over at the end of his selling season. There are some very knowledgeable plantspeople on the committee and I thought they would not sell bulbs that had no chance of success, and the donor would not want to spoil his reputation with his local customers by offering them useless bulbs, even at a pound a bag. So I started planting mine. It will be an interesting experiment to see how they turn out, although not a very scientific one. There are too many variables, since tulip bulbs that have flowered once in a pot can't be relied on to perform as well as pristine stock fresh from the bulb fields of the Netherlands even if planted in perfect soil, which the little sandy corner where I'm putting them certainly isn't.
Another job that should have been done before Christmas is picking all the leaves off the lawn. I got some, but not all of them, and by now those that are left have stuck to the wet grass, while around the birch trees in the lower part of the garden the self seeded cyclamen and snowdrops have emerged. The grass under the birch trees is fine and fragile with running stems that barely cling to the earth and liberally interspersed with moss, and I know that if I try to rake up the wet leaves I'll end up raking off half the lawn as well. I don't want to do that. The fine mossy lawn that is what you get if you try to grow grass under the shade of three birches, a huge wild gean and a Zelkova would not meet with the approval of the sort of lawn enthusiast who believes in stripes and scarifying and spiking but it is very pretty, with primroses and violets following on from the snowdrops and cyclamen. In fact, weeding out some of the coarser wild flowers I don't want there is on my list of things to do, though not rated as urgent.
In the meantime the brown smear of cherry and birch leaves and the litter of narrow, toothed, dark gold leaves from the Zelkova looks messy and is making the thin grass even thinner. They need to be cleared, on the other hand I don't want roots of fine running grass in the leaf litter bin, ready to set up new colonies of grass in whichever bed is lucky enough to get some leaf mould in a couple of years' time. I ended up picking out handfuls of leaves from the wet grass, then combing through the lawn with my fingers to dislodge more leaves, before picking out stragglers with my fingertips. It was not a garden maintenance technique I'd ever have specified for a Writtle College module on landscape management, but I couldn't think of any other way of doing it, given I needed to clear the leaves and couldn't use a rake. If only it had been done weeks ago as soon as the leaves fell and before everything got so wet and mixed up it would have been much easier.
I started cutting the leaves off the hybrid hellebores as well, now that they are coming up to flower. The old foliage was bagged up to go to the tip rather than putting it on the compost heap, to avoid recyling any disease back into the garden. Hellebores are prone to leaf infections, and the advice from the experts is to avoid putting the leaves on a domestic compost heap. The council one should in theory heat up more, being so much bigger, and so get rid of disease spores and other nasties. Of course other experts say you shouldn't cut all the leaves off at all, to avoid weakening the plants.
The Systems Administrator has voluntarily started reducing the overgrown hedge along the side of the meadow. Bits of it have got too big for me to tackle with the hand saw, but in any event I am hugely grateful the SA has taken on the project, since goodness knows when I'd have time. Jobs like that need doing inside the next month, before the buds start to break and the birds start thinking about nesting.
I wasn't sure whether by this stage it was worth planting them, or if I would simply be wasting a couple of hours of my time in addition to wasting the bulbs. They hadn't shrivelled and looked fat and healthy enough, but would they be hopelessly confused by the mismatch between the temperature and daylength they must be primed for as spring flowering bulbs and the growing conditions they would experience if planted now in early February? But then at the Plant Heritage meeting last weekend they were selling bags of tulips cheaply that had been donated by a local bulb merchant, being left over at the end of his selling season. There are some very knowledgeable plantspeople on the committee and I thought they would not sell bulbs that had no chance of success, and the donor would not want to spoil his reputation with his local customers by offering them useless bulbs, even at a pound a bag. So I started planting mine. It will be an interesting experiment to see how they turn out, although not a very scientific one. There are too many variables, since tulip bulbs that have flowered once in a pot can't be relied on to perform as well as pristine stock fresh from the bulb fields of the Netherlands even if planted in perfect soil, which the little sandy corner where I'm putting them certainly isn't.
Another job that should have been done before Christmas is picking all the leaves off the lawn. I got some, but not all of them, and by now those that are left have stuck to the wet grass, while around the birch trees in the lower part of the garden the self seeded cyclamen and snowdrops have emerged. The grass under the birch trees is fine and fragile with running stems that barely cling to the earth and liberally interspersed with moss, and I know that if I try to rake up the wet leaves I'll end up raking off half the lawn as well. I don't want to do that. The fine mossy lawn that is what you get if you try to grow grass under the shade of three birches, a huge wild gean and a Zelkova would not meet with the approval of the sort of lawn enthusiast who believes in stripes and scarifying and spiking but it is very pretty, with primroses and violets following on from the snowdrops and cyclamen. In fact, weeding out some of the coarser wild flowers I don't want there is on my list of things to do, though not rated as urgent.
In the meantime the brown smear of cherry and birch leaves and the litter of narrow, toothed, dark gold leaves from the Zelkova looks messy and is making the thin grass even thinner. They need to be cleared, on the other hand I don't want roots of fine running grass in the leaf litter bin, ready to set up new colonies of grass in whichever bed is lucky enough to get some leaf mould in a couple of years' time. I ended up picking out handfuls of leaves from the wet grass, then combing through the lawn with my fingers to dislodge more leaves, before picking out stragglers with my fingertips. It was not a garden maintenance technique I'd ever have specified for a Writtle College module on landscape management, but I couldn't think of any other way of doing it, given I needed to clear the leaves and couldn't use a rake. If only it had been done weeks ago as soon as the leaves fell and before everything got so wet and mixed up it would have been much easier.
I started cutting the leaves off the hybrid hellebores as well, now that they are coming up to flower. The old foliage was bagged up to go to the tip rather than putting it on the compost heap, to avoid recyling any disease back into the garden. Hellebores are prone to leaf infections, and the advice from the experts is to avoid putting the leaves on a domestic compost heap. The council one should in theory heat up more, being so much bigger, and so get rid of disease spores and other nasties. Of course other experts say you shouldn't cut all the leaves off at all, to avoid weakening the plants.
The Systems Administrator has voluntarily started reducing the overgrown hedge along the side of the meadow. Bits of it have got too big for me to tackle with the hand saw, but in any event I am hugely grateful the SA has taken on the project, since goodness knows when I'd have time. Jobs like that need doing inside the next month, before the buds start to break and the birds start thinking about nesting.
Friday, 3 February 2017
a day out
I went to London yesterday for the first time in six weeks. Indeed, it was one of only handful of times I've been anywhere apart from Colchester since mid December. An AGM just over the Suffolk border in Stratford St Mary, a garden lecture in Stowupland, and coffee in Mistley has been about as far as I've ventured, and I was exhausted by the trip to Stratford St Mary. But I had a ticket for the lunchtime concert at LSO St Lukes, bought months ago, and a keen desire to catch the Opus Anglicanum exhibition at the V&A. One of the exasperating things about lingering chest infections and colds is the way you go through a phase when you feel a lot better as long as you don't do anything, then discover you aren't really better at all as soon as you do. But I was feeling as though I might be quite a lot better, so set off to the concert on the basis that if I began to flag I could come home afterwards. That would have been a terrible waste of a rail ticket, but the alternative was to give up before I started, and I didn't want to turn into a hypochondriac.
The concert was the first of four Radio 3 lunchtime concerts focused on the Russian piano repertoire written before and after the 1917 revolution. Revolution is in the air: the Royal Academy has just opened an exhibition of Russian Art 1917-32, and Tate Modern will be opening Red Star Over Russia in November. I hope to go to both. Russian piano music is not necessarily my thing, but the pianist yesterday was Elisabeth Leonskaja, and I had a feeling that I had heard of her. She is now in her early seventies, born in Georgia and resident in the Soviet Union for the first half of her life, and she was twice the age of the other three pianists in the series. They will doubtless go on to have long and glittering careers, but I fancied seeing a major figure of the last century.
She played Shostakovich Piano Sonata no 2 followed by Tchaikovsky Grand Sonata in G major. Originally the programme was different, and LSO St Lukes wrote to me a while back to warn me of the change, but I was perfectly happy either way. I didn't know either of the pieces on the revised programme and I don't think I knew the original programme any better. I just wanted to see Elisabeth Leonskaja. I was rather taken aback when reading the programme notes before the performance over my customary coffee and millionaire's shortbread to see that the Grand Sonata had been described by Tchaikovsky's biographer as 'a strong candidate as the dullest piece of music Tchaikivsky ever wrote', the Scherzo being judged the best movement partly because it was the shortest. If Elisabeth Leonskaja and the LSO thought that then why perform it at all, and if not then why put it in the programme notes?
I won't actually be rushing out to buy a CD with the Tchaikovsky on it, but I was mightily taken with the Shostakovich. Written in 1943, deeply creepy, melancholy, unsettling, it was music of its age. And it didn't have too many notes so as a non-musical person I could follow what was going on some of the time. My list of albums I'd like to get is rather long, but I'd like to listen again to Shostakovich's second Piano Sonata. Elisabeth Leonskaja was magnificent. She never spoke once through the entire concert, no slightly toe curling interview with Fiona Talkington for the Radio 3 listeners about her long career or what the music meant to her, and I never discovered what either of the two encores were. Coming on to the stage at the beginning she sat down at the piano and began playing almost before the opening applause had died away, and continued in the same vein for the whole performance. She played everything from memory, and when she hammered the low notes on the piano I could feel it through the soles of my feet. At the end I thought as I left that I had seen greatness. If you want to hear as much greatness as survives the medium of radio the concert will be broadcast on Tuesday 14 March at 1.00pm.
Then, as I was still feeling quite energetic, I went on to the V&A to see Opus Anglicanum: Masterpieces of English Medieval Embroidery. It's been on since early October, and I wanted to visit from when it was announced some time before that, after watching a very good TV documentary about Opus Anglicanum, but with one thing and another I never got there and thought I'd missed my chance, since it finishes this weekend. The V&A always feels a step too far from Liverpool Street, as though my natural territory ends at The Queen's Gallery, even though it is only one tube stop further than Sloane Square on the Circle Line, and from LSO St Lukes you can do it with one tube change, Northern Line to Kings Cross and then the Piccadilly Line to South Kensington. And those central London Piccadilly Line stops are really close together. So objectively speaking it is not that far at all. Maybe knowing that it is beyond comfortable walking distance makes it seem further.
Opus Anglicanum was one of England's great artistic contributions to the art of Medieval Europe, an embroidery technique that allowed an incredible amount of shading and detailing. Not much survives now, textiles being inherently fragile and many examples having been destroyed in the Reformation or cut down and reused. The V&A have gathered together copes and other ecclesiastical garments and fragments from across Europe's churches and museums. They are very beautiful, once your eyes adapt to the low light they have to be displayed in, with extraordinary vivacity and detail. Their main business is to tell stories from the bible and portray the saints, but lots of other things get included as well, birds and all sorts of creatures, and six winged seraphim, and angels playing musical instruments. The cope is an interesting garment, being a semicircle when laid flat but designed to be seen as a cone when worn, and the Medieval embroiderers used various of patterns to divide the space, some taken from Islamic art. The art form began to go downhill in the fifteenth century after the Black Death, as wages rose for the survivors and the cost of making the incredibly labour intensive Opus Anglicanum became too great.
I enjoyed the exhibition very much, although an hour of looking at such fine detail in such low light was all my eyes could manage. So I came home, and the trains were running to time, and I was not shattered. Onwards and upwards.
The concert was the first of four Radio 3 lunchtime concerts focused on the Russian piano repertoire written before and after the 1917 revolution. Revolution is in the air: the Royal Academy has just opened an exhibition of Russian Art 1917-32, and Tate Modern will be opening Red Star Over Russia in November. I hope to go to both. Russian piano music is not necessarily my thing, but the pianist yesterday was Elisabeth Leonskaja, and I had a feeling that I had heard of her. She is now in her early seventies, born in Georgia and resident in the Soviet Union for the first half of her life, and she was twice the age of the other three pianists in the series. They will doubtless go on to have long and glittering careers, but I fancied seeing a major figure of the last century.
She played Shostakovich Piano Sonata no 2 followed by Tchaikovsky Grand Sonata in G major. Originally the programme was different, and LSO St Lukes wrote to me a while back to warn me of the change, but I was perfectly happy either way. I didn't know either of the pieces on the revised programme and I don't think I knew the original programme any better. I just wanted to see Elisabeth Leonskaja. I was rather taken aback when reading the programme notes before the performance over my customary coffee and millionaire's shortbread to see that the Grand Sonata had been described by Tchaikovsky's biographer as 'a strong candidate as the dullest piece of music Tchaikivsky ever wrote', the Scherzo being judged the best movement partly because it was the shortest. If Elisabeth Leonskaja and the LSO thought that then why perform it at all, and if not then why put it in the programme notes?
I won't actually be rushing out to buy a CD with the Tchaikovsky on it, but I was mightily taken with the Shostakovich. Written in 1943, deeply creepy, melancholy, unsettling, it was music of its age. And it didn't have too many notes so as a non-musical person I could follow what was going on some of the time. My list of albums I'd like to get is rather long, but I'd like to listen again to Shostakovich's second Piano Sonata. Elisabeth Leonskaja was magnificent. She never spoke once through the entire concert, no slightly toe curling interview with Fiona Talkington for the Radio 3 listeners about her long career or what the music meant to her, and I never discovered what either of the two encores were. Coming on to the stage at the beginning she sat down at the piano and began playing almost before the opening applause had died away, and continued in the same vein for the whole performance. She played everything from memory, and when she hammered the low notes on the piano I could feel it through the soles of my feet. At the end I thought as I left that I had seen greatness. If you want to hear as much greatness as survives the medium of radio the concert will be broadcast on Tuesday 14 March at 1.00pm.
Then, as I was still feeling quite energetic, I went on to the V&A to see Opus Anglicanum: Masterpieces of English Medieval Embroidery. It's been on since early October, and I wanted to visit from when it was announced some time before that, after watching a very good TV documentary about Opus Anglicanum, but with one thing and another I never got there and thought I'd missed my chance, since it finishes this weekend. The V&A always feels a step too far from Liverpool Street, as though my natural territory ends at The Queen's Gallery, even though it is only one tube stop further than Sloane Square on the Circle Line, and from LSO St Lukes you can do it with one tube change, Northern Line to Kings Cross and then the Piccadilly Line to South Kensington. And those central London Piccadilly Line stops are really close together. So objectively speaking it is not that far at all. Maybe knowing that it is beyond comfortable walking distance makes it seem further.
Opus Anglicanum was one of England's great artistic contributions to the art of Medieval Europe, an embroidery technique that allowed an incredible amount of shading and detailing. Not much survives now, textiles being inherently fragile and many examples having been destroyed in the Reformation or cut down and reused. The V&A have gathered together copes and other ecclesiastical garments and fragments from across Europe's churches and museums. They are very beautiful, once your eyes adapt to the low light they have to be displayed in, with extraordinary vivacity and detail. Their main business is to tell stories from the bible and portray the saints, but lots of other things get included as well, birds and all sorts of creatures, and six winged seraphim, and angels playing musical instruments. The cope is an interesting garment, being a semicircle when laid flat but designed to be seen as a cone when worn, and the Medieval embroiderers used various of patterns to divide the space, some taken from Islamic art. The art form began to go downhill in the fifteenth century after the Black Death, as wages rose for the survivors and the cost of making the incredibly labour intensive Opus Anglicanum became too great.
I enjoyed the exhibition very much, although an hour of looking at such fine detail in such low light was all my eyes could manage. So I came home, and the trains were running to time, and I was not shattered. Onwards and upwards.
Thursday, 2 February 2017
a night at the theatre
We went to the theatre last night. It felt like a strange novelty not just because we don't go to the theatre very often, but because it was the first time I'd been out in the evening for six weeks. We had tickets for The Play That Goes Wrong at the Mercury in Colchester, bought in about July of last year when the Systems Administrator spotted that it was on tour after rave reviews in London. It's just as well we got them when we did, because I think it was sold out. Certainly the auditorium was full last night, and I noticed when the Mercury's last brochure arrived that it wasn't included with the rest of the February productions.
It is a masterpiece, a quite howlingly funny farce. An amateur group of thesps, the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, are putting on a clunking country house murder mystery. Unlike whichever Ayckbourn it is about a theatrical performance where we are shown the back stage lives of the actors, The Play That Goes Wrong deals entirely with the attempts of the cast and crew to stage the play, and their attempts, dogged, lackadaisical and hysterical by turn, to deal with misplaced props, missed cues, mangled dialogue, and disintegrating scenery, The conceit of the play within a play is even kept up in the Mercury's programme, containing a programme within a programme, which was easily the best four quid I have ever spent on a theatre programme.
I laughed an awful lot, which made me cough. There was a note on the back of the programme asking me not to smoke, take photographs, talk, rustle sweet papers or cough because it could spoil the performance for my fellow audience members, but it didn't matter that I was coughing because the rest of the audience were laughing so much as well. It was a triumph, and virtuosically done with some splendid physical acting, including the funniest corpse I have ever seen. The actors had to get it right, though. A Play That Goes Wrong that really goes wrong would be worse than unfunny.
I love comedy, and have great sympathy with whichever actor it was who grumpily observed that Oscars almost never went to comedies, when comedy was one of the hardest things to do well. But it would be pointless for me to big it up any more, since if you live around Colchester I fear you have missed your chance to see it at the Mercury unless you have already bought a ticket.
It is a masterpiece, a quite howlingly funny farce. An amateur group of thesps, the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, are putting on a clunking country house murder mystery. Unlike whichever Ayckbourn it is about a theatrical performance where we are shown the back stage lives of the actors, The Play That Goes Wrong deals entirely with the attempts of the cast and crew to stage the play, and their attempts, dogged, lackadaisical and hysterical by turn, to deal with misplaced props, missed cues, mangled dialogue, and disintegrating scenery, The conceit of the play within a play is even kept up in the Mercury's programme, containing a programme within a programme, which was easily the best four quid I have ever spent on a theatre programme.
I laughed an awful lot, which made me cough. There was a note on the back of the programme asking me not to smoke, take photographs, talk, rustle sweet papers or cough because it could spoil the performance for my fellow audience members, but it didn't matter that I was coughing because the rest of the audience were laughing so much as well. It was a triumph, and virtuosically done with some splendid physical acting, including the funniest corpse I have ever seen. The actors had to get it right, though. A Play That Goes Wrong that really goes wrong would be worse than unfunny.
I love comedy, and have great sympathy with whichever actor it was who grumpily observed that Oscars almost never went to comedies, when comedy was one of the hardest things to do well. But it would be pointless for me to big it up any more, since if you live around Colchester I fear you have missed your chance to see it at the Mercury unless you have already bought a ticket.
Wednesday, 1 February 2017
bulb therapy
It rained heavily in the night. I heard it drumming on the roof each time I woke up, together with the shuffling about of the Systems Administrator who has another cold and did not sleep very well. Despite this the SA got up first, and reappeared from the bathroom a moment later to say that the boiler had not come on overnight.
The sky when I got up was leaden. The forecast was for low cloud, then light rain, followed by heavy rain, fog (after lunch), some more cloud, and more rain in the small hours. The relative humidity was forecast to be ninety-nine per cent all day, until mid-evening when it was due to fall to only ninety-six per cent. And that was pretty much what we've had, so far, though it wasn't quite as foggy as predicted. Oh, to be in England now that February's here. It was not a day to be going outside even if you hadn't got a chest infection or a cold, and I found myself quite grateful that I managed to put in a short morning and equally short afternoon's work on the garden yesterday, when it was not so damp. Our neighbour called round with the parish magazine while I was gardening, looking rather grey and small behind the wheel of his Volvo. I asked him how he was and he said he had had bronchitis. That's life in rural north east Essex in winter, just a swamp of respiratory infections.
Looking ahead to warmer or at least drier days, and glossing over the fact that I should be concentrating on pruning and cutting the hedges rather than messing around with even more plants, I put together an order for winter bulbs from Pottertons. They describe themselves as specialist growers of Alpines, Dwarf Bulbs and Woodland plants, and I had an order from them a while back of plants for the railway. That was very satisfactory, and I've kept an eye on their website since, while they have added me to their mailing list. They still send out rather nicely produced catalogues, one of alpines and plants and one (looking ahead) of dwarf bulbs for autumn dispatch. I don't know if that tells you anything about their customer demographic. Older, possibly, conservative with a small c, and not converted to internet shopping and email? Mind you, quite a few bulb companies still send out printed catalogues, the one from Peter Nyssen generally arriving after I've placed my order online. Most shrub and herbaceous nurseries don't bother anymore and stick to the odd promotional email.
Quite a few of the varieties offered bare root by Pottertons were also available throughout the year as pot grown plants, at no greater and in some anomalous cases a lower price than the bare root bulbs. But cyclamen were significantly cheaper now, especially if you wanted several plants, and I ordered three more Cyclamen cilicium to fill in the gap in front of the house. They should arrive at this time of the year with leaves on so I will know which way up they are supposed to go, and can make a careful mental note about any hollows in the tuber or other clues for future reference. I shall plant them with small stakes of some sort alongside, to deter the cats from using the freshly dug earth as a lavatory. In a fit of extravagance I ordered ten C. hederifolium to go in the far shady corner at the bottom of the garden, after toying with the idea of digging up some self seeded ones and trying to make do with what I had. But I like the self seeded ones where they are, and while I am not a great believer in retail therapy I thought that after the dismal non-event of Christmas and the money I must have saved scarcely going out or doing anything for a month I would treat myself.
Mid pink and pale pink Hesperantha, which used to be called Schizostylis, were a snip at £2.20 if you bought three of a variety. The common name is Kaffir lily, a clue to their South African origin, although best avoided nowadays. They are easy going plants, flowering usefully late in the autumn, and despite what most books tell you they will put up with partial shade quite happily. I shall pot up my bare root plants, and drop them into any gaps in the back garden later in the season. It pays to handle them gently when weeding around them or cutting down the old foliage and spent flower stems, since even a light tug can pull the bulb clean out of the ground, but they don't seem to mind if replanted immediately. They don't like it too dry, but if they like your garden they will self-seed and send out stolons.
The creeping, shade tolerant Disporopsis pernyi and Maianthemum dilitatum were likewise cheaper bought as bare root plants than potted, and at £1.30 a go I shall experiment with three of each in the shady corner at the bottom of the garden. Both will tolerate full shade, and one US nursery website even described the Maianthemum as tolerating wet soil. I shall try it in a spot that became absolutely sodden a few years ago when the water table rose in that part of the garden after a particularly wet winter. I lost quite a few plants through drowning, and finding species that will survive through occasional waterlogging without requiring constantly wet conditions is tricky. Some websites warned that the Maianthemum could become invasive, but given how few things want to live in the place where I plan to put it that's a risk that I'll take. If either or both do well I can buy some more, and if they don't the experiment hasn't cost me too much.
Addendum The boiler ran perfectly this morning and is chuntering away normally now, so we are no further towards knowing why it didn't come on last night.
The sky when I got up was leaden. The forecast was for low cloud, then light rain, followed by heavy rain, fog (after lunch), some more cloud, and more rain in the small hours. The relative humidity was forecast to be ninety-nine per cent all day, until mid-evening when it was due to fall to only ninety-six per cent. And that was pretty much what we've had, so far, though it wasn't quite as foggy as predicted. Oh, to be in England now that February's here. It was not a day to be going outside even if you hadn't got a chest infection or a cold, and I found myself quite grateful that I managed to put in a short morning and equally short afternoon's work on the garden yesterday, when it was not so damp. Our neighbour called round with the parish magazine while I was gardening, looking rather grey and small behind the wheel of his Volvo. I asked him how he was and he said he had had bronchitis. That's life in rural north east Essex in winter, just a swamp of respiratory infections.
Looking ahead to warmer or at least drier days, and glossing over the fact that I should be concentrating on pruning and cutting the hedges rather than messing around with even more plants, I put together an order for winter bulbs from Pottertons. They describe themselves as specialist growers of Alpines, Dwarf Bulbs and Woodland plants, and I had an order from them a while back of plants for the railway. That was very satisfactory, and I've kept an eye on their website since, while they have added me to their mailing list. They still send out rather nicely produced catalogues, one of alpines and plants and one (looking ahead) of dwarf bulbs for autumn dispatch. I don't know if that tells you anything about their customer demographic. Older, possibly, conservative with a small c, and not converted to internet shopping and email? Mind you, quite a few bulb companies still send out printed catalogues, the one from Peter Nyssen generally arriving after I've placed my order online. Most shrub and herbaceous nurseries don't bother anymore and stick to the odd promotional email.
Quite a few of the varieties offered bare root by Pottertons were also available throughout the year as pot grown plants, at no greater and in some anomalous cases a lower price than the bare root bulbs. But cyclamen were significantly cheaper now, especially if you wanted several plants, and I ordered three more Cyclamen cilicium to fill in the gap in front of the house. They should arrive at this time of the year with leaves on so I will know which way up they are supposed to go, and can make a careful mental note about any hollows in the tuber or other clues for future reference. I shall plant them with small stakes of some sort alongside, to deter the cats from using the freshly dug earth as a lavatory. In a fit of extravagance I ordered ten C. hederifolium to go in the far shady corner at the bottom of the garden, after toying with the idea of digging up some self seeded ones and trying to make do with what I had. But I like the self seeded ones where they are, and while I am not a great believer in retail therapy I thought that after the dismal non-event of Christmas and the money I must have saved scarcely going out or doing anything for a month I would treat myself.
Mid pink and pale pink Hesperantha, which used to be called Schizostylis, were a snip at £2.20 if you bought three of a variety. The common name is Kaffir lily, a clue to their South African origin, although best avoided nowadays. They are easy going plants, flowering usefully late in the autumn, and despite what most books tell you they will put up with partial shade quite happily. I shall pot up my bare root plants, and drop them into any gaps in the back garden later in the season. It pays to handle them gently when weeding around them or cutting down the old foliage and spent flower stems, since even a light tug can pull the bulb clean out of the ground, but they don't seem to mind if replanted immediately. They don't like it too dry, but if they like your garden they will self-seed and send out stolons.
The creeping, shade tolerant Disporopsis pernyi and Maianthemum dilitatum were likewise cheaper bought as bare root plants than potted, and at £1.30 a go I shall experiment with three of each in the shady corner at the bottom of the garden. Both will tolerate full shade, and one US nursery website even described the Maianthemum as tolerating wet soil. I shall try it in a spot that became absolutely sodden a few years ago when the water table rose in that part of the garden after a particularly wet winter. I lost quite a few plants through drowning, and finding species that will survive through occasional waterlogging without requiring constantly wet conditions is tricky. Some websites warned that the Maianthemum could become invasive, but given how few things want to live in the place where I plan to put it that's a risk that I'll take. If either or both do well I can buy some more, and if they don't the experiment hasn't cost me too much.
Addendum The boiler ran perfectly this morning and is chuntering away normally now, so we are no further towards knowing why it didn't come on last night.
Tuesday, 31 January 2017
pet habits
Every pet has its own pet habits, and over time develops rituals that no other pet wants or is allowed to do. The big anxious tabby used to jump on to a particular chair in the kitchen when he was hungry. How this started neither of us can remember, but it became a definite system of communication. Other cats might have stared at the food cupboard meaningfully, but he jumped on to his special chair. No other cat has hit on the same idiosyncratic method of making its wishes known, and I don't suppose any will.
Our Ginger has taken to being allowed into our bedroom in the morning. That's not so unusual, lots of pet owners let their pet into their bedroom for at least part of the night. We draw the line at allowing him to sleep in there all night, because I am not ready to go the full Huple's cat, and besides he might want to be let out during the night. He is an old boy and who knows how strong his bladder is nowadays. Instead he squawks outside the door when he wants to be let in. We have told him sternly that half past five is too early, but he's generally there at this time of year between seven and a quarter past.
It's a nice question who lets him in. The Systems Administrator's side of the bed is nearer the door, but the unspoken convention is that whoever lets the cat in is responsible for it thereafter, and that includes preventing Our Ginger from bothering the other person if they are still asleep. There are times when Our Ginger curls up nicely between us, dozes off, and everybody can have another fifty winks until it is time to get up. But there are other times when Our Ginger wants love and affection, He shows his love by sitting on your chest, or your back, or your shoulder, depending on which way up you are lying, and putting his face very close to yours while purring loudly. He likes faces, and if he is feeling especially fond he may try to put his toes up the Systems Administrator's nose, or chew my hair. And he likes being stroked, and demands this token of your love by nudging you with a damp nose, before settling down to purr for as long as the stroking lasts. Dare to stop and you will get another nudge. Occasionally he tries to burrow under the bedclothes or decides he really wants to lie on your pillow.
If you were asleep before it is not very easy to go on sleeping with close on a stone of ginger cat lying on your chest, paws pressed firmly against your throat, or even to go on sleeping with your life's partner scrabbling around beside you and hissing Get off, cat as they try to tug the cat back to their side of the bed. Our Ginger's paws long ago lost their velvet quality because he can no longer retract his claws. This is mildly uncomfortable when he prods your face, and unnerving when you can hear the little scratching sounds of them catching in the duvet cover. He dribbles from time to time, as old cats do, and while I know that as Jeremy Hardy helpfully pointed out cats are all covered in dried spit, still stroking a cat that you know on a theoretical level to be coated in cat saliva is not the same as having gobbets of cat dribble fall on your face. You are not entirely safe even if Our Ginger's face is not directly above yours, since if the accumulation of spit annoys him he occasionally and without warning shakes his head.
But is doesn't seem fair that the Systems Administrator should always be the one trying to placate Our Ginger, delivering the stroking while being dribbled on and trying to haul Our Ginger off me with one arm, simply on the basis of where the bedroom door happens to be. This morning the squawking started just after seven, punctuated by some thumping and a few squeaks from Mr Fluffy, and as I needed to get up to go to the loo I let Our Ginger in and stroked him devotedly for half an hour without disturbing the SA too much. It is Our Ginger's bit of protected quality time with us now that he shares the rest of the day with the kitties, and he purred tremendously for the entire half hour. Dribbling, claws, and all, there is no other creature on earth that is so lavishly and unambiguously happy and delighted with our company as Our Ginger when he is allowed into the bedroom in the morning.
Our Ginger has taken to being allowed into our bedroom in the morning. That's not so unusual, lots of pet owners let their pet into their bedroom for at least part of the night. We draw the line at allowing him to sleep in there all night, because I am not ready to go the full Huple's cat, and besides he might want to be let out during the night. He is an old boy and who knows how strong his bladder is nowadays. Instead he squawks outside the door when he wants to be let in. We have told him sternly that half past five is too early, but he's generally there at this time of year between seven and a quarter past.
It's a nice question who lets him in. The Systems Administrator's side of the bed is nearer the door, but the unspoken convention is that whoever lets the cat in is responsible for it thereafter, and that includes preventing Our Ginger from bothering the other person if they are still asleep. There are times when Our Ginger curls up nicely between us, dozes off, and everybody can have another fifty winks until it is time to get up. But there are other times when Our Ginger wants love and affection, He shows his love by sitting on your chest, or your back, or your shoulder, depending on which way up you are lying, and putting his face very close to yours while purring loudly. He likes faces, and if he is feeling especially fond he may try to put his toes up the Systems Administrator's nose, or chew my hair. And he likes being stroked, and demands this token of your love by nudging you with a damp nose, before settling down to purr for as long as the stroking lasts. Dare to stop and you will get another nudge. Occasionally he tries to burrow under the bedclothes or decides he really wants to lie on your pillow.
If you were asleep before it is not very easy to go on sleeping with close on a stone of ginger cat lying on your chest, paws pressed firmly against your throat, or even to go on sleeping with your life's partner scrabbling around beside you and hissing Get off, cat as they try to tug the cat back to their side of the bed. Our Ginger's paws long ago lost their velvet quality because he can no longer retract his claws. This is mildly uncomfortable when he prods your face, and unnerving when you can hear the little scratching sounds of them catching in the duvet cover. He dribbles from time to time, as old cats do, and while I know that as Jeremy Hardy helpfully pointed out cats are all covered in dried spit, still stroking a cat that you know on a theoretical level to be coated in cat saliva is not the same as having gobbets of cat dribble fall on your face. You are not entirely safe even if Our Ginger's face is not directly above yours, since if the accumulation of spit annoys him he occasionally and without warning shakes his head.
But is doesn't seem fair that the Systems Administrator should always be the one trying to placate Our Ginger, delivering the stroking while being dribbled on and trying to haul Our Ginger off me with one arm, simply on the basis of where the bedroom door happens to be. This morning the squawking started just after seven, punctuated by some thumping and a few squeaks from Mr Fluffy, and as I needed to get up to go to the loo I let Our Ginger in and stroked him devotedly for half an hour without disturbing the SA too much. It is Our Ginger's bit of protected quality time with us now that he shares the rest of the day with the kitties, and he purred tremendously for the entire half hour. Dribbling, claws, and all, there is no other creature on earth that is so lavishly and unambiguously happy and delighted with our company as Our Ginger when he is allowed into the bedroom in the morning.
Monday, 30 January 2017
indoor gardening
The hedges and roses remained unpruned for another day. After breakfast I went round to the back garden to see if it was really as cold and damp as I thought it was. The lawn was sodden. Moisture clung to every leaf and branch and surface. Chest tight, skin prickling, and muscles gently aching I had to admit that I still had a respiratory infection. On days when there's some warmth in the sun and the world dries out I can believe I am over it, but the chill of a thoroughly dank January day quickly dispels that illusion.
After lunch I did venture out to sweep the conservatory. It was dry in there compared to outdoors, and protected from the wind (not that there was much. The blades of the wind turbine on the farm on the opposite hill were stationary) and I thought that swaddled in my customary layers of winter gardening clothing I should be alright for a couple of hours. And I was itching to get on with something.
A lot of leaves had dropped, and I wanted to clear them out before the room became a nest of botrytis. The climbing fuchsia 'Lady Boothby' had lost about half of hers but not all, which is a bore as she'll probably discard the rest in stages over the next couple of months so that I have to keep sweeping up. Still, at least fuchsias are supposed to drop their leaves. Her neighbour on the back wall of the conservatory Jasminum mesnyi, a tender jasmine bearing semi-double yellow flowers in late spring, is nominally evergreen but the leaves on half the plant had faded to a nasty papery greyish-brown. I picked them off, hoping that since the stems were still green and healthy it would replace them in due course, and wondering if the loss was due to cold, over watering, under watering, or the aftermath of an attack of red spider mite.
All of the leaves have dropped off the Tibouchina I bought at a Plant Heritage meeting. I can't remember if it did that last winter, or if this is a new development. Tibouchina are tender shrubs from Brazil, with purple flowers for the most part, but I don't know which species mine is because it wasn't labelled. It grew quite vigorously last summer becoming rather lanky and I checked with its former owners at a previous Plant Heritage meeting that I'd be OK trimming it in the spring. Now I've just missed the chance to ask them a supplementary question as to whether it normally loses its leaves or if that is a sign that something has gone badly wrong. According to one post on a forum I found somebody else overwinters theirs in the garage and it loses all its leaves but recovers, but it would be nice to have an answer from somebody that I could be sure knew what they were talking about.
The big fleshy begonia I bought at the Great Dixter plant fair has gone mushy in places but most of it wasn't too bad. Every leaf has dropped from Begonia luxurians but the canes were still standing intact, one now taller than I am, so I expect it will leaf up in the spring. I removed the fabulously mouldy remains of two flower clusters from the top and fished the brown remains of the leaves out of the other plants where they'd fallen.
Some of the Dibleys streptocarpus have died back entirely. I'm afraid that's not a good sign. I normally manage to keep them going through the winter, and I'm not sure what I've done differently this time round, although I did kill one by over watering a couple of seasons back so maybe I've overcompensated the other way.
It was cold in the conservatory, and I didn't quite last to the end of the film review podcast and ended up listening to the last five minutes in the hall. A frost free conservatory is not really a very jolly place in the depths of winter. In fact, some of the plants looked so pathetic that I put the fan heater on as I shut the door for the night. Rather like me they could do with some sunshine.
After lunch I did venture out to sweep the conservatory. It was dry in there compared to outdoors, and protected from the wind (not that there was much. The blades of the wind turbine on the farm on the opposite hill were stationary) and I thought that swaddled in my customary layers of winter gardening clothing I should be alright for a couple of hours. And I was itching to get on with something.
A lot of leaves had dropped, and I wanted to clear them out before the room became a nest of botrytis. The climbing fuchsia 'Lady Boothby' had lost about half of hers but not all, which is a bore as she'll probably discard the rest in stages over the next couple of months so that I have to keep sweeping up. Still, at least fuchsias are supposed to drop their leaves. Her neighbour on the back wall of the conservatory Jasminum mesnyi, a tender jasmine bearing semi-double yellow flowers in late spring, is nominally evergreen but the leaves on half the plant had faded to a nasty papery greyish-brown. I picked them off, hoping that since the stems were still green and healthy it would replace them in due course, and wondering if the loss was due to cold, over watering, under watering, or the aftermath of an attack of red spider mite.
All of the leaves have dropped off the Tibouchina I bought at a Plant Heritage meeting. I can't remember if it did that last winter, or if this is a new development. Tibouchina are tender shrubs from Brazil, with purple flowers for the most part, but I don't know which species mine is because it wasn't labelled. It grew quite vigorously last summer becoming rather lanky and I checked with its former owners at a previous Plant Heritage meeting that I'd be OK trimming it in the spring. Now I've just missed the chance to ask them a supplementary question as to whether it normally loses its leaves or if that is a sign that something has gone badly wrong. According to one post on a forum I found somebody else overwinters theirs in the garage and it loses all its leaves but recovers, but it would be nice to have an answer from somebody that I could be sure knew what they were talking about.
The big fleshy begonia I bought at the Great Dixter plant fair has gone mushy in places but most of it wasn't too bad. Every leaf has dropped from Begonia luxurians but the canes were still standing intact, one now taller than I am, so I expect it will leaf up in the spring. I removed the fabulously mouldy remains of two flower clusters from the top and fished the brown remains of the leaves out of the other plants where they'd fallen.
Some of the Dibleys streptocarpus have died back entirely. I'm afraid that's not a good sign. I normally manage to keep them going through the winter, and I'm not sure what I've done differently this time round, although I did kill one by over watering a couple of seasons back so maybe I've overcompensated the other way.
It was cold in the conservatory, and I didn't quite last to the end of the film review podcast and ended up listening to the last five minutes in the hall. A frost free conservatory is not really a very jolly place in the depths of winter. In fact, some of the plants looked so pathetic that I put the fan heater on as I shut the door for the night. Rather like me they could do with some sunshine.
Sunday, 29 January 2017
overdue pruning
Yesterday morning and this morning I pruned the grape vine. Vines are notorious for bleeding if cut once the sap is rising, and received wisdom says that they should be tackled before the new year. I fully intended to prune ours then, except that I was ill and nothing got done in the garden, not even urgent pruning. Since then I have been seized with guilt each time I read another gardening article telling me to prune the vine before the end of December, if not in November. Finally the deed is done, and it did not bleed, or at least not at the time.
One year in a spirit of enquiry I severed one stem, not too thick, at a time when I thought the sap would be rising, to see what bleeding looked like. It was pretty dramatic. I'd imagined an occasional drip, a sort of sniffle, but liquid ran out of the cut end like a running tap. I could quite see why you would not want that happening all over the plant.
I call it pruning, but apart from the fact that I bother to cut back to just above a bud and avoid leaving snags it isn't a process that any viticulturalist would recognise. I have read about systems of grape vine pruning, and always finished up thoroughly confused. My pruning, or cutting back, consisted of removing the yards-long shoots that the vine made at some point last year when I wasn't looking, to leave short side branches, apart from a few long shoots that I kept to lead the plant further around the wire fence on which it lives. Vines make a phenomenal amount of growth each year with no encouragement or feeding whatsoever. Proper vine growers must have some method of dealing with this during the season.
I call it 'the vine' but in fact I think there are two different plants. Unfortunately due to poor record keeping I don't know which they are, and since vines are very ready to root themselves if you let a branch touch the ground I am not even sure where one ends and the other begins. I have never had a decent bunch of grapes, even in the year when I spent ages thinning them. I have cooked with the leaves, stuffing them with a mixture of spiced rice and mincemeat, and they were very good, but the main purpose of the vine from my point of view is decorative, to screen the anti-rabbit netting around the vegetable plot.
The vegetable plot itself is desperately weedy and the wooden edges of several of the beds have collapsed. I tried to imagine whether this was going to be the year I finally manage to grow vegetables, but I'm not sure. It's nearly February and I haven't tackled any of the boundary hedges yet, or pruned most of the roses. Losing a good month's worth of gardening time to flu has set me behind. Luckily it is forecast to be warmer this week, so I might start getting things done if it doesn't rain too much. It will be the moment of truth for the vine, if the warmer weather prompts the sap to start rising, whether it bleeds anyway out of its recently cut ends.
Saturday, 28 January 2017
a new lecture season
Today saw the start of the 2017 lecture season for the Suffolk group of Plant Heritage. I arrived rather early, since I'd volunteered to help put chairs out. This was prompted in equal parts by a genuine desire to be helpful, knowing that helping is one of the best ways of getting to know other club members, and an entirely selfish desire to have a reason to arrive early to get a parking space. The Plant Heritage group is well supported, and there are barely enough spaces as it is and some of them are so small and tight I find it jolly tricky wriggling in and out of them. Stowupland is one of those linear villages with a busy B road running through it and very limited on-street parking, while the village hall car park is shared with the next door sports field which is sometimes in use on Saturday afternoons. One way and another it pays to be early.
The committee member in charge of chairs seemed happy with my handiwork, but when we all sat down ready for the lecture the woman next to me remarked that they had put the chairs really close together. I did not admit that it had been me, but filed the observation away for next time. I'd been generous with the gaps between rows, but she was right, I should have spaced them out sideways. Being fairly small myself I forget that some others spread more than I do.
The lecture was by the editor of the RHS specialist publications, which include The Plantsman magazine, the Orchid Review, the RHS Plant Finder, various yearbooks and some gardening books. I don't subscribe to any of them. I am slightly surprised anybody still buys the Plant Finder in hard copy given that all the information is searchable online. The Plantsman is aimed at keen plant lovers whose desire to read stuff about plants is not fully satisfied by the RHS monthly magazine sent to all members. The Plantsman covers genus reviews, plant hunting, advanced cultivation and propagation techniques, plant breeding, horticultural science, taxonomy and nomenclature, and RHS trials. It is only sixty four pages long, and only slightly bigger than A5, but contains mostly articles and not advertising, mainly because as the editor ruefully admitted most specialist growers took the view that anybody that interested in plants would already have heard of them. Oh, and it has a circulation of only 3,000.
It was interesting hearing how a magazine is put together, and I have enjoyed leafing through my freebie sample issue of The Plantsman which I shall read properly at some point. The December 2016 edition includes articles on propagating cylamens by cuttings (new to me), genetic diversity or lack thereof in cultivated and wild populations of Acer griseum, dahlias in Mexico, and the great plantswoman Valerie Finnis. I am not sure I'll be taking out a subscription, though, because it is £29 a year to RHS members (more to non members). £7.25 per issue seems a lot for quite a slim magazine. You can pick up a whole hardback book for that on Amazon, if you are patient about stalking titles until they are remaindered and the internet is briefly awash with new copies, or if you don't mind going second hand. Public libraries weeding their collections can be a useful source. Some of the ex library books I've bought don't look as though they had ever been borrowed.
I mentioned the price and the circulation figures of The Plantsman to the Systems Administrator, who said briskly that it was too expensive. I think it probably is. On the basis of today's figures less than one per cent of the entire RHS membership are subscribers. If the RHS dropped the price could they get this up to two or three per cent? They don't really promote The Plantsman at all on their website. I logged on to the home page to check how much the magazine cost but couldn't see any link to publications, and when I experimentally tried clicking on shop that got me to various books I could buy but still not their specialist magazines or year books. I typed plantsman magazine into the search box but the message came up that it was unable to find any results, though it did suggest I try some of the more popular search terms Diary Mugs Gold Leaf Gardening Gloves and Address Book. In the end I found the right page using Google.
The committee member in charge of chairs seemed happy with my handiwork, but when we all sat down ready for the lecture the woman next to me remarked that they had put the chairs really close together. I did not admit that it had been me, but filed the observation away for next time. I'd been generous with the gaps between rows, but she was right, I should have spaced them out sideways. Being fairly small myself I forget that some others spread more than I do.
The lecture was by the editor of the RHS specialist publications, which include The Plantsman magazine, the Orchid Review, the RHS Plant Finder, various yearbooks and some gardening books. I don't subscribe to any of them. I am slightly surprised anybody still buys the Plant Finder in hard copy given that all the information is searchable online. The Plantsman is aimed at keen plant lovers whose desire to read stuff about plants is not fully satisfied by the RHS monthly magazine sent to all members. The Plantsman covers genus reviews, plant hunting, advanced cultivation and propagation techniques, plant breeding, horticultural science, taxonomy and nomenclature, and RHS trials. It is only sixty four pages long, and only slightly bigger than A5, but contains mostly articles and not advertising, mainly because as the editor ruefully admitted most specialist growers took the view that anybody that interested in plants would already have heard of them. Oh, and it has a circulation of only 3,000.
It was interesting hearing how a magazine is put together, and I have enjoyed leafing through my freebie sample issue of The Plantsman which I shall read properly at some point. The December 2016 edition includes articles on propagating cylamens by cuttings (new to me), genetic diversity or lack thereof in cultivated and wild populations of Acer griseum, dahlias in Mexico, and the great plantswoman Valerie Finnis. I am not sure I'll be taking out a subscription, though, because it is £29 a year to RHS members (more to non members). £7.25 per issue seems a lot for quite a slim magazine. You can pick up a whole hardback book for that on Amazon, if you are patient about stalking titles until they are remaindered and the internet is briefly awash with new copies, or if you don't mind going second hand. Public libraries weeding their collections can be a useful source. Some of the ex library books I've bought don't look as though they had ever been borrowed.
I mentioned the price and the circulation figures of The Plantsman to the Systems Administrator, who said briskly that it was too expensive. I think it probably is. On the basis of today's figures less than one per cent of the entire RHS membership are subscribers. If the RHS dropped the price could they get this up to two or three per cent? They don't really promote The Plantsman at all on their website. I logged on to the home page to check how much the magazine cost but couldn't see any link to publications, and when I experimentally tried clicking on shop that got me to various books I could buy but still not their specialist magazines or year books. I typed plantsman magazine into the search box but the message came up that it was unable to find any results, though it did suggest I try some of the more popular search terms Diary Mugs Gold Leaf Gardening Gloves and Address Book. In the end I found the right page using Google.
Friday, 27 January 2017
one step forward
An email plopped into my inbox this week to confirm what I'd heard on the radio. Following the petition on the parliament website calling for it to be made illegal for employers to require women to wear high heels at work which attracted 152,420 signatures, one of them mine, the House of Commons Petitions Committee launched a joint investigation with the Women and Equalities Committee, and their conclusion was that the Equalities Act 2010 was not fully effective in protecting workers from discrimination, and needed beefing up along with awareness campaigns aimed at employers and workers. MPs will debate the subject at 4.30 pm on Monday 6 March in Westminster Hall, and the Government will respond to the joint Committees' report within two months.
I was pleased that so far progress is being made on the issue. Admittedly, compared to the economic impact of Brexit, the fate of UK nationals currently living in Europe and EU nationals residing here (and the question of whether the lettuce farm will be able to find anybody to harvest the lettuces), the Syrian crisis, the mess in Iraq and Libya and Afghanistan, Islamic State, the Lord's Resistance Army, almost four years left to go with Donald Trump as President of the United States and an unknown number of years more of Putin, North Korea, the emergence of antibiotic resistant superbugs, the looming health crisis in the face of an aging and increasingly obese and diabetic population, female genital mutilation, the deteriorating mental health and wellbeing of Britain's young people, and global warming, the question of whether or not British women have to work all day in uncomfortable shoes that impede their mobility and are bad for their long term health is not the most burningly urgent issue of the day.
It is wrong, though, and goes along with a bunch of other things that are wrong like requiring women but not men to wear makeup or dye their hair blonde or wear body revealing clothing in order to carry out their jobs despite those things having nothing to do with the job of being a receptionist (as in the case of Nicola Thorp who started the petition). Or a lawyer, or accountant, or project manager, or data entry clerk, or risk management officer, or any of the zillion other things that women and men do in offices and businesses the length and breadth of the land, only the men are judged on whether they send visitors to the right meeting room and tell their host they've arrived, or bring their projects in on time and on budget, or input their data correctly, without the additional requirement to look sexy (in the eyes of other men who equate sexiness with makeup, blonde hair and high heels).
Maybe I should write to my MP to tell him I signed the petition and trust he will find the time to be at Westminster Hall on the afternoon of 6 March. He is very keen on Brexit and may not put the question of women's mandatory uncomfortable and unhealthy footwear at the top of his list of things to do. Theresa May did not initially sound convinced that the Equalities Act 2010 wasn't enough for the job. It would be a pity if this one were kicked into the long grass with an immaculate kitten heel. Besides, ruling that receptionists do not have to wear high heels will annoy Piers Morgan.
I was pleased that so far progress is being made on the issue. Admittedly, compared to the economic impact of Brexit, the fate of UK nationals currently living in Europe and EU nationals residing here (and the question of whether the lettuce farm will be able to find anybody to harvest the lettuces), the Syrian crisis, the mess in Iraq and Libya and Afghanistan, Islamic State, the Lord's Resistance Army, almost four years left to go with Donald Trump as President of the United States and an unknown number of years more of Putin, North Korea, the emergence of antibiotic resistant superbugs, the looming health crisis in the face of an aging and increasingly obese and diabetic population, female genital mutilation, the deteriorating mental health and wellbeing of Britain's young people, and global warming, the question of whether or not British women have to work all day in uncomfortable shoes that impede their mobility and are bad for their long term health is not the most burningly urgent issue of the day.
It is wrong, though, and goes along with a bunch of other things that are wrong like requiring women but not men to wear makeup or dye their hair blonde or wear body revealing clothing in order to carry out their jobs despite those things having nothing to do with the job of being a receptionist (as in the case of Nicola Thorp who started the petition). Or a lawyer, or accountant, or project manager, or data entry clerk, or risk management officer, or any of the zillion other things that women and men do in offices and businesses the length and breadth of the land, only the men are judged on whether they send visitors to the right meeting room and tell their host they've arrived, or bring their projects in on time and on budget, or input their data correctly, without the additional requirement to look sexy (in the eyes of other men who equate sexiness with makeup, blonde hair and high heels).
Maybe I should write to my MP to tell him I signed the petition and trust he will find the time to be at Westminster Hall on the afternoon of 6 March. He is very keen on Brexit and may not put the question of women's mandatory uncomfortable and unhealthy footwear at the top of his list of things to do. Theresa May did not initially sound convinced that the Equalities Act 2010 wasn't enough for the job. It would be a pity if this one were kicked into the long grass with an immaculate kitten heel. Besides, ruling that receptionists do not have to wear high heels will annoy Piers Morgan.
Thursday, 26 January 2017
a cold day
I don't think the thermometer ever rose above freezing all day. There was no frost on the grass and I was surprised when I went armed with a can of water to refill the hens' galvanised drinker to find that the top was iced on and I needed to go back and get another jug of hot water before I could get the lid off. I was even more surprised when I set off at ten to meet my friends and saw that the car thermometer was still registering minus two.
The first of them to arrive greeted me in the car park, and said that she had been thinking of walking until she walked as far as her dustbin and changed her mind, and it was very odd, there had been no ice on her windscreen but the dashboard display said it was minus two. The next friend to arrive said that her car only thought it was minus one. It was cold, anyway. We forgot to ask for a vote from the fourth to turn up, and the fifth never made it, leaving us with an empty chair and me with a vague feeling of anxiety on her behalf and the wistful thought that if I'd known she wasn't coming I needn't have pinched the extra chair and arranged myself with my knees wrapped round a table leg.
When I got home there was an apologetic message on the answerphone from the missing fifth friend, saying that she had forgotten to write our coffee on the calendar and so had forgotten to come. And that her husband had died on Saturday, but she would have come anyway. This is the friend whose husband was in a nursing home with Altzheimers so bad he didn't recognise her, the one who started signing her Christmas cards just from her and not from them both two years ago, so that I wondered if he had died and had to make discreet enquiries to discover that he had not and it must have been that he was no longer with her in any meaningful sense. And now he really has died. Life is sometimes very cruel.
It was so cold that I put the greenhouse and conservatory heaters back on even though it was the middle of the day, and then I spent the afternoon doing my tax return. One way and another today did not pan out to be a barrel of laughs.
The first of them to arrive greeted me in the car park, and said that she had been thinking of walking until she walked as far as her dustbin and changed her mind, and it was very odd, there had been no ice on her windscreen but the dashboard display said it was minus two. The next friend to arrive said that her car only thought it was minus one. It was cold, anyway. We forgot to ask for a vote from the fourth to turn up, and the fifth never made it, leaving us with an empty chair and me with a vague feeling of anxiety on her behalf and the wistful thought that if I'd known she wasn't coming I needn't have pinched the extra chair and arranged myself with my knees wrapped round a table leg.
When I got home there was an apologetic message on the answerphone from the missing fifth friend, saying that she had forgotten to write our coffee on the calendar and so had forgotten to come. And that her husband had died on Saturday, but she would have come anyway. This is the friend whose husband was in a nursing home with Altzheimers so bad he didn't recognise her, the one who started signing her Christmas cards just from her and not from them both two years ago, so that I wondered if he had died and had to make discreet enquiries to discover that he had not and it must have been that he was no longer with her in any meaningful sense. And now he really has died. Life is sometimes very cruel.
It was so cold that I put the greenhouse and conservatory heaters back on even though it was the middle of the day, and then I spent the afternoon doing my tax return. One way and another today did not pan out to be a barrel of laughs.
Wednesday, 25 January 2017
tidy desk, tidy mind
It was foggy again this morning, but this time the fog hung around all day, so it's a good thing I saw to the bees yesterday. It was so damp and cold that even Mr Cool objected to going out. Instead all three kittens wandered about the house disconsolately with only occasional outbreaks of wrestling to break the monotony, plus one unfortunate episode when I exchanged my new house shoes for some outdoor shoes to go and put food on the bird table, and came back inside to find Mr Cool chewing one of them. They are Danish, made of one hundred per cent wool felt with calfskin soles, in petrol blue, and extremely cosy. They are basically slippers, but I suppose they are marketed as house shoes because that sounds more upmarket and reassuringly hygge. In contrast wearing slippers all day might mark you out as ill, slovenly, or a benefits scrounger. The house shoes (or slippers) are washable, with the rather marvellous advice to vacuum them first, but it remains to be seen whether I can keep them respectable or whether they become very slovenly indeed as they accrete ash, soot, dust, and fur, culminating in the moment when I accidentally drop cat food on them.
Meanwhile I tidied my desk. Now I've finished the contrast with what it was like before is so great I wish I jolly well had stuck to my idea of photographing it every day. It was a proper tidy, going through all the lose stuff on the desk plus the pile of paper in my filing tray plus the wallet of paper that should have been in the filing tray but was shoved in a folder to save it from the cats. The top deck of the filing tray had cracked, finally falling victim to the weight of cat trying to sleep in it, but I solved that problem by swapping the top and bottom trays over.
I found all sorts of things. There was a large mysterious piece of plastic that the Systems Administrator said had come off an old printer and was rubbish. A small mysterious piece of plastic that the SA said was an in-car phone charger and kept. Several railway books belonging to the SA. Nearly a year's worth of bank statements, joint bank statements and credit card statements which shows how long it is since I did any filing. Assorted financial statements I need for my tax return which was why I could not put off tidying the desk any longer. Old plant catalogues I don't need to keep. Recent plant catalogues I will keep for now. Pieces of paper with notes about various plants written on them that needed to be transcribed to a more permanent record. A small rectangle of plywood, origins and purpose unknown. A screwdriver. Our annual electricity summary. Our annual water statement. Old magazines from various clubs I belong to, which I threw away after scrupulously ripping up any pages that had personal contact details on them. The eighteen-month guarantee for my previous watch battery which showed me that the old battery had run out five days after the guarantee expired, and that the price of watch batteries had risen by an extortionate amount. My birthday cards (my birthday was over four months ago). New terms and conditions from my bank and then even newer terms and conditions replacing the previous new ones. A card with the dates of green waste collections in 2017, and a booklet detailing what waste now would and wouldn't be accepted at which Essex recycling centres. The house insurance renewal. A card from the cat rescue centre with the kittens' birth date on it. The plastic base of my 2016 Zen desk calendar, allegedly recyclable. A small 2016 desk calendar with pictures of Korats on it including some of my aunt's, a present from my aunt, that used to live on the ice cream making machine. A new spiral bound garden lecture notebook with a snazzy red cover with white dots. An unsolicited notebook from the woodland charity for recording people's thoughts about trees, still empty. My old iPod docking station that I wasn't sure whether to keep or not, since the speakers were quite good but the iPod was broken. The old iPod, now stuck on playing nothing but Philip Glass.
Eventually every piece of paper had been read and checked to see if it could be thrown away, and every piece that had to be kept had been filed somewhere vaguely sensible. The wooden articulated artist's model was back on his stand after spending the second half of last year lying down in two bits. Months' worth of dust and cat fur had been wiped away. It actually looks like a desk, a working platform, rather than a kitten's playground cum rubbish tip. I told myself that I really should be more organised about keeping my filing up to date, and more decisive about disposing of out of date or broken things. We shall see.
Meanwhile I tidied my desk. Now I've finished the contrast with what it was like before is so great I wish I jolly well had stuck to my idea of photographing it every day. It was a proper tidy, going through all the lose stuff on the desk plus the pile of paper in my filing tray plus the wallet of paper that should have been in the filing tray but was shoved in a folder to save it from the cats. The top deck of the filing tray had cracked, finally falling victim to the weight of cat trying to sleep in it, but I solved that problem by swapping the top and bottom trays over.
I found all sorts of things. There was a large mysterious piece of plastic that the Systems Administrator said had come off an old printer and was rubbish. A small mysterious piece of plastic that the SA said was an in-car phone charger and kept. Several railway books belonging to the SA. Nearly a year's worth of bank statements, joint bank statements and credit card statements which shows how long it is since I did any filing. Assorted financial statements I need for my tax return which was why I could not put off tidying the desk any longer. Old plant catalogues I don't need to keep. Recent plant catalogues I will keep for now. Pieces of paper with notes about various plants written on them that needed to be transcribed to a more permanent record. A small rectangle of plywood, origins and purpose unknown. A screwdriver. Our annual electricity summary. Our annual water statement. Old magazines from various clubs I belong to, which I threw away after scrupulously ripping up any pages that had personal contact details on them. The eighteen-month guarantee for my previous watch battery which showed me that the old battery had run out five days after the guarantee expired, and that the price of watch batteries had risen by an extortionate amount. My birthday cards (my birthday was over four months ago). New terms and conditions from my bank and then even newer terms and conditions replacing the previous new ones. A card with the dates of green waste collections in 2017, and a booklet detailing what waste now would and wouldn't be accepted at which Essex recycling centres. The house insurance renewal. A card from the cat rescue centre with the kittens' birth date on it. The plastic base of my 2016 Zen desk calendar, allegedly recyclable. A small 2016 desk calendar with pictures of Korats on it including some of my aunt's, a present from my aunt, that used to live on the ice cream making machine. A new spiral bound garden lecture notebook with a snazzy red cover with white dots. An unsolicited notebook from the woodland charity for recording people's thoughts about trees, still empty. My old iPod docking station that I wasn't sure whether to keep or not, since the speakers were quite good but the iPod was broken. The old iPod, now stuck on playing nothing but Philip Glass.
Eventually every piece of paper had been read and checked to see if it could be thrown away, and every piece that had to be kept had been filed somewhere vaguely sensible. The wooden articulated artist's model was back on his stand after spending the second half of last year lying down in two bits. Months' worth of dust and cat fur had been wiped away. It actually looks like a desk, a working platform, rather than a kitten's playground cum rubbish tip. I told myself that I really should be more organised about keeping my filing up to date, and more decisive about disposing of out of date or broken things. We shall see.
Tuesday, 24 January 2017
treating the bees
When I looked out of the bathroom window this morning I could just see the tops of the trees through the fog. I went out to open the hen house armed with a jug of hot water to de-ice their galvanised drinker, and found I didn't need it and needn't have set the glasshouse heaters last night for it was not actually freezing. There was still a thick crust of ice on the pond, and when I looked out after giving the cats their breakfast I saw Mr Fluffy and Mr Fidget sliding about on it. I tried to coax them off, but Mr Fluffy thought that running on the spot was a great game. It was still too thick for them to fall through, but before the end of the afternoon the Systems Administrator broke it up with a stake.
The sun soon burnt off the mist and had real warmth in it while there was no wind at all, so I decided it was time to dose the bees for varroa. I'd normally have aimed to do this between Christmas and the New Year, since you want to pick a time when there is as little brood as possible in the hive. The varroa mites spend some of their life cycle inside the capped brood cells with the bee larvae, and any that are sealed away when you apply the treatment will be protected by their wax covering. I'd been in no fit state to mess around with bees then, though, and for the past few days it has been so savagely cold I didn't want to open the hives at all, but today was perfect. I didn't want it to be too warm, since you are supposed to trickle a measured amount of treatment over each seam of bees, meaning you want them to be clustered together into a nice tight ball. If they break the cluster and start wandering all over the place you don;t know where to direct the treatment, and it's important not to overdose them.
When I started beekeeping it was not long since the varroa mite had arrived in the UK, and the recommended course of treatment was to hang strips impregnated with pyrethroids inside the beehive. The pyrethroids were more lethal to the mites than the bees, and so a good measure of control was achieved. Over the next few years the mites developed drug resistance, which was pretty much inevitable. If you try to eradicate a pest chemically using only one class of chemicals, and beekeepers only had one class of chemical, any individual pests that happen to have an unusually high tolerance to that chemical will survive and breed, and in due course you will have selectively bred a resistant population of pests. That is why at Writtle we were taught that a basic principle if using chemical crop protection is to rotate between different classes of chemical treatment so that any pests that survive the first round will with any luck be done for in a subsequent one
There was a suggestion when resistance began to appear that beekeepers were partly to blame for using the pyrethroid strips incorrectly, leaving them in the hives for too long or reusing them and so exposing the varroa to sublethal doses that allowed them to build up resistance, but I'm not sure that follows. Even if an individual mite could develop higher tolerance through prolonged low exposure, like a human being building up tolerance to arsenic or alcohol, would it be heritable? Either way, I was always careful to use my strips properly because I was brought up to be respectful of medicines, but the time came when there was no point in applying them any more.
No other single treatment has been as effective as the pyrethroid strips used to be. I tried applying trays of a thymol based gel for a couple of seasons, the idea being that the thymol was more objectionable to the mites than the bees, but gave up, partly because some friends who used them reported that their bees disliked it so much they had simply absconded, and partly because it meant I had to change the hive floors specially for the treatment. When I started beekeeping hives came with solid wooden floors, then somebody hit on the notion that if you used a fairly fine wire mesh then any varroa mites that fell off the bees would drop through the floor and out of the hive before they could climb back on. The open mesh floor would not offer total control, but could help as part of an integrated pest management system, which has been the buzzword for a few years now in beekeeping as well as horticulture.
You can't use a thymol gel varroa treatment on an open mesh floor, though, because the fumes need to build up in the hive as the gel evaporates and as they are heavier than air they would sink out through the floor. I leave my bees on the open mesh floors all year round, after some initial uncertainty about whether it would be too cold in the winter, and have found that works fine, if anything better than the solid floor because condensation can't collect in puddles inside the hive. Damp is worse for bees than cold. My general view on beehives after many years of beekeeping is that I don't pull them around and take them apart more than I have to. It stresses the bees, and a stressed colony is a disease prone and unproductive colony. And changing floors is a fiddle. The brood box is heavy to lift when full of stores, and once the bees start coming out of the bottom it is very difficult to put it down on its new floor without squashing some of them. And getting the entrance block into the gap between floor and brood box is another fiddle where it is only too easy to squash your bees. Sometimes you want to look at the floor, to check for problems, but I didn't want to have to change every floor in the apiary and then change them back each time I treated for varroa.
For the past few years I've been trickling a solution of oxalic acid over the bees. The legal status of oxalic acid as a veterinary medicine was slightly obscure, but the big beekeeping suppliers sold it and the bee inspectors turned a blind eye or decided the ambiguity in the beekeepers' favour, because we had to treat the bees with something and there wasn't a lot out there. Now there is a licenced treatment available in the UK, called Api-Bioxal, and a government email arrived before Christmas warning that it was illegal to use oxalic acid and that we must buy the authorised product. That's what I did, being one of those people who always reads the leaflet and finishes courses of antibiotics. The Api-Bioxal crystals are dissolved in sugar syrup and trickled over the bees at the rate of five millilitres per seam of bees, which means all the bees huddled together between two adjacent combs, at a maximum of ten per hive, and the fastest way to do it so as to not have the hive open for longer than necessary is to fill ten plastic syringes before you open the hive and use as many as you need to. I forgot to buy any syringes when I ordered the chemical because I was feeling distinctly sub par, but fortunately we had some in the kitchen drawer, a legacy of some past pet's illness, and if we hadn't then the SA has them for railway modelling.
I feel pretty irritated, though, because I read the instructions on the back of the packet several times very carefully to make sure I applied it correctly, and as far as I can see the active ingredient is hydrated oxalic acid, which is according to Wikipedia a commonly encountered form. Oxalic acid is not a new active molecule, on the contrary it has been around for millennia. You will find it in rhubarb leaves and spinach. The Systems Administrator lent me a pair of small scales capable of measuring accurately to the last fraction of a gramme, because I wanted to split the contents of the packet instead of wasting sugar making up a full half litre of treatment when I only wanted a maximum of two hundred millilitres, and as I opened the packet I remarked that according to the instructions I ought to be wearing gloves and a protective mask, and the SA said oxalic acid wasn't that toxic, he used to use it to scrub rust stains off the boat.
And it's true, it is still sold for that purpose. A kilo of oxalic acid sold as a wood bleach will set you back £11.75 including VAT. The smallest packet I could buy in the form licenced as Api-Bioxal cost £10.99 for 35 grammes. That was sufficient to treat ten hives, which was twice as much as I wanted and more than most hobby beekeepers would need. When I was treasurer of my local beekeeping association I handled the bee disease insurance premiums, and so saw how many hives each member expected to have during the year. Relatively few had more than five, and a lot didn't admit to more than three. The instructions on the Api-Bioxal packet said that it was good until 2019 unopened, but once opened it had a shelf life of only three months, so it's not as though anybody can save the other half or two thirds of the packet until the next season. And not everybody has scales capable of weighing to the last gramme. Why can't the manufacturers at least break it down into smaller ten gramme sachets so that customers don't have to open the whole packet at once? I would not dream of trying to treat my bees with wood bleach, but I do feel that hobby beekeepers are being mugged, forced to pay over the odds for a chemical that's been around for donkey's years and to buy it in uneconomically large sizes.
The sun soon burnt off the mist and had real warmth in it while there was no wind at all, so I decided it was time to dose the bees for varroa. I'd normally have aimed to do this between Christmas and the New Year, since you want to pick a time when there is as little brood as possible in the hive. The varroa mites spend some of their life cycle inside the capped brood cells with the bee larvae, and any that are sealed away when you apply the treatment will be protected by their wax covering. I'd been in no fit state to mess around with bees then, though, and for the past few days it has been so savagely cold I didn't want to open the hives at all, but today was perfect. I didn't want it to be too warm, since you are supposed to trickle a measured amount of treatment over each seam of bees, meaning you want them to be clustered together into a nice tight ball. If they break the cluster and start wandering all over the place you don;t know where to direct the treatment, and it's important not to overdose them.
When I started beekeeping it was not long since the varroa mite had arrived in the UK, and the recommended course of treatment was to hang strips impregnated with pyrethroids inside the beehive. The pyrethroids were more lethal to the mites than the bees, and so a good measure of control was achieved. Over the next few years the mites developed drug resistance, which was pretty much inevitable. If you try to eradicate a pest chemically using only one class of chemicals, and beekeepers only had one class of chemical, any individual pests that happen to have an unusually high tolerance to that chemical will survive and breed, and in due course you will have selectively bred a resistant population of pests. That is why at Writtle we were taught that a basic principle if using chemical crop protection is to rotate between different classes of chemical treatment so that any pests that survive the first round will with any luck be done for in a subsequent one
There was a suggestion when resistance began to appear that beekeepers were partly to blame for using the pyrethroid strips incorrectly, leaving them in the hives for too long or reusing them and so exposing the varroa to sublethal doses that allowed them to build up resistance, but I'm not sure that follows. Even if an individual mite could develop higher tolerance through prolonged low exposure, like a human being building up tolerance to arsenic or alcohol, would it be heritable? Either way, I was always careful to use my strips properly because I was brought up to be respectful of medicines, but the time came when there was no point in applying them any more.
No other single treatment has been as effective as the pyrethroid strips used to be. I tried applying trays of a thymol based gel for a couple of seasons, the idea being that the thymol was more objectionable to the mites than the bees, but gave up, partly because some friends who used them reported that their bees disliked it so much they had simply absconded, and partly because it meant I had to change the hive floors specially for the treatment. When I started beekeeping hives came with solid wooden floors, then somebody hit on the notion that if you used a fairly fine wire mesh then any varroa mites that fell off the bees would drop through the floor and out of the hive before they could climb back on. The open mesh floor would not offer total control, but could help as part of an integrated pest management system, which has been the buzzword for a few years now in beekeeping as well as horticulture.
You can't use a thymol gel varroa treatment on an open mesh floor, though, because the fumes need to build up in the hive as the gel evaporates and as they are heavier than air they would sink out through the floor. I leave my bees on the open mesh floors all year round, after some initial uncertainty about whether it would be too cold in the winter, and have found that works fine, if anything better than the solid floor because condensation can't collect in puddles inside the hive. Damp is worse for bees than cold. My general view on beehives after many years of beekeeping is that I don't pull them around and take them apart more than I have to. It stresses the bees, and a stressed colony is a disease prone and unproductive colony. And changing floors is a fiddle. The brood box is heavy to lift when full of stores, and once the bees start coming out of the bottom it is very difficult to put it down on its new floor without squashing some of them. And getting the entrance block into the gap between floor and brood box is another fiddle where it is only too easy to squash your bees. Sometimes you want to look at the floor, to check for problems, but I didn't want to have to change every floor in the apiary and then change them back each time I treated for varroa.
For the past few years I've been trickling a solution of oxalic acid over the bees. The legal status of oxalic acid as a veterinary medicine was slightly obscure, but the big beekeeping suppliers sold it and the bee inspectors turned a blind eye or decided the ambiguity in the beekeepers' favour, because we had to treat the bees with something and there wasn't a lot out there. Now there is a licenced treatment available in the UK, called Api-Bioxal, and a government email arrived before Christmas warning that it was illegal to use oxalic acid and that we must buy the authorised product. That's what I did, being one of those people who always reads the leaflet and finishes courses of antibiotics. The Api-Bioxal crystals are dissolved in sugar syrup and trickled over the bees at the rate of five millilitres per seam of bees, which means all the bees huddled together between two adjacent combs, at a maximum of ten per hive, and the fastest way to do it so as to not have the hive open for longer than necessary is to fill ten plastic syringes before you open the hive and use as many as you need to. I forgot to buy any syringes when I ordered the chemical because I was feeling distinctly sub par, but fortunately we had some in the kitchen drawer, a legacy of some past pet's illness, and if we hadn't then the SA has them for railway modelling.
I feel pretty irritated, though, because I read the instructions on the back of the packet several times very carefully to make sure I applied it correctly, and as far as I can see the active ingredient is hydrated oxalic acid, which is according to Wikipedia a commonly encountered form. Oxalic acid is not a new active molecule, on the contrary it has been around for millennia. You will find it in rhubarb leaves and spinach. The Systems Administrator lent me a pair of small scales capable of measuring accurately to the last fraction of a gramme, because I wanted to split the contents of the packet instead of wasting sugar making up a full half litre of treatment when I only wanted a maximum of two hundred millilitres, and as I opened the packet I remarked that according to the instructions I ought to be wearing gloves and a protective mask, and the SA said oxalic acid wasn't that toxic, he used to use it to scrub rust stains off the boat.
And it's true, it is still sold for that purpose. A kilo of oxalic acid sold as a wood bleach will set you back £11.75 including VAT. The smallest packet I could buy in the form licenced as Api-Bioxal cost £10.99 for 35 grammes. That was sufficient to treat ten hives, which was twice as much as I wanted and more than most hobby beekeepers would need. When I was treasurer of my local beekeeping association I handled the bee disease insurance premiums, and so saw how many hives each member expected to have during the year. Relatively few had more than five, and a lot didn't admit to more than three. The instructions on the Api-Bioxal packet said that it was good until 2019 unopened, but once opened it had a shelf life of only three months, so it's not as though anybody can save the other half or two thirds of the packet until the next season. And not everybody has scales capable of weighing to the last gramme. Why can't the manufacturers at least break it down into smaller ten gramme sachets so that customers don't have to open the whole packet at once? I would not dream of trying to treat my bees with wood bleach, but I do feel that hobby beekeepers are being mugged, forced to pay over the odds for a chemical that's been around for donkey's years and to buy it in uneconomically large sizes.
Monday, 23 January 2017
winter's blast
It's been a cold couple of days. I've run the heaters in the greenhouse and conservatory for the past two nights, and left them on all yesterday, partly because it was so cold and partly so that I wouldn't forget to switch them on again when I got back from the concert. It would be a terribly expensive business if the whole winter was like this, but tonight will be only the fourth I've had to use them, and it is forecast to be safely back above freezing by the weekend. When you look at the price of plants, and tot up the replacement cost of my half dozen Geranium maderense alone, you can see that except in the longest and most savage winters it pays to keep some growing space frost free, quite apart from the fact that I am attached to my plants.
I used to be much more hawkish about switching the heaters on if the forecast was for anything below zero, but experience has taught that the glass is enough to keep the odd night of frost out if the thermometer only dips to minus one or so. The kind of weather that produces overnight frosts tends to also give us sunny days, and there is some thermal gain to be had under glass even in the winter. Plus, as Peter Gibbs explained in his talk to my Plant Heritage group a couple of years ago, the earth acts as a great reservoir of heat so if you cover it with glass or plastic or even fleece you can hold in enough of the warmth to protect your plants from light frosts. It gets trickier when there is a whole run of freezing nights, and I imagine the heat gradually being sucked out of the concrete base of the greenhouse and the brick wall at the back of the conservatory.
It helps being fairly close to the coast. I've seen reports of minus eight degrees at Writtle outside Chelmsford, and I'm sure it didn't get anywhere near that cold here. I don't know how cold it did get because I don't have a garden thermometer, but if it had got down to minus eight various things would be brown and dead. It also helps that it is only January and not late February after a mild spell to lure plants into growth. Cistus that have made it unscathed through a normal winter can have their new leaves badly scorched by even moderate frosts once they've started back into life. They generally grow out of it, but it is depressing to suddenly have to add Trim out dead Cistus shoots to your already long list of Things to Do. Our climate allows us to grow an amazing range of garden plants, but one reason why species from places with distinct Continental climates can suffer is that they can't cope with the start-stop-go-stop English winter.
The witch hazel flowers are not bothered by frost. I went and stared at them this morning from a polite distance, because by then the frost had melted to leave a very soggy lawn and I knew from bitter experience that the suede boots I was wearing would become soaked through within seconds if I trod on the grass. The Systems Administrator went out while the frost was still encasing every branch and stem to take some photographs. I think the SA knows better than to have walked on the frozen lawn, but if not the blackened footprints will give the game away in due course.
I used to be much more hawkish about switching the heaters on if the forecast was for anything below zero, but experience has taught that the glass is enough to keep the odd night of frost out if the thermometer only dips to minus one or so. The kind of weather that produces overnight frosts tends to also give us sunny days, and there is some thermal gain to be had under glass even in the winter. Plus, as Peter Gibbs explained in his talk to my Plant Heritage group a couple of years ago, the earth acts as a great reservoir of heat so if you cover it with glass or plastic or even fleece you can hold in enough of the warmth to protect your plants from light frosts. It gets trickier when there is a whole run of freezing nights, and I imagine the heat gradually being sucked out of the concrete base of the greenhouse and the brick wall at the back of the conservatory.
It helps being fairly close to the coast. I've seen reports of minus eight degrees at Writtle outside Chelmsford, and I'm sure it didn't get anywhere near that cold here. I don't know how cold it did get because I don't have a garden thermometer, but if it had got down to minus eight various things would be brown and dead. It also helps that it is only January and not late February after a mild spell to lure plants into growth. Cistus that have made it unscathed through a normal winter can have their new leaves badly scorched by even moderate frosts once they've started back into life. They generally grow out of it, but it is depressing to suddenly have to add Trim out dead Cistus shoots to your already long list of Things to Do. Our climate allows us to grow an amazing range of garden plants, but one reason why species from places with distinct Continental climates can suffer is that they can't cope with the start-stop-go-stop English winter.
The witch hazel flowers are not bothered by frost. I went and stared at them this morning from a polite distance, because by then the frost had melted to leave a very soggy lawn and I knew from bitter experience that the suede boots I was wearing would become soaked through within seconds if I trod on the grass. The Systems Administrator went out while the frost was still encasing every branch and stem to take some photographs. I think the SA knows better than to have walked on the frozen lawn, but if not the blackened footprints will give the game away in due course.
Sunday, 22 January 2017
a musical interlude
I made it to the music society concert, and the huge expensive thyme infused throat sweets preserved my decency and I did not cough, and the hall was jolly cold although the heating had been on. We all sat there in our coats, while the pianist appeared perfectly comfortable in a sleeveless dress. A friend told me she would be feeling OK because of the adrenaline, but I hope she didn't get chilled.
The concert opened with a suite by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre. Born twenty years before JS Bach, she performed at the court of the Sun King aged five, published her first set of suites for harpsichord at the age of twenty-two, and was the first woman to have an opera performed at the Academie Royale de Musique. Radio 3 chose her as the Composer of the Week back in 2015 as part of their celebration of International Women's Day, which was when I first came across her. Sadly, their enthusiasm for one of the greatest French Baroque composers didn't seem to last beyond the need to find some female composers for Women's Day and she's had little airplay since, or at least not when I've been listening. I would say I like the French Baroque, except that an unkind person could point out that I have no recordings of it beyond a cassette of Lully somewhere in a drawer, but nonetheless I do like the French Baroque and was delighted by the pianist's choice of opening number.
Then we had some Beethoven that was new to me and also to the friend sitting next to me, Sonata No. 4 in E flat major. It was big and muscular and brilliant, one of those pieces of music I find easier to respect than to love. Beethoven quite often has that effect on me, which says more about me than Beethoven.
After the interval we had a newly written piece by Kim Ashton, a selection from Ornithology, which was inspired by birds and unabashed by the fact that Charlie Parker already used the title. This afternoon's birds were the goldfinch, the kestrel, and a third bird I didn't know. I tried hard to listen with an open mind, while aware that my preconception was that I was not going to like it, but I'm afraid none of it seemed to me to have anything to do with goldfinches or kestrels. If forced to guess I'd have said that it was about Brutalist architecture or collapsing icebergs or a series of lorries breaking down on the M25. I am afraid I am hopelessly middlebrow and modern classical music is wasted on me.
Then we had two Fauré Nocturnes, perhaps chosen as a contrast or palate cleanser after the birds, romantic and effusive. I have no recordings of any of his work except the Requiem, which I adore. Every so often I think I should get some more, and then I hear some and remember that on the whole I don't like late nineteenth and early twentieth century French music very much. We finished up with three movements from Igor Stravinsky's Petroushka, except that that wasn't quite the end because we got a little piece of Scarlatti as an encore. The Scarlatti was wonderful. In my secret heart if we could have just have stuck to Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and Scarlatti for the whole concert, and maybe slipped in a bit of Antonio Soler and even some Handel, I'd have been entirely happy, but that probably wouldn't have suited the majority.
The concert opened with a suite by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre. Born twenty years before JS Bach, she performed at the court of the Sun King aged five, published her first set of suites for harpsichord at the age of twenty-two, and was the first woman to have an opera performed at the Academie Royale de Musique. Radio 3 chose her as the Composer of the Week back in 2015 as part of their celebration of International Women's Day, which was when I first came across her. Sadly, their enthusiasm for one of the greatest French Baroque composers didn't seem to last beyond the need to find some female composers for Women's Day and she's had little airplay since, or at least not when I've been listening. I would say I like the French Baroque, except that an unkind person could point out that I have no recordings of it beyond a cassette of Lully somewhere in a drawer, but nonetheless I do like the French Baroque and was delighted by the pianist's choice of opening number.
Then we had some Beethoven that was new to me and also to the friend sitting next to me, Sonata No. 4 in E flat major. It was big and muscular and brilliant, one of those pieces of music I find easier to respect than to love. Beethoven quite often has that effect on me, which says more about me than Beethoven.
After the interval we had a newly written piece by Kim Ashton, a selection from Ornithology, which was inspired by birds and unabashed by the fact that Charlie Parker already used the title. This afternoon's birds were the goldfinch, the kestrel, and a third bird I didn't know. I tried hard to listen with an open mind, while aware that my preconception was that I was not going to like it, but I'm afraid none of it seemed to me to have anything to do with goldfinches or kestrels. If forced to guess I'd have said that it was about Brutalist architecture or collapsing icebergs or a series of lorries breaking down on the M25. I am afraid I am hopelessly middlebrow and modern classical music is wasted on me.
Saturday, 21 January 2017
rest cure
I spent a second day sitting very quietly and keeping warm, apart from when I nipped down to the village to post a couple of things in time for the morning collection, and stock up on cough sweets. I don't really believe in cough medicines, and anyway coughing will help clear the gunk out of my lungs, but I am going to a piano recital tomorrow afternoon and I absolutely mustn't cough during that, or at least only during the applause. I got a packet of thyme based lozenges for the concert, and a little bag of Fisherman's Friends which I've been necking down today. Original menthol and eucalyptus flavour, as featured in Michael Portillo's Great British Railway Journey, made in Fleetwood in Lancashire. I'd forgotten how much I liked them, and wish I'd bought a bigger tube now.
My chest feels much better than it did a couple of days ago, which is good news except that I am forced to conclude that trying to resume the activities of normal life makes it worse. It's just as well I'm not currently employed by a plant nursery. How would you explain that yes, it is a full month since you were in bed with flu, but you still can't work outside for any length of time or stand all day or talk nicely to lots of people without feeling as though you are going down with full blown bronchitis and pneumonia? At the plant centre they did the stock take in January which meant days on end of sitting in a plastic chair in an unheated plastic tunnel leafing through an Excel printout with frozen fingers. I'd have had a major relapse.
We watched a sci-fi romance last night, the 2011 release The Adjustment Bureau starring Emily Blunt and Matt Damon. I caught up with a review last summer five years after the event when I was listening to podcasts of the Kermode and Mayo film review programme from before the time the Systems Administrator introduced me to it, and noted it down as something that was fun but not too deep or demanding. There are times, like when you have a foul bronchial cough, that you don't want to have to process anything too meaningful, and so we saved Brooklyn for another day. When I asked if we could have The Adjustment Bureau last night I was going on the note I'd made of the podcast which said it was light, snappy and funny, but forgotten the specific details. The romance turned out to be between a dancer and an up-and-coming American politician, which gave it an extra frisson on the day of Donald Trump's inauguration. The film was just what Mark Kermode said it would be and we both enjoyed it. Matt Damon is always likable and heroic, Emily Blunt was lively and funny, and there were mysterious agents wearing fedoras. It is based (probably rather loosely) on a story by Philip K Dick and so a first cousin to Blade Runner.
The only trouble with keeping a list of films to watch at some point based on reviews is maintaining a balance between genres. You trust the critics to weed out a lot of dross, though the odd good release may get overlooked in the process, but they are limited for space in their columns and do tend to go for the heavyweight films, dealing with serious issues and packing a big emotional punch. If you aren't careful you end up on a Friday evening with a choice between grim and grimmer. There have been a few times when we've looked hopefully through our little pile of LoveFilm envelopes and realised we had an unalloyed miseryfest. Nowadays we make sure we have a mixture, something thrillerish, something funny, some serious social commentary. The hardest category to keep topped up is comedy, because comedy is hard to do well.
I'm not sure we'll be bothering with LaLa Land, despite the near universal adulation. I love Singin' in the Rain, but neither of us are general fans of musicals, or jazz. A musical about a brattish jazz musician, with singing and dancing which even its admirers admit are not as good as the singing and dancing in Singin' in the Rain, doesn't sound as though it would be in either of our wheelhouses. It has got an awful lot of people going, though, including Bryony Gordon learning to dance in a yellow dress. As the owner of a yellow raincoat I can warn anybody thinking of buying a butter yellow sundress that pollen beetles find the colour irresistibly attractive.
My chest feels much better than it did a couple of days ago, which is good news except that I am forced to conclude that trying to resume the activities of normal life makes it worse. It's just as well I'm not currently employed by a plant nursery. How would you explain that yes, it is a full month since you were in bed with flu, but you still can't work outside for any length of time or stand all day or talk nicely to lots of people without feeling as though you are going down with full blown bronchitis and pneumonia? At the plant centre they did the stock take in January which meant days on end of sitting in a plastic chair in an unheated plastic tunnel leafing through an Excel printout with frozen fingers. I'd have had a major relapse.
We watched a sci-fi romance last night, the 2011 release The Adjustment Bureau starring Emily Blunt and Matt Damon. I caught up with a review last summer five years after the event when I was listening to podcasts of the Kermode and Mayo film review programme from before the time the Systems Administrator introduced me to it, and noted it down as something that was fun but not too deep or demanding. There are times, like when you have a foul bronchial cough, that you don't want to have to process anything too meaningful, and so we saved Brooklyn for another day. When I asked if we could have The Adjustment Bureau last night I was going on the note I'd made of the podcast which said it was light, snappy and funny, but forgotten the specific details. The romance turned out to be between a dancer and an up-and-coming American politician, which gave it an extra frisson on the day of Donald Trump's inauguration. The film was just what Mark Kermode said it would be and we both enjoyed it. Matt Damon is always likable and heroic, Emily Blunt was lively and funny, and there were mysterious agents wearing fedoras. It is based (probably rather loosely) on a story by Philip K Dick and so a first cousin to Blade Runner.
The only trouble with keeping a list of films to watch at some point based on reviews is maintaining a balance between genres. You trust the critics to weed out a lot of dross, though the odd good release may get overlooked in the process, but they are limited for space in their columns and do tend to go for the heavyweight films, dealing with serious issues and packing a big emotional punch. If you aren't careful you end up on a Friday evening with a choice between grim and grimmer. There have been a few times when we've looked hopefully through our little pile of LoveFilm envelopes and realised we had an unalloyed miseryfest. Nowadays we make sure we have a mixture, something thrillerish, something funny, some serious social commentary. The hardest category to keep topped up is comedy, because comedy is hard to do well.
I'm not sure we'll be bothering with LaLa Land, despite the near universal adulation. I love Singin' in the Rain, but neither of us are general fans of musicals, or jazz. A musical about a brattish jazz musician, with singing and dancing which even its admirers admit are not as good as the singing and dancing in Singin' in the Rain, doesn't sound as though it would be in either of our wheelhouses. It has got an awful lot of people going, though, including Bryony Gordon learning to dance in a yellow dress. As the owner of a yellow raincoat I can warn anybody thinking of buying a butter yellow sundress that pollen beetles find the colour irresistibly attractive.
Friday, 20 January 2017
three steps forward, two back
Alas, whatever bug I have had has lodged in my chest. I have been hacking away since the New Year with what is rather disgustingly known as a productive cough, and by yesterday afternoon it was letting me know that there was still an underlying infection associated with that cough. Cue lassitude, tight chest, prickling face, sore throat, and the sinking realisation that there was nothing to be done except rest indoors in front of the Aga or the stove with a regular supply of warm drinks. And there was me actually daring to arrange to meet some friends next week for coffee. Fortunately I probably can't go too far wrong sitting in the cafe at the Acorn Village for an hour, drinking coffee and maybe eating a cake if everybody isn't on a New Year diet, but it is getting very demoralising. Today was a beautiful, calm, sunny day, the garden is full of jobs that need doing, and I didn't do any of them except check the mousetrap by the hyacinths in the greenhouse. It had another mouse in it, and the hyacinth leaves had been chewed.
This is the stage at which in the good old days one would have gone to the doctor, demanding a prescription for antibiotics 'in case there was a secondary bacterial infection' and the GP would probably have acquiesced, in case there was and to get one out of the surgery. Nowadays with doctors acutely aware of the looming threat of widespread antibiotic resistance, and health boards monitoring practice's prescribing habits, there is little point. The NHS does not want to see people who have had a mild chest infection for a few weeks following flu, in the absence of other exciting symptoms like unexplained weight loss. There is no evidence to say that I have any bacterial infection. And antibiotics are fierce things.
I have been to see my GP a couple of times in the past decade requesting antibiotics, once when I'd been bitten on the wrist by a stray cat and again when I lodged a thorn deep in my knuckles while weeding around a rose. I didn't like the look of the rose wound as soon as I'd done it, and nor did the doctor. I was sent on my way with a week's supply of pills big enough for a horse, and a warning to seek medical attention immediately if red streaks started appearing up my arm. I took the full course of pills, and red streaks did not appear up my arm, and I was very grateful to have escaped a series of progressively higher amputations before dying of blood poisoning anyway, but the pills made me feel rotten. Really, really down. It's a bad idea to start randomly killing off bits of your gut flora unless you have to, since it is intimately linked to your mental state as well as your digestion. And while I have a weak chest my digestion is absolutely splendid.
So there is nothing to be done except drink tea and take things very easy until I feel better or the weather warms up, and the weather is not going to warm up any time soon. I was going to take a turn with the cooking, instead of which the Systems Administrator volunteered to carry on until next week and set off to the supermarket while I sat in the kitchen reading gardening magazines and playing with Mr Fluffy. Meanwhile I am painfully aware of all the things outside that need pruning, weeding, tying up and cutting back, and that I still haven't dosed the bees for varroa. It is all very, very dull.
This is the stage at which in the good old days one would have gone to the doctor, demanding a prescription for antibiotics 'in case there was a secondary bacterial infection' and the GP would probably have acquiesced, in case there was and to get one out of the surgery. Nowadays with doctors acutely aware of the looming threat of widespread antibiotic resistance, and health boards monitoring practice's prescribing habits, there is little point. The NHS does not want to see people who have had a mild chest infection for a few weeks following flu, in the absence of other exciting symptoms like unexplained weight loss. There is no evidence to say that I have any bacterial infection. And antibiotics are fierce things.
I have been to see my GP a couple of times in the past decade requesting antibiotics, once when I'd been bitten on the wrist by a stray cat and again when I lodged a thorn deep in my knuckles while weeding around a rose. I didn't like the look of the rose wound as soon as I'd done it, and nor did the doctor. I was sent on my way with a week's supply of pills big enough for a horse, and a warning to seek medical attention immediately if red streaks started appearing up my arm. I took the full course of pills, and red streaks did not appear up my arm, and I was very grateful to have escaped a series of progressively higher amputations before dying of blood poisoning anyway, but the pills made me feel rotten. Really, really down. It's a bad idea to start randomly killing off bits of your gut flora unless you have to, since it is intimately linked to your mental state as well as your digestion. And while I have a weak chest my digestion is absolutely splendid.
So there is nothing to be done except drink tea and take things very easy until I feel better or the weather warms up, and the weather is not going to warm up any time soon. I was going to take a turn with the cooking, instead of which the Systems Administrator volunteered to carry on until next week and set off to the supermarket while I sat in the kitchen reading gardening magazines and playing with Mr Fluffy. Meanwhile I am painfully aware of all the things outside that need pruning, weeding, tying up and cutting back, and that I still haven't dosed the bees for varroa. It is all very, very dull.
Thursday, 19 January 2017
fogged up
When I went into Colchester before Christmas I had a new battery fitted to my wristwatch, which had stopped. For the past few years I've been to the little stall in what used to be Williams and Griffin, and was relieved to discover that it had survived the transition to Fenwick. They have always been pleasant and efficient, with no hint of capriciousness. I used to go to a jewelers in Eld Lane that was part of the Co-Op group and that I felt on that basis ought to be reputable, until they suddenly announced they would not open any watch to change the battery unless they were agents for that brand. I fled from another Colchester jewelers without letting them touch my watch when in reply to my query whether they could change the battery in a gold watch the two girls behind the till looked at each other and one said sportingly that she didn't mind giving it a go.
Watches are personal. My gold watch was a present from the Systems Administrator. It is a small and absolutely plain Accurist and I always wear it on an absolutely plain slim leather strap. The glass has got lightly scratched over the years, which I suppose I could have replaced if I felt that strongly about it, and it loses time slightly, but I am very fond of it. It is a testament to how well the SA knew my tastes, because a small plain watch was exactly what I wanted. Come weddings, funerals, posh parties and any other rare social occasions when I can dress up in clothes that are not cat proof and the Accurist will be silently ticking away losing infinitesimal amounts of time on my wrist.
My other watch is for gardening, country walks and other activities where the gold watch might get damaged. It is a Mondaine which I saw featured in the Guardian, and instantly fell in love with the second hand. And the red strap, but straps can be changed. It was the second hand that did it for me. It is based on the Swiss railway clock, red, and the tip ends in a little red circle. The rest of the face is very, very plain. A total design classic, in fact. Psychologists may argue that buying things does not in the long run make people happier, and in general they are right, but I felt enormously cheerful when I yielded to temptation and bought the Mondaine, and the red second hand (and the strap) still cheer me up each time I look at them.
According to a snippet on today's Today programme, watches are an example of a dying art form, because in the future everybody will have the time on their smartphones. Maybe, maybe not. Things have a habit of sticking around for longer than you think they're going to. Radio is still with us decades after the invention of television, and Colchester is even going to have a new Curzon cinema and perhaps an out of town multiplex. I don't take my smartphone into the garden with me, and anyway it doesn't have a red second hand, and there are lots of social situations where sliding a quick glance down at your wrist seems more tactful than whipping out your phone.
It was the Mondaine that needed a new battery in December. Watch batteries are not cheap, which makes running two watches even more of an eccentric indulgence. Never mind, it was worth it to get that second hand ticking forwards again. Except that when I got home I found the watch had fogged up. It had looked fine in the warm air of Fenwick's basement, but moisture condensed out of the air inside it as soon as it got cold. I tried putting it in the airing cupboard to dry, but alas, the woman in the shop had done a very thorough job of resealing it. It has been in the airing cupboard for most of the six weeks since the new battery was fitted, but when I put it on this morning it fogged up again in the time it took me to let the hens out.
It is now back with the menders. The woman on the little stand was apologetic, and had various theories as to how it could be fixed, but none of them could be done on the spot. That means I'll have to go back into Colchester, which is a bore, since normally I save up all business in town until I have a haircut, which is only once every six weeks. I must remember that it wouldn't really be easier to rely on the smartphone to tell the time, though. Even apart from the fact that I like the Mondaine it would only be easier relying on the phone up to the point where I dropped it or knelt on it and broke it.
Watches are personal. My gold watch was a present from the Systems Administrator. It is a small and absolutely plain Accurist and I always wear it on an absolutely plain slim leather strap. The glass has got lightly scratched over the years, which I suppose I could have replaced if I felt that strongly about it, and it loses time slightly, but I am very fond of it. It is a testament to how well the SA knew my tastes, because a small plain watch was exactly what I wanted. Come weddings, funerals, posh parties and any other rare social occasions when I can dress up in clothes that are not cat proof and the Accurist will be silently ticking away losing infinitesimal amounts of time on my wrist.
My other watch is for gardening, country walks and other activities where the gold watch might get damaged. It is a Mondaine which I saw featured in the Guardian, and instantly fell in love with the second hand. And the red strap, but straps can be changed. It was the second hand that did it for me. It is based on the Swiss railway clock, red, and the tip ends in a little red circle. The rest of the face is very, very plain. A total design classic, in fact. Psychologists may argue that buying things does not in the long run make people happier, and in general they are right, but I felt enormously cheerful when I yielded to temptation and bought the Mondaine, and the red second hand (and the strap) still cheer me up each time I look at them.
According to a snippet on today's Today programme, watches are an example of a dying art form, because in the future everybody will have the time on their smartphones. Maybe, maybe not. Things have a habit of sticking around for longer than you think they're going to. Radio is still with us decades after the invention of television, and Colchester is even going to have a new Curzon cinema and perhaps an out of town multiplex. I don't take my smartphone into the garden with me, and anyway it doesn't have a red second hand, and there are lots of social situations where sliding a quick glance down at your wrist seems more tactful than whipping out your phone.
It was the Mondaine that needed a new battery in December. Watch batteries are not cheap, which makes running two watches even more of an eccentric indulgence. Never mind, it was worth it to get that second hand ticking forwards again. Except that when I got home I found the watch had fogged up. It had looked fine in the warm air of Fenwick's basement, but moisture condensed out of the air inside it as soon as it got cold. I tried putting it in the airing cupboard to dry, but alas, the woman in the shop had done a very thorough job of resealing it. It has been in the airing cupboard for most of the six weeks since the new battery was fitted, but when I put it on this morning it fogged up again in the time it took me to let the hens out.
It is now back with the menders. The woman on the little stand was apologetic, and had various theories as to how it could be fixed, but none of them could be done on the spot. That means I'll have to go back into Colchester, which is a bore, since normally I save up all business in town until I have a haircut, which is only once every six weeks. I must remember that it wouldn't really be easier to rely on the smartphone to tell the time, though. Even apart from the fact that I like the Mondaine it would only be easier relying on the phone up to the point where I dropped it or knelt on it and broke it.
Wednesday, 18 January 2017
a mysterious affair
As I went out to let the hens into their run this morning I was puzzled by the sight of something white lying in the drive half way along the eleagnus hedge. It took a while to sort the hens out because their water needed topping up but had frozen solid in the dish of their galvanised drinker, and I had to melt the ice before I could get the lid off. Then I went to investigate the mystery white thing.
It was a dead cat. A white cat with a couple of patches of brown fur on its left side. They were quite unusual markings and I was sure that I had not seen it before. It was not a regular visitor to the garden. It was lying stretched out on its right side, eyes open, mouth open, tongue protruding, and it was quite dead.
I retreated to the house and shut the glass door and the cat door to keep our cats in while I thought about the situation. I was upset. I like cats, and here this one was lying dead in our front garden, and somebody somewhere might be worrying that it hadn't come home last night. But where had it come from, how had it got here, and what had it died of? If I had seen it by the side of a road I'd have said it had been hit by a vehicle, but we are nowhere near any road. It was inconceivable that last night after it got dark somebody drove round our turning circle and ran over a strange cat. Had it been poisoned? Or had some malevolent nutter left a dead cat in the drive? That really didn't seem very likely either. But poisoning was not a comfortable thought. Would that be accidental poisoning from rodenticide, or deliberate poisoning with antifreeze? It does happen. And last summer somebody was shooting pet cats in Great Bentley and West Bergholt. The police even got involved, though I never read that anybody was caught or charged.
The Systems Administrator put the dead cat in a box in the pot shed, and agreed that the best thing to do was to ring up the RSPCA. The cat might be microchipped, in which case its owner could be informed if it still had one, and we were hoping somebody might be able to give us some clue as to cause of death. The RSPCA don't always get a good press and I feel slightly cautious of them, but I couldn't think who else to ask. The woman who answered the phone at the local center sounded extremely kind and sensible, though, and said that the two most likely causes of death were road traffic accident and accidental poisoning. I explained quite how far we were from a road, but she said that if it had been injured but not killed outright it might have had a very strong instinct to try and go home but collapsed en route. They were not able to send anybody out, but if we could take it to any vet they would check for a microchip free of charge and contact the owner. Or the RSPCA could do it.
That sounded a much better idea. Our vet was incredibly busy the last time we went there, and the thought of turning up with a mystery dead cat in a box and no appointment did not appeal. In fact I suppose you would leave the dead cat in the car while you went inside and explained to the receptionists what the problem was, since you probably shouldn't take the corpse into the waiting room along with other people's kittens waiting to be vaccinated, when you didn't even know what it had died of. And so we ended up driving to Colchester with a dead cat. If it had been our cat we would have wanted to know what had happened to it, even though the news was bad, rather than be left not knowing and nursing ever fainter hope that it might turn up. And I rather selfishly still hoped the RSPCA would be able to give us some more idea of the cause of death.
We saw two people, both volunteers, and they both sounded confident that the poor cat had suffered a head trauma and made it as far as our drive before collapsing. It did have a trickle of blood on the right hand side of its head where it had been lying, though the SA couldn't tell if that was from a head wound or had come out of its mouth. If the RSPCA staff were right it was the best outcome we could hope for as far as our own cats went. Not rogue cat poisoners or heavy handed idiots somewhere in the locality with no idea how to lay rat poison properly. And not a fox, which was the Systems Administrator's fear. The cat was a neutered tom, quite old but in fair condition, though the ragged state of its ears indicated it had led a fairly feral existence, according to the RSPCA. And it was microchipped, using an obsolete system they couldn't check online, but a phone call later they were able to tell us it was registered to a property up the road. So perhaps it had been trying to go home, poor thing.
We left it with them, and the sad task of contacting its owners. I felt quite jangled for the rest of the morning and our cats seemed out of sorts, though whether that was the presence of the dead cat or the shock of being locked in was hard to say. Mr Fidget went and sat in the wash basin in the downstairs cloakroom and wouldn't come out.
It was a dead cat. A white cat with a couple of patches of brown fur on its left side. They were quite unusual markings and I was sure that I had not seen it before. It was not a regular visitor to the garden. It was lying stretched out on its right side, eyes open, mouth open, tongue protruding, and it was quite dead.
I retreated to the house and shut the glass door and the cat door to keep our cats in while I thought about the situation. I was upset. I like cats, and here this one was lying dead in our front garden, and somebody somewhere might be worrying that it hadn't come home last night. But where had it come from, how had it got here, and what had it died of? If I had seen it by the side of a road I'd have said it had been hit by a vehicle, but we are nowhere near any road. It was inconceivable that last night after it got dark somebody drove round our turning circle and ran over a strange cat. Had it been poisoned? Or had some malevolent nutter left a dead cat in the drive? That really didn't seem very likely either. But poisoning was not a comfortable thought. Would that be accidental poisoning from rodenticide, or deliberate poisoning with antifreeze? It does happen. And last summer somebody was shooting pet cats in Great Bentley and West Bergholt. The police even got involved, though I never read that anybody was caught or charged.
The Systems Administrator put the dead cat in a box in the pot shed, and agreed that the best thing to do was to ring up the RSPCA. The cat might be microchipped, in which case its owner could be informed if it still had one, and we were hoping somebody might be able to give us some clue as to cause of death. The RSPCA don't always get a good press and I feel slightly cautious of them, but I couldn't think who else to ask. The woman who answered the phone at the local center sounded extremely kind and sensible, though, and said that the two most likely causes of death were road traffic accident and accidental poisoning. I explained quite how far we were from a road, but she said that if it had been injured but not killed outright it might have had a very strong instinct to try and go home but collapsed en route. They were not able to send anybody out, but if we could take it to any vet they would check for a microchip free of charge and contact the owner. Or the RSPCA could do it.
That sounded a much better idea. Our vet was incredibly busy the last time we went there, and the thought of turning up with a mystery dead cat in a box and no appointment did not appeal. In fact I suppose you would leave the dead cat in the car while you went inside and explained to the receptionists what the problem was, since you probably shouldn't take the corpse into the waiting room along with other people's kittens waiting to be vaccinated, when you didn't even know what it had died of. And so we ended up driving to Colchester with a dead cat. If it had been our cat we would have wanted to know what had happened to it, even though the news was bad, rather than be left not knowing and nursing ever fainter hope that it might turn up. And I rather selfishly still hoped the RSPCA would be able to give us some more idea of the cause of death.
We saw two people, both volunteers, and they both sounded confident that the poor cat had suffered a head trauma and made it as far as our drive before collapsing. It did have a trickle of blood on the right hand side of its head where it had been lying, though the SA couldn't tell if that was from a head wound or had come out of its mouth. If the RSPCA staff were right it was the best outcome we could hope for as far as our own cats went. Not rogue cat poisoners or heavy handed idiots somewhere in the locality with no idea how to lay rat poison properly. And not a fox, which was the Systems Administrator's fear. The cat was a neutered tom, quite old but in fair condition, though the ragged state of its ears indicated it had led a fairly feral existence, according to the RSPCA. And it was microchipped, using an obsolete system they couldn't check online, but a phone call later they were able to tell us it was registered to a property up the road. So perhaps it had been trying to go home, poor thing.
We left it with them, and the sad task of contacting its owners. I felt quite jangled for the rest of the morning and our cats seemed out of sorts, though whether that was the presence of the dead cat or the shock of being locked in was hard to say. Mr Fidget went and sat in the wash basin in the downstairs cloakroom and wouldn't come out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)