making it up as you go along

I found the village hall where I was doing last night's talk easily enough, and there were no traffic jams, so I arrived with loads of time to spare.  I'd rather do it that way round, and go through my talk again in my head sitting in the car, than be sitting in stationary traffic or hunting for an apparently non-existent venue as the minutes tick by.  It was a nice village.  There was a sign outside the pub on the way up to the village hall that read 'Beer runs out soon.  Please panic buy'.  As I sat in the car I saw a small bird with a very dark patch on top of its head, and no other obvious markings, flit about in a tree and then suddenly swing upside down below the branchit was perching on to pick some morsel out of the top of the hedge below, so I wondered if it was a blackcap, given there is such a thing.  I looked them up on the RSPB site this morning and it could have been.  Apparently the song is very distinctive, but I didn't hear it singing, and the RSPB didn't say whether it was likely to hang upside down from branches.  The talk went fine, though the hall had dreadful acoustics and I had to wear a clip on microphone, which meant I had to be careful how much I moved my head.

Today I returned to working on the back garden, and kept away from the new deck, since it turned out that the reason the Systems Administrator hadn't pressed on with construction the other day was that it was impossible to move beams around with my face centimetres from the work.  Which is fair enough.  It is going to have a boardwalk path to it, design to be finalised after the rest of the deck has been built and we can see what it looks like.  I fancy a Japanese style one, with two lengths parallel to each other but offset, overlapping in the middle.  Apparently witches can only run in straight lines and so can't manage the corner and can't get across.  I'm sure it would be a useful precaution to keep witches off.  Alternatively you could say that by forcing people to pause and take a sideways step as they approach the deck, you slow them down and make them focus on the moment.  The SA is not too fussed about witches, and is not sure about doing a sideways step while carrying a deckchair and a gin and tonic, so we'll see.  The SA's idea is that the boardwalk could be curved.  The deck is going to have a back, to give protection from the south-westerlies, and to stop the hedge growing out across it, and to make it feel slightly enclosed and more of a place.  The design of the back also has to be decided once the deck is in place.  I don't know if it should have an umbrella of some vaguely oriental design.  We are not really designers, making each bit up as we go along when we can see the effect of what we have done already.

I finally found a home for three glass ornaments I bought at least year's Chelsea Flower Show.  They are solid glass, quite thick and roughly egg shaped in outline, in blue and green, and they come with metal loops at the top for hanging them up.  They were from a brother and sister team trading as Hayhoe Designs, and I'd been eyeing up their stand for several years before settling on a trio of what they call glass leaves (I think they look more like fruit myself) for starters.  Then I couldn't immediately see exactly where to put them.  The back garden is starting to get quite full of ornaments, to the point where in the not too distant future there won't be room for any more, except small details that you only see when you're right on top of them.  Some people, famously Christopher Lloyd and Beth Chatto, loathe sculptures, ornaments or eyecatchers in the garden.  I love them, but it's essential to avoid becoming cluttered.  Each needs its own space and frame, and they mustn't be allowed to obtrude on each other.

The glass leaves, or fruit, needed to hang from a tree, which reduced the list of possible locations, and I wanted to put them somewhere so that, if they fell, they wouldn't either break or get lost.  I finally settled on a crab apple in the front garden, near where I already have a Whichford bespoke egg shaped obilesk with an inscription on it.  They're suspended using fishing line, which is almost invisible but difficult to tie in a tight knot, so if they do come undone they'll just fall on earth, or ground covering plants, and I should find them again.  I like them enough that I might buy some more, if the people are at Chelsea again this year.  The news on their website is still for 2011, but they're probably still in business and just haven't updated the site.   I really liked their glass panels, but they were quite expensive, and the SA was bullish about how it would be possible to make them at home.  Whether we'd have time is another question.

The 'Taihaku' survived the hail storm, by the way, though the lawn is becoming littered with fallen petals, and its days of glory for this year are numbered.  At least it came out.  A good friend of the SA lost all of the flowers on his magnolia, hit by one cold night at critically the wrong moment.