cold coming

Listening to the radio the other day I heard a feature about predictions of a dire winter to come, the worst for a hundred years.  It think it was on the Today programme, and they were reporting an article in the Daily Mail, or some other paper.  I didn't gather who was making the prediction, or how credible they were, or what their past track record was, and let it pass me by, since it seems as though every year the media get excited over forecasts of extreme weather, then allow those that don't materialise to pass without further comment.  Apart from the Met Office, that is, and their much ridiculed predictions of a barbecue summer.  I did have a look on the Met website later on, but they have stopped publishing medium range forecasts for public consumption, presumably discouraged by the public's inability or unwillingness to grasp the concept of probability.

Looking out of the kitchen window this morning at the gravel garden in the turning circle, with the olive, the extra-blue, extra tender form of Teucrium, the Phlomis italica, myrtle and variegated Luma, and the lemon scented Aloysia, not to mention the rosemary, Acca, and Buddleia 'Silver Anniversary' (which took so long to recover from those two cold nights last February that it has only just started  flowering.  It had better get on with it before this year's cold weather arrives) I wondered which of them would survive the winter.  Which was a rather depressing thought.

I asked the Systems Administrator about the medium term forecast of a bad winter, and was told that the prediction came from a commercial forecaster, which was quite reputable and sold forecasts to businesses that needed to know badly enough to be willing to pay for them.  The SA thought that what they had actually said was not as apocalyptic as what the Today programme said the Daily Mail (or Express, or whoever it was) had said they said.  Maybe more along the lines that December and January temperatures could be below average, with some sharp snaps, and some snow.  Like winter, in other words.  Curiosity then got the better of the SA, who went and invested six pounds buying their premium UK weather forecast for winter 2012-13.  I was going to give you their name and a link to their site, but the SA says that if I do that I can't tell you anything about what's in the forecast.

It doesn't honestly make very jolly reading, not if you have a collection of Mediterranean shrubs, and work for a plant centre where trade is already slack, and where you won't get paid at all if you're snowed in and can't get to work.  December is likely to be very cold and exceptionally snowy, while parts of eastern England are likely to experience below average temperatures for the vast majority of the month.  I summarise.  It doesn't say for your six pounds which parts of eastern England are facing the mini ice-age, so that could be Colchester, or Hull.  January is predicted to be a re-run of December, then in February things start to return to normal.  Normal for February, that is, which is still pretty cold.

Oh dear.  It makes me glad I haven't invested in a pair of tickets for the carol concert by candlelight in Long Melford in mid-December in aid of stroke victims, with the choir of one of the Cambridge colleges, which sounded very nice, but as the Systems Administrator said, you don't want to be committed to driving to Long Melford in the middle of December.  It's bound to be either foggy or snowing.  And my ticket for a bird watching barge trip in the first week of January may have been an unwise purchase.  We'd better start stocking up on baked beans and cat food, just in case.

chill winds

The chill winds of recession are blowing through the ornamental plant industry, even if the economy is technically back in growth.  One of our suppliers is shutting down their nursery from next week until after Christmas, with the staff put on unpaid leave whether they like it or not, while another has just laid off forty people.  At the plant centre the owner has been looking for volunteers willing to reduce their hours, with a couple of part timers dropping days or laid off until spring regardless of whether they volunteered or not.  My truthful answer to the question whether I wanted to reduce my hours over the winter was that no, honestly, I did not want to.  Although I knew trade was quiet, I needed a part time job, not a casual job.

It's a difficult one.  If I lost a day's work a fortnight, or even a day a week, between now and the beginning of March, that would be a few hundred quid.  In the grand scheme of things between now and when I start drawing my pension that isn't so much.  And the owner isn't alone in trying to cut staff costs to suit her cloth.  Earlier this evening I was reading an article about an electrical manufacturing business up towards Bury St Edmunds that has put the workforce on to short hours rather than make compulsory redundancies, faced with a falling order book.  But once I accept the principle of dropping days when it's quiet then I become a casual worker in the owner's eyes, and this won't be the last time.  And I am good at my job, better, dare I say it, than some of my co-workers.

Meanwhile, the manager found three nibbled bags of peanuts in the bird food section, so Ruby the white terrier was right.

After lunch I was finally given some labels for the Italian plants, though by no means all of them.  Putting labels on plants is one of those unskilled jobs which it is amazingly easy to mess up.  You can put the labels on the wrong plants, because you confuse different varieties that look vaguely similar and happen to be standing close to each other (how similar depends on your ability to see plants.  A former co-worker perceived no difference between Choisya and a narrow leaved form of Pittosporum tobira).  Or put labels on the wrong plants because once you have read the first couple of words in the name the rest of it passes you by.  Cornus kousa  var. chinensis 'White Dusted'.  Cornus kousa var. chinensis 'Wisley Queen'.  Whatever.  You can put two labels on different branches of the same plant, so that another goes out for sale without a label at all.  This is especially easy to do if the plants are sitting in a trolley, and you decide to save time and effort by not taking them out.  You can put the label on to a deciduous plant so that the only thing stopping it from dropping off the end of the twig to which it is attached are the leaves, which are going to drop off themselves fairly soon, instead of putting it lower down below a point where the twig branches.  You can put the label on upside down, which is surprisingly easy to do if the plant is on the ground and you are stopping down over it.  You can joyously and randomly put ten Edgeworthia chrysantha labels on ten plants, irrespective of the fact that the plants come in two different sizes at two price points.  I managed not to do that today, by dint of reading the labels as I was going along.  If you suffer from passive-aggressive tendencies then given a lorry load of Italian plants you can indulge in all of the above, on purpose.

We had buyers waiting for some of the labelled plants, so I made a couple of calls, and at least one person still wanted the Danae she had been waiting for since April.  A would-be mail order purchaser of a couple of Euonymus and a Viburnum henryi, who had telephoned last Thursday to find out what we had in stock, called again to place an order, and by today we had run out of the Viburnum.  It's never a good idea to let these things drag on, with rare shrubs.  Strike while the iron is hot, once you've located your plant.

Let us hope that things pick up come the spring.  It would be very sad if it turned out that in the new flat UK economy we could not afford the sort of specialist plant retailing that has grown up in the past half century, and were back to people swapping roots and cuttings with their neighbours, plus a few specialist societies, and small, fanatically keen growers selling rarities to a few passionate gardeners while content to live in poverty on a diet of lentils.  There again, this has been an exceptionally wet year, and it might all be looking better by March 2013.

compost and culture

There was a frost this morning, which came as a surprise to me since the overnight Met Office forecast for Colchester had suggested a minimum temperature of 4 or 5 degrees.  My car had an extraordinary amount of ice on the windscreen, for a night that wasn't supposed to be frosty at all, and by the time enough of a hole had cleared for me to see out safely I thought I was going to be late to work.  However, I arrived just in time to find a colleague unlocking the gates.

Following on from the clear night it was a bright and beautiful late autumn day, and the plant centre and arboretum, or at least the bits of it I saw over the wall and from the car park, looked lovely.  The sunshine brought customers out, and there was a reasonable stream of people heading for the till carrying trees.

Ruby the white terrier from Clacton came in with her owners, recently bathed and wearing a smart red collar with white dots on it.  However, although she looks every inch the pampered pet she still has hunting terrier instincts, and was a great deal too interested in the bird food stand.  Her owner assured me that there had to be something hiding in there, but though I crawled on hands and knees to peer underneath and behind it, I couldn't see any mice whisking out of sight.  There were two mousetraps, baited and set, but with nothing in them.  I'm afraid Ruby's instincts are probably right, though.  Unless she is modelling herself on the pair of terriers in the Kipling novella who used to pretend there were rats behind the wainscot, to upset a governess they disliked.

My colleagues agreed that they didn't mind if I clocked off half an hour early, so that I could scrub the worst of the filth from under my fingernails, get changed and arrive at the church by four in time for today's concert.   I used to go to afternoon concerts that fell on my working weekends in my work clothes, dirty fingernails and all, when I first discovered them and didn't know anybody there, and would just sit quietly in a corner exuding damp and compost.  Nowadays I would rather feel vaguely clean and tidy and in the same sartorial zone as the rest of the audience.  Besides, now I am on the committee I have standards to keep up.

The chairman has subcontracted the teas to the ladies of the church at a pound a go for tea and a biscuit, in aid of church funds.  I didn't mind pouring tea and then washing cups frantically, but it is nice to be able to be able to talk to people.  And to actually get a cup of tea and a biscuit.  When you are pouring out and washing up for the entire interval there isn't time.  Now that we don't have the teas to occupy us the chairman has nominated three of us to be a working party to increase the amount of publicity for the concerts, and the audience numbers.  I'm quite happy with that, since I like my fellow publicists.  One of them has invited the other two of us to supper in a couple of weeks so that we can discuss it.

The concert was jolly good by the way, a string quartet plus clarinet, playing Mozart and Bliss.  When we were originally discussing booking that quartet at the committee meeting I recall we had a choice between the clarinettist and a brass player, and that the brass player was going to play something very contemporary.  I could see the committee striving to embrace the new and veering towards the brass, and as the voice of the middle brow I murmured regretfully how nice the Mozart clarinet quintet was.  The sense of relief in the room was palpable, once somebody had said the philistine unsayable, and we went with the clarinet.

a priceless delivery

The Italian plants had arrived at work.  They came on Friday, later in the week than we were expecting, but still on a day when I wasn't there to help unload them.  One of my jobs for today should have been to put the labels on them, with prices and descriptions, but the boss hadn't done those, so I couldn't.  I compromised by helping my colleagues for half an hour as we removed the netting sleeves the plants were packed in to travel.  Imagine the sort of plastic netting tube some Christmas trees come in, and you get the general idea.  The wrappings stop the branches from getting tangled with each other and broken during loading, unloading and transport, and squashes the plants smaller so that more will fit in a lorry.  It is amazing how most shrubs will put up with being trussed up as if in a straitjacket, and then spending several days in the back of an articulated lorry, but I feel sorry for them by the time they reach us.  I want to release their confined limbs, and let them breath.  In the hours after taking the netting off you can see the branches relax, and the leaves move back into a more natural orientation relative to each other, and the light.  They really do look grateful.

I had a look to see what had come in.  Most were things we stock regularly, so there weren't many surprises.  A lot of clipped standards in various varieties of holly.  We get virtually all of our standards from Italy, except roses.  I think the Italians have the skills to produce them, and it may be that plant growth is faster under an Italian sun than an English one, so that the trunks thicken to a marketable size more quickly.  Whatever the reason, they seem to be an Italian speciality.  There were some large and very nice plants of the butcher's broom, Ruscus aculeatus.  By large I mean large for a Ruscus, a slow growing species.  These were a good fifty centimetres high, whereas the last ones that came in, from a specialist nursery down in Devon, were nearer five.  There were some chunky looking Danae racemosa as well.

Perhaps the labels will be ready tomorrow.  Or on Monday.  Quite a few varieties come in at several different sizes, so matching label to pot requires some thought.  It is embarrassing to put shrubs out for sale at £19.95, and then discover that you have labels for £39.95 for smaller plants of the same variety.  If you run out of labels, or think you have too many, that should sound alarm bells, since the boss is normally pretty good at printing the right number, and the manager is very hot about checking off deliveries.

The disagreeable discovery was that after tomorrow the new cafe people are giving up until the spring, and we will be back to dishing out tea and cakes in between manhandling plants off lorries.  Oh dear.  I really thought we had solved that particular problem, and now here we are back at square one until March.  By the middle of this morning my hands were filthy, as I'd been weeding pots of herbaceous plants and dressing their tops with fresh compost, and compost had worked its way inside my gloves.  I couldn't serve in the cafe in that state.  Not that I want to serve in the cafe anyway, so it's quite fortunate to have a good excuse.

A regular customer came in and chose four trees to be delivered.  I remembered to ask her if she needed tree stakes, ties, and rabbit guards and she decided that she did.  I helped someone else find the particular sort of evergreen Euonymus that he wanted, by dint of searching around on the ornamental displays, and spent a long time on the phone describing what Euonymus europaeus forms we had in stock, to somebody who had seen them on Gardeners' World.  And I pointed out the different forms of climbing hydrangea we had to somebody who came in thinking she wanted one climbing hydrangea, the usual deciduous form, and ended up buying two, a less usual evergreen species and an even more unusual variegated one.  So I tried hard to follow the boss's early morning injunction to sell, sell, sell.

The boss was in rather a good mood, so I seized the moment when I was not in disgrace for being implicated in till errors, failing to set the house alarm or other staff misdemeanours and asked whether he was able to sell me some straw bales for the chickens.  It turned out that he ploughs his straw in rather than baling it, to add the organic material back into the soil, but he thought he might be able to get me some straw.  A neighbouring farmer who might have some bales owes him a favour, apparently.  I thought the boss would have straw for the horses, but it seems not.  They live out.  That shows how little I know about horses.  I don't know any farmers either, except for the boss, despite living in the country, or at least not well enough to ask them a favour.

taking part in the democratic process

We went to the beekeepers' annual dinner last night, and on the way stopped to vote in the PCC election.  I firmly believe in the democratic process, and that if there's an election going I ought to vote in it.  When my grandmother was born, women didn't even have the vote.  Vote early and vote often, that's the slogan in our house.

I remember dutifully voting in the elections for the regional MEP, back in the pre-internet days of the  late eighties or early nineties (remember those?  It is like confessing that you lived in the Stone Age) and taking weeks to discover who had won, as it wasn't in the local paper.  I did keep an eye out, but nobody seemed interested in reporting the outcome.  Actually, nothing much has changed there as I still couldn't tell you who my MEP is, though at least nowadays I could look it up if I wanted to.  As the PCC elections drew closer it seemed that history was repeating itself before the ballot, because none of the local papers had anything to say on the subject at all.

I was disappointed by that.  I'd thought that maybe the East Anglian Daily Times could interview them over a few editions (starting with the candidates standing in Suffolk, naturally, but squeezing Essex in later).  Or somebody could organise a debate between the candidates and report on it.  Or there could be some town meetings, or a hustings, or something.  And it would have been quite helpful if the BBC, or the Telegraph, or Guardian, or Independent, had explained quite what it was that the winning candidate would be allowed or expected to do.  They can 'hold police forces to account' and they have the power to sack the Chief Constable.  Apart from sacking the Chief Constable I wasn't clear how they were supposed to hold police forces to account.  They could have a good moan at them, or grumble about them in the media (assuming they could persuade it to take any notice) but I didn't see what they could actually do, that would be any more effective than the threats of the English teacher at my school who couldn't keep order that if we didn't behave she was going to punish us in a minute.  She never did punish us, we never did behave, and only one girl in the class (not me) got an A grade at O level Eng. Lit.

The PCC is supposed to set policing objectives, but not to interfere in operational policing matters.  They are meant to act as a bridge between the police force and the communities they police, and relay the concerns and priorities of the community to the police.  That sounds excellent, like motherhood and apple pie.  Except that if the public say they want to see more police on the beat, is that a policing objective or an operational decision?  Sounds pretty operational to me, deciding how many policemen and women are going to be pounding the means streets of Colchester and Harlow versus doing other police duties.  Like traffic patrols on the A12.  Or dealing with fraud, or domestic abuse.  Or reporting animal sanctuaries to the authorities for having exotic owls.  I'd have been happy to hear an informed debate on where the boundary lies, but nobody held one, or if they did it was kept a closely guarded secret.

I looked at the website with details of the candidates for Essex on it.  Three were standing on political party tickets, or four if you count the English Democrats as a party, and there were two independents.  I'm not sure that party politics belongs in policing.  In fact, I'm rather sure that it doesn't.  I read what they all had to say about what they would do if they became Police and Crime Commissioner, but it was a bit vague.  Listen to the views of the community, put victims at the heart of policy, make Essex a safe and secure place to live and work.  Yes, but what are you actually going to do?  The UKIP candidate wanted a five year sentence to mean five years, a legal reform which I don't think will lie within the remit of the PCC, so he seemed about as unclear about the role as I was.  Or he knew he couldn't actually do that but was saying so anyway because it sounded good.  Whatever.  The main policy of the English Democrats seemed to be to fly the cross of Saint George over police stations, which sounded quite sweet, but irrelevant to policing.  The Conservatives were the most organised party, delivering a flyer to our house (in itself an achievement, professional delivery companies can't find it half the time) while a canvasser in a blue rosette was handing them out at Colchester railway station on Wednesday.  Their candidate had worked for thirty years at senior level in national security and defence.  That's what his biography on the Choose your PCC website said.  Does that mean he was a spy?  Or a software engineer?

I began to despair of the lot of them, and seriously thought about spoiling my ballot paper, to make the point that it wasn't that I didn't know the election was on, or couldn't be bothered to go out to vote.  But I've always thought that voting for None of the above was babyish.  In the real world you have to choose from the available alternatives, however unpalatable, and one of this lot was going to be the first Police and Crime Commissioner for Essex.  I voted.  Ours was the only car in the car park, and I could see from the number of names ticked off on our page of the electoral roll that not many other people had.

The Conservatives won, in Essex and Suffolk.  It's not really surprising.  East Anglia was a sea of blue in the 2010 General Election, with just Colchester and a couple of seats in Norfolk going to the Liberal Democrats.    I haven't yet discovered what the turnout was*, but I shouldn't think it was very high.  Maybe by the time we have to vote again we'll have discovered what it is that Police and Crime Commissioners actually do.

*12.81 per cent according to the Telegraph.  That's abysmal.

a quiet day at home

It was foggy when I got up, so much so that I couldn't see the wind turbine on the neighbouring farm, my usual benchmark for bad visibility.  There was a gleam of sunshine around mid-morning, then the fog rolled in again, to the extent that the Systems Administrator couldn't see the avenue of lime trees leading on to the farm from the kitchen window.  When the trees disappear from view that's foggier than when it's just the turbine.  It was very localised, as the SA went out to buy metal strips to finish mending the chicken house, and said that there was bright sunshine in Colchester.  The fog was cold, clammy stuff that chilled your legs and penetrated through thermals.  As the hours of daylight continue to diminish I console myself with the thought that it's only five weeks to the shortest day, but that doesn't work for cold, since we don't usually see the worst of it until February.  Another three months of this to go.  Good grief.

I have got to the bottom of the current crop of home made compost.  There is some leaf mould, but since I let weeds grow up around the leaf bin I need to think carefully about where I use that.  It will be full of goose grass burrs, and the seeds of a tall, rampant dead nettle relative whose name I don't know, and which I could happily do without.  In an ideal world the utility area with the compost bins would be the tidiest, most weed-free part of the entire garden, but Dr Pangloss hasn't yet arrived in this part of Essex.

I had to trim the Osmanthus delavayi on the corner of the island bed in the back garden, because it was spilling out over the lawn on two sides, and the other plants in the bed on the other two.  It is an evergreen with small, neat, dark green leaves, and sweetly scented white flowers in April.  If this were a pub quiz, and you knew nothing of Osmanthus delavayi but were asked what colour its flowers were, or whether they were scented, you would be pretty safe in saying White and Yes, since all Osmanthus seem to have fragrant, unshowy white blooms.  O. delavayi is a slow grower, and mine remained a pathetic little mite for several years, but the wet weather has obviously suited it, and after a trim earlier in the year it has pushed out another twenty to thirty centimetres of growth.  Once a shrub is a couple of metres across and approaching that in height, twenty centimetres of growth all round adds alarmingly to its bulk.

I hope I have not removed too many of next spring's flowers in the process.  I don't know when they are initiated, or if the early loss of some buds at this stage will encourage the production of more.  Trimming a plant makes you look at it closely, and it is striking how much denser the shrub is on the sides, where it has been pruned regularly, compared to the top, where it hasn't been stopped so much.  I copied the idea of trimming it and using it as a formal feature on the corner of a bed from the writings of Christopher Lloyd.  Left unpruned, it makes an open, graceful shrub.  Mine is in full sun and seems to relish it, but I have seen them do OK in light shade.

The ritual of the big tabby's special lunch continues to evolve.  He started getting a pouch of Sheba in the middle of the day to encourage him to eat, because he was too thin, and had to have it in the kitchen to stop the other cats from taking it.  He quickly got used to the idea, and started hanging around the kitchen from mid-day onwards, waiting for the treat.  If the other cats were getting normal cat food at lunchtime he learnt not to eat that, having discovered that if he held back from the ordinary food and loitered about the kitchen looking sorrowful he would get the expensive sort.  Then he began to jump on to my usual kitchen chair as lunchtime got closer, and now does that daily as a signal that he would like his Sheba.  Unfortunately his powers of sustained concentration are not good, and today he got bored of special lunch about three quarters of the way through it, and wanted to be let out of the kitchen.  He came back in half an hour to polish it off, but by then Our Ginger had eaten it.

Cotman in Dulwich

I went today to the Dulwich Picture Gallery.  This is one of my favourite galleries, notwithstanding that it is south of the river, and I have sung its praises before.  This time I took a friend who had never been there, thinking that she would like it as much as I do.  Thankfully, she did, so that was a success.

Dulwich is currently showing as their temporary exhibition some watercolours, drawings and engravings that John Sell Cotman made during the course of three trips to Normandy undertaken after the end of the Napoleonic wars meant that British tourists could once again visit France freely.  This is a lovely little exhibition.  Cotman was a fine draughtsman, who liked and understood architecture but also had a good eye for human detail, so his clean, meticulous renditions of houses, churches, ruins and street scenes are sometimes enlivened by frisking dogs and cats, or exact sketches of the different sorts of headgear sported by the local women.  I read in the caption to one watercolour that Cotman's use of colour was sometimes criticised at the time for being too loud, but I liked it.  He does use rich deep colours, by the standards of his time, and is all the better for it.  There are also some pictures of the region by other artists of the time, including Turner.  The show runs until early January, so you have time enough to catch it.

London Bridge station is being bewilderingly rebuilt, and having gone through a ticket barrier I don't think we should have, we took a strange and marvellous route up a tunnel and platform and over a bridge to get to where we should have been going, which turned out to be not quite where the member of transport staff we asked at the outset told us we should go.  Having discovered when we arrived at London Bridge that we had just missed a train, it took us most of the time until the next one to find the platform.  On the way back we found the shiny new concourse that we managed to miss on the outward journey.  And to demonstrate that luck about missing and catching trains does tend to average out, on the way back a train drew up seconds after we'd walked down the steps to the platform at north Dulwich station, and that was after I'd had to stop and top up my Oystercard at the machine because it only had 15p left on it.

On Wednesdays the Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery organise free concerts at lunchtime in the chapel.  Today's was billed as a trumpet concert, and given that we both like music, and that we were allowed out of the gallery and in again as many times as we wanted during the day (so civilised) we went.  I was interested to see the chapel anyway.  It turned out that the lunchtime concerts were a platform for local young musicians, and that today's slot belonged to Dulwich College, but the boy who was supposed to be playing the trumpet was not well, and we had an impromptu mixed brass programme instead.  The only reason I would normally go to a school concert would be if a relative or friend of the family were playing in it, but young musicians need to practice on somebody, and it was only for half an hour.  At the end of this I had concluded that if there is anything more lugubrious than one boy learning to play the trombone, it is four boys playing the trombone at once.

A rather small boy who performed a rondino on the trumpet with an air of great seriousness and a crisp sense of timing did catch my eye.  He had a great name for a musician, of which I have made a mental note, in case he should go on to great things.  So far the Systems Administrator's and my best musical coup is having seen Kate Rusby play live in the upstairs room of a pub, since last month she celebrated nineteen years in the folk business with a concert in the Royal Festival Hall.  If in twenty years a Benet Parker is the new Humphrey Lyttleton or Alison Balsom, then I saw him in the chapel at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2012.

There was a retiring collection at the end of the concert, in aid of funds for a new piano for the chapel.  My friend, who can play the piano, murmured that they needed one.  The Friends are no slouches, though, raising about £200,000 per annum for the gallery.  Another funding scheme Dulwich has adopted, which I never noticed on my previous visits, is that you can adopt an old master.  I've seen zoos do this, and even gardens with particularly attractive trees, but not an art gallery, though since Dulwich have been doing it since 1988 I obviously haven't been paying attention.  You contribute to the restoration costs, basically, and are invited to meet the conservators and to the unveiling when it goes back on display, and can have its image to use on your Christmas cards.

Dulwich does its share of outreach work, and there were several clusters of primary school children sitting on the ground in front of some of the pictures in the permanent collection, and an art class going on in a room in the modern extension by the original Soane gallery.  The children were all very well behaved and seemed fully engrossed in the art.  I thought that was great.  Often, when you hear somebody who has achieved eminence in their field interviewed, and asked when they first got interested in so-and-so, or when they first knew they were going to make a career out of it, the reply is that they were hooked before they were ten.  So let them try out some fine art at a young age, so that tomorrow's people who might be able to make a living out of doing something visual (not necessarily as artists) while loving what they do can start discovering what rocks their boat.

There is a very nice modern cafe, where we had first of all coffee and cakes, and later on bagels and tea.  The bagels at the Dulwich Picture Gallery are absolutely first rate.  By the time we'd eaten, and drunk, and been to the concert, and looked at the permanent collection as well as the Cotman, we'd made a full day of it.

more rodent problems

I thought we'd seen off the rats, for now.  The bait that I left by the chicken house, protected from passing birds and the cats by a broken flowerpot, had remained untouched for weeks and I was about to clear it away.  Then this morning, going to let the chickens into their run, I discovered as I topped up their food that a rat had gnawed a hole in the top of the back wall of the nesting box.  That must have happened within the past twenty-four to forty-eight hours, since it was fine the last time I filled their food hopper.

If you live in the country then rats are an undesirable fact of life.  The gardener warned the boss only yesterday morning that he had seen a huge one near the boss's chicken house.  The chickens at work live in a solid brick built outbuilding, not a mere wooden hen house, so the rat at work couldn't have got in, but was presumably on the lookout for spilled food.  The boss said that he was setting traps, and would catch it in due course.  It is a very unpleasant thought, but I'm afraid the rats are there, even at the best addresses.

The Systems Administrator had to go and buy a two by four sheet of heavy grade plywood specially, which was not cheap, and spend the afternoon cladding the nesting box in an extra layer of timber.  At my suggestion tomorrow the SA will also get some metal strips, as used to cover the edges of carpets where they go across doorways, and run pieces of that round the top of the nesting box, to prevent any rats chewing another hole.  (Metal edging is not a good look for carpets, and properly fitted ones don't have any.  We have ended up with it in the past when cats have got accidentally shut in rooms, and scratched up the carpet by the door trying to get out).  As rats need an edge to get a purchase on, and can't gnaw straight through a flat piece of wood, that should do the trick.  As long as they don't think of chewing at the corners of the chicken house, in which case we will need an awful lot of metal edging.

I enjoy keeping chickens.  They are entertaining creatures, and I like the eggs, when they are laying, which they mostly aren't by this stage of the year.  I'm happy to take responsibility for where my food comes from, when it comes to eggs.  However, they are not cheap pets, when you take the cost of housing and bedding into account as well as food.  Anybody who suggests you can save money on food bills by keeping your own poultry is deluding themselves (or their unsuspecting audience).

In the afternoon I went for my Pilates lesson.  This is nominally a monthly thing, but in practice happens about ten times a year, after taking holidays and illnesses (mine and the teacher's) into account.  She is taking a break from teaching in December, so I won't see her again until the third week in January.  My lower back was moving remarkably well, which is not always the case, and was the reason I started Pilates in the first place.  She asked me how it was feeling, and I realised it wasn't really feeling anything in particular, or rather, it was feeling normal.  It was moving when asked to, and the rest of the time it was quiet.  No aches, no stiffness, no weird referred pains in legs or feet, no anything.  Those of you who have suffered from a bad back at any point, which is a terribly large percentage of the population, will understand how pleasant that realisation was.  Anyone who has not experienced a bad back, and maybe even believes that bad backs are excuses invented by other people who want to be a nuisance or gain attention, don't be too smug.  Your time will come, probably.  The human spine is not one of the world's best bits of design, in the unfortunate way that things invented for one purpose (four legged locomotion) and adapted for something else (bipedalism)  so often aren't.

My teacher, seeing that for once it was all going well,  taught me new variants on some of the exercises, intended to challenge my abdominal and inner thigh muscles, and at the end of the lesson wrote them down complete with stick man diagrams so that I wouldn't forget them.  I don't find sequences of movements at all natural or easy to learn or remember.  Poetry, or the names and preferred habitats of plants are fine, but not any kind of choreography.  If I keep working at them then maybe by January I'll have a bum like Pippa's.

back in the plant centre

I don't understand the traffic at the Manningtree railway bridge on Monday mornings.  I left extra time for my journey to work, after arriving on the late side a couple of weeks running, and sailed straight through the bridge this morning with scarcely any need to queue.  This meant I was nearly ten minutes early, but there is a basic asymmetry in having a defined starting time for your job, which is that if you are ten minutes late your employers grumble, but if you are early you get no credit for it and just have to kick your heels for a while.

Mondays when I haven't been at work over the weekend start in a relatively relaxing fashion, as I can be fairly sure as the manager works his way through the accumulated pile of notes from the weekend and the owner appears to quiz us about till errors or garbled messages that none of it was my fault.  I haven't been there for a week, and know nothing.  A message from yesterday said that on Saturday somebody had told a customer that Clematis 'Etoile Violette' didn't exist, and he was so cross that on Sunday he came in with a book on clematis to demonstrate that it did (it does).  There was another note from the owner to the manager saying that he must Find Out who had delivered this piece of misinformation.  It wasn't me, Guv.  I was in Harlow, and have witnesses to prove it.

The only job the manager could think of for me to do first thing was to dead-head the pansies.  I like pansies, so that's fine.  Dead-heading the violas is so fiddly it is almost an act of Zen meditation, as you trace each tiny stem to its base and snip it off with scissors.  Then I had a look at the list of jobs for the weekend, to see what was left over, and saw that cleaning up the Dianthus and moving them into the tunnel on the far side of the car park (the Other Side) was still outstanding.  My colleague tasked with moving herbaceous plants had done a lot yesterday, and I could see why she'd left the Dianthus until last.  As the leaves lower down the stems die they wither and hang on to the plant rather than dropping, which looks unsightly, and  they are liable to fungal attack if left on the plant, but you can't cut the whole thing down to compost level with one ruthless chop because they are evergreen, and don't respond that well to hard pruning in November.  So the only answer is to snip out any dead stems, and pull the dead leaves off individually or in small groups with your fingertips.  They are brittle plants, and if you pull too hard on the stems they break away in your hand.  Finishing the Dianthus took until almost lunchtime.

I'd made some buns from a recently acquired book of cake recipes, but even allowing for the difficulties of translating normal cooker temperatures and times into an Aga method, I think the recipe overstated one or both.  I ate a couple, because I was cold after standing outside for most of the morning, but they were definitely overcooked, and I don't see how fifteen to twenty minutes at 200 degrees could ever have worked for such small cakes (twelve of them from only eight ounces of flour).  I checked them after twelve, alerted by the smell, and they had already caught.  I expect my colleagues will eat them anyway, since they didn't taste too bad (lemon zest and mixed spice is a good combination) and frankly some of my co-workers will eat anything.  If they really don't like them they can throw them away when I'm not there.  As long as they don't lose the tupperware box.

It began to rain in the afternoon, and I took refuge in the small greenhouse while I cleaned up the geraniums that need to be kept dry, ready for them to come inside for the winter.  One customer remarked to me that I should get an inside job.  There were some customers, despite the rain, and in the morning by special appointment the friend of the owner of a largish and quite good garden that opens to the public.  The manager was instructed by the boss to expect them both and be very helpful, but in fact while the friend seemed a perfectly nice chap he only bought a couple of shrubs.  We did get some people buying reasonably large trolley loads.  By this stage of the year they tend to know what they want and are on a mission.  You don't get many people who just want to wander about and look at plants in November, especially when it's raining.

Addendum  For all of you Lucy Jordans out there, who haven't yet ridden through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in your hair, you'd better get on with it, at least if you were hoping for a ride in a classic.  I have just seen that the Mayor of Paris plans to outlaw the use of cars more than seventeen years old inside the A86 ring road by September 2014, in order to cut pollution.

another day in the garden

It was another beautiful autumn day, and time to start potting up the tulips.  The advice on planting tulips is always to leave it until November, since if planted earlier they are more susceptible to the disease tulip fire.  I have never heard a technical explanation of why it makes a difference, but I'm happy just to follow the guidelines.  There are some jobs that you are told to do at a certain time, or in a particular way, and you would like to get on with it at a different time, or by another method, and start wondering if doing it by the book is really important, or if you could get away with doing something else.  The correct times to prune, move or split plants can fall into this category.  But it doesn't matter to me whether I plants tulips in September or November, so I happily follow received wisdom.  The collection of Whichford basket pots bought in their winter sale is building up nicely, though I might invest in just one more batch next January, depending on how lavish I am feeling.  It seems rather a waste when the pots arrive too late for that year's tulips, and sit around unused all through the growing season, so it is nice to be finally planting them up.  I have gone for hot colours again, purples, oranges and reds, from the excellent Peter Nyssen, and so far I have found one tulip bulb that had gone off, its basal plate having rotted.

I observed the two minute silence, standing head bowed by the shed, but the black cat didn't, and came and squeaked at me and sharpened his claws on a piece of wood.  I like to listen to the service at the Cenotaph, and feel a pang in the years when Remembrance Sunday falls on one of my working weekends.  We never manage to observe the silence in the plant centre.  The phone always goes, or customers don't seem inclined to pause in their shopping for two minutes.

The stems from the ivy hedge that's developed gaps, that I dibbled into buried pots of compost back in the spring, all rooted, except for one that broke free from its pot, and I cut them away from the parent plants and gathered up the pots, ready to plant into the gaps.  I still don't know why parts of the hedge died back like that, but wonder if it was starvation.  It is the side facing into the gravel, that never gets mulched, that has gone, but since it's north facing it could be that cold, or snow piling up, were to blame for killing parts of it.  I will give the whole thing a dressing of blood, fish and bone.  A form of grass with running roots has taken up residence in parts of the hedge and I sprayed the green growth with Roundup.  I will have caught the hedge as well, but experience tells me that a light dose of glyphosate is unlikely to kill it, given that ivy recovers from heavy doses of glyphosate when you're actively trying to get rid of it.

The chickens came out for a run and were pretty good about staying in the front garden, though the hens spent some time in the Eleagnus hedge.  The rooster does not like it inside the hedge, never has, and stood all by himself in the turning circle.  I gave him some sultanas to cheer him up, and he ate them all himself without trying to coax any of his ladies out of the hedge.

The Systems Administrator sawed up a cheap pine garden bench that had begun to rot and then disintegrated, to recycle as firewood.  Beware cheap wooden garden furniture, also hardwood benches of unknown build quality.  I once had a charming one, based on an historic design, but while the back, seat, legs and arms were hardwood, the joints turned out to be fastened with low grade, presumably softwood dowels, and the whole thing fell apart disappointingly quickly.  Unless you are going for teak from a reputable manufacturer I'd stick to metal, where there is a good choice of small, lightweight benches in some quite attractive designs.  The Museum Selection catalogue is generally a rich source, though probably more so in the summer than at this time of year.

a conference

Today was the Annual Conference of the Essex Beekeepers Association.  It was hosted this year by the Harlow Division.  Harlow is a bit of a hike from our side of Colchester, but I went anyway, since the speakers sounded interesting, and I enjoyed last year's event.  I allowed plenty of time to get to Harlow, which was just as well as I got lost twice, the first time through leaving the A120 before I should have, and then comprehensively in Harlow.  My plan was to take the A120, drop off that to the old A120, now the B1256, and cut south through Hatfield Broad Oak when I got to Takeley.  It is a good route, with the advantage if you are going to the Gibberd Garden that it delivers you to the end of their drive without having to go into Harlow at all.  However, seeing an exit signposted B1256 I took it, mesmerised by George Entwhistle's truly lamentable performance at the hands of John Humphrys, and it was the wrong bit of the B1256, so I took a detour through Felsted.  Which is very pretty.  I got lost in Harlow, despite having studied the map very carefully before leaving, because Harlow contains approximately one thousand roundabouts and has a system of positioning road signs so that you can't read them until you've driven past.  The venue was a school, which was also being used for some child-centred Saturday morning activity, but when I burst in through the doors with five minutes to spare the girl in reception pointed me in the direction of the beekeepers before I could ask.  Maybe the clue was in the EBKA lapel badge and absence of child.

The talk I particularly wanted to hear was on swarming, since my attempts at swarm control this year were laughable to non-existent, and I thought I could usefully learn more about the subject (though having marked queens would be a start).  The lecturer is the President of BIBBA, according to my programme.  He did not use up any of his allotted time telling us what BIBBA was, but I have just looked it up and it is the Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Association.  It was founded in 1964 by somebody called Beowulf Cooper, which is such a splendid name I think it should be celebrated more widely.  He was the author of the Hymenopterist's Handbook and Drawings for the British Standard Long Lug Hive (National, Modified National or Dublin Hive) in Metric and Imperial Measurements.

The talk on swarms reminded me about techniques I knew in theory and had failed abysmally to apply in practice, gave some ideas on how I might make them work better, and drew my attention in passing to the similarities between swarm control and queen breeding, which I had never thought about before.  It was a thoroughly good lecture, though my bee tutor (one of only two other Colchester members there, so far as I could see) gently ho-hummed that one of the useful tips didn't always actually work.  But he agreed that it couldn't hurt.  For the beekeepers among you, his tip was to move the old hive at the start of doing the artificial swarm, put the new hive on the site of the old one, and go and have a cup of tea to give the flying bees time to end up in the new hive.  Assuming you are doing this on a nice day and they are flying.  The old hive will then be that much emptier of bees and it will be easier to find the queen, and the remaining bees in the old hive will be young house bees, which don't sting as badly.  For the non-beekeepers among you the last two sentences were complete gobbledygook.  Sorry about that.

The Master Beekeeper's talk on honeybee biology was full of interesting facts, which I mostly enjoyed because I tend to like facts, though knowing that a worker bee's antenna has ten sections but a drone's has eleven is not going to make any practical difference to your beekeeping.  Honeybees can see in colour, but can't detect such subtle differences in colour as humans.  Apparently we can discriminate between wavelengths only one nanometre apart, whereas bees have an accuracy of around five, so we see about four hundred different colours and they see nearer seventy.  They can detect tastes with their front legs, though.

The Head of the National Bee Unit tried to tell us too much.  The NBU is part of Fera, and its activities span everything from pure research, to field inspections of beekeepers' apiaries around the country to monitor for disease, to work with pharmaceutical companies on veterinary medicines, to supplying information on best beekeeping practice to hobbyists.  And loads of other things.  Classic theory on how to structure a presentation would tell you that it is not possible to cover all of this in one conference session, and that most people's concentration starts drifting off after three quarters of an hour.  I reckon you can get away with up to an hour as long as you vary the presentation method, which is why in my woodland talks I start with actual twigs and then use slides.  Theory says you cannot keep an audience with you for an hour and twenty minutes of slides.  I know this is true, because today I sat through them.

You are advised to decide what the key two or three points are that you want your audience to take away with them, and structure your talk around that.  Signing up to the government's national database of beekeepers and apiaries is voluntary in the UK, unlike in most other developed countries that have such a thing.  Registration now is running at an estimated fifty to sixty per cent, versus Fera's target of eighty plus.  Anecdotal evidence (talking to other beekeepers) tells me that many people who aren't signed on are suspicious of the whole enterprise, and what 'they' are going to do with the data when they have it.  So if I were given the opportunity as a representative of the National Bee Unit to talk to a room containing over a hundred beekeepers, my first aim would be to demonstrate to them the benefits that would accrue to them personally, as well as wider society, by joining the database.  Today's speaker urged us to join, but the message didn't come across too clearly.

Apart from that, lunch was very nice once we had tracked down the dining room.  I was in the second sitting, and after a false start down the wrong corridor we worked out the way to food by observing the path of the returning foragers from the first sitting.  I bought a jar of borage honey from a professional bee farmer who was also selling mouse traps.  He told me that I could feed trapped mice to owls, if I left them on the roof at dusk, and that he froze surplus mice in the summer for supplementary feeding in the winter.  If I didn't have any frozen mice then a lump of pork or ham would do, once the owls were used to being fed.  He didn't sound as though he was winding me up, though I never heard before that owls would eat carrion (the System's Administrator's view was that if it was cold enough they would eat anything).

All in all it was an educational day out.  Next year's conference will be held in Epping, and they have already bagged Professor Nigel Dunnett as keynote speaker.

a whole day in the garden

Finally, a day with no frost to keep me off the ground until half way through the morning, when it didn't start raining at lunchtime, and I didn't have to pack up early to be somewhere else in the afternoon.  I was able to spend a whole day in the garden.  Of course days are not so long at this time of year, but even so I made visible progress down the island bed in the back garden, chopping down aster stems, pulling up weeds and spreading compost.

Areas of this bed had a good dressing of mushroom compost back in the spring.  Much of it is still sitting on the surface in discrete lumps, and I'm afraid it was too fresh when it went on.  I'd have expected the worms and soil organisms to have started incorporating it into the top layer of soil by now.  Still, it was broken down to a tilth (not that I'm planning on sowing seeds in that bed) by the time I'd finished pulling out the running roots of sheeps sorrel and chasing out the grass seedlings and odd pieces of horsetail.  I once read in an article about Gertrude Stein that she asked Alice B. Toklas what she saw when she shut her eyes, and Alice B. Toklas said Weeds, and this was supposed by the author of the article  to be very amusing and witty of Gertrude Stein, who in any case used Alice B. Toklas as a literary device, putting words into her mouth.  However, from my own experience I should say it could have been the literal truth, since there are times when, drifting off to sleep, I just see weeds.  Never mind giving Sisyphus the task of pushing a boulder endlessly up a hill, set him to weed a garden that contains horsetail and sheeps sorrel.

I am lavishing the last bin of home made compost on this bed, since it looks as though it could do with the attention.  There isn't much left, and I must make sure I keep some back to mulch the crowns of the two tender salvias, Salvia involucrata 'Bethellii' and S. guaranitica 'Black and Blue'.  Salvia involucrata 'Bethellii' grows to around a metre tall and has large, bright pink, sage-shaped flowers carried in terminal clusters at the ends of the shoots.  If you were completely into good-taste gardening you might consider it slightly vulgar.  I like it.  I have this plant in the ground, and my original plant in a pot, because I knew it was tender. On balance I should say it prefers being in the ground, when it survives at all. The top growth of my outside plant was killed completely during last winter, and it was so slow to reshoot that I thought it must be dead, though it put on quite a lot of growth eventually.  Not so many flowers as the one in the RHS picture, though.  Salvia guaranitica 'Black and Blue' is another large, tender sage, each dark blue flower held dramatically in a black calyx.  The RHS can't rate it so highly as 'Bethellii', since it doesn't have the Award of Garden Merit, and 'Bethellii' does, but I consider it equally attractive, and it seems comparably willing to grow, or not.

The cut-down herbaceous stems are piling up nicely in the compost bins, which should now be restored to a proper sequence, new material going in at the left hand end, and the contents of each bin being turned into the next at intervals, until by the time they reach the last bin on the right they have been transformed as if by magic into soil improver.  Compost is wonderful stuff.  When I mulch with compost I feel as though I am adding life to the soil, as well as merely improving its texture and ability to retain moisture.  It is frustrating how such a big heap of prunings reduces down to such a small amount of compost at the end of it.

At three I decamped to the front garden, so that I could guard the chickens while they had a run.  They haven't been out for a few days, since we've been out or it has rained in the afternoon.  Actually, I don't think it did rain yesterday, but it must have been too cold for the Systems Administrator to be able to face hanging around the garden for an hour watching poultry.  The chickens were eager to eat grass, and pleased to be let out.  They behaved themselves very nicely, remaining near me in the front garden while I cleaned their roosting board and spread fresh sawdust on it, then weeded the gravel and picked dead Eleagnus x ebbingei leaves out of it.  Indeed, they liked it so much that the last two hens refused to go back into their hen house until gone half past four, by which point I was getting rather chilly, and couldn't see to weed.  Tomorrow I'm going out, so it will be up to the SA's kindness and discretion whether they get to free range for an hour or two.

beautiful and dammed

I have just got back from a woodland charity talk.  I was not looking forward to it at all, firstly because I had visions of getting bogged down in a fractious discussion of ash dieback disease, and secondly because as of yesterday morning I still hadn't heard from the organisers since they booked me this time last year.  I forgot to ring them yesterday before going out, so called the person who sent the confirmation letter when I got back.  She sounded pretty fractious, telling me that she'd been ill and wasn't doing the bookings any more, and demanding to know 'what I wanted, exactly'.  What I wanted was to find out whether they were still expecting me, any special instructions about finding the hall, what time it would be open and all the usual sorts of things you would want to know before packing up your car and driving twenty miles to do a lecture.  I said I was sorry she'd been ill and sorry to trouble her, if she could just give me the number of the person now doing the bookings I'd ring them, but she said she didn't know who it was, although she assured me the meeting was still on.

I thought I'd have to leave it at that, but set off at lunchtime with a dark sense of foreboding that the handover to the new bookings secretary might not have worked, and I might arrive to find I was double booked with somebody else.  It was quite a spread-out village when I got there, but I found the hall without any false turnings, either through luck or because instinct born of long practice told me it was going to be down the hill and not up towards the church, at the first point where I had to choose between left and right.  They were expecting me, and turned out to be a perfectly friendly bunch of ladies, who claimed they had tried to ring me but the number they'd got hadn't worked, so something obviously got scrambled at some stage of the communications.

The chairman mentioned the dreadful news about ash trees in her introduction, and I'd already decided I'd meet that head on, and start with a potted summary of what I knew and how I saw things so far, with the disclaimer that I was a volunteer and was not a qualified tree pathologist.  I suggested leaving questions and discussion about chalara to the end of the rest of the talk, to avoid the risk of being trapped in a long, indignant, why did they, why didn't they series of complaints presented as questions which I would be unable to answer, given that I don't know the answers and wasn't in charge.  The ladies accepted that as a plan, and sat looking meek and sad while I ran through a potted history of public (and my) awareness of ash dieback, and my views on what was likely to happen now.  There were very few questions when we got to the end.

I am actually hopping mad about ash dieback in the UK.  We all (and I include myself in the criticism) seem to have fatalistically and supinely walked into the jaws of disaster.  From which you will gather that I believe the disease is already too widely spread to be contained, that we are going to lose a large part of our ash population, and it is too late to do anything about that.  Our best hope is to identify resistant trees and grow their progeny on, but that won't restore Fraxinus excelsior to the countryside in my lifetime.  And it is such a beautiful tree.  In recent weeks as I've been driving around the lanes, or working in the garden, I've been mentally deducting the ashes from the landscape.  North east Essex won't be denuded of tree cover.  There is more oak than ash, and several other species as well, but ash provides the tallest trees in many woodlands (the clue's in the name.  Excelsior.  Gloria in excelsis deo, Glory to God in the highest).  I shall miss it dreadfully when it's gone.

I am stunned that most people, including me, only heard about this at the start of October when the Guardian ran an article.  I am too mean to buy a daily paper, but read the broadsheets that are freely available on line. That's the Telegraph, Guardian and Independent.  I am a BBC junkie, reading their website and listening to R4 news, current affairs and environmental programmes.  I am a member of the Woodland Trust, the National Trust, the RHS and the RSPB.  No journalist and none of these conservation charities seem to have picked up on ash dieback.  Landscape managers, including those of National Parks and the Woodland Trust itself, were planting imported ash saplings, having apparently asked about the genetic provenance of the trees supplied, that is were they grown from UK seed, but not enquired about the biosecurity aspect of where they were actually grown.  I am a mere plant centre assistant and gardener, doing some voluntary work on the side, but what were all the conservation professionals doing?  Were they asleep?  The only body to have emerged with any credit at all, as far as I can see, is the Horticultural Trades Association, who wrote to Defra as early as 2009 asking for an immediate ban on the import of ash.  They were brushed aside and ignored by the authorities until it was too late.  A ban came in, far too late, and the government held a Cobra meeting last Friday, by which time the disease was so widespread they might as well have not bothered.

There seems to be a lot we still don't know.  If it is the case that some UK cases have resulted not from imports but from spores spread on the wind across the North Sea, then there will have been nothing we could have done in the long run anyway.  I suppose that might make us feel a little better.  The best we can hope for now, apart from the fact that in the long run the ash will almost certainly regenerate, is that politicians might finally start taking tree health seriously.  That means funding research, and being as tough as we need to be on imports.  I know we are part of the EU, but we are also an island.  We can keep rabies out, why not plant diseases?

a birthday party

Today was another non-gardening day, because we were invited to my first cousin once removed's eighty fifth birthday party.  I was rather touched to be there as the sole family representative, along with the Systems Administrator as the sole in-law.  We had lunch in an hotel overlooking the sea at Aldeburgh.

My cousin (I had to look up the once removed versus second cousin bit on Google, not being into genealogy, but it's an awful mouthful) is a thoroughly entertaining chap.  He is a keen geologist, still leading study groups on field trips every year, and the other lunch guests were friends acquired through walking, skiing and geology groups over about the past forty years, while one had just won a gold medal for ballroom dancing at Blackpool.  Conversation ranged widely across subjects including geology (a specialist subject for approximately half the table), strange food eaten on foreign trips (to places far more exotic than I've ever been), learning to drive in Rhodesia, maps, the history of railway gauges, great and not so great train trips, the under-representation of science in popular culture and women in science, the earliest known recording of the human voice (1790, but having recorded it they didn't have the technology to play it back, so that didn't happen for another two hundred years), and the Essex textile industry.  Apparently there is going to be an exhibition of Kaffe Fasset designs in Braintree next year, so if there is and I remember to go I'll remind you about it then.

It was a lively (though abstemious) party, demonstrating how part of the art of growing old gracefully is to remain interested in ideas and people.  And it was liberating to our inner geeks to be among equally geeky companions, people for example who thought that a full set of the entire Ordnance Survey maps of the UK was an entirely reasonable and natural thing thing to possess.  Indeed, while the Systems Administrator has it in digital form, which doesn't even take up any space, they had all two hundred and eighty something maps in hard copy, in a specially built book case (you put the maps in sideways then the shelves don't have to be so far apart).

I once mentioned to a friend that I hadn't seen for some months that I'd joined the committee of a music society.  His response was that he supposed they were all over seventy, which I thought was gratuitously unkind, but made allowances because he was going through a bad patch at the time.  In fact I don't think any of them are, but if they were it wouldn't matter.  The great and gracious lady gardener who gave some of us from work lunch this summer, after coming to my house in the spring, makes no secret of the fact that she is in her seventies, but says cheerfully that age doesn't matter, the main thing being to have interests in common with people and find them sympathetic.  Her advice to her friends of a similar age who grumble how difficult it is to make new friends at their age is that they should make friends with some younger people.

The saying goes that nobody on their death bed ever wishes that they had spent more time in the office.  Certainly today's cheerful lunch demonstrated that a life spent collecting interesting people that you like can go on paying dividends, long after the office would have spat you out and forgotten all about you.

half a day in the garden

We had the first frost of the year.  That's another thing that shortens the gardening day, since you can't weed frozen ground, and shouldn't walk on the frosted grass or your brown footprints will remain to haunt you for months.  (That happens because frozen grass blades break instead of bending when you tread on them, and the broken bits turn brown, in case you were wondering.  Gardeners will know this).  The sun shone brightly, helping burn the frost off, and I was in business before ten.

I planted out a hybrid anemone, the variety 'Wild Swan', which I only bought yesterday.  'Wild Swan' was a big thing at Chelsea in May, and was all over the telly as various journalists including Carol Klein picked up on it.  It looks like a normal Japanese anemone, with bowl shaped single white flowers held above typical lobed anemone foliage, but the backs of the three outer petals have a distinct blue stripe down them.  I thought it was quite enormously pretty.  We didn't get any in at work at the time, but a few pots appeared in the plant centre several weeks ago.  I didn't snap one up immediately, since while I liked it very much I wasn't at all sure where I'd put it, and they were as expensive as new hybrids tend to be.  I expected them to sell quickly, and consoled myself with the reflection that 'Blue Swan' would probably be around next year and I could pick one up later if I wanted to.  However, admiring blue stripes on the reverse side of a flower must be an acquired gardening taste, and they didn't sell especially fast.  Even when I took one along to a talk and pointed out how beautiful it was nobody bought it.  Once I'd finished weeding the sloping bed just uphill of the new bog garden there seemed to be space for one anemone.  They are supposed to like semi-shade, and it looks very natural in the artificial woodland edge conditions of a large mixed border.  Let us hope it actually likes it there.

The Primula florindae that I puddled into the new bog are looking very happy.  This is a Chinese species, flowering late for a primula, with yellow scented flowers, whose common name is the Tibetan cowslip.  It felt counter-intuitive dropping my new plants into liquid mud, though after planting them I saw them growing happily in a stream (an artificial one) with other Asian plants at Edinburgh Botanic Garden, so had proof that they really did like sitting in water.  Unless they are free with their scent I may not get the benefit, since I would need to paddle in 20 centimetres of mud to smell them.  Once we revert to dry weather I fear I am committed to irrigating that corner occasionally, now I've planted so many moisture loving plants there.  Trying to plant up areas where the water table is very unstable is a puzzle.

At quarter to one the Systems Administrator came out into the garden to warn me that the rain radar now suggested strongly that the rain would arrive by two o'clock, and ask whether I'd like to hold lunch back and keep on gardening until then.  That sounded an excellent plan, since at this time of year when the days are so short I need to seize the moment when I can.  By two I had finished excavating the usable compost from the second bin from the left, and was able to turn the contents of the first bin into it.  That left me with a further supply of compost in the first bin, at the end of the row, and space in the second bin to fill up while I used the compost.  The SA still needs to put a coat of timber preservative on the new bin at the right hand end, and then I'll be set up for weeks, able to turn every heap by shifting it one to the right, meaning I'll end up with two empty bins on the left to take this autumn's debris.  I'm getting increasingly hard-hearted about starting to cut stems down before the New Year.  Yes, they look very pretty rimed with frost, or spangled with dew with cobwebs strung between them.  Yes, the seeds provide food for birds.  But there simply isn't time to cut everything down in March, and experience teaches that February can be an almost total loss for gardening purposes, if we get a bit of snow.

By two I was getting hungry, and I imagined the SA must be wanting lunch too.  By twenty past the rain had arrived, and that was my gardening done for the day, all four and a bit hours of it.

niggles

The atmosphere at work was slightly scratchy, despite the fact that it was a nice day.  The manager was relieved that the boss was pleased with the quality of the shrubs that arrived last week from a new supplier we hadn't used before.  However, he was not happy that one of my co-workers had spent a lot of time rearranging the shop last week when the manager was on holiday for half term, while leaving a garbled note about how there hadn't been time to put a delivery of roses out on display in order.  Or that the Heuchera had been moved back out into the rain to make room for a delivery of Daphne, which had been put out for sale without disclaimer labels warning that since they were notoriously difficult to establish in the garden, then provided they were healthy and correctly named when we sold them, we wouldn't replace them if they failed.  My young colleague was not happy because her car had suddenly and mysteriously died, not long after being serviced.  The owner was not happy about the cafe, though not nearly as hopping mad as I thought she might be, and the boss was not happy because we'd gone home last night without setting the alarm on the house.  I was not happy to have to take the blame for this, since nobody had told me that the boss was out.  I'll just set it next time regardless, and if he's at home or the dogs trigger it then that's too bad.

I stole the idea for the disclaimers from another plant retailer over at Saffron Walden.  It took about two years to persuade the owners that it was a good idea.  First of all they said it would put people off buying daphnes, but anyone deterred by the label shouldn't be buying a daphne in the first place.  Then the boss said that we ought to tell customers at the till.  That doesn't work in practice because staff forget, or because when there's a queue you just focus on getting the right amount of money put through the correct till category.  There isn't time to stop for a chat about individual plants.  You don't expect the checkout at Tesco to grind to a halt because the operator and the customer ahead of you are having a long conversation about food allergies, or how to cook shin of beef.  Eventually, worn down by the number of customers bringing back dead daphnes and indignant that they had not been told that the plants weren't guaranteed, the owner who is in charge of the finances agreed that we could have Specialist Plant labels.  Based on careful reading of one newspaper article about the Sale of Goods Act I am confident that we are within our rights to refuse to replace failed daphnes.  As long as the plant was healthy when it left our premises, and correctly described, we have sold goods of merchantable quality.  After that the onus is on the customer to get it right.

Other plants which will die as soon as look at you, once planted, include Edgeworthia chrysantha, the Chilean fire tree Embothrium, and Franklinia alatamaha.  Although I have planted Edgeworthia twice at home, and it has established fine both times.  I lost the first plant because the water table rose under it during a wet spell and drowned it.  Customers can have very weird ideas about when we should replace plants for them, free and gratis.  Plants that are patently unsuitable for the site chosen for them (unless we erroneously advised that they'd be suitable), plants attacked by aphids months after we sold them, trees whose bark has been strimmed through by the customer's own gardener.  If you buy a piece of beef and turn it into an inedible leathery lump by cooking it for too long in too hot an oven, you don't expect your butcher to give you another joint, even if he is a lovely artisan one selling rare breeds and championship sausages, and not just heartless Mr Tesco.

A sweet old lady rang up asking about lavenders.  I surmise that she was old, from her voice, and the fact that she lived in a bungalow.  She wanted advice on dwarf lavenders to plant in a narrow bed along the front of the property.  I explained that really and truly November was not the best time to be doing this job, since lavender liked good drainage and warmth, and young plants might sit too wet and rot over the winter.  And we scarcely had any left.  If she were to plant her hedge in the spring, we would have a much better choice and could order in the right number of plants for her if we didn't have enough in stock.  She agreed that sounded sensible, and that she would leave it until spring.  Then she told me how much she liked the plant centre, and how well everything she'd bought from us had done, and how she'd seen the boss on the telly.  I'm pleased her plants did well, which is partly a credit to her, partly that we do stock good plants, and partly that we try to dissuade customers from planting things at difficult times of the year.

Another customer was torn by her desire to buy a particularly tender form of Teucrium, and the description on the label, backed up by my warning that it was not the hardiest of plants.  Teucrium fruticans is a lovely, grey leafed sun lover with lipped flowers in a soft powder blue.  It comes from southern Europe and north Africa, and has been grown in UK gardens since the early eighteenth century.  The variety 'Azureum' has flowers in a deeper shade of blue, but is even more tender than the ordinary sort.  I gave her my honest opinion, which was that in a harsh winter or given less than ideal growing conditions, she might lose it, but could see that she wanted it.  It cost £9.75, so I gave her the counter argument as well, which was that we asked an awful lot of our garden plants in terms of guaranteed reliability, since we would spend ten pounds on a bunch of cut flowers and take it for granted that they'd be over in a week.  She agreed that she'd just spent forty pounds on fireworks, which had been over in ten minutes, and decided to risk it with the Teucrium.  It is a black art, to be able to spell out the drawbacks of something while selling it anyway.

Addendum  I almost forgot, there was one piece of romantic news.  The boss's mother's gardener builds the bonfire for the local Guy Fawkes celebrations, and this year just as the heap was about to be lit he grabbed the microphone of the tannoy system and proposed publicly to his partner.  She accepted.

rainy Sunday

It was raining when I woke up, and when I got up, and when I went out to open the pop hole of the chicken house.  It rained as I drove to work, and when I got there.  I still had to get the hose out to water inside the polytunnels, where a few things were starting to look rather dry, though I was fairly frugal with the water, following the old advice on house plants, that more die from over-watering than under-watering.

It didn't seem likely that we'd get many customers, given the weather.  The chap who runs the cafe had the same thought, and rang shortly after ten to say that the cafe girl wouldn't be coming in, so could my younger colleague who knows how to operate the coffee machine do hot drinks, and we were to call him later on if it got busy.  I thought that was pretty poor, since we didn't think we were going to get many customers, but opened up as normal anyway.  You don't build a retail business by arbitrarily shutting when it suits you, and it reflects badly on the plant centre if refreshments aren't available when we say on our website that they are.

My older colleague counselled against telling the owner at that moment, on the grounds that it would only upset her just as she had to drive her son back to school in the rain, and would make no practical difference since we were going to be saddled with the teas anyway.  This was good advice, since the owner was already cross that the cafe shut so early yesterday.  I left a brief note for her at the end of the day.  She'll be able to digest the news overnight, instead of being provoked into ringing up the cafe man and screaming at him in the heat of the moment.

Euonymus were still selling briskly, after their television appearance.  I wasn't at work when they were filming, but apparently the crew were there for the entire day, of which no more than five minutes was finally transmitted.  A Viburnum we list turned out to have been in yesterday's Telegraph as well, but that only resulted in one sale.

I spent the first part of the morning, once I'd done the watering, clearing up after myself from yesterday.  The manager's note of jobs to do over the weekend included a list of herbaceous plants that I was supposed to round up and take over to the tunnel on the other side of the car park, where they will spend the winter under cover.  Salvia, Sedum, Stachys and other things that don't want to sit too wet in their pots.  After I'd worked my way through the list I looked at his instructions again, and saw the additional words 'and tidy'.  Oh.  Bother.  I was meant to cut down their dead stems, strip off their manky leaves, pull out any weeds and scrape off the liverwort.  By then I'd stacked them on two red trolleys, so half of them were at head height, and the centre of the bottom deck of a two-storey plant trolley about one metre by two is not the most comfortable place to work.  And one of the trolleys was outside and it was raining.  Fortunately most of the pots were fairly clean and tidy already, apart from the Kniphofia which were riddled with straggly dead leaves, and the Lathyrus which combined shabby leaves and a huge crop of liverwort.  I managed to sort out most of them in situ.  It wasn't the best plant cleaning job I've ever done in my life, on the other hand they are going to spend around five months sitting in a polytunnel anyway, plenty of time to grow fresh liverwort, and they'll need tidying again before they come back out for sale.

I was able to use up a largish part of the afternoon productively, advising a couple who wanted planting ideas for a reasonably sunny front garden on free draining soil, which they had totally cleared.  I felt I was on secure ground, given that our front garden and meadow are on sand, and the front garden is in sun for most of the day, and I was able to hold forth on a group of plants I know well from first hand experience.  I wrote down the names as we talked, so that they could look up more details afterwards (and because otherwise people always forget most of what you've suggested to them) and they were very happy, and said they would be back next week to make a start, once the topsoil had been delivered tomorrow.  They'd deliberately chosen to come and do their research on a wet day, because they thought we'd have more time to speak to them, which was quite cunning.  They were excited to have finally reached this stage, after doing all the grunt work of removing an old hedge (which had to wait until they'd sorted out the house) and weeding and preparing the ground.  As Charlie Dimmock used to say on Ground Force, and now for the fun part, the planting.

star of the small screen

The boss was on telly last night, talking about autumn colour.  We've largely given up watching Gardeners' World nowadays in favour of the meatier fare of The Sopranos box set, but we made an exception yesterday evening.  I thought he did very well.  We'd stocked up on deciduous Euonymus, hoping for a rush.

We did get more callers for those than usual, plus a small crop of disappointed people who had come to look at the garden without checking the website or ringing us first.  The website does say that the garden is open from 1 March to 30 September, admittedly not blazed in huge letters across the top of the home page Don't Bother Coming, The Garden Is Shut For The Winter, but quite clearly in the column marked Opening Hours on the Garden and Arboretum page.  The boss is clear that the garden really is shut, since it is incredibly slippery.  The sound recordist fell over making the feature for the BBC, and since someone slipped a couple of years ago, broke her ankle and sued us the owners are very keen not to have any more accidents.  A couple who had driven from Brentwood were aggrieved, but while sympathetic I stood firm.  It's November, for goodness sake, and if planning to drive any distance to visit a garden the sensible thing to do is ring first, and check whether it is open.

I was irritated to see that somebody had moved all the Heuchera that I spent half of last Monday morning gathering up and putting them under cover, as instructed by the manager, and put them back dotted around the display tables.  The culprits turned out to be my co-workers for today, who had wanted the table to display some Daphne, and rearranged it in the past couple of days, while the manager took some holiday for half term.  They said they wondered why all the Heuchera had been moved.  I thought they had not wondered enough, given that as it happened while the manager was there it was probably at his instigation, and he presumably had his reasons.

Understanding that other people normally do things for a reason, at least when operating within their own field of expertise, is one of the hardest things for many humans to grasp.  My favourite example comes from Thor Heyerdahl's account of his first Ra expedition.  In 1969 Heyerdahl and his companions set out to cross the Atlantic from Morocco to the Americas on a reed boat, copied from ancient Egyptian records.  Ropes ran from the upswept prow and stern to the centre of the boat.  The crew found these rather in the way, and since the curved ends of the boat showed no signs of straightening out, they removed them.  Half way across the Atlantic they discovered what the ropes had been for.  They were not to stop the bow and stern from uncoiling, but to hold the middle of Ra up, and as the papyrus absorbed water the central portion began to sag and sink.  The voyage had to be abandoned before they reached landfall.

The girl running the cafe today swept up and left at half past two.  We had quite a few customers after lunch, as we tend to on weekend afternoons when it's not raining, and some of them wanted tea, coffee and cake as well as plants.  My colleagues said that this was fine, they could make tea.  Given we're open until dusk and advertise the fact that we have a cafe, we ought to be offering tea at least until half past three, but I don't think plant centre staff should be doing it.  The cafe is now a separate business.  They shouldn't be happy with us in their kitchen any more than I'm happy with them operating our till.  I foresee tears.

welcome to Britain's oldest recorded town

Nobody told me that it was national Employ an Idiot day.  I went to pay a cheque into the bank in Colchester.  That was very quaint and old fashioned of me, but I was given it for a recent woodland talk.  A strict interpretation of charity rules doesn't let UK charities pay money to other charities, so I am sometimes given a cheque made payable to me, and I send the same amount on to the woodland charity.  I did that promptly, so have been out of of the money for a couple of weeks.

There was no queue at the counter, so I thought I'd pay in the cheque there instead of using one of the automated machines, since the cheque had been folded up in my purse and the paying-in machines don't always like paperwork with creases in it.  The young girl behind the glass smiled at me, and I passed over my cheque book open at the deposits section at the back, the counterfoil and slip already filled out, and the cheque.  She reached for a calculator, which puzzled me slightly since paying one cheque into one account didn't seem to involve any calculations, added two numbers together, wrote something on the next paying-in slip in the book, and stamped it with an official HSBC stamp.  I goggled at her and surmised that the older woman standing behind her chair was not just hanging around, but was in fact supposed to be supervising her.  The supervisor said that that was not what you were meant to do, wrote Void over the spoiled slip, and stamped my counterfoil, then asked if I'd like her to remove the used slip.  I said Yes please, it was no use to me now, and then later wished that I hadn't, as I'd have liked to confirm whether the girl at the counter had indeed used her calculator to add up twenty-five plus twenty-five, being the amount of the cheque and paying-in slip respectively.

If this is the future of Britain's banks then we're in deeper trouble than we already thought we were.  And our educational system is even worse than we already knew it was.

Then I went on to the main purpose of the day, which was to visit Colchester Castle.  I have been there before, but not for over twenty years, so when a friend suggested meeting up sometime I asked if she'd like to come for a cup of coffee in town and have a look at the castle, as a change from drinking tea in each other's houses.  The castle is the second largest Norman keep in the UK, after the White Tower in London, and is currently showing an exhibition of visiting Chinese artefacts that sounded interesting.

Colchester Castle Museum, as it describes itself, is fascinating and infuriating in equal measures.  Fascinating because it is stuffed with artefacts.  Locally collected stone age tools and bronze age axe heads.  A beautiful large cauldron dating from 1100 BC (they're still on BC and AD, no politically correct Before Current Era yet) that set me thinking of the magic cauldron in the Mabinogian which restored slaughtered warriors to life. Roman glass and memorials and coffins and mosaics and a fabulous sphinx crouched over the head of a man.  A small display on the mediaeval woollen weaving industry in Colchester.  Loads and loads of good stuff, crammed into old fashioned display cases linked by strange walkways vaguely based on neolithic huts.

The Chinese objects are great.  On loan from a museum in Nanjing, sometime capital of China, there are terracotta grave goods, porcelain bowls, carved jade animals and a jade suit made out of hundreds of small rectangles of stone strung together with silver wire, that was originally the burial dress of an emperor.  Some of the terracotta animals are wonderfully animated and life-like, others odd or downright comic.  It is a really good visiting collection and well worth a look, on until 6th January 2013.

The castle is infuriating because you can't really see the inside of the building at all.  It is filled up with galleries to hold the museum stuff, while staircases cut across the original doors and windows, so you get no sense of the original layout.  There is no interpretation about the castle itself.  No explanation of whether it was a royal castle or built by an uppity local baron, or where the stone came from, or when the curtain walls and all of the rest of the castle apart from the keep were destroyed.  It seems a great waste.  It is an atmospheric building, but it would be so much better to have a proper purpose built display for the pre-historical and Roman artefacts, and present the castle as a fascinating historical building in its own right, maybe with some information about mediaeval Colchester.  Just think, if all of that money spent on the Firstsite gallery had been invested in a modern museum to present Colchester's ancient past.

Colchester is generally terribly bad at making the most of its history.  Driving into the town you pass signs welcoming you to Britain's oldest recorded town.  And that's it.  If you park in the multi-storey car park next to the dual carriage way that the planners decided to route next to a large stretch of surviving Roman wall, you can walk through an actual Roman gateway, though most people don't bother and just skirt past it.  In the town centre you can see another section of the town walls, with the car parking theme carried one better since the car park runs along the base of the wall.  I think that somewhere in the Dutch quarter you can peer through a window and see an excavated Roman something-or-other.  And that's it.  They did find a chariot racing track a while back, but with the economic crisis plans to develop that as an historic attraction have gone very quiet.  Compare this meagre effort with the amount of fuss that York makes about the Vikings.  Granted, York has one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Britain, but the only visible evidence of Vikings you'll find now is in the Jorvik centre.

The management of Colchester Castle Museum must be aware that it doesn't quite make the grade as a twenty-first century museum, since it is due to close for fifteen months at the start of next year for modernisation.  I hope that will make it better and not worse, since upgrades to the National Maritime Museum have dumbed it down considerably, according to the Systems Administrator, with the collection of builders' models of ships disappearing from display, and eco displays about melting icebergs taking their place.  Looking on the bright side, I don't see how anybody can drag climate change into the Bronze Age and the Romans.  I fear, though, that what the Castle Museum really needs is another building into which most of the current collection could be relocated.

bread

The length of the gardening day is rapidly reducing.  I got up at quarter to eight, and it was only just getting light then.  There was no rush to leap out of bed any earlier, since I could hear from the drumming on the roof that it was raining.  I didn't know until I got up what time it was, since the fusebox tripped in the night and knocked out my bedside clock, but my body seems predisposed to rise with the dawn.  Getting out into the garden was further delayed by my plan to make soda bread for us to eat with our lunch.  I've been meaning to make soda bread for months, if not years, but yesterday took a slightly decisive step and bought a pot of buttermilk.  I still wasn't immediately committed, since the buttermilk would keep for ten days, but thought I might as well get on with the bread, especially since last night I made some soup for today's lunch.  Plus it was raining.

We used to have a mother's help when I was a child who made extremely good soda bread.  She made good shortbread as well.  As a child she seemed to me very old, although looking back I have no idea how old she was.  She may only have been around the age I am now.  The awfulness of the life of a paid companion has been fertile territory for novelists, from Anne Bronte to Daphne du Maurier, and I can't think that our untrained mother's help had a very nice life, living in our draughty Victoria pile a mile's walk from any amenities (she couldn't drive), with no economic security and two lippy children for company.  My parents disliked her, because she was noisy and not very bright, let alone academic.  It can't be pleasant, living on sufferance in somebody else's house.

Anyway, she made good soda bread.  I have tried it once or twice in the intervening decades, but not for a long time.  Hot to trot after breakfast, I discovered that while I'd remembered to buy buttermilk, the bicarbonate of soda had theoretically expired in April 2010.  It had gone rather solid in its pot, and as I jabbed at it with a teaspoon I wondered whether it still had any fizz in it.  Then I needed a recipe.  The Good Housekeepers, normally a reliable source of information on old-fashioned staples, didn't have a soda bread recipe, or at least I couldn't find it in the index under either S or B.  Elizabeth David's bread book wanted me to use wholemeal flour and talked about raising the loaves under inverted cake tins, which sounded too complicated.  I thought I remembered seeing soda bread in Tom Norrington-Davies' book Just like mother used to make, and since everything I've tried out of that so far has worked, and he doesn't over-complicate things, I thought I'd go with the erstwhile gastro pub supremo.

Almost immediately I started deviating from the recipe, halving the amount of salt, since I couldn't believe that 500 grammes of flour needed two teaspoons of the stuff.  Neither the Systems Administrator nor I have a very salty tooth (the soup didn't contain any).  When we have guests we have to remember to put some on the table for those that like more of it than we do.  I know that in yeast cookery you have to be careful about reducing the salt too far, since it affects the structure of the dough, but with bicarb raised bread I thought I could do what I liked.

Once the ingredients are all mixed up, Tom Norrington-Davies talked about kneading the loaf for up to ten minutes.  I couldn't believe that.  After all, soda bread is a giant scone, and the ideal with those is to handle them as little as possible.  Thorough kneading is helpful in making bread with yeast, when you are trying to develop the gluten, but I didn't think it applied to cakes.  I decided to ignore the instructions in the book, and put the loaf in the oven as soon as it felt smooth.  I did cut a cross in the top as instructed.  Tom Norrington-Davies said that this would make my bread 'traditional looking', but from past reading of Elizabeth David  and other bread books I thought it had a structural point, to help the loaf open out.  I dropped it to a lower point in the oven than his suggested temperature as well after fifteen minutes, since the top was going rather dark, but mapping given cooking temperatures in non-Aga cookbooks on to the best position within an Aga is a black art and not a science.

The bread was fine, as was the soup.  Leek and potato.  I cooked it last night while I was doing the supper, and liquidised it before lunch when it was cold.  Having a completely home made lunch gave me quite a glow of virtue, and I really will try yeast raised bread sometime soon.  When it is raining all morning.

In the afternoon it drizzled in patches, so that I was never quite sure whether it was going to come on to rain hard and I was going to have to run inside.  I am still clearing suitable places to use the home made compost, so that I can start refilling the bins.  The clay soil at the lower end of the sloping bed in the back garden would surely like a dressing of nice crumbly decaying organic material.  Weeding it after all the rain is a pain, since it goes to a slick when you touch it, each weed comes up with a great gobbet of clay stuck to its roots, and every footprint sinks in and makes the bad structure even worse.