discovery of the search for lost time

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

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

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

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

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

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

visit to the museum (part II)

The Hajj exhibition at the British Museum was interesting.  This is on until  mid-April, so you've plenty of time to go and see it.  The first part deals with the scope of the pilgrimage, with maps and photographs of major pilgrim routes, coming across Africa, down from the Indian sub-continent, and from as far afield as Indonesia, and describes the history of the Hajj, with accounts of early pilgrims.  There are some colourful touches, such as a ritual tent being carried through Egypt on a camel, and the experience of a seventeenth century European captured by slavers and forcibly converted, who was taken by his master.  This all sets the scene for the final part, where a video explains what it is that people do when they actually reach Mecca.  Non-Muslims are not permitted to enter Mecca, or Medina, but there's no taboo on our  seeing photographs and models, and there are some beautiful textiles.  Visitors like me who can't read Arabic script must miss a lot compared to those who can, but the curator has done a good job of explaining it.  I found some of the ritual requirements quite strange, like the neat little calculating devices for working out the direction where Mecca lies for purposes of prayer, but not any more extraordinary than this morning's debate on the Today programme about the ordination of women bishops in the C of E.

Unfortunately I couldn't work out any timetable for buying timed tickets for two exhibitions in advance that would avoid the risk of missing my first slot if the trains into London were late, while getting me back to Liverpool Street before the rush hour prohibited period for cheap day returns, without the risk that I'd find myself touring one or the other exhibition against the clock.  I wandered about the museum for a while after visiting the Hajj display, so as not to spend too long at the station waiting to be allowed on a train again, and ended up spending forty minutes there anyway.  Trying to enjoy London culture from the provinces can turn into an endurance test.

The tickets for Lucien Freud and the two LSO lunchtime concerts have still not arrived, so I rang the National Portrait Gallery and Barbican booking offices to find out what the form was.  They both said that if the tickets never turned up it could be sorted out at the door, provided I had my booking reference and the credit card I paid with.  In the case of Ticket Master I have to ring them five days before we are due to go.   I don't have any expectation that the tickets will ever arrive, so hope to goodness it does all work smoothly and there isn't a hoo-ha on the door, particularly as I'm going with somebody.  Memo to self to book online in future, especially if that means printing your own ticket and cutting the vagaries of the postal service out of the loop.  The home-printed receipts for the British Museum worked beautifully.  You just show your piece of paper at the door like a regular ticket bought at the desk, and in you go.  (When we went to a concert at the London Irish Centre in Camden a while back they insisted on taking our pieces of paper, and giving us instead tiny green cloakroom tickets).  I only booked these wretched missing tickets over the phone because I arranged the trips while my internet connection was playing up.

The snow was still lying on the ground, and the thermometer was stuck just above freezing all day, so there was no doing anything outside, even if I hadn't still had a cold.  In lieu of any more enticing project I spent the day cleaning the kitchen, which badly needed doing.  The post, while not bringing my tickets, did bring a nice thank you letter from the ladies group I talked to last week.  They have discovered the reason why the heating in the hall was not working, which is that when the new kitchen was fitted somebody installed a radiator directly below the thermostat for the central heating.  The vet sent us a condolence card about the cat, which was unexpected but kind.

a day at the British Museum

I went to London today.  A bit like the last time I went to London, I felt so coldy I probably wouldn't have gone if I hadn't already got something arranged, but I had tickets for a couple of exhibitions at the British Museum.  It seemed a pity to waste them, and as one of the shows closes fairly soon it was a case of probably not seeing it if I didn't go this week.  And it seemed better than rattling around the house on my own, aware of the absence of the cat and the unworkable, frozen, still snow covered garden.  (The Systems Administrator has disappeared off on a mission to explain spreadsheets to a former colleague and old friend who has recently become the treasurer of his local cricket club.  Then they were going to go to the racing at Ludlow.  The snow has scuppered that, but by then they'd booked a hotel so thought they might as well go to Ludlow anyway.  It has a very interesting castle.  Prince Arthur died there, thus leaving his younger brother Henry to marry Arthur's widow Catherine.  You could call it the birthplace of the Reformation).

The first exhibition I went to was the Grayson Perry curated The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman.  This has been extended until 26 February so there is still time to go and see it.  I enjoyed it very much.  The convenient shorthand often used to describe Grayson Perry is 'the transvestite potter', which I suppose he is, much as A.E. Houseman was a suppressed homosexual versifier or Vita Sackville-West a bisexual essayist and gardener.  Some angry critics have described him as a charlatan.  I don't know about that.  He's come across as an entertaining and thought-provoking man in interviews with him I've read, and that was my reaction to his exhibition.  Grayson Perry has got the measure of his audience, since the first object inside the exhibition is a pot decorated with museum visitors with speech bubbles coming from their heads.  I try to keep up with what's going on in the arts.  It is an almost spiritual experience.  The Times website says it is a must-see *****.  It is the kind of thing people like me go and see.  Ouch, Grayson Perry has got my measure, and that of the nay-sayers who regard him as a joke or a fraud, judging by the less adulatory speech bubbles.  I don't think he's too fussed.

The format of the show is that objects chosen by Perry from the BM's collection are displayed alongside new works by him, so an Asante helmet, decorated with small horns and feathers, sits alongside a Grayson Perry Early English motorcycle helmet in dull aluminium.  The ramshorn ear defenders look quite ancient, the motorcycle crest on the top less so.  A medieval lead alloy pilgrim badge is displayed above a set of twentieth century ones, including a couple celebrating 15 years of the twinning of Havering with Ludwigshafen.  He is interested in the themes of pilgrimage, shrines, maps, the power we invest in objects,the way that one culture plays on another, and representations of sexuality and danger in art.  These are all big, serious themes, and I can't see that an academic curator would necessarily have come up with a better list, though they might have omitted the teddy bear fixation.  Perry plays with the idea of a museum as a modern shrine to self-improvement, or as a tomb, given that so many of the things in it were taken from tombs.  He likes maps especially when they are maps of ideas and the imagination, rather than a literal exercise in how to get from A to B.  He coins some good phrases.  Everything in the British Museum was contemporary once.

I found myself looking with a keener eye at many of the museum artifacts than I think I would have done if I'd encountered them along with dozens of similar items from their own culture in a strict and purist anthropological setting.  There is a strange Boli figure from Mali, made out of mud and hair, shaped liked a huge guinea pig or coypu (which are not even African animals but that's what it looked like) next to an elaborate Congolese power figure decorated with rags and feathers, plus a Grayson Perry skull drawing on the aesthetics of Goth horror (not generally my favourite) and covered, when you look closely, with images of the English heritage industry, buses, Tudor ruffs, and heraldic lions.  There are several more Grayson Perry pots, him being a potter, one examining his ideas of Africa, entitled I have never been to Africa, and a couple poking irreverent fun at the UK buzzwords of early 2011, and the ideas behind the British Museum.

The show finishes with a homage to craftsmanship, the long and sympathetic hands-on relationship with materials.  A relaxed, humble, ever-curious love of stuff is central to my idea of being an artist, says Grayson Perry.  Funny, David Hockney has just said something rather similar.  It looks like a manifesto is brewing.  The centre-piece of the final part of the show is a ship that seems to owe much to the aesthetics of Pirates of the Caribbean, called The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, its central cargo a quarter of a million year old flint hand axe.  Grayson Perry certainly knows how to do astonishingly kitsch.  The pots, on the other hand, are not kitsch.  Elegant, funny, thought-provoking, but not kitsch.  I left with my brain buzzing with ideas, which was presumably the idea.  Getting off the train at Colchester a stranger, seeing my British Museum shop bag, asked enthusiastically whether I'd been to the Grayson Perry.  Turned out she went last week, and loved it.  I should say that was evidence of a good show.

My thoughts on Hajj, which I saw next, will have to wait until another time, as will the buzzing thoughts, since it is now late, and I'm tired and want my supper (left-over cold sausage) and the chest cold is pressing in with a vengeance.  It was worth going to London to see that, but possibly not sensible.

in memoriam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

snow on snow

Last night it snowed for real.  It was forecast to hit the eastern counties after dark, and when I finally summoned the energy to get out of my warm bed this morning I didn't even wait to find out the awful truth until I got to the view down the garden from bathroom window, but peered through the bedroom curtains into the wood.  Snow.  Horrible, lumpen, cold, obstructive, destructive, snow.

The point at which I stopped loving snow must have been one of the moments that I became, at least in some ways, middle aged.  When I was a child I loved snow, and desperately hoped it would last until I could get home from school, but then I wasn't a gardener.  Middle age is a matter of attitude as much as years.  We must all have met people, still young in chronological terms, as cautious, censorious and set in their ways as if they were already within sniffing distance of collecting their pensions, and we can probably think of others in receipt of their free bus passes whose spontaneous enthusiasm for life seems undimmed by years.  Likewise middle age is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon.  My inner five year old is in many respects alive and well.  Just not when it comes to snow.  Or at least, snow on my garden and in my lane and disrupting my trains.

Snow is a destructive force in a garden.  It bends shrubs out of shape, sometimes never to recover, and tears branches off trees, leaving ugly, rot-prone gashes in the trunk.  It clings wetly to evergreen leaves, and seems to have a particularly bad effect on some of the southern hemisphere shrubs like Pittosporum.  It may act as an insulating blanket for those plants that are adapted to harsh winters, but it kills and maims many that aren't.  Reading reports of the frozen shoreline at Sandbanks, and the metre of snowfall in northern Italy, I imagine the damage done in my own garden being multiplied in other gardens around Europe, gardens much finer and lovelier than mine, and I detest the snow.

The book I've been reading, confined in the house by the snow and the cold, is Romantic Moderns by Alexandra Harris.  The subtitle is 'English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper', which is a bit of a mouthful.  It is a good book, and I'll probably return to the subject when I've finished it.  One of the questions that exercised artists in the early part of the last century was whether the visual arts should carry any associations with actual objects and places at all, or whether art should be a purely aesthetic experience, stripped of meaning.  I find it impossible to extract a purely visual response to the snow in my garden. I can't strip the snowfall of its meaning.  It is causing damage.  It is harming my plants.  The fact that it is white, and changes the shapes of things, and makes the ordinary look different and puzzling, gives no pleasure, even though I can see that's what it's doing.  In a different context it might look beautiful, and as it happens one of my favourite photographs in last year's exhibition of the Hungarian photographers at the RA was of a scene in a snowy park, with trees, curving railings, seats and figures all outlined against the white blankness of snow.  But that was in another country.

Even allowing for my unenthusiastic eye, this snow has not looked like a classic scene of snowy beauty.  Because it has not been that cold (hurrah!) the branches of the trees are not sparkling and studded with hoar frost, and the blanket of white is mostly confined to ground level, apart from making Eyeores out of any evergreens.  10cm of snow is not enough to give complete cover, and the fields in the middle distance are speckled with brown rather than being a sea of gleaming white.  And nothing much has gleamed at all, because it's been a dull, overcast day, not good for viewing.

The snow tells its own stories.  A set of footprints this morning, their bases already partly filled with more snow showing the prints were made in the night while the snow was still falling, went past the end of the house and up to the door of the hen house, where they turned around in a sharp V and went around the back of the chicken house to the corner where the netting of the run meets the side of the shed, then away across the herb bed.  I should say that was the fox, coming by to check that the hens really were locked in.  No messing around, just an efficient inspection of potential weak points.

The Systems Administrator went out on foot to check the state of the roads, and reported that someone had put a snowplough along the lane, which is an improvement on last winter.  I should think the local farmers have taken it in hand.  Getting out by car should be do-able with care, when we need to.  Until then I'm staying indoors.  My inner five year old is one thing, but my outer almost fifty year old has a stinking chest cold and a life-long tendency to rheumatism if it gets chilled or damp.

snow had fallen (a very tiny amount)

I wound the bathroom blind up this morning to find a very light dusting of snow on the lawn, and settled on the leaves of the Magnolia grandiflora.  After sorting out the cats' breakfast and the chickens' morning treat of porridge oats and sultanas, and defrosting their water, I refilled the bird table.  The little crowd of tits, robins and finches was back within seconds, too cold and too hungry for the luxury of flitting around playing at being frightened by me.

A mixed flock of pheasants and pigeons was under the young oak, eating more of last autumn's bumper crop of acorns.  There were still quite a few left, when I raked up a few more oak leaves not so very long ago, but they won't last long at this rate.  I don't especially welcome pheasants into the garden, since they eat fritillaries and other flowers, but I don't grudge them acorns in this weather.  The nuts make a mess of the grass anyway, or sprout like weeds when the squirrels and jays cache them in the borders, so I'm really quite grateful for something to get on and eat them.  Just as long as the pheasants don't all come back for pudding in the fritillary season.

In the front garden the blackbirds have moved in en masse on the three trees of Malus 'Red Sentinel'.  They always leave these until late in the winter, and as the fruit are capable of hanging on the tree for a very long time if nothing takes them, the display of small, bright red apples lasted right through January.  I don't know if the birds find the fruit unpalatable, only to be eaten after finishing everything nicer, or if they find the slender branches, bowed down under the weight of fruit, uncomfortable to perch on.  Whatever the reason, the 'Red Sentinel' season is always late, but has finally been declared open.  I like the blackbirds, except when they eat the soft fruit or peck holes in the eating apples before they're ready to pick.  I enjoy their full-throated song, and the chuck of their alarm calls.  The cocks are handsome birds, plump, black and sleek, yellow of eye and of bill.  The hens are softer-looking creatures.  I don't begrudge them the crab apples.

It wasn't a day for working outside.  The Systems Administrator announced that as it was the weekend it was time to light the fire 'up the top', so that we could have our Saturday night dinner at the dining table instead of on our laps in the study or in the kitchen.  The SA gets cabin fever if confined to the study for too long, and regards eating the evening meal in the kitchen as a social failure in a way that I can't fathom.  Having grown up with an Aga I've always liked kitchens, anthracite fumes and all.  But it is sensible to get some warmth back into the fabric of that end of the house from time to time.  By this morning the temperature in the sitting room had fallen to 11 degrees C.  After putting the radiator on mid morning, and burning a fire all day (with coal as well as logs), it took until half past four in the afternoon for the first ball in the galilean thermometer on the mantelpiece to drop.  This thermometer is remarkably accurate, judged against the weather station indoor sensor, and the lowest ball is calibrated at 18 degrees C.  The temperature outside didn't rise above freezing all day, and I think remained at minus one or minus two, and I never switched off the greenhouse heater at all.

One of the friends I saw yesterday has simply retreated with her husband and dog to one room for the duration.  They live in a larger and colder house than this one, and with the price of coal what it is aren't able or willing to keep a fire going in two rooms all day.  Some do-gooding organisation suggested a couple of months back that people like us should be encouraged to move into smaller homes that we could afford to heat, freeing up our surplus space for families.  Apart from the fact that we like our existing homes, and the peace, and the privacy, and our gardens, and having enough shelf space for our books, that is a really helpful suggestion and I've never have thought of it by myself.  Wow.  Thanks loads.  Actually, other friends who live in better insulated, or smaller, or less open plan houses, or just spend three times as much as we do on heating, are sometimes worried by the idea that in winter you simply retreat from a chunk of your house.  It's fine.  Compared to all the people who can't afford to heat even the one room, or who live in flats so shoddy and badly built that they can never be made properly warm or dry, we have absolutely nothing to grumble about at all.  It is a peculiarly English thing, a certain kind of middle class bohemiamism, to deliberately make oneself so elaborately uncomfortable.  You can tell we are the sort of people who went for a week's canal holiday in a boat heated only by a coal burning stove, in October.

The cold weather and charging about doing things have made my chest worse again, and although I am very sorry that one of the friends we were due to see tonight is ill himself, it is probably just as well that we don't have to clamber into the car at about the point the snow is due to arrive and go out to supper.  April might be the cruellest month, but Eliot hadn't tried living in a 60s built timber framed house in north Essex in February.  Maybe if he had he'd have considered it a luxury, making it to the point where the dead land started breeding any lilacs.

cabbages and kings

It was another bitterly cold day, so I spent the morning reading a book of essays about England by Roy Hattersley, taken from his columns for the Guardian and the Daily Mail.  Roy Hattersley is deeply attached to England, reveres Shakespeare and George Eliot, likes Trollope without considering him first class, enjoys walking, especially in the northern hills, and looking around churches, so it was all nice, uncontentious stuff and just the thing for someone with a cold.

The post didn't arrive until ten minutes before mid-day, and my National Portrait Gallery and LSO tickets still weren't in it.  As I've said, thank goodness I'm not trying to run a business from here.  The Systems Administrator counselled patience on the tickets front, saying that they would probably turn up, since the post has been dreadful recently, and a small parcel sent first class took four working days to arrive, and added that if the tickets were genuinely lost then the venues must have procedures to deal with it.  I'll be out next Monday and Tuesday, so I do hope they turn up before the middle of next week, otherwise I shall be spending half of Wednesday morning on the phone to the Barbican and Ticket Master.  I have disagreeable visions that (if they haven't disappeared into a black hole in the maw of the Mount Pleasant sorting office) they might have been shoved through the letterbox of any one of the several houses around here with the same name as ours, just because I know how often we get other people's mail.  But probably I am putting the worst possible gloss on it because I am bored with having a chest cough and a runny nose.

In the afternoon I washed my hands very carefully to get any cold germs off, and went for a long-arranged tea with a couple of local beekeeping friends, conscientiously managing not to cough on them.  Tea, cake and gossip is a very good way to pass the afternoon at any time, and especially when it is cold and it wouldn't be sensible to go outside and you don't feel up to it anyway.  Starting from whether or not 2011 was a dreadful year for earwigs (it was) we roamed widely, across cats, fleas on cats, nits on children, the price and habits of llamas, the gait and disposition of camels, the dangers of ostriches, the dilemmas of inheritance and the step-family, the necessity of making a will, canal boats, Broads sailing boats, unfinished craft projects (oldest example dating back to 1952), glass engraving, whether you can mend cracks in glass (not easily), RSPB reserves on the river Stour, the pointlessness of Twitchers, the tediousness of housework, feeding candy to bees, the exercise requirements of dalmations (high), the Maidstone bakelite museum, lifeboat launches, the use of air raid sirens to muster firemen before the days of pagers and mobiles, bonfires, thorns and thistle spines in the hand, and how to hem silk without it puckering.

There were probably a lot of other things I've already forgotten, but I know that our spirits were not once raised by considering either the Olympics (which definitely didn't get a mention at all) or the Diamond Jubilee (which only got a mention in the context of how the owner of the partly embroidered table mat started in 1952 might wish to finish it for the Jubilee).  At the end of the afternoon we had a very vague agreement in principle to go trekking with llamas, if we could find any not too expensive treks locally, and to go on an RSPB barge trip to look at birds, if we could summon the energy to get up that early in the morning.

mission accomplished

I woke up this morning and hadn't lost my voice or developed a raging temperature in the night, so I set off to to do the talk, armed with my projector and trug of twigs, and a precautionary box of hankies.   It was a clear, glittering morning, and the thermometer in the car registered -0.5 C for most of the journey.  The preliminary signs when I arrived were not entirely encouraging.  My hosts had thought to save me a parking space near the door, which made unloading easier.  You'd be surprised how club organisers don't always think of that.  Somebody wanted to help me carry things inside, which was kind, but I find faintly nerve-racking, ever since the time I slammed the car door shut on somebody's thumb who was trying to help.  Inside the hall I discovered, firstly, that the temperature was not a great deal warmer than it had been outside, and secondly, that the seating for my talk was in the form of chairs set around tables already set with wine glasses and flowers.  Lunch evidently followed the formal proceedings, and I was not going to be able to persuade everyone to sit in the front three rows where they might be able to hear me if my voice packed up.

I apologised to my host that I had a cold, and she offered the use of a microphone, remarking that some of their speakers didn't like using it.  I'd rather not use one if it can be avoided, especially since there is never any opportunity for a sound check before the talk, so you only find out if it is working after you've started.  Also it was a hand held mike, not a lapel clip on, and I wave my arms around when I talk, particularly when illustrating the growth habits of different trees, and need to brandish twigs at the audience.  It became apparent in the first two minutes of my introduction that this sound system wasn't set up right, as I tried holding the mike at various distances from my mouth but all were greeted with cries of 'we can't hear you', so I had to revert to unamplified (but hands-free) and try very hard to project to the back of the hall.  By the time all the members had filed in and sat themselves at tables there must have been sixty of them, so it was a case of having to reach to the back.

After that it went fine, and people said afterwards that they'd enjoyed it, and someone asked for my details for a 2013 programme she was putting together, so that was OK.  Once we'd done the Q&A (not many Qs) it became clear that they wanted me out of the way, and that I wasn't going to get one of the glasses of fruit juice that were circulating at the other end of the room, so I packed up my stuff.  Somebody unplugged my projector before it was ready, since the bulb gets very hot during use and you are supposed to switch off the beam and leave it until the fan has finished cooling the machine before turning the power off.  I wish people wouldn't fiddle with other people's equipment.  I suppose whoever it was was trying to be helpful, or worried about somebody tripping over the cable.  Their donation to the charity came to approx 50p a head given the size of audience.  I leave you to decide for yourself if that is generous.  Anyway, I was mightily relieved to have done my duty and to be safely out of there.

In the porch at home was an amazingly tall box, which turned out to contain my Ashwood Nurseries hellebores.  The plants only came a quarter of the way up the box, and I can only presume that they had run out of shorter boxes.  The pots were very ingeniously anchored to the bottom of the box with some sort of transparent sticky tape, and it took me a long time standing out in the cold of the porch and cursing slightly to cut them free with a pair of kitchen scissors, working at absolute arms length (I am a short person with correspondingly little arms).  My complaint about the difficulty of unpacking them is my only grumble.  The plants themselves are absolutely sublime.  Three of the hellebores are in flower (only one flower stem each, but I can see what I'm getting), and are chunky plants in 3L deep pots.  The other two (which were cheaper) are younger and smaller plants that won't flower this year, but their leaves look wonderfully healthy.

I was especially relieved to get the black hellebore, since when I looked at their website again later on the day I placed the order, it had changed from 'Add to wheelbarrow' to say 'Out of stock' against the black one. Until the parcel arrived and I unwrapped it I wasn't 100% confident whether I had indeed bagged one of the last black flowered plants they had for this season, or whether I would find on the packing note that they were out of stock and my credit card had been refunded.  The black hellebore is of course very dark purple, as most black flowers are, but it has the most marvellous dusky bloom upon it, like a very lux Fritillaria persica 'Adiyaman', and a formal boss of yellow stamens within like a Tudor carving.  The young leaves on the flower stalk are also purple, and it promises to be a glamorous addition to the garden.  It is true that dark flowers don't show up well from a distance, but never mind that.  This is a secret beauty, something to come upon suddenly as you walk round.

Ashwood included care leaflets for the hellebores, and the three little Hepatica that I bought as well.  They recommend cutting off all old hellebore leaves in December, to prevent any leaf disease being carried on to the new season's emerging leaves in January.  Opinions on whether to remove old leaves as a matter of routine vary, with some growers saying it is better to leave them unless they look tatty or diseased, as they help strengthen the plant.  My existing plants have been suffering from a degree of leaf spot in recent years, so maybe I'll go over to the December cutting-off method and see how that does for me.  It might also be that removing the leaves to expose their burrows to predators will help deter the rodents currently living among the hellebores in the ditch bed.

In my mailbox at home was a message from Transport for London giving me tips on how I can reduce the delays I experience travelling during the Olympics.  I already have a plan for that, which is not to go anywhere near the place for the duration.

Addendum  In a way I got off quite lightly, doing the talk.  My original idea was to go to a lunchtime concert at LSO St Lukes today where they were playing (I think) Brahms' clarinet quintet.  At any rate, it was something I wanted to hear, but then I discovered I was already booked to do something today, and the former colleague I'd suggested the trip to didn't reply to my e-mails anyway.  A lucky escape, as it turns out.

keeping warm

I have ventured out of the house today twice, briefly, once to top up the food on the bird table, let the chickens out and turn the heaters off, and again to shut the chickens up for the night and turn the glasshouse heaters back on.  Last night's frost wasn't very heavy, and I could probably have got away without heating, but today was so cold that the greenhouse and conservatory won't have warmed up much, so tonight they'll be starting from a low base, even if the frost isn't much harder.  Yesterday evening, despite having said that the Norfolk Island Pine would have to take its chances outside, I did lay it down in the conservatory.  The winter so far has been so mild it has survived in reasonable condition.  I've only got to get it through a few more weeks and it should be OK for another summer, so it seems a shame to lose it at this stage.

The cold is in full, bubbling swing.  It is following exactly the pattern of the Systems Administrator's cold, which came on at the end of November, seemed much better by Christmas, and then went on to a second, more liquid phase at the New Year.  Mine got going on New Year's Eve, after giving intimations of its incipient presence from mid December onwards, seemed to be almost better by the end of last week, and then kicked off again.  I don't know where the theory comes from that colds last a week, but as the SA's former boss and good friend says, There is only one thing wrong with that theory: it is complete bollocks.  Actually a lot of rubbish is talked about colds.  They are 'only' a cold.  They are the sufferer's own fault, for eating the wrong food, or going out in the wrong weather, or being stressed.  They are a good thing because they are nature's detox.  I don't think so.  The cold virus is a supremely successful parasite, one that doesn't kill its host, mutates frequently, and defies eradication through treatment or vaccination.  Most adults in the UK get two to five a year.  The SA and I are well within the normal range.

It's a nuisance that I'm booked to do a woodland charity talk tomorrow.  I could cancel, but that would leave a room full of people expecting to have a lecture with nothing to do except chat among themselves, which seems pretty mean to them, and especially unfair to the organisers.  The committee may keep an emergency quiz or last minute entertainment up their sleeves, but I don't think a cold counts as an emergency.  Flu, yes, or total voice loss through laryngitis, or a medical crisis like appendicitis requiring hospitalisation, but not a cold.  If it had been a Trustee's meeting I'd be going.  Apart from a sense of noblesse oblige, that once you've agreed to do something you do it if humanly possible and don't mess people around, I have my own reputation to consider.  If I turn up, even muffled and subdued, they'll be able to see that I tried, but if I don't go I look flaky.  Club organisers want to book speakers who know their stuff and are entertaining, but they equally want to avoid those with any whiff of unreliability.  It's my cold, and I'm going to share it with them (unless, of course, it gets a great deal worse in the night).

In the meantime I've been reading a book that turns out to be just the thing, and watching the birds on the bird table.  The book is Ferdinand Mount's autobiography Cold Cream: my early life and other mistakes.  I heard bits of it on R4 a while back, and have been following its progress from hardback to paperback to remaindered paperback, before picking up a copy.  He is the same age as my own parents, but from a completely different world, growing up in 'Hobohemia', his parents both from landed gentry families but without either inherited wealth or any inclination to work for a living.  After prep school (the fees a struggle for his parents) and Eton (scholarship), he went to Oxford, where his friends were the sorts of upper class and well-connected people whose friendship groups firmly excluded people like my parents, or (still, thirty years on) me and the SA.  He drifted through private tutoring, Fleet Street, and Conservative Central Office, and wrote several novels, though I haven't got to that bit yet.  It is a wonderful memoir, because Mount is such a self-deprecating, funny, observant narrator.  The book is full of encounters with people who ended up part of, or connected with, The Establishment.  If Mount were self-important, or crass, or a snob, it could have been the most awful book, but as he is the opposite of all of those it is a delight.

We didn't do The Big Garden Birdwatch last weekend.  I was at work and the SA couldn't be bothered.  The more I heard about it the less sure I was what, if anything, it would tell anyone about Britain's bird population.  After the harsh winter last year if you didn't see many birds that might mean that they'd perished in the cold, but this year after the mild winter if you didn't see many birds that might mean that there was plenty of wild food and they didn't need to come into gardens.  So seeing or not seeing many birds doesn't seem to tell you anything.  I don't believe the counts anyway, because birds vary so much in their willingness to be seen, and I don't trust people not to yield to the temptation to put down rare visitors like coal tits if they know they have them in the garden sometimes, even if there weren't any in the hour they chose to record in.  On our bird table the robins seem to pick on the male chaffinches the worst, apart from the other robins (though they are belligerent little beasts towards all other birds).

Addendum  The ex Sir Fred's title doesn't happen in north east Essex and I've never met him, so he doesn't belong in this blog, but everybody else has had a pop at the subject so I'm going to.  I'm with the Telegraph columnist who disapproves on principle of attempts to rewrite history, and says it is too much like the Soviet authorities air-brushing fallen politicians out of photos.  I think he should have kept his knighthood, as a perpetual reminder to politicians, and regulators, and financial journalists, that they all went along with it at the time.  I think the civil servants who administer the honours system should keep big photographs of Fred on their desks, and the Queen who nominally awards them should do the same.  Everybody nominating anybody for an honour should have to consider the example of Fred and say whether, hand on heart, they still think this is a good idea.  Or we could just not have honours, and take satisfaction from our good deeds.

hellebores made me a killer

The phone went at half past nine this morning, and it was my Pilates teacher apologising that she was going to have to cancel this afternoon's lesson as she was ill.  While I wouldn't have wished her to be unwell I was quite happy to postpone, since my cold was getting snufflier by the hour.  There's a lot of it about.  A friend contacted us last night to rearrange supper booked for the weekend because our host had gone down with a cold so bad he was having to cancel his university lectures.  What's the old saying?  That a green winter makes a fat churchyard.  At least things are not that bad.  When the days begin to lengthen, then the cold begins to strengthen, that's another one, and true enough.

It didn't seem to be raining when I went out to release the chickens into their run, and I kidded myself that I would be able to get on with some gardening as long as I was well wrapped up and remained active.  As I carried my tools down the garden I had to admit that the dusting of fine white granules on the beds was snow, and that it was gently sleeting.  I put the tools back in the garage, and limited myself to resetting the mousetraps.

I'd caught one mouse.  I felt sorry for it, and wondered if the desire to create a garden justified killing it.  But I want flowers.  I'm not a vegetarian.  If I am willing to go on eating meat provided I don't have to participate in the animals being slaughtered or see the process at first hand, but refuse to deal with rodents that are spoiling my garden, that makes me some sort of squeamish hypocrite.  I don't have to grow hellebores, or crocus (whose bulbs were almost entirely stripped out of the borders in last year's cold winter), but I like them.  I feel much more strongly about gardening than meat eating, which apart from domestic considerations I could take or leave.  One doesn't have to eat meat, any more than grow hellebores.  The Systems Administrator is absolutely not a vegetarian, doesn't want to be one, and does most of the cooking, so I have what the SA's having.  If I hadn't caught the mouse, something else probably would have.  It is in the nature of mice to be caught.  If they weren't, the mouse population would explode until north Essex was laid bare like the Oklahoma dust bowl.  I tipped the little body over the fence and reset the traps, still feeling mean.  I'll see how this campaign goes.

I ordered some more hellebores on-line, from Ashwood Nurseries.  This is a small family firm in the Midlands, renowned in the world of hellebore breeding, and I have wanted to get some of their plants for a long time.  Ashwood Garden Hybrids are readily available as young plants, take pot luck on colour, but although all of them would probably be lovely I wanted the luxury of choosing my colours.  I stuck to single flowers, which are much cheaper than the elaborate doubles, but more to the point more graceful, and went for a black, a claret, a green, a pinkish green, and one described as slate, colours that should combine well in a display around the soon-to-be-planted Enkianthus.  In a couple of years I should start getting self sown seedlings, which will be worth growing on and trying in other parts of the garden, with parentage like that.  Ashwood sell various species hellebores, but after reading up on their comparatively weak constitutions, susceptibility to disease and fussiness about soil I stuck with the Garden Hybrids.  Very vigorous plants, tolerant of most soils.  That's what I want.

And that was it.  I know it's a dull day when I'm reduced to doing the ironing.  I listened to a new CD of Norweigan folk songs by Trio Mediaeval and the first part of Pandolfi's violin sonatas, which made it more interesting, but I could have listened to them while gardening, if it hadn't been such miserable weather and I hadn't had a cold.

Addendum  The Systems Administrator updated the wireless driver on my laptop last Friday, and since then it has been connecting to the internet without problems, like a normal machine, which is provisionally encouraging.  The new wireless transmitter ordered at the same time, to see if fitting that would help, still hasn't arrived, and nor have any of the various concert, museum and theatre tickets I ordered last week.  If it's not BT it's the post office, out here in the boondocks.  

introducing the Caucasian wing nut

As I was standing in the hall this morning, piling on more layers of clothing in preparation to leave the cosy kitchen and go to work, a muntjac walked right past the front door, travelling from the direction of the wood towards the lettuce farm.  That's not such a welcome wildlife sighting to start the day.

It was very quiet at the plant centre.  The temperature never rose above 3 or 4 degrees C, and it's forecast to get colder, so I can't blame people for not feeling an immediate desire to come and buy plants.  Even the inside of the shop felt cold.

We received a visit from a woman who is staying with the owner's parents, who had been given the impression by somebody that we had Pterocarya fraxinifolia in stock.  I'm not quite sure how that came about, as I don't think any member of staff told her that.  After we'd failed to find any about the plant centre we asked the boss, who checked on the computer and confirmed that we probably hadn't any, so told the gardener to take a mattock and dig a nice straight sucker up for her from the tree in the arboretum.  P. fraxinifolia is a lovely, large tree, with big divided leaves ('fraxinifolia' = leaves like an ash, Fraxinus.  The clue's in the name), and huge, dangling greenish white catkins in summer.  I have admired the boss's tree in full bloom, but never grasped that it was such a prolific suckerer.  My colleague took the customer to see the sucker being dug up, and because she wanted to see the tree for herself, and reported that the suckers were coming up over an area of tens of square metres.  The Hillier manual says that it is happiest in a moist loamy soil, and is particularly suitable for planting near lakes or rivers.  It sounds like the boss's specimen is extremely happy.  His father-in-law's friend began to look rather alarmed, and to talk about keeping her Pterocarya in a pot.

I tried to finish the pots stock take, but some didn't have labels, or even prices, and the names on the stock list were as arbitrary and ridiculous as Ikea furniture designs, so there was no logical way of matching physical pot to stock item on the print-out, if you weren't already in the know.  It began to drizzle.  My cold, which had been seeming to go away, resurged last night as a spectacularly phlegmmy cough, and I didn't think that standing about outside in the cold and rain was doing it any good at all.

None of the staff know what is happening about the tea room.  After a flurry of builders arriving to quote nothing else happened, and I presumed that in view of the Eurozone crisis and general economic doom the management had decided to conserve their cash and postpone it, but today the owner went on a food hygiene course.  Maybe she is just planning ahead.  We are surely getting too close to the busy spring period to have the builders in now.  Any kind of change at work always seems to take a very long time.  When I first worked there, the tills were outside in a small garden shed.  The owner and the boss spent a year agonising over whether it was a good idea to move them inside, and even after they had bought new counters to put the tills on, the tills stayed in the shed for several more months while the new furniture stood unused in a corner at the back of the shop.  Also when I started working there we didn't have uniforms, and after the idea was mooted that we should wear something that made in obvious who were members of staff, reps from assorted work wear companies were summoned in to a whole series of meetings stretching out over months, bringing samples of our logo stitched on to various fabrics, before it was finally agreed that we would have a uniform, what it would be, and who would supply it.  Same with website designers.  So I expect they'll get there eventually with the tea room, but they might need another year or two first to get used to the idea.

problems of access and choice

It was a grey morning, the cloud hanging low, and driving to work I passed a hawk sitting on a gate post.  I presumed it was a kestrel that had given up hovering because it couldn't see anything.  It had a dark back with barred markings.  A colleague suggested it might have been a female sparrow hawk, which have bright yellow legs.  I didn't see this one's legs, trundling past it at 30mph, but I'll try and remember that for next time.  She recently saw some short eared owls on some rough grass by the river Stour, when she was out beating, but I definitely wouldn't recognise one of those.

An early phone call at work was from a woman who wanted a white flowered camellia.  I described what we had in stock to her (not much, some tiny specimens of 'Silver Anniversay' and a couple of 'Alba Simplex' and 'Mathotiana Alba'.  She then warned me that she was a wheelchair user, and asked if we still had the gravel in the plant centre, which is not wheelchair friendly.  I had to confess that we did still have it, not least because we couldn't afford to replace it with paving over such a large area.  We arranged that when she arrived she would ring us, and we would take the plants out to her car for her to have a look at them.  I pointed out that it might be a good idea to bring enough cash, or we were happy to take a cheque, since if she wanted to use the credit card machine she would need to get into the shop.

She offered to tell me her pin number.  I promised that if she wanted to do that I would never tell her bank that she had, and she said it was all right, she had to do it quite often, at petrol stations.  That is something I never even thought of.  I read Melanie Reid's 'Spinal Column' in the Times supplement when one of my colleagues brings it into work, and I had imagined the difficulty of getting into shops, especially small independents, but it never occurred to me that you wouldn't be able to do something as mundane as pay for petrol.  I suppose the alternative is to carry a lot of cash, but that isn't ideal either.  You would feel exposed even withdrawing it, then continuing on your way in your chair.  When she arrived she liked one of the plants, and had brought enough money to pay for it in the car park.  She had a beautiful and calm smile, despite the fact that each day of her life must contain enough aggravation and petty annoyances to keep the rest of us going for a fortnight.

The next customers ended up bewildered by choice.  They had been to Anglesey Abbey, and fallen for the charms of the grove of white stemmed birches, which they had photographed.  Unfortunately the name they had latched on to was Jacquemontii.  When they discovered that there were several different named varieties of Betula utilis var. jacquemontii they became frozen with indecision.  We didn't have the straight species in stock anyway.  We had 'Grayswood Ghost', which has extra long catkins as well as the striking white bark, but having not seen catkins at Anglesey Abbey they didn't want them.  I don't know why not, given that they weren't being offered a choice between bark and catkins but the opportunity to have both, but they had a set idea of what their birch trees should look like, and catkins were not included.  They were very reluctant to believe that the brown stems of our young trees would turn to the glistening white they had admired, even after I had pointed out the white patches developing at the base of the trunk where it was thickest.  It was a pity not to have sold them some 'Grayswood Ghost' on the spot, but I expect they'll be back, when they've done some more reading up and adjusted to the idea that there are so many different sorts of white stemmed birch.

Then we went on with the stock take in the shop.  This is a job of such awful, mind-numbing tedium that if you let yourself think about how boring it really is you would lie down on the ground and refuse to open your eyes, or start howling like a distressed inmate of the Battersea Dogs' Home.  The whole thing ought to be done using bar codes, on an electronic tablet, instead of by hunting manually through about 80 pages of printout of an excel spreadsheet for something that fits the description and price of each stock item.  The spreadsheets are in no discernable order, and the things in the shop are artistically dotted around all over the place.  Still, I've only got one day of that left to go, and then by Monday week they must have finished.

It got very cold later on.  My colleagues at 4.00pm asked if anybody should stay late.  I said firmly that I didn't think so.  Nobody was going to come now.  When I got into my car the thermometer read one degree.

stock taking, bulbs and shopping

On the Radio 4 farming programme this morning there was talk of how the mild winter has led the UK population of rats and mice to explode, so I am not alone with my rodent problem.  On farms they gather around grain stores.  Even if they are kept out of the actual store, it's getting to the point where the risk of treading droppings inside on their shoes is an issue for some farmers.  Rabbit numbers have soared nationally too, which fits with the Systems Administrator's warning to me last night that they are coming into the meadow again.

The new chap has started at work.  Today was the end of his first week, and he still seems enthusiastic.  Even having begun with us during the stock take (easily the most tedious task of the entire working year) has not put him off, as he said that it was a good opportunity to discover where things were.  With a positive attitude like that he will go far.

So many stock categories have now been stock-taken that the only thing to do is to write down everything that we sell, while apologising to the customers for the delay at the till.  Fortunately everyone today was very relaxed about it.  I was briefly dispatched with the new chap to stock take some pots, but as we couldn't find the first pots we looked at anywhere on the system, either by description or by price, we decided we'd have to leave that section until the manager was around.  We did manage to do the faux oriental terracotta lanterns and hollow clay balls with stars cut out, and my colleagues finished the shrubs while I minded the till.

My task for the day was to put a fresh delivery of bulbs out for sale.  This entailed getting the stand for them out of the back of the tractor shed, where it had been stowed right at the very back behind a table, some scaffolding, a broken chair, assorted planks of wood and other Stuff.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and it is in the nature of sheds to attract Stuff.  This one is full of it, with just enough space for the tractor.  A half full stand of bulbs looks miserable, so I consolidated the new delivery with some odd lilies and gladioli that were on the seed potato and onion rack, and spread the latter out to fill the gaps.  The stand itself was slightly alarmingly wobbly, and I propped it up from behind with a galvanised incinerator and a box of plastic plant ties, just in case.

The new bulbs included Galtonia candicans, a tall growing, summer flowering species with white flowers like little bells up stout spikes.  Its common name according to the packet is summer flowering hyacinth, though if you ever want any you'd do better to stick to Galtonia.  It appeared on Gardeners' World last year, and I remembered that following the programme someone had wanted some, and left their details, so I rang him and left a message to say that Galtonia were now in.  He came to get some later in the day, and thanked me profusely for ringing, which was nice of him, so I gave some cultural advice free and gratis, which is that the plant is said to like to see the light, so despite the height of the flower spike it's happier at the front of the border than tucked away at the back among lots of other foliage.  He said he had just the spot for it, and went away happy.

I went away happy too, having succumbed to the beauty of 'Livia' (I thought I would, assuming there were any left) and while I was at it picked up a couple of rare, not too big shrubs to tuck in by the new Enkianthus, as I got the Rosa rugosa stump out yesterday so that bit of the sloping bed is nearly ready for replanting.  One was Mahonia gracilipes, a late summer or autumn flowering charmer with purplish red (not yellow) flowers and chalky white undersides to its (more typically Mahonia like) pinnate leaves.  It is a Roy Lancaster introduction to western gardens.  The other was a female variety of Skimmia called 'Wakehurst White' with white berries and dainty clusters of white, scented flowers.  Also a small leaved myrtle, Myrtus communis 'Tarrentina' for the gravel, since last season we ran out for most of the year.  Apart from the Hamamelis x intermedia 'Livia' these are all staying in my greenhouse for another month, until February's weather is safely out of the way.

the war of the rodents

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

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

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

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

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

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

barely connected in the digital world

There is something severely wrong with our broadband connection.  In a way that is the good news, since initially we thought it was my computer, until the Systems Administrator’s computer began to show the same symptoms.  It seems unlikely that some bot so well hidden it has slipped past all virus checks has infected both laptops, so we are back to our internet connection, either the line or the modem, as the chief suspect.

Broadband here has never been very good.  We are a long way from the exchange, by the winding route that the copper cable takes, and various trees lean on it en route.  There was a proposal a few years ago from a rival to BT to build a wireless broadband network in this area.  Our house would have been in direct line of sight of the transmitter, and we were all for it.  At the last minute BT announced an upgrade to their service, still not to anything very good, but just enough to kill the wireless idea.  Last summer our broadband capacity rose for several months, and the SA became quite excited and started talking about being able to stream films, but then it crashed back again.  BT must have stuck another fifty houses on the end of the line.  Now there are plans to upgrade the service to various villages in the Tendring peninsular, but ours isn’t on the list of lucky places that are going to get a decent signal.

My current laptop has never been very good, which is a pity.  The technical description sounded as though it ought to be just right for my purposes.  I don’t need huge capacity to handle graphics as I don’t play computer games.  I just want to browse the net, use e-mails, and do a bit of typing and very low-level spreadsheeting.  That shouldn’t be too hard.  Even a mid range laptop should be able to do that in its sleep with one hand tied behind its back.  Mine has always been on the slow side navigating around the web.  The SA has spent a long time adjusting the settings and clearing its caches.  I have obediently tried to follow a shifting set of instructions about closing it, not closing it, restarting it, not running too many applications at once and so on.  Its performance has remained erratic.

This morning it fell back to a level that would have been poor in the days of dial-up.  The CPU was very, very busy, and little lights on the keyboard showed that it was contacting the internet.  It just wouldn’t let me on-line.  The SA began to mutter that it was really not right, and there must be something in there, even though all home tests had come back clean.  I steeled myself to take it for a professional inspection.  It isn’t a nice thought, contemplating handing your laptop over to a stranger.  I don’t store any passwords, but it has all sorts of data on it, and I have some on-line accounts.  I don’t know any professional laptop doctors, and don’t know how to find a reputable one.  Go to the little shop next to the village store, and assume that since they’ve been there for a few years they must be honest?  We agreed that the SA would take it in tomorrow on the way to Tesco.

By lunchtime the SA’s laptop was doing all the things that mine often does, crashing out of sites, churning away but without accessing the page the SA had asked for, and temporarily losing the internet connection.  By mid afternoon both machines were behaving perfectly well on-line.  The SA’s latest theory is that something, the line or the modem, is causing frequent micro-interruptions to our connection, and that my machine for whatever reason doesn’t cope with this at all well.  That could explain why it seems to keep going into full start-up mode in the middle of a session.  It’s a theory.  The visit to the little shop in the village has been put on hold, for now.

I have to smile grimly when I hear politicians chunter on about how the UK needs to be a knowledge based economy, small businesses are what will create jobs and lead us out of recession, and all that stuff.  If I were trying to run a small business from here I would be tearing my hair out.  We live sixty miles from London and six miles from Colchester (the UK’s fastest growing town, apparently) and we don’t have a decent internet connection.  Never have had.  That’s one reason why I don’t leave things like my on-line tax return until the last minute (though we do have a 3G dongle for emergencies).

Of course it could be our modem.  If that is what’s causing the temporary loss of signal then I owe BT an apology.  Only a small one, though, because we get a pretty pathetic amount of capacity at the best of times.

the sweet delights of winter flowers

It was so murky this morning that I couldn't even see the wind turbine from the bathroom window, but the rain had passed.  The still, damp, not too cold air provided perfect conditions to actually be able to smell the witch hazels in the back garden.  On very cold days, or when there's a stiff breeze, their scent can be pretty elusive, but there was no missing it today.  Above the spicy tang of the Hamamelis drifted the insistent, sweet fragrance of Daphne bholua 'Jacqueline Postill'.  The bush has thrown up more suckers since I potted the last lot up, and one of them is blooming.  I saw to my pleasure that the flowers were the same as on the rest of  the plant, meaning that the original wasn't grafted.  I didn't think it was, as I never saw any signs of the graft, and you usually can if you look closely, but it's nice to have confirmation that my two spare plants in pots in the greenhouse are 'Jacqueline Postill' and not a nameless and inferior rootstock.

I put canes along the edge of the wood to mark the spot where they will go in a month or so, once the risk of a freezing blast in February is over.  The parent plant has come through two severe winters here, but small, newly planted specimens can be vulnerable, and they have spent all winter in the greenhouse and never yet experienced a frost in their lives.  I planted the Oemleria cerasiformis, and surrounded it with a wire netting cage to try and keep the rabbits and muntjac off it until it has had time to get established.  It is a suckering shrub, and the boss gives its ultimate dimensions as 2.5m tall by 4m across, so once it gets going I don't think the rabbits will make much of an impact.  Surveying the small tuft of sticks that is all the Oemleria runs to at the moment, and the two bamboo canes standing in for the Daphne, I tried to visualise their full spread at maturity and wondered hopefully if there was space for the plum red flowering Hamamelis x intermedia 'Livia', which we have started stocking for the first time this year.  It is very handsome, and in a different part of the red spectrum to the others, and I should dearly like to grow it, but I had to admit that there probably wasn't room for one, or at least not anywhere where it would get enough light.  If we have any left at work come the weekend then I may yet talk myself into the contrary position.

Daphne bholua 'Alba' is out as well.  It is a pretty thing, which has only grown to half the height of 'Jacqueline Postill', and so far is not suckering at all, so could be a good choice for a small space.  The wintersweet, Chimonanthus praecox, is blooming.  I bought mine as the pure yellow form, but the flowers have a definite smudge of purple on the inside.  It has been quite slow growing in its early years.  The scent of Daphne bholua was so strong that it was difficult to detect whether the wintersweet smelt of anything or not.  It is certainly supposed to.  Further up the garden, Prunus mume 'Beni-chidori' has suddenly opened.  The flowers are single, about the size of a penny or a little larger, in a good, clear, strong shade of dark pink.  They have no scent, and nor has the lovely Lonicera 'Elisae', which is just opening its slender, tubular flowers in a delicate, tantalising shade of very pale melon pink.

After sorting out the Oemleria, I re-potted my three Acer palmatum.  One existing pot had fractured and partially delaminated due to frost.  I'd made temporary repairs with glue, but knew it was only a matter of time before I went out into the back garden and discovered the root ball of my poor Acer exposed to the elements, with bits of disintegrated pot scattered around it.  It needed more root space anyway.  I decided to re-pot the other two while I was at it, partly because they needed potting on, one badly so, and partly because I wanted to standardise on the same design of pot for purely aesthetic reasons.

I have seen the light when it comes to pot design.  After a flirtation with egg shaped pots, very trendy in the early part of the new century and now so horribly last decade, I have come to appreciate the enormous, practical virtues of the traditional flower pot shaped pot, one whose diameter expands steadily from the base upwards.  The design I have fixed on, with minor variations depending on the manufacturer, is the classic camellia pot, a thick walled, sloping sided pot with a couple of horizontal ribs round the outside.  I presume that these evolved to strengthen the walls of the pot, as well as for ornament.  The camellia pot is a design classic which has remained essentially unchanged since the Renaissance, because nobody has been able to improve on it in hundreds of years.  You can see the same pots scattered through the illustrations to Monty Don's Great Gardens of Italy.

The trouble with egg shaped pots is that the diameter at the top is narrower than the widest part of the root ball.  Getting an established shrub out, let alone one that has been allowed to become at all pot-bound, is a brutal job.  I had to get the Systems Administrator to pull from above at the Acer that was still in an egg pot, while I scrabbled at the edges of the root system, scraping off compost until I'd narrowed the root ball down enough for us to drag it out of the pot (the alternative is to smash the pot with a lump hammer).  Getting a shrub out of a flared flower pot is a comparative doddle.  Once you've broken the surface connection between the mass of roots and compost and the inside of the pot, and got the root ball to slide even a couple of millimetres, the rest is easy.  I did ask for help lifting a big Acer that was going from one camellia pot into a larger one, but that was a question of bulk and gravity, not pot design.

finally shopping in the sales

When I got up this morning, and wound the bathroom blind up, it didn't look too bad out of the window.  Grey, yes, but I thought that maybe the rain that was forecast yesterday evening hadn't made it this far east.  Going out to let the chickens into their run, I discovered that I was mistaken.  It was raining, a gentle steady silt of water, the sort of rain that if you were to dash outside for a minute you could deceive yourself into thinking that it was nothing much, but if you were to work in it for half an hour you would be soaked.

At least it meant I sat down to the third re-write of the garden guide without the feeling that I was missing out on doing anything more exciting.  It is supposed to read as though the visitor had somebody friendly, chatty and knowledgeable walking beside them (someone, in other words, just like me) but I've now read it so many times that I can't tell how it would seem, if you were coming to it cold.  I think it's OK.  The next step will be to send it off to the people who are going to print it, and we'll find out if it is far too long and needs to be cut down.  The owner is using the same firm that designed the website, to get a unified look for the business, and presumably because she is used to working with them.  They provided text for the website when it was first set up, which was written in a sort of mangled estate agent speak and was truly awful, so we ought to be able to do better than that.  I have discovered, though, that if you want to avoid sounding like a magazine advertising feature, you do tend to end up rather jolly and hearty like the Boden catalogue.

Then I ordered some pots from the Whichford Pottery.  In recent years they've done a January offer, with 10% off pots and free delivery on orders over £90, a minimum saving of £38.50.  I wanted some more tulip pots, and while I won't need them until November when it is the right time to plant tulips, I thought I might as well get them cheap.  I can use them for bedding over the summer, which will be pretty, and it's not as though I'm going to get ten per cent on the money from the bank between now and then.  I was just beginning to worry that I hadn't had details of an offer this year, and wonder if they were going to do one, when the catalogue arrived.  I have said it before, but they are wonderful pots, and will last you a gardening lifetime, unless you drop them (or run them over in a truck, as happened to one of mine once).

It was still raining.  I arranged to meet up with various friends and relations, and trawled through my Amazon wish list.  I always keep a long list.  It acts as a reminder of things I've read about or heard on the radio that sound interesting, instead of keeping notes on scraps of paper which I invariably lose.  Sometimes they sit on there for years, and I go off the idea and delete them again.  Prices go up and down a lot, especially for second hand stuff.  There was a folk album I tracked for years, that always seemed to have three vendors on at £38.50, before a used copy described as very good popped up for a tenner.  I've gone off Amazon vendors for used books, after buying one too many that was grubbier and more battered than I would have expected from the description, but used CDs are generally fine.  After all, every CD I own counts as 'used', and unless they get scratched there isn't much to go wrong.  Or at least, we have been threatened with disc degradation and incompatibility with modern equipment, but it hasn't happened yet.

It is of course very quaint and old fashioned to still be buying CDs, and statistics show that the trend is against me.  I still like them.  Apart from a few that I have managed to scratch, every CD I have ever bought since they were first introduced still works, which is more than you can say for all the computers I've ever owned, most of which are completely dead.  And no, I don't expect Apple to go bust, and the chances of my music collection being lost in the cloud are probably about the same as those of my house burning down with my CDs in it.  But I like having information stored in discrete packages where if one gets damaged or lost the others are fine (eggs, baskets).  As I'm not great at managing technology I like having a disc that I can put in a slot just like putting vinyl on a turntable, without getting caught up in an episode of Computer says No.  I like the sleeve notes.  I actually like the thing-ness of the row of cases in the shelf.

It's still raining.  There's no more to be said.

taking stock

The owner and I walked around the garden first thing, with the latest draft of the garden guide, checking that everything mentioned occurred at the point where the text said it would (it did) and adding in extra trees worthy of mention.  There was lots to see, with big fat bunches of snowdrops almost fully open, and camellias and witch hazels in bloom.  As Monday mornings go, being paid to walk around an interesting garden is well up there as a good way to start the week.  The dog came along, and more or less stayed with the owner for the entire tour.  Apparently on Saturday she was taken on a shoot and disgraced herself, charging around uncontrollably.  Today, truffling about in evergreens against the wall of the plant centre, she flushed out a large muntjac, which ran away in a lumbering and slightly non-urgent fashion.  After a long pause the dog followed, without conviction.  She is a terrier, not a hound, and doesn't seem to consider that chasing large beasts of the field is part of her remit.  It's just as well, really, as she gets lost often enough running after rabbits.

Things went downhill after the positive start, and I was required to scribe for the shop stocktake.  Stocktaking the shop is a task of such awful, tedious grimness that I think it is worse than doing my tax return, if that is possible.  The stuff in the shop comes from umpteen different suppliers, and we don't have bar-codes.  Records of stock brought forward and ordered during the year are entered on an excel spreadsheet so large that the printed version is stapled together in four separate sections, because it is too fat for our staplers to cope as a single document.  The person doing the counting announces what the stock item is, and the scribe has to hunt for it in the vast spreadsheet.  Sometimes whole minutes elapse between the counter saying how many items, and the wretched scribe finding the right page, by which time both have forgotten the answer and the counter has to count them again.

Insecticides.  Fertilisers.  Fungicides.  Garden lanterns.  Lamp oil.  String.  Gloves.  Mugs.  Watering cans.  Raffia.  Hose connectors.  Toiletries.  Vases.  Trugs.  Metal obelisks.  Garden hand tools.  Jam pot covers.  Vegetable peeling bins.  Bird boxes.  Bird feeders.  Plant supports.  Bird food.  Plant supports.  Books.  Greetings cards.  Tea towels.  Soil testing kits.  Plant labels.  Wooden fruit.  Notepads.  Bridge sets.  Candles.  Tea cosies.  Shopping bags.  Swiss army knives.  Seeds.  Door stops.  Boot jacks.  Garden kneelers.  Beneficial miccorrhizae.  Coat hooks.  Plastic tubs.  Toasting forks.  Nutcrackers.  Scrubbing brushes.  Tissue box holders.  Place mats.  Seed storage tins.  Kitchen roll holders.  Gift wrap.  Paper napkins.

We sell all of these and more, mostly in multiple sizes and colours and varieties.  You wouldn't believe how many different sorts of gardening glove we stock, or how many varieties of string.  Sometimes the boss has loaded the stock code on to the spreadsheet, but sometimes there is just a description.  Sometimes the boss's description doesn't pick up on the key word that appears on the packaging, so a 'power saw' is recorded as a 'folding saw' (probably a more accurate description, looking at it).  The scribe then spends a long time trying to match what the counter has told them to the spreadsheet, without success.  Sometimes similar items appear in more than one place on the spreadsheet, so gloves give way to wellington boots, but then over the page there are suddenly some more gloves, as the spreadsheet fails to run in stock code order.

It would be too simple if all of the watering cans were together, or all of the string in one place.  To make the shop appear more tempting there are themed tables and ornamental displays.  One of my colleagues put together a display of green things.  It was quite cute, in a sort of Gardens Illustrated shopping section way, and mixed up string, raffia, candles, vases, watering cans, candles, kitchen waste caddies, bottles for making infusions of herbal oil, gloves and a textile door stop, all coloured different shades of green.  In all it ran across at least a dozen different categories of the stock sheet.  My colleague would tell me that the next thing was a glove code TML406S.  I would spend five minutes trying to find my way back to gloves.  She would say 'There's one of those', and on we went, hunting this time for the green metal vertical sided vase.

The new member of staff starts tomorrow.  Poor sod, he is going to have a baptism of fire.  After the stocktake things can only get better for him.

a short walk on the Orwell

I went to Pinmill this afternoon.  I hadn't been there for a long while.  It is a ridiculously pretty village on the river Orwell, reached down a narrow lane in a valley that feels more West Country than East Anglia.  Quaint cottages sit higgledy piggledy along the road, including Alma Cottage, setting of the start of Arthur Ransome's We didn't Mean to Go to Sea.  The hard is broad and wide, with wooden scrubbing posts, and assorted traditional boats, which were sitting upright on the mud as it was no more than half tide.  At high tide the water laps the walls of the famous pub, the Butt and Oyster.  It's an historic pub, full of beams and panelling, and also mentioned by Ransome, and is a pleasant place to sit, especially if you can get a window seat with a view out over the river, though I see it is not in the 2012 Camra guide.  However, I was not there for the pub, but for a Sunday afternoon walk with a friend.

Parking in Pinmill was unexpectedly tight, for a winter's day, and the two cars ahead of us bagged the last two spaces in the town car park.  I thought I was going to have to squeeze in next to somebody's hedge on the lane, then got lucky as someone vacated a place in a little enclave just off the road, that had other cars parked in it and didn't seem to be a passing space or part of anyone's garden.  Life for car owners in Pinmill must be difficult, especially in the warmer weather when the tourists flock in.  It looks as though it would be a challenge for them to find spaces to park themselves, let alone for their guests if they want to hold a party.

We set off upstream, armed with a map the Systems Administrator had printed off the computer for me.  Normally the SA is in charge of walks, and I just tag along, so I felt a vague burden of responsibility, although as we were only going up the river and not venturing on to the high fells there wasn't that much that could go wrong.  We passed some cottages that seemed worrying close to sea level, though very quaint and boasting (do houses still boast in estate agents' details?) lovely river views.  The river was almost empty of boats, in contrast to the summer when nearly every mooring buoy is occupied, and a strong breeze was churning the water to a grey chop.  Birds sat out on the mud, and we gazed at them with vague benevolence.  A tidy houseboat, sitting so high on the marsh that it must have been floated on during a big spring tide, had a notice outside saying it was available as a holiday let.  It would be a beautiful and atmospheric place to stay, if you didn't mind carrying your luggage half a mile across fields.

The riverside path after a while seemed to lead us into the river, and we decided that the path lay further inland inside a little patch of woodland.  We soon came to the Cat House, a brick built grade II listed Gothick cottage near the riverfront at Woolverstone.  The name refers to the story that in smuggling days of old the owner used to put a cat in the window to show when the coast was clear of revenue men.  I always assumed it was a china cat, but according to Wikipedia it was his pet cat which he had stuffed when it died.  The view of the Cat House is rather obscured by Woolverstone Marina and the Royal Harwich Yacht Club, and their associated shore based litter of boat hoists, parked day boats and dinghy racks.

The marina enjoys (do houses still enjoy?) a highly scenic position, and rapid access to the open river, but offers limited protection, as the pontoons simply sit along the edge of the channel.  In today's wind they were bouncing up and down a lot, and the few boats still in the water were rolling with them.  Conditions on board would be uncomfortable, and there's always the risk that a boat will roll on to the edge of the pontoon and smash its stanchions.  There is the possibility of passing marine traffic ploughing into the outside pontoons.  We kept a boat there at one time, but not any more.

Despite the map I couldn't pick up the path that would have taken us back into the wooded environs of Woolverstone Park, and we walked up the road from the marina, until we came within sight of the church that lay on our return route.  Or at least, our return route assuming that we were turning round at that point.  The SA had printed off more map for me than that, and spoken encouragingly about how we could go up to Freston Tower.  This is a handsome sixteenth century six storey brick tower, whose original purpose is a complete mystery.  Nowadays it is owned by the Landmark Trust, so you could go on holiday there if you wanted a holiday on the banks of the Orwell and didn't fancy a houseboat with no road access.  We didn't make it that far, since the afternoon's walk was supposed to be a nice chat with added views, not a route march.  We did stop to look at the church of St Michael, Woolverstone, but it was locked, so we admired the clipped yews leading to the door, and the porch with its unusual chequerboard floor of slate laid on edge, but couldn't see inside.

Our route back took us along the edge of a field, and was clearly a popular local route for dog walkers.  One elderly and stout black labrador had got three good long sticks jammed into its jaws, and looked thoroughly pleased with itself, tail wagging wildly.  Black labs seem a favoured breed in this part of Suffolk.  We met lots, and most stopped to say hello.  Only a great grey curly coated lurcher type slunk past us, eyeing us shyly, and a jack russell was too excited running up and down to stop.

As we were about to drop down the side of a small wood back to the river, a buzzard appeared from the trees, and was soon joined by another.  They circled closer to us than buzzards usually come, and we watched for several minutes as they flapped lazily over the fields, until they dwindled to small distant dots.  My companion managed to get a proper look at them through binoculars.  I can never see anything through binoculars, so I didn't take up her offer to have a go.  It used to be the case that there weren't any buzzards in the Eastern counties, and if you thought you had seen one you had made a mistake, but they have been steadily re-establishing themselves on this side of the country, and are no longer a rare sighting.  They will take pheasant poults, so gamekeepers don't like them.

By the SA's standards it was rather a small walk.  I don't think it was nearly far enough to offset the piece of homemade fruit cake I ate afterwards, but it was a very nice afternoon.