I wish the weather would co-ordinate itself with the opening hours of the local tips (sorry, recycling centres). Yesterday when it was frosty I was all set to drive over to Manningtree to offload another load of bags of perennial weeds I won't have on the compost heap. A trip to the tip is a good way of using the first hour of a frosty morning, and I needed to go to Manningtree because I'd promised to try and get concert posters put up in a couple of the local shops, that have notice boards where community events are advertised. Then I thought to check the opening hours of the tip, and discovered that it didn't open on Thursdays.
Today it wasn't frosty. The garden waste would have kept until another day, but since I still needed to go and put the posters up I had to go to Manningtree anyway. I thought it diplomatic to buy something in both shops before asking about the posters, but fortunately the wholefood shop had my favoured brand of hand cream in stock, and I needed some milk and bread in the Co-op. The drive to the tip is no further than the drive to the one at Clacton, but Manningtree is not my recycling centre of choice, since the access for cars is very tight, and the other drivers particularly doddery. I always feel a sense of vague relief when I manage to leave without someone having accidentally reversed into my car.
I spent the rest of the day weeding the top of the big sloping bed in the back garden. Initially I was watching while the Systems Administrator was out for a parcel van which was supposed to be bringing a part for the Ford transit, but it never came. The part is a fan heater that will run off a twelve volt battery, which the Systems Administrator ordered to sit on the dashboard to de-mist the windscreen, in lieu of a working heater. Having started in that part of the garden I stuck to it, even after the SA was back.
2012 was a great year for ants. Not good for much else, but really good for ant colonies. An area of pebble mulch had completely vanished under a fine silt of sand thrown up by burrowing ants. Weed grasses had sown themselves into the sand, and as I pulled up the tufts of grass, their roots lifted with a great mass of sandy soil attached, suddenly exposing the pebble layer again. I felt like an archaeologist uncovering a buried Roman pavement. Brambles were advancing on that corner of the garden as well as the grass. Gardening is a process of holding back encroaching nature. Leave an area alone for a few months and it starts to look like the decaying ruins of central London in The Day of the Triffids.
The SA had to go out to visit the dentist, for the final, permanent filling. I was expecting a triumphant return, tired but happy, after weeks of temporary fillings and toothache. Instead a battered and irritated SA came to tell me bleakly that the tooth had had to come out after all. It had split. That would explain why it had been painful again in the last few days. The dentist would not do the permanent filling until it had settled and was definitely not infected, and more than a fortnight after having the last root drilled out it was not supposed to still be hurting, so the SA was concerned about what was going on. It is rather demoralising, after two sessions of root canal surgery and weeks of trying to remember to eat on only one side of the mouth and worrying about crumbling temporary fillings, to have lost the tooth anyway. In the end it wouldn't have made any difference to have had it out in early December, and saved all the subsequent faff.
Having teeth out has become a more serious affair than in my youth. I had four molars removed, in preparation for orthodontic work. That was done under total anaesthetic administered by injection in the dentist's chair, something which is definitely not done nowadays (and several of my dentist's other patients did allegedly die in the chair). Afterwards my mother took me home, and I don't remember any fuss being made about it. The SA came back with strict instructions about the need to control bleeding, because otherwise infection might get into the bone. Rest for the remainder of the day, preferably lie down, definitely no exercise or anything that might raise the blood pressure, no hot drinks. I don't think that in my day anyone even mentioned the possibility of bone infection.
The dentist said, and the SA agreed, that it was right to try and conserve the tooth. If it hadn't split the treatment would probably have worked. One of my incisors was root-canal-filled around twenty-five years ago, and is still firmly stuck in my jaw. I use it for eating every day The dentist would have been quite happy if the SA's tooth had lasted even another five years, since the SA would have had the use of it in that time, and any replacement wouldn't have had to last as long. The question now is whether the SA can manage happily without a replacement. Most patients do, apparently. The dentist is reluctant to fit a bridge and drill into the two neighbouring and perfectly healthy teeth, so the choices are a gap or an implant. Let's hope the gap is comfy.
Friday, 11 January 2013
Thursday, 10 January 2013
winter flowers
There was a frost this morning. They don't half shorten the gardening day, frosts. I went to Colchester instead to buy tickets for various events that are coming up during 2013 at the Arts Centre and the Mercury. The thermometer had just reached 0.0 degrees when I left the house at half past ten. Scrolling down the Events page of the Arts Centre website in a moment of idle curiosity, after clicking on the site to check what time the box office opens (half past ten) I saw at the very bottom of the list, way after the period covered by the current printed brochure, that Adrian Edmondson and the Bad Shepherds are playing there on 4 December. That was a result, since the last time I checked their website (admittedly a while ago) there was nothing about any future tours, and I did wonder whether he'd got bored with his folk-punk project, but evidently not. The Arts Centre has switched to a new ticket machine that no longer gives the ticket number, so gone are the days when you could see that you had tickets number six and seven (not so reassuring if the gig's less than a month away), but I should think that with ten months and three weeks to go we are among the first to book in this case.
By lunchtime the garden had thawed out, and I wandered down the back to say hello to the witch hazels. The orange flowered varieties were the first to flower, but now the reds are coming out as well, the group of them in their pots making a warm haze in one corner of the top lawn. In the lower part of the garden I found the white flowered Daphne bholua was out, with 'Jaqueline Postill' just opening. The white form is not such a strong grower, but has the same intense, spicy scent. Sarcocca confusa is scented too, a sweet, penetrating fragrance. I made mine look tidier by quickly snapping off the old Kirengeshoma stems that still stood like bleached spears in front of it.
The rounded leaves of Cyclamen coum are coming through. Some of them have particularly nice silvery leaves, and they may even be named varieties, though by now I have no idea what the names might be. I've ordered the odd luxury cyclamen from the specialist bulb growers, but labelling them is hopeless. The border would look like a hamster's graveyard, and the birds would scratch the labels up. Self-seeded Helleborus foetidus are coming up in the borders, and I made a mental note to remove them where they threatened to overshadow the cyclamen. There are a few pale, hesitant cyclamen flowers, but the show hasn't really started.
The garden yields up some of its secrets at this time of year. I never knew there was a bird's nest high in the rambling rose on the wild cherry tree. The areas of border I weeded and mulched with compost in the autumn are looking very brown and plain and I can see with painful clarity every emerging goosegrass seedling. I sprayed a few dandelion rosettes in the border with glyphosate. It's too cold for it to work very effectively, but seeing them clear of other foliage and on a day with no wind the chance seemed too good to miss.
The bottom of the rose bank is horribly wet. Water is lying on the mypex fabric that covers the bank, and running sullenly into the edge of the lawn, and I think it must simply ooze out of the soil. I'm pretty sure that's what killed the wintersweet, which was doing quite nicely, then last year suddenly died. The manager at work confirmed that they don't like too sit wet, which makes them tricky to keep alive and in good health in plastic pots in the plant centre. There are some buds on the Edgeworthia chrysantha. Not as many as on the plants at work that came in from Italy, but some, and at least the shrub hasn't succumbed to waterlogging like its neighbour.
The bark of the Zelkova carpinifolia is starting to peel in apricot patches, like the one I saw and fell in love with at Wisley. I can't remember when that was, but it must have been at least sixteen years ago, since I was on my penultimate City job at the time, and stopped at Wisley for a brief visit on my way back from some working trip. The apricot patches on my tree are still very small, but they are a start. I grew the Zelkova from seed, and am very attached to it. It has always insisted on keeping a many-branched and weaving habit, which I have read is characteristic of the species in this country. Some of the branches have fused where they touch, which in theory is a bad thing to have allowed to happen, since they will press on each other as they grow and set up stresses within the tree. However, it is fascinating to watch.
The red catkins on the Alnus incana 'Aurea' managed to look extraordinarily vivid, given it was such a murky afternoon. This is a delightful tree. I have spoken to unhappy owners who have found them slow, but finding itself unexpectedly sitting in a quagmire, mine has grown rapidly. The leaves would be a stronger shade of yellow in summer if it were in a sunnier position, but it is charming anyway.
The forecast is for it to get colder. I felt rather plaintive, sniffing my daphne and eyeing up the fat buds of the Edgeworthia, in case a blast of freezing weather was about to arrive and bring the display to an end before it had fairly got going.
By lunchtime the garden had thawed out, and I wandered down the back to say hello to the witch hazels. The orange flowered varieties were the first to flower, but now the reds are coming out as well, the group of them in their pots making a warm haze in one corner of the top lawn. In the lower part of the garden I found the white flowered Daphne bholua was out, with 'Jaqueline Postill' just opening. The white form is not such a strong grower, but has the same intense, spicy scent. Sarcocca confusa is scented too, a sweet, penetrating fragrance. I made mine look tidier by quickly snapping off the old Kirengeshoma stems that still stood like bleached spears in front of it.
The rounded leaves of Cyclamen coum are coming through. Some of them have particularly nice silvery leaves, and they may even be named varieties, though by now I have no idea what the names might be. I've ordered the odd luxury cyclamen from the specialist bulb growers, but labelling them is hopeless. The border would look like a hamster's graveyard, and the birds would scratch the labels up. Self-seeded Helleborus foetidus are coming up in the borders, and I made a mental note to remove them where they threatened to overshadow the cyclamen. There are a few pale, hesitant cyclamen flowers, but the show hasn't really started.
The garden yields up some of its secrets at this time of year. I never knew there was a bird's nest high in the rambling rose on the wild cherry tree. The areas of border I weeded and mulched with compost in the autumn are looking very brown and plain and I can see with painful clarity every emerging goosegrass seedling. I sprayed a few dandelion rosettes in the border with glyphosate. It's too cold for it to work very effectively, but seeing them clear of other foliage and on a day with no wind the chance seemed too good to miss.
The bottom of the rose bank is horribly wet. Water is lying on the mypex fabric that covers the bank, and running sullenly into the edge of the lawn, and I think it must simply ooze out of the soil. I'm pretty sure that's what killed the wintersweet, which was doing quite nicely, then last year suddenly died. The manager at work confirmed that they don't like too sit wet, which makes them tricky to keep alive and in good health in plastic pots in the plant centre. There are some buds on the Edgeworthia chrysantha. Not as many as on the plants at work that came in from Italy, but some, and at least the shrub hasn't succumbed to waterlogging like its neighbour.
The bark of the Zelkova carpinifolia is starting to peel in apricot patches, like the one I saw and fell in love with at Wisley. I can't remember when that was, but it must have been at least sixteen years ago, since I was on my penultimate City job at the time, and stopped at Wisley for a brief visit on my way back from some working trip. The apricot patches on my tree are still very small, but they are a start. I grew the Zelkova from seed, and am very attached to it. It has always insisted on keeping a many-branched and weaving habit, which I have read is characteristic of the species in this country. Some of the branches have fused where they touch, which in theory is a bad thing to have allowed to happen, since they will press on each other as they grow and set up stresses within the tree. However, it is fascinating to watch.
The red catkins on the Alnus incana 'Aurea' managed to look extraordinarily vivid, given it was such a murky afternoon. This is a delightful tree. I have spoken to unhappy owners who have found them slow, but finding itself unexpectedly sitting in a quagmire, mine has grown rapidly. The leaves would be a stronger shade of yellow in summer if it were in a sunnier position, but it is charming anyway.
The forecast is for it to get colder. I felt rather plaintive, sniffing my daphne and eyeing up the fat buds of the Edgeworthia, in case a blast of freezing weather was about to arrive and bring the display to an end before it had fairly got going.
Wednesday, 9 January 2013
why I never became an accountant
I spent today doing the beekeepers' accounts. It was a waste of a good gardening day, what with it being dry, calm and sunny, but I have to get them audited before the AGM which will be on the fourth Thursday of the month, and the timetable for submitting the divisional accounts to the county won't wait for a frosty day when I don't want to be outside anyway.
I started the accounts last night, thinking that there couldn't be that much to do, since I've kept writing them up (or rather, putting numbers into spreadsheets) through the year. After half an hour or so I decided that they were, to borrow a phrase from Fred Wedlock, doing my noodle in. I've always been better at that sort of analytical work between about half past eight and eleven in the morning. Evenings are for associative free-thinking, not tracking mystery missing sums of money round a series of spreadsheets.
I returned to the accounts this morning, thinking that hostilities would be all over by Christmas, or rather coffee time. Not a bit of it. With half an hour for lunch and a few brief de-noodling breaks spent wandering about, I finally nailed the last discrepancy of sixty-five pounds at around five in the afternoon. I was exhausted, noodle well and truly done-in. I can believe all the stories in the newspapers about how sitting down at a desk five days a week kills you. Your blood vessels congeal with fat, your arse spreads to the size of Hampshire and you expire. Goodness knows how I did it, or spent a significant hunk of my working days staring at computer screens, for as many years as I did, or why the Systems Administrator is not serving a life sentence after going completely insane over a bank reconciliation that wouldn't reconcile and stabbing the nearest person to death with a biro.
I have learnt a lot. If re-elected as Treasurer at the AGM I will have much more of an idea next time round of how to write the books up as I go along, so that at the end of the year useful numbers drop out of the bottom of my spreadsheets, and it really is a question of pulling them together into an income and expenditure account, and making a couple of adjustments for pre-payments and contras. When I came to look at the spreadsheets for 2012 I did have to admit that there were rather a lot of unanalysed totals highlighted in yellow with a note Breakdown in File, and that the quality of information in the file was such that the first breakdown was liable to be mine.
One presentational difficulty sprang from the fact that the financial records my fellow officers and committee members had given me were a weird mixture of net and gross income and expenditure. Take the annual meal. That was fairly tidy. The person who organised it banked two sets of cheques received from members in payment for their dinners. The secretary and I signed two cheques, one to pay the pub and one to reimburse the person who had got cash out of the bank with which to tip the staff. It was only made a tiny bit more complicated by the four pounds charged for printing place cards included in an invoice for quite a lot of other things that were nothing to do with the meal.
And then a bit more complicated than that by the person who forgot to pay on or before the day, and eventually sent me a cheque made payable not to the beekeepers, or even to me, but to the person who organised the meal. I gave her the cheque and she gave me cash, out of which I paid £9.30 expenses for stationery and postage to the Secretary, because I did not know if it was all right for the Secretary to countersign a cheque made payable to herself, and I could not face driving to the other side of Colchester to obtain a signature from the other signatory. I then banked the balance, together with a cheque for fifteen pounds received in the post from a member, whose purpose I was not clear about at the time.
Accounting for the meal took some unscrambling, but at the end of it I had a pretty good idea what our income had been and how much we'd paid out. Not so the summer barbecue, whose organiser banked the surplus after paying for the food, so I couldn't present that as Income from barbecue, Expenditure on barbecue. The proceeds from the Chatto wildlife fair were net after someone had paid thirty-three pounds in cash to have the honey show trophies engraved.
Then there was the member who managed to pay his sub twice, the member who misunderstood the form and over-paid by ten pounds, and the man whose cheque bounced. And the woman who paid an annual subscription in respect of 2013 for her father's Christmas present. It was a kind thought, but it means I have an accrual. As I grappled with the necessary accounting reversals I was reminded of how it was that I gave up training to be a chartered accountant, which was that I was sitting in a squalid rented flat in Highgate over a bottles and cases account that wouldn't come out, when it got to about ten at night and I said to the Systems Administrator Oh sod this, let's go to the pub.
As for the subscriptions, I don't understand what the previous Treasurer did, and I don't want to know, unless somebody insists on telling me. Our subscriptions are conceptually straightforward, but unwieldy. The sub covers membership of the local division, the Essex Beekeepers and the British Beekeepers, plus bee disease insurance. The amount you pay for disease insurance depends on how many colonies of bees you have. Some members make additional donations when they pay their subs which may be for bee research, for educational purposes, or for general divisional funds. There are joint memberships, which cost less than twice a single one, and a few life and associate members who pay a lesser sub for a smaller range of benefits. Members send their payments to the Membership Secretary, who pays them into the bank, which I'm grateful for in that it saves me several trips to town, or else by direct bank transfer. In April when I offered to be Treasurer I was given a copy of the Membership Secretary's spreadsheet. She is on a Mac whereas I'm on Windows Seven, and I found my copy of the spreadsheet difficult to manipulate. It wouldn't let me freeze panes, for example, so that every time I scrolled down it all the column headings disappeared.
By dint of going through every membership form in the course of checking everyone's insurance premium I was able to pull out the totals for each kind of donation, which the Membership Secretary hadn't recorded. If I'd been inputting the data I'd have done that at the outset, and broken subs down between county and national dues while I was at it. But I wasn't and didn't. The County Treasurer sent me bills for amounts due to the County and National associations, which I duly paid. As far as I'm concerned that's what should go into the Income and Expenditure sides of the accounts for money due to the EBKA and BBKA. Which leaves the question unanswered as to how the previous Treasurer managed to come up with different amounts for membership income attributable to EBKA and BBKA fees, and expenditure on them?
There is a consoling thought, which is that if anyone tries to give me too hard a time at the AGM about my accounts I can smile at them bashfully and suggest that they might like to take over for 2013. That will shut them up.
I started the accounts last night, thinking that there couldn't be that much to do, since I've kept writing them up (or rather, putting numbers into spreadsheets) through the year. After half an hour or so I decided that they were, to borrow a phrase from Fred Wedlock, doing my noodle in. I've always been better at that sort of analytical work between about half past eight and eleven in the morning. Evenings are for associative free-thinking, not tracking mystery missing sums of money round a series of spreadsheets.
I returned to the accounts this morning, thinking that hostilities would be all over by Christmas, or rather coffee time. Not a bit of it. With half an hour for lunch and a few brief de-noodling breaks spent wandering about, I finally nailed the last discrepancy of sixty-five pounds at around five in the afternoon. I was exhausted, noodle well and truly done-in. I can believe all the stories in the newspapers about how sitting down at a desk five days a week kills you. Your blood vessels congeal with fat, your arse spreads to the size of Hampshire and you expire. Goodness knows how I did it, or spent a significant hunk of my working days staring at computer screens, for as many years as I did, or why the Systems Administrator is not serving a life sentence after going completely insane over a bank reconciliation that wouldn't reconcile and stabbing the nearest person to death with a biro.
I have learnt a lot. If re-elected as Treasurer at the AGM I will have much more of an idea next time round of how to write the books up as I go along, so that at the end of the year useful numbers drop out of the bottom of my spreadsheets, and it really is a question of pulling them together into an income and expenditure account, and making a couple of adjustments for pre-payments and contras. When I came to look at the spreadsheets for 2012 I did have to admit that there were rather a lot of unanalysed totals highlighted in yellow with a note Breakdown in File, and that the quality of information in the file was such that the first breakdown was liable to be mine.
One presentational difficulty sprang from the fact that the financial records my fellow officers and committee members had given me were a weird mixture of net and gross income and expenditure. Take the annual meal. That was fairly tidy. The person who organised it banked two sets of cheques received from members in payment for their dinners. The secretary and I signed two cheques, one to pay the pub and one to reimburse the person who had got cash out of the bank with which to tip the staff. It was only made a tiny bit more complicated by the four pounds charged for printing place cards included in an invoice for quite a lot of other things that were nothing to do with the meal.
And then a bit more complicated than that by the person who forgot to pay on or before the day, and eventually sent me a cheque made payable not to the beekeepers, or even to me, but to the person who organised the meal. I gave her the cheque and she gave me cash, out of which I paid £9.30 expenses for stationery and postage to the Secretary, because I did not know if it was all right for the Secretary to countersign a cheque made payable to herself, and I could not face driving to the other side of Colchester to obtain a signature from the other signatory. I then banked the balance, together with a cheque for fifteen pounds received in the post from a member, whose purpose I was not clear about at the time.
Accounting for the meal took some unscrambling, but at the end of it I had a pretty good idea what our income had been and how much we'd paid out. Not so the summer barbecue, whose organiser banked the surplus after paying for the food, so I couldn't present that as Income from barbecue, Expenditure on barbecue. The proceeds from the Chatto wildlife fair were net after someone had paid thirty-three pounds in cash to have the honey show trophies engraved.
Then there was the member who managed to pay his sub twice, the member who misunderstood the form and over-paid by ten pounds, and the man whose cheque bounced. And the woman who paid an annual subscription in respect of 2013 for her father's Christmas present. It was a kind thought, but it means I have an accrual. As I grappled with the necessary accounting reversals I was reminded of how it was that I gave up training to be a chartered accountant, which was that I was sitting in a squalid rented flat in Highgate over a bottles and cases account that wouldn't come out, when it got to about ten at night and I said to the Systems Administrator Oh sod this, let's go to the pub.
As for the subscriptions, I don't understand what the previous Treasurer did, and I don't want to know, unless somebody insists on telling me. Our subscriptions are conceptually straightforward, but unwieldy. The sub covers membership of the local division, the Essex Beekeepers and the British Beekeepers, plus bee disease insurance. The amount you pay for disease insurance depends on how many colonies of bees you have. Some members make additional donations when they pay their subs which may be for bee research, for educational purposes, or for general divisional funds. There are joint memberships, which cost less than twice a single one, and a few life and associate members who pay a lesser sub for a smaller range of benefits. Members send their payments to the Membership Secretary, who pays them into the bank, which I'm grateful for in that it saves me several trips to town, or else by direct bank transfer. In April when I offered to be Treasurer I was given a copy of the Membership Secretary's spreadsheet. She is on a Mac whereas I'm on Windows Seven, and I found my copy of the spreadsheet difficult to manipulate. It wouldn't let me freeze panes, for example, so that every time I scrolled down it all the column headings disappeared.
By dint of going through every membership form in the course of checking everyone's insurance premium I was able to pull out the totals for each kind of donation, which the Membership Secretary hadn't recorded. If I'd been inputting the data I'd have done that at the outset, and broken subs down between county and national dues while I was at it. But I wasn't and didn't. The County Treasurer sent me bills for amounts due to the County and National associations, which I duly paid. As far as I'm concerned that's what should go into the Income and Expenditure sides of the accounts for money due to the EBKA and BBKA. Which leaves the question unanswered as to how the previous Treasurer managed to come up with different amounts for membership income attributable to EBKA and BBKA fees, and expenditure on them?
There is a consoling thought, which is that if anyone tries to give me too hard a time at the AGM about my accounts I can smile at them bashfully and suggest that they might like to take over for 2013. That will shut them up.
Tuesday, 8 January 2013
straw
Today we finally went and got some straw for the chicken's run, a task that's been sitting on the list of Things to Do since before Christmas. We agonised then about who we knew that might be able and willing to sell us straw. I picked my moment to ask the boss at work, who made vaguely encouraging noises, but apart from the owner in the course of the staff Christmas meal enquiring who it was that had been asking about hay, nothing happened. I also discovered that a friend's on-off relationship with a farmer was on again, so got his mobile number from her, then didn't ring him for several weeks. First of all the SA had toothache, and driving around the countryside in an ancient flat bed transit van with no heating didn't seem like a good idea, and then it was Christmas and the New Year and it seemed rude. I finally made contact last week.
We'd arranged to collect the straw around four o'clock, since the farmer would be in the yard at dusk shutting things up for the day. We have been there before, but still managed to get lost and go on a magical mystery tour of the network of lanes north of the A12 out towards Langham. The SA made a journey plan before we set off, so that we could go cross country and avoid taking the truck anywhere near the north station roundabout in Colchester, but one of the lanes on the map didn't seem to exist in real life. It must have been access only, for an expected right hand turning never materialised and we found ourselves trundling over a bridge to the wrong side of the A12. We doubled back so that we were at least the right side of the main road, but the next promising-looking turning in the right direction taken by the truck ahead of us transpired to be a private no-through road, with nowhere sensible to turn round. The SA had to do a seventeen point turn in somebody's driveway, while I hoped that the householder wouldn't come out and challenge us.
We'd gone shopping for straw in our gardening clothes. It seemed a waste of time to change, and it's not as though a working farmyard is a very dressy place. As we hurriedly manoeuvred in a stranger's gateway I realised that the only badge of respectability I had with me at that moment was my accent. Ancient jeans thick with mud, cheap wellington boots and a nineteen year old M reg ex-builder's truck with a hundred and twenty thousand miles on the clock and one front wing made out of an old kitchen unit door do not give out the most reassuring social vibes. We escaped before anyone could come and shout at us. I know it is rude to turn round in people's driveways, but once you've gone down a private road by mistake you have to turn somewhere.
The farmer was there when we arrived, looking somewhat careworn. There was such a gap between my getting his number and contacting him, I don't even know whether his fledgling relationship with my friend survived Christmas. Farming in Essex over the past year would be enough to make anyone look careworn, with a struggle to get every job done, and a poor harvest at the end of it. The SA asked him if he was badly behind and he just said Yes. He could do some ploughing, and that was about it. The farmyard was very muddy, so we were right not to put on tidy clothes for the expedition.
On the way home the truck started to make a loud and horrible noise. The SA said with a note of real concern that it didn't sound good, then turned the fan off and the noise stopped. Phew. An alarming moment when the clutch felt sticky ceased to be alarming when the SA realised there was a piece of plastic stuck under the clutch pedal. By the time we got home with the straw it was dark. Some of the more romantic articles I've seen about the joys of backyard poultry keeping do seem to gloss over the practicalities. Even a few fowl make their run muddy, especially in a wet year, and you will need something to put down on the ground. What will you use, where are you going to get it, and how are you going to transport it home?
We'd arranged to collect the straw around four o'clock, since the farmer would be in the yard at dusk shutting things up for the day. We have been there before, but still managed to get lost and go on a magical mystery tour of the network of lanes north of the A12 out towards Langham. The SA made a journey plan before we set off, so that we could go cross country and avoid taking the truck anywhere near the north station roundabout in Colchester, but one of the lanes on the map didn't seem to exist in real life. It must have been access only, for an expected right hand turning never materialised and we found ourselves trundling over a bridge to the wrong side of the A12. We doubled back so that we were at least the right side of the main road, but the next promising-looking turning in the right direction taken by the truck ahead of us transpired to be a private no-through road, with nowhere sensible to turn round. The SA had to do a seventeen point turn in somebody's driveway, while I hoped that the householder wouldn't come out and challenge us.
We'd gone shopping for straw in our gardening clothes. It seemed a waste of time to change, and it's not as though a working farmyard is a very dressy place. As we hurriedly manoeuvred in a stranger's gateway I realised that the only badge of respectability I had with me at that moment was my accent. Ancient jeans thick with mud, cheap wellington boots and a nineteen year old M reg ex-builder's truck with a hundred and twenty thousand miles on the clock and one front wing made out of an old kitchen unit door do not give out the most reassuring social vibes. We escaped before anyone could come and shout at us. I know it is rude to turn round in people's driveways, but once you've gone down a private road by mistake you have to turn somewhere.
The farmer was there when we arrived, looking somewhat careworn. There was such a gap between my getting his number and contacting him, I don't even know whether his fledgling relationship with my friend survived Christmas. Farming in Essex over the past year would be enough to make anyone look careworn, with a struggle to get every job done, and a poor harvest at the end of it. The SA asked him if he was badly behind and he just said Yes. He could do some ploughing, and that was about it. The farmyard was very muddy, so we were right not to put on tidy clothes for the expedition.
On the way home the truck started to make a loud and horrible noise. The SA said with a note of real concern that it didn't sound good, then turned the fan off and the noise stopped. Phew. An alarming moment when the clutch felt sticky ceased to be alarming when the SA realised there was a piece of plastic stuck under the clutch pedal. By the time we got home with the straw it was dark. Some of the more romantic articles I've seen about the joys of backyard poultry keeping do seem to gloss over the practicalities. Even a few fowl make their run muddy, especially in a wet year, and you will need something to put down on the ground. What will you use, where are you going to get it, and how are you going to transport it home?
Monday, 7 January 2013
back to work
Today was back to work day, my first at the plant centre for three weeks. I would not say that I felt unalloyed joy at six-fifteen this morning when the alarm clock went off. I was slightly early to work, but the manager was earlier, already checking the e-mails on the computer in the office when I arrived. My young colleague was slightly late, and had a disastrous cold. The dog seemed quite pleased to see me.
My colleagues had been busy in my absence creosoting the display benches, or rather creosote-substituting them. A pungent smell of creosote substitute hung over the plant centre. I have never yet been asked to take part in the annual creosote-fest, and knew I wasn't going to break my duck today, because it was drizzling. If you apply creosote substitute to wet wood it doesn't seem to soak in properly, but stays on the surface for days in an oily slick of droplets, waiting to coat the clothes and skin of anybody unwise enough to touch it.
The manager stayed so long at the computer that I thought I'd better find myself something useful to do, and started picking dead leaves off the remaining stock of primula in the plant centre. In a couple of cases the entire plant came as well. Primula don't survive especially well in pots, because they are particularly suscept to vine weevil, and I put the two pots to one side for the manager to investigate later. They might have just got too wet, and rotted. The manager found me standing cleaning pots in the drizzle, and suggested I might like to go and clean up herbaceous plants under cover in the polytunnel on the Other Side. He brought in trolley load after trolley load of pots, mostly iris, and I spent the rest of the day trimming off their dead leaves, pulling out weeds, and making them presentable. If I'd known I was going to be doing that I'd have put my radio in the car. Probably I should anyway as a precaution at this time of year.
Technically I think that if I listen to music on my radio or any other device with a loudspeaker while at work my employers are supposed to have a music licence. If, on the other hand, I were to listen to a radio or i-Pod through headphones for my own exclusive personal use, I don't think they would be required to get one. The manager told me recently about one of our suppliers, a larger horticultural firm than ours, which in order to comply with the music licence rules restricted music at work to personal devices. They changed their minds after a girl who was listening on headphones didn't hear an approaching tractor and was quite badly hurt when she stepped into its path. I'm all for musicians being paid for their efforts, but it seems mad that I can legally listen alone to Radio 3 on Tuesdays in my own greenhouse, but not on Mondays in my employer's polytunnel.
The poster for the snowdrop walk never made it to the woman who works in the office, so far as I could discover. I presume it is sitting in the boss's inbox, maybe waiting for the owner to approve it, but it has not been printed, or laminated, or put up in the shop. I asked the manager if he could chase it up, and remind the owner that the website needed updating. Apparently the answerphone message still gives our Christmas opening hours as well.
My colleagues had been busy in my absence creosoting the display benches, or rather creosote-substituting them. A pungent smell of creosote substitute hung over the plant centre. I have never yet been asked to take part in the annual creosote-fest, and knew I wasn't going to break my duck today, because it was drizzling. If you apply creosote substitute to wet wood it doesn't seem to soak in properly, but stays on the surface for days in an oily slick of droplets, waiting to coat the clothes and skin of anybody unwise enough to touch it.
The manager stayed so long at the computer that I thought I'd better find myself something useful to do, and started picking dead leaves off the remaining stock of primula in the plant centre. In a couple of cases the entire plant came as well. Primula don't survive especially well in pots, because they are particularly suscept to vine weevil, and I put the two pots to one side for the manager to investigate later. They might have just got too wet, and rotted. The manager found me standing cleaning pots in the drizzle, and suggested I might like to go and clean up herbaceous plants under cover in the polytunnel on the Other Side. He brought in trolley load after trolley load of pots, mostly iris, and I spent the rest of the day trimming off their dead leaves, pulling out weeds, and making them presentable. If I'd known I was going to be doing that I'd have put my radio in the car. Probably I should anyway as a precaution at this time of year.
Technically I think that if I listen to music on my radio or any other device with a loudspeaker while at work my employers are supposed to have a music licence. If, on the other hand, I were to listen to a radio or i-Pod through headphones for my own exclusive personal use, I don't think they would be required to get one. The manager told me recently about one of our suppliers, a larger horticultural firm than ours, which in order to comply with the music licence rules restricted music at work to personal devices. They changed their minds after a girl who was listening on headphones didn't hear an approaching tractor and was quite badly hurt when she stepped into its path. I'm all for musicians being paid for their efforts, but it seems mad that I can legally listen alone to Radio 3 on Tuesdays in my own greenhouse, but not on Mondays in my employer's polytunnel.
The poster for the snowdrop walk never made it to the woman who works in the office, so far as I could discover. I presume it is sitting in the boss's inbox, maybe waiting for the owner to approve it, but it has not been printed, or laminated, or put up in the shop. I asked the manager if he could chase it up, and remind the owner that the website needed updating. Apparently the answerphone message still gives our Christmas opening hours as well.
Sunday, 6 January 2013
admin and drill
This morning it was foggy, the wind turbine on the neighbouring farm invisible in the murk. It's just as well my trip on the sailing barge Victor was yesterday and not today, since they might not have sailed in that much fog, and if they had we wouldn't have seen many birds. I should add the caveat that the weather at Harwich isn't always exactly the same as it is here. I should also add that we saw egrets yesterday. They are very easy to identify, looking like gleaming white miniature herons. Their natural range has been gradually spreading across Europe and into the UK, so that whereas thirty years ago, reports of an egret sighting would have brought twitchers running from six counties, nowadays they are nice to see but not something extraordinary. They are very handsome, though, and not that common even now, so I don't know why I forgot to mention them, except that I was cold and my mind was already stuffed with bird names. I forgot the heron as well, that perpetually derelict-looking haunter of garden ponds and estuaries.
Originally I was going to garden today, but by the time I'd been to Tesco for groceries the mood had passed. It was so damp and chilly outside, and my chest was gently intimating that it would sooner not be crawling around out there. The hideous canned music in Tesco has now ceased, thank goodness, so it was just for Christmas, not for life. Tesco customer services did reply to my complaint, several times. First of all they rang me, but I was out, so they left an answerphone message, and e-mailed to say they'd tried to ring me, and eventually sent me another e-mail explaining that the in-store music was only temporary, and was not supposed to be annoying. It left me feeling quite relieved that I hadn't sent them a second e-mail complaining that you could only complain if you gave them your mobile phone number.
Meanwhile, the Royal Mail is not doing so well in the customer service stakes. Friday's post brought us a letter addressed to one of the neighbours, which I finally remembered to drop off today when I was passing. Yesterday, chatting about this and that with my friend on the way to Harwich, it transpired that she regularly gets letters and parcels addressed to another house with the same name as her house, but in a different village, and that they regularly get her letters. In the evening, driving to Ipswich for a concert with another friend, she mentioned that since a new house was built in her village and given the same name as her house, they keep getting each other's mail. Not just scruffy, partially addressed mail, but letters with the recipient's name, the street name, and the full postcode, none of which seem to make any difference to the Royal Mail sorting office or the postman. Same village, same house name. Good enough. Who has time to read postcodes these days?
Instead of gardening I did all the inside jobs I could to put off the moment when I had to start on the beekeepers association accounts. I don't know why, since the AGM is at the end of the month, and I'm going to have to do them very soon. I wrote a long letter to my gardening friend in Japan and managed to print it using both sides of the paper and with all the pages the same way up. I filled out the form and wrote a cheque renewing my beekeepers association subscription. I wrote to somebody about the music society concerts, who had heard on the U3A grapevine that I'd been promoting them, and was so interested in the concerts she tracked us down via the phone book, banking on our unusual name, because she didn't have a computer or use e-mail.
I ordered church pillar candles for the holders in the sitting room, deciding to go for the premium version with a high percentage of beeswax from a firm of ecclesiastical suppliers. Before you can order from the website you have to create an account. The drop-down menu of prefixes starts with the following titles:
The Revd
The Revd Canon
The RT Revd
Fr
The Revd Prof
The Revd Dr
At the moment they have reductions on surplices, choir gowns in a range of colours, and birettas, the latter available in head sizes 58 to 62 centimetres, collapsible for easy storage and carriage.
I ran up a poster to put up in the shop at work advertising the snowdrop walk in February, lifting a nice picture of snowdrops from the internet, and e-mailed it to the office ready for the woman who works in the office to insert our logo, print and laminate. The owner asked me to take on that sort of publicity, but has not entrusted me with a digital copy of the logo. I noticed in passing that the website still hasn't been updated.
Then I made the supper, but I can see the beekeepers accounts creeping inexorably up the list of Things to Do, together with my tax return.
Originally I was going to garden today, but by the time I'd been to Tesco for groceries the mood had passed. It was so damp and chilly outside, and my chest was gently intimating that it would sooner not be crawling around out there. The hideous canned music in Tesco has now ceased, thank goodness, so it was just for Christmas, not for life. Tesco customer services did reply to my complaint, several times. First of all they rang me, but I was out, so they left an answerphone message, and e-mailed to say they'd tried to ring me, and eventually sent me another e-mail explaining that the in-store music was only temporary, and was not supposed to be annoying. It left me feeling quite relieved that I hadn't sent them a second e-mail complaining that you could only complain if you gave them your mobile phone number.
Meanwhile, the Royal Mail is not doing so well in the customer service stakes. Friday's post brought us a letter addressed to one of the neighbours, which I finally remembered to drop off today when I was passing. Yesterday, chatting about this and that with my friend on the way to Harwich, it transpired that she regularly gets letters and parcels addressed to another house with the same name as her house, but in a different village, and that they regularly get her letters. In the evening, driving to Ipswich for a concert with another friend, she mentioned that since a new house was built in her village and given the same name as her house, they keep getting each other's mail. Not just scruffy, partially addressed mail, but letters with the recipient's name, the street name, and the full postcode, none of which seem to make any difference to the Royal Mail sorting office or the postman. Same village, same house name. Good enough. Who has time to read postcodes these days?
Instead of gardening I did all the inside jobs I could to put off the moment when I had to start on the beekeepers association accounts. I don't know why, since the AGM is at the end of the month, and I'm going to have to do them very soon. I wrote a long letter to my gardening friend in Japan and managed to print it using both sides of the paper and with all the pages the same way up. I filled out the form and wrote a cheque renewing my beekeepers association subscription. I wrote to somebody about the music society concerts, who had heard on the U3A grapevine that I'd been promoting them, and was so interested in the concerts she tracked us down via the phone book, banking on our unusual name, because she didn't have a computer or use e-mail.
I ordered church pillar candles for the holders in the sitting room, deciding to go for the premium version with a high percentage of beeswax from a firm of ecclesiastical suppliers. Before you can order from the website you have to create an account. The drop-down menu of prefixes starts with the following titles:
The Revd
The Revd Canon
The RT Revd
Fr
The Revd Prof
The Revd Dr
At the moment they have reductions on surplices, choir gowns in a range of colours, and birettas, the latter available in head sizes 58 to 62 centimetres, collapsible for easy storage and carriage.
I ran up a poster to put up in the shop at work advertising the snowdrop walk in February, lifting a nice picture of snowdrops from the internet, and e-mailed it to the office ready for the woman who works in the office to insert our logo, print and laminate. The owner asked me to take on that sort of publicity, but has not entrusted me with a digital copy of the logo. I noticed in passing that the website still hasn't been updated.
Then I made the supper, but I can see the beekeepers accounts creeping inexorably up the list of Things to Do, together with my tax return.
Saturday, 5 January 2013
birds by barge
Today I did two things I've been vaguely meaning to do for a long time. I went on a Thames barge, and I went on a birdwatching trip where somebody who knew about birds told me what I was looking at. The trip was cold, but worth it. (If you aren't interested in birds or barges you might as well stop reading now, and save yourself some time).
I have been on Thames barges before, in the sense that I have clambered across their decks when they were moored to a quay, and our boat was tied up alongside them, and we wanted to get ashore, but I don't think that counts. Today's barge the Victor set off from the Ha-penny Pier at Harwich and took us up the Stour as far as Mistley, under the auspices of the RSPB, so that we could see the birds feeding on the exposed mudflats.
Victor was built in 1895 for the linseed oil trade. Nowadays she makes her living as an offshoot of the leisure industry. You can hire her for that special party, go along for a sightseeing trip as part of the throng, follow a barge match, or subject your employees to a never-to-forgotten teambuilding and training day, and if any of your staff get seasick that's just tough. Today the Stour was extremely calm, and we did not get seasick, though we did get very, very cold. The instructions said to wear trainers or deck shoes, and while I thought I might have got away with purpose-designed yachting boots, I didn't know where mine were, and failed to find them in the two months which elapsed between booking this trip and going on it. That left me with deck shoes, which aren't large enough to let me wear more than two pairs of thinnish socks. Reader, if you are contemplating spending four hours standing in light drizzle in north Essex in January, then I can warn you from personal experience that deck shoes are not enough.
We did see lots of birds, despite the drizzle. Curlew, oyster catcher, cormorant, great crested grebe, lapwing, shelduck, merganser, goldeneye, teal, widgeon, pintail duck, dunlin, redshank, black tailed godwit, bar-tailed godwit, grey plover, turnstone, Brent goose. Marsh harrier, peregrine, shag. Eider duck, but I'm not sure they count in my case. Seals. The RSPB man said some avocet flew in front of some trees, but I missed them. Gulls and crows, but the RSPB man didn't say so much about those.
Curlews and oyster catchers I'm OK with. I've seen many over the years when we've been sailing, and could even recognise their calls, though I didn't know until today that female curlews have longer and springier beaks than male curlews. I can recognise cormorants as well, because not much else looks like them, or dives like them, or has their habit of sitting as though crucified while their wings dry. There were some great crested grebes on the Exe when I was growing up, and I've always been reasonably confident about identifying them as long as they're on the water. They have those long necks, and long heads, and they dive, so you see them out in the middle of the river and not just on the mudflats. I was pleasantly surprised at how many we saw today, having not realised they were that common. They are rather weedy fliers, but I'm not sure I'd recognise one if it was in flight, and not obligingly diving not too far away from me.
There were always lapwings in the winter on the grazing marshes along the banks of the Clyst, so I've grown up more or less knowing what they look like, and am shocked that nowadays their numbers have reduced so much that sighting one is a noteworthy event. When I was a child they were just there. Today's lapwings weren't feeding, and the RSPB man said that this was typical. Lapwings don't feed in the estuarine mud, just stand there resting in their downtime.
Once you get to the great mass of birds feeding in the mud my bird knowledge becomes extremely hazy. There are ducks and waders and that's about it. Mergansers it turns out are large ducks. When swimming they sit low in the water so that from a distance you scarcely see their backs, and the males have punk tufts on their heads. By this stage of the winter the males are starting to display to the females by throwing their heads up. In flight they show a dramatic mixture of dark and light patches. I might recognise a male merganser again.
The dunlins were fairly unmistakable, once somebody had told me what they were, because they are tiny. They run around the mud in spread-out flocks, and fly in flocks low over the water. Apparently in flight people confuse them with knots, but knots are more silvery in flight. I've seen flocks of dunlins before, without knowing what they were, though not watched them feeding, because they are so small that without binoculars you would scarcely see them.
Shelducks are large ducks with a lot of white in them. I used to know which they were, and felt a vague sense of familiarity looking at them today. Pintail ducks have the longest necks of any British duck. On the Stour they have their favourite corner just below Mistley, where the RSPB man said they gathered every year. You could not possibly see a goldeneye's eye from the deck of a barge, but they are darkish birds, the female having a white ring round the neck. Teal are small, or possibly that was wigeon. I couldn't identify the smaller ducks after today's trip, or tell the difference between grey plover, greenshank, redshank, and turnstone. The light was really not good enough to see which ones had red legs, or dark armpits (truly), or any of the other distinguishing features the RSPB man told us to look for. Some of the experienced birders on the trip were identifying all sorts of things, and as the other experienced birders didn't contradict them, there was either a conspiracy of public solidarity and they were unwilling to show each other up, or more likely they could tell from the whole jizz of the bird, without being able to see the colour of its armpits.
The eider duck had been spotted previously on the Suffolk bank of the river, just five of them, and the barge skipper agreed to nose the barge in as close as she would go up a creek to see if we could find them, until she ran aground. This was a calculated risk, since by then the tide was rising. Some of the party said they did see the eiders, which are large brown ducks. I looked at all the bird-shaped objects I could see in that part of the river, so may have seen them in the sense that light reflected from the eider duck fell upon my retina and I identified it as a bird, but since I never knew which were the eider duck I'm not sure that counts.
Quite a few seals bobbed up through the course of the trip, including one near the ferry terminal at Harwich which obligingly took a long time to eat a flatfish. Initially it had one end of the fish sticking out on each side of its mouth, and it gradually turned it around (no flippers allowed) until the fish was held head-first in its jaws, at which point there was still a lot of fish sticking out each side. The seal swallowed it anyway.
The marsh harrier appeared on the Suffolk shore near Holbrook, and flew downstream for a time. They are big, powerful fliers, and I would not have known it was a marsh harrier if people hadn't told me. The peregrine was sitting on one of the cranes at Harwich, initially outlined against the sky on a narrow ledge, and becoming much more difficult to spot as we moved on so that it was no longer silhouetted, but sat against a blue background of crane. Peregrines will eat small waders and ducks, up to the size of a wigeon, and apparently in past years they have been seen roosting on the old lightship moored in Harwich Harbour.
The gulls were only given bit-part mentions. We saw great black-backed gulls, which are the largest gulls, almost as large as cormorants, a common gull, black-headed gulls, and some others that nobody bothered to identify. The distinguishing feature of the black-headed gull was not its head, but the white flash along the front of its wings (just as the way to tell black tailed godwit and bar-tailed godwit apart is not to look at their tails). Bird watching is like gardening, in that like some plants, some birds have more cachee than others for the bird watcher. Gulls clearly come a long way down the list, an avian equivalent of Spiraea or shrubby Potentilla. As a non-twitcher I'm as happy to learn about gulls as waders, and was intrigued to see the large number of crows feeding on the stonier mud banks at low water, that never got a mention from the experts at all.
We docked an hour behind our scheduled time, presumably because of the detour to see the eider duck, and my feet were so cold as I walked up the pontoon that I wondered whether I'd be able to drive. When I got home the Systems Administrator was not at all concerned that I was late, having tracked the whole progress on-line, including the part where we stopped moving because we'd run aground. There is a site that displays ship movements, using the information they are constantly transmitting to each other and the port authorities, and it turns out that Victor is on it. That is rather a surprising thought, almost as incongruous as the sight of the barge skipper steering with one hand, and holding a mobile telephone with the other.
I have been on Thames barges before, in the sense that I have clambered across their decks when they were moored to a quay, and our boat was tied up alongside them, and we wanted to get ashore, but I don't think that counts. Today's barge the Victor set off from the Ha-penny Pier at Harwich and took us up the Stour as far as Mistley, under the auspices of the RSPB, so that we could see the birds feeding on the exposed mudflats.
Victor was built in 1895 for the linseed oil trade. Nowadays she makes her living as an offshoot of the leisure industry. You can hire her for that special party, go along for a sightseeing trip as part of the throng, follow a barge match, or subject your employees to a never-to-forgotten teambuilding and training day, and if any of your staff get seasick that's just tough. Today the Stour was extremely calm, and we did not get seasick, though we did get very, very cold. The instructions said to wear trainers or deck shoes, and while I thought I might have got away with purpose-designed yachting boots, I didn't know where mine were, and failed to find them in the two months which elapsed between booking this trip and going on it. That left me with deck shoes, which aren't large enough to let me wear more than two pairs of thinnish socks. Reader, if you are contemplating spending four hours standing in light drizzle in north Essex in January, then I can warn you from personal experience that deck shoes are not enough.
We did see lots of birds, despite the drizzle. Curlew, oyster catcher, cormorant, great crested grebe, lapwing, shelduck, merganser, goldeneye, teal, widgeon, pintail duck, dunlin, redshank, black tailed godwit, bar-tailed godwit, grey plover, turnstone, Brent goose. Marsh harrier, peregrine, shag. Eider duck, but I'm not sure they count in my case. Seals. The RSPB man said some avocet flew in front of some trees, but I missed them. Gulls and crows, but the RSPB man didn't say so much about those.
Curlews and oyster catchers I'm OK with. I've seen many over the years when we've been sailing, and could even recognise their calls, though I didn't know until today that female curlews have longer and springier beaks than male curlews. I can recognise cormorants as well, because not much else looks like them, or dives like them, or has their habit of sitting as though crucified while their wings dry. There were some great crested grebes on the Exe when I was growing up, and I've always been reasonably confident about identifying them as long as they're on the water. They have those long necks, and long heads, and they dive, so you see them out in the middle of the river and not just on the mudflats. I was pleasantly surprised at how many we saw today, having not realised they were that common. They are rather weedy fliers, but I'm not sure I'd recognise one if it was in flight, and not obligingly diving not too far away from me.
There were always lapwings in the winter on the grazing marshes along the banks of the Clyst, so I've grown up more or less knowing what they look like, and am shocked that nowadays their numbers have reduced so much that sighting one is a noteworthy event. When I was a child they were just there. Today's lapwings weren't feeding, and the RSPB man said that this was typical. Lapwings don't feed in the estuarine mud, just stand there resting in their downtime.
Once you get to the great mass of birds feeding in the mud my bird knowledge becomes extremely hazy. There are ducks and waders and that's about it. Mergansers it turns out are large ducks. When swimming they sit low in the water so that from a distance you scarcely see their backs, and the males have punk tufts on their heads. By this stage of the winter the males are starting to display to the females by throwing their heads up. In flight they show a dramatic mixture of dark and light patches. I might recognise a male merganser again.
The dunlins were fairly unmistakable, once somebody had told me what they were, because they are tiny. They run around the mud in spread-out flocks, and fly in flocks low over the water. Apparently in flight people confuse them with knots, but knots are more silvery in flight. I've seen flocks of dunlins before, without knowing what they were, though not watched them feeding, because they are so small that without binoculars you would scarcely see them.
Shelducks are large ducks with a lot of white in them. I used to know which they were, and felt a vague sense of familiarity looking at them today. Pintail ducks have the longest necks of any British duck. On the Stour they have their favourite corner just below Mistley, where the RSPB man said they gathered every year. You could not possibly see a goldeneye's eye from the deck of a barge, but they are darkish birds, the female having a white ring round the neck. Teal are small, or possibly that was wigeon. I couldn't identify the smaller ducks after today's trip, or tell the difference between grey plover, greenshank, redshank, and turnstone. The light was really not good enough to see which ones had red legs, or dark armpits (truly), or any of the other distinguishing features the RSPB man told us to look for. Some of the experienced birders on the trip were identifying all sorts of things, and as the other experienced birders didn't contradict them, there was either a conspiracy of public solidarity and they were unwilling to show each other up, or more likely they could tell from the whole jizz of the bird, without being able to see the colour of its armpits.
The eider duck had been spotted previously on the Suffolk bank of the river, just five of them, and the barge skipper agreed to nose the barge in as close as she would go up a creek to see if we could find them, until she ran aground. This was a calculated risk, since by then the tide was rising. Some of the party said they did see the eiders, which are large brown ducks. I looked at all the bird-shaped objects I could see in that part of the river, so may have seen them in the sense that light reflected from the eider duck fell upon my retina and I identified it as a bird, but since I never knew which were the eider duck I'm not sure that counts.
Quite a few seals bobbed up through the course of the trip, including one near the ferry terminal at Harwich which obligingly took a long time to eat a flatfish. Initially it had one end of the fish sticking out on each side of its mouth, and it gradually turned it around (no flippers allowed) until the fish was held head-first in its jaws, at which point there was still a lot of fish sticking out each side. The seal swallowed it anyway.
The marsh harrier appeared on the Suffolk shore near Holbrook, and flew downstream for a time. They are big, powerful fliers, and I would not have known it was a marsh harrier if people hadn't told me. The peregrine was sitting on one of the cranes at Harwich, initially outlined against the sky on a narrow ledge, and becoming much more difficult to spot as we moved on so that it was no longer silhouetted, but sat against a blue background of crane. Peregrines will eat small waders and ducks, up to the size of a wigeon, and apparently in past years they have been seen roosting on the old lightship moored in Harwich Harbour.
The gulls were only given bit-part mentions. We saw great black-backed gulls, which are the largest gulls, almost as large as cormorants, a common gull, black-headed gulls, and some others that nobody bothered to identify. The distinguishing feature of the black-headed gull was not its head, but the white flash along the front of its wings (just as the way to tell black tailed godwit and bar-tailed godwit apart is not to look at their tails). Bird watching is like gardening, in that like some plants, some birds have more cachee than others for the bird watcher. Gulls clearly come a long way down the list, an avian equivalent of Spiraea or shrubby Potentilla. As a non-twitcher I'm as happy to learn about gulls as waders, and was intrigued to see the large number of crows feeding on the stonier mud banks at low water, that never got a mention from the experts at all.
We docked an hour behind our scheduled time, presumably because of the detour to see the eider duck, and my feet were so cold as I walked up the pontoon that I wondered whether I'd be able to drive. When I got home the Systems Administrator was not at all concerned that I was late, having tracked the whole progress on-line, including the part where we stopped moving because we'd run aground. There is a site that displays ship movements, using the information they are constantly transmitting to each other and the port authorities, and it turns out that Victor is on it. That is rather a surprising thought, almost as incongruous as the sight of the barge skipper steering with one hand, and holding a mobile telephone with the other.
Friday, 4 January 2013
familiar objects through new eyes
My mother and I took my six year old nephew to London today, to visit The Courtauld Gallery. This was not an instance of pushy middle class relatives inflicting extracurricular improving activities during the school holidays. He likes art galleries. Earlier in the holidays his parents took all three children to the Transport Museum and then the National Gallery, where my nieces apparently sat on a bench being bored, while my nephew pleaded with his mother to go and look at just one more room. I think the family logic of permitting today's expedition was that my mother knows how to look after children, while I know how to find my way around London, so between us we would probably manage to get there and back in one piece.
The Courtauld collection was the first major gallery my mother took me to see, before it moved into its present splendid home in Somerset House. It used to be somewhere down in Kensington. My nephew at three weeks short of his seventh birthday is younger than I was when I was introduced to the gallery habit, but has taken to it like a natural. His attention span is certainly no smaller than some of my adult friends.
In the first room he wasn't especially taken by the Gaugins, instead asking penetrating questions about the painted ceiling that my mother and I were unable to answer. Why were those angels scaring somebody with a horrid face? My mother pointed out the dots of the two Seurat paintings, and my nephew said that they must have taken ages to do. I confessed to finding Seurat's dots desperately irritating because the paintings were so static, and we moved on to the next room.
A crowd of people on an organised tour stood around the sad, resigned barmaid at the Folies Bergeres, but once they'd gone we were able to sit on the bench in front of it and contemplate. My nephew was struck by the glass bowl holding oranges, while my mother remembered her initial amazement at the gold foil on the champagne bottles. I pointed out the mirror behind the bar, and the reflection of the man talking to the barmaid and the audience who would really be behind us, and my mother explained that the barmaid's reflection wouldn't be where it was in the painting. My nephew got the idea of multiple or impossible viewpoints almost straight away, since we'd already been talking on the train about one of his drawings that included several London landmarks you couldn't see all at once in real life.
He spotted immediately and without prompting that the two Cezanne landscapes on opposite walls of the room were both by the same artist. I'd assumed that a child would like the post Impressionists in much the same way as they attract top bids at auctions, all those bright flowers and accessible subject matter. In practice my nephew seemed equally taken with the Gainsboroughs and the Georgian silverware, and wanted to know why the latter were in an art gallery and not a museum. Then we began to flag and went for our lunch in the cafe, where it turned out that my sister-in-law had been right to send her son off for the day equipped with a large tinfoil packet of ham sandwiches, since there really was nothing on the menu likely to appeal to a six year old.
After lunch my nephew wanted to see the Medieval and Renaissance art, and we spent some time looking at religious triptyches, before returning to where we'd left off. As we crawled on the floor to examine an Italian wooden chest painted with scenes of war, he countered my observation that it was very unfair on the horses who hadn't asked to be there with fact that many soldiers in the first and second world wars hadn't asked to be there either. Cranach's picture of Eve tempting Adam with the fruit while the serpent slithered above them in the tree had my mother and I struggling as he quizzed us about the exact terms of the expulsion from the garden of Eden, and whether the serpent was expelled as well.
Lely was quite well received, and then we were abruptly among the Fauvists. My nephew did not immediately decode splashes of paint as the bending figure of a man in one brilliantly coloured Vlaminck, though he liked it anyway, but he noticed for himself the thickness of the paint in another picture. He notices how paintings are framed as well.
I can't remember which major artist it was who said that almost all children under the age of six can paint well, and almost none can over the age of sixteen. Something over a year ago my nephew showed me one of his paintings. It was of trees in a landscape. Children's pictures of trees normally have the ground below, the sky above, the tree in the middle, and a gap between land and sky. This painting had a continuous foreground, middle distance, horizon and sky, with no gap. He'd given a clue before then that he was interested in paintings when he commented unfavourably on how dark part of a landscape that hangs in my parents' house was. Today we had perfectly sensible conversations about whether the sky was boring, heights of horizons within paintings, the idea of the colour wheel, whether gold and silver were colours, light versus dark shades of the same colour, what kinds of subject were painted when and why, the role of the rich patron and religion in art history, and symbols. My mother and I were keen to instruct, but my nephew gave as well as he got.
I think he is a bright kid. I think also we tend to underestimate children.
The Courtauld collection was the first major gallery my mother took me to see, before it moved into its present splendid home in Somerset House. It used to be somewhere down in Kensington. My nephew at three weeks short of his seventh birthday is younger than I was when I was introduced to the gallery habit, but has taken to it like a natural. His attention span is certainly no smaller than some of my adult friends.
In the first room he wasn't especially taken by the Gaugins, instead asking penetrating questions about the painted ceiling that my mother and I were unable to answer. Why were those angels scaring somebody with a horrid face? My mother pointed out the dots of the two Seurat paintings, and my nephew said that they must have taken ages to do. I confessed to finding Seurat's dots desperately irritating because the paintings were so static, and we moved on to the next room.
A crowd of people on an organised tour stood around the sad, resigned barmaid at the Folies Bergeres, but once they'd gone we were able to sit on the bench in front of it and contemplate. My nephew was struck by the glass bowl holding oranges, while my mother remembered her initial amazement at the gold foil on the champagne bottles. I pointed out the mirror behind the bar, and the reflection of the man talking to the barmaid and the audience who would really be behind us, and my mother explained that the barmaid's reflection wouldn't be where it was in the painting. My nephew got the idea of multiple or impossible viewpoints almost straight away, since we'd already been talking on the train about one of his drawings that included several London landmarks you couldn't see all at once in real life.
He spotted immediately and without prompting that the two Cezanne landscapes on opposite walls of the room were both by the same artist. I'd assumed that a child would like the post Impressionists in much the same way as they attract top bids at auctions, all those bright flowers and accessible subject matter. In practice my nephew seemed equally taken with the Gainsboroughs and the Georgian silverware, and wanted to know why the latter were in an art gallery and not a museum. Then we began to flag and went for our lunch in the cafe, where it turned out that my sister-in-law had been right to send her son off for the day equipped with a large tinfoil packet of ham sandwiches, since there really was nothing on the menu likely to appeal to a six year old.
After lunch my nephew wanted to see the Medieval and Renaissance art, and we spent some time looking at religious triptyches, before returning to where we'd left off. As we crawled on the floor to examine an Italian wooden chest painted with scenes of war, he countered my observation that it was very unfair on the horses who hadn't asked to be there with fact that many soldiers in the first and second world wars hadn't asked to be there either. Cranach's picture of Eve tempting Adam with the fruit while the serpent slithered above them in the tree had my mother and I struggling as he quizzed us about the exact terms of the expulsion from the garden of Eden, and whether the serpent was expelled as well.
Lely was quite well received, and then we were abruptly among the Fauvists. My nephew did not immediately decode splashes of paint as the bending figure of a man in one brilliantly coloured Vlaminck, though he liked it anyway, but he noticed for himself the thickness of the paint in another picture. He notices how paintings are framed as well.
I can't remember which major artist it was who said that almost all children under the age of six can paint well, and almost none can over the age of sixteen. Something over a year ago my nephew showed me one of his paintings. It was of trees in a landscape. Children's pictures of trees normally have the ground below, the sky above, the tree in the middle, and a gap between land and sky. This painting had a continuous foreground, middle distance, horizon and sky, with no gap. He'd given a clue before then that he was interested in paintings when he commented unfavourably on how dark part of a landscape that hangs in my parents' house was. Today we had perfectly sensible conversations about whether the sky was boring, heights of horizons within paintings, the idea of the colour wheel, whether gold and silver were colours, light versus dark shades of the same colour, what kinds of subject were painted when and why, the role of the rich patron and religion in art history, and symbols. My mother and I were keen to instruct, but my nephew gave as well as he got.
I think he is a bright kid. I think also we tend to underestimate children.
Thursday, 3 January 2013
back in the garden
I've allowed my gardening diary to get behind. Since we moved here and I started the garden I've kept a series of cloth bound, A4 notebooks in which I've scribbled down roughly what I was doing, when I was doing it, and the names of what I planted, with a note of where I planted them. I knew I'd forgotten to record my last session, and the day's outdoor work in the week before Christmas, but I was shocked when I opened up the diary to discover no entries since 4 December. However, when I looked at my pocket diary to see what else I might have been doing, and my December blog entries for whatever they might reveal on the subject, I realised that there were only three days in December when I did any gardening at all, apart from checking the watering in the glasshouses. I had a day in the lower garden the Tuesday before Christmas, and could be sure about the date of that since I listened to Rumpole of the Bailey broadcast on Radio 4 while pruning the edge of the rose bank, and another stint in the garden on Boxing Day, and that was it from 4 December. The blog confirmed that it snowed after that, and a combination of poor weather and other things to do kept me out of the garden for two weeks until 18 December, then Christmas preparations followed by Christmas itself took up another eight days. In the eight days since Boxing Day we've seen people and been for a couple of walks, and it has rained some of the time.
Today I got out there. It's all been happening without me. The first of the witch hazels have suddenly burst into bloom in the past couple of days. The fat snouts of miniature iris have appeared in the gravel of the turning circle. Some strappy leaves which I never noticed until today are already 30 centimetres long. It took me some moments to remember that they were the widow iris, Hermodactylus tuberosus. I started the bulbs off the autumn before last in pots in the greenhouse, and they managed to almost finish flowering tucked away on a middle shelf of the greenhouse rack before I discovered that they had come out at all, at which point I planted them out in the garden. I hope they will manage to bloom again this year, and that I'll manage to look at them properly. I saw this plant flowering in gravel at Cambridge University Botanic Garden a few years ago, and was quietly charmed.
The back garden is very wet. I knew that it would be, and apart from loading the trailer with prunings left over from December didn't try to do anything useful round there. Instead I went on weeding the gravel in the front and trimming the ivy hedge round the long bed. The gravel provides a picture of what the birds have been eating, and where they have been perching, with large numbers of tiny rose and ivy seedlings around the 'Red Sentinel' crab apples. There were also several species of grass, an annual member of the pea family whose name I don't know, goose grass seedlings, groundsel, chickweed, bittercress, scarlet pimpernel and some sort of coltsfoot-like plant. Again I don't know its name, but you can pull up the whole root, unlike dandelions which always break.
After lunch I let the chickens out for a run. They hadn't been out for goodness knows how long, what with the weather and Christmas. Christmas is not much fun for hens, even if they don't end up as part of dinner. They did get the leftover vegetables after our friends came to lunch, dished up in an old and past-it baking tray, and I discovered that chickens like boiled carrot, roast parsnip and mashed potato, but are not so keen on red cabbage cooked with sugar and vinegar. Today they behaved themselves beautifully, and stayed with me in the front garden fussing about in the gravel for things to eat, while I listened to Radio 4 exploring the fishing traditions of Hastings.
Today I got out there. It's all been happening without me. The first of the witch hazels have suddenly burst into bloom in the past couple of days. The fat snouts of miniature iris have appeared in the gravel of the turning circle. Some strappy leaves which I never noticed until today are already 30 centimetres long. It took me some moments to remember that they were the widow iris, Hermodactylus tuberosus. I started the bulbs off the autumn before last in pots in the greenhouse, and they managed to almost finish flowering tucked away on a middle shelf of the greenhouse rack before I discovered that they had come out at all, at which point I planted them out in the garden. I hope they will manage to bloom again this year, and that I'll manage to look at them properly. I saw this plant flowering in gravel at Cambridge University Botanic Garden a few years ago, and was quietly charmed.
The back garden is very wet. I knew that it would be, and apart from loading the trailer with prunings left over from December didn't try to do anything useful round there. Instead I went on weeding the gravel in the front and trimming the ivy hedge round the long bed. The gravel provides a picture of what the birds have been eating, and where they have been perching, with large numbers of tiny rose and ivy seedlings around the 'Red Sentinel' crab apples. There were also several species of grass, an annual member of the pea family whose name I don't know, goose grass seedlings, groundsel, chickweed, bittercress, scarlet pimpernel and some sort of coltsfoot-like plant. Again I don't know its name, but you can pull up the whole root, unlike dandelions which always break.
After lunch I let the chickens out for a run. They hadn't been out for goodness knows how long, what with the weather and Christmas. Christmas is not much fun for hens, even if they don't end up as part of dinner. They did get the leftover vegetables after our friends came to lunch, dished up in an old and past-it baking tray, and I discovered that chickens like boiled carrot, roast parsnip and mashed potato, but are not so keen on red cabbage cooked with sugar and vinegar. Today they behaved themselves beautifully, and stayed with me in the front garden fussing about in the gravel for things to eat, while I listened to Radio 4 exploring the fishing traditions of Hastings.
Wednesday, 2 January 2013
goodbye Christmas
We took the Christmas decorations down today. It isn't quite twelfth night, but they went up a few days before Christmas, and it felt as though they had been up for long enough. I always feel sad stripping the Christmas tree, even though I know I don't really want a cut fir tree in my sitting room for the entire year. There is a certain ritual pleasure in putting all the decorations back in the right boxes. The three large fat baubles from Cracow were packed away into the white cardboard box in which they travelled home all the way from Poland, sitting on my lap during the flight, in the days before airlines became so picky about quantities of hand luggage. The long drop-shaped baubles from Heals, the red ones with their incredibly smooth lustre and the clear glass with snowflake patterns, went into their flat boxes with concertina folds to hold each decoration securely. The heaviest metal stars went in the bottom of a cardboard box, with the DIY store balls next, and the slightly more delicate and upmarket baubles from John Lewis on top. The shaker style hearts, the tartan stocking, the giraffe angel, the wooden teddy bear with hinged arms and legs, and the sinister hanging cat with his pipe cleaner thin legs and red scarf and mittens, were tucked carefully into another cardboard box on top of the little boxes of special glass balls.
The Systems Administrator put the two strings of lights into two separate bags. The new lights have the same desperate urge to twist around themselves as a saucepan of Chinese noodles (hands up who has ever managed to serve a pan of these equally between two bowls, rather than finding they slither in one tangled mass into the first dish). I had better remember to leave plenty of time to unwind them from themselves next year. I remembered to put the bag of spare bulbs at the top of one of the boxes, and not under all the baubles, since you need to get the lights tested, working and on the tree before putting anything else on it.
The tree was unscrewed from its supporting stand, and carried out of the front door in a hail of needles. All Christmas we've been saying to each other how well it was holding its needles. Not any more. The SA hasn't even put the vacuum cleaner away yet, on the basis that we are sure to spot more needles every time the sun shines from a new direction for several days. We'll still be finding a few we missed in October.
The SA took the greenery down from the mantelpiece, and proudly showed me the holly berry. Just the one. It was all the birds had left us by Christmas Eve. I put the big candle back in the spare room, out of the way of the cats and protected from dust and sunlight for another year by an old pillow case. The red cloth and the white lace cloth and the other red cloth that the tree sits on all went in the wash. The black cat had taken to sleeping under the tree, and the other red cloth was covered in clumps of black fur as well as pine needles.
The Christmas cards are in a pile on my desk, waiting to be checked through for those that need replies, those that include the names of people's children which I must write in the address book before I forget them again, and those with such good pictures I can't bear to throw them away. Putting the best ones in a shoe box under my desk instead of the paper recycling bin doesn't really achieve anything, and I ought to go through the box and pick out some of the saved cards that would go well together, and put them in a frame. We have spare clip-together frames about the place, and quite a lot of pictures of cats.
The sitting room looked sad and empty when we'd finished, and we retreated to the study this evening. It is easier to heat, and feels cosier than the bare expanse where the tree used to be.
I did an hour of work as well, checking through the plant centre's website for pages that need updating now that Christmas, Christmas shopping, Christmas trees, and wishes of goodwill for Christmas and the New Year are redundant. I was amused to discover that the list of creatures customers might see during their visit included two guinea foul. The dogs and pea fowl get mentioned by name, but not the staff, except for the manager.
The Systems Administrator put the two strings of lights into two separate bags. The new lights have the same desperate urge to twist around themselves as a saucepan of Chinese noodles (hands up who has ever managed to serve a pan of these equally between two bowls, rather than finding they slither in one tangled mass into the first dish). I had better remember to leave plenty of time to unwind them from themselves next year. I remembered to put the bag of spare bulbs at the top of one of the boxes, and not under all the baubles, since you need to get the lights tested, working and on the tree before putting anything else on it.
The tree was unscrewed from its supporting stand, and carried out of the front door in a hail of needles. All Christmas we've been saying to each other how well it was holding its needles. Not any more. The SA hasn't even put the vacuum cleaner away yet, on the basis that we are sure to spot more needles every time the sun shines from a new direction for several days. We'll still be finding a few we missed in October.
The SA took the greenery down from the mantelpiece, and proudly showed me the holly berry. Just the one. It was all the birds had left us by Christmas Eve. I put the big candle back in the spare room, out of the way of the cats and protected from dust and sunlight for another year by an old pillow case. The red cloth and the white lace cloth and the other red cloth that the tree sits on all went in the wash. The black cat had taken to sleeping under the tree, and the other red cloth was covered in clumps of black fur as well as pine needles.
The Christmas cards are in a pile on my desk, waiting to be checked through for those that need replies, those that include the names of people's children which I must write in the address book before I forget them again, and those with such good pictures I can't bear to throw them away. Putting the best ones in a shoe box under my desk instead of the paper recycling bin doesn't really achieve anything, and I ought to go through the box and pick out some of the saved cards that would go well together, and put them in a frame. We have spare clip-together frames about the place, and quite a lot of pictures of cats.
The sitting room looked sad and empty when we'd finished, and we retreated to the study this evening. It is easier to heat, and feels cosier than the bare expanse where the tree used to be.
I did an hour of work as well, checking through the plant centre's website for pages that need updating now that Christmas, Christmas shopping, Christmas trees, and wishes of goodwill for Christmas and the New Year are redundant. I was amused to discover that the list of creatures customers might see during their visit included two guinea foul. The dogs and pea fowl get mentioned by name, but not the staff, except for the manager.
Tuesday, 1 January 2013
the day we went to Frinton
The Systems Administrator had been promising for weeks to take me to Frinton, so as today was bright and sunny we went for a New Year's walk by the sea after lunch. Us and half the other inhabitants of north east Essex, plus their dogs. The top of Connaught Avenue was heaving with traffic, as was the Esplanade, and I could sense the SA starting to wonder whether we'd find a parking space, but we did. On the path leading down to the sea we met our neighbours, who greeted us remarkably cheerfully, given that our poplar tree fell on their garden last year. I'm glad there are no hard feelings about that.
Frinton-on-Sea is possibly the most genteel place in England. It became famous for the fuss the inhabitants created over a period of three years when Network Rail wanted to replace the old-fashioned wooden railway gates at the level crossing on the main road into Frinton with modern lifting ones. They strenuously resisted proposals to open a pub and a chip shop as well. Frinton is posh.
The walkway along the sea is lined with beach huts, sometimes in single file and sometimes in rows two and three deep, running up the shallow cliff. Some are painted in bright, classic beach hut seaside colours, and some are just stained shed brown. A few were in use, families sitting on their porches or spilling out on to the path with plastic tables and chairs. I wondered whether for some this was an annual New Year's Day ritual, whatever the weather. It was near high water, and waves slapped melodiously against the sea wall and groynes.
The dogs were oh-so-happy, tails wagging, greeting the other dogs, investigating interesting smells, miraculously managing not to wrap their leads around passing pedestrians' legs. A small brown terrier ran along the top of the sea wall, hopped down when a larger dog at ground level sniffed him in an alarming manner, skirted round his potential aggressor, and leapt back on to the wall. On a patch of sand not covered by the tide dogs raced up and down, and in and out of the sea.
The light was strong and clear, so that the colours the beach huts and the greensward seemed to glow. We could see the wind turbines scattered across the lower reaches of the Thames estuary, those on the Gunfleet Sands close at hand, and the London Array further out. I've stood at the end of Clacton Pier on a wet day and not been able to see as far as the Gunfleet. The rotating blades do have a sort of sculptural beauty, but it's strange to think how they intrude on the seascape of the estuary. We've crossed it enough times in past years, picking our way down the Black Deep and through Fisherman's Gat. There are commercial shipping buoys, but they can be hard to see in foul weather, and especially before the days of satellite navigation it felt a very lonely place. Gone now are the days of watching the echo sounder like a hawk to make sure you didn't stray on to the edge of the Gunfleet, for there are 48 large turbines to remind you where it is.
At Walton we walked through the amusement arcade to the end of the pier. A daily fishing permit will set you back seven pounds, or you can buy an annual licence for sixty-five. People were fishing, all men, though next to one fisherman sat a woman, leaning against the railings around the edge of the pier, reading a book. Some of the men had got little fisherman's stools, and two had umbrellas, though I noticed that one umbrella was prudently lashed to the pier. Several had flasks, and tubes of Pringles were the snack of choice. You don't seem to need to do much, fishing from a pier. Most of the time you don't even hold the rod, just lean it against the balustrade.
The Walton and Frinton lifeboat lives permanently afloat, moored to a large purpose built pontoon alongside the pier. She was new in 2011, is called The Irene Muriel Rees, and has her own Facebook page. She is a Tamar class all weather lifeboat, and was named by The Duke of Kent, the RNLI's President. The pier is half a mile long, and the SA wondered how the crew got to the lifeboat when the shout went up. Do they run, or do they have a little electric buggy stashed away somewhere behind the amusement arcade? Or bicycles?
Walton is not so posh as Frinton, or so prosperous. Opposite the entrance to the pier, a charming Italianate brick building with a small tower and windows shaped like Norman arches is boarded up, as was the first cafe we came to, while the pub across the road was has a To let sign. However, while there is a little bad post-war infilling, there are a lot of nice Victorian shops with intact frontages above the tacky fascias, and it would only need a little prosperity and fairy dust to fall upon Walton for it to become as chic as Whitstable. Maybe it will be discovered by the seaside-going inhabitants of north London and become the next Islington-on-Sea in the next economic cycle.
The Systems Administrator took me to see the Walton and Frinton Yacht Club, among a huddle of red corrugated iron sheds and overwintering yachts at the top of a creek off the Backwaters. Most of the houses by the creek had signs up saying Save the Mere. It turns out there is a proposal to build a supermarket, houses and a marina on the mere, a silted-up former boating lake. The landowners say it would act as a catalyst for economic regeneration of the town. Well, it would certainly economically regenerate them. Opponents to the scheme would prefer to see the lake restored, with nature trails, and a windmill.
We walked back by road, to see the architecture. Frinton is largely a twentieth century creation, and includes a scattering of International Modernism, houses with white stucco walls, flat roofs, and ocean-liner-inspired curving tiers and balconies. Some were modest, others rather large and grand. Many had sadly been spoiled by inappropriate PVC replacement windows. One retained its sunray pattern railings, painted in an authentic shade of pale mint green. Residential Frinton does not seem to have been designed for long distance pedestrian use, with a lot of dead ends, and we took a slightly circuitous route back to the Esplanade. Almost everyone else had already gone home.
I always register the front gardens on that sort of a walk. Today we saw a lot that were paved over for parking, very few that were untidy, quite a number of small and pointless lawns, and a particular local aesthetic, pea shingle studded with conifers, evergreen euonymus and hebe, all severely trimmed. The most sophisticated examples had crazy paving edging around each shrub. Christmas decorations on the front of the house and in the front windows do not appear to be popular in Frinton.
The houses near the golf course are the grandest, great sprawling inter-war interpretations of something vaguely neo-classical, with a few Arts and Crafts examples thrown in. Most are supremely ugly, and they must be worth a bomb. Surrey-on-Sea.
The SA measured the distance on the map when we got home, and we covered six miles, including the detour along the pier.
Frinton-on-Sea is possibly the most genteel place in England. It became famous for the fuss the inhabitants created over a period of three years when Network Rail wanted to replace the old-fashioned wooden railway gates at the level crossing on the main road into Frinton with modern lifting ones. They strenuously resisted proposals to open a pub and a chip shop as well. Frinton is posh.
The walkway along the sea is lined with beach huts, sometimes in single file and sometimes in rows two and three deep, running up the shallow cliff. Some are painted in bright, classic beach hut seaside colours, and some are just stained shed brown. A few were in use, families sitting on their porches or spilling out on to the path with plastic tables and chairs. I wondered whether for some this was an annual New Year's Day ritual, whatever the weather. It was near high water, and waves slapped melodiously against the sea wall and groynes.
The dogs were oh-so-happy, tails wagging, greeting the other dogs, investigating interesting smells, miraculously managing not to wrap their leads around passing pedestrians' legs. A small brown terrier ran along the top of the sea wall, hopped down when a larger dog at ground level sniffed him in an alarming manner, skirted round his potential aggressor, and leapt back on to the wall. On a patch of sand not covered by the tide dogs raced up and down, and in and out of the sea.
The light was strong and clear, so that the colours the beach huts and the greensward seemed to glow. We could see the wind turbines scattered across the lower reaches of the Thames estuary, those on the Gunfleet Sands close at hand, and the London Array further out. I've stood at the end of Clacton Pier on a wet day and not been able to see as far as the Gunfleet. The rotating blades do have a sort of sculptural beauty, but it's strange to think how they intrude on the seascape of the estuary. We've crossed it enough times in past years, picking our way down the Black Deep and through Fisherman's Gat. There are commercial shipping buoys, but they can be hard to see in foul weather, and especially before the days of satellite navigation it felt a very lonely place. Gone now are the days of watching the echo sounder like a hawk to make sure you didn't stray on to the edge of the Gunfleet, for there are 48 large turbines to remind you where it is.
At Walton we walked through the amusement arcade to the end of the pier. A daily fishing permit will set you back seven pounds, or you can buy an annual licence for sixty-five. People were fishing, all men, though next to one fisherman sat a woman, leaning against the railings around the edge of the pier, reading a book. Some of the men had got little fisherman's stools, and two had umbrellas, though I noticed that one umbrella was prudently lashed to the pier. Several had flasks, and tubes of Pringles were the snack of choice. You don't seem to need to do much, fishing from a pier. Most of the time you don't even hold the rod, just lean it against the balustrade.
The Walton and Frinton lifeboat lives permanently afloat, moored to a large purpose built pontoon alongside the pier. She was new in 2011, is called The Irene Muriel Rees, and has her own Facebook page. She is a Tamar class all weather lifeboat, and was named by The Duke of Kent, the RNLI's President. The pier is half a mile long, and the SA wondered how the crew got to the lifeboat when the shout went up. Do they run, or do they have a little electric buggy stashed away somewhere behind the amusement arcade? Or bicycles?
Walton is not so posh as Frinton, or so prosperous. Opposite the entrance to the pier, a charming Italianate brick building with a small tower and windows shaped like Norman arches is boarded up, as was the first cafe we came to, while the pub across the road was has a To let sign. However, while there is a little bad post-war infilling, there are a lot of nice Victorian shops with intact frontages above the tacky fascias, and it would only need a little prosperity and fairy dust to fall upon Walton for it to become as chic as Whitstable. Maybe it will be discovered by the seaside-going inhabitants of north London and become the next Islington-on-Sea in the next economic cycle.
The Systems Administrator took me to see the Walton and Frinton Yacht Club, among a huddle of red corrugated iron sheds and overwintering yachts at the top of a creek off the Backwaters. Most of the houses by the creek had signs up saying Save the Mere. It turns out there is a proposal to build a supermarket, houses and a marina on the mere, a silted-up former boating lake. The landowners say it would act as a catalyst for economic regeneration of the town. Well, it would certainly economically regenerate them. Opponents to the scheme would prefer to see the lake restored, with nature trails, and a windmill.
We walked back by road, to see the architecture. Frinton is largely a twentieth century creation, and includes a scattering of International Modernism, houses with white stucco walls, flat roofs, and ocean-liner-inspired curving tiers and balconies. Some were modest, others rather large and grand. Many had sadly been spoiled by inappropriate PVC replacement windows. One retained its sunray pattern railings, painted in an authentic shade of pale mint green. Residential Frinton does not seem to have been designed for long distance pedestrian use, with a lot of dead ends, and we took a slightly circuitous route back to the Esplanade. Almost everyone else had already gone home.
I always register the front gardens on that sort of a walk. Today we saw a lot that were paved over for parking, very few that were untidy, quite a number of small and pointless lawns, and a particular local aesthetic, pea shingle studded with conifers, evergreen euonymus and hebe, all severely trimmed. The most sophisticated examples had crazy paving edging around each shrub. Christmas decorations on the front of the house and in the front windows do not appear to be popular in Frinton.
The houses near the golf course are the grandest, great sprawling inter-war interpretations of something vaguely neo-classical, with a few Arts and Crafts examples thrown in. Most are supremely ugly, and they must be worth a bomb. Surrey-on-Sea.
The SA measured the distance on the map when we got home, and we covered six miles, including the detour along the pier.
Monday, 31 December 2012
one year on and still blogging
In something under five hours it will be time to say goodbye to 2012, and hello to 2013. I'm not sure we'll stay up that late, in which case I will see in the New Year by putting up the 2013 Den Phillips East Coast calendar in the hall, and putting my old 2012 diary away in a drawer of my desk. That's another year of writing a daily blog entry, apart from the week I took off when we were on holiday.
Some entries have been lovingly crafted in reasonably competent prose. They will be the ones I wrote on days when blogging wasn't squeezed in between several other things, or when something interesting happened to write about. Some have been more slipshod affairs, with wandering tenses, and the same word cropping up five times in two paragraphs. They were written in a rush, or on days when I was feeling ill or out of sorts. I have kept almost entirely to my principle of never pressing the Publish button on a computer linked to the internet after consuming any alcohol. Yesterday was an exception as I had a couple of beers over lunch before launching into my account of cooking Elizabeth David style The fastest posts have been knocked out in under twenty minutes, and the slowest stretched to over an hour, on days when I was feeling pernickety or inspired , and didn't have anything else pressing to do. I'll probably speed up if the weather improves so that I can get out into the garden more.
Cardunculus has not gone viral during 2012. My mum reads it, and some friends, and a few random assorted people who fell into it by mistake. The mother of a folk singer I said kind things about found out and liked the entry about her son, though I'm not sure she's been an avid follower since. The Systems Administrator's brothers dip in from time to time, as a handy way of keeping tabs on the SA. I had lunch early in the year with some former colleagues, and after listening politely to their tales of woe about competition for school places, school fees, and exam grade trauma, I mentioned that since the start of 2011 I'd been writing a blog. One replied Yes, but how many people read it? and the rest giggled nervously about what I was going to say about them on it. None showed any desire to write down the address.
As a matter of policy I say very little about my friends. Some professional journalists make their living, or at least part of a living, from using their families and friends as material for their columns. I suppose their families are OK with that. I guess that if you start dating a columnist you sign up to the idea that your private life will be amusingly recycled in the Lifestyle section of a national newspaper. Since I am not a professional journalist and none of my friends or relations or my colleagues or employers agreed to star on screen, even in an obscure blog that's read by a few regular followers and a drunk bloke who clicked on the wrong link, they should be allowed their privacy. The SA gets a starring role, but you will agree only as a heroic character portrayed in an almost entirely positive light. Plus the SA is particularly well placed to exercise rights of veto and censorship.
So the blog is simultaneously true, and deeply misleading. It is a true record of things that happened. You could identify the lettuce farm, the ramshackle 1960s house, and garden on Google Earth. You would find us pretty much as described, middle aged, used to work in the City, had enough, with our cats and chickens and bees. The picture of the changing seasons, of days getting longer and shorter again, of sun, rain, snow, cold, and how that affects the way people spend their days in the countryside, even in twenty-first century south-east England, is pretty accurate. You would not need Sherlock Holmes' extraordinary powers of detection to track down the plant centre, where you would find the boss, the owner, the manager, the dog. If I say I went to London and saw such and such an exhibition then that's what I did. When I tell you I have just noticed the first Iris unguicularis of the winter then I have.
The blog gives a misleading impression of my interior life because it skips over much of the personal. If we see friends for a meal, for instance, that is probably the most significant event of the day. Since I am not about to rehash private conversations in public, or write a restaurant review of their cooking, the friends may get a passing mention in one sentence, or no mention at all, while the day's blog entry is a riff on painting the hall, or a meditation on toads. And I don't generally seem to talk about books very much, despite reading quite a lot. I don't know why not, except that I never set out to post a series of book reviews. Maybe that will change in 2013, and you can join me on my current baffling journey through the history of Prussia and my struggles to work out which King Frederick the author is talking about now.
I will keep going in the New Year, despite having still not gone viral. Next year in Jerusalem. Blogging is good fun and entirely free. Blogspot let me have this platform for nothing. I suppose they are hoping I will produce some advertising revenue eventually, or at least that enough others will, while the marginal cost of hosting me is zero. Forcing myself to sit down and write something every day and submit it to the scrutiny of other people, albeit a handful, may not have made me a good writer yet but it has made me a better writer than I would be otherwise. And it is handy for my mother and the SA's brothers to be able to keep track of what we're up to. So Happy New Year, to those of you who know us, and to anyone who followed a stray link and doesn't, but has somehow made it this far anyway.
Some entries have been lovingly crafted in reasonably competent prose. They will be the ones I wrote on days when blogging wasn't squeezed in between several other things, or when something interesting happened to write about. Some have been more slipshod affairs, with wandering tenses, and the same word cropping up five times in two paragraphs. They were written in a rush, or on days when I was feeling ill or out of sorts. I have kept almost entirely to my principle of never pressing the Publish button on a computer linked to the internet after consuming any alcohol. Yesterday was an exception as I had a couple of beers over lunch before launching into my account of cooking Elizabeth David style The fastest posts have been knocked out in under twenty minutes, and the slowest stretched to over an hour, on days when I was feeling pernickety or inspired , and didn't have anything else pressing to do. I'll probably speed up if the weather improves so that I can get out into the garden more.
Cardunculus has not gone viral during 2012. My mum reads it, and some friends, and a few random assorted people who fell into it by mistake. The mother of a folk singer I said kind things about found out and liked the entry about her son, though I'm not sure she's been an avid follower since. The Systems Administrator's brothers dip in from time to time, as a handy way of keeping tabs on the SA. I had lunch early in the year with some former colleagues, and after listening politely to their tales of woe about competition for school places, school fees, and exam grade trauma, I mentioned that since the start of 2011 I'd been writing a blog. One replied Yes, but how many people read it? and the rest giggled nervously about what I was going to say about them on it. None showed any desire to write down the address.
As a matter of policy I say very little about my friends. Some professional journalists make their living, or at least part of a living, from using their families and friends as material for their columns. I suppose their families are OK with that. I guess that if you start dating a columnist you sign up to the idea that your private life will be amusingly recycled in the Lifestyle section of a national newspaper. Since I am not a professional journalist and none of my friends or relations or my colleagues or employers agreed to star on screen, even in an obscure blog that's read by a few regular followers and a drunk bloke who clicked on the wrong link, they should be allowed their privacy. The SA gets a starring role, but you will agree only as a heroic character portrayed in an almost entirely positive light. Plus the SA is particularly well placed to exercise rights of veto and censorship.
So the blog is simultaneously true, and deeply misleading. It is a true record of things that happened. You could identify the lettuce farm, the ramshackle 1960s house, and garden on Google Earth. You would find us pretty much as described, middle aged, used to work in the City, had enough, with our cats and chickens and bees. The picture of the changing seasons, of days getting longer and shorter again, of sun, rain, snow, cold, and how that affects the way people spend their days in the countryside, even in twenty-first century south-east England, is pretty accurate. You would not need Sherlock Holmes' extraordinary powers of detection to track down the plant centre, where you would find the boss, the owner, the manager, the dog. If I say I went to London and saw such and such an exhibition then that's what I did. When I tell you I have just noticed the first Iris unguicularis of the winter then I have.
The blog gives a misleading impression of my interior life because it skips over much of the personal. If we see friends for a meal, for instance, that is probably the most significant event of the day. Since I am not about to rehash private conversations in public, or write a restaurant review of their cooking, the friends may get a passing mention in one sentence, or no mention at all, while the day's blog entry is a riff on painting the hall, or a meditation on toads. And I don't generally seem to talk about books very much, despite reading quite a lot. I don't know why not, except that I never set out to post a series of book reviews. Maybe that will change in 2013, and you can join me on my current baffling journey through the history of Prussia and my struggles to work out which King Frederick the author is talking about now.
I will keep going in the New Year, despite having still not gone viral. Next year in Jerusalem. Blogging is good fun and entirely free. Blogspot let me have this platform for nothing. I suppose they are hoping I will produce some advertising revenue eventually, or at least that enough others will, while the marginal cost of hosting me is zero. Forcing myself to sit down and write something every day and submit it to the scrutiny of other people, albeit a handful, may not have made me a good writer yet but it has made me a better writer than I would be otherwise. And it is handy for my mother and the SA's brothers to be able to keep track of what we're up to. So Happy New Year, to those of you who know us, and to anyone who followed a stray link and doesn't, but has somehow made it this far anyway.
Sunday, 30 December 2012
a lunch party, with assistance from Elizabeth David
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a host who has invited people to lunch should not attempt to cook anything they haven't cooked before. So in theory I should have tested Elizabeth David's Sussex stewed steak and raspberry shortbread on the Systems Administrator in advance, before trying them on friends, probably two or three times to be on the safe side. I didn't, because they didn't look that monumentally different to other things I've managed to cook in the past, and if I have to practice each new recipe on the SA before risking it on anybody else, my repertoire is going to expand very slowly, given the infrequency with which I cook.
The Sussex stewed steak and the pudding are both included in At Elizabeth David's Table, a collection of 'Her very best everyday recipes' compiled by Jill Norman, complete with kind introductory words by contemporary foodie luminaries including Jamie Oliver and Simon Hopkinson and muted colour photographs, linked by extracts from the original books and some of Mrs David's articles for Vogue and The Spectator. The Systems Administrator gave it to me a little while back, but this was the first time I'd actually cooked from it. I must have leafed through it when I first received it. I think I thought that the full page photographs of food, roosters and Italian scenery were dreamy, but that the opening pages seemed to include a lot of things that contained either fish or spinach. I was probably biased by my inbuilt suspicion against books that are rehashes of existing material, put together by publishers determined to get some more financial mileage out of a dead writer.
That view turns out to be very unfair to At Elizabeth David's Table. It helps that Jill Norman was Elizabeth David's editor, and knew her well. She has chosen wisely. Elizabeth David's books don't always feel terribly approachable, with her sharp advice about the precise quality of ingredients and instructions to buy cuts of meat that never appear on the supermarket shelves, not even in Waitrose. Rereading the selected recipes, this time with a proper degree of attention, I realised that a high proportion of them sounded achievable, without demands for caul, pig's dripping, five pounds of sea salt, larding bacon, a boiling fowl, or mutton.
To be on the safe side I started on the Sussex steaks the day before we wanted to eat them. The recipe required five or six tablespoons of port, as well as stout and mushroom ketchup, and the SA said that given we had several bottles of port we might as well open one, so I did. This does leave me with the subsidiary question of how to use the rest of it. The SA has volunteered to drink some, while admitting that port nowadays produces a cracking hangover. It also appears that I could use it in a terrine, or oxtail soup, and the SA found a Nigella lamb recipe on the internet that sounded plausible. Elizabeth David promised me that after three hours of slow cooking the toughest piece of meat would emerge beautifully tender, so four steaks described on the packet as Irish were dusted in flour, doused with five tablespoons each of port and stout and two of ketchup, sprinkled with three smallish chopped onions, and given half an hour in the bottom oven of the Aga to get them going, and three hours in the simmer oven. The book said to include a double layer of greaseproof paper under the lid of the casserole, which I dutifully did. We have a wide shallow Le Creuset pan with a close fitting lid, and I wasn't sure the paper would really make any difference, but my rule of thumb is to follow the book as closely as I can the first time round, and then modify things the second time if it seems warranted.
After three hours in the simmer oven the steaks emerged with all the tender and melting qualities of shoe leather, swimming in red-brown liquid which had not reduced to a rich-looking and interesting gravy. The SA said encouragingly that the steaks would probably relax overnight. I thought I would probably not relax overnight, but that several more hours in the simmer oven was likely to improve things in the morning. At least as a consolation I got to drink the left-over stout.
When I woke up this morning I remembered that I had to produce lunch by noon, the point at which our friends were due to turn up and everything was scheduled to be keeping warm so that I could socialise with our guests, and that so far all I had to show for my labours was a dish of shoe-leather and a saucepan of red cabbage. Red cabbage is always worth cooking in advance, because it is one less thing to do on the day, and it improves with reheating. Vitamins in this context are a bourgeois distraction. I remembered to get the raspberries out of the freezer for the pudding, and peeled the potatoes for the mash, and the carrots and parsnips, bought in a fit of anxiety that there would not be enough vegetables for a Christmas-New Year festive lunch. The shoe leather went back in the bottom oven on the hot side of the Aga for another hour, then back into the simmer. The paper lid was starting to look a little the worse for wear, and fragments fell off each time I inspected the meat.
By eleven the Irish steak had finally, miraculously become beautifully tender, and by the time I came to dish it at one it was dropping to melting pieces from the spoon. The gravy was indeed rich. It's lucky we didn't leave serving lunch until half past, since the gravy had reduced about as far as you'd want it to, even with the greaseproof paper. I can heartily recommend Elizabeth David's Sussex stewed steak, only I would not leave it until the last minute to prepare. Give yourself an hour or three's leeway, just to be on the safe side. I included the suggested garnish of fried mushrooms, which definitely add something.
Her Raspberry shortbread is a variant on fruit crumble. The book says that it can be served hot or cold and is excellent. We had ours at room temperature, to avoid the anxiety of trying to keep it hot. That turned out to be a good call as the Aga was full of other things keeping warm. I nearly smashed the dish of mushrooms which were sitting on top of the pan of mashed potato, grabbing the handle of the latter without seeing that the mushrooms were there. The shortbread topping consists of butter rubbed into plain flour in the ratio three to one, with just over half of the weight of the flour in muscovado sugar, and some ginger and baking powder. The resulting mixture forms dry, fine crumbs which you are instructed not to press down over the raspberries, and I'm not sure the baking powder can make much difference. I would not have thought of combining ginger and raspberry, but a little touch of it, half a teaspoon in six ounces of flour, does very well. Some of the flour mixture seems drop down into the juice as the raspberries cook and thickens it slightly, so that the raspberries sit in slightly cloudy, gingery liquid rather than plain juice. Everybody had second helpings, except for the SA who is not crazy about puddings.
The big tabby and Our Ginger mild slight nuisances of themselves all the time we had guests. We kept the cats out of the room while we ate, but the rest of the time they jumped on the dining table, held mock fights, clambered insistently into laps, and clamoured for food every time either of us went near the kitchen. As soon as the visitors departed both cats completely lost interest in gaining our attention.
The Sussex stewed steak and the pudding are both included in At Elizabeth David's Table, a collection of 'Her very best everyday recipes' compiled by Jill Norman, complete with kind introductory words by contemporary foodie luminaries including Jamie Oliver and Simon Hopkinson and muted colour photographs, linked by extracts from the original books and some of Mrs David's articles for Vogue and The Spectator. The Systems Administrator gave it to me a little while back, but this was the first time I'd actually cooked from it. I must have leafed through it when I first received it. I think I thought that the full page photographs of food, roosters and Italian scenery were dreamy, but that the opening pages seemed to include a lot of things that contained either fish or spinach. I was probably biased by my inbuilt suspicion against books that are rehashes of existing material, put together by publishers determined to get some more financial mileage out of a dead writer.
That view turns out to be very unfair to At Elizabeth David's Table. It helps that Jill Norman was Elizabeth David's editor, and knew her well. She has chosen wisely. Elizabeth David's books don't always feel terribly approachable, with her sharp advice about the precise quality of ingredients and instructions to buy cuts of meat that never appear on the supermarket shelves, not even in Waitrose. Rereading the selected recipes, this time with a proper degree of attention, I realised that a high proportion of them sounded achievable, without demands for caul, pig's dripping, five pounds of sea salt, larding bacon, a boiling fowl, or mutton.
To be on the safe side I started on the Sussex steaks the day before we wanted to eat them. The recipe required five or six tablespoons of port, as well as stout and mushroom ketchup, and the SA said that given we had several bottles of port we might as well open one, so I did. This does leave me with the subsidiary question of how to use the rest of it. The SA has volunteered to drink some, while admitting that port nowadays produces a cracking hangover. It also appears that I could use it in a terrine, or oxtail soup, and the SA found a Nigella lamb recipe on the internet that sounded plausible. Elizabeth David promised me that after three hours of slow cooking the toughest piece of meat would emerge beautifully tender, so four steaks described on the packet as Irish were dusted in flour, doused with five tablespoons each of port and stout and two of ketchup, sprinkled with three smallish chopped onions, and given half an hour in the bottom oven of the Aga to get them going, and three hours in the simmer oven. The book said to include a double layer of greaseproof paper under the lid of the casserole, which I dutifully did. We have a wide shallow Le Creuset pan with a close fitting lid, and I wasn't sure the paper would really make any difference, but my rule of thumb is to follow the book as closely as I can the first time round, and then modify things the second time if it seems warranted.
After three hours in the simmer oven the steaks emerged with all the tender and melting qualities of shoe leather, swimming in red-brown liquid which had not reduced to a rich-looking and interesting gravy. The SA said encouragingly that the steaks would probably relax overnight. I thought I would probably not relax overnight, but that several more hours in the simmer oven was likely to improve things in the morning. At least as a consolation I got to drink the left-over stout.
When I woke up this morning I remembered that I had to produce lunch by noon, the point at which our friends were due to turn up and everything was scheduled to be keeping warm so that I could socialise with our guests, and that so far all I had to show for my labours was a dish of shoe-leather and a saucepan of red cabbage. Red cabbage is always worth cooking in advance, because it is one less thing to do on the day, and it improves with reheating. Vitamins in this context are a bourgeois distraction. I remembered to get the raspberries out of the freezer for the pudding, and peeled the potatoes for the mash, and the carrots and parsnips, bought in a fit of anxiety that there would not be enough vegetables for a Christmas-New Year festive lunch. The shoe leather went back in the bottom oven on the hot side of the Aga for another hour, then back into the simmer. The paper lid was starting to look a little the worse for wear, and fragments fell off each time I inspected the meat.
By eleven the Irish steak had finally, miraculously become beautifully tender, and by the time I came to dish it at one it was dropping to melting pieces from the spoon. The gravy was indeed rich. It's lucky we didn't leave serving lunch until half past, since the gravy had reduced about as far as you'd want it to, even with the greaseproof paper. I can heartily recommend Elizabeth David's Sussex stewed steak, only I would not leave it until the last minute to prepare. Give yourself an hour or three's leeway, just to be on the safe side. I included the suggested garnish of fried mushrooms, which definitely add something.
Her Raspberry shortbread is a variant on fruit crumble. The book says that it can be served hot or cold and is excellent. We had ours at room temperature, to avoid the anxiety of trying to keep it hot. That turned out to be a good call as the Aga was full of other things keeping warm. I nearly smashed the dish of mushrooms which were sitting on top of the pan of mashed potato, grabbing the handle of the latter without seeing that the mushrooms were there. The shortbread topping consists of butter rubbed into plain flour in the ratio three to one, with just over half of the weight of the flour in muscovado sugar, and some ginger and baking powder. The resulting mixture forms dry, fine crumbs which you are instructed not to press down over the raspberries, and I'm not sure the baking powder can make much difference. I would not have thought of combining ginger and raspberry, but a little touch of it, half a teaspoon in six ounces of flour, does very well. Some of the flour mixture seems drop down into the juice as the raspberries cook and thickens it slightly, so that the raspberries sit in slightly cloudy, gingery liquid rather than plain juice. Everybody had second helpings, except for the SA who is not crazy about puddings.
The big tabby and Our Ginger mild slight nuisances of themselves all the time we had guests. We kept the cats out of the room while we ate, but the rest of the time they jumped on the dining table, held mock fights, clambered insistently into laps, and clamoured for food every time either of us went near the kitchen. As soon as the visitors departed both cats completely lost interest in gaining our attention.
Saturday, 29 December 2012
adjust your settings
I braved Tesco this morning. After the amount of food and drink I bought last week you would not think we could possibly have needed any more, but friends are coming to lunch tomorrow, and we were running out of cat food. (To clarify that last statement, the cat food is for the cats. The friends are getting Sussex steak and raspberry shortbread out of 'At Elizabeth David's Table'). It was the first time I'd started my car for a week, and damp still shone in patches on the floor mats from the last time I went out, so I was rather pleased that it did start, though the brakes had gone sticky and it took a positively boy-racerish quantity of revs to persuade the car to move off. The traffic going up the final hill to Colchester was extremely light, and I wondered where everybody was, and why they were not all going to the sales. Tesco promised to be a doddle.
It was not a doddle, but a thoroughly unpleasant experience. I still haven't learnt where everything is in the new revamped store, which is my fault for not going there more often and paying attention. However, the main problem today was not my tendency to circle the vegetable and dairy sections like an aircraft waiting for permission to land at Heathrow, searching in vain for where mushrooms and creme fraiche have got to. No, it was the music that was playing throughout the store, a disjointed medley of top hits of the past decade. I don't like quite a lot of what's been in the charts since about 1978. I do like the Kaiser Chiefs, but I don't want to listen to them played tinnily over a sound system that was designed for calling all till qualified staff to the checkout or a cleaner to aisle 17, while I'm trying to work out which things on my list I still haven't got. There were gaps between the songs, leading me to hope that the music might have stopped, and to suspect that it was being played on an ad hoc basis by someone who was a bit slow to start a new track when the previous one ended. With any luck that means it was a Christmas season festive one-off, and that come next week it will cease. If it is part of the new-look Tesco then I'm not shopping there any more.
As I made my escape I realised that I'd forgotten to pick up one of the five pound orchids I'd been eyeing up on the way in. I was still so cross by the time I got home that I e-mailed customer services to let them know how much I'd disliked my trip to their store. There was no category for complaints about horrible shopping experiences on the website in the Contact Us section, and I had to file my message under Other. Initially my attempt to submit my comment was blocked because I hadn't included my mobile phone number. That's not good. Not everybody has a mobile phone, my father for instance. Are they not supposed to contact Tesco? I only give my number to personal friends and professional contacts, and had no desire to give it to Tesco customer services, who would then presumably start sending me texts on it, so I made one up. The website wouldn't accept 0799 9999999 and I had to choose something that sounded more random. If it happens to be a real number then the owner may receive a message from Tesco about why distorted broadcasts of I Predict A Riot are an appropriate accompaniment to post-Christmas grocery shopping, followed by unwanted marketing texts.
After lunch I cleaned the kitchen and the downstairs loo, fired up by my resolution to have a cleaner and tidier house. I have been trying to follow the technique described by Guardian psychologist Oliver Burkeman as Adjusting My Defaults. His article addresses the question of how to take more exercise, which is not particularly an issue when you have a large garden and only a part-time job in which you almost never get to sit down. However, I thought I could adjust my defaults to be more tidy just as well as more active. So after breakfast I am trying to remember to empty and rinse the teapot, instead of leaving it standing by the kettle until lunchtime or supper time or the next time I want a pot of tea, and when I see used mugs in the sitting room I am trying to fall into the habit of taking them to the kitchen and washing them, instead of leaving them to deal with later, or half dealing with them by taking them to the kitchen but not washing them, or hoping that the Systems Administrator will do it if they are the SA's mugs. Unwanted sales leaflets from several mail order companies have gone straight into the paper recycling basket instead of spending several weeks piled on top of the ice cream maker. That sort of thing. It has worked up to a point, though by this morning I did have two gardening socks living on the telephone table, which I'd stuffed into my boots when we got in from our walk, and then taken out of the boots because I wanted to slip the boots on to do the chickens and couldn't be bothered with the socks, plus a packet of suet for the birds that wouldn't fit in the crock of bird food by the front door and that I hadn't bothered to take down to the garage.
Tidiness is all very well, but the kitchen and hall floors still needed washing, which is how I come to be stuck in the sitting room waiting for them to dry. They probably have by now. I'm not sure I'm going to manage to keep this up throughout 2013, but Oliver Burkeman assures me that it will start feeling automatic.
It was not a doddle, but a thoroughly unpleasant experience. I still haven't learnt where everything is in the new revamped store, which is my fault for not going there more often and paying attention. However, the main problem today was not my tendency to circle the vegetable and dairy sections like an aircraft waiting for permission to land at Heathrow, searching in vain for where mushrooms and creme fraiche have got to. No, it was the music that was playing throughout the store, a disjointed medley of top hits of the past decade. I don't like quite a lot of what's been in the charts since about 1978. I do like the Kaiser Chiefs, but I don't want to listen to them played tinnily over a sound system that was designed for calling all till qualified staff to the checkout or a cleaner to aisle 17, while I'm trying to work out which things on my list I still haven't got. There were gaps between the songs, leading me to hope that the music might have stopped, and to suspect that it was being played on an ad hoc basis by someone who was a bit slow to start a new track when the previous one ended. With any luck that means it was a Christmas season festive one-off, and that come next week it will cease. If it is part of the new-look Tesco then I'm not shopping there any more.
As I made my escape I realised that I'd forgotten to pick up one of the five pound orchids I'd been eyeing up on the way in. I was still so cross by the time I got home that I e-mailed customer services to let them know how much I'd disliked my trip to their store. There was no category for complaints about horrible shopping experiences on the website in the Contact Us section, and I had to file my message under Other. Initially my attempt to submit my comment was blocked because I hadn't included my mobile phone number. That's not good. Not everybody has a mobile phone, my father for instance. Are they not supposed to contact Tesco? I only give my number to personal friends and professional contacts, and had no desire to give it to Tesco customer services, who would then presumably start sending me texts on it, so I made one up. The website wouldn't accept 0799 9999999 and I had to choose something that sounded more random. If it happens to be a real number then the owner may receive a message from Tesco about why distorted broadcasts of I Predict A Riot are an appropriate accompaniment to post-Christmas grocery shopping, followed by unwanted marketing texts.
After lunch I cleaned the kitchen and the downstairs loo, fired up by my resolution to have a cleaner and tidier house. I have been trying to follow the technique described by Guardian psychologist Oliver Burkeman as Adjusting My Defaults. His article addresses the question of how to take more exercise, which is not particularly an issue when you have a large garden and only a part-time job in which you almost never get to sit down. However, I thought I could adjust my defaults to be more tidy just as well as more active. So after breakfast I am trying to remember to empty and rinse the teapot, instead of leaving it standing by the kettle until lunchtime or supper time or the next time I want a pot of tea, and when I see used mugs in the sitting room I am trying to fall into the habit of taking them to the kitchen and washing them, instead of leaving them to deal with later, or half dealing with them by taking them to the kitchen but not washing them, or hoping that the Systems Administrator will do it if they are the SA's mugs. Unwanted sales leaflets from several mail order companies have gone straight into the paper recycling basket instead of spending several weeks piled on top of the ice cream maker. That sort of thing. It has worked up to a point, though by this morning I did have two gardening socks living on the telephone table, which I'd stuffed into my boots when we got in from our walk, and then taken out of the boots because I wanted to slip the boots on to do the chickens and couldn't be bothered with the socks, plus a packet of suet for the birds that wouldn't fit in the crock of bird food by the front door and that I hadn't bothered to take down to the garage.
Tidiness is all very well, but the kitchen and hall floors still needed washing, which is how I come to be stuck in the sitting room waiting for them to dry. They probably have by now. I'm not sure I'm going to manage to keep this up throughout 2013, but Oliver Burkeman assures me that it will start feeling automatic.
Friday, 28 December 2012
rain again
When I got up this morning the rain was gurgling loudly through the metal downpipe outside the bathroom window. It was almost melodic, and would have been worth sampling, if you happened to be a producer of electronic music, but I'm not. I went to let the chickens out into their run, and the ground in their enclosure has got much too muddy. I wished the boss had come up to scratch with the small bales, instead of the owner just remembering at intervals that I'd asked if they had any spare, or that I'd seized the moment to make contact with the farmer friend of a friend who had some, instead of leaving it because the weather was so cold and the Systems Administrator had toothache. As it is we do not have any straw, and we need some, urgently. The SA says I should not contact the farmer this week, as he will be taking time off from the farm and be busy with his shoot, and will not want to think about work or straw bales until the New Year. I can sympathise with that.
The whole world is wet. The garden, the lawns and borders and shrubs and hedges, all disgustingly wet, waiting to dump a great load water on you if touched, or deform with hideous squelchings if walked upon. The cats go into the garden to do their business, and come in again with wet feet and damp fur. The damp is worming its way into my bones and lungs, reminding me that while the SA melts in warm weather, I am probably better suited to somewhere hot and dry, not on the cold, rain-sodden margins of northern Europe. I can see why so many rich, keen Edwardian gardeners busied themselves in the winter months making a second garden in the south of France. It must have been more rewarding than staring out at the soggy mess of their English one, and better for their rheumatism and bronchial health.
I went out to check the watering in the greenhouse and conservatory. I hadn't checked them for days, and felt a guilty concern that I might have left it too long and that things might be getting dry. Not a bit of it. Overwintering plants use very little water at this time of year, when the sun is so weak and the days so short, and while a few evergreens in the brightest spots needed a drink, most pots were still wet enough. I was pleased to see quite a few of the bulbs starting to come through, and relieved that after the opening skirmish with mice, most of them had escaped without being eaten.
I made a bad error when we had the greenhouse put up, one which no garden writer I've come across has owned up to in print, or warned against. Take this therefore as a warning, in case you are thinking of buying a greenhouse. When we moved into the property it had no greenhouse or sheds, or parking area other than the edge of the turning circle, and so we had an area of concrete put down to give us somewhere to park cars and boats, and put up outbuildings. The process of getting the concrete laid is a story for another day, of which all that I will tell you now is that you should never leave a builder alone and unsupervised on your property with a mechanical digger. The concrete itself was fine, and he managed to lay it with a slight slope so that all of it drains, and scored the surface so that it is non-slip. The plan was that the greenhouse would stand in one corner of the concrete.
The greenhouse is made of wood, which is bolted down to purpose-made concrete footings like giant kerb stones, supplied by the same firm that sold me the greenhouse. The man who put it up did a good job, and well into its second decade it has stood through many gales without shifting. Not a single pane of glass has shattered in all that time. However, the rain water that falls on the concrete, or runs on to it from the next door field, drains over the continuous concrete raft on which the greenhouse stands. It does not stop when it gets to the greenhouse, but just carries on under the base slabs supporting the sides, and through the greenhouse. This means that in weather like this, when you would like to keep the atmosphere inside dry and buoyant, to prevent fungal diseases attacking your plants, the inside of the greenhouse is as damp and dismal as a 1960s bus station. The overwintering pelargoniums are suffering from mildew, and all is not as it should be. The answer would have been to put the greenhouse on its own separate piece of concrete, with a drain around it, so that water could not run in, but I didn't think of that at the time, and nobody told me.
The Systems Administrator retrieved the weather data from the old laptop. With a couple of days to go until the end of the year it looks as though we've had 820 millimetres of rain, which would be about sixty per cent more than normal. The total is slightly suspect, since the weather station threw a wobbly in July and the SA had to borrow the total for that month from the Epping Weather Site. The Clacton coastal strip is generally drier than Epping, so we should probably shave something off their July figure of 132 millimetres. However, with four days of the year to go, Epping has already recorded 944.9 millimetres of rain for 2012, so our 820 millimetres doesn't sound too wildly implausible.
The whole world is wet. The garden, the lawns and borders and shrubs and hedges, all disgustingly wet, waiting to dump a great load water on you if touched, or deform with hideous squelchings if walked upon. The cats go into the garden to do their business, and come in again with wet feet and damp fur. The damp is worming its way into my bones and lungs, reminding me that while the SA melts in warm weather, I am probably better suited to somewhere hot and dry, not on the cold, rain-sodden margins of northern Europe. I can see why so many rich, keen Edwardian gardeners busied themselves in the winter months making a second garden in the south of France. It must have been more rewarding than staring out at the soggy mess of their English one, and better for their rheumatism and bronchial health.
I went out to check the watering in the greenhouse and conservatory. I hadn't checked them for days, and felt a guilty concern that I might have left it too long and that things might be getting dry. Not a bit of it. Overwintering plants use very little water at this time of year, when the sun is so weak and the days so short, and while a few evergreens in the brightest spots needed a drink, most pots were still wet enough. I was pleased to see quite a few of the bulbs starting to come through, and relieved that after the opening skirmish with mice, most of them had escaped without being eaten.
I made a bad error when we had the greenhouse put up, one which no garden writer I've come across has owned up to in print, or warned against. Take this therefore as a warning, in case you are thinking of buying a greenhouse. When we moved into the property it had no greenhouse or sheds, or parking area other than the edge of the turning circle, and so we had an area of concrete put down to give us somewhere to park cars and boats, and put up outbuildings. The process of getting the concrete laid is a story for another day, of which all that I will tell you now is that you should never leave a builder alone and unsupervised on your property with a mechanical digger. The concrete itself was fine, and he managed to lay it with a slight slope so that all of it drains, and scored the surface so that it is non-slip. The plan was that the greenhouse would stand in one corner of the concrete.
The greenhouse is made of wood, which is bolted down to purpose-made concrete footings like giant kerb stones, supplied by the same firm that sold me the greenhouse. The man who put it up did a good job, and well into its second decade it has stood through many gales without shifting. Not a single pane of glass has shattered in all that time. However, the rain water that falls on the concrete, or runs on to it from the next door field, drains over the continuous concrete raft on which the greenhouse stands. It does not stop when it gets to the greenhouse, but just carries on under the base slabs supporting the sides, and through the greenhouse. This means that in weather like this, when you would like to keep the atmosphere inside dry and buoyant, to prevent fungal diseases attacking your plants, the inside of the greenhouse is as damp and dismal as a 1960s bus station. The overwintering pelargoniums are suffering from mildew, and all is not as it should be. The answer would have been to put the greenhouse on its own separate piece of concrete, with a drain around it, so that water could not run in, but I didn't think of that at the time, and nobody told me.
The Systems Administrator retrieved the weather data from the old laptop. With a couple of days to go until the end of the year it looks as though we've had 820 millimetres of rain, which would be about sixty per cent more than normal. The total is slightly suspect, since the weather station threw a wobbly in July and the SA had to borrow the total for that month from the Epping Weather Site. The Clacton coastal strip is generally drier than Epping, so we should probably shave something off their July figure of 132 millimetres. However, with four days of the year to go, Epping has already recorded 944.9 millimetres of rain for 2012, so our 820 millimetres doesn't sound too wildly implausible.
Thursday, 27 December 2012
a country walk
I woke rather late this morning, and realised I was missing the start of the Toast on-line sale. In general I'm not a great fan of Sales. I did have a look at the John Lewis offering, since the edges of my bath towel have frayed so badly that strands of fabric hang loose, and I thought I might be able to get a nice soft fluffy Egyptian cotton replacement. When I investigated towels I discovered that most colours of Egyptian cotton were only available in face flannel size, and gave up in disgust. Toast are very organised with their sale, and sent me a paper flyer before Christmas listing what would be included, so I already knew which two jackets I wanted to buy, if they were available in my size. They are the same jackets I have been admiring since September while being too mean and too poor to pay full price for them. Happily, when I got downstairs and logged on I discovered that the Sale did not start until 9.00 am, so I had only missed the first twenty-five minutes of it. That seemed deeply civilised. I heard on Radio 4 about all those people who had spent Christmas Day night camping out ready to storm the shops when the doors opened on Boxing Day morning, and I really couldn't see the attraction. They had both jackets in my size, so waiting for the sale paid off this time. They have upgraded their website since the early days. I recall one infuriating sale when every page took minutes to load, and nothing I wanted was available in any size between 8 and 18.
It rained all morning. Absolutely poured. By lunchtime it had stopped, and become calm, the sort of slightly ominous calm you get when you are in the very centre of a low pressure weather system. We finally went for our Christmas walk. Setting out up the lane and then looping across the fields we felt the breeze on our right cheeks, telling us the wind had swung round to the north. It was a cold wind that made my eyes water as I walked.
The route took us through one of the local ancient woods, in private ownership, but actively coppiced. Fallen trunks of birch and sweet chestnut lay on a south-west, north-east axis, with strong vertical regrowth arising at intervals along their length. From the direction in which they were thrown, and the size of the new growth, we guessed they were relicts of the 1987 storm. Professional woodland managers I've met with the woodland charity now admit that they were far too quick to tidy up after the Great Storm. It made everyone feel better at the time, to think that they were restoring and making good the damage wrought by the wind, but they underestimated the power of recovery of wind-thrown broadleaf trees. The trunk topples, but half the root plate remains in contact with the soil, and in time the fallen bole will root where it touches. A row of three or four birch grow up, where there was one before. We saw the same thing happen with odd branches that had splayed out from the hazel coppice.
The brooks and field ditches were as full as the Systems Administrator had ever seen them, and it was strange walking through the north Essex countryside to the sound of babbling water, a noise I associate with Lake District walks in the Fells. We passed the farm where often a little dog rushes out of the cat flap, woofs once enthusiastically at the SA, and then rushes in again, but today he didn't come out to greet us. It began to rain, a solid drizzle that settled on my spectacles. My nose began to run from the cold as well.
Crossing over the main road we picked up Cockaynes Lane, which runs down to Cockaynes Wood. Oliver Rackham writes that if you reach a wood by going down Wood Lane, there is a high probability that there has been a wood there for a long time, and I think the same is true if the name of the wood is incorporated into the road name. At any rate, Cockaynes is an Ancient Wood, with a fine display of bluebells in spring. It is next to some large disused gravel workings, recently converted to a nature reserve, with the wood and gravel pits now held by a Trust, and managed with some input from the Essex Wildlife Trust. A large bank that could be a mediaeval wood bank runs through Cockaynes, but overall the wood is not very large, and I wonder whether it was bigger, and mostly lost to quarrying. We didn't see much bird life in the reserve, beyond a pair of swans and two moorhens, but I suppose the ecology will take time to build up.
The brook along the bottom of the wood was in spate, by Essex standards, though not covering the path, and I saw what I thought was opposite leaved golden saxifrage along the banks. That's not very rare nationally, but rare enough in Essex to be interesting. The Trust has been busy renewing the boardwalks through the wetter parts of the wood, using that reconstituted non-slip plastic imitation wood, which does look pretty convincing, and is presumably lower maintenance than timber. I was puzzled by the black stones in the bottom of a tributary carving its way down the hillside towards the brook, since we have nothing like them in our own garden, and took one with me, intending to quiz those of my friends and relatives who know anything about geology as to what it was, and why it was abundant in Cockaynes and absent from my garden only a couple of miles away.
There was a BT van in Cockaynes Lane, engine idling. The SA walked that way one time, and met a disconsolate BT engineer who had just realised that he'd left his bag with his mobile phone in it at the top of the extremely tall communications mast. There was another BT van the far side of Cockaynes, when we got back to the main road, this time with three engineers wandering about and peering into the bushes as if they had lost something. We began to suspect there must be a telephone fault in the area, and further on passed a third, and a fourth at the Alresford railway crossing, where we all waited for some time for two trains to pass. The driver kept his engine idling throughout. Alresford is faced with the expansion of the existing quarry, and there are posters protesting about the plans in quite a few windows. The church, at some distance apart from the village, is a ruin since burning down in the 1970s. A pity, since the nave was Norman. The war memorial, a Celtic cross, is tidily kept, with wreaths of poppies still left from last Remembrance Day. One of the surnames is the same name as the farm shop in the village, and I wondered whether it was the same family.
Passing from farm to farm, you get a picture of which farmers are signed up to countryside stewardship schemes and which aren't. You walk for a time between generous field margins and headlands left to grow rough grass, then suddenly hit a change of regime, with the plough coming to within a metre of the hedge line, and every last little corner ploughed, no matter how small and how tight the turns for the machinery.
Crossing one of the final fields before reaching the network of footpaths on the farm where we live, the path took us across the centre of the field. Notices at both entrances ask walkers to keep to the path, rather than use the margins, which are managed for wildlife. The trodden track across the lower half of the field was clearly visible in the crop, but almost none of the winter wheat or whatever it was had germinated in the upper part of the field. Water ran visibly over the surface of the soil, and had started to dig a small gully along the line of the path. The Tenpenny Brook at the bottom had swelled beyond its banks, so that the alder trees along the southern shore stood marooned in the fast flowing stream.
The rain did stop, about half way round. The loop is almost exactly six miles long, and I felt rather stiff by the end of it, a disturbing reminder that I am not so fit as I should be, after the idle days of rain and Christmas festivities. You can extend the walk by dropping right down to the banks of the Colne, which is pretty, but ambitious for an afternoon walk at this time of the year, when the days are so short, and we are full of sloth and turkey.
It rained all morning. Absolutely poured. By lunchtime it had stopped, and become calm, the sort of slightly ominous calm you get when you are in the very centre of a low pressure weather system. We finally went for our Christmas walk. Setting out up the lane and then looping across the fields we felt the breeze on our right cheeks, telling us the wind had swung round to the north. It was a cold wind that made my eyes water as I walked.
The route took us through one of the local ancient woods, in private ownership, but actively coppiced. Fallen trunks of birch and sweet chestnut lay on a south-west, north-east axis, with strong vertical regrowth arising at intervals along their length. From the direction in which they were thrown, and the size of the new growth, we guessed they were relicts of the 1987 storm. Professional woodland managers I've met with the woodland charity now admit that they were far too quick to tidy up after the Great Storm. It made everyone feel better at the time, to think that they were restoring and making good the damage wrought by the wind, but they underestimated the power of recovery of wind-thrown broadleaf trees. The trunk topples, but half the root plate remains in contact with the soil, and in time the fallen bole will root where it touches. A row of three or four birch grow up, where there was one before. We saw the same thing happen with odd branches that had splayed out from the hazel coppice.
The brooks and field ditches were as full as the Systems Administrator had ever seen them, and it was strange walking through the north Essex countryside to the sound of babbling water, a noise I associate with Lake District walks in the Fells. We passed the farm where often a little dog rushes out of the cat flap, woofs once enthusiastically at the SA, and then rushes in again, but today he didn't come out to greet us. It began to rain, a solid drizzle that settled on my spectacles. My nose began to run from the cold as well.
Crossing over the main road we picked up Cockaynes Lane, which runs down to Cockaynes Wood. Oliver Rackham writes that if you reach a wood by going down Wood Lane, there is a high probability that there has been a wood there for a long time, and I think the same is true if the name of the wood is incorporated into the road name. At any rate, Cockaynes is an Ancient Wood, with a fine display of bluebells in spring. It is next to some large disused gravel workings, recently converted to a nature reserve, with the wood and gravel pits now held by a Trust, and managed with some input from the Essex Wildlife Trust. A large bank that could be a mediaeval wood bank runs through Cockaynes, but overall the wood is not very large, and I wonder whether it was bigger, and mostly lost to quarrying. We didn't see much bird life in the reserve, beyond a pair of swans and two moorhens, but I suppose the ecology will take time to build up.
The brook along the bottom of the wood was in spate, by Essex standards, though not covering the path, and I saw what I thought was opposite leaved golden saxifrage along the banks. That's not very rare nationally, but rare enough in Essex to be interesting. The Trust has been busy renewing the boardwalks through the wetter parts of the wood, using that reconstituted non-slip plastic imitation wood, which does look pretty convincing, and is presumably lower maintenance than timber. I was puzzled by the black stones in the bottom of a tributary carving its way down the hillside towards the brook, since we have nothing like them in our own garden, and took one with me, intending to quiz those of my friends and relatives who know anything about geology as to what it was, and why it was abundant in Cockaynes and absent from my garden only a couple of miles away.
There was a BT van in Cockaynes Lane, engine idling. The SA walked that way one time, and met a disconsolate BT engineer who had just realised that he'd left his bag with his mobile phone in it at the top of the extremely tall communications mast. There was another BT van the far side of Cockaynes, when we got back to the main road, this time with three engineers wandering about and peering into the bushes as if they had lost something. We began to suspect there must be a telephone fault in the area, and further on passed a third, and a fourth at the Alresford railway crossing, where we all waited for some time for two trains to pass. The driver kept his engine idling throughout. Alresford is faced with the expansion of the existing quarry, and there are posters protesting about the plans in quite a few windows. The church, at some distance apart from the village, is a ruin since burning down in the 1970s. A pity, since the nave was Norman. The war memorial, a Celtic cross, is tidily kept, with wreaths of poppies still left from last Remembrance Day. One of the surnames is the same name as the farm shop in the village, and I wondered whether it was the same family.
Passing from farm to farm, you get a picture of which farmers are signed up to countryside stewardship schemes and which aren't. You walk for a time between generous field margins and headlands left to grow rough grass, then suddenly hit a change of regime, with the plough coming to within a metre of the hedge line, and every last little corner ploughed, no matter how small and how tight the turns for the machinery.
Crossing one of the final fields before reaching the network of footpaths on the farm where we live, the path took us across the centre of the field. Notices at both entrances ask walkers to keep to the path, rather than use the margins, which are managed for wildlife. The trodden track across the lower half of the field was clearly visible in the crop, but almost none of the winter wheat or whatever it was had germinated in the upper part of the field. Water ran visibly over the surface of the soil, and had started to dig a small gully along the line of the path. The Tenpenny Brook at the bottom had swelled beyond its banks, so that the alder trees along the southern shore stood marooned in the fast flowing stream.
The rain did stop, about half way round. The loop is almost exactly six miles long, and I felt rather stiff by the end of it, a disturbing reminder that I am not so fit as I should be, after the idle days of rain and Christmas festivities. You can extend the walk by dropping right down to the banks of the Colne, which is pretty, but ambitious for an afternoon walk at this time of the year, when the days are so short, and we are full of sloth and turkey.
Wednesday, 26 December 2012
returning to normality
So that's over for another year. The presents wrapped and unwrapped, the gargantuan lunch cooked and eaten, the Boxing Day National Hunt races run. It's not quite over, of course. The tree, greenery and lights up the stairs are still up and looking bright and sparkly, and the candles are burning on the white and red cloths on the dining table and on the mantelpiece. It will take several days to eat up all the leftovers, and most of the year to read all the books. We had a nice Christmas. I solved the dilemma of How Not to Ruin a Turkey by not having a turkey, and by letting somebody else do the cooking. Contrary to newspaper reports of how the typical family Christmas Day goes, lunch was ready within ten minutes of when the Systems Administrator said it would be, and there were no arguments. All the cats had Sheba for lunch, and the chickens had an extra handful of sultanas.
This morning I did some work in the garden. As I went to fetch my tools from the garage I noticed the first few flowers out on the Iris unguicularis under the sitting room window. The garden is very, very wet. We had another twelve millimetres of rain in the space of two hours yesterday morning. I spent my time trimming the ivy hedge around the long bed in the front garden, and cutting down herbaceous stems. The sand in the front garden has its drawbacks, mainly its complete inability to retain moisture in dry periods and almost zero natural fertility, but you can walk on it with impunity an hour after the heaviest rain. The forecast was for rain in the afternoon, and sure enough it is raining now.
The long bed is infested at its northerly end by some sort of grass with a running root. It is not so rank as twitch, but impossible to weed every scrap out where it runs into the root zones of shrubs or the ivy hedge, or disappears deep beneath the ground like a crash-diving submarine. I winkled out what I could, but will need to go around in the spring treating the new emerging leaves with glyphosate. In a properly conducted garden I suppose that such things would never gain a foothold, but in the real imperfect world they do. I don't see how you can ever keep the soil really clean of perennial weeds long term in a mixed border.
Snouts of bulb foliage are emerging all over the place. There are tulips in the gravel and daffodils down by the bog bed. The grape hyacinths try to come into leaf from autumn onwards, though I don't know why they bother, as something always eats the leaves. If I were to go and poke through the leaf litter in the ditch bed I'm sure I'd find snowdrop leaves. It makes weeding slightly more laborious, having to avoid slicing off the newly emerging tops of the bulbs, and the task of weeding seems all the more urgent, to be finished as soon as possible before plants make any more growth.
The pile of woody prunings up the bonfire site has grown vast, ominous and dripping. It needs a dry day for the SA to go up and have a burn. There are more prunings to come up from the back lawns, left over from my last gardening stint before rain and pre-Christmas housework took over. The vine round the vegetable patch needs pruning as a matter of urgency, or the sap will have started to rise and it will bleed when cut. Maybe next year I'll manage to grow vegetables. I didn't even try this year, because there were so many other things to do. Some people are surprised by the low priority I give to growing food, but you can buy perfectly acceptable vegetables in the shops, whereas you cannot buy an ornamental garden. It's a pity that the forecast tomorrow is for more rain.
This morning I did some work in the garden. As I went to fetch my tools from the garage I noticed the first few flowers out on the Iris unguicularis under the sitting room window. The garden is very, very wet. We had another twelve millimetres of rain in the space of two hours yesterday morning. I spent my time trimming the ivy hedge around the long bed in the front garden, and cutting down herbaceous stems. The sand in the front garden has its drawbacks, mainly its complete inability to retain moisture in dry periods and almost zero natural fertility, but you can walk on it with impunity an hour after the heaviest rain. The forecast was for rain in the afternoon, and sure enough it is raining now.
The long bed is infested at its northerly end by some sort of grass with a running root. It is not so rank as twitch, but impossible to weed every scrap out where it runs into the root zones of shrubs or the ivy hedge, or disappears deep beneath the ground like a crash-diving submarine. I winkled out what I could, but will need to go around in the spring treating the new emerging leaves with glyphosate. In a properly conducted garden I suppose that such things would never gain a foothold, but in the real imperfect world they do. I don't see how you can ever keep the soil really clean of perennial weeds long term in a mixed border.
Snouts of bulb foliage are emerging all over the place. There are tulips in the gravel and daffodils down by the bog bed. The grape hyacinths try to come into leaf from autumn onwards, though I don't know why they bother, as something always eats the leaves. If I were to go and poke through the leaf litter in the ditch bed I'm sure I'd find snowdrop leaves. It makes weeding slightly more laborious, having to avoid slicing off the newly emerging tops of the bulbs, and the task of weeding seems all the more urgent, to be finished as soon as possible before plants make any more growth.
The pile of woody prunings up the bonfire site has grown vast, ominous and dripping. It needs a dry day for the SA to go up and have a burn. There are more prunings to come up from the back lawns, left over from my last gardening stint before rain and pre-Christmas housework took over. The vine round the vegetable patch needs pruning as a matter of urgency, or the sap will have started to rise and it will bleed when cut. Maybe next year I'll manage to grow vegetables. I didn't even try this year, because there were so many other things to do. Some people are surprised by the low priority I give to growing food, but you can buy perfectly acceptable vegetables in the shops, whereas you cannot buy an ornamental garden. It's a pity that the forecast tomorrow is for more rain.
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