The Systems Administrator has got a summer cold. This left me in charge of catering, and while I scored a hit with last night's supper (soft white finger rolls with slices of corned beef, because it hurt the SA's throat to swallow anything hot) I forgot to buy cat food. For their breakfast this morning they had two of the ultra expensive pouches split between the four of them, and as many biscuits as they could eat to fill up on. The black cat and his sister, the fat indignant tabby, don't like biscuits, and the fat tabby is intensely suspicious of any change to her normal routine, so the feline atmosphere was frosty.
Our friend Roger met us at the spinney, and in about quarter of an hour had the truck pulled back on to level and solid ground. He was very cheerful about the whole thing, and regaled us with stories of hauling out other vehicles that had been bogged down to their axles. I suppose that if you enjoy testing the full capabilities of your Landrover, rather than having a four wheel drive as a status symbol while not using it for anything more difficult than ascending the heights of Muswell Hill or Southwold High Street, you do need a willing partner in order to use the winch in earnest. Plus part of innate good manners is knowing how to make people you've helped feel that they've practically done you a favour.
We brought back two truck loads of wood, then the SA's back began to give warning signs that we'd done enough for one day. My Pilates teacher would have a fit to see me hauling a couple of tonnes of wood on to the back of a Transit, but what's the point of building up your strength if you aren't going to use it for anything productive? Days of lifting many, many of pots of compost have given me strong arms and shoulders, for a small middle aged lady, and I rather enjoy carrying wood, up to a point. After two truck loads we had probably reached that point.
It grieved me to leave the rest of the wood unattended in full sight of the public lane, but the SA has promised to go back for another load tomorrow. We took the smaller pieces away first, that would be the easiest to lift, both literally and metaphorically, and most of what's left is too big to carry until it's been split. Sawn rounds of poplar turn out to split reasonably easily. The SA hits them along the line of the radius with a wood splitting maul, which is a not especially sharp axe whose head has a wide, blunt back, then once the maul lodges in the log, if it doesn't split it clean through, hits the back of the maul with a sledge hammer.
The SA looked up poplar wood on the internet, as one does, and discovered that its only commercial use is for making matches, on which basis we could have a match factory. It has a high water content when fresh, but once seasoned burns well, fairly quickly and with a nice flame. It is relatively cheap to buy, and easy to split, and one forum contributor said that it was the best wood for pubs with open fires, better than oak whose logs last for ages, since customers enjoyed being able to put extra logs on the fire from time to time. It has to be seasoned and stored under cover, otherwise it absorbs rain water. I can't work out at all how many truck loads of bought wood our haul of poplar will come to, but if we get all of it back safely we'll probably recoup the full amount of the arborist's bill.
By way of complete contrast we went last night to see Dancing at Lughnasa at Colchester's Mercury Theatre. It's the last in the current season of productions by their own company, and I was keen to see it on the basis that I knew it was terribly famous and that Brian Friel is a highly regarded playwright. Plus, I like to support the theatre and didn't much like the sound of the alternatives. A literary play about the lives of women in rural Donegal in the 1930s would not be the SA's first choice, and nor would spending the evening in a theatre while suffering from a cold, but my offers to find out the Mercury's returns policy, which I vaguely thought was generous, were brushed aside, and we went.
I was a little taken aback at first to discover that last night was a captioned performance for the hard of hearing, and that the illuminated matrix display in front of one side of the stage was in our line of vision, and my heart sank when it described the music being played in the auditorium before the performance started as a lively jig, when it was a hornpipe. The human eye and brain are very good at detecting faint signals in the visual periphery, so much so that if you are looking for a lit navigation mark at night, one of the best ways of finding it is to let your gaze drift gently over the whole area where you expect to find it, rather than staring for it fixedly, and you'll often catch it out of the corner of your eye, and I was afraid that the wretched thing was going to be distracting. On the other hand, having taken part in a demonstration of one very famous psychological experiment that shows how people can fail to see something in front of their eyes if they are concentrating on something else, I would never underestimate the ability of the human brain to screen visual stuff out, and so it proved with the deaf interpretation board. After the first few lines of dialogue I didn't see it any more.
Dancing at Lughnasa is a good play, and it was well done at the Mercury. Tackles big issues with a light touch, well acted, good set. It's on for a couple more days, and is not a sell out, which is a shame. There is one moment near the end, when something is brought on to the stage, which I won't identify to avoid giving a plot spoiler, which I would have made more realistic and shocking if I'd been producing it, since I think that moment is meant to give the audience a jolt, but that's a minor caveat. When we got home the SA was quite enthusiastic about it, and admitted to having enjoyed it having expected not to. A play that can grip somebody who isn't naturally inclined to like that sort of thing and has sat in a theatre for two and a half hours suffering from a sore throat bad enough that they've given up on hot food, must be pretty good.
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