a dry day in the garden (blimey)

Our Ginger caught a squirrel this morning.  He came stomping around the side of the house with the body in his jaws, looking as if he had captured the squirrel himself, rather than nicking it from the big tabby.  I put a box in front of the cat door so that he couldn't take it into the house, and he ate the head outside the front door.  He'll never lose weight if he goes eating squirrels between meals.

I did a garden talk last night, up in the Suffolk Sandlings.  The Orwell Bridge and A12 were clear, and the instructions on how to find the hall, which looked on the map as though it might be going to be difficult, turned out to be accurate and helpful, corresponding to the sort of detail on the ground that you can spot when driving by yourself at main road speeds, so it was an easy trip up there, and I had time to run through my talk in my head sitting in the car park, and look at the swallows perching on the telephone wires.  It is lovely countryside up beyond Woodbridge, and it was a fine evening, the light having the sort of fierce clarity that you get as you approach the North Sea on a sunny day.  Among the conifer plantations are little patches of broadleaf woodland, at this time of the year vivid with bluebells.

The audience seemed to like the talk, although what some of the ladies really wanted to know was where I got my sweater.  They were a little disappointed to learn that it was at least twelve years old, though the company I bought it from is still going, so they could have one if they wanted to, albeit not to the same design.  My vintage one is in a cheerful pattern of smallish squares in rich earth colours, which reminds me of a small Paul Klee painting I once saw, but might remind some other people of a Channel 4 garden show presenter circa 1998.  It is made out of alpaca, an excellent and hard wearing wool that doesn't pill and is a much better bargain than cashmere, looking nicely worn in after twelve years.

The instructions on how to find the hall warned me sternly to beware of deer in the forest, and I saw one on the way home, lurking in the verge.  Despite having read The Yearling at an impressionable age I'm not a great fan of deer.  I don't wish them individual suffering, and I know that in the right numbers they have their place in England's ecosystem, but I can't shake off their associations as destroyers of trees and gardens.  I can't perceive grey squirrels as cute for the same reason, hence my instant reaction on seeing Our Ginger this morning was not 'poor squirrel' but 'bother, the cat's found something to eat'.

In theory I now have the rest of the week to get on with working in the garden.  I don't have anything booked, and the forecast is for it to remain dry.  I spent today weeding the island bed, where great patches of weeds ran away from me in the wet weather before I could tackle them small and get the Strulch down.  After two late nights on the trot I felt slightly tired, and conscious that I must take particular care not to poke myself in the eye on the low branches of the Judas tree.  Fatigue breeds clumsiness, and pessimism, and I had a vague conviction all day that it couldn't last, and that presently it would start to rain, or I would stab myself on a plant and spend half tomorrow morning at the walk-in medical centre, or the phone would ring and I would have to leave the garden and go and do something else instead, but none of these things happened.

four exhibitions

It was raining lightly this morning when I got up.  Looking at the electronic weather station I saw that we'd had 28.9mm of rain in the previous 24 hours (that's over an inch in old money, or more than 5% of our expected annual total).  I'd been thinking I might go up to London to see some art exhibitions, unless the rain moved through unexpectedly quickly, and while it had rained a good deal in the night, it didn't look as though I was going to get a dry day to get on with the gardening, and the garden was going to be sodden anyway, so I thought I'd stick to Plan A.

The big tabby had a partridge last night.  The Systems Administrator blocked the cat door so that he couldn't eat it in the hall, and when I went out to let the chickens into their run, I found that he'd eaten it on the doorstep.  He'd left the wings, both legs (so I know it was a red legged partridge and not the rarer grey one) and, rather bizarrely, the head, which was sitting upright outside the front door like the head of John the Baptist upon a platter.

The A12 was blocked by rainwater at Kelvedon.  I knew that from reading the news on the net before setting out, and the SA heard on the traffic report on R2.  The electronic traffic news sign on the Colchester inner ring road didn't see fit to warn drivers of the delay, or alternatively let them know that the road was now clear, instead exhorting us to plan ahead for our journey during the Olympics.  I have already planned ahead, my plan being that from mid July at the latest until after our holiday in September I don't intend to go anywhere near London.

The first leg of my art trip took me to Dulwich.  I love the Dulwich Picture Gallery, a little gem designed by Sir John Soane and Britain's first purpose built art gallery.  I like Dulwich, too, once I get there.  It is reassuringly bourgeois and leafy.  In general I don't like south of the river.  The actual south bank is OK, along the stretch from Blackfriars Bridge past the Tate and the Royal Festival Hall and up to Hungerford Bridge, but I get twitchy as soon as I can't see the Thames and the north bank.  Peckham makes me think of Alexei Sayle in a tight suit, and Damilola Taylor.  Today everybody was very respectable, though the ticket inspectors on the train were hunting in pairs.

The Dulwich Picture Gallery has a nice cafe.  When I went there on a sunny day not long after their Canaletto exhibition opened it was completely full, but today it wasn't, and I had a smoked salmon bagel and a pot of tea, then got on with the real business of the day, which was a show of Indian ragamala paintings, and a small assemblage of Van Dykes.  Ragamalas are miniatures, painted to illustrate pieces of music called ragas.  The pictures were tiny, detailed and jewel like in their colours and clarity, and we were encouraged to borrow one of the supply of magnifying glasses to examine them more closely.  I did, and marvelled at the faces, clothes and jewels of the little people, and the animals and plants.  I find Hindu mythology utterly baffling, when I have tried to read about it, so decided not to worry about why some gods were blue, and so on, and just enjoy the images.  It is not a big exhibition, with a couple of dozen pictures in it, which is about the right number.  My eyes and brain couldn't have coped with any more, and I was getting a stiff arm holding up the magnifying glass.  It's lucky it wasn't busier, as only one person at a time could really examine each picture.

Van Dyke in Sicily is not a large exhibition either, and going into it from the Indian pictures you rather confusingly start in room 3 of three, and are confronted with half a dozen Saint Rosalias casting their eyes up to heaven as they intercede on behalf of Palermo in time of plague.  Working my way back to the start, I found three splendid portraits, an early self-portrait, a merchant with magnificant curling moustaches, and Emanuel Philibert of Savoy in armour.  In a coup de theatre the gallery had managed to borrow the original armour shown in the portrait, though by now the gilding has largely rubbed off and it does not look so gorgeous as it did in 1624.  The room guide warned everyone coming in the front was that the armour was alarmed, but that you had to get very close to it to set it off, but coming in the back way via Saint Rosalia I escaped the warning.  The armour is tiny, and Emanuel Philibert must have been a little chap, but he looks every inch the nobleman and governor, which he was, until dying of the plague only a few months after Van Dyke painted him.  Then there are a couple of devotional portraits and a sketch and cut-down painting of a great woman artist in her old age, and the Rosalias.  She was extremely pious and lived in a cave, and her bones were thought to be a defence against plague, though it doesn't sound as though they worked.  I really like Van Dyke, and I liked this excursion into the Sicilian phase of his career, my only caveat being that there is an egregious misuse of the word 'decimated' in the introductory paragraph about the plague, and that the captions for some of the pictures are in a small font hung at hip level.

Both of these exhibitions are on until May 27th, so you have time to visit them, but not loads of time.  If you are going all the trouble of getting yourself to Dulwich it's worth having a look at the gallery's permanent collection while you're there, as they have a fine set of Old Masters, some good eighteenth century English portraits, and some Dutch landscapes.

Rolling back into London Bridge station I debated whether to head home, and get a train ahead of the peak time ban on cheap day returns, or go to Tate Modern.  I opted for the Tate, since I'm running out of time to see various things, and I thought I might as well get maximum value out of the train ticket.  The SA is out tonight anyway for a curry (which should have been preceded by a cricket match, but rain stopped play for the second time in a fortnight).  Tate Britain is showing the work of a Japanese artist I'd never heard of, until I heard about this exhibition, but is sounded interesting.  Her name is Yayoi Kusama.  She was born in 1929, worked in America in the 1960s, then returned to Japan, where after a few years she voluntarily admitted herself to a mental hospital, but continued to work.  The booklet (I love it that the Tate gives its supporters a booklet with their free exhibition entry) says that she is perhaps Japan's best-know living artist, which proves that I know nothing about Japanese contemporary art.  I found some of her work very interesting and beautiful, and some not, which wan't surprising.  Some of her early monochrome paintings have an eerie calm that I could look at for a long time, and some of her late ones have a joyous vibrancy that reminded me strangely of the banks of brightly coloured late Hockneys in his recent show at the RA.  My favourite thing was the Infinity Mirrored Room at the very end of the exhibition.  Walls and ceiling are covered with mirrors, and strings of small globes hang from the ceiling, with a pathway for visitors to move through the room.  Inside the globes are coloured lights, presumably LEDs, which change colour, interposed with brief periods of darkness.  They turn red, yellow, pink, green, blue and green, and are reflected in the walls and ceiling, as are the viewers, so that one moment you see a dozen of yourself among a cheerful infinity of glowing yellow lights, then the lights turn yellow and green, or all blue, or blue and red.  Mirrored installations, and indeed dots, are a recurring theme for Kasuma, who has experienced visual hallucinations since childhood, and the installation does indeed 'invite the viewer to suspend his or her sense of self and accompany Kusama on her ongoing journey of self-obliteration'.  It is also quite extraordinarily pretty.  You have until 5 June to catch this one, and it is worth seeing.

As I was there, and I couldn't get a train for another hour and a half, I wandered into Alighiero Boetti.  The first room included objects like a roll of cardboard, and I began to nurse hostile feelings towards Boetii, though I liked the two illuminated red and white signs either side of a doorway which came on alternately, one saying Ping and the other Pong, but two rooms on came to some bits I really liked.  Boetti was interested in maps, and politics, and came up with the idea of colouring in countries on a map with their national flag, but doing it a lot of times and on a grand scale.  As politics move on and national boundaries and symbols change, so do the maps.  Boetti drew up what he wanted, in terms of choosing which map projection to use and specifying the latest flags, then handed the whole project over to Afghan embroiderers, who made his ideas into huge embroideries.  The end results were sometimes unexpected, as in the time when one world map came back with pink seas.  Afghanistan is a land-locked country, the embroiderers had a lot of pink thread, and the idea of the sea didn't occur to them.  I've always liked textiles and maps, and thought that these were completely wonderful, though I gather the Italian avant-guard art establishment wasn't immediately convinced at the time.  In the next room a set of kilims were made using one hundred squares, arranged in a ten by ten grid, each square divided into one hundred smaller squares.  One of the hundred larger squares had one black small square and ninety-nine white, the next two black, and so on.  Boetti left it to the discretion of his kilim makers to choose their arrangements of large and small squares.  The results, arranged within colourful borders, were almost infinitely varied, rhythmic and subtle.  I really liked the kilims.  Then there's lots more stuff, some quite interesting, some not, but it's worth going just for the maps and the carpets.

I'd love to hear Grayson Perry's or David Hockney's views on Boetti's textile works.  Both of them believe that it is important for the artist to have physically made their work.  Boetti's textiles don't even use studio assistants working under his supervision, but crafts people in a different continent, and he gave them guiding principles, but a lot of discretion about how they interpreted them.  My hunch is that Perry and Hockney wouldn't mind, in Boetti's case.

I didn't go to see Damian Hirst, and I don't think I'll bother.  I know you shouldn't condemn something without seeing it (although actually we do that all the time.  Most right-minded liberals are against murder, torture, or cannibalism without having personally tried them first, and concluded that they are a Bad Idea).  I think Damian Hirst is a Bad Idea, and I am going to vote with my feet.

getting on with stuff

Gardening is a bit like holidays, in that the disasters are much more interesting to write about than the days when everything goes smoothly and you trundle around, having a nice time.  Today was a beautiful sunny day, not too hot, not too cold, and in this Goldilocks world I dug, weeded, mulched, planted and picked up two sorts of stones, the rough and the smooth, without anything exciting happening at all.

White flowers are about to burst upon the garden.  After the white of snowdrops it all goes yellow, with daffodils and primroses, and the chrome yellow flowers of Euphorbia, and blue and mauve, with hyacinths and grape hyacinths, violets and pasque flowers.  Now the Osmanthus delavayi on the corner of the island bed in the back garden is just opening, and the buds on 'Taihaku' and the wild gean are, as the suppliers' weekly lists put it, showing colour.  The trees are studded with knobs of white, and very soon will burst forth in a cloud of whiteness.

Three buzzards circled over the next door field for a long time.  They often seem to occur in threes, and I wonder what the group consists of.  Rival males and one female?  Last year's chick still flocking with its parents?  I need to find somebody who understands the habits of birds and ask them.

The Systems Administrator was all set to get the next coat of gloss paint on the section of barge board the scaffolding currently reaches, as the thermometer had hit the vital level of 15 degrees, but discovered that the new and unopened tin of paint bought last autumn and never used as the weather got too bad for painting, was not white, but Parisian Pink.  The SA must have picked up the wrong tin from the DIY store shelf, and six months on, with no receipt, there's not a lot we can do with it except think of something we would like to paint pink.  It looks rather a nice shade of pink, like a squashed strawberry, and I fancy a little pink summerhouse, but there isn't anywhere to put one.

We are starting to be able to tell the new little hens apart.  One has yellow legs, which are very distinctive, and another has a row of dark feathers down the outside of her legs.  One of the last two is lighter coloured than the other, so that we can tell them apart when they're side by side, but not necessarily identify either one in isolation.

I ran the hose on recently planted trees and renovated areas of the border while working.  Digging holes to plant out hyacinths that have finished flowering in their pots, as I suspected the soil 25 centimetres below the surface is dust dry.  A rose in the back garden, that was struggling last year, has suddenly died off in great sections.  It is supposed to rain hard on Tuesday, which will force me to clean the house and get to grips with the beekeepers' treasury stuff, both of which urgently need doing, but quite apart from that we desperately need the rain.

About the only exciting thing to happen in the past 24 hours was that the big tabby set his ruff on fire.  He has never done this before, and I thought he was more sensible than that around candles, but now know differently.  He decided to march straight across the dining table just as I was snuffing the candles out after dinner, and suddenly I had a flaming cat on the loose.  I managed to extinguish him before it could burn his skin, or he could set fire to the curtains, but the smell of burning fur was terrible.  I don't think he understood in the least what had happened, so was bewildered that I'd suddenly hit him with the candle snuffer, and gave me a wide berth for the next couple of hours.  Excitement is frequently greatly over-rated.

food issues

We think that Our Ginger's diet is starting to work, a bit.  From some angles he looks slightly less like a rugby ball covered in acrylic orange fur with a leg at each corner.  From some angles.  When he goes into Clive Anderson mode and shrinks his neck down into his shoulders he still looks pretty chunky.  The Systems Administrator says there is a little less podge around the tummy, and I think that's probably right.  Our Ginger has been quite good about being dieted, finishing his breakfast and then spending the rest of the morning asleep rather than agitating for more food, though that could partly be down to the mild weather.  Cats need to eat significantly less when it's warm, a reminder that they have a higher surface area to volume ratio than us, and that in cold weather they need to stack away a lot of calories just to maintain their body heat.

We are trying to get him to lose weight for his own good, after staring one time too many at the poster in the vet's consulting room illustrating the health dangers of obesity.  Unfortunately, by the law of unintended consequences, the fat tabby has taken the non-constant availability of food as a personal threat, and started hoovering down any she can see, so as Our Ginger gets slimmer (possibly) she gets fatter.  The big tabby's nerves are still jangled, so that he is sometimes reluctant to eat at all, and sits staring at his food with a vague expression.  Standing with him talking to him nicely sometimes helps encourage him to eat, but we have had to resort to taking him into the kitchen with us while we eat lunch, and giving him extra rations behind closed doors.  He seems to like eating with us (his dish is on the floor) so the exclusive company and occasional sachet of Sheba generally persuade him he feels hungry.

The black cat knows what he's doing, eats what he wants, and remains at a healthy weight.  But in response to the Telegraph vet who says it is a tired old excuse among pet owners that they can't control the weight of their animals because they have to feed more than one, I say, try it.  If you happen to have four like the black cat then good luck to you, and no wonder you think it's easy.  For those of us who have one with gluttonous and one with paranoid tendencies, plus another with a borderline eating disorder, it's a challenge.

They are moulting as well, a sign of spring.  The Systems Administrator looked last night at the strands of fur that were rising one by one under the heat of an anglepoise lamp from a mat on the table in front of the TV and said 'Do you think you could move that thing?' and that it was no wonder we both had permanent runny noses and sore throats.  I sometimes think we are slightly allergic to them, but it's too late to worry about that now.

Addendum  The replacement gear part for the lawn tractor arrived in a little cardboard sleeve, and was the right, genuine Briggs and Stratton component.  Taking half the afternoon, and sustaining only minor flesh wounds, the SA managed to rebuild the starter motor.  The tractor now works perfectly, and it will be handy knowing how to disassemble the starter motor for the next time something breaks.

back in the garden

Suddenly the air outside feels gentle.  I took a stroll round the garden counting my losses, after the cold spell.  The leaves on the poor little Phlomis italica growing in the gravel are shrivelled, and I think I'm going to lose the top growth, but it will probably shoot from the base.  It did last spring, and the plant is larger and more established now than it was then, and this cold spell was shorter and less severe.  The leaves on the olive tree look utterly unaffected so far, and I wonder whether the lack of cold wind helped it survive this time round.  The operative phrase in the last sentence is 'so far', since evergreens have a disconcerting habit of looking OK immediately after being hit by cold, and then dropping their leaves later, like somebody who initially seems to have survived their paracetamol overdose, only to die of liver failure after three days.  The leaves on my nice new Pittosporum tenuifolium 'Wrinkled Blue', that was making such good progress last year, have turned a suspicious colour, and I'm worried about that.  Pittosporum tenuifolium varieties that were hit last year but not killed outright have made little recovery since, though the drought may not have helped them.

The open flowers on the two Daphne bholua varieties are spoilt, burned to a dingy shade of brown.  There are still buds, so it's a case of waiting to see if these open normally.  The leaves on the evergreen Michelia doltsopa, that was turned out of the conservatory to take its chances at the edge of the wood, have gone brown round the edges and the plant looks distressed, but as long as the shoots haven't been injured my money's on it flushing new leaves in spring.  It has managed to pull off that trick in the conservatory, after red spider mite attack plus whatever else it was that it disliked about conditions in the conservatory had defoliated it.

The display of snowdrops is disappointing, after the quantity I planted two and three years ago.  Maybe the cold weather has held them back, and they'll look better in another couple of days, but I fear that some of the places I tried them, coupled with the very dry weather last spring and this winter, have not suited them.  The shortage of crocus I put down to some bastard small rodent eating the corms.

Still, it was very nice to be able to work outside in comfort.  When I investigated what it was like yesterday the wind felt so raw and cold that I merely watered the conservatory and greenhouse and scuttled inside again, but today felt positively inviting.  I've been digging over the area where the Rosa rugosa used to be, and forking in mushroom compost, so by the weekend it should be ready to receive the new shrubs and the Ashwood's hellebores and Hepatica.  I made encouraging noises to the cats to come out too, and Our Ginger and the big tabby came and ran about a bit.  They could do with the exercise, especially Our Ginger. (His diet is not going very well, since the big tabby is still upset and refusing to eat, so we end up having to leave food down for him.  Alternatively he will eat if one of us stands by him making encouraging noises.  It isn't very convenient).

Addendum  The newspapers and Radio 4 have finally caught up with the idea that we are facing a serious drought in the southern and eastern counties, now that Caroline Spelman has been having meetings about it.  It has been blindingly obvious for weeks to anyone who listens to the farming programme, or just notices how much it rains, that trouble is brewing.

listen again

We thought we'd settle down last night and listen to the Radio 2 Folk Awards via Listen Again.  Last year we watched them live on the telly, and we used to listen on the night on R2, but this week I had a music society meeting on Wednesday evening, and the Systems Administrator had disappeared to Ludlow in search of racing (there wasn't any, and English Heritage had closed the castle because of the snow, and the church was locked.  Who was the woman bigging up the UK as a tourist destination yesterday on R4 and saying that the weather was good for visiting attractions all year round?).  Anyway, we were going to listen to the awards.  I'd even managed to avoid finding out who won, apart from June Tabor getting a lifetime achievement award, which was broadcast on the Today Programme at 7.08 on Thursday morning (it is richly deserved as she is the best UK female traditional singer living, but why mention it on Today?  What with Syria, Egypt the US election, Greece, the rest of the Eurozone crisis, quantitative easing, UK health reforms, the UK company results season getting underway, not to mention the ruddy Olympics and the English football team manager, you'd think they'd have enough news and current affairs to keep them going.  And if they'd exhausted those topics they could always tell us something about what's going on in China, or Africa, or Russia, or Japan (never seem to hear about them nowadays), or Latin America (apart from Argentina's attitude towards Prince William going to the Falklands)  Sometimes I think that Today is dumbing down).

Anyway, we were going to listen to the Radio 2 Folk Awards on the telly on Listen Again.  Except that we couldn't, because our broadband download speed had dropped to nought point one something megabits per second.  I told you that any apologies I owed to BT were only muted, because their service is so crappy so often, even if it was not actually their fault that my computer kept falling off-line a couple of weeks ago.  It was only the download speed that was almost non-existent, the upload speed was fairly OK.  The Systems Administrator said that this had to be a BT fault, and it was good that it was so bad, because BT would have to mend it.  I checked this morning using the useful Broadband Speed Checker site and the download speed was up.  To 0.6 Mb/s.  It ought not to be under 2.0 Mb/s.  If the Today programme is short of material maybe they could give us an update on rural broadband provision.  That's 'rural' in the sense of villages around 65 miles as the crow flies from Charing Cross, not the outer Hebrides or Herefordshire.

The good news is that the Lucien Freud tickets turned up in yesterday's post.  There's nothing like giving up hope sometimes to make things happen.  Also a piece of rose thorn finally worked its way out of my knuckle.  I hadn't given up hope of that, since the swelling was getting ever more localised and focused into quite a small lump, instead of taking up my entire knuckle, and it looked as though things were developing.  It was a tiny piece of wood, no more than a couple of millimetres long, and it has taken my hand something over two months to expel it.  This was the second fragment of thorn, and I'm fairly sure it was the last.  My hand began to look calmer almost immediately, in a way it hasn't since the accident, which probably means it is finally free of foreign bodies.  I'm glad it's gone, since even I didn't really want an ugly lump on one knuckle that turned purple whenever my hands got cold.

The cats think it is too cold and wet to go out, and I can't blame them. I wouldn't want to walk around in melting snow in bare feet getting freezing slush on my tummy.  I don't even want to go out there in wellington boots, and have only been as far as the chicken house and the bird table, and to water the hellebores that are still sitting in their pots in the porch.  This morning the cats radiated fractious boredom, and now they have gone to sleep, the big tabby curled around my laptop on the kitchen table, and Our Ginger snoring on the worktop next to the Aga.  Later I shall have to evict them and wipe the table and the counter very carefully before making 24 helpings of apple crumble for the music society supper concert.  I told the chairman that I'd cleaned the kitchen in readiness, but she just smiled at me brightly and vaguely and said surely everybody had animals in their kitchens.

 

 

 

discovery of the search for lost time

The world is shrinking.  With the snow still lying on the ground and my nasal passages and chest still snuffling and wheezing like a pig hunting for truffles, I'm reluctant to go anywhere.  I've shuffled a chair round the kitchen table so that I can sit immediately in front of the Aga.  Our Ginger has gone one better, and started sleeping on the warming plate on top of the Aga.  A vet once told me that cats don't have many nerves for detecting heat in their skins, so I removed him last night before going to my music society committee meeting, in case he should burn himself without noticing.

Since the grey tabby died, and we are no longer dishing out spoonfuls of cat food on demand to try and keep some weight on her, Our Ginger has been put on a diet.  He became a chubby creature as soon as he moved in with us, always happy to finish up any little bits of food left by any of the others, but this winter he has ballooned.  Obesity is a risk factor for diabetes in cats as well as humans.  Witnessing the grey tabby's 48 hour decline into terminal organ failure has concentrated our minds regarding the Billy Bunter character that is our (now fourth) cat, and it will be easier to stick to regular mealtimes in future, now we're not trying to keep poor grey skin-and-bones going.  The other three cats aren't keen on a transition to twice a day feeding, and I am still having to shut Our Ginger either in or out of the kitchen, while dispensing extra rations to the others on the opposite side of the door.

I have begun reading Swann's Way.  The initial impulse came from seeing a reference to Marcel Proust in the paper, and reflecting that I had never even attempted to read In Remembrance of Things Past, although I have cheerfully referred to 'Proust's madeleines' in conversation, and only yesterday noticed a Guardian journalist use 'not have to explain that Marcel Proust was not an F1 racing driver' as a way of denoting that you had met someone vaguely educated and at least moderately cultured.  It turns out that you can get Swann's way on Kindle, absolutely free.  Marcel Proust is out of copyright, and it has been put on Amazon by volunteers.  It seemed worth at least giving it a try, though in truth I expected it to be wordy and dull as hell and that I wouldn't get beyond page 50.

Of course on a Kindle you don't have page numbers, because you can choose how large you want the pages to be.  My free download has some typos, and the layout is rather peculiar here and there.  I don't deny the potential beauty of the book as a physical object (Alexandra Harris's book Romantic Moderns is published by Thames and Hudson on nice quality paper set in an attractive typeface, and I appreciated that all the time I was reading it).  Free Proust on Kindle is not even a contender in the physical object stakes.  But the narrative turns out to be unexpectedly gripping.

It has no business to be gripping.  Virtually nothing happens in the first book, or part of a book (I am so completely unfamiliar with the saga and the edition I'm reading is such a muddle that I'm not at all sure what part of the multi-volume epic I'm on).  Proust takes pages and pages to describe waking from sleep, and suffering from confusion until waking further and working out where he is.  He remembers his great aunt.  Going for walks takes more pages (or screenfuls).  And yet I am gripped.  Proust describes how his aunts will not say what they mean explicitly, but hedge around it with circumlocutions and are quite unaware that the person they are talking to hasn't grasped their meaning.  Haven't we all met people like that?  He explains how his relations form an idea of the sort of person the family friend Swann is, and then interpret and filter all future behaviour by and evidence about Swann to fit their existing concept of him.  Grayson Perry made the same point in his show (one point at which associations started to buzz in my head).  Calling it Cognitive Dissonance makes it sound more scientific, but Proust was already there.

Reading experiments inspired by a mixture of curiosity and a desire for self-improvement haven't always turned out so well.  I tried to read Doctor Zhivago and found it, and him, dreadfully boring and irritating, and I've never made it to the end of War and Peace.  Well done Amazon for the Kindle, and well done the volunteers who let me try Proust out for free, even if the typography is a bit dodgy. 

in memoriam

I took today off work.  It was not a duvet day, or a sickie, because the deal for part timers at the plant centre is that if you don't turn up, you don't get paid.  I couldn't imagine that with the snow they would have many customers, if any, so I thought they could manage with two people, and I did not think my chest would stand working in a polytunnel in close to freezing temperatures for nearly eight hours.  Also, the grey tabby had to go to the vet, and as we both expected the worst I did not want the Systems Administrator to make the trip unaccompanied, and take whatever decision had to be made single-handed, and drive back to the house alone with the empty basket.

When we first saw the grey tabby she was six weeks old.  Out of a delightful swarm of kittens in a front room in Romford, she was the one making a determined line for the back of the television in the far corner.  We said that we'd have that one, because she had the most get-up-and-go.  When she was thirteen weeks old we brought her home.  It was July 1999, a very hot day, and she and her brother panted alarmingly in the back of the car in the clogged traffic on the A12.  Her given name was Ronkerval Betty Boo, a ridiculous name if there ever was one, and we called her Belle.

The grey tabby had incredibly crimped, electrically charged fur which stuck to everything.  Her face ended in a long snout, for a cat, which with her imperious expression gave her a vulpine look.  Her chin was soft white.  You can see similar long, white tipped faces on the little cats that lurk in the edges of seventeenth century Dutch paintings.  Her voice was loud, an expressive yelp, and if she was alone in a room, or on the landing, she would howl because nobody was paying attention to her.  Her feet were vast, with great tufts of fur between the toes. She loved being fussed, right up to the point where she got bored of it, when she would suddenly growl and stomp off your lap, as if she had been importuned.  She stamped when she entered a room, so that you knew it was her coming.  She was particularly the Systems Administrator's cat, and loved to lie stretched out on the SA's chest, faces inches apart, claws digging into the quaking human skin beneath.

Though the spirit was titanic, the flesh was weak.  She was always a skinny creature, even by Maine Coon standards, and the vet who micro-chipped her struggled to find enough fat to bury the chip, itself only the size of a grain of rice.  As a youngster she suffered from a couple of bad abscesses in her feet, presumably resulting from infected bites, and after the second one the vet said that she was worried about the grey tabby's immune system, and then became embarrassed and told us to forget that she'd said that.  The vet's intuition was right.  In middle age the grey tabby developed an auto-immune problem in the pads of her feet, which became hugely swollen, and one burst through the skin in a raw lump.  Surgery in such cases does not always work well, because there is no healthy tissue to stitch and the wound tends to break down repeatedly.  The grey tabby's skinny frame came through the general anaesthetic, and the wound eventually healed, rather to our and the vet's surprise.  Months of steroid pills followed, and the grey tabby's pads, though never again normal, ceased to be grotesque.

She continued to live an active life, stomping out into the garden, always in the direction of the lettuce farm rather than the wood, shouting, growling, purring, sitting on the ice in the middle of the frozen pond and daring it to break.  She was not a thrifty cat, perpetually skinny and always the first to be hungry.  She got gradually thinner.  On Saturday morning when I came downstairs she seemed rather spaced out in the hall, and spent the day curled in a chair where she doesn't normally sleep.  She had suddenly lost a lot more weight, and smelt slightly bad.  By yesterday morning it was clear that something was seriously wrong.  She went out into the garden, and then sat in the snow looking in through the glass door.  Once inside, she didn't wash herself and spend the morning curled on her wet fur.  She ate a tiny helping of food, very slowly, purring, but was even thinner, and constantly dribbling.  The smell was rank.

I rang at 8.00am on the dot this morning to get a vet's appointment.  We hadn't driven over the snow in our lane since it fell, so the SA went out to warm the car up and turn it around, and then once it was moving didn't dare to stop until the farmyard, where the neighbours had scraped the snow off the road.  The SA had to walk up to the house and we made a sad little procession going back to the car, the SA in the lead, carrying the basket with the grey tabby wrapped in a purple towel, me following behind carrying a shovel for the snow, just in case.  When we arrived it was obvious that most other people booked in today had cancelled, but the tone of my voice had probably told the receptionist that an appointment 'today' meant just that.

The vet's verdict was bleak, but not unexpected.  Kidney failure, and given the speed of the grey tabby's decline, almost certainly some other problems as well.  Acute dehydration.  We could have blood tests done, and have the grey tabby put on a drip, and given huge shots of antibiotics.  She might rally short term, but there was no treatment for the underlying kidney disease.  No prospect of a proper, permanent cure.  When the grey tabby had the operation on her foot the vet had to ring for us to come and collect her early, she hated being there so much.  Having her rehydrated so that she could spend her last few days at the vet with kidney failure was no option at all.  The SA signed the consent form for euthanasia.  I think the vet was relieved that we had done the right thing.

We agreed to leave the body with them.  Our other pets are buried up in the meadow, but with the cold and the frozen ground we both had visions of the burial turning into something out of a Coen brothers black comedy, or not being able to dig deep enough and finding the fox had dug her up.   The vet agreed to send us the bill.  Payment is normally at the time of treatment, but they're sympathetic that way, when it comes to the end of life, and we didn't feel like fiddling around with credit cards at the reception desk.  We told the grey tabby she'd been a good cat, and stroked her terribly bony back for the last time and went home, with the empty basket.  And because of the way that normal life has to carry on even in the face of disaster we went via the farm shop, although we agreed that we weren't feeling hungry, because we would be later, so that we could get something for lunch and for supper.  The bill will be extra for the cremation, but worth it not to be trying to hack a grave out in the snow.  We didn't want the ashes.  I don't know what we've have done with them.

It is the nearest that human beings get to being gods, to love animals, that have such little lives compared to ours.

the war of the rodents

Something has been eating the flower buds of my hellebores.  I was picking up dead hydrangea leaves from around them as I tidied the bed by the ditch, and cutting off any blackened and unhealthy looking hellebore leaves, when I found the mangled remains of petals on the ground.  On first seeing a damaged flower shoot I thought I must have inadvertently trodden on the crown of the plant, but I soon realised that there was much too much damage for that (besides which, I am generally fairly careful where I put my feet and I didn't think I had stepped on them).  The pink and white fragments were in little piles, and I am pretty sure that rodents were the culprits.  I found the entrances to burrows among the plants, and as I knelt scooping up leaves and ruined flowers, I put weight on my left hand and the ground crumbled beneath it.  I temporarily wondered if pheasants were to blame, as they will eat flowers, but given the remains of the buds were piled under the hydrangea leaves it clearly wasn't them.

I felt rather stricken with disappointment, though not yet crushed.  Stuff happens when gardening, and plants that you like and were looking forward to have off years.  I don't know if the loss of their buds at an early stage before the flowers were pollinated and started to set seed will trigger the plants to make more buds, or if hellebore metabolism doesn't work like that and I've had my lot, or rather the rodents have.  It will be interesting, in a purely scientific way, to see what happens next.

Then I felt irritated that with five cats on the payroll, plus Black and White Alsatian Killer Cat having the run of the garden, my flowers should suffer in this way.  The sad truth is that the cats are quite useless as rodent operatives, preferring to spend their evenings in front of the fire.  Or at least, the boys sit with us by whatever fire we've got lit at the time.  The two females don't often bother, the grey tabby spending her time in the hall and the fat indignant tabby in whichever room we're not in, away from it all.

I considered my options.  I could sigh and take it lying down.  That was an option, although not a palatable one.  Using poison in the open garden was not an option.  I have in desperation resorted to it under cover, in sheds, but not outside.  We have a thriving owl population, not to mention the cats.  I couldn't risk them eating poisoned rodents.  Research by The Barn Owl Trust shows that 40% of dead barn owls brought in to them contained some rat or mouse poison.  That's not to say rodenticide was the immediate cause of death, since many barn owls are killed in collisions with road traffic, but it can't be good for their health having poison in their systems.  The blue poison pellets were out.

That left trapping.  The manager uses mousetraps at work in the polytunnels.  Small rodents will unearth and eat bulbs in pots, and gnaw off the bark at the base of shrubs, and cause a great deal of damage.  One of our suppliers lost a substantial part of an entire crop of daphnes, when rodents got to work in the greenhouse.  Trapping mice is not pleasant, but sometimes it has to be done.   I called at B&Q, where I found various live-catch-and-release traps, and some traditional snap-and-kill ones.  I went for the lethal variety.  Live trapping, unless you are going to check your traps several times a day, seems to me very cruel indeed.  I set one of the traps on the kitchen table, and cautiously triggered it with a pencil.  It snapped shut with such ferocity that it leaped into the air.  I found it deeply alarming.  Still, it needs to be powerful to kill the mouse instantly.  I baited my pair of traps with peanuts, set them, and carried them carefully down the garden.  There I put them inside a length of drainpipe that the Systems Administrator conveniently had left over from some project, poking them well in with a stick.  I don't want to risk catching birds, and indeed as it said on the mousetrap packaging it would be an offence to do so.  Nor do I want them snapping shut on the foot of a passing cat.

I'll see how it goes.  I may not catch anything, or the supply of hellebore-eating rodents in that part of the garden may be inexhaustible.  It's nature red in tooth and claw.  At least I am not yet as mad as Michael Pollan, who poured gasoline down a woodchuck's burrow and set fire to it.

birds and beasties

Now that winter is properly here, we're feeding the birds.  There was a spotted woodpecker on the table a couple of days ago, tucking into the lard with porridge oats.  I can't tell the difference between Greater and Lesser, but think it's fair to assume that it was whichever is the more common.  They seem to have had a good year, and when it was warm enough to sit outside watching the chickens, the Systems Administrator used to see them quite regularly around the garden.  The main visitors to the table are blue and great tits, robins, chaffinches, and hedge sparrows, plus a few goldfinches and on one or two occasions the long tailed tits.  Last winter when it got really cold the blackbirds came, but there are still lots of berries in the wood and garden, and they don't generally bother with our offerings until they've stripped the shrubs.  The coal tits are shy, and will only feed on the table if things get really tough in the wild.

The cats are keen to lick the lard with porridge oats, given half a chance, and I found the big tabby with his face in the bowl of bird food on the kitchen worktop.  The first time we saw his mother, she was sitting up on a kitchen unit with her long snout in a bowl of fruit while her doting owner enquired whether she had eaten that waspie, so we knew then what to expect.  Some of the larger birds would like to take a big piece of lard and porridge oats away, to eat later, but it breaks up, and I found a lump on the steps down to the conservatory, where the black cat was licking at it.  I put it back on the bird table.  I do not believe that lard with porridge oats is good for cats.

To try and stop the cats from gulping their food, in case that is what was making them sick, we have been doling out tins in small spoonfuls, and making them wait between courses while they work out whether they are actually still hungry.  I've read accounts by people who grew up in large families of how they learnt to gulp their food, so as to be in the running for seconds before their siblings had eaten everything, and I think the same thing can happen when you have five cats.  The new feeding regime is working in the sense that there haven't been any more pools of cat sick for several days, but it means that feline breakfast stretches over an hour and a half, and throughout the day whichever of us comes within reach of the food dishes is likely to be met by at least one furry accuser, staring meaningfully at the empty plates, or the door of the cat food cupboard.

There was ice on the pond yesterday morning, real ice that hadn't melted completely by the end of the day.  The trouble with ice is that the grey tabby, who appears to believe that she ought to be able to walk on water and that it is only by some quirk or error that this ability has been denied to her, likes to sit in the middle of the pond when it's frozen.  With ice like we had last winter this isn't an issue, as I could have sat on the pond myself if I'd wanted to (I didn't) but with thin ice who knows?  When she gets an idea in her head she is the most obstinate creature I know, but I have no idea how good her judgement is as to whether ice will bear her weight, which is something under 5kg.  She is now 12, desperately skinny and perpetually hungry, and we never expected her to make old bones, but though she seems to have a frail constitution she has a will of iron.  It would be a pity if she drowned or froze to death falling through the ice on the pond.

As it was drizzling and cold I thought I would go and see if I could get some cheap camellia pots at one of the local garden centres, that used to be good for cheap pots.  They didn't have any suitable pots, or even any space in the car park, and I had to go and park round the corner and walk up the road.  What they did have was a grotto with Father Christmas and his Reindeer, with a very long queue of parents and small children trailing back from it through the shop.  Poor reindeer.  There seem to be more and more of these reindeer experiences about at Christmas, but I'm not sure it is a very nice experience for the reindeer, being kept in a sort of shed in a garden centre and gawped at by an endless stream of unfamiliar people.

slaves to our pets

The cats have decided they don't like their food.  A couple of nights ago they refused to eat the half tin I'd put down for them, and the Systems Administrator was convinced that it was off.  Cats are very good at detecting tins that are dodgy, and there was a time when I dished out one that smelt fine to me (well, it smelt of cat food, but in a normal way, cat food never smells that good) and they all refused to touch it.  Half an hour it stank, and I realised that they had sussed that it was off as soon as it was opened.  We left the recent possibly off tin down for them, on the grounds that if it was OK they would eat it in the night when they got hungry, and if it wasn't OK they would know not to eat it, and gave them some biscuits as well.  The next morning they had licked the jelly off the chunks, but as all five looked fit and healthy it couldn't have been off.  Then I looked at the tin and saw that it was haddock flavour.  They got funny about haddock once before, so before going out for the day I left the Systems Administrator a note explaining that the tin was not off but haddock, and we had better get some non fish flavoured packs.

Two packs of tins that were meat, not fish, and a different brand were duly bought, and this morning I spooned out some beef in jelly.  Now they don't like beef either, and I'm beginning to run out of ideas, except that once the weather gets colder they will be hungrier and less fussy.  The S.A. suffers more than me in the feline diners' strike, getting punched by the fat tabby if she doesn't like her breakfast.  I'm still getting a chirp and a hop, though that may not last.

Now (5.23pm) the S.A. is sitting in the front garden, dressed in a fleece and thermal leggings, armed with a pair of binoculars to watch passing birds and aeroplanes, supervising chicken exercise time and trying valiantly to look as though it is fun and not freezing cold.  Sometimes I think our pets are spoiled.

Black and White Alsatian Killer Cat has spent the day curled up among the hybrid teas.  I greet him 'Hello Arnie' when I go past, but he just looks at me.

back at the vet again

The black cat saw the vet today, for his final sign-off after his operation.  We were several minutes early, having allowed for traffic that might have been bad but wasn't, and the vet was running half an hour late, so we sat for some time in the waiting room, the cat wedged between us in his red wire basket, looking resigned.  Once in the consulting room, he obliged by marching around the floor to exhibit his gait, and we expressed our satisfaction with the outcome while the vet fretted that he had lost some muscle mass on that side and his knee still wasn't absolutely perfect.  As the Systems Administrator pointed out to console her, the S.A.'s knee was operated on several years ago at vast expense by a man at the Wellington Hospital, and that isn't absolutely perfect either.  The vet agreed that absolute perfection after the cat had totally detatched his cruciate ligament was never going to be achievable, and repeated that his outlook as regards arthritis were much better than if he'd simply had cage rest.  I thought his chances of ever speaking to us again were much better than if we'd gone down the cage route, and we thanked her and left with expressions of mutual satisfaction.

The cat has actually become noticeably friendlier since his accident.  This is slightly surprising, since I wouldn't have expected five visits to the vet in just over three months plus several weeks kept locked in the house to have improved his view of his human companions.  I can never quite believe it when in nineteenth century literature people's characters are suddenly improved by suffering.  Chuck Katy out of a swing and stick her in a wheelchair for a few years, that'll turn her from a noisy tomboy into a caring sensitive young lady with modest manners.  Drop a burning house on Mr Rochester's head and he'll discover his inner feminist.  However, the black cat, whose presence in the household has always been counted by whether either of us have seen him in the past two or three days rather than whether he was in for his tea, has become much fonder since his acccident and sticks around virtually all the time.

I was afraid I had scared him off this morning, just on the day we needed him to go to the vet, as he followed me into the garden while I was letting the chickens out of their house, and decided to make a mad dash past me at the exact moment that I threw away the water from the jug that had held their wet bread.  I hit him full on, and he ran away with the amount of panic and indignation you would expect from a cat whose owner has suddenly hurled a pint of starchy cold water over him.  I had to follow him empty-handed, apologising profusely, and coax him out from among the jerusalem artichokes.

mud

The Systems Adminsistrator has gone to London to meet up with former colleagues for drinks and a potential curry, leaving me to supervise chicken exercise time.  The rooster is a modest soul who is in bed by six, even on nice evenings, but one of the young hens is always determined to extract every scrap of enjoyment from her period of liberty, and is still rootling around among the dahlias.  The wi-fi works sitting in the Italian garden in front of the house, so long as I don't position my body between the house and the lap-top.

I spent the rest of the day, until it was time to release the chickens, weeding the gunnera bed.  This is going to be a slow one.  I have a piece of board to rest my kneeling mat on, to spread my weight, and haven't actually knelt in the mud so far, but it is impossible to dislodge most of it from the roots I pull up, and the bags of stuff to go the the dump have got a lot of soil in them.  Once the site is cleared I think I'd better hold off planting for a while, to give the remaining roots a chance to resprout so that I can hit them with glyphosate, and then I need some rampant competitive groundcover for boggy places.  I've got one Darmera, bought from work, which is looking very sorry for itself in its black plastic pot and needs to go out soonish, but I don't want too many thistles and things shooting up all around it.  I'm amazed at how many worms I've dug up in the wettest patches.  I didn't think worms were adapted to aquatic conditions.

A large dumpy bag of gravel is due to arrive tomorrow.  The gravel is thin in so many places I could easily use more than one bag, but I am trying to learn from the builders' sand experience and not order more at once than I can spread fairly quickly.  I forget who is was that said that true stupidity lay in making the same mistake repeatedly.

In the Italian garden the Crinum x powellii is blooming.  It lives in a fairly large pot, and spends the winter in the greenhouse, where it's kept on the dry side while dormant.  The leaves come back in the spring from a huge elongated bulb, that only wants to be half-buried, and the flowers are trumpet shaped like a lily, held in a tuft on top of a stout stalk.  Last year I think it threw up a second stalk, and the bulb is starting to form offsets.  The flowers are pale pink.  I do have a white one as well, but that has only made a small and weedy plant, and has not actually flowered yet (so it might not even be white).

Addendum  The other ginger, the one with a white tip to its tail, has just strolled past, looking very casual.  Our ginger has gone to look at its departing back with an air that said that of course he could take the other ginger on if he wanted to, but fortunately without starting anything.  I've told him, no more septic bites.  The feline medical budget is all spent for this year.

a grey day

I looked this morning at the five day weather forecast for Colchester, and saw that we are supposed to have medium level cloud for the duration, except for two three-hour periods when it is forecast to be low level cloud, and one of drizzle.  The light today was quite depressing, grey and dull.  It doesn't feel like summer.  It is the kind of weather in which I tend to get lost, since my sense of direction only works when I can see the sun.  Given shadows I'm quite good.  No shadows and I easily wander off course.

I went to the dump (AKA household recycling centre), to offload the weeds that I don't want on the compost heap, tangled roots and seed heads of nettles and grasses, horsetail, sheep's sorrel, thistle stems and the like.  A well-conducted garden would not have such things, but the gunnera bed has ceased to be well-conducted.  I saw a pied wagtail while I was there.  I only ever seem to see these birds on man-made surfaces, and sometimes I think they must eat asphalt.  On the bird table at home was a rare visitor, a spotted woodpecker, so they must eat porridge oats soaked in lard.  Later on it was pecking at the electricity pole in the lettuce field.  I thought the poles were treated with wood preservative so that there wouldn't be anything in them for a bird to eat, and encouraged by the dismal light drifted off into a lettuce-picker electrocution disaster fantasy, in which the pole collapsed after being pecked through.

One of the cats was sick in the gravel, but the Systems Administrator had to clear it up as I was out at the time.  The sick apparently contained what initially appeared to be an enormous fur-ball, but turned out to be an entire shrew, swallowed whole.  On being told of this event I composed a short verse:

There was an old lady who swallowed a shrew
What an odd thing to do
To swallow a shrew
Perhaps she'll spew

It was that sort of day really.  I am now going to go and eat an artery-busting fry up with compensatory bean salad, and watch a documentary about canal restoration.

a fortunate toad

I trimmed the edges of one of the beds in the back garden.  I am not as conscientious about doing the lawn edges as I should be, since keeping them defined is probably the single thing that most makes a garden look cared for.  As we were told on a Writtle trip to Wakehurst Place, if the edges are neat most people don't really notice what's going on in the beds, so if you've only got time to do one thing, do the edges.  I don't like them too nerdily sharp, since everything else is a bit shaggy, and the odd stem overhanging onto the lawn is fine by me, but there is a middle way between obsessively tidy edges and a marginal fringe of long grass complete with seed heads.  I'm trying to find it.  Edging a bed each time I'm out there before moving on to other tasks is one way.

As I was shearing a little patch of longer grass under an overhanging rose bush, that the lawnmower had swerved around, I had a close encounter with a toad that has to be the luckiest creature still alive in the garden.  Brushing up the grass I'd just cut I found it flattened into the turf.  I couldn't see any blood, so gave it a gentle and experimental prod with one finger.  It very slowly raised itself up, and eventually hopped away into the safety of the bed.  If I hadn't stopped to pick up the fallen grass at that point, and shuffled another pace forward to continue cutting, I'd have knelt on it.

I like toads.  I found another later on, that emerged while I was weeding in the gunnera bed.  They have such ancient, fathomless faces.  If you disturb other creatures they run or fly away, but toads believe the thing to do is to remain very still, presumably hoping you won't notice them if they don't move.  I found a couple in recent days while weeding the gravel in the front, pulling up a large clump of unwanted vegetation each time to reveal the toad sitting resolutely underneath.  Sometimes I have picked one up to move it out of harm's way, cupping it between my two palms, and when they wriggle they are surprisingly strong.

A space appeared in the front of the gunnera bed.  Trying to remember what used to be there, I think a Rheum died in the winter.  It was looking pretty poorly last year, and I don't think previous winter did it any good, so 2010-2011 must have finished it off.  Rheum die down completely in the summer after flowering, so are not really great plants for the front of a border anyway.  Further back it would be easier to hide the gap.  The space provided a home for a rather smart Thalictrum I bought months ago at work, which has been hanging around for quite long enough in its pot, and some sad-looking Lobelia I raised from seed last year, which have definitely spent too long in their containers, plus some Geum rivale 'Lemon Drops', also from seed, which are the survivors of a vine weevil attack in the greenhouse.  Vine weevils are very partial to Geum (also Primula and Heuchera).

Addendum  The grey tabby has had a crooked back and walked oddly for years.  We don't know what she did to it, but it hasn't been right for a long time, and now aged 12 she can not longer manage to look after her fur, which is long, extraordinarily crimped, and always charged with static (the sort of fur that sticks to the walls and has to be vacuumed off).  Very unpleasant knots had begun to form over her flanks and tummy, and for some days I've been combing these out.  She seems to understand I am trying to help, and purrs loudly while also wriggling and tottering around the kitchen table (I do disinfect it before cooking).  Today she took a swipe at my hand with her claws, and drew blood along half the length of my thumb.  If she could I think she would be one for throwing telephones at her assistant.

some drought tolerant summer flowers

I am still bashing along weeding the gravel.  I keep thinking that one more day's work will finish it.  Maybe tomorrow really will be the day.  This will be a swift blog entry (and therefore potentially riddled with typos and examples of lexical facilitation, although since Con Coughlin used the phrase 'pet projects' three times in as many paragraphs in the Telegraph I should say anything goes nowadays)  as I have been nominated as officer in charge of supper, on the grounds that it is chicken pie from the remains of the weekend's roast and I know how to make pastry.

There is quite a bit going on florally in the long bed.  The perennial wallflower 'Bowles Mauve', of which I have written before, is still blooming away.  The bed is not very rigorously colour-themed, but the far north end mostly contains pale blue, pink, white and yellow flowers.  Trotting out there just now to collect some flowers I came back with a handful, and could have picked more if the chicken pie hadn't beckoned.  Verbascum nigrum does well in the light soil.  This is longer lived than some of the hybrids like the Cotswolds series, let alone 'Helen Johnson', and gradually bulks up to make a many-stemmed plant.  The caterpillars of the mullein moth attack it occassionally, but not too often.  The flowers, held in tall typical verbascum spikes, are individually small, and a rich shade of yellow.  I know that some people consider it a mark of good taste not to have yellow flowers in their gardens, but I like them myself.

The shrubby Potentilla fruticosa are flowering.  Again, some people despise them because of their associations with municipal planting, but they are good tough plants with a long flowering season.  I mostly stick to the whites and yellows.  The single flower I have brought in with me is a beautiful thing, looked at objectively and forgetting it is a potentilla.  Five rounded soft yellow petals surround a boss of dusky yellow stamens.  In winter when they are out of leaf they do look astonishingly dead, but they will actually take very low temperatures, and I have read that they are popular in the scandinavian countries.  They can be clipped to form low hedges, though you rarely see them used in that way.

Gaura lindheimeri is trendy at the moment.  This is a skinny plant, that produces tall spikes of white flowers that open from the bottom of the spike upwards.  The unopened buds are pale pink, which gives an overall effect of soft pink rather than stark white.  The petals are slender and held upwards, while a bunch of white stamens protrudes, and the effect is often compared to butterflies.  There is a cultivar called 'Whirling Butterflies', but mine are the straight species, raised from seed.  Gaura has a reputation for being short-lived, though the pink cultivars are said to be worse than the white.  However, in my experience G. lindheimeri is pretty long lasting given very free draining soil.  The leaves can be oddly spotted, a feature commented on (somewhere) by Christopher Lloyd, but mine are looking very green and healthy this year (so far).  It will seed itself modestly if happy.

There is a useful Campanula, which I think is C. alliarifolia (I'll look it up later when I have time, and confess tomorrow if I have got this wrong).  It has wrinkled, roughly heart-shaped leaves, white bell-shaped flowers, and seeds itself usefully around shrubs and at the base of hedges, where it tolerates drought, root competition, semi-shade, and looks exactly right for a country garden.

The Catananche are great.  They form rosettes of narrow, grey-green leaves, from which cornflower shaped flowers rise on wiry stems.  The base of each flower is a cup of overlapping papery scales, each with a dark rib up the centre, which is as pretty as an everlasting flower.  I have the blue form, and some white ones, which don't spread as readily as the blue.  The season lasts a long time, following which the dried flower heads are quite architectural.  It seeds itself generously, but I am grateful for things that do so well on such light and starving soil, and just pull out the seedlings I don't want.

The news is that we let the black cat out for a couple of hours.  He has been looking increasingly energetic, and bored in the house.  He sunbathed in the long bed, then lay under the hedge, then went back inside and we shut him in so that he wouldn't wander off.  We wouldn't want him overdoing things, and he can spend another night or two safely locked in the study with his dose of anti-inflammatories and his special luxury food.  It will be an immense relief when he is judged fit to go out as he pleases, and we can leave the inner hall door open again.

medical progress

The black cat went for a post-operative checkup this morning with the vet.  He has been walking around the house more than he did, though still with a pronounced limp, and jumped up on to the kitchen table the other day, and engaged the grey tabby in a staring and growling match, so we were optimistic that he was on the mend.  He yowled in the back of the car all the way to Colchester, which he has not done on his previous three visits, and once in the surgery limped obligingly about the consulting room so that the vet could see his gait, and purred nicely.  The vet was initially impressed that he was so much more mobile, and then concerned that the limp might be due to the joint slipping rather than the cat putting his weight down awkwardly on that leg, and then reassured that the suture was still in the right place. He has gained 200g in weight, but lost muscle from lack of activity. We were prescribed another bottle of anti-inflammatories, and told that in another couple of weeks he could probably go outside under supervision, and to bring him back again in a month.  She warned us that while she was always keen to get each cruciate ligament patient back to perfect condition, he might always have a slight limp, say one on a scale of one to ten.  That sounded fine to me.  As long as he isn't in pain and can move around freely that would count as a success.

I'm very impressed by the extent of the aftercare vets provide.  The cat saw the vet who carried out the operation two weeks after surgery, and again today which is five weeks since the op, and she wants him back in another month.  The Systems Administrator and I have both had surgery in the past, and all that either of us got was one follow-up appointment four weeks after the event.  We didn't get anti-inflammatories either (or screening for deep vein thrombosis, or stockings to prevent it, or all sorts of things that you are supposed to get nowadays.  The S.A.'s experience of treatment for a fractured knee cartilage was especially unfortunate as it was done under the company health scheme, who booked a London hospital.  The S.A. was sharing a room with an elderly patient, breathing very heavily and apparently on the verge of death, and I received a plaintive call mid-evening on the day of the op to say could I come now, please.  I managed to find my way to the hospital in St Johns Wood in the dark, which I thought was good going, and the S.A. hopped at great speed down the steps of the Whittington.  On the way home, just as we passed the M25, the exhause fell off my car.  We rattled thunderously home for the last forty miles at about 30mph, vibrating hideously.  I suggested that the S. A. could pretend we were in a damaged bomber limping back from a raid over Germany, but I don't think that helped ).

The cats have adapted pretty well to the shut inner door, and know to hang around by it when they want to go in or out.  The fat tabby still gets confused that it must be a trap, and dashes out of it when it's opened, then remembers that actually she wants to be inside.  The black cat doesn't try to rush the door, so he must understand at some level that he couldn't cope outside at the moment.  He does lie around with his eyes open, looking bored.  When he was going outside all he did for great hunks of the day was lie around in the long grass or under a bush sleeping, and the big tabby and our ginger happily lie around with him in the house, eyes shut and happily asleep.  The difference must be that they know they can go outside when they want to.  It has been a great relief that our ginger, who used to be rather a bully, has been very nice to the black cat since the op and not pestered him at all.

We've had a fair amount of time in the vets' waiting room to look at the other pets coming for treatment.  Somebody today had a couple of hedgehogs, or at least I think they were hedgehogs and not punk guinea pigs.  On our first visit someone had a small iguana resting on their chest.  There are lots of dogs, from the tiny, cute and healthy puppies that are only there for their jabs to the old and ill, and a fair number of greyhounds, because one of the partners specialises in them (plus reptiles).  A cheerful but overweight staffie was sent last time to be weighted on the scales in the corner of the waiting room, and as his equally fat owners headed back to the consulting room with him I thought their vet's powers of tact and diplomacy were about to be tested.  One man burst out of a consulting room in tears, and as he blundered towards the door without stopping to pay the receptionists murmered that it was all right, sort it out later.  (Actually there is a private back exit for owners who have just lost their pets).  I take my hat off to the vets, dealing with patients that can't speak and could be any species from a dog to an iguana, and simultaneously coping with the human owners, who have to take the decisions and pay the bills.  Actually I like our vets.  I rather wish I could go there when I'm ill.

luxury cat food and other delicacies

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.

rainy day on the lettuce farm

The Systems Administrator has received another appeal from our alma mater to join the college network, which promotes career networking between old members and keen young graduates.  They didn't bother to write to me.  It must have reached their database that I've dropped out.  Pity, as I should like the chance to network with Robin Lane Fox.  He could put in a word for me to inherit his gardening column in the Weekend FT when he retires.

The rain had started in earnest by lunchtime.  The Met Office forecast said it would, and the rain radar backed them up.  We watched it pass Chelmsford, and continue eastwards.  In the field next to us they are still picking lettuces in the rain.  A tractor crawls at very slow speed across the field, towing a trailer on the back of which are big plastic trays.  The pickers follow behind, harvesting lettuce and filling the trays.  Full trays go up into the covered part of the trailer and down come fresh trays.  The pickers wear their choice of waterproof clothing and stay outside.  They play loud pop music off the back of the trailer as they go, which used to be an eastern European station but today sounds English.  At one point the tractor sputtered into silence, and I could hear laughter and ebulliant cries in Lithuanian through the hedge.  The music, and indeed the tractor, would be pretty annoying if they were there all the time, but they don't stay by our garden for long.  If I were disposed to be grumpy about it I should consider how I would like to be picking lettuces all day in the rain.

The gravel garden is looking cheerful in a dishevelled way.  The bulbs have finished, but their place has been taken by field poppies.  These started off as pastel selections, and are steadily reverting back to the red ones, a very clean, deep shade which is completely beautiful.  There are a few pinks and lilacs left, one of which happily placed itself immediately next to the Phlomis italica.  This is a lamb-soft, grey leafed dwarf shrub with soft pink flowers.  It was badly hit by the winter and half of it killed, but the missing half has regrown from ground level.  I ought to look up how to propagate it and make some more, as it is doing well, and besides being charming in itself is a good foil for louder plants.

Various lavenders are coming out, but I don't know the names of most of them.  I'm not good at identifying or remembering different sorts of lavender.  I don't know why, but I read catalogues and plant labels and books, and the information wanders into my head and drifts straight out again.  I think it is because lavenders are short-lived and I allow them to seed themselves.  I am not even sure whether I actually planted my two fattest plants, or if they are seedlings.  The lavenders make a nice underplanting for the Genista aetnensis, or Mount Etna broom, which is just opening.  This will eventually make a big, airy shrub, practically a small tree.  Beth Chatto uses them trained up as trees on only a couple of main stems, but mine desperately wants to be shrubby.  I cut out as many branches as I dared last year after flowering, to try to start lifting the canopy and concentrate the plant's energies into fewer stems, but it seems as bushy as ever.  The twigs are very slender, a pleasant shade of middling olive green, utterly devoid of leaves, and the whole plant is light and airy.  The flowers are bright yellow, but so small and dainty that the overall effect is not brash.  They are typical of the pea family, with an upper petal, which on Genista aetnensis is the size of a little finger nail, held upright above a delicate keel and two slim petals hanging downwards.  The twig I have picked smells fragrant when held to my nose, a sharp smell that reminds me of spring, more daffodils and violets than roses and honeysuckle.

I don't think the broom really goes with the pink flowered Dierama by the pond, but never mind.  I like Dierama, and don't have the space to do rigorously colour-themed areas.  The shortest one has flowers of a salmon hue, and I think is D. igneum.  The others are D. pulcherrimum and D. dracomontanum, but only one is flowering at the moment, I think D. dracomontanum which is the smaller of the two.  The flowers are a purplish pink.  Dierama germinate fairly readily from seed and you will find a good choice in the seed catalogues, or you can keep an eye out for seedlings, if you share my insouciance about precisely which species you are growing.

For years there were blue Nigella damascena, or love-in-the-mist, but there are very few this year.  Maybe I managed to weed the gravel at the wrong time, but I presume the hard winter hit them.  I'll get a packet of seed next spring to top the numbers up.  Garden magazines keep giving me packets of mixed colours, but I want the pure blue, so never even open the mixed ones.

The cat is sleeping quietly in one of the armchairs.  Fortunately he seems inclined to rest most of the time, but can now put some weight on his bad leg when he does walk around the room.  He has been very good, except for one odd episode a couple of evenings ago when he suddenly went mad, and tried to climb out of the window.

an unfortunate accident

It would be a turn up for the books if cardunculus turned out to be a young, single political activist from a tough background living in Damascus, and not half of a pair of white, middle-aged, middle-class, graduate, ex-City downshifters, living in peaceful obscurity in southeast England.  Blogspot will let you have multiple blogs, maybe I should try out some new personas.  Still, they say stick to what you know.

We have an invalid cat.  This has been distressing for all concerned, but could have been much worse.  Early last week our black cat started hobbling on his left hind leg.  There was no obvious wound or bite, so we thought we'd better leave it a day or two and see how things developed.  The last time the grey tabby developed a limp, having a history of septic bites in her feet and a dodgy immune system, we rushed her to the vet immediately.  Once released from the cat basket she stomped about the consulting room without limping at all.  The vet consoled us that this happened often, as animals in a strange place would make an effort not to appear weak and vulnerable, and gave us a prescription for antibiotics to present to the reception desk if she developed a septic bite later.  She didn't.  It must have been a sprain.

By Thursday the limp was worse, not better, and the cat was sitting with his lower leg stuck out at an odd angle.  He was quite happy to be picked up, and we still couldn't find any external wound or injury, but we thought he'd better see a vet before the weekend, and booked him in for Friday morning.  We have used the same practice for nearly twenty years.  They are very good, and the vet we saw has known the black cat since he was a tiddler, having microchipped him when he was a kitten.  She listened to our account of what seemed to be wrong with the cat, and a look of concern came over her face when we mentioned the leg sticking out at an odd angle.  It appeared that the most likely cause of his problems was damage to his cruciate ligament.  She took him away to be examined with the help of a veterinary nurse, and reappeared a while later without him.  We were not going to be sent away with antibiotics this time.  Instead she wanted to sedate and x-ray the cat, and given his age (12) apologetically suggested that really blood tests would be a good idea.

We went back just before five to collect the cat, and saw a different vet, who showed us the x-rays.  They had been a shock to the vets and were a shock to us.  The lesser shock was that he had snapped his cruciate ligament completely away from the bone.  We could see the little detatched bone fragment waving around inside the equivalent of his knee joint, which is the joint half way up a cat's hind leg (I always get confused about how the bones and joints in the legs of quadrupeds equate to those of humans).  The bigger shock was that the x-ray revealed he had about a dozen shotgun pellets in him.  Our immediate thought was that he had been shot, had jumped out of his skin, and snapped his ligament in the panic.  The Systems Administrator had looked up ligament problems in cats when we got home from the vet in the morning, and overweight is a frequent cause, which doesn't apply to the black cat, who is a svelte and healthy outdoor creature.

There are two possible approaches to treating a detached cruciate ligament in a cat, the vet explained.  They could operate, using 50lb nylon fishing line to hold the two halves of the joint together until it healed.  The cat would need to rest for a week or so, to the extent of being confined to a room.  She favoured the operation route herself.  Or the cat could rest completely, what they call 'cage rest', for 6 to 8 weeks.  One of the partners in the practice was more conservative, and favoured cage rest.  They'd rung a vet in Ipswich who specialised in orthopaedics, and he was firmly in the operation camp.  It was important to start doing something soon, before the cat became accustomed to the pain, walked on the damaged leg, and wore the lining of the joint away.  She said that the operation was now routine, with a good expected outcome. and that they carried out around two a week.  However, if we did not want to risk it or could not afford it, the cage rest cure worked eventually.  She gave us the cat and some strong painkillers, and told us to go home for the weekend and decide.

We already had decided, after our initial consultation and internet researches.  Putting a twelve year old cat under general anaesthetic isn't ideal, but the thought of keeping him shut in a cage for two months over the summer, while he fretted and pined and the other cats came and jeered at him, was too unpleasant to be seriously contemplated.  We booked him in for surgery on Monday morning.

He survived the operation, was kept at the vets overnight for the administration of strong painkillers, and we collected him yesterday morning.  He was terribly, terribly pleased to see us, and purred hugely in the consulting room while the nurse talked us through his aftercare.  He hadn't eaten anything, but she thought that was because he was upset, as he hadn't been at all responsive when the nurses tried to make a fuss of him.  The shotgun injuries turned out to be nothing to do with the damaged leg, as we'd begun to suspect, given he'd not shown any signs of soreness in recent days.  He could have been carrying the pellets for years, and they would never have been discovered if he hadn't been x-rayed for something else.  We will never know how or when he was shot, though I need to compose a carefully worded and polite letter to the local farmers reminding them that their land does abut residential properties, and that we have pets and they need to be careful when rabbiting.

The cat was almost hysterically pleased to get home, and hopped around on three legs purring, though he still wouldn't eat anything.  Then he became very tired, and since then has been mostly lying down, installed in the study with a litter tray and his own food.  He has a poodle shave on his leg up to hip level, which is not a good look for cats, and a 10cm operation scar up the outside of his thigh.  We take it in turns to sit with him sometimes, and he still purrs when we talk to him. ( When you have downshifted you end up painting your own house instead of calling in a decorator, but you do have time to spend with your pets when they're ill).  He is now eating, and is not trying to chew his stiches out, and it is going better than we might have expected.

It is not very convenient, though.  When he is not lying down he has a surprising turn of speed, and we've been keeping the inner hall and veranda doors shut so that he can't escape into the garden.  This impedes the free flow of the other cats, who have to be let in and out, are missing out on lap time, and are spooked by the whole thing, especially the black cat's sister, who is so suspicious of any change to routine that she knows if I am even thinking about taking her to the vet.  It also impedes the free flow of air, since normally we have the doors propped open in the summer.  We had planned to go to look at some Cotswolds gardens next week, and a friend had kindly agreed to look after the place while we were away, but we can't leave the cat with her.  She has looked after them before, but this one only likes people he knows (basically us) and can't be trusted not to disappear for the duration (not sensible a week after the op) or humanely be left locked in a room without friendly (in his view) company. And he has to go for a follow-up appointment next week.   By coincidence our friend has had another request to mind somebody else's pets for the same three nights, so at least she'll be able to accept that offer, and we hadn't booked anywhere to stay, thinking we'd get a late deal, but it would have been nice to go to the Cotswolds in the rose season.  The Systems Administrator even turned down an invitation to a cricket match because we were going to be away.

As for the cost, a colleague was lamenting the expense as well as the pain of needing to have root canal surgery, and all I can say is that having a cruciate ligament repaired in a geriatric cat is getting beyond root canals and into bottom-end implant territory, and we don't have pet medical insurance.  But we still have the cat.  He must have used up at least two of his nine lives, though.