surprise

I ought to be at work today, instead of which I have booked Sunday off because we have been invited to a surprise birthday party.  After the birthday party we’re supposed to be calling in at the neighbours’ Bank Holiday get together, and after that, well frankly, I shall need a rest.

I’m not too sure what to expect of the surprise party.  It was described as ‘just a few close friends round’ which could encompass practically anything, socially and sartorially.  I expect it will be very nice.  You could not easily hold a surprise party here, as the other person would be bound to notice the amount of effort it takes to get the house clean and tidy enough.  It is in a fairly typical state of muddle this morning, which goes as follows:

The hall.  On the hall table, besides the things that ought to be there, like a bread crock full of wild bird food, a ceramic jar with Value currants for the chickens, and the telephone, are the following objects:  My best trowel.  The S.A.’s secateurs. The S.A.’s gloves.  A yellow plastic torch that broke when it got dropped on the floor plus the bit that broke off it.  A clip from a picture frame that broke when it blew off the wall.  (There used to be a set of six framed black and white photos of traditional boats, cut out of a calendar, but that is down to four due to breakages.  I have got a new, posh, limited edition copy of an Edward Bawden print to replace them, which has been professionally framed, but is still propped against the wall on the floor in the bedroom.  Before the S.A. screws it to the wall I need to remove the old hooks and paint the hall).  The glass wall and door (1970s house) need cleaning, as does the floor.  Estimated time to clean the hall to surprise party standards:  two hours, or two days if I were to do the decorating.

The inner hall.  Besides the pottery (which needs washing) on the hall dresser (which needs dusting) are the following.  A plastic tub full of fence staples.  A plastic tube containing the shotgun pellets the vet took out of the cat.  A broken bronze watering can rose.  Assorted scarves and hats.  The S.A.’s subsidiary filing including a vehicle tax disk and some Tesco vouchers.  A plastic bag of jam jars my father gave me.  A box of Colchicum bulbs that arrived last Thursday.  A wooden bowl containing stones with holes in.  A pair of binoculars.  A piece of paper with instructions for Pilates exercises.  The floor needs washing and for a party we would tidy away the cats’ beds and the Wellington boots.  Estimated time to clean the inner hall to party standards: at least two hours including washing the china.

The study.  Maybe if it were just a small surprise party we could shut the study door, and direct all the visitors to the sitting room.  Last time, when we were doing a full buffet lunch for circa 50 people, we needed it as an overflow room for them to sit down to eat.  At the moment every horizontal surface that could have stuff on it (my desk, the top of the cupboards, the window sill, the niches at the ends of the bookcases) has got stuff on it, including the following:  My laptop.  My old and almost defunct laptop that I haven’t quite finished copying data off.  My old desktop, ditto, including keyboard and mouse.  Rechargeable batteries.  Battery chargers.  Gardening magazines.  Beekeeping magazines.  Assorted bills. Books.  A broken lampshade.  Chequebooks.  My Zen desk calendar.  The boxes from the previous three calendars with old pages stuffed in them for use as shopping lists and notes.  My camera.  Railway magazines.  The S.A.’s folding umbrella.  A pinecone.  A green ceramic frog.  A wooden bowl containing half-discharged batteries.  A padded envelope containing small change.  A crème fraiche pot containing interesting stones.  A jam jar containing long thin stones.  A solitaire set (needs dusting).  A filter that might have come out of the vacuum cleaner.  A wooden artist’s dummy.  A toy wooden duck that walks down a ramp when you push it.  A boxed set of 100 penguin postcards, partly used.  At floor level there is the following:  A pile of paper for recycling that has spread to approximately one metre square.  Several plastic storage boxes (empty).  The packaging the new telly came in, which I am not allowed to throw away yet in case the telly stops working.  Some nails that were in a pallet we burned in the stove, which I felt had sculptural possibilities, if only I knew how to weld.  A wire cat basket.  A plastic storage box containing empty water bottles that the S.A. thought might come in useful on the boat.  A shoebox containing interesting stones.  A cardboard box the grey tabby likes sleeping in.  A Band of Brothers DVD box set.  A paper shredder.  For full party mode we would need to rearrange the furniture as well as clear away the clutter and clean the room, so estimated time to bring up to party readiness:  at least half a day, probably more like a full one.

The kitchen.  That isn’t too bad, as we are both quite keen on not getting food poisoning.  The Aga needs a thorough clean and polish, and the floor could do with a quick wash, and I think it’s time I cleaned the fridge out.  In terms of clutter we have:  My gardening diary.  Three gardening magazines.  A beekeeping magazine.  Some catalogues including a couple I actually want to buy things from.  Bills.  The 2004 Good Beer Guide.  A black marker pen.  A fact sheet about stag beetles.  An empty ginger powder jar that is supposed to remind us to buy more ginger.  Some marketing gumph from Fidelity addressed to the S.A., who isn’t going to bother to open it.  Estimated time to clean the kitchen, if I were to do the fridge properly and including getting the drips of glue from the flypaper off the top of the vegetable peelings recycling bin:  at least half the morning.

The cloakroom.  This is fairly clean, just needs a quick wipe and vacuum.  When the electrician came to trace the wiring fault, the Laura Ashley remnant curtain that hangs in front of the ceiling level fuse box, and coiled  power take-off cable in case we were to run a generator (it was there when we moved in) got half ripped off the ceiling.  Estimated time to sort out the cloakroom:  about an hour, including re-tacking the curtain to the ceiling.  Longer if lumps of plaster fall out of the ceiling.

The sitting room.  This doesn’t contain too much clutter, as we retain a veneer of Modernist minimalism at that end of the house by dint of shoving all the bits and pieces into the study.  The S.A. vacuumed it very thoroughly the last time we had people round, including hanging over the banisters to try and clean up the grey fluff that had stuck to the wall in the stairwell, but it would need doing again.  And we would have to move the furniture round, which always uncovers new exciting bits of dust you couldn’t see before.  For a full party I would dust the tops of the radiators, and the mantelpiece, which I am critically too short to see so it doesn’t normally bother me.  Estimated time: a couple of hours should do it.  Maybe three.

So that comes to between two and three days to get the house ready, before you even started thinking about the food and drink.  Fortunately it is not going to happen, as the S.A. and I have promised each other that we will not put on surprise parties.  I did check before the S.A.’s fiftieth, in case the S.A. was secretly hoping for one, but the response was ‘Good god, no’, and we went to Norfolk for the day instead.

a lively start to the week

On arriving at work I discovered that a coach party was due later in the morning from an international horticultural society.  I had once looked up their website, after seeing a mention of them in a newspaper article, and knew that they are not a society you can apply to.  Candidates for membership must normally be proposed and seconded by a member of the society resident in their country of domicile and, where possible, the application should be supported by the appropriate Vice President.  That should keep the riff-raff out, then.  The gardener was sent to sweep the terrace where they were to have lunch, and I was told to arrange some unusual trees that would interest them by the entrance to the shop.  I wondered what constituted unusual in the eyes of a member of an exclusive international society.  The Chinese version of the tulip tree seemed to cut the mustard.  Its leaves are more deeply incised than the North American one, and the new leaves are tinged bronze, and it is not the common sort but the differences are subtle enough to deceive the unwary.  I added a Crataegus with black fruit (in autumn, obviously, not now), a couple of obscure oaks, one of which actually said on the label that it was 'rarely available', a fastigiate Koelreuteria, and a slow growing, very beautiful lime called Tilia henryana.  If you have never looked closely at the leaves of a lime tree then do the next time you're passing one, and you will see that they are asymmetrically lobed at the base.  Tilia henryana in addition has lovely fringes around the leaf margins.

The coach party arrived, and fell upon the plant centre with a frantic air of so many plants, so little time.  They were wearing name badges, and I discovered that the woman wearing a shin-length tunic in a psychedelic pattern, that I was helping look for Stewartia and Michelia, was a Scottish marchioness.  Members of international plant appreciation societies get their plants mail ordered to them even outside the official mail order season, when lesser mortals don't always.  The manager dealt with the marchioness' delivery, but I gathered that the delivery instructions included to go to the tradesmen's entrance.

Into the middle of the chaos arrived a pair of non-coach party customers, who wanted to know where they could find a Californian tree poppy.  I struggled to work this one out, and showed them Romneya, which was rejected, so suggested Dendromecon rigida, which was also not what they were after.  I had to abandon them in pursuit of the marchioness, promising to come back as soon as I had finished serving my other customer.  They managed to flag down one of my colleagues, who suggested Dendromecon, before getting side-tracked into Escholtzia, which is Californian poppy, a pretty and easy annual flower.  I began to wonder if I had misunderstood about the shrub aspect of the quest, but they said no, their old plant had grown very tall.  The manager weighed into the debate, nominating Carpenteria.  Eventually they mentioned that its leaves were hairy, and the hairs irritated their skin, at which point my colleague realised that they were after a Fremontodendron.  We didn't have any.  I do wish people would stick to Latin plant names.  It makes life so much quicker and easier when you are all sure that you are talking about the same thing.  They are not elitist or snobby.  Invitation-only horticultural societies possibly are, but not botanical Latin.

The other excitement of the morning was that the gardener found a swarm of bees in the arboretum, low down and easy to collect.  The boss was out, and we couldn't find the phone number of the beekeeper who keeps his bees there.  It may not have been his swarm anyway.  I rang the secretary of the Suffolk Beekeepers Association, as we were in Suffolk, and he gave me phone numbers for a couple of beekeepers in the village, who were out.  I tried a couple of my friends just over the border, who were out as well, and had to go back to the secretary for more names.  At the forth attempt I got through to a beekeeper in a nearby village, who happened to be working from home that morning, and was with us in less than half an hour.  He hived the swarm in a little nuc box (a half sized brood box) and said he'd come back for them in the evening, if I could just check before I went home that they were still there.  He was very cheerful about it.  Beekeepers are generally happy to take swarms, pro bono publico, and because the bees come in useful.  He knew a beginner locally who had two colonies, both queenless after a slightly muddled attempt to combine them.  This was only a small swarm, but contained a queen, the vital ingredient she was after.

A party from Writtle College turned up, celebrating somebody's birthday, so I saw one of my old tutors, which was nice.  She teaches one module about the use of art in the landscape, so I said I'd send her a link to the picture of the stone with the hole in it, mounted on its plinth.  I'd told her about finding the stone when she came in before Christmas.  I'll probably send her the link to Cardunculus, though she must have enough to do ploughing through the essays of the current crop of students, without worrying about ex-students as well.

The afternoon was rather quiet in comparison.