I woke up this morning, and realised that it was Christmas Day. I remember how exciting that felt as a child, knowing that the pillowcase at the end of the bed would be bulging with interesting packages. I am not that excited nowadays, but it was a pleasant thought that it was Christmas. It was warm in bed, and I lingered before I got up. Newspaper websites have been stuffed full with articles about what to wear for Christmas day, and whether novelty jumpers can be worn ironically, or simply worn. I detest novelty jumpers. If you are spending Christmas at home where your pets will clamber on you, and planning to enter a kitchen at some point, then there is no point in wearing anything that will make you stressed about getting cat hair or cooking splashes on it. I put on a pair of velvet trousers that started off several years ago as trousers to wear to other people's houses, and are now worn at home, but only when guests are present or for special occasions, and a newish t-shirt with a neck low enough that I can wear the necklace the Systems Administrator gave me for my birthday. That's only possible at this time of the year because we have cranked the heating up for the holiday, otherwise the necklace would be buried under layers of sweaters.
The newspapers have also been full of articles by journalists saying that Christmas is really for children, as if people without them shouldn't give each other presents, or enjoy themselves. Presumably these writers have children, and have fallen into the trap of believing that everyone else should be like them. But our Christmas has evolved its own customs and traditions, which we follow and enjoy. The fact that it isn't child centred doesn't create a void, it just makes it different. After the SA had put up the greenery, I brought out the festive red tablecloth, which we always have on the table at Christmas, though after many years of use it is stained with drips of candle wax that don't come out in the wash. On top of the red tablecloth goes the traditional white lace cloth. Christmas cards that won't fit anywhere else, and those that have been evicted from the mantelpiece, go at the far end of the table, with the giant candle. I discovered what was wrong with that, which was that a great wall of wax had built up round the outside as the centre burned down to the point where the flame began to run out of air, while the wick had fallen into the wet wax the last time it was used and entombed itself. I trimmed the surplus edges, excavated the wick, and it will be fine. I put fresh candles in the candelabra (it's pressed metal from Ikea, nothing grand) and rather wobbly hand-dipped by me beeswax candles in the iron candlesticks, ready for the next day. It all looked very pretty.
Ten minutes later the big tabby knocked over the jug of alstroemerias, causing a flood that needed three towels to mop it up, and we had to eat our traditional Christmas Eve steak and chips off a damp tablecloth. There was still a towel wedged underneath, so you had to be careful not to put your wineglass on the slope where it stopped.
Before supper we listened to a CD reissue of an album Frost and Fire by the Watersons. It was first released in 1965, and my father had a copy on vinyl when I was growing up. We listen to this every Christmas Eve without fail, though never during the rest of the year. Other folk groups have attempted that kind of a capella harmony singing since the Watersons, and none have matched their wild brilliance. Frost and Fire is an antidote to all the media wails about how Christianity has been squeezed out of the modern Christmas. Sorry guys, but human beings have been celebrating the turning of the year during the depths of winter since long before Jesus of Nazareth came on the scene. Christianity doesn't have a monopoly on Christmas.
After the Watersons we listened to Thea Gilmore's superb Strange Communion, which has become part of the Christmas tradition since I heard a song from it on the radio a few year's back and bought the album. The lyrics of one track are a reading of an extract from Lous MacNeice's Autumn Journal, and by a strange coincidence in the same year that I bought the album I also suggested the book to my mother when she asked me what I'd like for Christmas, again on the back of hearing an extract from it on Radio 4. Then I snuck in a highbrow Advent from Saint Paul's on the Hyperion label while the Systems Administrator was cooking the supper, and after supper the SA went completely off-message with the Second South Carolina String Band, which is not traditional. The American Civil War doesn't have anything to do with Christmas, the SA just felt like listening to it.
The SA is now composing the timetable for cooking lunch. We are having chicken, not turkey, since neither of us is especially keen on turkey, and a whole turkey is too large for two people even if they like turkey to start with. The chicken is larger than the SA is used to cooking, and the SA has suspiciously checked the suggested cooking time on the packaging with the formula for chicken roasting times in the Aga book. Part of the point of the timetable is so that the triumphant appearance of lunch is not spoiled by my demanding to know where the chestnut stuffing is, and the SA's shamed admission that it didn't get cooked. I don't think this has actually happened, though there have been years when lunch has been delayed by the SA's horrified discovery of some key ingredient that didn't go in the oven when it should have. There was a year when I bought red currant jelly by mistake, instead of cranberry, which upset me more than the SA, who can take cranberry sauce or leave it. My contribution will be to peel the sprouts, which have made the spare room smell faintly of cabbage, and make the rum butter. There was a year when I followed the book and added lemon juice and nutmeg, and it tasted disagreeably of lemons and nutmeg. Nowadays I only use butter, sugar and rum.
Lunch will probably be on the late side, since the timetable always seems to slip, but that doesn't matter. Afterwards we will not go for a walk. My parents believed in a walk after lunch, and have tried dragging us out when staying here for Christmas. Indeed I think I may have capitulated. But really and truly, after a large and late lunch neither of us feels like walking, and the walks around the lettuce farm at this time of year consist of vistas of muddy fields. If you walk far enough you can get to the local woods, and watch the leafless trees drip. Better to sit in front of the fire. We won't watch a film on Christmas Day, though we might tomorrow night with the traditional Boxing Day cheese fest, and we don't watch TV, so there will be no arguing over the remote control. The SA will record Downton Abbey to watch tomorrow sans adverts, squeezed in among the Boxing Day racing coverage, though it is pretty tricky to avoid the plot giveaways in the Telegraph following each episode of Downton. My money was on Matthew Crawley being killed in a Boxing Day shooting accident, if they have to write him out, but I am beginning to suspect that
Dan Stevens will do another series, and has just been spoofing his fans for the publicity, once the will-he won't-he with Lady Mary was sorted out.
The stollen was fine, by the way. I have just eaten a piece for breakfast. The dough didn't rise as much as my friend's bread dough, but I assume that was the effect of the butter and egg dragging it down. It is very difficult to judge whether a stollen is cooked or not, when it is exuding melted marzipan from both ends, and it looked horribly unpromising when it came out of the oven, since the sultanas nearest the outside had broken free of the rather loose dough to stand proud like ticks on the cat, and then burned. I picked them off, but couldn't dust the stollen with icing sugar because I discovered I didn't have any. I used the last bit of it to shake on the bees, to encourage them to groom themselves and so remove varroa mites.
The Systems Administrator is now laying the fire in the sitting room, following which we will prep the vegetables. Have a good Christmas yourself.
Tuesday, 25 December 2012
Monday, 24 December 2012
the day before Christmas
The Systems Administrator kicked off Christmas Eve by going to the dentist for a replacement temporary filling, since last week's filling proved so temporary that half of it disintegrated over the weekend. The dentist said that the seal over the drilled out root was still intact, so the tooth shouldn't have got infected, but lunch will be delayed since the SA is not supposed to eat anything until at least two o'clock, to give whatever it is that they make temporary fillings out of time to set. The SA's brother claims that their father once did an emergency repair on his own tooth with araldite.
I am attempting to bake a stollen, buoyed up by the experience of having made three successive batches of edible bread. Stollen is a more elaborate affair, requiring a starter dough that ferments away for an hour before being added to the rest of the flour. Once again in the absence of fresh yeast I had to guess how much dried yeast would do it, and have gone for half a teaspoon for the 160 grammes of flour in the recipe. The initial ferment rose up, so I know the yeast is working. Once the ferment is ready you add it to the rest of the ingredients, and knead for ten minutes, in the course of which you can feel the dough changing texture and become silkier under your hand. The resulting dough is now sitting by the Aga and seems a bit slow to rise as much as I feel it should, but since I added the butter almost straight out of the fridge it probably started off cooler than it was meant to. The book is alarmingly precise about all sorts of things, telling me that the milk in the ferment should be at 32 degrees, but I really can't cope with that. Human beings have been making leavened bread for centuries without the aid of thermometers. The milk came out of the fridge because that's where you keep milk. The dough is by the Aga which is warm. When it's ready, it's ready. I did remember to put the fruit to soak in brandy yesterday. One of the difficulties with making bread is all the things you discover you should have done hours ago.
The SA is waiting for the greenery to dry. Every year the SA always decorates the mantelpiece with holly and ivy, and constructs a less traditional display of ivy and flashing white lights up the banisters. This can only be done on Christmas Eve. The SA's mother, who was from north Wales, firmly believed that it was bad luck to bring the greenery in any sooner (as it was bad luck to give a knife, which must always be paid for with a token penny), and the SA, an ultra-rationalist in most respects, equally insists that the mantelpiece must be done on Christmas Eve, no sooner. The tree is exempt from this condition, it's just the stairs and the mantelpiece that have to wait. It is going to be a rather green arrangement, since it was a terrible year for berries, and the birds have already eaten most of the few that there were. The SA managed to find one spray of hips on a self-seeded climbing rose that lurks among the shrubby ivy at the edge of the wood, and some hips on the climbing rose 'Meg', though they are more brown than the usual pleasant coral pink. We do have some pine cones saved from last year's tree, and raffia in three different colours, so I expect the SA will manage something. We'll just have to tell ourselves that holly berries and rose hips are so 2011.
I need to investigate the giant glass candle holder and candle that were a wedding anniversary present a few years ago. It lives in the spare bedroom, and only comes out at Christmas, since cats and glass objects don't make a good combination through the year. Accidents don't happen that often, but every breakable bowl that I ever tried to keep on the dining table was eventually broken, even a wooden one. I have a nasty feeling that the glass may be sooted up from last year, so I may end up scrubbing away at that while I listen to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, which will keep me out from under the SA's feet while the SA decorates the mantelpiece. The presents are still in the spare room for safe keeping, and won't go under the tree until Christmas morning, in case of cat-related disasters. On the spare bed is a magnificently middle class arrangement of a cardboard box containing a sprout stalk from the farm shop, complete with leaves, a cut glass bowl full of oranges, put there because the fridge was full and the spare room is almost as cold as a fridge, and the December selection from Hotel Chocolat.
Back to the stollen now. I'll let you know how I got on. Have a nice Christmas
I am attempting to bake a stollen, buoyed up by the experience of having made three successive batches of edible bread. Stollen is a more elaborate affair, requiring a starter dough that ferments away for an hour before being added to the rest of the flour. Once again in the absence of fresh yeast I had to guess how much dried yeast would do it, and have gone for half a teaspoon for the 160 grammes of flour in the recipe. The initial ferment rose up, so I know the yeast is working. Once the ferment is ready you add it to the rest of the ingredients, and knead for ten minutes, in the course of which you can feel the dough changing texture and become silkier under your hand. The resulting dough is now sitting by the Aga and seems a bit slow to rise as much as I feel it should, but since I added the butter almost straight out of the fridge it probably started off cooler than it was meant to. The book is alarmingly precise about all sorts of things, telling me that the milk in the ferment should be at 32 degrees, but I really can't cope with that. Human beings have been making leavened bread for centuries without the aid of thermometers. The milk came out of the fridge because that's where you keep milk. The dough is by the Aga which is warm. When it's ready, it's ready. I did remember to put the fruit to soak in brandy yesterday. One of the difficulties with making bread is all the things you discover you should have done hours ago.
The SA is waiting for the greenery to dry. Every year the SA always decorates the mantelpiece with holly and ivy, and constructs a less traditional display of ivy and flashing white lights up the banisters. This can only be done on Christmas Eve. The SA's mother, who was from north Wales, firmly believed that it was bad luck to bring the greenery in any sooner (as it was bad luck to give a knife, which must always be paid for with a token penny), and the SA, an ultra-rationalist in most respects, equally insists that the mantelpiece must be done on Christmas Eve, no sooner. The tree is exempt from this condition, it's just the stairs and the mantelpiece that have to wait. It is going to be a rather green arrangement, since it was a terrible year for berries, and the birds have already eaten most of the few that there were. The SA managed to find one spray of hips on a self-seeded climbing rose that lurks among the shrubby ivy at the edge of the wood, and some hips on the climbing rose 'Meg', though they are more brown than the usual pleasant coral pink. We do have some pine cones saved from last year's tree, and raffia in three different colours, so I expect the SA will manage something. We'll just have to tell ourselves that holly berries and rose hips are so 2011.
I need to investigate the giant glass candle holder and candle that were a wedding anniversary present a few years ago. It lives in the spare bedroom, and only comes out at Christmas, since cats and glass objects don't make a good combination through the year. Accidents don't happen that often, but every breakable bowl that I ever tried to keep on the dining table was eventually broken, even a wooden one. I have a nasty feeling that the glass may be sooted up from last year, so I may end up scrubbing away at that while I listen to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, which will keep me out from under the SA's feet while the SA decorates the mantelpiece. The presents are still in the spare room for safe keeping, and won't go under the tree until Christmas morning, in case of cat-related disasters. On the spare bed is a magnificently middle class arrangement of a cardboard box containing a sprout stalk from the farm shop, complete with leaves, a cut glass bowl full of oranges, put there because the fridge was full and the spare room is almost as cold as a fridge, and the December selection from Hotel Chocolat.
Back to the stollen now. I'll let you know how I got on. Have a nice Christmas
Sunday, 23 December 2012
preparations for a family lunch
It is not raining, and I could be outside. The Systems Administrator is in the garden, finding out whether copious quantities of Easystart will persuade the lawn tractor to splutter into life, that has been parked on the top lawn with a trailer full of herbaceous prunings bound for the compost heap for rather too long, since the SA's tooth went into meltdown, and then it seemed as though the Mayans might have been right after all, only the end of the world was to come gradually by flooding rather than being instantaneous.
I am not in the garden, because my parents are coming to lunch, and there isn't time to do anything useful and get cleaned up again in the hour and twenty minutes before they arrive. I don't mind that. It's quite restful, once a year, to have an excuse not to charge about doing things all the time.
As they are my parents and I invited them, I volunteered to do the cooking. Cooking for them and the Systems Administrator is not the easiest thing, since we all have our own personal preferences for things that we can't or won't eat. The SA and I seem to find enough in common to enjoy a reasonably varied diet, and I eat quite a lot of the same food as my parents. After all, they brought me up. Put all four of us together and the central intersection in the Venn diagram of everybody's chosen foods is alarmingly small.
I often do chicken. Chicken is safe and uncontentious and it goes with mushrooms and leeks and carrots and other vegetables that everybody likes. It is also the only kind of meat I know how to roast. The SA is normally in charge of roasts in our house, while I mainly do baking and boiled things. But it is too close to Christmas to have chicken, since in two days time everybody will be having chicken again, or turkey. So we can't have roast chicken, or my standby chicken stew with bacon and shallots vaguely based on a reading of the Penguin Cordon Bleu cookery book over three decades ago.
It's partly a clash over seasonings. The SA and I both like garlic, curry spices and chilli, and eat accordingly, but my mother dislikes all of them. My parents eat fish, including anchovies, which are a standard modern cookery book flavouring if you're not going down the garlic route, but the SA is allergic to fish. I'd be quite happy to head towards Eastern Europe and cook with dried fruit, if I can't have garlic, but the SA isn't keen on fruit with meat, except for apple sauce with pork. So many recipes in modern cookery books include spinach that you'd think the stuff was a food staple, but the SA is allergic to spinach, which rules out all sorts of Italian inspired feta parcels and suchlike. The SA said helpfully that I could do my pork with the olives, but I'm afraid I did that last time. Otherwise I seem to end up feeding them from a menu that rotates between seasoning with thyme, or a couple of sprigs of rosemary, or goulash. Today is a rosemary and bay leaf day, a Diana Henry recipe for lamb which includes some chorizo and smoked paprika by way of a change. In the book she includes garlic, but I had to leave that out.
Puddings are almost as tricky. I don't want anything that needs last minute preparation, demanding to be eaten immediately, which means either something that can be cooked in advance and kept in the simmer oven without spoiling, or a cold pudding. It's tempting just to go for fruit crumble, which has the great merit that it will sit happily keeping warm for a long time, and still be worth eating at the end of it. I love home made fruit crumble, but I don't want to overdo it. My mother loves chocolate but will eat fruit, my father loves fruit and is indifferent to chocolate, the SA is indifferent to pudding. Modern trendy books, like Diana Henry's, seem to include an awful lot of puddings where the instruction is to Eat Immediately or Rest for ten minutes before serving. Even if I could time cooking the pudding so precisely that I knew when it was going to be ready to Eat Immediately, I couldn't tell you how long my family are going to take to finish their main course and be ready for pudding. My old fashioned and completely un-trendy copy of the Good Housekeepers Cookery Book has a section on Cold Puddings, which sounds unromantic but is very sensible of it. Most of them are made with large amounts of cream, which my father is not supposed to eat because of his high cholesterol, or raw eggs. Raw eggs are a no-no for anyone whose had cancer treatment, and probably not a brilliant idea for anyone in their seventies or eighties, given that age depresses the immune system even in people who are otherwise thoroughly healthy.
I settled for a choice between lemon syllabub (more or less pure cream, but hell, it's Christmas, and at least it contains some vitamin C), mince pies, and a bowl of tangerines and clementines as a healthy eating option, so sorry Mum, no chocolate. I'm sure there'll be plenty of that to eat over Christmas anyway. I haven't finished the syllabub yet, since when I read the recipe more carefully I was supposed to soak the grated peel in the lemon juice for two to three hours. Two hours puts me on course for final assembly 11.30, which is tight, but do-able. I have washed the Moroccan tea glasses in readiness.
The SA is doing the last minute vacuum. We are going to have to fix the flap on the bottom of the dust box. The central heating has been churning away since half past nine, the fire is burning, and three balls have descended in the Galilean thermometer. My parents know to wear warm clothes, when they come to our house.
I am not in the garden, because my parents are coming to lunch, and there isn't time to do anything useful and get cleaned up again in the hour and twenty minutes before they arrive. I don't mind that. It's quite restful, once a year, to have an excuse not to charge about doing things all the time.
As they are my parents and I invited them, I volunteered to do the cooking. Cooking for them and the Systems Administrator is not the easiest thing, since we all have our own personal preferences for things that we can't or won't eat. The SA and I seem to find enough in common to enjoy a reasonably varied diet, and I eat quite a lot of the same food as my parents. After all, they brought me up. Put all four of us together and the central intersection in the Venn diagram of everybody's chosen foods is alarmingly small.
I often do chicken. Chicken is safe and uncontentious and it goes with mushrooms and leeks and carrots and other vegetables that everybody likes. It is also the only kind of meat I know how to roast. The SA is normally in charge of roasts in our house, while I mainly do baking and boiled things. But it is too close to Christmas to have chicken, since in two days time everybody will be having chicken again, or turkey. So we can't have roast chicken, or my standby chicken stew with bacon and shallots vaguely based on a reading of the Penguin Cordon Bleu cookery book over three decades ago.
It's partly a clash over seasonings. The SA and I both like garlic, curry spices and chilli, and eat accordingly, but my mother dislikes all of them. My parents eat fish, including anchovies, which are a standard modern cookery book flavouring if you're not going down the garlic route, but the SA is allergic to fish. I'd be quite happy to head towards Eastern Europe and cook with dried fruit, if I can't have garlic, but the SA isn't keen on fruit with meat, except for apple sauce with pork. So many recipes in modern cookery books include spinach that you'd think the stuff was a food staple, but the SA is allergic to spinach, which rules out all sorts of Italian inspired feta parcels and suchlike. The SA said helpfully that I could do my pork with the olives, but I'm afraid I did that last time. Otherwise I seem to end up feeding them from a menu that rotates between seasoning with thyme, or a couple of sprigs of rosemary, or goulash. Today is a rosemary and bay leaf day, a Diana Henry recipe for lamb which includes some chorizo and smoked paprika by way of a change. In the book she includes garlic, but I had to leave that out.
Puddings are almost as tricky. I don't want anything that needs last minute preparation, demanding to be eaten immediately, which means either something that can be cooked in advance and kept in the simmer oven without spoiling, or a cold pudding. It's tempting just to go for fruit crumble, which has the great merit that it will sit happily keeping warm for a long time, and still be worth eating at the end of it. I love home made fruit crumble, but I don't want to overdo it. My mother loves chocolate but will eat fruit, my father loves fruit and is indifferent to chocolate, the SA is indifferent to pudding. Modern trendy books, like Diana Henry's, seem to include an awful lot of puddings where the instruction is to Eat Immediately or Rest for ten minutes before serving. Even if I could time cooking the pudding so precisely that I knew when it was going to be ready to Eat Immediately, I couldn't tell you how long my family are going to take to finish their main course and be ready for pudding. My old fashioned and completely un-trendy copy of the Good Housekeepers Cookery Book has a section on Cold Puddings, which sounds unromantic but is very sensible of it. Most of them are made with large amounts of cream, which my father is not supposed to eat because of his high cholesterol, or raw eggs. Raw eggs are a no-no for anyone whose had cancer treatment, and probably not a brilliant idea for anyone in their seventies or eighties, given that age depresses the immune system even in people who are otherwise thoroughly healthy.
I settled for a choice between lemon syllabub (more or less pure cream, but hell, it's Christmas, and at least it contains some vitamin C), mince pies, and a bowl of tangerines and clementines as a healthy eating option, so sorry Mum, no chocolate. I'm sure there'll be plenty of that to eat over Christmas anyway. I haven't finished the syllabub yet, since when I read the recipe more carefully I was supposed to soak the grated peel in the lemon juice for two to three hours. Two hours puts me on course for final assembly 11.30, which is tight, but do-able. I have washed the Moroccan tea glasses in readiness.
The SA is doing the last minute vacuum. We are going to have to fix the flap on the bottom of the dust box. The central heating has been churning away since half past nine, the fire is burning, and three balls have descended in the Galilean thermometer. My parents know to wear warm clothes, when they come to our house.
Saturday, 22 December 2012
the big shop
This morning's post produced another small flurry of Christmas cards. I was pleased to find one from an old school friend with whom I have just, miraculously, stayed in touch for over thirty years while she clawed her way up to a partnership in a City law firm, and produced three children, the oldest now at university. I don't know at what age City partners are expected to make way for the next up-and-coming generation of solicitors, but I reckon that if we can keep it up for another decade she'll be retired and with the children all launched into the world, and we might finally have time to go out to lunch or to some museums. I fancy Carlyle's house. Still haven't been there yet, so what's another ten years?
We also received the sort of utterly pointless card that gives the ritual sending of cards a bad name. It was not strictly speaking for us, although the envelope had the name of our house on it and the postman put it through our letterbox, since it was addressed to the couple we bought the house from. They moved out nineteen years ago, and she has been dead for two years. For many years I used to take post round for them which arrived here, which they seemed to appreciate since as he pointed out, their friends were getting on and sometimes got a bit muddled. After about a dozen years or so of redirecting mail I began to feel that anyone who still hadn't twigged that they'd moved couldn't be a very close friend. But who on earth wants a card addressed to him and his dead wife at a house he left nearly two decades ago?
The Systems Administrator produced a little clutch of cards from a coat pocket, left there since the office reunion on Thursday night. I exclaimed that Eileen had sent us a Christmas card, and we hadn't given her one, but the SA said matter of factly that Eileen always sent a card. I have never, ever written a card for Eileen and George, and the SA never sends cards at all, so she must be resigned by now to the one-sided exchange to keep doing it.
I went to Waitrose to do the last stage of the Christmas shop. Actually, I spent virtually the entire morning in Waitrose. I began to work out that it was going to be busy when I had to hover in the car park just to get a space. Fortunately because it was Waitrose all the other customers were very polite about holding back and letting whoever was waiting for the space have first dibs at it. There were no trolleys by the store entrance and I had to go and retrieve one from the car park.
Waitrose was bedlam. There were already queues stretching back literally half way up the aisles. I only went in there for a gammon joint and some nuts, since their gammons and nibbles are better than Tesco, but once I'd looked at the size of the queue I decided I was buying everything on the list. I certainly wasn't going to wait in that queue so that afterwards I could go and wait again in a Tesco queue. Finding everything on the list took a long time, partly because I don't know where most things in Waitrose are, and partly because the aisles were blocked by the queues for the tills.
The basics were starting to run out. Staff were replenishing shelves of brandy sauce and other festive fare as quickly as they could, but there was almost no tinned cat food left, and only one packet of firelighters. They were the unwrapped sort that make your fingers smell when you lay the fire, and they were right at the back of a top shelf where I had to ask a member of staff to reach them for me, because I couldn't. I waited until somebody tall came by, and he could only just touch them
I thought I was going to be defeated by the fresh orange juice, which I wanted to mix with cava on Christmas morning. We always have orange juice and fizz then, while opening the presents. The fruit juice section was close to the checkouts and jam-packed with queuing trolleys, and I had to ask the woman to move whose trolley was blocking the orange juice and who was too busy telling someone on her mobile phone how bad the queue was to think of getting out of the way, as I reached over her mountain of shopping trying to pick up bottles of OJ with my fingertips. The bottles at the front of the shelf were all best before 23 December, and I cursed inwardly, thinking that I was not going through these queues again just to buy orange juice. I searched the bottles at the back of the shelf, which Waitrose do not want me to do because they want to sell the shortest dated ones first, and managed to find two that were good until Christmas day.
The only example of bad behaviour was in the cheese section, where two small boys were playing with the packets of cheese on the bottom shelf as if they were toy bricks. I stared at them in distaste and some disbelief, thinking that they couldn't be out by themselves at that age and that someone ought to be in charge of them. A woman standing nearby didn't look as though they were anything to do with her. I caught the eye of a man standing just down the aisle, my expression conveying my opinion that children were revolting, playing like that with food that other people were going to buy, and they turned out to be his. Having previously watched unconcerned as his offspring trashed the cheese section he finally told them to move out of the way. Sir, my taxes go towards paying child benefit and child tax credits and god knows what other entitlements towards the costs of raising the next generation. The least you can do is keep them under control in public, particularly where food's involved.
I think we have enough. Well, I'm sure that we have more than enough. We have sufficient food to keep us going for a fortnight. The question is more whether we have all the right food, or whether some vital part of the ritual meal will be found to be lacking at the eleventh hour. I don't think it will be, but if it is we will jolly well have to improvise and start a new tradition, because I am not going back into a supermarket between now and December 27.
We also received the sort of utterly pointless card that gives the ritual sending of cards a bad name. It was not strictly speaking for us, although the envelope had the name of our house on it and the postman put it through our letterbox, since it was addressed to the couple we bought the house from. They moved out nineteen years ago, and she has been dead for two years. For many years I used to take post round for them which arrived here, which they seemed to appreciate since as he pointed out, their friends were getting on and sometimes got a bit muddled. After about a dozen years or so of redirecting mail I began to feel that anyone who still hadn't twigged that they'd moved couldn't be a very close friend. But who on earth wants a card addressed to him and his dead wife at a house he left nearly two decades ago?
The Systems Administrator produced a little clutch of cards from a coat pocket, left there since the office reunion on Thursday night. I exclaimed that Eileen had sent us a Christmas card, and we hadn't given her one, but the SA said matter of factly that Eileen always sent a card. I have never, ever written a card for Eileen and George, and the SA never sends cards at all, so she must be resigned by now to the one-sided exchange to keep doing it.
I went to Waitrose to do the last stage of the Christmas shop. Actually, I spent virtually the entire morning in Waitrose. I began to work out that it was going to be busy when I had to hover in the car park just to get a space. Fortunately because it was Waitrose all the other customers were very polite about holding back and letting whoever was waiting for the space have first dibs at it. There were no trolleys by the store entrance and I had to go and retrieve one from the car park.
Waitrose was bedlam. There were already queues stretching back literally half way up the aisles. I only went in there for a gammon joint and some nuts, since their gammons and nibbles are better than Tesco, but once I'd looked at the size of the queue I decided I was buying everything on the list. I certainly wasn't going to wait in that queue so that afterwards I could go and wait again in a Tesco queue. Finding everything on the list took a long time, partly because I don't know where most things in Waitrose are, and partly because the aisles were blocked by the queues for the tills.
The basics were starting to run out. Staff were replenishing shelves of brandy sauce and other festive fare as quickly as they could, but there was almost no tinned cat food left, and only one packet of firelighters. They were the unwrapped sort that make your fingers smell when you lay the fire, and they were right at the back of a top shelf where I had to ask a member of staff to reach them for me, because I couldn't. I waited until somebody tall came by, and he could only just touch them
I thought I was going to be defeated by the fresh orange juice, which I wanted to mix with cava on Christmas morning. We always have orange juice and fizz then, while opening the presents. The fruit juice section was close to the checkouts and jam-packed with queuing trolleys, and I had to ask the woman to move whose trolley was blocking the orange juice and who was too busy telling someone on her mobile phone how bad the queue was to think of getting out of the way, as I reached over her mountain of shopping trying to pick up bottles of OJ with my fingertips. The bottles at the front of the shelf were all best before 23 December, and I cursed inwardly, thinking that I was not going through these queues again just to buy orange juice. I searched the bottles at the back of the shelf, which Waitrose do not want me to do because they want to sell the shortest dated ones first, and managed to find two that were good until Christmas day.
The only example of bad behaviour was in the cheese section, where two small boys were playing with the packets of cheese on the bottom shelf as if they were toy bricks. I stared at them in distaste and some disbelief, thinking that they couldn't be out by themselves at that age and that someone ought to be in charge of them. A woman standing nearby didn't look as though they were anything to do with her. I caught the eye of a man standing just down the aisle, my expression conveying my opinion that children were revolting, playing like that with food that other people were going to buy, and they turned out to be his. Having previously watched unconcerned as his offspring trashed the cheese section he finally told them to move out of the way. Sir, my taxes go towards paying child benefit and child tax credits and god knows what other entitlements towards the costs of raising the next generation. The least you can do is keep them under control in public, particularly where food's involved.
I think we have enough. Well, I'm sure that we have more than enough. We have sufficient food to keep us going for a fortnight. The question is more whether we have all the right food, or whether some vital part of the ritual meal will be found to be lacking at the eleventh hour. I don't think it will be, but if it is we will jolly well have to improvise and start a new tradition, because I am not going back into a supermarket between now and December 27.
Friday, 21 December 2012
countdown to Christmas
It wasn't raining today, so I could theoretically have been out in the garden, but the ground would have been sodden, and I had cleaning to do. I am rather dismayed at the way that the end of the house I started with is getting dirty again, even before I've got to the other end. The cats have been treading bits of leaf on to my clean kitchen floor, and the Systems Administrator has left tea stains on to the worktop by the kettle, where I scrubbed the last lot off with bicarbonate of soda. At the current rate of progress I can see the cleaning stretching into a third day, though the SA has promised to help with the vacuuming tomorrow.
Today the SA has escaped the domestic upheaval by going to London again for another lunch, this time the annual old lags' lunch. It is an annual event. I asked where they were meeting, as I drove the SA to the railway station, but that was a redundant question, because they are meeting in the George and Vulture. They always meet in the George and Vulture. Everybody at the lunch once worked with somebody else, and nobody worked with everybody. Some of them are still working, which is partly why the lunch is traditionally held so close to Christmas, after the corporate entertainment season has finished. The rest of the year they remain united by a shared love of cricket.
I took advantage of the SA's absence to wrap my Christmas presents on the kitchen table, instead of kneeling on the bedroom floor. Carpets and sticky tape don't really go together. We have a friend whose parcels are always marvels of precision, and I can never work out how she gets them so neat, with the same amount of paper folded over at each end, and no wrinkles in her cellotape. Most of the things I have to wrap up are books, which ought to be straightforward, since they are both rectangular and solid, but mine tend to come out slightly wonky, even using the table. The hopelessly lumpy and irregular presents are almost easier to wrap, since I just swathe them in gold tissue paper.
We are past the point of no return for Christmas cards, as the last posting date was yesterday, even first class. I took the last minute decision to add a few names to our list, on the basis that if we've eaten a meal in their house in the past year we are probably now on Christmas card terms, and today's post brought a card from one of them to us. Phew. Got that one right. I sent one last week to somebody I don't know terribly well, but who is waiting to go into hospital for surgery, offering help afterwards if needed. Newspaper articles about offers of assistance to friends and acquaintances in a tight spot always say Be specific, don't just say to let you know if there's anything you can do, so I offered help with shopping or some home cooking. It is hard to know what to say, since you don't want to be intrusive, but they rang this morning, sounding genuinely touched. I was chatting about the usefulness versus wastefulness of Christmas cards with a colleague on Monday, and she was pleased to have received a card from someone she had lost touch with and not seen for years. Even in the days of theoretical constant communication via Facebook, to have an annual ritual excuse to make contact with people can be useful.
I almost forgot that the world was due to end. My theory about the Mayan calender is that they must have got to the bottom of the piece of stone it was written on and run out of space, like Thurber's famous dog with really short legs, that came out that way because it started off as a doodle on a notepad, and he got to the bottom of the page without enough room for them.
Today the SA has escaped the domestic upheaval by going to London again for another lunch, this time the annual old lags' lunch. It is an annual event. I asked where they were meeting, as I drove the SA to the railway station, but that was a redundant question, because they are meeting in the George and Vulture. They always meet in the George and Vulture. Everybody at the lunch once worked with somebody else, and nobody worked with everybody. Some of them are still working, which is partly why the lunch is traditionally held so close to Christmas, after the corporate entertainment season has finished. The rest of the year they remain united by a shared love of cricket.
I took advantage of the SA's absence to wrap my Christmas presents on the kitchen table, instead of kneeling on the bedroom floor. Carpets and sticky tape don't really go together. We have a friend whose parcels are always marvels of precision, and I can never work out how she gets them so neat, with the same amount of paper folded over at each end, and no wrinkles in her cellotape. Most of the things I have to wrap up are books, which ought to be straightforward, since they are both rectangular and solid, but mine tend to come out slightly wonky, even using the table. The hopelessly lumpy and irregular presents are almost easier to wrap, since I just swathe them in gold tissue paper.
We are past the point of no return for Christmas cards, as the last posting date was yesterday, even first class. I took the last minute decision to add a few names to our list, on the basis that if we've eaten a meal in their house in the past year we are probably now on Christmas card terms, and today's post brought a card from one of them to us. Phew. Got that one right. I sent one last week to somebody I don't know terribly well, but who is waiting to go into hospital for surgery, offering help afterwards if needed. Newspaper articles about offers of assistance to friends and acquaintances in a tight spot always say Be specific, don't just say to let you know if there's anything you can do, so I offered help with shopping or some home cooking. It is hard to know what to say, since you don't want to be intrusive, but they rang this morning, sounding genuinely touched. I was chatting about the usefulness versus wastefulness of Christmas cards with a colleague on Monday, and she was pleased to have received a card from someone she had lost touch with and not seen for years. Even in the days of theoretical constant communication via Facebook, to have an annual ritual excuse to make contact with people can be useful.
I almost forgot that the world was due to end. My theory about the Mayan calender is that they must have got to the bottom of the piece of stone it was written on and run out of space, like Thurber's famous dog with really short legs, that came out that way because it started off as a doodle on a notepad, and he got to the bottom of the page without enough room for them.
Thursday, 20 December 2012
trying to be a domestic goddess
It poured with rain today, but that didn't matter in as far as my plan was to spend the day cleaning the house. I gave up with formal New Year's resolutions a long time ago, but I generally survey my life around this time of the year, and one of the conclusions I came to was that maybe it would be nice to live in a slightly cleaner and tidier house. Not that I particularly like cleaning and tidying, but I like the results. I also decided that it would be nice to have flowers more often, instead of just occasionally buying jugs, and bought a modest bunch of five alstroemeria stems while I was in Tesco on the first round of the Christmas shop. The alstroemeria would look better with a few stems of greenery, but it was raining too much to go out and pick any.
Buying flowers was the simple bit. Cleaning took rather longer. In fact, hostilities will resume in the morning, since I'm only two thirds of the way round the kitchen and half way across the sitting room. I have vacuumed unbelievable quantities of cat fur out of the rugs, off the walls, and from the gaps under the doors. Vacuuming the pouffes I was reminded of the washer woman in Three Men and a Boat who said that she ought to have charged extra to wash their clothes, as they were so dirty it was not laundry, more in the nature of an excavation. Every five minutes the red light showed on the vacuum cleaner, indicating that it was blocked up, and I had to remove the filter and pull out wads of fur. The filter lives in a removable plastic box with a hinged bottom that opens, and as well as tipping fur out of the box you have to unscrew a cone shaped section and peel the fur off that. Getting the whole thing back into the machine is made more difficult by the fact that the plastic hinge on the bottom has broken, so that the end drops off when you try to put the plastic box back in.
There is damp coming through the end wall of the downstairs sitting room. The Systems Administrator has insisted for a long time that there is nowhere for damp to come in, which doesn't explain why in that case the plaster has bubbled up. Now the plaster has lifted some more with all the rain, and feels damp when you touch it. We definitely have a leak. It doesn't normally show badly, because there is a chair in front of it, but I moved that to vacuum in the corner.
I have successfully defrosted the fridge, which meant I could remove the piece of a red string bag that oranges came in, that had frozen to the back of the fridge. It seemed a good idea to do this before we filled it with Christmas food.
Meanwhile, the cats were so disturbed by all the cleaning, or the incessant rain, that one of them scent sprayed copiously over the curtain that hangs in front of the front door. None of them have ever, ever done that before. I don't know which it was, but suspect Our Ginger, since he was running about looking hyper at the time, whereas the others were lying down in postures suggesting they hadn't moved for a while. I had to dunk the curtain in a bucket of soapy water to clean it, then more buckets to rinse it, and now it has a fan heater playing on it to dry it, otherwise it will stay wet for days, and probably go mouldy. I fear the wretched thing may be shrinking. Probably I was not supposed to wash it as it is made out of furnishing fabric, but it is a double door and the curtain is absolutely vast, and I was not going to set off with a gigantic cat pee stained curtain in search of a dry cleaner. I don't think the chap in the Tesco branch of Timpson with whom I left a velvet scarf earlier today would be willing to accept it.
The Systems Administrator has escaped the cleaning blitz by going to London for the day to lunch with old workmates. Prospective numbers were depleted at the last count by one case of Norovirus, one bad cold, and one wife with a badly cricked neck who needs looking after, but I expect they've had a nice time.
Of course, if the world ends tomorrow it will have been rather a waste to spend my last full day on earth cleaning. Still, as Major Wimsey told his men, according to the Oxford porter who'd served under him, if you've got to meet your Maker, for gawd's sake do it with a clean chin.
Addendum Flicking down the Daily Telegraph's homepage I was startled to see a photograph of a building I thought I recognised as my old convent school. I left when I was ten, and don't recall ever going back since, and I couldn't have told you what it looked like, but as soon as I saw the picture of what was described as an unusual home for sale, I thought that it had to be Palace Gate in Exeter. Sticking that into Google got me straight to the right page of Devon Life. The chapel where I attended Catholic services, though baptised into the Church of England and rapidly lapsing into agnosticism at best, is now an extremely stylish sitting room. I liked the convent school, and even went through a brief phase of piety. We wore white cotton gloves in summer, had elocution lessons, and even now if I hear Where the Bee Sucks or Full Fathom Five, it takes me back to Sister Saint Patrick's class. It turns out the school closed in 1996.
Buying flowers was the simple bit. Cleaning took rather longer. In fact, hostilities will resume in the morning, since I'm only two thirds of the way round the kitchen and half way across the sitting room. I have vacuumed unbelievable quantities of cat fur out of the rugs, off the walls, and from the gaps under the doors. Vacuuming the pouffes I was reminded of the washer woman in Three Men and a Boat who said that she ought to have charged extra to wash their clothes, as they were so dirty it was not laundry, more in the nature of an excavation. Every five minutes the red light showed on the vacuum cleaner, indicating that it was blocked up, and I had to remove the filter and pull out wads of fur. The filter lives in a removable plastic box with a hinged bottom that opens, and as well as tipping fur out of the box you have to unscrew a cone shaped section and peel the fur off that. Getting the whole thing back into the machine is made more difficult by the fact that the plastic hinge on the bottom has broken, so that the end drops off when you try to put the plastic box back in.
There is damp coming through the end wall of the downstairs sitting room. The Systems Administrator has insisted for a long time that there is nowhere for damp to come in, which doesn't explain why in that case the plaster has bubbled up. Now the plaster has lifted some more with all the rain, and feels damp when you touch it. We definitely have a leak. It doesn't normally show badly, because there is a chair in front of it, but I moved that to vacuum in the corner.
I have successfully defrosted the fridge, which meant I could remove the piece of a red string bag that oranges came in, that had frozen to the back of the fridge. It seemed a good idea to do this before we filled it with Christmas food.
Meanwhile, the cats were so disturbed by all the cleaning, or the incessant rain, that one of them scent sprayed copiously over the curtain that hangs in front of the front door. None of them have ever, ever done that before. I don't know which it was, but suspect Our Ginger, since he was running about looking hyper at the time, whereas the others were lying down in postures suggesting they hadn't moved for a while. I had to dunk the curtain in a bucket of soapy water to clean it, then more buckets to rinse it, and now it has a fan heater playing on it to dry it, otherwise it will stay wet for days, and probably go mouldy. I fear the wretched thing may be shrinking. Probably I was not supposed to wash it as it is made out of furnishing fabric, but it is a double door and the curtain is absolutely vast, and I was not going to set off with a gigantic cat pee stained curtain in search of a dry cleaner. I don't think the chap in the Tesco branch of Timpson with whom I left a velvet scarf earlier today would be willing to accept it.
The Systems Administrator has escaped the cleaning blitz by going to London for the day to lunch with old workmates. Prospective numbers were depleted at the last count by one case of Norovirus, one bad cold, and one wife with a badly cricked neck who needs looking after, but I expect they've had a nice time.
Of course, if the world ends tomorrow it will have been rather a waste to spend my last full day on earth cleaning. Still, as Major Wimsey told his men, according to the Oxford porter who'd served under him, if you've got to meet your Maker, for gawd's sake do it with a clean chin.
Addendum Flicking down the Daily Telegraph's homepage I was startled to see a photograph of a building I thought I recognised as my old convent school. I left when I was ten, and don't recall ever going back since, and I couldn't have told you what it looked like, but as soon as I saw the picture of what was described as an unusual home for sale, I thought that it had to be Palace Gate in Exeter. Sticking that into Google got me straight to the right page of Devon Life. The chapel where I attended Catholic services, though baptised into the Church of England and rapidly lapsing into agnosticism at best, is now an extremely stylish sitting room. I liked the convent school, and even went through a brief phase of piety. We wore white cotton gloves in summer, had elocution lessons, and even now if I hear Where the Bee Sucks or Full Fathom Five, it takes me back to Sister Saint Patrick's class. It turns out the school closed in 1996.
Wednesday, 19 December 2012
four small exhibitions
Today, to celebrate the fact that I'm on holiday, I went up to London to catch some exhibitions. Several things I've been meaning to see finish soon after Christmas, and I thought I might as well not leave it until the last minute, or the weather had turned snowy again.
First off was a small free display at Tate Britain, Family matters: the family in British art. I read an enthusiastic review of this when it was showing in Norwich, and never got round to going to see it there, but gathered that it was due to move on to the Tate in winter of 2012-13. It was not a large exhibition, just one room's worth, and if I had gone all the way to Norwich specially I might have felt rather short-changed, but it's worth catching as part of a day out if you are in the area. Central London in this context is a likelier area for most of us to be in than Norwich. It is on until 24 February, if you want to go and tut-tut at the profligacy of the Victorian Pulleyne family, forced out of their ancestral home by gambling debts, and the modern day parents and small children sitting eating chips on a bench next to an overflowing litter bin.
Tate Britain made a handy jumping off point for the Garden Museum, who are showing their nascent art collection in a show called Collecting cultures - from cabbages to kings. This only runs until 6 January, and the entire museum shuts over Christmas until 8 January. On this basis I'm not clear how the art exhibition can be said to run until 6 January. I should say you had tomorrow and Friday to look at it. Since 2008 the museum has been buying garden related paintings, drawings and etchings, and these are now on display, before reappearing in a planned new permanent gallery in four years' time. I'm interested in garden art anyway, and the clincher was seeing that they'd laid their hands on an Anthony Gross etching of kite flying in Battersea Park. I first encountered Gross in an exhibition in Eastbourne of original artworks commissioned by Lyons Corner House. He had a lively, whimsical style, redolent of 1930s graphic art, and I was enchanted. He is so much out of fashion that I have never managed to track down a book about him, though I suspect that even out of fashion his etchings would be outside my price bracket.
I love the garden museum, with its gently, slightly chaotic ambience and vagueness about dates. When I looked up the finishing date of the art exhibition last week it wasn't even on their website at that point, and I had to e-mail them and ask them. There were almost as many volunteers staffing the front desk as there were visitors looking at the pictures. I had a very nice piece of chocolate and cherry cake for £2.50, infinitely nicer than the cake I had the last time I went to Fortnum and Mason's tea room, at approximately one third of the price.
From Lambeth Palace it's a short walk up Whitehall to the National Portrait Gallery, to learn about the oldest son of James I of England and VI of Scotland, who would have been king of England if he hadn't unfortunately died when he was eighteen, in The Lost Prince - the life and death of Henry Stuart. The paintings in this span an interesting period, Tudor stiffness giving way to greater naturalism and animation in some of the later works. Poor Henry was clever, handsome, cultivated, athletic, beloved, and being groomed as the perfect model of chivalrous kingship. Instead we got his sickly younger brother, Charles I, whose performance as king can't have been improved by the fact that he was constantly compared to his elder brother by everybody, including himself. If I'd planned things better I'd have stopped in Whitehall to visit Inigo Jones' Banqueting House, from whose central window Charles stepped out on to the scaffold in 1649. Another time. You've only got until 13 January to see The Lost Prince.
From the National Portrait Gallery is is only another short walk to Somerset House, where The Courtauld Gallery is showing Peter Lely - a lyrical vision, also until 13 January. Lely's nymphs and musician frolic in delightful pastoral landscapes, showing a great deal of luscious flesh amidst implausible draperies. When I was a teenager I fell for Lely's cavaliers and ladies, with their bright, knowing expressions, their lace and their amazing shiny satin, and now that I am middle aged I still have a soft spot for him. This show is great fun, and afterwards I went and stared for a long time at my favourite Braque fauvist rendition of the waterside at Antwerp. The Courtauld only has it on loan from a private collection, and I am afraid that one day I will go, and it will have gone. Somerset House has created a temporary ice rink in the courtyard, as they do every year, and people were skating round in circles in the drizzle. I think that sort of thing works better on the Continent, where it is reliably colder. I avoid ice skating myself, since I shouldn't enjoy the skating bit, and breaking my wrists, arms or fingers would be a calamity.
First off was a small free display at Tate Britain, Family matters: the family in British art. I read an enthusiastic review of this when it was showing in Norwich, and never got round to going to see it there, but gathered that it was due to move on to the Tate in winter of 2012-13. It was not a large exhibition, just one room's worth, and if I had gone all the way to Norwich specially I might have felt rather short-changed, but it's worth catching as part of a day out if you are in the area. Central London in this context is a likelier area for most of us to be in than Norwich. It is on until 24 February, if you want to go and tut-tut at the profligacy of the Victorian Pulleyne family, forced out of their ancestral home by gambling debts, and the modern day parents and small children sitting eating chips on a bench next to an overflowing litter bin.
Tate Britain made a handy jumping off point for the Garden Museum, who are showing their nascent art collection in a show called Collecting cultures - from cabbages to kings. This only runs until 6 January, and the entire museum shuts over Christmas until 8 January. On this basis I'm not clear how the art exhibition can be said to run until 6 January. I should say you had tomorrow and Friday to look at it. Since 2008 the museum has been buying garden related paintings, drawings and etchings, and these are now on display, before reappearing in a planned new permanent gallery in four years' time. I'm interested in garden art anyway, and the clincher was seeing that they'd laid their hands on an Anthony Gross etching of kite flying in Battersea Park. I first encountered Gross in an exhibition in Eastbourne of original artworks commissioned by Lyons Corner House. He had a lively, whimsical style, redolent of 1930s graphic art, and I was enchanted. He is so much out of fashion that I have never managed to track down a book about him, though I suspect that even out of fashion his etchings would be outside my price bracket.
I love the garden museum, with its gently, slightly chaotic ambience and vagueness about dates. When I looked up the finishing date of the art exhibition last week it wasn't even on their website at that point, and I had to e-mail them and ask them. There were almost as many volunteers staffing the front desk as there were visitors looking at the pictures. I had a very nice piece of chocolate and cherry cake for £2.50, infinitely nicer than the cake I had the last time I went to Fortnum and Mason's tea room, at approximately one third of the price.
From Lambeth Palace it's a short walk up Whitehall to the National Portrait Gallery, to learn about the oldest son of James I of England and VI of Scotland, who would have been king of England if he hadn't unfortunately died when he was eighteen, in The Lost Prince - the life and death of Henry Stuart. The paintings in this span an interesting period, Tudor stiffness giving way to greater naturalism and animation in some of the later works. Poor Henry was clever, handsome, cultivated, athletic, beloved, and being groomed as the perfect model of chivalrous kingship. Instead we got his sickly younger brother, Charles I, whose performance as king can't have been improved by the fact that he was constantly compared to his elder brother by everybody, including himself. If I'd planned things better I'd have stopped in Whitehall to visit Inigo Jones' Banqueting House, from whose central window Charles stepped out on to the scaffold in 1649. Another time. You've only got until 13 January to see The Lost Prince.
From the National Portrait Gallery is is only another short walk to Somerset House, where The Courtauld Gallery is showing Peter Lely - a lyrical vision, also until 13 January. Lely's nymphs and musician frolic in delightful pastoral landscapes, showing a great deal of luscious flesh amidst implausible draperies. When I was a teenager I fell for Lely's cavaliers and ladies, with their bright, knowing expressions, their lace and their amazing shiny satin, and now that I am middle aged I still have a soft spot for him. This show is great fun, and afterwards I went and stared for a long time at my favourite Braque fauvist rendition of the waterside at Antwerp. The Courtauld only has it on loan from a private collection, and I am afraid that one day I will go, and it will have gone. Somerset House has created a temporary ice rink in the courtyard, as they do every year, and people were skating round in circles in the drizzle. I think that sort of thing works better on the Continent, where it is reliably colder. I avoid ice skating myself, since I shouldn't enjoy the skating bit, and breaking my wrists, arms or fingers would be a calamity.
Tuesday, 18 December 2012
restoration
I celebrated the fact that I'm on holiday with a trip to the dump, then for good measure cleaned the chickens' roosting board. Trade at the dump was pretty quiet, and almost nobody there had brought garden refuse, confirming my suspicion that by the week before Christmas very few people are thinking about their gardens, let alone doing any gardening.
After lunch I did get out into the garden. If I haven't mentioned the garden recently, it's because one way and another I haven't managed to get much gardening done. Today the ground was wet, but I managed to work my way round the edges of the rose bank, pruning the roses and honeysuckle where they've grown out over the lawn, and cutting the grass where it had grown long and straggling up into the roses, sheltered by the thicket from the lawnmower. Cutting the grass is a slow process, as I have to rake each section through with my hands in a virtual fingertip search, to make sure there are no toads hiding in there. A robin watched me sharp eyed as I progressed, and the piles of snail's eggs I uncovered won't last long.
Meanwhile, the Systems Administrator went back to the dentist for the next stage of root canal treatment. The good news is that the pain the SA experienced all last week is normal, not the signs of infection or anything untoward beyond the final screams of the nerve dying back. That tooth is taking longer to die than a Puccini heroine. The bad news is that after the dentist spent a final session drilling, the SA can expect another five days or so of pain, though he did say cheerfully that the SA should be fine to eat lunch by Christmas day. After three quarters of an hour in the dentist's chair the SA said it felt like being punched in the face, and that's before the packing of novocaine wears off. The final appointment for a permanent filling is booked for the second week in January, and in the meantime the SA has been told not to eat toffee, or anything sticky. I think it is worth the unpleasantness, though, since with any luck the tooth will be good for another two or three decades after this. I still have an incisor that died for no discernible reason back in the mid 1980s. It went blue over time, and I eventually had it veneered for cosmetic reasons, but it is still firmly attached to my jaw.
Last night the SA's laptop came back from the menders. It failed due to a problem with the motherboard, which the firm were able to fix, so the SA can retrieve the data from it. It is amazing how much information one accumulates on a laptop nowadays. Ours includes all the weather records since early 2011, the code number for the part to mend the kitchen tap which we got from the kitchen company the last time it went wrong but can't keep asking them, and the SA's tax records for the past umpteen years. Vows have been taken about regular downloads to a back-up disc in future. They haven't yet been followed through, so far as I know, but the toothache intervened. The computer repair company said that they were very busy, with a lot of people getting their machines repaired at the moment. I presume that's a combination of people trying to make them last longer in the recession, and people like us realising quite how much stuff they now have on their laptops. Your machine is almost as finely and individually tuned to you as your gut bacteria, and if it goes down permanently before you've transferred to the new one you lose all your bookmarks, apart from anything else.
The SA has promised to mend the tap, as soon as the tooth has stopped screaming. It is dripping at an interval of slightly less than once a second, and getting worse. In the good old days you bought a washer, but with mixer taps you have a thing called a cartridge. There are lots of different sorts, of course, so without the part number you're sunk. In the meantime the drip is wasteful, but too regular to work as water torture.
After lunch I did get out into the garden. If I haven't mentioned the garden recently, it's because one way and another I haven't managed to get much gardening done. Today the ground was wet, but I managed to work my way round the edges of the rose bank, pruning the roses and honeysuckle where they've grown out over the lawn, and cutting the grass where it had grown long and straggling up into the roses, sheltered by the thicket from the lawnmower. Cutting the grass is a slow process, as I have to rake each section through with my hands in a virtual fingertip search, to make sure there are no toads hiding in there. A robin watched me sharp eyed as I progressed, and the piles of snail's eggs I uncovered won't last long.
Meanwhile, the Systems Administrator went back to the dentist for the next stage of root canal treatment. The good news is that the pain the SA experienced all last week is normal, not the signs of infection or anything untoward beyond the final screams of the nerve dying back. That tooth is taking longer to die than a Puccini heroine. The bad news is that after the dentist spent a final session drilling, the SA can expect another five days or so of pain, though he did say cheerfully that the SA should be fine to eat lunch by Christmas day. After three quarters of an hour in the dentist's chair the SA said it felt like being punched in the face, and that's before the packing of novocaine wears off. The final appointment for a permanent filling is booked for the second week in January, and in the meantime the SA has been told not to eat toffee, or anything sticky. I think it is worth the unpleasantness, though, since with any luck the tooth will be good for another two or three decades after this. I still have an incisor that died for no discernible reason back in the mid 1980s. It went blue over time, and I eventually had it veneered for cosmetic reasons, but it is still firmly attached to my jaw.
Last night the SA's laptop came back from the menders. It failed due to a problem with the motherboard, which the firm were able to fix, so the SA can retrieve the data from it. It is amazing how much information one accumulates on a laptop nowadays. Ours includes all the weather records since early 2011, the code number for the part to mend the kitchen tap which we got from the kitchen company the last time it went wrong but can't keep asking them, and the SA's tax records for the past umpteen years. Vows have been taken about regular downloads to a back-up disc in future. They haven't yet been followed through, so far as I know, but the toothache intervened. The computer repair company said that they were very busy, with a lot of people getting their machines repaired at the moment. I presume that's a combination of people trying to make them last longer in the recession, and people like us realising quite how much stuff they now have on their laptops. Your machine is almost as finely and individually tuned to you as your gut bacteria, and if it goes down permanently before you've transferred to the new one you lose all your bookmarks, apart from anything else.
The SA has promised to mend the tap, as soon as the tooth has stopped screaming. It is dripping at an interval of slightly less than once a second, and getting worse. In the good old days you bought a washer, but with mixer taps you have a thing called a cartridge. There are lots of different sorts, of course, so without the part number you're sunk. In the meantime the drip is wasteful, but too regular to work as water torture.
Monday, 17 December 2012
don't shoot the messenger
The owner was not happy this morning. She was not happy because she had discovered that a couple of potential customers had refused to buy a reconstituted stone bird bath yesterday, because it was chipped. She was unhappy because we had missed out on a sale, and because an expensive stock item was damaged. She made her unhappiness loudly and volubly clear.
Her principal unhappiness was directed at me. I did not serve the couple yesterday. I did not damage the bird bath. I hadn't even touched it. According to the label it weighs 36 kilogrammes. I don't attempt to lift anything weighing 36 kilogrammes. As far as I'm concerned, bird baths arrive from the manufacturer and stay exactly where my colleagues put them, until they are sold, when somebody else lifts them into a customer's car or our van.
However, I had unwisely entered the arena of the chipped bird bath, because I had added a supplementary memo to the rather Delphic note left by the member of staff who did serve the bird bath couple and who was not going to be at work today, explaining why it was that they would not buy the one on display and were asking instead whether we could get another in before Christmas, and what it would cost to have it delivered directly to their house. The owner had written on my note in angry, spiky handwriting that the bird bath ought not to have been chipped, highlighted with pink highlighting pen for extra effect. She demanded to know who had chipped the bird bath, scolded us about the evils of damaging the reconstituted stone ornaments, and lamented the narrowness of the margin she made selling them at the best of times. Then she told me that she had to go out, that the stone company would ring me, and that I must ring the potential customer telling them delivery terms on a new bird bath, and offering a reduction on the one in stock.
We all went out to the plant centre and the manager disappeared, probably to have a nervous breakdown in the polytunnel on the other side of the car park. I spent some time waiting for him to come and tell me what to do, before it dawned on me that he was not going to, so I went and picked up leaves and pruned off mouldy twigs in the heated tunnel. The stone company rang pretty early, and I relayed the news to the customer, delivery to their house £60 including VAT, and they would have to place the order today to be sure of receiving it by Christmas. The customer said she would need to make one phone call, presumably to her husband who was the one to spot the chip yesterday. She didn't call back, so I guess they don't want the chipped bird bath, or to pay £60 to have an unchipped one delivered.
I contemplated leaving a note for the owner at the end of the day, explaining where we had got to with bird baths, and decided against it. Trying to keep your employer informed only leads to trouble.
And now I don't have to think about it at all for three weeks, because I am on holiday. The owner was looking for people to drop days over Christmas, to cut staff costs, and issued an ultimatum to the manager that she wanted a maximum of two, and preferably one person in each day over the Christmas period. I really dislike working a full day in the plant centre on my own. Even if there are only three customers, sod's law dictates they will all arrive at the same time and while the phone is ringing. I could see that I was going to have to agree to lose at least some days, and decided that on that basis I'd rather have a proper break. Accordingly I volunteered to take all four of my working days over Christmas and the New Year off, and watched as the manager crossed my name through on the rota.
That's three solid weeks with no chipped bird baths. No customers who have driven from North Norfolk especially to collect a shrub which I can't find, and whose existence is not recorded anywhere on our system, but which the customer insists we rang to say was ready. No aggressive pushy people demanding I replace the tree which died because their gardener strimmed through the bark. No power cuts so that the till and credit card machines stop working just as a customer with two hundred pounds worth of stuff in their trolley approaches. No worrying about why the tunnel heater won't come on. No till errors to account for.
It will feel like a holiday so long as I don't have to go in at all. Even a single day at work would ruin the beautiful off-duty feeling that for three weeks none of it was my problem. I do feel sorry for my colleague who has been persuaded to work on New Year's Eve, by herself, after the manager booked it as holiday and the third person who would have been in then asked for the time off to go partying. However, she should just have said she couldn't do it. The owners could cover, or shut for an extra day. Still, it's not my business, and not my problem.
Her principal unhappiness was directed at me. I did not serve the couple yesterday. I did not damage the bird bath. I hadn't even touched it. According to the label it weighs 36 kilogrammes. I don't attempt to lift anything weighing 36 kilogrammes. As far as I'm concerned, bird baths arrive from the manufacturer and stay exactly where my colleagues put them, until they are sold, when somebody else lifts them into a customer's car or our van.
However, I had unwisely entered the arena of the chipped bird bath, because I had added a supplementary memo to the rather Delphic note left by the member of staff who did serve the bird bath couple and who was not going to be at work today, explaining why it was that they would not buy the one on display and were asking instead whether we could get another in before Christmas, and what it would cost to have it delivered directly to their house. The owner had written on my note in angry, spiky handwriting that the bird bath ought not to have been chipped, highlighted with pink highlighting pen for extra effect. She demanded to know who had chipped the bird bath, scolded us about the evils of damaging the reconstituted stone ornaments, and lamented the narrowness of the margin she made selling them at the best of times. Then she told me that she had to go out, that the stone company would ring me, and that I must ring the potential customer telling them delivery terms on a new bird bath, and offering a reduction on the one in stock.
We all went out to the plant centre and the manager disappeared, probably to have a nervous breakdown in the polytunnel on the other side of the car park. I spent some time waiting for him to come and tell me what to do, before it dawned on me that he was not going to, so I went and picked up leaves and pruned off mouldy twigs in the heated tunnel. The stone company rang pretty early, and I relayed the news to the customer, delivery to their house £60 including VAT, and they would have to place the order today to be sure of receiving it by Christmas. The customer said she would need to make one phone call, presumably to her husband who was the one to spot the chip yesterday. She didn't call back, so I guess they don't want the chipped bird bath, or to pay £60 to have an unchipped one delivered.
I contemplated leaving a note for the owner at the end of the day, explaining where we had got to with bird baths, and decided against it. Trying to keep your employer informed only leads to trouble.
And now I don't have to think about it at all for three weeks, because I am on holiday. The owner was looking for people to drop days over Christmas, to cut staff costs, and issued an ultimatum to the manager that she wanted a maximum of two, and preferably one person in each day over the Christmas period. I really dislike working a full day in the plant centre on my own. Even if there are only three customers, sod's law dictates they will all arrive at the same time and while the phone is ringing. I could see that I was going to have to agree to lose at least some days, and decided that on that basis I'd rather have a proper break. Accordingly I volunteered to take all four of my working days over Christmas and the New Year off, and watched as the manager crossed my name through on the rota.
That's three solid weeks with no chipped bird baths. No customers who have driven from North Norfolk especially to collect a shrub which I can't find, and whose existence is not recorded anywhere on our system, but which the customer insists we rang to say was ready. No aggressive pushy people demanding I replace the tree which died because their gardener strimmed through the bark. No power cuts so that the till and credit card machines stop working just as a customer with two hundred pounds worth of stuff in their trolley approaches. No worrying about why the tunnel heater won't come on. No till errors to account for.
It will feel like a holiday so long as I don't have to go in at all. Even a single day at work would ruin the beautiful off-duty feeling that for three weeks none of it was my problem. I do feel sorry for my colleague who has been persuaded to work on New Year's Eve, by herself, after the manager booked it as holiday and the third person who would have been in then asked for the time off to go partying. However, she should just have said she couldn't do it. The owners could cover, or shut for an extra day. Still, it's not my business, and not my problem.
Sunday, 16 December 2012
of birds, labels and beekeepers
The gamekeeper at work has suffered a sad loss. He forgot to shut his chicken house last night, and the fox killed all but one of his hens. It seems ironic that a gamekeeper, of all people, should lose his poultry in such a way, but it's easy enough to forget to close a pop hole, after a hard day at work. Christmas and the New Year is a busy season for keepers. They were shooting on the estate yesterday, and will be again next weekend, and on Boxing Day. The gamekeeper spoke regretfully of his hens, and how they all had personalities, and would come up to the front door or hop into the back of his daughter's car when she left the tailgate open to load it. Admittedly she didn't find this last habit entirely endearing, since she sells pies and cakes at farmers' markets, and didn't really want poultry walking about among her stock, but still, the gamekeeper liked his chickens. Just because your day job involves raising pheasants and then organising for them to be shot doesn't mean that you can't get genuinely fond of birds, in another context.
Taking a trolley of clean and tidy pots of herbaceous plants over to spend the rest of the winter under cover in the polytunnel on The Other Side, I could see something fluttering on the ground in front of the tunnel door. As I got closer I saw it was two robins, fighting intently and completely silently. They rolled about in a feathery ball, not squawking or making any cry, pecking at each other's breasts. From a human perspective the whole contest looked ineffectual and faintly ridiculous, like Rudyard Kipling's account of two butterflies arguing, but from the robins' point of view I suppose it was a deadly combat. They are belligerent little birds, and it is odd of us to choose them as our favourites to adorn Christmas cards and ornaments. When I got very close the pair stopped fighting, briefly, and flew half way along the front of the tunnel, then set to again.
The boss was around briefly, issuing indistinct instructions about the price of the elephant trays over a crackly radio link, so I seized the moment to remind him cheerfully that we still needed prices for a few of the Italian topiary plants that were sitting outside the back of the shop. It turned out that he had just done the labels, which were hanging from the printer, and that the thing I described to him over the radio as a double pompom box thingummy was more properly called a two ball box upright. At least with that one we were both talking about the same plant. The Ilex crenata standards defeated me utterly, when I came to try and put labels on the unlabelled ones, and I ended up hiding them all out of sight for the manager to sort out tomorrow. The new labels included four for I. crenata standards at ninety-something pounds each, and I only had three unlabelled plants, but I did also have two larger ones that were already labelled, but priced at fifty-something pounds, less than the small ones. I couldn't just swap the labels round because then I'd only have two of the fifty-something pound labels for three plants, and I had six labels for five plants, while one small plant and two large ones appeared to be missing.
A couple bought a standard bay tree, and I warned them to protect the trunk if we got really cold weather, since that was the most vulnerable part of the plant. For good measure I told them how they could use bay leaves to flavour egg custard, for a very old fashioned taste that went well with cooked fruit.
I came home via a beekeeping co-signatory's house, so that we could sign cheques. Lots of cheques. One for a whole year's worth of mailing out the monthly magazine to members. The person who kindly does that doesn't put her bill in until the end of the year, looking on it as her holiday savings. Given she would get nothing in the way of interest from her bank it's not a totally daft method of enforced regular saving, as long as she trusts the beekeepers not to go bust. We owe someone else for candle moulds and sundry printing costs, and the rent on the room for our last meeting, which is payable in arrears, as well as deposits for the next three meetings, which will be held in our preferred hall now that the wretched Zumba class next door has ceased, at least for now. The bookings forms for next year's meetings were sent out for January, February and April for some reason, with no March. I would have thought we did want a meeting in March.
Chasing up various U3A group organisers who might be willing to publicise the music society's concerts will have to wait. I can only cope with one club at a time, after a day at work.
Taking a trolley of clean and tidy pots of herbaceous plants over to spend the rest of the winter under cover in the polytunnel on The Other Side, I could see something fluttering on the ground in front of the tunnel door. As I got closer I saw it was two robins, fighting intently and completely silently. They rolled about in a feathery ball, not squawking or making any cry, pecking at each other's breasts. From a human perspective the whole contest looked ineffectual and faintly ridiculous, like Rudyard Kipling's account of two butterflies arguing, but from the robins' point of view I suppose it was a deadly combat. They are belligerent little birds, and it is odd of us to choose them as our favourites to adorn Christmas cards and ornaments. When I got very close the pair stopped fighting, briefly, and flew half way along the front of the tunnel, then set to again.
The boss was around briefly, issuing indistinct instructions about the price of the elephant trays over a crackly radio link, so I seized the moment to remind him cheerfully that we still needed prices for a few of the Italian topiary plants that were sitting outside the back of the shop. It turned out that he had just done the labels, which were hanging from the printer, and that the thing I described to him over the radio as a double pompom box thingummy was more properly called a two ball box upright. At least with that one we were both talking about the same plant. The Ilex crenata standards defeated me utterly, when I came to try and put labels on the unlabelled ones, and I ended up hiding them all out of sight for the manager to sort out tomorrow. The new labels included four for I. crenata standards at ninety-something pounds each, and I only had three unlabelled plants, but I did also have two larger ones that were already labelled, but priced at fifty-something pounds, less than the small ones. I couldn't just swap the labels round because then I'd only have two of the fifty-something pound labels for three plants, and I had six labels for five plants, while one small plant and two large ones appeared to be missing.
A couple bought a standard bay tree, and I warned them to protect the trunk if we got really cold weather, since that was the most vulnerable part of the plant. For good measure I told them how they could use bay leaves to flavour egg custard, for a very old fashioned taste that went well with cooked fruit.
I came home via a beekeeping co-signatory's house, so that we could sign cheques. Lots of cheques. One for a whole year's worth of mailing out the monthly magazine to members. The person who kindly does that doesn't put her bill in until the end of the year, looking on it as her holiday savings. Given she would get nothing in the way of interest from her bank it's not a totally daft method of enforced regular saving, as long as she trusts the beekeepers not to go bust. We owe someone else for candle moulds and sundry printing costs, and the rent on the room for our last meeting, which is payable in arrears, as well as deposits for the next three meetings, which will be held in our preferred hall now that the wretched Zumba class next door has ceased, at least for now. The bookings forms for next year's meetings were sent out for January, February and April for some reason, with no March. I would have thought we did want a meeting in March.
Chasing up various U3A group organisers who might be willing to publicise the music society's concerts will have to wait. I can only cope with one club at a time, after a day at work.
Saturday, 15 December 2012
not quite click and collect
There was a shoot on the estate today. We could tell that because there were only two radios left in the office for three members of staff. One of them was the boss's radio, which is permanently stuck on channel one since he dropped it and the knob that changes channels broke off. I like having that one anyway, because it can't accidentally twiddle itself to the wrong frequency in my pocket.
There were some classic examples of things that go wrong in a retail plant centre, or at least go wrong in ours. A couple arrived to collect two trees that had been paid for and reserved 'ages ago', except that the trees were not with the other reserved trees, and nobody had recorded any details of them in the book of reserved plants. Fortunately the couple remained extremely placid throughout, until one of my colleagues in a moment of real inspiration managed to find the lost trees. They were not anywhere we normally put reserved plants, but with the small collection of pot-bound trees that have been reduced to half price, with their prices cut off and reserved under the first names of the couple who had bought them, in about August. I mean, why wouldn't they be?
Later on another couple arrived to buy a tray with a picture of an elephant which we had ordered in for them specially. I knew we were trying to get hold of an elephant tray, which somebody wanted to give as a present to somebody else who liked elephants. My colleague who does orders for the shop had been so keen to get them their tray before Christmas that she had rung them to say it had arrived before the boss had given us a sales price for it, which left us with the task of working out a price. The paperwork that came with the tray had actually got a cost price to us on it, which is more than delivery notes usually do, but none of us had been told the gross mark-up we were supposed to use for shop items. We tried to work this out from the stock records on our computer, but it wasn't entirely obvious which columns did and didn't contain VAT. We decided that if we were to charge £29.99 for the tray we wouldn't be robbing our employer. However, by then the customers had decided it was not the right elephant tray, and didn't want it. The woman was convinced that the one she saw before had a lighter background. My guess is that there is only one design, and her visual memory is not that accurate.
Some customers were easier to please. A lovely old boy came to collect two lime trees as a present for his nephew. Last year he gave the nephew four Wellingtonias which are apparently doing very well. A mother and daughter who are regular customers came in for some mistletoe, and we wished each other happy Christmas and chatted about the gardening year and the floods.
A chap with the sort of thick Suffolk accent you don't often hear nowadays came in with his mobility scooter bound companion for coffee and cake. I summoned a colleague who is less squeamish than I am about serving food in compost-dusted clothes to do the refreshments, and it turned out that they knew each other from my colleague's previous job at Nottcutts, and that the old Suffolk boy and his wife had just come from there, having tried to get coffee and been turned away because the cafe was given over to Santa's grotto. They had a long chat about peat free compost, and the difficulties of looking after plug plants. The customer raises hundreds of these each year, and sells them in aid of the children's hospice, and as he talked about the illogicality of UK gardeners being banned from using peat when the Irish were still burning it in power stations, the folly of shipping coir half way around the world, and various articles on peat substitutes he'd read in the RHS magazine, it became clear that he was a more accomplished and thoughtful gardener than most of our customers. His last job before retirement was in the garden section of B&Q.
At the other end of the gardening spectrum, a customer possessed of a notable local garden and a double-barrelled surname paid for over two hundred pounds worth of shrubs with his Coutts credit card.
We struggled slightly with the last of the Christmas trees. Those that were left were mostly large, crooked and partially bald, and while some people bought them, there was a steady trickle of disappointed punters asking whether that was all that we had. One man even brought one back, after he'd got it home and realised that it was too large to fit into his house. Should have used a tape measure, mate. Someone rang up asking whether we had any good quality trees, to which my colleague could only answer truthfully that we had trees, but that they were not as bushy as Christmas trees usually are.
There were some classic examples of things that go wrong in a retail plant centre, or at least go wrong in ours. A couple arrived to collect two trees that had been paid for and reserved 'ages ago', except that the trees were not with the other reserved trees, and nobody had recorded any details of them in the book of reserved plants. Fortunately the couple remained extremely placid throughout, until one of my colleagues in a moment of real inspiration managed to find the lost trees. They were not anywhere we normally put reserved plants, but with the small collection of pot-bound trees that have been reduced to half price, with their prices cut off and reserved under the first names of the couple who had bought them, in about August. I mean, why wouldn't they be?
Later on another couple arrived to buy a tray with a picture of an elephant which we had ordered in for them specially. I knew we were trying to get hold of an elephant tray, which somebody wanted to give as a present to somebody else who liked elephants. My colleague who does orders for the shop had been so keen to get them their tray before Christmas that she had rung them to say it had arrived before the boss had given us a sales price for it, which left us with the task of working out a price. The paperwork that came with the tray had actually got a cost price to us on it, which is more than delivery notes usually do, but none of us had been told the gross mark-up we were supposed to use for shop items. We tried to work this out from the stock records on our computer, but it wasn't entirely obvious which columns did and didn't contain VAT. We decided that if we were to charge £29.99 for the tray we wouldn't be robbing our employer. However, by then the customers had decided it was not the right elephant tray, and didn't want it. The woman was convinced that the one she saw before had a lighter background. My guess is that there is only one design, and her visual memory is not that accurate.
Some customers were easier to please. A lovely old boy came to collect two lime trees as a present for his nephew. Last year he gave the nephew four Wellingtonias which are apparently doing very well. A mother and daughter who are regular customers came in for some mistletoe, and we wished each other happy Christmas and chatted about the gardening year and the floods.
A chap with the sort of thick Suffolk accent you don't often hear nowadays came in with his mobility scooter bound companion for coffee and cake. I summoned a colleague who is less squeamish than I am about serving food in compost-dusted clothes to do the refreshments, and it turned out that they knew each other from my colleague's previous job at Nottcutts, and that the old Suffolk boy and his wife had just come from there, having tried to get coffee and been turned away because the cafe was given over to Santa's grotto. They had a long chat about peat free compost, and the difficulties of looking after plug plants. The customer raises hundreds of these each year, and sells them in aid of the children's hospice, and as he talked about the illogicality of UK gardeners being banned from using peat when the Irish were still burning it in power stations, the folly of shipping coir half way around the world, and various articles on peat substitutes he'd read in the RHS magazine, it became clear that he was a more accomplished and thoughtful gardener than most of our customers. His last job before retirement was in the garden section of B&Q.
At the other end of the gardening spectrum, a customer possessed of a notable local garden and a double-barrelled surname paid for over two hundred pounds worth of shrubs with his Coutts credit card.
We struggled slightly with the last of the Christmas trees. Those that were left were mostly large, crooked and partially bald, and while some people bought them, there was a steady trickle of disappointed punters asking whether that was all that we had. One man even brought one back, after he'd got it home and realised that it was too large to fit into his house. Should have used a tape measure, mate. Someone rang up asking whether we had any good quality trees, to which my colleague could only answer truthfully that we had trees, but that they were not as bushy as Christmas trees usually are.
Friday, 14 December 2012
a baking lesson
Today I nearly went to Cambridge, but didn't. I'd arranged to see a friend who lives in that direction, partly so that we could exchange Christmas presents before Christmas, and had suggested that I'd like to see Kettle's Yard. We agreed that we would go, subject to weather. The weather we were imagining at that stage was ice and snow, but by about Wednesday of this week the five day forecast was predicting torrential rain. I couldn't see the point of driving another hour from her house to Cambridge in the rain, waiting for a bus in the park and ride car park, which is a pretty windswept and godforsaken place that reminds you that Cambridge is on the edge of the fens, squelching around Cambridge in the wet and then standing at a bus stop in more rain for the return trip to the car. I suggested that maybe we should leave Cambridge until another day, and she replied that we could take a view on the day.
I arrived at her house in light drizzle to find coffee cups and posh panettone laid out on a tray. By the time we'd finished our second cup of coffee it was raining heavily. It was the sort of rain that would once have been described as coming down like stair rods. Nowadays nobody has stair rods and I'm not sure what the new benchmark comparison for rain is. Anyway, there was lots of it. I think she would have been game to go anyway, but she gave in gracefully when I repeated my view that while Kettle's Yard would be lovely and I wanted to go there at some stage, I didn't see the point of flogging around Cambridge in the pouring rain. We are both prone to chest infections, it's nearly Christmas, and why risk getting cold and wet to see something that we could see another day, when it was dry?
Instead we lit the fire, and settled down to a nice gossip, and after lunch she showed me her fail-safe version of bread, or at least the first stage of it. If I'd waited for the second proving and to see it cooked I'd just about be leaving now. This used a fifty-fifty mixture of wholemeal and white flour, rather than one hundred per cent wholemeal, and quick action yeast, which I've read about in the baking books but never cooked with, plus a slug of olive oil. One minute in the food processor replaces ten minutes of kneading, or rather four lots of one minute each, since she makes enough dough for four loaves at a time. (If you doubt that English is a challenging language for foreigners to learn, try saying the phrase 'enough dough' out loud, and despair).
The bread had rather a long time to rise, which it does in the boiler room, because we forgot about it, but she had previously told me that it didn't matter if you gave it two hours or even longer. She covers it with clingfilm rather than a damp cloth, and after the best part of three hours in the warmth of the boiler it was bursting out of the top of its bowl. The clingfilm peeled off beautifully anyway, without disturbing the surface, until she gave it a brisk thump, and the great puffball of dough subsided dramatically, with a sigh that released a beautiful whiff of raw organic bread. The second kneading will consist of a mere ten seconds per loaf in the food processor, then it will get a second rising, and into a hot oven.
I have never used a food processor. I've never owned one, my mother never had one, and so when I read recipes that tell me to whizz everything in a food processor I have to work out what you would do instead, if you were doing it by hand. The machine is very ingenious, and saves you some time. Against that it is noisy, and you have to wash the bowl out afterwards, so the net saving in time is not quite as much as you'd imagine. Whether to knead bread by hand is like asking whether you should dig your borders or vegetable patch. If you enjoy digging then dig, and if you don't then don't. I enjoy kneading bread, liking the rhythm and the quiet of it, and I have strong hands. But the food processor saves time and physical exertion, and I can see that if I were cooking more intensively, more frequently and for more people, then it could be very useful.
My friend was cooking in pounds and ounces, whereas I was making bread in grammes, and her four loaf recipe was larger than the one I was using, so I struggled to work out how the quantity of salt in her recipe compared to mine. I thought hers was saltier. As Cordelia famously observes, bread does need salt, but how much is very much a matter of personal taste and what you're used to. Bread is about the only thing I cook that I add salt to at all, and I find one teaspoon for 600 grammes of wholemeal flour is ample. My friend adds five teaspoons to three pounds of flour, which she has cut down from six as a concession to health, but finds any less makes bread insipid.
I have eaten her bread in the past. It was delicious. When I ate it I didn't know how much salt she put in, and it certainly didn't taste overly salty. It is a marvellous alchemy, making your own bread, and I shall try her recipe now I've seen it in action. It's true that the instructions for timings and temperatures were given in gas regulos, and we aren't on gas, so I'll have to improvise that bit. Done properly she promises me that it works every time. If you want to try it, you'll need 30 fluid ounces of water, give or take, for three pounds of flour, and two 7 gramme sachets of the quick action yeast.
I arrived at her house in light drizzle to find coffee cups and posh panettone laid out on a tray. By the time we'd finished our second cup of coffee it was raining heavily. It was the sort of rain that would once have been described as coming down like stair rods. Nowadays nobody has stair rods and I'm not sure what the new benchmark comparison for rain is. Anyway, there was lots of it. I think she would have been game to go anyway, but she gave in gracefully when I repeated my view that while Kettle's Yard would be lovely and I wanted to go there at some stage, I didn't see the point of flogging around Cambridge in the pouring rain. We are both prone to chest infections, it's nearly Christmas, and why risk getting cold and wet to see something that we could see another day, when it was dry?
Instead we lit the fire, and settled down to a nice gossip, and after lunch she showed me her fail-safe version of bread, or at least the first stage of it. If I'd waited for the second proving and to see it cooked I'd just about be leaving now. This used a fifty-fifty mixture of wholemeal and white flour, rather than one hundred per cent wholemeal, and quick action yeast, which I've read about in the baking books but never cooked with, plus a slug of olive oil. One minute in the food processor replaces ten minutes of kneading, or rather four lots of one minute each, since she makes enough dough for four loaves at a time. (If you doubt that English is a challenging language for foreigners to learn, try saying the phrase 'enough dough' out loud, and despair).
The bread had rather a long time to rise, which it does in the boiler room, because we forgot about it, but she had previously told me that it didn't matter if you gave it two hours or even longer. She covers it with clingfilm rather than a damp cloth, and after the best part of three hours in the warmth of the boiler it was bursting out of the top of its bowl. The clingfilm peeled off beautifully anyway, without disturbing the surface, until she gave it a brisk thump, and the great puffball of dough subsided dramatically, with a sigh that released a beautiful whiff of raw organic bread. The second kneading will consist of a mere ten seconds per loaf in the food processor, then it will get a second rising, and into a hot oven.
I have never used a food processor. I've never owned one, my mother never had one, and so when I read recipes that tell me to whizz everything in a food processor I have to work out what you would do instead, if you were doing it by hand. The machine is very ingenious, and saves you some time. Against that it is noisy, and you have to wash the bowl out afterwards, so the net saving in time is not quite as much as you'd imagine. Whether to knead bread by hand is like asking whether you should dig your borders or vegetable patch. If you enjoy digging then dig, and if you don't then don't. I enjoy kneading bread, liking the rhythm and the quiet of it, and I have strong hands. But the food processor saves time and physical exertion, and I can see that if I were cooking more intensively, more frequently and for more people, then it could be very useful.
My friend was cooking in pounds and ounces, whereas I was making bread in grammes, and her four loaf recipe was larger than the one I was using, so I struggled to work out how the quantity of salt in her recipe compared to mine. I thought hers was saltier. As Cordelia famously observes, bread does need salt, but how much is very much a matter of personal taste and what you're used to. Bread is about the only thing I cook that I add salt to at all, and I find one teaspoon for 600 grammes of wholemeal flour is ample. My friend adds five teaspoons to three pounds of flour, which she has cut down from six as a concession to health, but finds any less makes bread insipid.
I have eaten her bread in the past. It was delicious. When I ate it I didn't know how much salt she put in, and it certainly didn't taste overly salty. It is a marvellous alchemy, making your own bread, and I shall try her recipe now I've seen it in action. It's true that the instructions for timings and temperatures were given in gas regulos, and we aren't on gas, so I'll have to improvise that bit. Done properly she promises me that it works every time. If you want to try it, you'll need 30 fluid ounces of water, give or take, for three pounds of flour, and two 7 gramme sachets of the quick action yeast.
Thursday, 13 December 2012
my part in the Big Society
After a gap of twenty years or so since I was last on a committee, I have now found myself on two. The last time I was on a committee it was that of a sailing association. We were members, and I'd sent them some suggestions about their events and how they were run, which provoked the response 'With ideas like that you ought to be on the committee'. I joined it, and discovered that there was nothing tangible for me or any other new member of the committee to do. The officer's posts were all filled by people who, while they grumbled about how over-worked they were, had no intention of delegating anything, and the events were run on the basis of doing again what we did last year. After a year or two the Systems Administrator and I switched from that kind of sailing to a different boat, and drifted away from the association, and I gave up the committee, making a mental note to avoid them in future.
Roll the clock forward twenty years, and I am finding committee life fascinating as a study in human nature, and an object lesson in how not to get things done. The individual members, who have bothered to give up their evening to sit in a church hall or somebody's dining room when they could be at home watching Masterchef, have presumably gone there with good intentions, wishing to further the activities of the club or society. There is the odd E.F. Benson, Mapp and Lucia moment, when you can see people manoeuvre to foil someone else's pet project to which they object, but generally everyone has not gone there with the explicit aim of not getting things done. And yet the committee has to be one of the most effective mechanisms invented for converting human energy and ideas into noise, culminating in no action.
It is said that people don't value what they don't pay for. I'm sure that's true. One of my fellow beekeeping committee members would like to see us charge our beginners for their first swarm of bees, which we now give them for free, and charge more for lessons than we do. As she says, beekeeping is not a cost-free hobby, and if they can't or won't pay anything for their first bees they can't afford to keep them, and don't want them enough. To the chairman and officers of a committee, there is no cost to signing up a few extra committee members, or letting the old ones stay on indefinitely. At the beekeepers committee meetings we don't even get refreshments. The music society lives more graciously, with tea and cake, and an annual supper thrown in. But commercial organisations don't run themselves on the basis of assembling random groups of managers, half of whom have no specific duties or responsibilities, who then all discuss everything.
It is another characteristic of committees that the agenda tends to be the same at each meeting. Minutes of the last meeting, Chairman's report, Secretary's report, Treasurer's report. Anything that any of the supernumerary committee members might have been delegated to do will be covered under AOB, which always falls at the end of the meeting, when people are tired, concentration slipping and tempers shortening. But if the ad hoc project that the committee agreed at the previous meeting doesn't appear on the agenda for the next one, that reduces the incentive to get on with it. Perhaps everyone else will have forgotten, or nobody will want to talk about it. It was agreed at one beekeepers committee meeting that someone should prepare a welcome pack for new members, telling them what happened at our apiary meetings and so on, to encourage them to take part. The person who agreed to take on the job had in the past said we ought to have such a thing, which is why I volunteered him. Come the next meeting it wasn't on the agenda, the Chairman didn't mention it, nor the person who'd agreed to prepare the welcome pack, and I didn't have the heart. Like I said, I'm only the Treasurer. Two more meetings further on we are no closer to having a welcome pack.
Last night it was the turn of the ad hoc working group on publicity. We'd done exactly what the Chairman had asked us to do in her e-mail, got together and brainstormed, and someone had written up our ideas ready to present to the meeting. Publicity wasn't on the agenda. I e-mailed the Chairman and Secretary, cc my fellow brainstormers, to remind them that we were ready to talk about it, and publicity was scheduled for AOB.
A music society like ours books acts one to two seasons ahead, so at this time of the year we are in the later stages of finalising 2013-14, and starting to work on 2014-15. Booking a programme of just five concerts plunges you into a bewildering maze of contingent decisions. You don't want too many string quartets in the same season. One act you would like is very restricted as to dates. You want to schedule your most expensive and prestigious artists for the beginning and end of the season, to start and end with a flourish and so that the cheapest ones are booked for the depths of winter, when ticket sales are most likely to be hit by bad weather. You have to worry about the date of Easter, because people will be doing other things and you can't book the church then for a concert. Should you even attempt an oboe concert with continuo, which means borrowing a harpsichord from somewhere and paying for an extra musician in the form of a cellist, or should you just take the simple option and go for a piano? Do you like a particular quartet more than another enough to pay an extra five hundred pounds for them? Will a group based in Germany drop their charge to us if they have other concerts in the region so that their travel costs are amortised over several music societies? Should we drop the December concert date, because people have so many other things to go to in December, and move the fifth concert to spring when the weather might be nicer? The Bookings Secretary began to look more and more exhausted, and the Chairman became fractious. The Treasurer had to leave for another engagement.
Eventually we got on to the subject of publicity. Audience numbers for the young soprano were deemed disappointing, by the way, so the question of how to attract more people is getting more urgent. Our suggestions on what we might try doing uncovered a deep strand of pessimism in the rest of the committee. There was no point in trying to attract a younger audience, because they weren't interested and didn't have time and couldn't afford it. There was no point in trying to attract more older people because they didn't like driving at night and couldn't afford it. Everybody had too many other things to do. Our posters were not eye-catching enough but more attractive, eye-catching posters would be too expensive to print. People didn't take any notice of posters. Our kind of audience wouldn't use Facebook or Twitter so there was no point in starting to use those. If we did use them we needed to find a younger person to do it for us. We needed media cover, but reviewers ignored us when we sent them brochures and free tickets. Giving our existing season ticket holders vouchers for free tickets to bring a friend, in the hopes that they might become regular attendees, was a good idea but some of the concerts were already full. If we used a ticketing agency how would we know how many tickets we had sold?
After the publicity we galloped through the menu for the fund raising supper concert and the date of the next committee meeting. The only firm decision made around the table on publicity was that one person would try to persuade the local paper to cover a piano master class we are sponsoring, and the small coup we have pulled off in persuading Marina Warner to come and do our annual lecture. As we were getting up from the table I asked the Chairman if she would like me to start approaching local branches of the U3A to advertise the concerts to their music appreciation groups. She replied loftily that everyone could do anything they liked. Which I very much doubt. I don't know what my Vires are, but I'm sure I don't have to go very far before I'm Ultra them.
Roll the clock forward twenty years, and I am finding committee life fascinating as a study in human nature, and an object lesson in how not to get things done. The individual members, who have bothered to give up their evening to sit in a church hall or somebody's dining room when they could be at home watching Masterchef, have presumably gone there with good intentions, wishing to further the activities of the club or society. There is the odd E.F. Benson, Mapp and Lucia moment, when you can see people manoeuvre to foil someone else's pet project to which they object, but generally everyone has not gone there with the explicit aim of not getting things done. And yet the committee has to be one of the most effective mechanisms invented for converting human energy and ideas into noise, culminating in no action.
It is said that people don't value what they don't pay for. I'm sure that's true. One of my fellow beekeeping committee members would like to see us charge our beginners for their first swarm of bees, which we now give them for free, and charge more for lessons than we do. As she says, beekeeping is not a cost-free hobby, and if they can't or won't pay anything for their first bees they can't afford to keep them, and don't want them enough. To the chairman and officers of a committee, there is no cost to signing up a few extra committee members, or letting the old ones stay on indefinitely. At the beekeepers committee meetings we don't even get refreshments. The music society lives more graciously, with tea and cake, and an annual supper thrown in. But commercial organisations don't run themselves on the basis of assembling random groups of managers, half of whom have no specific duties or responsibilities, who then all discuss everything.
It is another characteristic of committees that the agenda tends to be the same at each meeting. Minutes of the last meeting, Chairman's report, Secretary's report, Treasurer's report. Anything that any of the supernumerary committee members might have been delegated to do will be covered under AOB, which always falls at the end of the meeting, when people are tired, concentration slipping and tempers shortening. But if the ad hoc project that the committee agreed at the previous meeting doesn't appear on the agenda for the next one, that reduces the incentive to get on with it. Perhaps everyone else will have forgotten, or nobody will want to talk about it. It was agreed at one beekeepers committee meeting that someone should prepare a welcome pack for new members, telling them what happened at our apiary meetings and so on, to encourage them to take part. The person who agreed to take on the job had in the past said we ought to have such a thing, which is why I volunteered him. Come the next meeting it wasn't on the agenda, the Chairman didn't mention it, nor the person who'd agreed to prepare the welcome pack, and I didn't have the heart. Like I said, I'm only the Treasurer. Two more meetings further on we are no closer to having a welcome pack.
Last night it was the turn of the ad hoc working group on publicity. We'd done exactly what the Chairman had asked us to do in her e-mail, got together and brainstormed, and someone had written up our ideas ready to present to the meeting. Publicity wasn't on the agenda. I e-mailed the Chairman and Secretary, cc my fellow brainstormers, to remind them that we were ready to talk about it, and publicity was scheduled for AOB.
A music society like ours books acts one to two seasons ahead, so at this time of the year we are in the later stages of finalising 2013-14, and starting to work on 2014-15. Booking a programme of just five concerts plunges you into a bewildering maze of contingent decisions. You don't want too many string quartets in the same season. One act you would like is very restricted as to dates. You want to schedule your most expensive and prestigious artists for the beginning and end of the season, to start and end with a flourish and so that the cheapest ones are booked for the depths of winter, when ticket sales are most likely to be hit by bad weather. You have to worry about the date of Easter, because people will be doing other things and you can't book the church then for a concert. Should you even attempt an oboe concert with continuo, which means borrowing a harpsichord from somewhere and paying for an extra musician in the form of a cellist, or should you just take the simple option and go for a piano? Do you like a particular quartet more than another enough to pay an extra five hundred pounds for them? Will a group based in Germany drop their charge to us if they have other concerts in the region so that their travel costs are amortised over several music societies? Should we drop the December concert date, because people have so many other things to go to in December, and move the fifth concert to spring when the weather might be nicer? The Bookings Secretary began to look more and more exhausted, and the Chairman became fractious. The Treasurer had to leave for another engagement.
Eventually we got on to the subject of publicity. Audience numbers for the young soprano were deemed disappointing, by the way, so the question of how to attract more people is getting more urgent. Our suggestions on what we might try doing uncovered a deep strand of pessimism in the rest of the committee. There was no point in trying to attract a younger audience, because they weren't interested and didn't have time and couldn't afford it. There was no point in trying to attract more older people because they didn't like driving at night and couldn't afford it. Everybody had too many other things to do. Our posters were not eye-catching enough but more attractive, eye-catching posters would be too expensive to print. People didn't take any notice of posters. Our kind of audience wouldn't use Facebook or Twitter so there was no point in starting to use those. If we did use them we needed to find a younger person to do it for us. We needed media cover, but reviewers ignored us when we sent them brochures and free tickets. Giving our existing season ticket holders vouchers for free tickets to bring a friend, in the hopes that they might become regular attendees, was a good idea but some of the concerts were already full. If we used a ticketing agency how would we know how many tickets we had sold?
After the publicity we galloped through the menu for the fund raising supper concert and the date of the next committee meeting. The only firm decision made around the table on publicity was that one person would try to persuade the local paper to cover a piano master class we are sponsoring, and the small coup we have pulled off in persuading Marina Warner to come and do our annual lecture. As we were getting up from the table I asked the Chairman if she would like me to start approaching local branches of the U3A to advertise the concerts to their music appreciation groups. She replied loftily that everyone could do anything they liked. Which I very much doubt. I don't know what my Vires are, but I'm sure I don't have to go very far before I'm Ultra them.
Wednesday, 12 December 2012
ice
The Systems Administrator got up this morning to go to the loo, and hurried back to bed saying it was jolly cold out there. I wondered whether I could get away without taking a shower, but decided that would be the start of the slippery slope to becoming Dylan Winter (who walked the length of Offa's Dyke with two horses, one of which unexpectedly gave birth in the night. One priceless dialogue ran thus. Winter to shopkeeper: Excuse me, may I ask you something? Shopkeeper: Yes. Winter: Do I smell? Shopkeeper: Yes, you do, rather. Dylan Winter's other greatest line was: I've just done something really stupid. I've set my tent on fire. There was also the time on a canal barge trip when the horse fell in the canal. He was one of my favourite ever radio journalists).
The weather station in the sitting room told me that it was minus four and a half degrees Celsius outside, when I got downstairs after having my shower. Actually, the shower wasn't too bad. I have been experimenting this winter and not using the electric blanket, the theory being that the cold will stimulate my metabolism to crank up a gear and generate more heat. It seems to be working, though I wear thermals as a matter of course, even indoors. I had to defrost the chickens' water, and there was a deputation waiting by the bird table.
The cats have decided they do not like Felix. They liked it yesterday, and last week, but as of this morning they do not like it. The fat indignant tabby ate her's, which made me think it could not be off, since the fat tabby is the most suspicious cat I have ever met, with a highly developed sense of self preservation, and if she thinks cat food is safe to eat then it almost certainly is. Our Ginger had a nibble as well, but the big tabby and the black cat just stared at the Felix, and ran away. This is a nuisance, as it is on special offer in Tesco and we have several packs in stock. The Systems Administrator had to get a pallet of Whiskas, to keep them going until they have forgotten that they don't like Felix.
The countryside looked very beautiful, with a vivid blue sky, low but bright sun, and tiny ice crystals glittering on every twig and seed head. The wind turbine was not turning at all. You do have admit that's a drawback of wind power. It's the coldest day of the year, and the electricity generator has stopped working. I should have rushed out and taken photographs for you, but I am not very good at photography, and the internet is already stuffed full with pictures of frost. The best pictures are on radio anyway, so you can use your imaginations. I walked down to the post box to post my Christmas cards, those that aren't being handed over in person or stuffed through people's doors when I'm passing, and little pieces of ice fell from the lime trees as I passed under them.
I set out to make more bread. This will be the third lot, the second having come out like real bread as well. I'm now on to a new bag of flour, and the dough came out significantly wetter, even though I measured all the ingredients as precisely as before. It mystifies me when the authors of bread books get very strict about how you should weigh the water down to the last gramme for greater accuracy and not just measure it in a jug, since the moisture content of flour varies from one batch to another. I didn't add extra flour, thinking I would see how the wetter dough came out. I still don't have the hang of how long bread is going to take, and vaguely imagined we'd be able to have one of these loaves with the soup for lunch, before realising that would mean having a very late lunch.
After lunch the Systems Administrator had to go outside and chop more wood for the stove. By chop I mean split and saw some of the stack that's seasoning into small enough pieces to fit in the stove, rather than the forestry equivalent of the cookery instruction for jugged hare to first catch your hare (I have just noticed how much alliteration there is in the penultimate phrase. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Beowulf don't pack in any more than that).
I tracked down addresses for my cousin and the defector to south London, and wrote a Christmas card to my old horticultural tutor. The SA did not want to go for a proper walk, because the tooth is still sensitive to cold air. The two cats remained on hunger strike faced with the Felix. Later on I will have to drive very carefully to a music society committee meeting. That's about as exciting as it gets at this time of year, when the thermometer is below freezing.
The weather station in the sitting room told me that it was minus four and a half degrees Celsius outside, when I got downstairs after having my shower. Actually, the shower wasn't too bad. I have been experimenting this winter and not using the electric blanket, the theory being that the cold will stimulate my metabolism to crank up a gear and generate more heat. It seems to be working, though I wear thermals as a matter of course, even indoors. I had to defrost the chickens' water, and there was a deputation waiting by the bird table.
The cats have decided they do not like Felix. They liked it yesterday, and last week, but as of this morning they do not like it. The fat indignant tabby ate her's, which made me think it could not be off, since the fat tabby is the most suspicious cat I have ever met, with a highly developed sense of self preservation, and if she thinks cat food is safe to eat then it almost certainly is. Our Ginger had a nibble as well, but the big tabby and the black cat just stared at the Felix, and ran away. This is a nuisance, as it is on special offer in Tesco and we have several packs in stock. The Systems Administrator had to get a pallet of Whiskas, to keep them going until they have forgotten that they don't like Felix.
The countryside looked very beautiful, with a vivid blue sky, low but bright sun, and tiny ice crystals glittering on every twig and seed head. The wind turbine was not turning at all. You do have admit that's a drawback of wind power. It's the coldest day of the year, and the electricity generator has stopped working. I should have rushed out and taken photographs for you, but I am not very good at photography, and the internet is already stuffed full with pictures of frost. The best pictures are on radio anyway, so you can use your imaginations. I walked down to the post box to post my Christmas cards, those that aren't being handed over in person or stuffed through people's doors when I'm passing, and little pieces of ice fell from the lime trees as I passed under them.
I set out to make more bread. This will be the third lot, the second having come out like real bread as well. I'm now on to a new bag of flour, and the dough came out significantly wetter, even though I measured all the ingredients as precisely as before. It mystifies me when the authors of bread books get very strict about how you should weigh the water down to the last gramme for greater accuracy and not just measure it in a jug, since the moisture content of flour varies from one batch to another. I didn't add extra flour, thinking I would see how the wetter dough came out. I still don't have the hang of how long bread is going to take, and vaguely imagined we'd be able to have one of these loaves with the soup for lunch, before realising that would mean having a very late lunch.
After lunch the Systems Administrator had to go outside and chop more wood for the stove. By chop I mean split and saw some of the stack that's seasoning into small enough pieces to fit in the stove, rather than the forestry equivalent of the cookery instruction for jugged hare to first catch your hare (I have just noticed how much alliteration there is in the penultimate phrase. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Beowulf don't pack in any more than that).
I tracked down addresses for my cousin and the defector to south London, and wrote a Christmas card to my old horticultural tutor. The SA did not want to go for a proper walk, because the tooth is still sensitive to cold air. The two cats remained on hunger strike faced with the Felix. Later on I will have to drive very carefully to a music society committee meeting. That's about as exciting as it gets at this time of year, when the thermometer is below freezing.
Tuesday, 11 December 2012
seasonal greetings and reciprocal obligations
What was I saying about living closer to the seasons in the countryside? I wasn't expecting there to be such a thick frost this morning, since I didn't even have to de-ice my windscreen last night leaving the restaurant, and that was at gone ten. Although the sun shone brightly all morning, it didn't make an appreciable impact on the ice, which stayed crustily on lawn and gravel, and rimed the outlines of the grasses, leaves and seed heads the way frost is supposed to according to the photographs in the glossy gardening magazines. The thermometer eventually crept up to four degrees, but it felt cold. I suppose four degrees is cold.
The Systems Administrator disappeared to London for lunch, leaving me to wait for a parcel that Citylink tried to deliver yesterday while we were both out. The contents of the parcel are for me, and my waiting in a quid pro quo for the time a couple of weeks ago when the positions were reversed. I could have stomped about the frozen gravel in the front garden cutting down aster stems and chopping icy strands off the ivy hedge, but it gradually dawned on me that I didn't want to. It just felt too cold.
Instead I ordered our Chelsea tickets. The website said that all day tickets for the Tuesday were down to limited availability, but let me buy two. Phew. I know that Chelsea sold out this year, but I didn't expect there to be a problem buying tickets before Christmas, when the show isn't until May. After an internal struggle I opted to have them posted to us, which will produce spasms of anxiety from late March until they arrive, in case the post office has lost them, but will avoid queuing to collect them on the morning provided they do arrive. I will probably have smaller spasms of anxiety between now and late March in case I should have opted to pick them up at the venue, but I didn't know how slow the queue would be, and had visions of the day getting off to a bad start as we hung around outside the show for ages while other happy visitors streamed past us, and our chance to visit the small gardens early as we always do slipped away. Permitting oneself to worry at all about either of these problems is extremely un-mindful.
Then I returned to the Christmas card list. Nowadays sending cards is fraught with alternatives and the possibility of bad choices, almost as worrying as buying Chelsea tickets. Should I send a card to the great and gracious lady gardener? I like her. I would be quite happy to have her think that I am thinking of her fondly, albeit briefly, at Christmas. I have enough cards and I shall be driving past her house en route to a music society meeting. But then maybe she will feel that I have created a reciprocal obligation, and she will not be driving past my house, and might feel she had to spend fifty pence on a stamp. I know that some of my friends have agreed not to send each other cards, so perhaps I shouldn't burden a relative stranger with the need to send me one. But she might like to get a card, and feel it didn't matter if she didn't send me one, or deliver it to the plant centre and save a stamp, or not grudge a stamp in the circumstances. I have no idea.
I write the cards by dint of going through the address book systematically so that I don't forget anybody. The first name in the book was the chap that the Systems Administrator is lunching with today. I asked whether if I gave the SA the card to take it would reach our friend's home, or whether it would remain in either the SA's pocket or the friend's pocket, not to be found again until after Christmas when it would be squashed as well as out of date. The SA agreed that all of these outcomes were highly likely and that I had better post it.
Going all the way through your address book makes you think about the state of your friendships, which is probably reason enough for the custom of annual cards to persist. Entries in our address book are always written in pencil. People move, they divorce, they die, so that the book becomes steadily messier and more illegible, and it is depressing to see the crossed out names of one's late friends and relatives when trying to look up a phone number. Better to be able to erase out of date entries. Every so often the book gets so tatty we start a new one, but shove the old one in a drawer. It was nice to have to dig out the old book, to look up the addresses of old school friends of the SA whom we saw at the party back in the summer, and while I was at it I copied their details over to the new book, now that we are back in contact.
I saw that in the case of one friend who separated from her partner last year I had crossed their joint address out very neatly and written her new one in underneath. Was I hoping that the break might not be final? They are seeing each other again, cautiously, so my sense that it might not be over yet was not misplaced. I found the addresses of a couple of acquaintances, a friend of a friend and a former work associate, where intermittent contact has not quite kindled into friendship. The question whether or not to send them a piece of coloured cardboard is really about whether to try again, or decide it hasn't worked. Somebody who moved out of the marital home, met somebody else very quickly, moved in with her without divulging his new address, and communicated the fact of their engagement by group text. A card to his office doesn't seem appropriate. Compared to that, chasing down the addresses of my young cousin, who I vaguely think is in the process of moving house, and our oldest nephew, who has never been a card sender but since we went to his wedding I feel he and his new wife should be on our card list, is merely an administrative problem.
I dropped the neighbours' cards around on foot, since it was such a beautiful afternoon that I fancied the walk, and I would like not to be the last to send them for once. One of them was at home, and invited me in for a chat, where we rejoiced over the demise of the quarry plans. He and his late wife were very suspicious of us commuting London people when we first moved in, but two decades later relations have mellowed.
I have had to set the heaters in the greenhouse and conservatory again tonight, the second time this year. Ten days to go until the shortest day, following which the saying goes that when the days begin to lengthen, then the cold begins to strengthen.
The Systems Administrator disappeared to London for lunch, leaving me to wait for a parcel that Citylink tried to deliver yesterday while we were both out. The contents of the parcel are for me, and my waiting in a quid pro quo for the time a couple of weeks ago when the positions were reversed. I could have stomped about the frozen gravel in the front garden cutting down aster stems and chopping icy strands off the ivy hedge, but it gradually dawned on me that I didn't want to. It just felt too cold.
Instead I ordered our Chelsea tickets. The website said that all day tickets for the Tuesday were down to limited availability, but let me buy two. Phew. I know that Chelsea sold out this year, but I didn't expect there to be a problem buying tickets before Christmas, when the show isn't until May. After an internal struggle I opted to have them posted to us, which will produce spasms of anxiety from late March until they arrive, in case the post office has lost them, but will avoid queuing to collect them on the morning provided they do arrive. I will probably have smaller spasms of anxiety between now and late March in case I should have opted to pick them up at the venue, but I didn't know how slow the queue would be, and had visions of the day getting off to a bad start as we hung around outside the show for ages while other happy visitors streamed past us, and our chance to visit the small gardens early as we always do slipped away. Permitting oneself to worry at all about either of these problems is extremely un-mindful.
Then I returned to the Christmas card list. Nowadays sending cards is fraught with alternatives and the possibility of bad choices, almost as worrying as buying Chelsea tickets. Should I send a card to the great and gracious lady gardener? I like her. I would be quite happy to have her think that I am thinking of her fondly, albeit briefly, at Christmas. I have enough cards and I shall be driving past her house en route to a music society meeting. But then maybe she will feel that I have created a reciprocal obligation, and she will not be driving past my house, and might feel she had to spend fifty pence on a stamp. I know that some of my friends have agreed not to send each other cards, so perhaps I shouldn't burden a relative stranger with the need to send me one. But she might like to get a card, and feel it didn't matter if she didn't send me one, or deliver it to the plant centre and save a stamp, or not grudge a stamp in the circumstances. I have no idea.
I write the cards by dint of going through the address book systematically so that I don't forget anybody. The first name in the book was the chap that the Systems Administrator is lunching with today. I asked whether if I gave the SA the card to take it would reach our friend's home, or whether it would remain in either the SA's pocket or the friend's pocket, not to be found again until after Christmas when it would be squashed as well as out of date. The SA agreed that all of these outcomes were highly likely and that I had better post it.
Going all the way through your address book makes you think about the state of your friendships, which is probably reason enough for the custom of annual cards to persist. Entries in our address book are always written in pencil. People move, they divorce, they die, so that the book becomes steadily messier and more illegible, and it is depressing to see the crossed out names of one's late friends and relatives when trying to look up a phone number. Better to be able to erase out of date entries. Every so often the book gets so tatty we start a new one, but shove the old one in a drawer. It was nice to have to dig out the old book, to look up the addresses of old school friends of the SA whom we saw at the party back in the summer, and while I was at it I copied their details over to the new book, now that we are back in contact.
I saw that in the case of one friend who separated from her partner last year I had crossed their joint address out very neatly and written her new one in underneath. Was I hoping that the break might not be final? They are seeing each other again, cautiously, so my sense that it might not be over yet was not misplaced. I found the addresses of a couple of acquaintances, a friend of a friend and a former work associate, where intermittent contact has not quite kindled into friendship. The question whether or not to send them a piece of coloured cardboard is really about whether to try again, or decide it hasn't worked. Somebody who moved out of the marital home, met somebody else very quickly, moved in with her without divulging his new address, and communicated the fact of their engagement by group text. A card to his office doesn't seem appropriate. Compared to that, chasing down the addresses of my young cousin, who I vaguely think is in the process of moving house, and our oldest nephew, who has never been a card sender but since we went to his wedding I feel he and his new wife should be on our card list, is merely an administrative problem.
I dropped the neighbours' cards around on foot, since it was such a beautiful afternoon that I fancied the walk, and I would like not to be the last to send them for once. One of them was at home, and invited me in for a chat, where we rejoiced over the demise of the quarry plans. He and his late wife were very suspicious of us commuting London people when we first moved in, but two decades later relations have mellowed.
I have had to set the heaters in the greenhouse and conservatory again tonight, the second time this year. Ten days to go until the shortest day, following which the saying goes that when the days begin to lengthen, then the cold begins to strengthen.
Monday, 10 December 2012
countdown to Christmas
Trade ticked along in the plant centre, and I struggled to get to grips with our e-mail system. It's not as though I'm a technophobe who doesn't like using computers, but the plant centre has a weird network that I really don't understand and nobody has ever successfully explained to me, or even tried unsuccessfully to explain. There are multiple e-mail addresses going to different inboxes, a hierarchy of incoming messages so that many of them arrive on the boss's computer who can then redirect them internally, and some computers can't see what messages have been sent on other computers. The owner has recently introduced a procedure for deleting messages once they have been replied to, to try and make sure that incoming missives don't sit around unanswered for days, but it makes picking up on a previous correspondence confusing, to say the least. The whole thing operates on Outlook, a programme I don't use at home.
I needed to find the past e-mails between a customer who had been asking about the availability of various Euonymus and one of my colleagues, because she rang up wanting to buy two each of the varieties he had said we'd got. Unfortunately that was last week, and by today one variety had sold out, but she accepted a substitute when offered one. Our standard mail order delivery charge for an order worth that much was supposed to be twenty per cent of the value of the plants. Neither my colleague who packs the parcels nor the manager knew whether that was going to cover it, but since that's what we say on the website we rounded it up to the nearest five pounds and hoped for the best. The manager said to me anxiously that this was all a bit make it up as you go along, wasn't it, and I agreed that it was. My colleague spent part of the afternoon constructing three strange, dalek shaped parcels. We'll discover in due course if we can really have those shipped to Kent for thirty five pounds.
The gardeners went to cut some more Christmas trees, the owner explaining that she hadn't said before that there would be more because then people wouldn't have bought the first ones. The second scraping of the barrel was not really any worse than the first, and some of the trees were pretty good, though on the large side. However, some were what you could term individualistic takes on the concept of a Christmas tree.
I think the schools must have broken up for the holidays, as the children were around. The girl has started wearing her hair up, and looking quite grown up, but appeared a child again all of a sudden when she came into the plant centre mid afternoon asking whether we'd seen the dogs, because she had lost both of them. We hadn't, but the manager went to help look for them, and they turned up on the far side of the car park. The older one had been digging, but knew she shouldn't have been, and kept wiping her nose on tufts of grass as they came back towards the house. I think that the parental wrath if the daughter had lost both dogs would have been pretty fearsome. I hear the younger dog is not a good influence on its mother, since it is barely house trained and gets away with all sorts of things, which makes the older one think that in that case she can do that too.
I am shortly heading out again for an evening with my colleagues, since it is our staff Christmas meal. Knowing that trade had been tough my colleagues suggested to the owners that we'd be quite happy to have a DIY party, with everyone bringing something. I wouldn't have minded making cheese straws, or nibbles of fish on rye, or even aubergine boreks. However, the owners said it would be easier to go out. I am not sure why it ended up being tonight, and one person can't go because he is going to his aunt's care home's Christmas party, but someone wouldn't have been able to go whenever it was held. I ought to be at a beekeepers' committee meeting, but decided I'd already gone the extra mile for the beekeepers this autumn. The village pub was fully booked, so we have ended up going to a rather nice hotel just across the river. The last thing the local economy needs is small businesses pulling in their horns at the expense of other small businesses, so from a macro-economic point of view it's just as well we're going. And I am looking forward to my parsnip soup and Blythburgh pork.
I needed to find the past e-mails between a customer who had been asking about the availability of various Euonymus and one of my colleagues, because she rang up wanting to buy two each of the varieties he had said we'd got. Unfortunately that was last week, and by today one variety had sold out, but she accepted a substitute when offered one. Our standard mail order delivery charge for an order worth that much was supposed to be twenty per cent of the value of the plants. Neither my colleague who packs the parcels nor the manager knew whether that was going to cover it, but since that's what we say on the website we rounded it up to the nearest five pounds and hoped for the best. The manager said to me anxiously that this was all a bit make it up as you go along, wasn't it, and I agreed that it was. My colleague spent part of the afternoon constructing three strange, dalek shaped parcels. We'll discover in due course if we can really have those shipped to Kent for thirty five pounds.
The gardeners went to cut some more Christmas trees, the owner explaining that she hadn't said before that there would be more because then people wouldn't have bought the first ones. The second scraping of the barrel was not really any worse than the first, and some of the trees were pretty good, though on the large side. However, some were what you could term individualistic takes on the concept of a Christmas tree.
I think the schools must have broken up for the holidays, as the children were around. The girl has started wearing her hair up, and looking quite grown up, but appeared a child again all of a sudden when she came into the plant centre mid afternoon asking whether we'd seen the dogs, because she had lost both of them. We hadn't, but the manager went to help look for them, and they turned up on the far side of the car park. The older one had been digging, but knew she shouldn't have been, and kept wiping her nose on tufts of grass as they came back towards the house. I think that the parental wrath if the daughter had lost both dogs would have been pretty fearsome. I hear the younger dog is not a good influence on its mother, since it is barely house trained and gets away with all sorts of things, which makes the older one think that in that case she can do that too.
I am shortly heading out again for an evening with my colleagues, since it is our staff Christmas meal. Knowing that trade had been tough my colleagues suggested to the owners that we'd be quite happy to have a DIY party, with everyone bringing something. I wouldn't have minded making cheese straws, or nibbles of fish on rye, or even aubergine boreks. However, the owners said it would be easier to go out. I am not sure why it ended up being tonight, and one person can't go because he is going to his aunt's care home's Christmas party, but someone wouldn't have been able to go whenever it was held. I ought to be at a beekeepers' committee meeting, but decided I'd already gone the extra mile for the beekeepers this autumn. The village pub was fully booked, so we have ended up going to a rather nice hotel just across the river. The last thing the local economy needs is small businesses pulling in their horns at the expense of other small businesses, so from a macro-economic point of view it's just as well we're going. And I am looking forward to my parsnip soup and Blythburgh pork.
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