choral music and a fox attack

I went last night to hear a performance of Haydn's The Seasons in Dedham Church by the Stour Choral Society.  I never even heard of The Seasons before, but I like Haydn.  It's probably true that I don't like his music so much that I would drive twelve miles in the pouring rain to hear an amateur choir perform a work I'd never heard of, if a friend hadn't been singing in it, but she was.  The Systems Administrator is pretty indifferent to Haydn, and opted for the stay at home in front of the fire alternative.  Several of us went, and opinions about abandoning one's spouse on a Saturday night varied.  One husband apparently didn't like it, and as The Seasons turned out to be quite a long piece, even in its cut-down form (it took an hour to get through Spring and Summer), her mobile phone came out during the ten minute interval and she shot off as soon as the applause died, asking me to give her best wishes to the performer.  The other married lady in the party took a more robust view, saying that she'd told him she was going out and he'd had his dinner.  I thought the SA would be quite happy reading a book, or watching some film I didn't want to see, but as the full magnitude of The Seasons struck me I consoled myself with the thought that since supper was reheated goulash that was already in the oven, the SA could always tuck in before I got back if too hungry.

Arriving at the church was slightly confusing, as I pushed open the door to be greeted by the sight of a lot of men in dinner jackets, and a woman in black who demanded to know whether I was a member of the public.  I thought I probably was a member of the public, since I was not a member of the choir, or a space alien.  It turned out that what she wanted to know was whether I was general audience, or a patron of the Stour Choral Society.  For a minimum annual donation of £25 I could have had a reserved seat (as I discovered once I'd managed to find a seat and read the notes in my programme).  Seats were reserved by dint of putting notices that said Patron at the ends of the pews, which confused most of the members of the public, including me, who could not work out whether that meant that the whole pew was off-limits, or just the place with the notice on it. This meant that my husband-not-too-happy friend and I ended up sitting nearer the back than we need have done, though that didn't really matter, since you  don't need to sit right on top of a choir anyway.

The Seasons is a rousing piece of music, most of the time, though I thought during Spring that Haydn was presenting an idealised view of that season, and we could do with a bit more bounteous sun rolling from Aries and Taurus.  Come gentle spring, ethereal mildness, come - yup, I'm with Franz Joseph on that one, could definitely do with some ethereal mildness and a few lovely charms unfolding in a fragrant scene.  Instrumental accompaniment was provided by an organ and a percussionist, and the organist was having a ball and pulling out all the stops.  Hunting horn?  Yes, I can do that.  Oh, you want a flute and a string section, no problem.  A couple of the music society committee members turned out to be in the choir.  Chatting to the treasurer in the interval I said I didn't know he was in that choir, and he said he wasn't, always, but his arm had been twisted.  It turns out there is a shortage of tenor voices for amateur choirs.  More women than men want to join, and most of the men are older chaps whose voices, if they were ever in the tenor range when they were younger, have since dropped down to baritone.  All the research I've seen shows that belonging to a choir confers enormous emotional and mental health benefits, and I don't know why men in the 30 to 55 age bracket are so reluctant to do it, when women aren't, but there you go.

One of the sopranos was blind, and sang from a braille score, her guide dog at her feet.  The dog had been to all the rehearsals, of course, and apparently behaved impeccably except during the warm-up exercises, when he joined in by howling.  It was the dog's birthday a couple of weeks ago (not the owner's), and the choir sang Happy Birthday to it.

I didn't get back until half past ten, and found a very hungry Systems Administrator who had waited supper for me to be sociable.  I realised that if I'd rung when I left Dedham there would have time to cook the rice while I was driving home.  We settled for brown bread.

This morning I discovered that at some point during the night something, presumably a fox, had tried hard to dig into the chicken run.  When the snow was lying we'd seen a set of tracks that came out of the wood, went to the pop-hole, and round to the other side of the run to that particular spot, so maybe Charlie has had an eye on it for some time.  The invader had not got all the way through, prevented partly by the roots of a self-sown hawthorn that I hadn't had the energy to dig out, and had just been cutting the regrowth off the top.  The roots were deep and obviously very obstinate, so that was a fortunately placed weed.  The wood at the base of the run that the wire was stapled to had rotted, and the SA is going to have to go out this afternoon in the rain and staple it to a new and larger piece of wood.  We've got some sections of beam left over from the old deck that should do nicely.  A bit of extra wire wouldn't come amiss either.

Foxes are at their most blatant and dangerous at this time of year, when they have cubs.  I have seen them around the chickens in the garden in broad daylight twice, during the summer.  As a precaution this morning I put the chicken gate we use to stop them wandering up to the meadow across the damaged section of run, with a large clay jar in front of it.

Addendum  After lunch I am going to make some coconut buns and then the gloss I did this morning will be ready for a second coat (overcoating time six hours).  You didn't think I was going to let the whole day go by without mentioning paint, did you?  I really do need to finish the painting today.  The cats are starting to go mad, with the rain and the doors locked at random and furniture and food in the wrong places, and in turn are starting to drive us slightly mad as well.

bird of dawning

I woke early, in time to hear the rooster crowing.  I love the sound of the rooster.  It is a cry of hope, heralding the start of a new day, and of reassurance.  The chickens made it through the night.  We remembered to lock the hen house, and the fox didn't break in.  Sometimes, if I wake at four or so in the morning, I can't go back to sleep until I've heard the rooster, affirming that all is well outside.

It saddens me when I read in the local papers of disputes between neighbours over the noise made by someone's cockerel, especially if they live in the country.  Why buy a house in a rural location if you don't like the sound of a rooster?  It's like people who move in next to a medieval church, and then complain about the noise made by bell ringing practice or on Sunday mornings.  It's a church.  It has bells.  They have been there for centuries.  If you don't like them why did you move there?  I think people who find the noise of their neighbour's rooster intolerable must at some deep level find their general proximity to their neighbour upsetting.  The crowing of a cockerel inside a hen house is, objectively speaking, no louder than the dawn chorus, heard from a bedroom, even with a window open, and whoever heard of anyone complaining that the noise of the blackbirds and robins was preventing them from sleeping?

Once at work I was asked for advice on sound-deadening shrubs by somebody who had been ordered by an environmental health officer to plant them to shield the noise of their swimming pool pump from the next door neighbours, who had made a complaint about it.  Fresh out of horticultural college and eager, I expressed my doubt that the amount of planting they could do in a domestic garden would make any difference at all to the noise, since academic research showed that you needed a buffer of shrubs and trees tens of metres deep to give a measurable improvement.  I suggested that a better approach would be to go to an automotive parts supplier or yacht chandler and invest in some sound insulating foam for the pump housing, like that used around engine compartments in boats.  With hindsight I think that although this was good technical advice, it may have missed the point, and that what the environmental health officer may chiefly have intended to do was give the neighbour visible reassurance that something was being done.  Even though it didn't really cut down the noise, it might have stopped them worrying about it.

I mind the noise from the lettuce farm, when they are particularly busy, running lorry engines in the yard and charging about on their forklifts and tractors, much more than I do the background noise from the local main roads, even though the roads can be quite noisy when the air is damp and the wind is from the right (or rather the wrong) direction.  I mind the noise of the roads more than an equivalent amount of noise from passing aircraft.  That's because the lettuce farm noise seems to uniquely blight my house, and the other properties on the farm, whereas road noise affects lots of people, so doesn't make me feel so much as though I made an unfortunate choice of residence.  And aeroplane noise affects absolutely everybody, no matter how carefully you chose the lie of the land where you live, so I take that even less personally.

The weather forecast was for heavy rain by ten, but since it had stopped raining by the time I'd finished my breakfast I thought I'd go outside and get on with the garden until it started.  We'd only had 6mm of rain in the previous 24 hours, but that was enough to have made the centre of the gunnera bed truly swampy.  I moved operations to lighter ground further up the slope, although it would have been nice to actually finish a job.  Half past ten came, and I ducked from the Radio 3 studio guest (a feature I find peculiarly annoying) to Radio 2 Popmaster, which is conveniently scheduled for the same time.  There was still no rain by half past eleven, and at half past twelve the Systems Administrator came out to say that the weather was very peculiar, as the rain radar kept showing huge showers sweeping in our direction, which petered out about ten miles short of us.  The SA had not got all the tools out to get on with the deck, on the basis that it had been about to rain all morning, but thought that the rain really would arrive in about forty-five minutes, and would I like to hold off lunch until it did?  I agreed that was a splendid plan to make the most of the dry spell, and went on weeding until quarter to two, when it still wasn't raining, but I was extremely hungry.

There were showers in the afternoon, and I went and pricked out seedlings in the greenhouse, but it goes to show how sometimes the extra information we get from technology is counter productive.  The SA, mesmerised by the high tech evidence of imminent rain, had missed out on a dry morning, while for me, working on the low tech basis that it wasn't raining until it was, it had been business as usual.

back in the gunnera bed

I had been thinking of going up to London today, to catch the polar expedition photos at the Royal Gallery before they end, and the Zoffany exhibition at the RA, and maybe finish up with the RHS show in Vincent Square, which didn’t shut until 7pm and would have seen me through until after the watershed for the cheap trains.  Yesterday when it was so grey and cold that seemed like a good plan.  This morning, with the sun shining enticingly on the garden and ‘Taihaku’ glowing in all its snowy glory, it seemed a less attractive way to spend the day.  When I discovered I’d lost the stamped ticket from my previous trip to the Royal Gallery, that would have let me in free today, I gave up on the whole plan, and decided to push on with clearing the gunnera bed instead.  (There is no gunnera in the gunnera bed at the moment.  It died.  I have a rather sorry looking little replacement in a pot in the greenhouse that needs planting out).

'Taihaku' turned out to be absolutely humming with bees working the flowers, and as I admired it against a blue sky I was glad I'd taken the time to look at it.  By lunchtime I’d almost cleared the nettles from the area where the new deck is supposed to go, so I told the Systems Administrator that it was virtually ready, and that soon after lunch I’d be ready to hand the site over, suggesting hopefully that work could start tomorrow, or even this afternoon.  So far the position of the deck is marked by four alder posts out of the wood banged into the ground.  Alder is supposed to be resistant to rot when in contact with wet soil, and we are going to test this empirically by using it for the deck uprights.  The SA came and measured the distance apart of the posts, remarked that they were not square but it didn’t matter, and disappeared into the workshop.  I heard the sound of a circular saw, but no further progress materialised on the ground.

I advanced up the bed, digging out nettle roots and chiselling away at more of the yellow bamboo.  Parts of the bed have water lying on the surface despite the drought, other parts are stickily damp, and patches are quite dry.  I think the original clump of Phyllostachys nigra died of excessive water at the root, since while bamboo likes reliable moisture, it is not a bog plant.  It managed to spread before dying, so there is some black bamboo growing on drier ground, though not nearly so much as there is of the yellow sort.  I got the two rolls of galvanised lawn edging back out of the garage, as I am determined to keep going this time until I’ve got the yellow monster contained.

The nettle roots have unfortunately worked in between the roots of the tree that isn’t a swamp cypress in places, which has meant I have caused some damage to the tree in the course of extracting the nettles.  They have run into the bamboo a little, but haven’t yet had time to delve deep, and I think I’m managing to pull most of them out.  I discovered the red leaves of an ornamental rhubarb emerging from one especially prominent lump of nettle roots, so it’s a stroke of luck I didn’t get round to removing them earlier in the season, when the rhubarb was dormant and I might not have realised what it was.

The tree that isn’t a swamp cypress was bought and planted under the impression that it was one, and referred to as The swamp cypress for years.  However, as I looked at it, and at trees in public gardens that had labels on them, and young trees for sale at work, I became more and more convinced that it was not a swamp cypress, Taxodium distichum, at all, but a Metasequoia glyptostroboides, or dawn redwood.  I haven’t found telling the two apart as cut and dried as the tree books make it sound it ought to be.  The arrangement of the leaves is supposed to be the clincher, opposite pairs in the case of the redwood, alternate for the swamp cypress, but labelled trees I looked at in public gardens, and our tree, seemed to exhibit both, and the length of the leaves also seemed intermediate between the two descriptions.  Our tree developed a marked flare at the base of the trunk, said to be characteristic of Metasequoia, but Taxodium sometimes does that too.  Deciding whether the bark was spongier and redder than that of a different species without being able to compare the two side by side was tricky.  Every time we visited a garden that had either, or both, I rushed up to them, checked whether they were labelled, and examined for diagnostic clues, but there seemed to be a wide range of different forms across both species.  However, our tree does look more and more like a Metasequoia, and so has come to be called The tree that isn’t a swamp cypress.   I don’t especially mind it being a dawn redwood, since it is a good looking tree, and the story of how they came into cultivation in the west is quite romantic.  They were known from fossil records, and thought to be extinct, until a small colony was found growing in China in 1943, and identified as the extinct tree in 1948.  The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University collected seed, and the species entered western cultivation.  It is critically endangered in the wild, so it’s just as well there are specimens scattered over the gardens of the western world.  According to my Collins Tree Guide it roots very easily from cuttings, though I haven’t tried.  One giant conifer is enough for the garden.

At twenty to six there was a clap of thunder, and it began to rain, suddenly and quite hard.  I put my tools back in the garage, and asked the SA through the front door whether the rain had driven the chickens in, or whether the SA was stuck in the porch.  The letterbox flap opened, and the SA looked at me through the slot.  ‘They haven’t gone to bed.  I think they’re in your greenhouse’.  The next thunderclap was almost instantaneous with the lightning, and tripped the switch on the fusebox.  From the porch the SA could smell the ozone off the strike.  Then the storm passed, and the chickens went to bed.

cold Easter

Speaking as a non-Christian, it seems a waste to have the bank holiday weekend so early in the year.  Today was raw cold at work, the sort of dank, chill air that grips the back of your throat and makes you think you must be going down with another cold.  My nose dripped all day as if it had a faulty washer, until I had to substitute a paper hand towel for my original hanky.  Customers, shrouded in layers of clothing, fumbled with numb fingers for their credit cards and money.  Oh, the joys of an English spring.

The cold weather disagreed with the back door in the shop, which failed to open half the time even when somebody was standing inside it.  We had to scuttle over from the till to let people out, and the sparky girl who looks after the tea room did sterling service nipping to the end of the kitchen and pressing the door open button.  A few customers managed to find the button for themselves, so perhaps they had been watching the people ahead of them in the queue, but most stood baffled, waiting to be let out.  We tried leaving the door permanently open some of the time, but that made it jolly cold for whoever was standing at the till, not to mention those sitting down in the tea room.  When all of the people in your cafe are still wearing their coats I think you have an issue.  The boss is going to have to fix the door.

My job for the day was to ring people to let them know that plants they had been waiting for had arrived.  It always feels rather awkward calling someone to try and interest them in buying a plant they asked for this time last year, and a secret relief if for the most long-standing queries you just get an answer machine, but amazingly some people did still want their plants.  It takes a certain consistency of purpose to ask for Alstroemeria 'Rhubarb and Custard' in May 2011, and not have found something else to fill the space before April 2012.  Some people had found the plants elsewhere in the meantime, or been in recently and bought them without getting their names crossed off the list, but that's only to be expected.  Some sounded pleased and grateful to be rung, as well as thoroughly surprised, and none were hostile.

I came home via the house of the beekeepers' Membership Secretary, and so got one of the required signatures for my bank mandate change form.  She raised the question of whether she and the Chairman could jointly sign a cheque, both being signatories and two signatures being required, or whether one of the signatures had to be that of the Treasurer.  If that's the case then I need to track down the Chairman as a matter of urgency, since until we've got the mandate changed we can't pay anybody for anything, and we have a hefty bill outstanding for wax for the recent candle making day.  Another question for the outgoing Treasurer.

I got home to find the Systems Administrator sitting in a deckchair in the front garden, wearing a thermal hat and looking cold, staring at the chickens who were eating grass.  I asked whether it wasn't rather cold to let them out, and was told it had been warmer when the sun was out.  The trouble is that the chickens know exactly how to play on the SA's heart strings, rushing up to the door of the run squawking and looking eager and anticipatory when the SA goes near them from mid-afternoon onwards.

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.

exercising the chickens

The big tabby has come to sit with me while I type this.  He is purring enthusiastically, even though there's no food in the offing, which is rather endearing, and dribbling on the end of my laptop, which is rather less so.  I wonder if Ernest Hemingway's cats dribbled on his typewriter, or whether Dr Johnson's dictionary was spattered with Hodge's spit, while it was still a work in progress?

The Systems Administrator has gone to London for a retirement party, so I thought I'd better take responsibility for letting the chickens out.  The SA discovered how one of the new little hens was escaping up towards the bonfire heap after seeing her walk away from the chicken gate,turn, run towards it, and flapping madly fly over the top.  Apparently it was straight out of Chicken Run.  We are hoping that as they got older and fatter they will forget about flying, but in the meantime have to prop a motley collection of bamboo canes above the gate to raise the bar.  These are very inconvenient if you need to go up to the bonfire heap to empty a bin of prunings.  I tried going through the SA's workshop, but that is not very convenient either, as the various benches aren't laid out on the assumption that you are going to want to walk through it carrying a large bin with twigs sticking out of it.

Today the speckledies didn't try to wander off, but hid in the sage bush in the herb bed.  I found it vaguely worrying to look up from cutting back the santolina and not be able to see them, and had to go and check that they were all right every so often.  The SA tells me that one is definitely the leader, and squawks occasionally, so if I think I've lost them I just have to listen for the squawk, and when I've found one I'll find all.  This afternoon they were notably silent.

The rooster and the old lady hen went to scratch around on the daffodil lawn, which was no good to me as it is the other side of the eleagnus hedge, and if I can't see them then the fox can't see me.  Fortunately they can recognise the Value sultanas bag (actually, there is nothing fortunate about it, as the SA has trained them by waving the bag around prominently when feeding them) and were agreeable to being bribed to come back into the front garden.  They still don't flock with the tinies, though.  The rooster once or twice has had a vaguely interested expression, as if he realised that they were going to turn into ladies, but they are still quite small, so it is just as well that he hasn't discovered his inner Humbert Humbert.  The old lady hen seems jealous of the rooster's incipient interest, which is odd, when she doesn't seem to like sex, but no different to some people.

Altogether it is quite hard work exercising the chickens, and really taking a dog for a walk would be more straightforward, at least if you kept it on a lead.  I don't know how the SA manages to remain so calm and get through so much of the sinking of the Tirpitz while on chicken patrol.  I must be more paranoid.  We haven't lost one on the SA's watch yet, so it would be awful if the morning after the retirement party I had to confess that I'd gone and mislaid one of the speckledies.

a lovely day

The postman brought us a letter that wasn't for us.  It had a postcode on it, not ours, and the name of a road, not the road where we live.  The only detail that matched our address was that the house had the same name.  I was irritated enough to find a post office website where I could register an official complaint.  It happens too often, that we get mail that is clearly addressed to the neighbours, or mail addressed to any other house called the same as ours in the CO postcode area.  It is difficult, philosophically speaking, to know what mail we haven't received.  I'm currently short two sets of concert tickets, and hoping the LSO really will sort that out on the door as easily as they say they can, and have previously missed a monthly subscription magazine (though to even things out the postman has in the past brought me two of those addressed to other people), but who knows which of my friends, relatives or acquaintances I've offended by failing to reply to something they sent me, which I never received?  From now on I am going to complain every time, and if I don't get satisfaction there's always the nuclear option of contacting You and Yours.

Apart from that it was a very beautiful day.  The Systems Administrator hadn't heard of Britain's Lost Cricket Grounds, or Beyond The Tower, John Marriott's history of East London (the latter was something of a joint present, but it's traditional we give each other at least one book we want to read ourselves.  Anyway, it gives us something to talk about) and seemed pleased with both.  Target Tirpitz had featured on the radar, but not to the extent of buying it yet, so that was a mixture of something already on the SA's wish list, and some total surprises.  I still think Amazon's search algorithms are marvellous, and the reader comments give a fair idea what a book is like, even if you don't agree with their conclusions.  If I had gone into the best independent bookshop in Britain and said that I wanted books for somebody who was interested in cricket, railway history, the visual imagery of twentieth century soviet Russia, the history of London and the second world war, I don't see how they could have come up with recommendations for all of them off the top of their heads.  Suggesting the latest Max Hastings doesn't count.

There are so many jobs needing doing in the garden, it was a toss-up where to start, but I settled on Strulching the borders where the bulb foliage is lengthening by the day, while it was still upright enough for me to shake the mulch down between the leaves.  I've used nearly six of my 25 bags on the last pallet in two days, which makes me wonder if I should have gone for 50 bags and got a cheaper price per bag.  However, when I come to the end of the areas I've recently weeded the rate of application will slow, and the Strulch gradually goes damp and rather solid in its bags if not stored under cover (and I don't have anywhere) and is easier to apply when dry.  Also, the bulk bags physically degrade over time.  I discovered this empirically when I was using the last of my previous order, which had hung around the end of the house for months.  As I dragged it down the stairs by the conservatory the bag disintegrated spectacularly, spilling damp mineralised straw over the steps and my feet.

The Systems Administrator celebrated the beautiful day by letting the chickens out for a yomp in the afternoon.  The new little hens didn't want to come out of their run, but as soon as the older hen and the rooster saw the chicken gates go across the way up to the meadow and the back garden, which are there to encourage them to stay in the front garden and make the chicken minder's life easier, they went running to the outside door of the run, ready for their turn in the garden.  They haven't been let out since late November, and I could work out the date because it was the day I got the rose thorn in my knuckle.  After that it got too cold to sit with them, and then we were both ill, and couldn't face minding them.  Today they were very happy, and fussed about the herb bed plucking beakfuls of greenery.  We had to buy some eggs, me for my lunch party and the SA for Cheltenham week cooked breakfasts, and the bought ones are anaemic looking things with pale yellow yolks, compared to those produced by our own hens.  With fresh parsley and lemon balm in their diet the eggs should now be even better.

last concert of the season

The new little hens came out of the chicken house with the fully grown fowl when I opened the hen house door this morning, which is an advance.  Previously they've waited in the egg box until the big scary hen and the rooster have gone out, and then made for the food hopper.  I can tell this because after the two older birds have emerged there is the sound of cheeping and small beaks tapping on galvanised iron from inside the house.  (I don't think it is conventional wisdom to keep the food hopper inside the hen house, but it stays dry that way, and is protected from any visiting rats at night when the door's shut.)  Coming out at the same time as the others gave the new small hens a chance to sample wet bread.  The old hen and the rooster were not keen on sharing their morning treat with the incomers, so the technique of the little hens was to grab one piece of bread and run away.  I don't see any signs of pecking or real bullying going on, so I'm relaxed on that front, but they haven't yet formed a united flock, the two oldies keeping themselves to themselves most of the time.  The new hens, while quite tame, are not used to being treated as pets, and are taking their time learning the concept of being given snacks.  The first time I sprinkled some Value sultanas for them, the old hen and the rooster came bustling over for their share, while the tiny chickens just looked at me blankly.  Food falling out of the sky was evidently not something they'd experienced.

This afternoon was the last music society concert of the season.  A string quartet was playing, who started with Haydn, finished with Brahms, and did the conventional classical music wheeze of including a piece of twentieth century music that approximately half the audience were not going to like as the second piece in the first half, just before the interval.  Today's piece of compulsory musical self improvement was Benjamin Britten's third string quartet.  I am afraid I fell into the half of the audience that didn't take to it.  It wasn't distressingly awful, but my mind wandered off to what I intended to do in the garden on Thursday, if it wasn't raining.  My fellow committee members all said they enjoyed it (or at least those who expressed an opinion did) but that's fine.  I'm sure I'm the most middle-brow member, but it needs one, to represent the half of the audience who don't especially like much twentieth century classical music.  Happily, the Haydn was good and the Brahms was completely wonderful.

The church has a new kitchen.  It now has a dishwasher, quiet enough to be run while events are taking place in the body of the church.  It isn't large enough to hold all the cups and saucers we use for a concert, but takes quite a lot, which helps break the back of the washing up.  There are two sinks replacing one before, which makes things easier.  Most significant of all, there is a new water boiler.  It takes only ten minutes to come to the boil, and we don't have to mess around with dials turning it down and trying to keep it just below boiling during the first half of the concert.  The tap runs faster too, so we had the first pots of tea on the go significantly faster than during our previous attempts.  The fridge and half the cupboards have moved around, so we kept looking in the wrong places for things, but overall it is a great improvement.  I think the verger and the vicar are both extremely proud of it.

The queue for tea did seem to stretch on forever, even with the upgraded kitchen.  We filled up two large tables with cups before the start, with milk in them, so that all we had to do was pour tea, but people refuse to move down and use the full length of the table.  Instead, they all want to take their tea from the first corner of the table they reach.  Maybe they feel that moving down feels like queue jumping (it's always a nice question of manners whether, in self-service cafes that have the hot drinks after the food cabinets and just before the tills, it is OK to overtake people who are having plates of food dished out to them, if all you want is a cup of tea.  I think it is, but some people won't).  Apart from the mass refusal to use a serving space more than about a metre wide, there did seem to be more people wanting tea than had been in the first half of the concert, but that must have been an illusion.  I don't think passers-by could really have been nipping into the church for a free cup of tea and a biscuit at the music society's expense.

One of my fellow volunteers questioned whether it was worth doing tea, as we washed up the last of the cups after the concert, when everyone else had headed off home.  I'm sure it's worth it.  That kind of event is a social occasion, as well as a cultural one, and people like to socialise over light refreshments.  Every decent club I've ever belonged to has had a break at some point in the proceedings for chat over a drink (normally beer, if it's a folk club).  I belonged for a while to a county garden trust, before giving up because, among other things, the organisers were so cliquey and the experience so unwelcoming.  One of the signs that all was not well was when they ditched the tea and biscuits.

talk in Chelmsford

I drove to Chelmsford today to do a woodland charity talk.  It is slightly mad to have someone clogging up the roads driving from north Essex to Chelmsford to bang the drum for environmental conservation, but they don't have a volunteer based in the middle of the county.  They did have somebody a few years back, but he found his working hours became unpredictable and he couldn't combine work with volunteering.  I once stepped in to cover one of his gigs at Hatfield Peveril at extremely short notice, a fact to which the organisation saved from having a meeting without a speaker were totally oblivious, and so completely ungrateful.

Today's group were perfectly pleasant, and the talk went fine, apart from a heart-stopping moment before the start.  I'd got the digital projector set up, and done my best to level the image by twiddling the legs under the machine, trying to work out how much of my problem was that the screen is wonky after years of use and makes the picture look off-kilter when it isn't, and to what extent the issue was that the floor wasn't level.  The picture looked about right, or at least as good as I was going to get it, I put the remote control down on the projector stand, and the power cut out.  Suddenly there was not merely no image, but no green light on the projector.  My host said he hadn't switched anything off, so I didn't know if it was a momentary power interruption, or if my equipment had broken.  The remote requires you to press the off button twice before the machine will power down, to save you from accidentally switching it off if you press 'Off' once by mistake while talking, so I knew I hadn't turned it off.

The digital projector takes several seconds either to power up or power down, so once you have tried anything you need to give it time to work.  I tried pressing the on-off button once, and the red light on the back of the machine began to flash, which normally means it is powering down.  My host began to flap around me, trying to be helpful, and looked alarmingly as though he were going to experimentally unplug the machine.  My cry of 'please don't touch that' had more than a touch of squeak about it.  The machine went through a phase of bringing up the slide menu, but refusing to go into the first slide, claiming not to be able to detect an input, then settled down and worked for the rest of the afternoon.  At times like that I still find the digital projector un-nerving, even after years of using it, because I know that if it goes off-script and does something I am totally not expecting, it is only a small and stupid computer and I am not good with computers, so my chances of getting it to work are slim.  Especially when I have an anxious pensioner fussing around me who knows even less about digital projectors than I do, and a compilation of popular songs of the twentieth century playing rather too loudly in the background.  (I find background music hampers thought, and always have to switch off the radio for tricky bits of navigation in the car.  I don't understand all those people who call Classic FM with their requests and say they are at work, or worse still, finishing a thesis or revising for exams.)

On the journey home I got cut up by a van and a four wheel drive on my way back to the A12, and then ground to a halt around Hatfield Peveril, which turned out to be due to a jackknifed lorry blocking one lane at Rivenhall.  The lorry had demolished a lampost before coming to rest with the cab at ninety degrees to the road jammed into a large bush, and the trailer across one carriageway, but the glass of the cab was intact and I shouldn't think the driver was seriously hurt.  It was a perfectly nice day by then, not raining, decent visibility.  Goodness knows how anybody manages to jacknife a lorry in those conditions, but they ought to be prosecuted for causing a nuisance.  There are some evil potholes in that part of the A12, which I was able to study in detail at my leisure as we crawled along.  They need filling in before the next traffic jam is caused by a motorcyclist sticking their front wheel down one and killing themselves.

When I got home (eventually) I discovered that all four little hens had come out of the chicken house, and been scratching around the straw bale in the run while the rooster stood on top of it with a horrified expression, like somebody standing on a chair to escape from mice.  He'll like them when they're older.

Addendum  BT refused to admit that the reason why our broadband capacity falls off a cliff in the evenings is because they don't provide enough capacity for the number of customers using the line then, and said we must have a new home hub.  The Systems Administrator fitted it, and we discovered that our wireless printers would no longer work.  Seems the new home hub can't support them.  I now have a too-short USB cable strung across my desk as an emergency measure.  Good old BT.

more mushroom compost

The tiny hens were ravenous when I let the others out, and went rushing to the food hopper as soon as the rooster and the big hen went out of the hen house.  It occurred to me belatedly that yesterday, with the adult fowl sheltering from the rain in the house, which the SA reports they did, the new hens may have spent the day hiding in the egg box and not have got much to eat.  Two of them came out into the run briefly later on, so that's progress.  They are very tame, and don't flinch away from my hand when I top up their food or renew their water, though they still keep kicking sawdust in their pan of water, and the sooner they start using the run normally with the others the better.  They keep together in a little flock, and make small peeping noises, which again is encouraging, as hens generally seem to chatter when they're content.

We went and got more mushroom compost this morning.  Originally we were going to go last Friday, then the Systems Administrator began to think that a morning spent shovelling straw and manure might not be the best preparation for an evening sitting on the chairs in the village hall, which was a perfectly sensible thought.  It was just a pity that we had over 20mm rain in the intervening period.  The yard at the mushroom farm was particularly slurry covered, and staff were dumping fresh loads of spent compost when we arrived, so that the only accessible pile for us to dig from lay the other side of a large puddle and a layer of semi-liquid straw and manure about 15cm thick.

I went to pay at the office, and the woman there asked me how many bags we'd had.  I said that we hadn't loaded it yet, but would like 25.  She looked at me and asked 'How large is your car?'  We agreed that mushroom compost was splendid stuff for the garden and she wished me happy shovelling.

By the time we got to the twentieth bag I was beginning to feel tired, but I really wanted that compost, and when we'd bothered to drive all the way up there it seemed a pity not to make the most of it.  I nearly got my boot stuck a couple of times, but didn't, and we both managed not to fall over.  We had a bit of a scare with the truck when the SA reversed it down a slope to bring it nearer to the bags, to save carrying them across the yard, and it wouldn't go up the hill again because the wheels kept slipping on the slurry.  Eventually the truck made it back to the top, after taking a run at the hill, and we heaved the bags on board.  I could lift the small ones that originally held B&Q composted farmyard manure, but the big ones that originally held Strulch were a two person job

On the way home we agreed that it was just as well I hadn't gone for 30 bags, and the SA confessed to hating loading manure, while seeing that it had to be done.  The bags certainly weigh more than 25kg, which is the weight of a sack of chicken feed or bag of cement.  If they weighed as much as 40kg each then we lifted 1000kg of manure, which is a tonne.  Literally.  It might have been a bit less than that, but it was a lot.  As the SA says, a whole heap of shit.

unfit persons

I thought I might have a couple of hours to work in the garden before the rain arrived, but it was already raining by the time I got up.  We need rain, and it didn't rain yesterday afternoon when it was supposed to, so I can't really complain.  It would be handy if it could be nicer weather just at the moment, to encourage the new little chickens to come out of the hen house.  They were all clustered in the egg laying box when I went to let them out this morning, and when I lifted the lid four little faces did look up at me, and start peering over the side of the box, so they have had a glimpse of what lies out there.  It is not very convenient for the laying hen to have the nesting box occupied by tiny hens, and I hope they get a little braver soon, but a cold, wet day like today does not provide a good incentive for them to want to come out.  Later on the rooster went into the hen house, and the new little chickens all tried to hide in a heap behind the food hopper, like something out of the Keystone Kops.  They have got a tray of water in there, as they won't come out to use the proper drinker, and they keep kicking sawdust in it.

I spent a happy hour picking dead leaves off the overwintering pelargoniums in the greenhouse, until my feet got cold, and then scrubbed the old writing off my collection of used plastic plant labels.  Pencil washes off quite easily, with the help of a green scouring pad.  It's a job to save for a wet day, when there's not much else to do, and you can listen to the radio while you're doing it.  Later I might scrub some flowerpots, and sow some seeds.  A greenhouse is a wonderful toy for anybody who likes pottering around with plants.  It has all the merits of a shed, but with abundant natural light.

I also failed my UK Citizenship Test.  This would come as a blow if it weren't that I am already a citizen.  I took the on-line practice test out of curiosity, to see what kind of questions they asked, after reading an article about it in the Telegraph, and Nigel Farndale was right, it is a really bizarre test.  I got 63%.  Nigel Farndale failed it too, though he doesn't say what he scored.  It's true that I wasn't trying very hard, and maybe subconsciously wanted to do badly to prove how silly it was.  I was finished in nine minutes and something seconds, and you have up to 45 minutes to complete it.  However, as it is a multiple choice test you shouldn't need that long to answer 24 questions.  If you don't know the answers then the safest method, like spelling a word you're not sure about, is to go for the first answer you think might be right, and not spend too long agonising over it.

For example, the number of children and young people aged up to 19 in the UK is 13,14,15 or 16 million?  I guessed 15 million, which turned out to be correct.  This was based on nothing except that I remembered from a Woodland Trust campaign that several years ago there were 12 million UK children under the age of 16.  It turned out to be right, but what earthly bearing does it have on anybody's fitness to be a UK citizen?  If they'd thought that the answer was 5 million or 25 million we should be worried that the applicant was innumerate, deeply stupid, or hadn't even a rough idea of the size of the total population, but 15 million versus 14 or 16 million?  It doesn't matter.  I got the next question wrong, guessing that the Muslim population in 2001 was 1.6% of the total, whereas it turns out it was 2.7%.  I knew it was a low number  And the question asks about eleven years ago, not even now.  If a prospective new citizen believed that Muslims comprised 10% of the population, or 25%, then I'd be worried, but 1.6% versus 2.7%?  Sub three per cent, either way.  A smallish minority.

Some of the questions were ambiguously worded, when you thought about them.  I decided that it was True for the purposes of the test that you could only attend a hospital without a letter from a GP in an emergency, thinking of visiting A&E versus seeing a consultant for the first time, where you do need a referral.  But follow-up appointments with consultants, and regular attendance at things like diabetes clinics, don't need a GP's letter every time.  Once you're in the system you deal directly with the hospital, so the literal answer to the question would be False.  I got that one right, but failed the first question.  It turns out to be False that in the 1980s the largest immigrant groups were from the West Indies, Ireland, Pakistan and Indian.  They were from the United States, Australia, Africa and New Zealand.  The test must take a narrow definition of immigrant group as citizens of other countries currently living in the UK, whereas I'd taken it to include second and third generations who still formed parts of culturally distinct immigrant communities.  It's true that in the 1980s The Systems Administrator and I did know several Americans, Australians and Africans who were working in the UK (who never took UK citizenship and have mostly since left), but you don't hear talk on the radio or read in the papers of 'the American community' or 'the Australasian community', whereas you do hear about 'boys from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds' or 'the Pakistani community'.  The latter exist as official concepts.  Their attainments are monitored by state bodies and they are the recipients of outreach programmes.  The former don't and aren't.

Many of the questions are astonishingly narrow.  Children aged 13-16 are limited to 10 or 12 hours of work during the school week?  I don't have children, and I'm not planning to employ any children.  If I needed to know the answer to that question I could find it out.  But what constitutes work?  Does it count if it's the family business?  If it's not paid?  Where is the cut-off line between helping out your parents and work?  Some of the questions are straight out of O level history, 1970s style.  In which year did married women get the right to divorce their husbands, 1837, 1857, 1875, 1882?  What??!!  They are all dates in the nineteenth century, during the Victorian age.  How many native born UK citizens whose ancestors have been here since Boudicca was at war with the Romans know the answer to that question? (it's 1857, if you want to know.  I didn't).  If a prospective citizen thought that the answer was 1980, or 1500, I'd be slightly worried, but not very.  If they thought that married women couldn't divorce their husbands I'd be more worried, and if they believed that they ought not to be allowed to, I'd be really worried.

There is nothing in the test about values or beliefs.  Absolutely nothing.  The cultural questions are mostly very odd.  Asking whether people know what the speed limit is on single track roads is fair enough (glad I got that one right) but checking whether they know that Ulster Scots is a dialect spoken in Northern Ireland?    Checking whether they are up to date with the plot line of at least one TV soap and the last round of the current reality show would be a better guide to their prospects of fitting in socially around the water cooler.

The SA failed the test as well, so we had better start searching for a country to take us in.  Meantime, I have a modest proposal.  Let every MP and senior civil servant take the test.  Those that fail will of course resign immediately, since they are not fit for office.  Or they could invent a better test.

first count your chickens

The new little chickens arrived last night.  We had to get more hens, as we were down to one hen and the rooster.  Chickens are social animals, so a flock of two was barely adequate, and ran the risk that if we lost another we would have one lonely, sole fowl rattling around in the run.  We got four more, which could mean we end up with rather a lot of eggs, but lots of things could go wrong between now and when we get the hypothetical egg mountain.

I tend not to mention when we lose a hen, unless it is to a fox.  They are pets, of a sort, and we are fond of them, though not in the same way as the cats.  They don't come into the house, or have individual names, and we don't cuddle them, though during a bird flu scare my brother asked me rather nervously whether we did, and I could imagine him weighing up whether or not he should ban us from contact with his family, in case we infected his children.  The trouble with telling anybody except a fellow poultry keeper that one of your hens died is that you don't get a sympathetic response.  Instead you are quite likely to get a joke about bird flu, one of those awkward jokes that (a) aren't actually funny, and (b) fail to hide the joker's underlying anxiety, in this case about about bird diseases that might spread to humans.  Or else a comment along the lines that you don't seem to have much luck with your hens.

The trouble with hens is that they do tend to die.  We've had a couple that battled on to a grand old age, and several that became fox food soon after arrival.  One pair of young hens persisted in foraging along the edge of the wood, instead of staying in the front garden, and they were picked off one after the other in short order.  One old lady jumped on to a low wall, and fell off it stone dead, presumably of a heart attack.  One developed an impacted gizzard immediately after we bought her, as a result of eating something unsuitable.  Two or three just began to look poorly over a period of days, and then died.  Reading poultry forums we seem not to be alone.  Still, we don't generally talk about our losses.  If all of them died one after the other I'd call the vet and resign myself to the next bird flu epidemic possibly having started in my chicken house, but so far each loss has been an isolated incident, the rest remaining perfectly healthy, so I've put the deaths down to one of those things.

The last chicken we lost had a stroke.  We are pretty confident it was a stroke, and not Newcastle Disease (a notifiable virus infection that causes paralysis) because she went to roost right as rain, and the next morning I found her lying on her back under the perch.  I put her the right way up, thinking that this didn't look very good,  and she got neither better nor worse, but seemed paralysed.  It was the weekend the snow came, and it seemed inhumane to leave her out in the cold in the chicken house, so we put her in a cat basket in front of the Aga, covered with a towel.  Occasionally she scrabbled noisily against the wire basket, and most of the time she was quiet.  She ate a small amount of wet bread, and seemed to possess a great will to live, but was disabled below the neck.  This was the same weekend the grey tabby fell ill, so we had the cat fading away before our eyes in the study, and the hen insisting on living even after we had both begun to hope she would die in the kitchen.  It was horrible, and faintly ludicrous.  After we had taken the grey tabby on her one way trip to the vet, the Systems Administrator had to round off a miserable morning by taking the chicken outside and giving her a merciful dispatch.

Now is not a good time of the year to buy hens.  Left to their own devices they go off lay in the winter, so young hens which have reached the point of lay tend to become available from amateur enthusiasts in the summer, having developed from eggs laid in the spring.  The Systems Administrator tracked down some commercial suppliers of hens to hobby keepers like us, and ordered four on-line.  I think commercial hen producers use artificial lighting to keep them laying in the winter months, so that they have hens available at all times of the year.  We have gone for Speckledys this time, instead of pure bred Marans, partly because that's what we could get, and partly in the hope that they might have better constitutions than the Marans.  The Speckledy is a hybrid cross between the Maran and the Rhode Island Red, with dark feathers very like a Maran, but a slightly more prolific egg layer.  They were developed in the 1990s for organic commercial egg producers, who wanted something that could free range and laid pretty brown eggs, but was more productive than the pure rare breeds.  They are said to be friendly birds, and they should be large enough to discourage the cats from getting any improper ideas.

The new little hens came from somewhere near Blackburn in a dedicated chicken delivery van operated by two cheerful blokes, who scooped them out of their travelling box and put them into our hen house.  They arrived at about 7.00pm, so the existing chickens were already roosting.  The delivery men didn't seem to think there was a problem putting them straight in with birds they didn't know, which is just as well, as we only have one hen house, and so do most other amateur poultry keepers.  Letting them get to know each other gradually might be the ideal way to do it, but was not a practical option.  Our two are nice with other chickens anyway.  When their late companion collapsed they showed no signs of picking on her, and if anything they looked rather worried.  I have never seen any signs of feather pecking, vent pecking or other bullying in the run.

The new little hens are terribly sweet, and don't look quite large enough to start laying yet, but that doesn't matter.  We aren't in a great hurry for loads of eggs, as long as we got company for the other two chickens, and we can start letting them out into the garden fairly soon.  The eggs can come later (if all four little hens survive then probably rather a lot of them).  I think they spent the night huddling together in the egg laying box, all four of them, and today they explored the hen house, where they have food and water, but wouldn't come out into the run.  Of course they may never have been outside, but I'm sure they'll get the hang of it.  They have little undeveloped combs, and little anxious faces, and look as though it is all a bit much for them, at the moment.  

eggs

This morning I found another sign of the approach of spring.  Opening the chicken house to top up their food, I discovered two eggs in the nesting box.  Nice fat dark brown ones, slightly speckled.  The chickens have looked distinctly bouncier in recent days, more active and alert, and have started taking an interest again in the world outside their run.  In the shortest, darkest days they just stood hunched in the corner, looking as if they were waiting for winter to be over.  It'll be time to start letting them out for an afternoon constitutional soon.

I got another three rhododendron stumps out of the wood.  That was cheating slightly, as I picked on the ones that looked least likely to offer resistance (two were completely dead).  The three left to go still have some leaves, and may have more of a root system to contend with.  Still, I feel I'm approaching the home straight in the end of the wood.  I filled up the trailer with another load of brambles and ivy, and managed not to poke myself in the eye on the brambles during the course of the day.  The Systems Administrator obligingly got out the electric chainsaw, and removed a branch of a coppiced hazel that was growing into the airspace of Magnolia campbellii 'Charles Raffill'.  It's all beginning to come together.  I should be safe buying a Eucryphia x nymansay, when I see a good one at work, as I now have the space cleared to put it.  (Finally.  I identified the spot where I wanted to put it back in 2009, which shows the speed at which things sometimes progress in this garden).

There was one solitary snowdrop in bloom.  There are the first leaves of a few bluebells showing, but in general the bulbs in the wood haven't yet started coming through.  I remember panicking about this in past years, thinking that by mid January there ought to be more growth visible, and that something must have happened to them (I don't know what.  The biggest vole invasion in the history of gardening).  They have always turned up in the end, so I expect they will this year.  It's a mystery why this one lone snowdrop is so early.

I finally ticked the Italian garden off my list of things to do.  That has shrunk since I set it up, but is still far too long to finish by the end of February (or probably before the end of 2012).  There are some jobs on it that I haven't touched at all.  Mind you, there are some that are to all intents and purposes finished that I haven't crossed off.  It seems I have a neurotic reluctance to declare any gardening task actually finished.

The black cat was in the wars again, this time with a septic eyelid, but his shot of antibiotics last Monday seems to have been sufficient to nip trouble in the bud, as it looks better than it did.  He is now famous at the vets, following his cruciate ligament operation.  Although they have not explicitly said so, we are more and more certain that he was the first ever cat (as distinct from dog) they'd tried the operation on.  Well done that cat, for being a medical pathfinder.

cold winds

The wind had a chill edge today.  The chickens gave up mid morning, and just went and sat in their house instead of their usual corner of the run.  I feel sorry for them.  It isn't very interesting being a chicken in bleak December, but there isn't much I can do about it.

I set out to make a homemade lard cake for the birds, done by melting a block of lard in the simmer oven, then pouring porridge oats into it until all the lard is soaked up.  Unfortunately the first time I checked the lard it hadn't finished melting, and then I forgot all about it, and the Systems Administrator shoved the soup for lunch into the oven without looking, and molten lard slopped over the edge of the basin and on to the oven shelf, transferred itself to the bottom of the soup saucepan and so the oven hob, and dripped to the base of the cool oven.  It turns out that the simmer oven shelf can be removed for cleaning.  I've managed to get by without knowing that for the past five years, not being especially keen on oven cleaning and not having spilt lard on it before.

The SA filled up the peanut feeder for the first time this winter, and within a very short space of time there were fifteen tits on it and clustering around it.  Even the long tailed tits came, and we haven't seen them near the bird table before all season.  It was amazing how quickly word got around that there was something good to eat in that red wire cage, and that it was safe to go in.  How do they know?  Especially the ones that hatched this year and may never have seen peanuts before.  Though birds can be cleverer than we expect.  I heard on Radio 4 that members of the crow family that hide food when other birds are observing them will return later and move their stash to a new hiding place, but don't bother if they don't think they were seen hiding the food the first time.  That puts their theory of mind ahead of the human nine and ten year old autistic children I heard about on Radio 4 this morning.

The heating oil arrived, and we now have a full tank, having been down to the last bar on the electronic gauge.  The SA ordered the delivery more than a week ago, and we were starting to get slightly twitchy.  The central heating hasn't been turned on yet, but we might now venture to run the radiator in the bedroom.  Probably just that one for now, and maybe the small one in the sitting room whose valve has broken, if the SA can't work out how to turn it off.  The Aga heats the kitchen and the study is heated by a log burner.  Indeed, so deeply ingrained is the habit of never running the radiator in the study that it has a bookshelf in front of it with the TV on top.  The oil delivery was 1925 litres and will last us a year or slightly longer.  I am dismayed that we use such a lot, but the SA tells me that compared to friends also living in detached country houses our consumption is about 40% of the norm.  We have put insulation into the loft space we have, all 15cm of it, and installed double glazing, and a super efficient condensing boiler, and there isn't anything else cost-effective we can do, short of deciding that cold showers are really bracing and healthy and improve your immune system.  The best thing to do with this house when we trundle off to the retirement home would be to demolish it and start again.  It is just a gigantic shed.  There are no cavities to insulate.

Addendum  One of the cats has been being sick.  I had to clear up a mess from the stairs this morning, and the SA had to clear up in the hall over the weekend.  This evening, just as I was browsing through the Guardian arts pages on-line, I heard cat sick noises from the hall, and found the grey tabby throwing up on the hall chair.  She managed to puke into my wellington boots which had been left (bad move) in front of the chair.  Sometimes my Franciscan love of animals almost deserts me.

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.

tackling the second pond

The army has been firing some very heavy artillery for the past three days, four guns one after another in rapid succession, in vollies that make the house shake.  The Systems Administrator said that it sounded like practice battery firing, and that it is usually done on the ranges up in Northumberland but moves to Essex during the grouse shooting season.  I asked if the sound of gunfire disturbed the grouse particularly, and the S.A. said that it was more a question of not shelling the shooting parties.

I put on my waders and set out to tackle the wildlife pond in the meadow, but soon discovered that it was so dry that the waders were de trop.  I hope the water has simply evaporated, and the pond hasn't sprung a leak.  It has a butyl liner, but I have allowed a lot of brambles and shrubs to grow around it.  Indeed, it has alder trees growing in it, plus so many reeds and iris that I haven't made it to the far side yet.  Things seem to be getting slightly damper as I go downhill, and I haven't seen any holes or damage to the liner, so I'm reasonably optimistic so far that it will hold water when refilled.

I had assumed that I would be scooping out wet gloop, but it turned out that the layer of soil covering the liner was held together with a very solid matrix of roots.  Instead I found I had to cut through the roots with secateurs, and remove the soil in slabs, almost like lifting turf.   Using the secateurs, and occassionally the loppers, I am careful to hold the mat of roots and earth clear of the liner as I cut, to avoid stabbing it.  Progress has been impeded around the edges by the ornamental cobbles originally used to cover the liner, which are now embedded in the root mat, invisible until I hit them with the secateurs.  This is the first time I've ever cleared the pond out, and we made it over a decade ago.  The soil and roots accumulated since then measures between 5cm and 15cm thick.  It is, I think, an example of a hydrosere, the process whereby bodies of fresh water tend to convert to dry land, without intervention to maintain them as open water.  Whenever I've asked wildlife experts from the Essex Wildlife Trust the best time to clear out a pond, they've always said that ideally you don't, just dig another.  But that isn't really an option in a domestic garden with limited space, and if I don't clear the pond then at some point in the future I won't have one any more, just a butyl lined bed filled with alder trees.

The chickens are great creatures of habit.  Yesterday I let them out early, in mid afternoon, as it was such a lovely day and I was working in the front garden to keep an eye on them.  I thought it would be a treat for them, instead of which they were intensely suspicious, took a long time to come out, and after eating some grass retreated back into their run.  The Systems Administrator tempted them out with Value Sultanas (the rooster can recognise the sultana container at a considerable distance) but soon after eating their snack they went back into the run, until it got to proper chicken letting out time, a couple of hours before sunset, at which point they came out happily under the S.A.'s supervision.  Right person, right time.  I consoled myself that at least they weren't pining all day in their run for the final bit of the afternoon when they would be allowed out.  Final bit of the afternoon seems to be all that they want.

stocking up for autumn

Stock is now arriving in the plant centre in quantity, ready for the autumn selling season.  I hope we do sell it.  The manager ran a stand for us yesterday at the Helmingham Hall rare plant fair, and trade was slack.  Everybody seems to have had a bad year, so our sales weren't helped by the fact that other stallholders were knocking out plants (by now potbound) at massive discounts to avoid being left with them over the winter.

A delivery of shrubs came in some time last week, while I wasn't there.  Some of these were lined up in confusing trolley loads behind the shop, the same variety split between more than one trolley but not yet carrying our labels with price, description, and most crucially, name.  The grower just sends them out in batches with a single label to cover all ten or twenty plants of each variety, and it is a very good idea to keep them in their groups and not muddle them up until you've tagged them.  Some of the plants were intended to go out for sale straight away, and others to be stored behind the scenes in the tunnel on the other side, to replenish stock in the plant centre as needed over the coming months.  It wasn't clear to me which were which, and it didn't seem to have been clear to the staff working over the weekend either.  The manager startled me with a howl of rage as I was watering in one of the tunnels, which initially made me think that maybe he wanted the abutilons and Lobelia tupa to be really dry and that it was my mistake to have watered them, but it turned out that they were not supposed to be in that tunnel at all.

The boss is in the process of buying a new tractor.  I thought this was quite an encouraging sign, but it turned out that his hand was forced, because the old tractor had begun to give off such copious amounts of smoke that it was unusable.  This may have had something to do with our attempts to run it on paraffin (left over from the old tunnel heater) instead of diesel.  There again, it was a very old tractor.  The proposed new model was delivered for the gardeners to inspect, and they looked as engrossed as you would expect two blokes to be, given the prospect of a shiny new mechanical toy.

While the gardeners and the boss were putting the potential new tractor through its paces, an articulated lorry-load of trees arrived.  We ask our suppliers not to send artics, since they won't go up the drive, but I expect that an artic is all some of them have.  This one had to park out on the road, and the boss refused to interupt the tractor trials so that the gardeners could help unload the trees, so the rest of us had to plod up and down the drive with trolleys out of the garden centre, six trees at a time.  The driver must have thought that we were taking the piss.  Eventually the gardeners came to help with a big trailer, and things speeded up.  Our most long-standing employee came to help, who works part time behind the scenes potting and weeding, but the manager's self-appointed guardian told her that we could manage without her, and that it got confusing with too many people.  The longest-serving member of staff said that the manager had told her to come over, but that she would go back to her proper work, and retreated fuming to the polytunnel.

We were one member of staff down, due to illness, and so after the excitement of the trees I found myself largely confined to the shop.  Occassionally the manager would suggest I could move trolleys of this and that, but customers can get into the shop and feel as though they have been unattended for a very long time in less than the time it takes to unload a trolley of plants, so that isn't a very easy piece of multi-tasking to pull off.  I did manage to make some phone calls to let people know that their stuff had arrived.  Sometimes I just got their anwerphone, but one woman sounded really pleased.

The extra-tender and extra-beautiful 'Azureum' form of Teucrium fruticans had come in since the last time I was at work, so I put one aside with my name on it, to go in our turning circle in due course.  No ginger scented rosemary yet, but I live in hope.  I was tempted by a rather tender species of buddleia, B. crispa, with lovely rounded felty leaves, but I'll ponder that before committing.  I do have a collection of plants waiting to go in the ground, and am trying to deal with them before buying too many more.  It is easy to be tempted when rarities turn up, though, since if I don't grab my chance I might not get another for a year, if not longer.  I still wish I'd bought a plant of a particularly long-flowering white Weigela I'd had my eye on, before the grower supplying us and the liner nursery supplying them both ceased trading.  I've never seen one since.

At home the Systems Administrator had the sad task of disposing of the body of the old lady hen, who took bad yesterday and died in the night.  She was pretty old, for a chicken.  I think we got her in 2005, and she lived through a fox attack and was a feisty creature in her day.  In recent months she had got reluctant to venture out of the run, though she did come out for a nice walk about on Friday afternoon, and we guessed her time was drawing to a close.  It is sad to see her go, when we had known her for so long, but maybe less sad than when young hens fall prey to the fox.  Chickens seem a bit like fighter pilots.  If they survive the first few weeks of conflict their chances of survival rise considerably.

an unexpectedly busy day

Day Two in the plant centre turned out to be more successful than I was expecting.  The gale force winds that had been forecast didn't materialise (though I think they are coming, listening to the shipping forecast on the way home) and while it was a bit breezy, not too many pots blew over.  And trade, after an incredibly slow start, picked up so that we ended the day at quite a respectable total.  True, we were helped by one customer who bought three multi-stemmed birch trees and spend over five hundred quid, but even without her the day's takings wouldn't have been a disgrace.

I pushed on with the display tables, and managed to redo another half dozen, though the shortage of suitable plant material had not miraculously remedied itself in the night, and I felt distinctly gravelled for lack of matter.  Customers bought things out of the ones I'd already done, which at one level was very gratifying, and at another a nuisance as I had to scrabble around looking for substitutes to plug the gaps.  Two plants of a silver leafed dead nettle went, to two different customers, and that was almost certainly down to the display as they hadn't attracted any interest in days, stuck in alphabetical order between the Kniphofias and the Leucanthemums.  My colleague who was tidying the roses yesterday kept a tally of each rose we sold, and got quite excited when he hit ten.  I think we were supposed to keep it up for him today, but I forgot.  Tidying plants and presenting them attractively can induce customers to buy them, even though a good gardener sets out with a list, or at least a clear idea of the spaces they wish to fill, and should not be swayed by such temptations.  I might have been tempted myself, though I have not yet done the deal, but I was very taken with a soft orange shrubby potentilla, which I feel could usefully go somewhere near the 'Hot Chocolate' roses and purple leaved Cotinus (bits of the Cotinus are dying.  I am rather peturbed by this).

I spent a long time with a customer who wanted an unusual evergreen, not too big, to give to her neighbours as a 50th anniversary present.  An added complication was her wish to spend what she judged an appropriate amount of money, around £15, so while she was very taken by a small leafed form of Pittosporum tenuifolium, with silvery leaves that contrasted beautifully with the black stems, it was slightly cheaper than her ideal.  We took a long time looking at other things, before she settled for the Pittosporum anyway.  The time spent with customers is only weakly correlated with how much they actually spend.  The one who spent over five hundred pounds chose all of her own plants, without any input from us at all.

Yesterday was the annual sponsored bicycle ride in aid of the Suffolk historic churches.  The owner had bicycled to seven different churches in three hours, after spending the morning on duty in the village church, and was pleased with her efforts.  Today we inherited most of a box of mixed biscuits for the staff room, left over from the refreshments for the participants.

After the close of business we all went to see Eric the rooster.  The owner said that Eric was not at all vicious, and she thought that when he ran at the gardener this was not with the plan of attacking him, but because he wanted a cuddle, and possibly to be saved from the peacock.  Poor Eric, the misunderstood rooster.

who has seen the wind

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I

But when half the pots in the plant centre fall down

The wind is passing by.

Or so might Christina Rossetti written, if she'd been working in a plant centre in Suffolk, instead of as a reclusive poet in Victorian Bloomsbury.  It was dreadfully windy, the sort of wind that creates mess and chaos, tipping over the plants (which then spill compost everywhere and crush each other) and driving every coherent thought out of my head.

The owners had a new rooster, who arrived yesterday.  This morning he apparently came into their kitchen while they were having breakfast, and later, when I went up to the house with a phone message I'd taken, he was in the office.  He was an amiable, dumpy bird with feathered feet, who looked to be an agreeable addition to the household.  By mid-afternoon he had disappeared, last seen running into the garden pursued by the peacock, so I hope they find him this evening.  Left out overnight he is likely to be fox food, which would be a shame.

My job for the day was to redo a row of display tables, which is generally an amusing task, though less so while it's blowing three quarters of a gale.  Some nice sedums had come in since the last time I was there, plus Callicarpa bodinieri showing a fine display of their purple berries, pale flowered astrantia that were looking very fresh and bandbox-clean, straight out of a glasshouse, and a selection of cultivars of Pittosporum tenuifolium, so I had some material to work with.  Even so I felt as though I were scrabbling around at times for suitable plants to use, but I think that was partly the stressful effects of the wind.

A longstanding customer rang to speak to a colleague, having heard on the grapevine that she'd not been well, and wanting to offer support and sympathy, which was really very nice of her.  One of the pleasures of working in a small firm where people tend to stay for a long time, is that we get to know some of the regular customers as people, not just as punters that we relieve of money in exchange for goods.

The manager was charging about compiling lists of big orders for the autumn, and I discovered with pleasure that we should be getting some more ginger-scented rosemary, and the extra-tender, extra-blue form of Teucrium, neither of which we've had since spring, and then they were only a few sad specimens held over from last season.  I tried the rosemary, and it died.

of puddings, self seeding, and the pickiness of chickens

I was worried a month ago that with the dry weather earlier in the year the apples weren't swelling properly, but they've plumped up since then, and are holding nicely on the trees.  There were a few lying on the ground, but only a few, not windfalls but hit-by-lawnmower-falls.  Since the blackberries are ripening in the lane, I thought I might as well make blackberry and apple crumble.  To be on the safe side I cook apple crumble in two stages, baking the filling until it's just soft, and then adding the topping.  Some apples explode to a fluff after ten minutes in the oven, and then it's a redundant precaution, but today's lot took nearly an hour to soften.  It is such a disappointment when crumble topping browns and the fruit underneath is still crunchy.  The end result can only be a sad compromise, of overcooked but just-edible brown crumbs over a partially raw base.  We don't normally eat puddings, as both of us are inclined to stoutness given half a chance, so we had the crumble for lunch.  Just the crumble.  We're having lamb curry for supper, so it will almost average out to a balanced diet over the course of the day, though I suppose the health police would say we should not eat crumble topping at all.  Sometimes I stir porridge oats in, for a bit of added texture, but this was the first crumble of autumn and I stuck to the purist version.

I picked some extra blackberries for the chickens, thinking they would like them, but they looked at my offering of fruit very suspiciously.  Sometimes I think they might be spoiled, what with their daily dose of Value sultanas.  I am sure chickens are supposed to be pleased when their owners go to the trouble of picking fresh blackberries for them.

The rain arrived mid-afternoon.  We'd been checking its progress on the rain radar through the morning, and it started bang on schedule.  In expectation of its arrival I'd spent another morning tidying the front garden, only taking a trowel and secateurs with me, instead of scattering the full range of tools across the back lawn or going as far as the meadow.  The Systems Administrator popped out to tell me when I had ten minutes left to go.  Rain ruled out painting the outside of the house, while it was not raining in Taunton, so the S.A. was stuck with the prospect of watching the finals of the 40:40 cricket all day, such hardship.

The yellow evening primroses I grew from seed collected on Dunwich beach, thinking that if they grew there they should grow in my front garden, have seeded themselves lavishly, and I think we're well on the way to having a naturalised colony.  The gravel garden in the centre of the turning circle is divided into two parts, by a breakwater made out of timber reclaimed from old sea defences, and the evening primroses started off on the south side, that is themed Beach.  They have seeded themselves there, but more seedlings seem to have come up on the other side of the barrier, where the theme is Italian Garden and I have a lot of small bulbs planted.  They particularly like the gaps between the paving.  The relaxed atmosphere of planting styles that incorporate self-seeding is largely illusory, since avoiding a monoculture of evening primrose, or Verbena bonariensis, or whatever it is, depends on a fair degree of vigilance and selection on the part of the gardener.  I should be able to move some of the smaller plants, and some of the others may have to go in the compost bin.  In the back garden new Verbena bonariensis are appearing from the ample seedbank to replace those lost last winter, as I hoped they would, and I've been potting up some young plants from places where I don't want them, like the middle of a path, to use elsewhere.  I did this last week just before the hot spell and they wilted pathetically, but I'm hoping that today's wet weather will give them time to recover.  Each one got a little scoop of Rootgrow in its pot to help restore its traumatised root system.  I haven't tried using it in pots before, but since the way it works is to link to the plant's own roots to form a larger water collecting system, it ought to help.

I think the sea campion is seeding itself about, but the pea plant that I thought was my one surviving sea pea turned out to be yet another everlasting pea, Lathyrus latifolius, which must have grown from a seed that fell down as the remains of a plant were being carted off to the bonfire.  The perennial everlasting pea is a useful plant, flowering over a long period and as tough as door-nails.  Its pink flowers are cheerful, though scentless, and after dying down to ground level in winter, it makes branches up to a couple of metres long, that will drape themselves over spring flowering shrubs and jazz them up for the late summer.  I like it, but have to admit that it does seed itself prodigously, and that the seedlings are hard to dig out unless you get them young.  I have a lot of it in the back garden, probably slightly more than I really want, and I don't want it in the front garden as well.  It's a shame about the sea pea, but it doesn't seem to have relished life in our front garden.  You win some, you lose some.