the joy of tech

Wet days are for catching up with domestic stuff.  I went into Colchester for a haircut.  Admittedly that was booked in the middle of last week, so if it had been a lovely day for gardening I'd still have had to go, but it is always mildly satisfying to be able to catch up with things like that while feeling that the opportunity cost is pretty much nil.  I bought a 2013 East Coast Calender by Den Phillips as well, while I was at it, and went to the bank.  I parked behind in the car park behind the leisure complex in Cowdray Avenue, to avoid the aftermath of the water main that burst last night at the bottom of Balkerne Hill, and the sound of church bells ringing as I walked back across Castle Park in the light rain had a sort of melancholy charm.

By the afternoon the rain was seriously settling in, and the puddle in the drive that indicates we've had more than a sprinkling was beginning to form.  I decided it was time to do my ironing, which had been piling up on the spare bed for quite a time.  There was a lot of ironing, enough to last for the whole of Schubert's Death and the Maiden, and two Beethoven piano concertos.  Actually, I think my iPod was doing something peculiar with those, along the lines of playing all the right movements but not necessarily in the right order, and I have just scrubbed them off my iTunes library and reloaded them from the CD.

Meanwhile the Systems Administrator was wrestling with new replacement technology, in the form of a laptop and a stereo amplifier.  The SA's previous laptop failed spectacularly, or at least totally, two days ago.  It didn't start playing up and getting cranky about things, but simply stopped.  No lights, no action, no power, no nothing.  It is now with a professional firm in Colchester to retrieve the data off the hard disc.  By yesterday evening the new replacement laptop had wiped the SA's iPod, instead of reloading the SA's music library from the iPod to the laptop.  By this evening the SA had managed to find the file where the laptop had put the library.

The amp died by degrees a few weeks ago.  First one channel went, and then weird distortions started appearing on the other.  It had done us well, since the SA bought it not long after we moved into our previous house, which dates it to 1987 or 1988.  It was a Marantz, which came out well in hi-fi surveys in the late 1980s.  Twenty five years later it still does, so the SA replaced like with like.  The new amp comes with a remote control, and it is rather lux to be able to adjust the volume without getting up, going to the shelf under the stairs where the stereo lives, twiddling the knob and shouting to the person in the upstairs room to ask if that's OK, or if it needs to go up a bit or down a bit.  The stairs would get in the way of the remote signal, but an infra-red booster station that we already had gets round that.  As an added bonus it is possible to change tracks via the remote.  The SA can't work out quite how the stack does that, but says that the amp and CD player must be able to talk to each other, in which case well done Marantz for maintaining compatibility between pieces of equipment bought a quarter of a century apart.

Now I have a technological challenge of my own, to update my iPod after copying some more Chopin and Dvorak into my iTunes library on the laptop.  The iPod has been getting rather difficult about updating itself, so I hope that technological death is not going to come in threes.

clubs and associations

I went last night to hear Bob Flowerdew talk at a local garden club on the unlikely subject of Gardening by UFO light.  I'm not a member, but know a couple of people who are, and have lectured there myself a couple of times, so for the last two years when they've opened the booking to their annual celebrity lecture to non-members they've made sure I got a ticket.  They make a proper evening of it, with the village hall packed out, and home made sandwiches and cakes included in the price of the event (home made by members of the committee.  It seems to be a feature of village committee life that you help provide refreshments, and I get off rather lightly in that respect when it comes to the beekeepers).

My first and irrelevant thought was that he was shorter than I expected.  Given I've mainly heard him on the radio I don't know why I expected him to be any particular height, though I do have his Organic Bible and I suppose there are some photographs of him in there.  The talk was great fun, in a bonkers way.  His central thesis was that since science was complicated and there was a great deal we still didn't know, it was better to be open minded and curious about gardening problems and life in general than to dismiss or attack new or unfamiliar ideas.  Which sounds fair enough.  I am not inclined to start believing in healing crystals, or planting by the phases of the moon (planting when I have time and it is not pouring with rain is as much as I can manage), but look at the way that, for example, recent new understanding of how the expression of genes can be switched on and off by environmental factors has complicated notions of heredity.

The Systems Administrator spent the evening catching up with old work friends, which would have been a nicer evening overall if the 22.18 and 22.30 out of Liverpool Street hadn't been cancelled, and the 22.38 left ten minutes late, spent another ten minutes stopped outside Stratford and dawdled back to Colchester, so that the SA got home at five minutes past one.  The late running 22.38 had people standing as far as Colchester, since passengers for Norwich had been told to get that train and it was packed.  There was no information at Colchester about how they were supposed to get to Norwich.  Greater Anglia's apology after two days of chaos in this morning's East Angian Daily Times only covered the severe delays on Wednesday night (a friend's husband who left Liverpool Street at twenty to seven or thereabouts got home at gone eleven) and the daytime delays during Thursday, and didn't even mention that Thursday night was chaos as well.

Meanwhile, a dispute has broken out among the beekeepers committee, conducted mainly by e-mail with occasional telephone sorties, about whether or not you can move the venue of an advertised event at one week's notice.  You can't.  End of.  I thought I had the final say on that, as I was going to lend the projection equipment for the talk and could decide where I was taking it (to the advertised hall), but yesterday we discovered that our booked speaker was unable to make the date anyway, leaving us with one week to organise an alternative entertainment.  I've suggested a session on honey jar labelling regulations, presented as a light-hearted quiz and group discussion, but so far only one fellow committee member has replied.  They said it was a good idea (in fact, a brilliant idea) but a minefield.  Which seems a very good reason to have a teach-in on the subject.  Nobody else has suggested anything, apart from one volunteer to cover the original topic, which was brave of him, but seems hard on the booked speaker, who was very keen to do the talk and has got all his slides ready.  It is not his fault he can't make it, so we should try and reschedule him for next year.  I'm waiting for the rest of the committee to start showing more interest in the problem, as I volunteered to be Treasurer, not Entertainments Officer.

In the garden I continued to cut down herbaceous stems, and trim back the roses on the bank between the top and bottom lawns, which are sprawling out across the border at the top, engulfing an iron tripod and threatening to annihilate a tree peony.  Everything has made a phenomenal amount of growth (for north Essex) after the wet year.  I filled an entire trailer with stems and leaves bound for the compost heap, and there is masses more to come off.  In fact, I am going to run out of space in the compost bins fairly soon, despite the Systems Administrator building another one only recently.  The ground is absolutely saturated, so that I am breaking down the lawn at the edges of the beds as I kneel down to work, and I dread to think what damage I am doing to the soil structure walking on it.  But there isn't time to wait for it to dry out and do everything in March.  Work will continue right through the winter, unless it is pouring, freezing or snowing.

real bread

Most of us live with some significant gaps between the sort of person we imagine ourselves to be and the things we feel we ought to be doing, and the things we actually do.  For some this means living with the dream of being a footballer, or a pop star, or even just being a celebrity, famous for being famous, while continuing with the day job as an accountant.  For me it means imagining I am the sort of person who bakes their own bread.  I feel it goes with the beekeeping and gardening and general enthusiasm for baking.  I have the sort of short, strong, broad hands that were clearly made for kneading.  I have an Aga.  I like home made bread.  I like the idea of knowing what is in the loaf I eat and that it contains flour, yeast, salt, and water.  No enzymes, flour treatment agents, bleach, reducing agent, emulsifier, or preservatives.

There is one snag with this self-image, which is that I am not very good at making bread.  I've managed milk rolls over the years that weren't bad, in a slightly yeasty sort of way, and a Moroccan flatbread cooked in a hot frying pan, that was pretty good.  I even once, with enormous effort, produced a ciabatta that was quite nice, though not necessarily sufficiently nicer than the ones from Tesco to justify the time spent making it at home.  I made a soda bread the other day as a sort of preparatory move towards bread making.  But producing a proper wholemeal loaf that looked, felt and tasted like bread, rather than having all the texture and flavour of a brick, has eluded me.

It doesn't help my confidence that the books say that wholemeal bread tends to be denser than white.  I prefer wholemeal, for everyday use, but dense is not a good characteristic in the Systems Administrator's eyes when it comes to bread.  The SA would like bread to be fluffy.  Sliced brown bread from the farm shop or supermarket passes muster, but I don't think you can get brown, or rather wholemeal, to fluff up like that at home.  I think you need all the steam and additives the Chorleywood bread process can give you, and maybe a mix of wholemeal and white flour with a dollop of caramel to give that nice brown colour.  I have once or twice experimented with the Cranks recipe book Doris Grant no-knead brown loaf, and I think it came out right, or at least like the bread in Cranks, when there used to be a branch round the corner from my office in the early 90s, but it was much too brick-like for the SA's taste.  Cranks has now retrenched to one branch, in Totnes where they don't mind eating bricks, as long as they are wholefood.

Since yesterday it was raining I decided after we'd been shopping for the Significant Birthday present that I would make bread.  Originally I was thinking of a stollen.  I did make a stollen the Christmas before last, and it came out remarkably well, given my lack of expertise with yeast cookery.  But then I realised I didn't have any marzipan and hadn't soaked the fruit, and that the bag of wholemeal flour was on the elderly side, as was the tub of instant yeast.  The flour smelled all right, so I decided to practice using the most basic ingredients on a bog standard ordinary brown loaf.  If it wasn't very nice I could always feed it to the chickens, since they wouldn't be that fussy, and organic wholemeal flour certainly wasn't going to hurt them.

I decided to go with Andrew Whitely on this one.  His book is slightly ominously titled bread matters.  The state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own.  It was that or Richard Bertinet or Elizabeth David.  Bertinet's book is called Dough: Simple Contemporary Bread, and it leans towards oil enriched doughs made into fancy shapes.  Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery is simply wonderful, but more discursive than I wanted at that moment, since it starts with the history of grain before moving on to the history of milling, reaching different types of oven by page 155 and finally recipes on page 255.  The recipes are hedged around with enough anecdotes and alternative methods to not be entirely confidence inspiring to the nervous cook.  I wanted somebody bossy to tell me what to do.

Andrew Whitley includes a fair amount of pre-amble, including detailed descriptions of the ingredients and methods going into modern commercially produced bread that leave you not really wanting to eat it.  However, once you get on to the recipes on page 141 he does kick off with something called Basic Bread.  I thought that basic bread was what I wanted.  If I could get the hang of that I could start adding walnuts or olives or sundried tomatoes, once I was over the brick stage.  The recipe for one large or two small loaves told me to use 600g of wholemeal flour and 8g fresh yeast.  Now I did not have any fresh yeast, only some Allinson's Dried Active Yeast that was best before the end of July.  I vaguely recalled that to convert from fresh to dried yeast you halved the weight in the recipe, which was also what it said on the tin.  But the tin said to use 15g of dried yeast or one level tablespoon for 650g flour.  600g and 650g aren't so very different, not nearly as different as 4g versus 15g.  I had a nasty feeling the books all cautioned against using too much yeast, as the resulting bread would taste odd, keep badly and otherwise be a sad disappointment, on the other hand I didn't want to be sitting up until two in the morning waiting for the dough to rise if I used too little.

I followed the instructions on the tin.  After all, I don't even know if all dried yeast is the same.  The books tend to be rather sniffy about dried yeast, encouraging you to go and beg some from a local baker, or buy it in a health food shop.  No wonder making your own bread ends up sounding so off-puttingly complicated, if you have to trawl around the local health food shops and negotiate with bakery counter staff before you can even start.  The yeast frothed up gratifyingly in the jug of warm water with a teaspoon of sugar, so had not died since July.  I mixed it into the flour and salt, transferred the dough to a board once the liquid was absorbed as the book said, and kneaded for ten minutes by the clock, then left it to prove for something over two hours next to the Aga, the bowl covered with a damp tea towel.  After a slow start it rose until it was quite a lot bigger.  I shaped it into two loaves as the book told me, not because I especially wanted small loaves but because I only had small tins, and left them for a second proving for something over half an hour.  They did get larger, though not enough to reach the corners of the tins, and I thought that maybe I was heading for brick territory.  The books warn about the dangers of over-proving, which can cause the loaf to collapse, or taste odd, or something, so when they began to feel quite spongy I put them in the bottom of the top oven for ten minutes, then moved them to the top of the bottom for another twenty.

The cooking times in the book were amazingly vague, for a recipe that gave the total weight of ingredients as 1013g and not one kilogramme.  The instructions for telling whether your loaf was cooked weren't cut and dried either, warning that even if the bottom sounded hollow when tapped that didn't mean it was cooked all the way through.  Basically, if it looked cooked it was, and if you didn't know what cooked bread looked like then that was tough.  Keep practising.  I thought the loaves looked cooked after half an hour and decided to risk taking them out of the oven, since overcooked bread would be as nasty as undercooked, and if they were doughy in the middle the chickens would eat them anyway.

We didn't need any bread with supper, so I had to wait until breakfast time to cut a slice and see what they were like.  They were just like real bread.  The crumb was OK all the way through, not soggy in the middle, and it tasted like brown bread, not all weird and yeasty like some of my past efforts.  If I'd been given a slice with soup in a gastropub or restaurant that boasted home made bread I'd have thought it was perfectly fine.  Very nice, in fact.  The Systems Administrator had some for lunch and pronounced it to be good, though with some regret that it wasn't as fluffy as the farm shop sort.

It was pretty straightforward to make, and the washing up didn't take long, just one bowl and the pastry board, plus the tins and cooling rack.  I think the main obstacle to making bread regularly is working out when to do it, since after starting it off you have to come back to do more to it in a couple of hours, for which you need clean hands, and then hover around for the next hour while it proves and cooks.  If your ideal day at home consists of disappearing into the garden after breakfast and then not reappearing until lunchtime, happy and grubby, then making your own bread would disrupt the morning.  If you do it in the evening then unless you get started by six you won't be finished until after you might have liked to go to bed, unless you are by nature an owl rather than a lark.  The ideal might be to find a recipe that would work with the second proving overnight, in the fridge.  Then the initial kneading and shaping the loaves could be done in the evening, after I'd finished gardening for the day and cleaned my hands.  I'd even have fresh bread for breakfast, hot out of the oven, if I weren't in a tearing hurry to get going.

In the meantime they do sell bread in Tesco.

a time of gifts

As December approaches my thoughts are starting to turn to Christmas shopping.  I haven't got anything so far, apart from the pudding (hand made by barn owls, ho ho) and some new Christmas tree lights.  The Systems Administrator got those in Tesco a couple of weeks ago, because noticing the enormous display of them right inside the door reminded me that last year I fitted the last of the spare bulbs to our existing ones when a bulb blew, and had totally omitted to try and source any more bulbs in the intervening period, so if another went then the lights wouldn't work.  I also remembered that last year the shops seemed to sell out of tree lights quite a long time before Christmas.  I was baffled by the choice of lights, having no idea whether we wanted fairy lights or LEDs, so left that to the SA, who said the former because the light was warmer.  Two strings of one hundred lights apiece may be too many, but if it is we can cannibalise one to supply the other with spare bulbs and should never need to buy any more tree lights again, which at five pounds a box can't be bad.

I'm rather worried about the tree, because I'm not at all sure if the plant centre will be selling them this year, or if last year's crop of tall, thin trees represented the last scrapings of the barrel.  The plant centre trees were always extraordinarily cheap, an excellent bargain provided you had a very high ceiling and weren't fussed about the tree not being very bushy, and having to go to another garden centre or B&Q and buy a normal tree at the usual commercial rate is going to be a shock to the system.  I asked the SA if we could chop down an alder that has seeded itself by the wildlife pond where I don't want a full sized tree, and have a deciduous Christmas tree instead, but the SA said that while I could if I wanted it would look rather Blue Peter made out of coat-hangersish.  Which it probably would.  But it would be free, and incredibly green.

Anyway, I haven't got as far as Christmas presents.  Indeed, the SA and I went today and finally bought the last part of my present for my Significant Birthday, and that was over two months ago.  The SA said on the day that I could have a piece of jewellery but that it would be better if I chose it, and that we might see something on holiday, but we didn't, and I didn't find anything I especially liked in my favoured craft jewellers in Colchester.  A friend had told me that there was a talented designer and maker in Thorpe le Soken, and sported a very pretty necklace from her to prove it, so I'd been planning to go there on a wet day and when I was in the right mood for shopping.  I found a necklace of smoky quartz beads with a silver and gold leaf pendant (it is made in the shape of a leaf, and decorated with gold leaf) which I liked very much, so took the SA back with me after lunch to make the ceremonial purchase.  I could have bought it the first time I was there and presented the bill, but that isn't the same.  The jeweller made it into a beautiful package while we watched, which seemed a slight waste when I was going to unwrap it again as soon as I got home, but was fun.  The quartz beads are cut with facets so that they catch the light and sparkle gently, and the quartz seems to change colour from soft black to brown, and from opaque to translucent, depending on the light source.  The jeweller is called Marisa Arna, she has a shop in Thorpe le Soken High Street, sells her own off-the-peg designs or will work to commission.  You could get something simple but good in silver and have change from forty pounds, then prices go up from there.  Her style is more bohemian arty than Mappin and Webb.  I loved it.

But that doesn't solve the question of Christmas presents.  Martin Lewis has written an article in the Telegraph asking if it is time to ban Christmas presents.  He argues from an economist's perspective that the social requirement to reciprocate gifts distorts spending priorities, and that people end up spending money they can't afford in order to end up owning things that wouldn't have been their top choice of what to buy.  Gifts should be for children only.  This is moderately amusing, though somebody (possibly Martin Lewis) has certainly made the same point in an article in a previous year.  It contains a grain of truth but also a couple of fallacies.  Firstly, it is possible by mutual consent and without having to invest in a special app that sends out formal No Gifts requests to your friends and relations, to limit the circle of people with whom you exchange presents and the amount that you each spend.  Secondly, it is not necessarily the case that presents have to be Gifts, as in useless clutter that the recipient doesn't need or want.

I like presents, hence I am very pleased to be the possessor of a smoky quartz and silver and gold leaf necklace that until this afternoon was sitting in a showroom in Thorpe le Soken.  I am happy to be allowed to choose something I really like, though I enjoy surprises.  Provided they are something I want.  Another article in the Telegraph said that British women are the recipients of £100m of unwanted lingerie every year.  The Systems Administrator and I solve this problem by mostly giving each other books.  In fact, I give practically everybody books.  Admittedly, it is easier if you live with someone and can check the bookshelves to see what they've already got, but failing that if you stick to titles that were only recently published you're relatively safe.  The SA and I have pact about not buying books for ourselves within four to six weeks of birthdays and Christmas (except for really obscure titles that the other could never possibly think of) to make it easier, and I know at least one pair of friends who have a similar arrangement.

The Kindle makes it more difficult, without that row of spines to check out on the bookcase.  Looking at somebody else's Kindle feels vaguely intrusive, only one step away from looking at their mobile phone.  And I don't know why Amazon still haven't introduced the technology for making gift purchases of kindle titles in time for Christmas.  Another Amazon innovation I'd like to see is the ability to tag books bought as presents when you buy them, so that later on you could search by the name of the recipient and see what you'd previously bought for them.  At the moment you can only look up each order.  They go back an impressively long way, but it would be very handy to be able to check which detective stories I've already given to my mother, for example.

The most difficult aspect of present giving, and the reason why people end up giving and receiving Gifts, is when social convention dictates you have to give something to somebody you don't know that well.  You don't know enough about their tastes, or pet authors, or hobbies in the event that they don't like books, to be able to make a reasonable stab at choosing something that they might really like.  My default position is champagne and chocolate, but that's not foolproof.  Not everybody likes champagne, or chocolate.  We have a growing collection of bottles of port, given to us by people who meant kindly but didn't know that we don't drink the stuff.

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.