I have ventured out of the house today twice, briefly, once to top up the food on the bird table, let the chickens out and turn the heaters off, and again to shut the chickens up for the night and turn the glasshouse heaters back on. Last night's frost wasn't very heavy, and I could probably have got away without heating, but today was so cold that the greenhouse and conservatory won't have warmed up much, so tonight they'll be starting from a low base, even if the frost isn't much harder. Yesterday evening, despite having said that the Norfolk Island Pine would have to take its chances outside, I did lay it down in the conservatory. The winter so far has been so mild it has survived in reasonable condition. I've only got to get it through a few more weeks and it should be OK for another summer, so it seems a shame to lose it at this stage.
The cold is in full, bubbling swing. It is following exactly the pattern of the Systems Administrator's cold, which came on at the end of November, seemed much better by Christmas, and then went on to a second, more liquid phase at the New Year. Mine got going on New Year's Eve, after giving intimations of its incipient presence from mid December onwards, seemed to be almost better by the end of last week, and then kicked off again. I don't know where the theory comes from that colds last a week, but as the SA's former boss and good friend says, There is only one thing wrong with that theory: it is complete bollocks. Actually a lot of rubbish is talked about colds. They are 'only' a cold. They are the sufferer's own fault, for eating the wrong food, or going out in the wrong weather, or being stressed. They are a good thing because they are nature's detox. I don't think so. The cold virus is a supremely successful parasite, one that doesn't kill its host, mutates frequently, and defies eradication through treatment or vaccination. Most adults in the UK get two to five a year. The SA and I are well within the normal range.
It's a nuisance that I'm booked to do a woodland charity talk tomorrow. I could cancel, but that would leave a room full of people expecting to have a lecture with nothing to do except chat among themselves, which seems pretty mean to them, and especially unfair to the organisers. The committee may keep an emergency quiz or last minute entertainment up their sleeves, but I don't think a cold counts as an emergency. Flu, yes, or total voice loss through laryngitis, or a medical crisis like appendicitis requiring hospitalisation, but not a cold. If it had been a Trustee's meeting I'd be going. Apart from a sense of noblesse oblige, that once you've agreed to do something you do it if humanly possible and don't mess people around, I have my own reputation to consider. If I turn up, even muffled and subdued, they'll be able to see that I tried, but if I don't go I look flaky. Club organisers want to book speakers who know their stuff and are entertaining, but they equally want to avoid those with any whiff of unreliability. It's my cold, and I'm going to share it with them (unless, of course, it gets a great deal worse in the night).
In the meantime I've been reading a book that turns out to be just the thing, and watching the birds on the bird table. The book is Ferdinand Mount's autobiography Cold Cream: my early life and other mistakes. I heard bits of it on R4 a while back, and have been following its progress from hardback to paperback to remaindered paperback, before picking up a copy. He is the same age as my own parents, but from a completely different world, growing up in 'Hobohemia', his parents both from landed gentry families but without either inherited wealth or any inclination to work for a living. After prep school (the fees a struggle for his parents) and Eton (scholarship), he went to Oxford, where his friends were the sorts of upper class and well-connected people whose friendship groups firmly excluded people like my parents, or (still, thirty years on) me and the SA. He drifted through private tutoring, Fleet Street, and Conservative Central Office, and wrote several novels, though I haven't got to that bit yet. It is a wonderful memoir, because Mount is such a self-deprecating, funny, observant narrator. The book is full of encounters with people who ended up part of, or connected with, The Establishment. If Mount were self-important, or crass, or a snob, it could have been the most awful book, but as he is the opposite of all of those it is a delight.
We didn't do The Big Garden Birdwatch last weekend. I was at work and the SA couldn't be bothered. The more I heard about it the less sure I was what, if anything, it would tell anyone about Britain's bird population. After the harsh winter last year if you didn't see many birds that might mean that they'd perished in the cold, but this year after the mild winter if you didn't see many birds that might mean that there was plenty of wild food and they didn't need to come into gardens. So seeing or not seeing many birds doesn't seem to tell you anything. I don't believe the counts anyway, because birds vary so much in their willingness to be seen, and I don't trust people not to yield to the temptation to put down rare visitors like coal tits if they know they have them in the garden sometimes, even if there weren't any in the hour they chose to record in. On our bird table the robins seem to pick on the male chaffinches the worst, apart from the other robins (though they are belligerent little beasts towards all other birds).
Addendum The ex Sir Fred's title doesn't happen in north east Essex and I've never met him, so he doesn't belong in this blog, but everybody else has had a pop at the subject so I'm going to. I'm with the Telegraph columnist who disapproves on principle of attempts to rewrite history, and says it is too much like the Soviet authorities air-brushing fallen politicians out of photos. I think he should have kept his knighthood, as a perpetual reminder to politicians, and regulators, and financial journalists, that they all went along with it at the time. I think the civil servants who administer the honours system should keep big photographs of Fred on their desks, and the Queen who nominally awards them should do the same. Everybody nominating anybody for an honour should have to consider the example of Fred and say whether, hand on heart, they still think this is a good idea. Or we could just not have honours, and take satisfaction from our good deeds.
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