We watched Silent Running with our cheese fest. This is a 1972 sci-fi minor classic, or at least Dr Mark Kermode keeps recommending it on the R5 Live film programme, and the Systems Administrator was very keen for us to see it. It is about an astronaut working in a fleet of space ships carrying biospheres containing all that is left of plant and animal life, after a catastrophe on earth has sent the surface temperature to 75 degrees C. As a chronic biophile and pet lover I found the whole thing very upsetting, especially what happened to the plants and the robots.
The robots were waddling boxes about the size of an old fashioned TV, and according to IMDb they were played by actors without legs, walking on their hands in lightweight costumes. These were remarkable performances, deserving more credit than they got. I was reminded of an interview I'd heard on R4 with David Hockney earlier in the day, who recounted how he took his mother to an exhibition that included a work by Barry Flanagan, a rope snaked and coiled across the floor. Mrs Hockney looked at this and asked 'Did he make the rope?'
The Carr's water biscuits bought to go with the cheese fest had a strong and insistent peppery taste that competed with and detracted from the flavour of the cheese. On close inspection they had little black bits in, and the box said, in mauve letters 3mm high*, with roasted garlic and herbs. I think manufacturers should put a large yellow exclamation mark on the packaging when they have introduced a fresh twist to an established brand, so that we could check we really do want the new version with added whatever, instead of the normal flavour we were expecting. I suppose they're hoping that I'll like water biscuits with roasted garlic and herbs and buy lots more biscuits, but I don't, so the only effect is to devalue the Carr's brand slightly in my eyes as being unreliable.
If you want to sleep well and soundly then I don't think watching a disturbing film before bed while eating too much cheese is probably the best way to go about it, and I was rather slow to get going this morning. Tidying the daffodil lawn, that was supposed to be a quick job just finishing it off, seems to be taking forever. I badly underestimated how much there was still to do. There are endless straggly bits of hedge to trim, and creeping tufts of grass that ducked under the power scythe in the autumn cut, and have now gone yellow and look unsightly. The old dead leaves from the eleagnus take a small eternity to rot down, and in the meantime have worked their way down among the straggly grass and embedded themselves in the surface of the lawn. The oak leaves would be very useful on the leaf compost pile, if I could get them out without carrying away half a bin load of weedy grass and rot resistant eleagnus leaves at the same time. I was reduced to using the leaf vacuum machine.
There were honey bees foraging on the Mahonia x media 'Winter Sun'. I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing. Honey bees don't hibernate, but they undergo metabolic changes for the winter, laying down extra fat stores, and ceasing to produce the bee milk they feed to their young, while the queen stops laying eggs. In this winter state they can live for six months, instead of the six weeks which is all that workers manage in the height of summer. If the weather is unseasonably warm does the colony remain in its winter state, or will the workers change metabolically to short lived summer bees too early, before the queen starts laying and it is warm enough for them to raise young? And are they eating their stored food too quickly, if they are active when they should be resting? I really don't know.
*Literally. I retrieved the packaging from the recycling and measured the typeface with a ruler. I find that vaguely disturbing.
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