how I helped destroy the planet

I was reading the papers on-line while eating my breakfast, and clicked on a story in The Independent Gardening turns out to be very eco un-friendly.  I don't know why I did that, as I knew it was going to upset me before I read it.  It turns out that a study done by the University of Reading, the University of Sheffield and the RHS has found that gardening activities, from mowing and watering the lawn to the use of peat and pesticides, have a harmful effect on the environment.  Planting trees doesn't help, as they can take a decade to become carbon neutral.  Garden paving has a carbon cost.  The production and use of garden chemicals 'contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions'.  The use of peat is controversial due to the association of peat extraction with habitat loss and carbon emissions.  Oh, and gardeners introduce invasive species.  The RHS concludes rather primly that they will 'continue to work closely with gardeners, horticultural trade and horticultural researchers to minimise negative impacts'.

I never water my lawn, and I don't know anybody who does, though the last time I went to RHS Hyde Hall they were running sprinklers on the borders.  As for trees taking ten years to become carbon neutral, since when did we plant trees on a ten year view?  The trouble is, everything we do has an environmental impact.  I've spent a couple of days this week working in my garden.  During that time I have rather knackered a pair of gardening gloves, which will end up in landfill, and I'll have to buy new ones, which will use up some of the planet's resources in their manufacture and distribution, but other than that I've consumed remarkably little.  Infinitesimal wear and tear on my tools is about the sum of it.  Think what else I could have been doing in my time off.

I could have gone shopping.  I could have taken the train to Westfield at Stratford (driving to the station and contributing to air pollution in Colchester) or driven all the way to Bluewater.  I could have walked around in a heated mall, and drunk coffee out of a disposable cup, and bought throwaway fashion.  My dear, this fabulous pair of neon pink plastic shoes made by children in the third world was only twenty pounds!  Imagine!  For that price you can afford only to wear them a couple of times.  Or I could have bought the latest electronic gadget.  I know my antique Nokia still works, but it is so last decade, I'm ashamed to be seen with it.  My friends will lose all respect for me and teenagers will laugh at me on the train.  And I don't have any kind of a tablet, or a games console, or an espresso maker.  We could have gone away for the weekend, and stayed in a lovely little hotel, that being a classy joint would have washed the sheets and towels after our stay, despite the fact that we'd slept in them for one night only and dried ourselves after only a single shower.  We could even have flown abroad (whee!) for some winter sun.  Lots of people do that.

Or I could take up golf, played on a big green grassy expanse that definitely gets mowed, and watered, and fed with chemicals and treated with herbicides.  Or go swimming, in a big sploshy heated pool, treated with chemicals.  Or go skiing (more flying, and an entire set of special clothes that I only wear for one week each year and change after four or five years even though they still function because they are so out of fashion).  Or I could give my house a whole new look with new cushions and throws (the Saturday supplements never say what I am supposed to do with the old cushions and throws but there's always landfill, via the charity shop).  I could paint the walls while I'm at it (with chemicals whose production and use presumably contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions).

I could have a big fat steak for dinner.  I read once how producing one kilo of steak required a quite extraordinary input of water and energy, though I forget how much, so you'll have to Google it, if you're that interested (bet you're not).  The frozen chips to go with the steak require another load of energy to transport and store them, and the cream in my coffee after the meal adds to atmospheric methane as all those cows farting is a major source of greenhouse gas.  It would be much better for the planet if I were to dine off lentils chased down with peppermint tea.

You get the picture.  Almost everything that people do in their leisure time and as they live their lives has a detrimental environmental impact.  Some things have less of an impact than others.  Going for a walk (starting walking from your own house, not driving your car to somewhere more scenic first) seems comparatively harmless.  Once in a while you'll need some new shoes, and you might eat a bit more than you would otherwise, but your ecological footprint is going to be pretty small.  Sitting looking out of the window would be even better for the planet, as you won't wear your clothes out and you'll eat less.  Flying down to the Med to indulge in a weekend of powerboat racing is not going to be good.

What would be really helpful would not to be told that chemicals and paving and compost are all Bad things, and that we should feel really, really guilty about using them, but to be given sensible advice on how we can reduce the environmental impact of whatever it is we choose to do, and how different kinds of activity compare.  My patio (Bad) is equivalent to your junk clothes habit (Bad) but only half his trip to Australia (v. v. Bad).  Maybe people who want a patio, or fifty pairs of shoes, or a foreign holiday, could find ways of saving elsewhere on the demands they place on the planet, if they were given the information to help them do it.  Of course the most effective thing we could do to reduce our future environmental impact would be to simply die now, but not even George Monbiot is suggesting that.

keeping track

I was shocked when I wrote up my gardening diary for Thursday to see that it was apparently the first day I'd spent working on the garden since January 27th.  Indeed, my initial reaction was that I must have forgotten to enter a couple of days, but when I checked against my pocket diary and February's blog entries, it was true.  I'd been ill, or busy, or at work, or the weather had been impossible, and I hadn't done a thing for over a fortnight.  It's so easy to lose time.  The Systems Administrator said that I probably ought to budget for bad weather and colds in the winter and assume that I would lose a few weeks, which is sensible, but not what I want.

I've kept a gardening diary since moving in.  I use A4 ruled hardback books from the stationery section of Tesco or Staples, nothing bound in moleskin or anything fancy, and I'm halfway through the fourth book.  The daily entries are short, noting where in the garden I was working and roughly what I was doing, and listing anything I planted and where I planted it.  It doesn't represent a complete record of all the work done in the garden, partly because I sometimes forget to write it up and have to try and remember what I was doing several days after the event, and because it is my diary and I don't record each time the SA cuts the grass or has a bonfire.  Also I don't keep detailed notes in the diary of every packet of seed sown, though I sometimes do a spreadsheet for that growing season when I'm feeling organised.  It isn't a descriptive diary, with records of what is blooming or how nice things are looking, or not.  I've sometimes tried writing that sort of thing down separately, and always petered out by February at the latest.

The records of things planted in the garden are transferred to a spreadsheet when I get round to it, though at the moment it's about a year out of date.  It is helpful, when looking at a plant I can't put a name to, to at least have a short-list of possible identities.  It doesn't always work, because occasionally I forget to write down things I've planted in the book, and a few have probably missed being transcribed from the diary on to Excel.  Some plants came to me without names, or obviously misnamed, and I've never discovered what they are.  When it does work it allows me to check quickly when something was planted, which can produce a sense of gratification if it has made a lot of growth in the time since, or more often a crushed feeling of disappointment that the shrub or tree is still so small after that many years.  Consulting the spreadsheet does force me to acknowledge how many things have been planted and are no longer extant.  Some gave a good account of themselves and reached their natural span, but many reached untimely ends, failing to thrive in the spot where I'd put them, or falling prey to wildlife or extremes of weather.

Labelling plants in the garden is difficult.  I have bought and used a great many aluminium stick-in labels over the years.  They tend to get lost, scratched up by birds or cats, or trodden on and broken at the base.  They don't always remain legible when I can find them, as pencil can rub off over the years.  Ink is pretty indelible, but requires me to have the special pen for writing on aluminium, which I don't seem to most of the time.  I've tried tie-on copper labels, that you write on with ballpoint pressing hard, to indent the name.  These often disappear into the centre of the plant as it grows, or get removed without noticing during pruning.  Herbaceous plants often travel around the garden, via division or by cuttings, which aren't always accompanied by the correct label, or by self-seeding, which makes labelling individual clumps absolutely hopeless.  There are parts of the garden, such as the gravel, where I actively don't want to be looking at a sea of labels, like a hamster's graveyard.  Labels are not easy.  Those professionally printed black plastic rectangular labels with plant names, families, date of planting and accession number, used in some professionally managed gardens, represent a considerable effort and expense on the part of the garden management.

I was making good progress today clearing weeds from the sloping bed in the back garden, and cutting back the field hedge, a job that needs to be finished soon, before birds start nesting in it.  Work was brought to a premature close when it began to rain so much that I could no longer ignore it and pretend that it wasn't really raining.  We do need the rain, but that's another couple of hours gardening time lost.  

a day at the races

We went racing at Fakenham today.  It's something we'd been talking about for ages, going to a small course where I could see the horses close up, and stand down by the rails and hear the thunder of hooves as they go over a fence, but we'd never got round to it.  Finally today was the day.

It's years since I went to the races at all, and I wasn't sure what to expect.  It turns out that Fakenham is a sweet little racecourse.  The Systems Administrator, who takes racing seriously, got us our orange day member passes, which entitled us to use the members' end of the little stand, and use the bar in the small but perfectly formed members' pavilion.  Admittedly the other end of the stand was open to non-members, but the bar was jolly nice, with a view down on to the finishing line and across the course, and heating.  (The heating probably made all the difference, as I'm typing this after spending two hours in the warm car on the way back and I'm still cold).

The first race wasn't until 1.30pm, and we arrived before then, having allowed for traffic which turned out not to need that much allowing for.  We saw the last heats of some greyhound racing, and then there was a parade by the West Norfolk Foxhounds and the North Norfolk Harriers.  The harriers were some sort of small hound that came in subdued shades of magnolia rather than white and tan, very tasteful, and apparently they are one of only seven packs in the world.  The huntsmen wore coloured coats and blew their horns, and tipped their hats to various eminent local ladies whom they addressed as 'Ma'am', and I thought that is really why so many urban politicians hate fox-hunting.  It isn't purely indignation about the sufferings of the fox, otherwise they'd make an equal amount of fuss about intensive farming.  It's a class thing.  Oh well.  The hounds were very well behaved, and the huntsmen must have had faith in their good nature, because members of the public were invited on to the course to meet them.

Then there were the races.  I understand nothing about racing, except that all the races were won by a horse.  In fact, the last race we stayed for was won by a mare, and I was pleased to see a female getting a look-in.  The horses were very beautiful, and none of the jockeys fell off, and the green screens never had to go up, which is my definition of a successful race meeting.  We went down and stood by the parade ring and admired them at close quarters, and stood by the rails to hear them thundering past and watch them jump, and stood in the stand where we had a view to the far side of the course, and inside the bar where we had a view and heating.  It was vibrant but not too crowded.  In fact, it was a perfect sporting event, from the viewpoint of somebody who isn't interested in sport.

I began to get my ear in for the commentary.  It is much less waffly and more precise than I'd realised, with its own phrases that carry specific meanings.  Some horses were said to be 'not travelling', which sounds contradictory when they are galloping, but means not running freely and easily.  Likewise one was said to be 'ridden along', which again sounds silly, when it's got a jockey on its back who is riding it, but means that the horse is not running well and the jockey is using arms and legs to urge it on.

The Systems Administrator placed a couple of modest bets, working on the theory that there had to be a reason why Jonjo O'Neill had sent two John P McManus horses to run at Fakenham.  The theory turned out not to work.  I don't know why the SA expected it to work, given that long days of this winter's successive colds were largely spent building enormous spreadsheets of racing results, and testing theories of betting, none of which worked.  Using the best theories the punter ends up about 5% down, which is what I'd expect.  Bookies make a living, don't you know.  But it's the taking part that counts.

There were lots of dogs, on leads.  The programme had a note saying that Fakenham was one of the few UK courses that allowed dogs into the enclosures, and would owners please keep their dogs on leads, as there had been an incident in the past when a dog ran on to the course during a race, and if it happened again dogs would have to be banned (well, the programme said the Racecourse Management would be forced to consider banning them, but I can't imagine the decision would go the other way).  The dogs all seemed to be enjoying themselves very much, bouncing up and down at the other dogs, and sniffing them, and watching the hounds.  I find that dogs add greatly to the atmosphere of country events, and am all in favour of them.

The final of the greyhound race was won by a lady dog, by a very short head.  The final of the whippets and lurchers race was a shambles, as after a promising start one of the contestants started barging the other off the course, and they stopped half way to the finishing line and had a friendly wrestling match instead of a race.  The person doing the commentary with great decisiveness awarded first prize to the dog in the red collar, on the grounds that it had got further before stopping.

The Queen had two winners, although I don't think she was there in person to see them.  My favourite winner was the mare, partly because she struck a blow for equal rights, and because she was bred, owned and trained by the same person.  They'll be having a real celebration tonight.  When you own lots of horses, like the Queen or John P McManus, and don't have a hands-on role in their careers, it can't be quite the same when they win.

We skipped the last two races, which were a hunter race with only three runners and a flat race, and managed most of the drive home in the light.  Two hours exactly.  I recommend Fakenham racecourse, if you like country days out, even if you aren't fussed about racing.

back in the garden

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

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

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

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

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

art in the east end

I went yesterday to the Whitechapel Art Gallery, in yet another case of catching something I wanted to see which was going to end soon.  If I made New Year’s resolutions then my one for 2012 ought to have been to get more organised.  I’d promised my uncle that I’d go to my aunt’s lunchtime recital, so I went to Whitechapel via Wesley’s chapel.  The concert started with a piece for cello and piano by a contemporary of Brahms called Albert Dietrich, who used to be famous in his day but has sunk almost without trace.  Unfortunately the concert organiser had omitted to copy the copious notes my uncle had prepared, so the audience left no wiser about Dietrich than they were at the beginning, apart from having heard his Sonata in C major.  Then there was some Faure.  My aunt did not think the Dietrich went so well as it had at the run-through, and my uncle was preoccupied because my aunt was unhappy, and cross that his programme notes had got lost, so the effort I'd made to travel up to town went largely unappreciated by my relations.

I knew that bits of the East End were now very trendy, with prices to match (a far cry from the days when my grandfather grew up there), but I hadn’t seen it for myself, until cutting through from Wesley’s chapel to Whitechapel High Street via the Commercial Road.  Blimey, there are some posh shops and eateries round the back of Spitalfields.  The trendy bits seem to pop up among the unreconstructed areas like currants in a bun, so one minute I was walking past uber-cool clothes shops and delis, and the next minute back in the Tower Hamlets that is the most derived borough in the country.

The Whitechapel Gallery is a lovely art gallery.  I’ve said so before.  It is a very nice, quiet, soothing space.  I feel good just being in the building.  It has the best art gallery café I know.  Lemon polenta cake yesterday, yummy (I love the slight grittiness).  The main draw for me was the third selection of works from the Government Art Collection (I missed part two), this time chosen by Simon Schama.  The Government has managed to acquire an eclectic set of art, and the current offering has everything from a neon installation to a portrait of Admiral Nelson after his victory at the battle of the Nile.  My favourite thing in the room was probably Grayson Perry’s Map of an Englishman.  Drawn in the style of a Tudor map, from a distance it looks just like the real thing, showing an island with estuaries, mountains, and trees.  There are pictures of little buildings and towns, and the whole thing looks very English, until you read the captions and find that the regions are called Normal, Myth, Posh and Guru, the seas off the coast called Paranoia, Anorexia Nervosa, and Schizophrenia, and the names of the buildings and towns are all states of mind or human behaviours.  It was funny and clever and I’d have liked to buy the poster, but there weren’t any.  Goodness knows if it’s Art, but who cares?

The Government Art Collection exhibition (which only takes up one room, it’s not big) comes with a chunky free booklet, telling you something about Simon Schama’s thought-processes in making his selection, and a bit about each individual work, including where each one is normally hung, a detail that gives an extra layer of interest to the show.  In the Cabinet Office they go in for modern, conceptual pieces (though they do also have Lord Nelson).  A Howard Hodgkin oil painting titled Mud on the Nile normally lives in our ambassador’s residence in Cairo, while the Government Office for the East of England in Cambridge has to make do with a giant colour photograph of allotments in Ely.  It’s great fun. You have until 26 February to see it, then twelve works from number 10 Downing Street, selected by number 10 staff, go on show from 9 March.

The other thing I particularly wanted to catch was a meta-exhibition, a show about a show the Whitechapel did in 1961 of Rothko’s work.  I went to the Rothko exhibition at the Tate a while back and loved it.  I went twice, and if only I’d still been working in the City I’d have gone every week.  Nothing much seems to be happening in those huge canvases, and yet everything is happening.  I could look at them for hours.  There is just one smallish Rothko at the current Whitechapel show, a red and black one, plus photographs of visitors to the original 1961 exhibition, looking grave and absorbed and wearing amazing 1960s hairstyles and spectacles.  There are letters between Rothko and various UK artists and gallery directors discussing the arrangements for that show, a visit Rothko made to the UK, the Tate’s first purchase of a Rothko, and his subsequent gift to them of the Seagram murals.  Rothko was very particular about how his paintings should be hung, at what height from the floor, against what shade of white paint, and how they should be lit, suffuse moderately bright ambient light please and definitely no spot lights.  He rejected the claim by one friend and admirer that his great canvases were like great calm windows in a cathedral, saying that on the contrary they were full of rage and turmoil.  Three months after making his gift to the Tate he killed himself.

There were some other things on as well, but by then I was very tired and not in the mood, so I gave up.  I was able to go straight home instead of hanging around London for another hour and three quarters, because the new railway company on the Colchester line is so far following the example of their predecessor, and lifting the evening restrictions on cheap day travel for half term week.  A friend discovered this wrinkle in the ticketing system a couple of years ago, and it makes a huge difference.  My train home was not full when it left Liverpool Street, and while I see that season ticket holders who have to make the journey every day should get priority for seats during the rush hour, I wish the train company would take a less sweeping view of when the rush hour is.  Normally I can’t get any train home between 4.15pm and 6.44pm.  A quarter past four is too early.  It really limits how much the day-tripper can fit into their trip to town, and most office workers don’t leave their desks for at least another three quarters of an hour after that.  The alternative of hanging around London until quarter to seven can be utterly dismal.  Fine on a sunny summer’s day, when you can sit outside with a book, OK if you are with somebody, miserable on a chilly day in February when you are tired and at the tail end of a cold.

support live music

We went last night to hear Ewan McLennan at the Colchester Arts Centre.  He is a young Scottish musician I first heard on Mike Harding’s Radio 2 folk programme about three years ago.  Mike Harding opined that he was very good, and although Mike Harding is a natural enthusiast with many swans and very few geese, I too was greatly taken with this new and unknown Scottish voice.  I looked him up after the next day, when R2 had finally posted programme details up, and found that he had a modest website but no record company deal yet.  Instead he was marketing his home produced CD himself, so I sent off for one, which he kindly sent back by return of post despite the fact that I’d spelt his name wrong on the cheque and had to send him another one.  You could tell it was a homemade CD because it took about eight times longer than normal to load to my iPod.

Two or three years on Ewan McLennan is on national tour.  Colchester last night, Carlisle this evening.  He has a record company deal, with the first CD out and the next one due soon.  In 2011 he won the R2 Horizon Award, and he has just played at a Martin Simpson gig.  He has had guitar lessons from Martin Simpson (presumably only once he was up to the folk equivalent of grade 8) and it shows, but in a good way.  He has a nice, light, husky voice, good for folk (meaning that in a good way too), and you can hear the words when he sings, even in the slightly muddy acoustics of the deconsecrated church that houses the Colchester Arts Centre.  He has a gentle, amusing line in stage chat, which he needs, having also studied in the Martin Simpson school of guitar tuning.  He sings a mixture of traditional and modern songs, has found good versions of the former, and mostly decent examples of the latter.  He is clearly anti-war, and his politics are to the left of centre, but he wears his convictions lightly and doesn’t ram them down the audience’s throats.  Folk musicians tend to be of the left, a bit like comedians.  His stage manner is still quite reserved to the point of shyness, but he comes across as a very genuine human being.

I’d bought the tickets in advance, although I knew it would be nowhere near a sell-out, to galvanise us into bothering to go on the night.  While I wasn’t expecting us both to be suffering from colds (we were), going out on a Monday night in February after three days at work can feel like an effort, and staying in by the fire seem a very attractive proposition.  But I thought I’d like it if I only made the effort to get there (I did) and having heard Ewan McLennan’s debut on R2 I wanted to see him live and support his fledgling career.  And I felt a certain moral obligation to go because I had asked the organiser of the Colchester folk club if she could book him, though she doesn’t know me and I shouldn’t think she did it for my benefit.  I think Ewan McLennan is poised to go far.  His guitar technique is already superb, and he has a real feeling for traditional music.  Given time and practice to develop his stage persona and confidence he looks like the natural heir to Martin Simpson (though I hope Martin Simpson will not be retiring for many years yet).  If and when he is headlining at the major folk festivals and picking up folk awards for best album or best traditional song, I shall get a little buzz that I bothered to go and hear him on a cold night in Colchester, when he was almost unknown.

gone to pot

Today I was mostly potting.  I rather thought I might be, given that I knew there was some potting left over from last week, and went dressed accordingly, wearing two pairs of socks and thermals over my thermals.  The boss didn't allow us to pot over the weekend, as we had to be supervised by the manager.  I don't know if the boss realises that the extent of the manager's supervision is to ask us how those hemerocallis or hostas looked, so that he can write it on his records.  Today's plants were from the Netherlands, and were mostly pretty good, though there was one bag of Tradescantia roots that were five plants short.

There was a potting hiatus in the middle of the day, as we ran out of labels.  The labels are stapled to the sides of the pots for herbaceous plants, and you really do need to staple them to the rim before filling the pot up with compost.  It is possible to retro-fit them, but fiddly and time consuming, and impossible to do without spilling compost.  Plus the finished potting is stood in large blocks so that you couldn't reach most of the pots to label them.  Plus you would be practically bound to lose track of which varieties were in which pot.  The hold-up with the labels occured because they were varieties that we hadn't sold before, so the boss had to write the descriptive blurb for each one before we could print them.  Writing the descriptions is a task that the boss refuses to delegate, and he was supposed to have done it this morning, but it is half term and he took the children out riding instead.  The manager, who had managed to prise both gardeners out of the garden to help, and called in an extra staff member who is normally laid off at this time of year especially to finish the potting, was rather irritated to have his crack potting team standing by with no labels.  We all found other jobs to do in the interim until the boss produced labels, and finally got the last geranium roots safely encased in compost five minutes before closing.

None of us are sure how the tea room is going to work out.  Apparently the idea is that we will have somebody to run it during the busy season.  The gig has gone to the gamekeeper's daughter, who has passed her foor hygiene exams and is also going to make the cakes (at this point I feel as though I might be living in The Archers, in one of the brief interludes when nothing sensational is happening).  In the quiet season the plant centre staff are going to dish out the tea and cakes.  We are?  When I get home from work it generally takes me ten minutes to scrub the dirt from my hands, and my cuffs and the front of my jacket are always covered in a dusting of compost and the odd smear of green slime.  How exactly are we going get this past the environmental health officer?

We do have one splendid new piece of equipment.  Last year a couple of us said that what we needed for the plant centre was a mobile potting bench, so that we had a working surface on which to clean pots that was at the right height to work all day, and not 15cm too low, which the display tables are.  Working for eight hours on a surface that is uncomfortably low would give anybody backache, even the fit youngsters, and the two of us grumbling about it have combined ages of over 110.  I discovered today that the older gardener has indeed made a mobile potting bench, with proper wheels, a sturdy metal frame and elegant wooden handles.  I asked, fascinated, what it was made out of, and it turned out to be based on an old ice-cream cart which had been sitting in one of the sheds for the past fifteen years.  I have no idea whatsoever why the boss possessed an old ice-cream hand-cart, but it goes to show that you should never throw things away.  Eventually they do come in useful.

playing at shops

I was right about the shortage of customers, but wrong that nothing would be going on at the plant centre.  It turns out that we are going to have the tea room for this season, and the builders start on Monday, moving the radiators and making a couple of extra windows.  When I arrived for work on Saturday the shop was in a state of flux, with the display cabinets in random groups around the room as if they'd been caught up in an ocean current, then stranded.  I had a choice of tasks for the day, to clean up dead leaves in the polytunnels (guessed that one right) or help rearrange the furniture in the shop.  I don’t rate my skills as a shop designer particularly highly, but it was very cold in the polytunnels, so I thought that as somebody who had done some shopping I would hunt for my inner Mary Portas, or at least make myself useful clearing debris and rejected shop fittings out of the way.

The owner had an idea that customers ought to be directed diagonally across the shop and back again, rather than being allowed to go straight to the till.  I expect this is based on sound retail theory, but most retailers aren’t dealing with shoppers who may have a metre or two of tree sticking out of the back of their trolley.  The width of the aisle required to allow customers with trees to negotiate the bend was so vast that we ended up losing about a third of the floor area of the shop to this gigantic runway.  Besides seeming wasteful and looking rather silly (not helped by the exposed acreage of concrete floor), this didn’t leave enough room for all of the display cabinets.

It became clear that various improvised structures made out of shabby tables and old packing cases swathed in black landscape fabric were going to have to go.  It was a pity about the picturesque wooden vintage port crate, but there was simply not enough space for the amount of furniture.  Two or three metal display racks, that seemed to occupy a volume out of all proportion to the quantity of goods they held, were evicted into the snow as well.  After some debate a large dovecote was moved outside, and we ended up with some wooden bookshelves, and the purpose built cabinets, which are quite nice ones with glass shelves.  My colleague, who has a really good eye for that sort of thing, hit on the notion of placing them on the diagonal instead of flat against the wall, and the whole layout began to come together.  The owner got her diagonal route into the gift area, but we kept a straight run from the door to the till as well.  She is still not fully reconciled to that, but she will be if she makes us get rid of it, after a few shelf-fulls of china have been swept to the ground by a passing tree.

We moved the cabinets that had been placed along the edge of what’s going to be the tea area.  Sitting next to a wall of glass shelving felt claustrophobic, and it’s going to be quite a tight squeeze fitting 10 tables and 40 chairs into that amount of floor space, which is the plan.  Putting shelves of bone china mugs and glass flower vases in range of people’s flailing arms and coat hems as they sit down to their tea seems to be asking for trouble, so I thought there should be not too much stuff there, and what there was should be non-breakable.  My new colleague, whose previous retail experience has given him a jaundiced view of humanity for one so young, added that it should be low value, since it would be easy for people sitting at their tables to slip things off the bottom shelf into their bags.  We compromised with a few cabinets, not too tall.

My colleagues managed to move all the display units with their contents still in place and without any of it falling out.  I don’t know how they did that.  It saved a lot of time, but meant that things ended up all over the place.  This morning I volunteered to rearrange, which the rest of today's shift agreed to.  I don’t normally clean and tidy my own house that much, so wiping glass shelves with windolene and arranging things on them nicely is not really my forte, but it seemed preferable to picking up leaves in the polytunnel (although first thing this morning it was only –3.5C and not –10.5C like it was yesterday).  The shop at work tends to go in for artistic displays, because various staff members like doing them, and believe that if the place looks attractive and eye-catching we will sell more.  I don’t regard shopping as a pleasurable leisure pursuit, so as I’d volunteered to sort out the muddle I did it my way, which was to make it efficient.  So I put all the bridge scoring sets together, and all the gift bags and tags on one shelf, and all the mugs in a china section.  My view is that if you want to buy a mug you would like to know that you have looked at all the mugs there are, ditto if you want to buy a bridge scoring set for a friend who likes playing bridge, and so on.  Mixed displays that combine napkins, greetings cards, candles, soap, a biscuit tin, a hand trowel and some raffia, all colour co-ordinated in carefully chosen shades of pink and green, are very good in moderation to add to the ambience, but not the way to present your entire stock.  I was commercial enough to put the toiletries in the middle where people would see them (and felt a glow of pride when this afternoon we sold a set of two sorts of handcream in a stand), and banish things that seemed out of season or never sell at the best of times to the edge of the room.

I’m sure that within a month it will all have been changed round, but the way that I did it was very rational.

Addendum  The supper was quite amusing and my apple crumbles arrived intact and did not turn to apple-flavoured quicksand during the drive to the hall.   The committee members were not even required to do the washing up, which came as a welcome surprise.

it's going to be a long (cold) day

I’m not going to have time to write a blog entry today, which is why I’m doing it last night.  Today is a working day.  I don’t suppose there’ll be many (any?) customers, as it’s still forecast to be jolly cold, and the roads will be icy, but it’s my weekend to work.  The only thing I can imagine the manager will find for me to do is to tidy away dead leaves and spilled compost in the tunnels, although come to think of it that’s all there’ll have been for my colleagues to do all week.

At the start of February our finishing time moves later, to 5.00pm.  It is light until then, so on a normal day that would make sense.  If we have any customers after 4.00pm today I’d be very surprised.  I’m hoping to negotiate to go home then, even though it is February, as I need to get cleaned up and changed for the supper concert and then drive back to the village hall with the apple crumbles.  It’s probably going to be so cold that the boot of the car won’t get any warmer than a fridge, and I could get away with leaving them in there all day, but I’m nervous about making the experiment.

Goodness knows what they’re going to be like, after an eleven-mile drive to the hall.  I still have bad memories of an apple crumble cooked in a school cookery lesson, taken home on the bus and carried the final mile from the bus stop.  It was pretty soggy by the time we ate it.  Cookery lessons at school were a waste of time anyway, because I’d already done more than that at home, apart from learning how to gut herrings, a skill so revolting I have never again put it into practice, and made sure I wouldn’t need to by marrying a non-fish eater.

I haven’t been to the supper concert before and don’t know what to expect.  At the committee meeting they were talking about tablecloths and flower arrangements, and the timetable of events said the rehearsal was at 6.30pm.  I asked whether this was a musical rehearsal or a catering one, to general hilarity, but honestly I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.  Scurrying about carrying plates of chicken stew to 90 people, I think, which I don’t mind.  I’m glad I volunteered to cook extra pudding and not get involved in the main course.  The scope for accidentally poisoning people with apple crumble is quite limited.  I’m slightly amazed that this kind of community catering hasn’t been banned by now, unless all the volunteer cooks have obtained Level something-or-other Hygiene and Food Handling certificates and submitted their kitchens for official inspection.

I suppose that at the end there’ll be washing up, and then the roads will be icy going home, and it will be horribly late, and then on Sunday morning I’ll have to leap up early to go to work again.  Still, the thaw is forecast to start on Sunday.  Here’s hoping.

listen again

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

discovery of the search for lost time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.