The lecture was very entertaining, though it turns out that the answer to the question What Matters in Jane Austen is Everything. I've read the books several times, apart from Sanditon which the professor excluded from the main body of work, but realised within the first five minutes that I hadn't been paying proper attention. Essex features once, apparently. Emma's sister Isabella and her family holidayed at Southend, where they were not inconvenienced by the mud. I'd a vague feeling that somebody went to Harwich, but on second thoughts maybe that was in Trollope. Or Dickens.
Between us we had managed a lavish collection of nibbles, though I think I may need to up my game and master the mini quiche. I keep a hopeful eye on the newspaper cookery columns but when they feature nibbles recipes they always seem to be things that need cooking at the last minute. I really can't work out the target audience for these, since who asks people round for drinks only to be messing around with oven timings and grease during the party? In the real world trays of individual hot flaky pastry savouries and deep fried prawns with dipping sauce belong to the realm of the professional caterer. DIY nibbles need to be something you can prepare in advance, and store safely with less than three fridges' worth of space.
I have been trying to extract the weeds and ivy seedlings from the moss lawn without pulling up too much of the moss. At the moment it looks rather patchy, but I can imagine it being an attractive feature. Not labour saving, though. None of my conventional gardening books have any advice on how to manage a moss lawn, indeed, the reflex English position would be to start trying to eliminate the moss, but I've a feeling I've read something about it somewhere. Possibly in a book on Japanese gardens, or maybe in an article about a sculpture garden. Working from first principles I should say the two main jobs are to pick up twigs and fallen leaves, and to remove weeds. At least the moss doesn't mind light foot traffic. I think that with some Scandinavian mosses, or possibly lichen, you have to avoid treading on them because you'll kill them. Though if that's the case then how do they cope in the wild with reindeer tramping about?
At lunchtime I ordered this year's supply of Strulch, before my five per cent off discount voucher valid to the middle of the month expired. And because I should be around for most of next week to take delivery of it. The last load of Strulch arrived very late in the day, because the driver had got held up in traffic, and I was due to go out that evening and had to leave it to the Systems Administrator to deal with. The lorry driver didn't manage to negotiate the reverse into the garden in the dark, and as he tried to offload the pallet in the entrance the tail lift collapsed, and fifty 150 litre bags spilled out over the drive. The lorry as well as a defective tail lift had no working interior light, and the two of them were left scrabbling around by torchlight trying to clear the bags off the drive. I hope that this time round it will arrive in daylight and they'll manage to offload it in a controlled fashion instead of dropping it. Now I've cut back the brambles at the entrance the lorry should be able to get further than the gate.
I noticed from the Strulch website that they'd applied a basic bit of psychology and reworded their delivery terms. If access to your property is tight and you need a small lorry, as we do, Strulch used to make a delivery surcharge, while standard delivery in a large lorry was free, and it always galled to have to pay the extra. Nowadays standard delivery costs £10.50, in a small lorry, and you can get free delivery if you have space for the big lorry, which comes to exactly the same thing but sounds much better. Beware, though, that if you try to go for the large lorry and it can't get to your property, there will be a penalty of not £10.50 but £30 for making the driver come back the next day in a smaller vehicle.
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