We have done something we said we would never do, and admitted luxury cat food on to the premises. With five cats to support, whose combined weight must be pushing 30 kilos, we had been concealing the existence of Sheba from them. It's bad enough buying that amount of ordinary cat food. Only our ginger is really overweight, and the grey tabby is borderline skinny. They are all large cats. A fully grown Maine Coon tom can stand on his hind legs and comfortably rest his chin on a normal height table, when he has the mind to do so.
The luxury cat food purchase came about to tempt the invalid to eat. As it has been hot, and all he has to do all day is lie around the study or, for a change of scene, lie about the sitting room, he doesn't have much of an appetite. It doesn't help that all of them decided to go off fish flavours, especially haddock, just as we'd bought two dozen tins of it. So the black cat was shut in the privacy of the study and a special pouch of luxury food opened for him, which it turned out he liked very much. The other cats knew something better than tinned haddock was in the offing and queued outside the study door. When they manage to get in before the invalid has finished they polish it off, so now they have all had a taste of the stuff. If the big tabby were a human being he would definitely be one of those hospital visitors who while they are there absent-mindedly finishes off the patient's grapes. However, I don't think luxury cat food is simply a con to play on the sensibilities of owners who want to pamper their pets. It does actually seem to taste nicer to cats, alas.
Sometimes I feel guilty about the environmental impact of having so many cats, but not very guilty and not very often. I don't suppose the bits of haddock that end up in a tin of cat food are from any part of the fish that a human being in the developed world would consent to eat.
For human consumption I have just finished making blackcurrant jelly, but the jam thermometer seems to have broken, because I boiled it until it looked and behaved like jelly and it never got to within five degrees of jam temperature according to the thermomemeter. As downbeat starts to a day go, having to tip half a dozen jars of fruit soup back into the jam pan that you washed once already after making the fruit soup, then wash all the jars again, before reboiling and rebottling it and washing the pan again, scores quite highly on the pointless scale, so I hope it has set. Besides, we have other plans for tomorrow morning. Somebody from the lettuce farm called round this afternoon to say that bees had taken up residence in the loft over their office and could I remove them? I was not able to help at that minute, because I had an appointment elsewhere in an hour's time, and anyway didn't think the middle of a thunderstorm was a good moment to disturb them, but I promised to ring in the morning. He said they were flying in and out through the light fittings, and mentioned a lot of insulation. I am not optimistic that this will be straightforward. They could be my bees. I was planning on inspecting mine tomorrow once the thunderstorms had blown through. If neither hive has managed to smuggle a queen cell through my last inspections and abscond since last week then I shall be very pleasantly surprised.
Showing posts with label blackcurrants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blackcurrants. Show all posts
Tuesday, 28 June 2011
Thursday, 23 June 2011
investment gripes among the currants
After looking at the weather forecast this morning I decided to leave the bees until tomorrow, as heavy rain was forecast by lunchtime and thunderstorms by tea. Instead I picked more blackcurrants and raspberries (what with the bees trying to swarm and the soft fruit ripening it's probably just as well that thanks to the cat we're here and not in the Cotswolds). At half past ten heavy rain suddenly fell on me for five minutes, then it was dry again for the rest of the morning. The Systems Administrator, who had gone to the supermarket to buy lunch and cat litter, reported that at the far end of the lane it was raining so hard that a sheet of water was pouring off the potato field across the road, while back at the farmyard there was no rain at all. Our fruit cage must have been just on the edge of it.
I pick the blackcurrants from the comfort of a three legged collapsible stool bought in the local fishing shop, which saves me having to stoop. It is an excellent system, and I recommend it to anyone else who suffers from a dodgy lower back (so that's most of the UK population over 45 who have ever commuted or worked in an office). The suggestion came from a junior hospital doctor, whose speciality was not actually orthopaedics, as she tried to work out whether the pains in the part of my body that were her speciality were anything to do with her, or simply referred back pain. I do like it when doctors treat the whole person, and I hope she goes far in her profession.
As I picked I listened to Radio 4, and Nick Clegg's proposal that the privatised banks should be given to the British people, as their money had been used to save the banks. There is another group of people whose money was used to keep the British banks on a life support machine and who had absolutely no say in what happened, and that was the small shareholders. I know that, because I am one. I ended my wild City days as a UK equities pension fund manager (how wild can you get) working for a subsidiary of Lloyds Bank, and I committed the incredibly rash act of buying shares in the bank for which I worked under the staff sharesave scheme. When I left I kept the shares, believing Lloyds to be a soundly managed bank of impeccable dullness. Given I got that one so wrong it is probably just as well that I am now employed as a horticulturalist and not an investment manager.
Fortunately I was not there for very long, so I couldn't buy very many shares. Possibly you think it served me right to lose some of my evil gains from the iniquitious sink that is the investment market. This is what I tell myself, as well as reminding myself that at least I got some tax relief when I bought them. But as evil City schemers went we were very much at the innocent end of the scale. We invested in shares in UK companies. We tried to identify decent companies that were undervalued. We even met the managements and tried to understand their strategies, which is more than index funds do. We weren't always very good at it, and we were probably overpaid for what we did, though compared to investment bankers we were paupers. But if you don't feel for me, have sympathy for people like the father of a friend of a friend, who worked for Lloyds retail banking operations all his life, and took part in the employee sharesave. He's dead now, but the nest egg he thought he was leaving to his wife is almost worthless.
When Lloyds were given special dispensation by Gordon Brown and the banking regulators to acquire HBOS, and with it a larger slice of the UK banking market than would normally be permitted under UK competition rules, the authorities decided not to tell the Lloyds investors who were required to vote to allow this to happen that HBOS was already pretty much bust and in receipt of secret government funding. If Lloyds shareholders had known that maybe they would have voted differently. There is now a shareholders' group taking legal action for compensation. I haven't paid to join. It felt like throwing good money after bad, and after watching the long slow quest of Equitable Life policyholders for compensation I don't expect the Treasury to be handing out a big lump of cash any time soon. The bigger fools us shareholders for trusting management who when it came to it behaved like greedy idiots. We were materially misled, though. Or, in plain language, they lied to us and took our money.
I pick the blackcurrants from the comfort of a three legged collapsible stool bought in the local fishing shop, which saves me having to stoop. It is an excellent system, and I recommend it to anyone else who suffers from a dodgy lower back (so that's most of the UK population over 45 who have ever commuted or worked in an office). The suggestion came from a junior hospital doctor, whose speciality was not actually orthopaedics, as she tried to work out whether the pains in the part of my body that were her speciality were anything to do with her, or simply referred back pain. I do like it when doctors treat the whole person, and I hope she goes far in her profession.
As I picked I listened to Radio 4, and Nick Clegg's proposal that the privatised banks should be given to the British people, as their money had been used to save the banks. There is another group of people whose money was used to keep the British banks on a life support machine and who had absolutely no say in what happened, and that was the small shareholders. I know that, because I am one. I ended my wild City days as a UK equities pension fund manager (how wild can you get) working for a subsidiary of Lloyds Bank, and I committed the incredibly rash act of buying shares in the bank for which I worked under the staff sharesave scheme. When I left I kept the shares, believing Lloyds to be a soundly managed bank of impeccable dullness. Given I got that one so wrong it is probably just as well that I am now employed as a horticulturalist and not an investment manager.
Fortunately I was not there for very long, so I couldn't buy very many shares. Possibly you think it served me right to lose some of my evil gains from the iniquitious sink that is the investment market. This is what I tell myself, as well as reminding myself that at least I got some tax relief when I bought them. But as evil City schemers went we were very much at the innocent end of the scale. We invested in shares in UK companies. We tried to identify decent companies that were undervalued. We even met the managements and tried to understand their strategies, which is more than index funds do. We weren't always very good at it, and we were probably overpaid for what we did, though compared to investment bankers we were paupers. But if you don't feel for me, have sympathy for people like the father of a friend of a friend, who worked for Lloyds retail banking operations all his life, and took part in the employee sharesave. He's dead now, but the nest egg he thought he was leaving to his wife is almost worthless.
When Lloyds were given special dispensation by Gordon Brown and the banking regulators to acquire HBOS, and with it a larger slice of the UK banking market than would normally be permitted under UK competition rules, the authorities decided not to tell the Lloyds investors who were required to vote to allow this to happen that HBOS was already pretty much bust and in receipt of secret government funding. If Lloyds shareholders had known that maybe they would have voted differently. There is now a shareholders' group taking legal action for compensation. I haven't paid to join. It felt like throwing good money after bad, and after watching the long slow quest of Equitable Life policyholders for compensation I don't expect the Treasury to be handing out a big lump of cash any time soon. The bigger fools us shareholders for trusting management who when it came to it behaved like greedy idiots. We were materially misled, though. Or, in plain language, they lied to us and took our money.
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
the longest day
Today is the summer solstice. It normally falls on June 21st, though in 1975 it fell on 22nd June and next year it will be on 20th June. I was rather puzzled that my diary (W.H.Smith smallest and most basic pocket diary) said that midsummer day would be this Friday, June 24th. A quick whizz round the internet (where would we be without it) yielded the answer that midsummer day and the summer solstice, though often confused, don't have to fall on the same day and generally don't nowadays. The solstice is an astronomical phenomenon, being the point at which the sun is furthest from the celestial equator. This is according to the website of the National Maritime Museum, who ought to know, given they are host to the Royal Observatory and gave got John Harrison's chronometer. For myself, my eyes used to glaze over with boredom as a child when people tried to explain the relative movements of the sun, moon and planets using oranges and a ping-pong ball, and I haven't improved since so will not attempt to elaborate further.
Midsummer Day is a cultural construct. In northern Europe it falls on the feast of St John the Baptist which is 24th June, though the traditions of bonfires and fairies roaming abroad are pre-Christian. It is also one of the four legal quarter days of the year, along with Lady Day (25th March), Michaelmas (29th September) and Christmas Day (you know this one), when accounts were settled, rents paid and servants hired.
Nowadays there seems to be a fair amount of interchangeability between the two terms and I am not alone in my confusion e.g. the londonist website giving a preview of an early morning bike ride that took place today treated the summer solstice as synonymous with midsummer day. It doesn't really matter, not like less and fewer or disinterested and uninterested. I won't be writing to The Daily Telegraph. As a gardener, however, I note the turning point. Some plants need short days to flower, or rather, long nights, because if you give them a long period of darkness but turn the lights on briefly part way through this disrupts their behaviour. The favourite examples at horticultural college were chrysanthemums and poinsettia, both of which need long nights to stimulate flower production. Onions are day length sensitive, long day bulbs needing 14 to 16 hours of light to initiate bulb formation, while short day bulbs do it at 10 to 12 hours. I note this as an interesting scientific phenomenon, having never bothered growing onions myself when they are so cheap in the shops.
I don't find the shortening days depressing. The long days are beautiful, but the evenings are often warmer later in the summer, and I like sitting out on the veranda after dark listening to Glenn Miller drifting out through the open doors. I like autumn colour, and the first log fire, and making crab apple and rosehip jelly. I like asters and chrysanthemums and all the flowers of autumn.
Just at the moment things are not happening in their proper season, and that is down to the weather and nothing to do with day length. I normally pick the blackcurrants around the 7th to 9th July (I know because I write the date on the bags when I freeze them) but this year I started picking today. It's not a bumper crop, after the dry spring, but the flavour is good.
Midsummer Day is a cultural construct. In northern Europe it falls on the feast of St John the Baptist which is 24th June, though the traditions of bonfires and fairies roaming abroad are pre-Christian. It is also one of the four legal quarter days of the year, along with Lady Day (25th March), Michaelmas (29th September) and Christmas Day (you know this one), when accounts were settled, rents paid and servants hired.
Nowadays there seems to be a fair amount of interchangeability between the two terms and I am not alone in my confusion e.g. the londonist website giving a preview of an early morning bike ride that took place today treated the summer solstice as synonymous with midsummer day. It doesn't really matter, not like less and fewer or disinterested and uninterested. I won't be writing to The Daily Telegraph. As a gardener, however, I note the turning point. Some plants need short days to flower, or rather, long nights, because if you give them a long period of darkness but turn the lights on briefly part way through this disrupts their behaviour. The favourite examples at horticultural college were chrysanthemums and poinsettia, both of which need long nights to stimulate flower production. Onions are day length sensitive, long day bulbs needing 14 to 16 hours of light to initiate bulb formation, while short day bulbs do it at 10 to 12 hours. I note this as an interesting scientific phenomenon, having never bothered growing onions myself when they are so cheap in the shops.
I don't find the shortening days depressing. The long days are beautiful, but the evenings are often warmer later in the summer, and I like sitting out on the veranda after dark listening to Glenn Miller drifting out through the open doors. I like autumn colour, and the first log fire, and making crab apple and rosehip jelly. I like asters and chrysanthemums and all the flowers of autumn.
Just at the moment things are not happening in their proper season, and that is down to the weather and nothing to do with day length. I normally pick the blackcurrants around the 7th to 9th July (I know because I write the date on the bags when I freeze them) but this year I started picking today. It's not a bumper crop, after the dry spring, but the flavour is good.
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