no snow

The promised heavy snow didn't materialise overnight.  We had a light dusting, but no more.  The authorities are still predicting the worst, with stern warnings on the BBC Essex website from the police to motorists to Be Prepared.  There is heavy snow shown throughout Sunday on the Met Office five day forecast for Colchester, and regional warnings for snow and ice stretching out until Tuesday, when, rather prosaically, it is going to rain.  It's going to be rather a let-down if, after all this anticipation of ferocious weather and precautionary cancellation of tomorrow's lunch, nothing much happens in Essex after all.

I needn't have insisted on taking my beekeepers accounts over yesterday evening to our examiner in Clacton if I'd known it wasn't going to snow heavily in the night.  I thought that if and when it did snow hard I'd never get there at all, and the AGM is on Thursday.  Clacton seafront is a pretty desolate spot in January after dark, even when it's not snowing.  The red warning lights on the wind turbines out on the Gunfleet have an air of eerie desolation, and light up the sea just enough to show you how unpleasant it is.  On a windy night like yesterday the cold cuts through to your bones.

The examiner rang mid morning, to ask about the subscriptions included in expenses.  I explained that these were repayments of subs overpaid in error, plus the bank reversing out a cheque which bounced.  He didn't ring again, and as the morning wore on I thought this was a good omen.  After lunch he e-mailed to say he approved the accounts, which was a relief.  They are rather untidy accounts, income being a hybrid of gross income, and surpluses on events banked by the organisers after deducting costs.  I was afraid that a proper accountant might object to them, though I had done my best with the information presented to me by my fellow club members.  Fortunately it turns out that most small club accounts look like that.

The Systems Administrator's great friend in Hitchin is Treasurer of the local cricket club, whose income includes match fees.  I never thought about how you would structure the membership fees of a village cricket club, but apparently it is very cheap to join, then you pay per match if you play, to cover direct costs of the match including balls and your tea, as well as a contribution to the club's running costs.  It's something like a tenner a game, which sounded quite a lot to me, but I suppose you should view it as similar to a gym membership.  In theory the captain collects the match fees from his players on the day.  In theory.  In practice members run up tabs then pay for several matches at once, so that it's quite complicated from the Treasurer's point of view keeping track of who is fully paid up, versus who still owes.  Remind me not to offer to help with the finances of any village cricket clubs.

After lunch I started off the dough for some milk rolls, going back to my ancient Good Housekeepers cookery book.  The bread book I used for the wholemeal recipe and the stollen, which both worked, is rather sniffy when it comes to rolls, talking about how the flavour is improved by two stage fermentation processes.  That would be fine if I'd started off stage one yesterday, but I didn't.  I just want some rolls to go with the soup for supper.

Settling down to cook brought the unwelcome discovery that my iPod was malfunctioning.  It normally lives on a docking station in the kitchen, whose two small speakers produce remarkably decent sound quality, and it was working beautifully before Christmas, but is now jumping slightly within tracks, like the stylus on a turntable if the floor is vibrating.  The SA tried wriggling the iPod on its connector in case the connection was faulty, but that didn't improve matters, then tested the iPod quickly with headphones, since my hands were covered in dough and I don't have any headphones.  It still jumped.  That means it is the iPod and not the docking station.  Blast.  It is a fairly old iPod, but not that heavily used.  I'm not impressed.  Look at our Marantz stereo system, still going strong and only needing a new amp after nearly twenty years.

If we don't get heavy snow tomorrow, or any snow at all, then there will have been no need to cancel our pub lunch.  I wish the forecasters would get it right.  Over-forecasting everything just to be on the safe side might make the Met Office and authorities feel better, but it doesn't help the rest of us.

cancelled due to extreme weather conditions

The thermometer was reading only half a degree below freezing when I got up this morning, an improvement on the last few days, but the wind made it feel much colder as I crouched outside in the chicken run, trying to knock the block of ice out of the bottom of their water container.  Looking at the weather forecast over my breakfast porridge I discovered that the forecast snow had shifted later, but with more of it.  Heavy snow was no longer expected until nine in the evening, plus or minus an hour and a half, versus heavy snow expected by six tonight when I went to bed yesterday.  On the other hand, the forecast for the weekend had got snowier, with more or less constant falls expected through Saturday and Sunday.

This left me with the dilemma of whether or not to try and get to the concert.  My usual route involves two steep hills, and the last time it snowed heavily and I ventured to go to work, the hill on the Suffolk side wasn't gritted at all.  I managed to drive there and back then without disaster, but made a mental note at the time not to do it again.  I searched the Met Office site for a five day forecast for the nearest place to the concert, and began to doubt the reliability of the forecasts, since they seemed to differ so much.  How could Hadleigh get heavy snow all day when Manningtree was only expected to have a few sprinkles?

Even if I got to the concert, I would not be likely to enjoy it very much if I were sitting all the time wondering how hard it was snowing now, and what the drive home would be like, and whether I would even be able to get out of the car park.  By late morning I'd come down on the side of not going, and was just starting to compose an apologetic message to the Secretary, warning her that I probably wouldn't be coming and so wouldn't be bringing any fishy nibbles, when an e-mail popped into my in-box.  Interrupting myself to open it I discovered that it was from the Secretary.  CONCERT THIS EVENING CANCELLED.  That solved that problem, then, though it leaves me with a lot of mackerel pate.  It isn't suitable for home freezing, I checked on the pot yesterday.

Two minutes later another e-mail arrived.  CANCELLATIION OF THIS EVENING'S CONCERT.  The Secretary reiterated the information given in the first e-mail, and apologised if we'd received it twice, but she had received a failure notice.  Cancellatio9n of concert tonight.  She had received another failure notice.  I felt for her.  The pianist is stuck in Vienna due to flight cancellations.  He was supposed to be giving a master class to aspirant local pianists tomorrow, as well as today's concert.  Everything will have to be rescheduled.

The Systems Administrator asked whether we were insured for losses on the concert, since we will have hired in the piano to no good purpose, and I realised that I didn't know the answer.  The Treasurer always seems to deal with that side of things.  It is the un-nerving thing about being the beekeepers' Treasurer, wondering what I am supposed to be dealing with but haven't, because I never thought of it.

Meanwhile, I contacted the friends in London we were going to meet for lunch on Sunday in a pub mid-way between us, suggesting that in view of the forecast we'd better put that off, and rang the pub to un-book the table.  I don't suppose they were surprised, but it seemed polite to give them some notice.

a necessary evil

This morning when I got up the weather station was reading minus five degrees outside, and nine degrees in the sitting room.  The cold snap is intensifying.  The chickens came bouncing out of their house happily enough despite the plummeting night time temperatures.  They look good running around on the straw, and it makes me feel better to think that they are not now getting damp feet, though in this weather the ground is frozen anyway.  I had to defrost their drinking water when I let them out, and again later in the morning.

The Systems Administrator was very determined about volunteering to go to Tesco.  I was quite willing to go myself, since I need ingredients to make post-concert nibbles tomorrow, assuming I make it to the concert.  There are now forecasts of blizzards on Friday evening, and dire warnings not to travel after dark.  Blizzards in this context means winds up to 25 mph and up to five inches of snow.  Goodness knows what they make of us in parts of the world where it really does snow.

The SA went out and was some time, returning with the news that there seemed to be panic buying in Tesco and they had run out of packets of rye bread.  That is a nuisance, since I was going to make miniature open sandwiches with (ready made) mackerel pate.  The SA bought two packets of pate anyway, and an un-sliced rye loaf, so if I don't manage to get to the concert then that's my lunch sorted out for several days.  We have got adequate supplies of cat food, fire lighters and loo roll, which are the main things.  Everything else one can improvise.

Since it was most definitely not gardening weather I thought that after breakfast I'd do my tax return.  I hate completing my self-assessment form, which is why it always gets left until January, though logging on to the government website I saw that this year I am two days earlier than in 2012.  I hate the scrabbling around for the one unit trust tax voucher that always seems to be missing, and the way that on-line savings accounts don't even seem to send tax vouchers.  In the end this year's form wasn't too bad, as I had managed to save all the key documents, and lied on the form at the end when I ticked the box saying there were no provisional or estimated figures.  Actually, I did estimate the interest on one pathetic account that was paying approximately £5.48 per month in interest, deciding I couldn't face spending the time to discover exactly how much it had paid in the twelve months to April of last year, and that twelve times £5.50 would be an acceptable figure to use.  If ever challenged, which I won't be, I shall invoke the accounting concept of materiality.  I'm not a higher rate tax payer, and the account is taxed at source, so it doesn't matter exactly how much it was.

I gave up with the charitable giving section as well.  I do give to charity, in a modest way as befits my income.  The National Trust, the Barn Owl Trust, the Essex Beekeepers, the Art Fund, the Tate, the RHS, the Woodland trust, and the RSPB are all registered charities.  The RSPB membership is held jointly with the SA, just to complicate things.  Whenever asked by a charity I tick the Gift Aid box, since I am a tax payer, but I really can't be bothered to go through my bank statements and try and work out how much I've paid them in total in a given tax year.  And I have not kept a record of all the entry fees to museums where I've made a Gift Aid declaration while buying a ticket.  I don't know why HMRC even wants to know how much I gave to charity, since it's not as though I can claim tax relief on it.

In the end I owed them a small amount of money.  I thought I would.  I passed on the opportunity to set up a direct debit and paid by card, since I don't fancy the idea of giving the Inland Revenue carte blanche to remove money from my account.  According to the cheery adverts on Classic FM, once I'd sorted out my 2011-12 tax before the deadline I should have experienced a sense of euphoric relief, but I didn't, I just felt as though I'd had a really tedious morning.

winter

There was a power cut in the night.  I woke up at some point, and before I noticed what time it was, my bedside clock made a tiny peeping noise and the display went blank.  There were further faint bleeps from the rest of the house, as power was momentarily restored to various appliances, but the clock didn't come back on.  After a while the Systems Administrator volunteered to go downstairs and check whether power to the house was now cut off, or whether our fuse box had tripped, and set off down the corridor clutching a guttering candle.  I lay in bed, reflecting that it was not very warm, and wondering what time it was and whether the Aga would have at least partially reheated itself before the power went off, before remembering that my greenhouse heaters would have gone off when the power did, and that unless electricity was restored fairly soon then all the Geranium maderense were going to die.

The Systems Administrator returned, having swapped the candle for a torch, and said that it was not our fuse box but the general supply, and that the lights on the farm had all gone out.  More electronic squeaks from the telephones downstairs indicated that power had very briefly returned several times, then suddenly there was a squawk from my alarm clock, the time began flashing as 12.00, and there was the blessed noise of the boiler coming on.  End of power cut, all that remained being to reset the clocks on the umpteen appliances that had forgotten what time or day it was.

When I got up there was no broadband.  I assumed this was a legacy of the power cut, and tried restarting my computer, and unplugging the modem and plugging it in again.  That exhausted my repertoire of self-help techniques for loss of internet access without solving the problem, leaving me with my fallback position of waiting until the Systems Administrator got up.  I do not think of myself as an internet junkie.  I'm still not on Facebook, or Twitter, and most of my friends don't e-mail from one week to the next.  Even so, I felt strange not being able to check out what was going on first thing in my digital world.

The SA got up eventually, and investigated and found that we had not merely lost the line, but that the BT service for reporting broadband faults was unavailable.  Major broadband problems are generally better news for us than small, local problems, since BT tackles them immediately.  Loss of service to just one or two rural houses somewhere in the Tendring peninsular comes a long way down their list of Things to Do.  The SA plugged in the 3 Mobile dongle that is kept for holidays and emergencies.

The temperature outside was minus 3 degrees Celsius, according to the weather station.  The sky was very blue and clear, and the frozen snow on the shrubs and grass stems in the garden objectively speaking very pretty, but there isn't a lot to do here when it's that cold.  A friend who lives in a small, neat house in Islington and still does the sort of job that entails spending a long time in meetings with spreadsheets and PowerPoint, or sitting in airport lounges, occasionally asks me with some incredulity if I don't get bored at home.  Or even stuck at home.  True, if I were stuck in her house I would get extremely bored, since I'd have run out of things to do in the garden after a couple of days, and I couldn't look at art galleries all the time.  But here there is normally lots to do.

But not when the garden is lightly coated with snow and the thermometer remains below zero for the entire day.  I looked at the newspapers on the internet, once the temporary connection was up, noticing with disgust that train services from Essex to the capital were delayed.  Again.  I read a book of pasta recipes in search of new ideas for supper, finding the idea of all those carbohydrates vaguely comforting, and wishing the Italians would not keep putting fish and spinach in things.  I went out to defrost the chickens' water for a second time.  I would not say I was bored.  It is very un-Zen to be bored, and I can generally find something to think about, only there wasn't much to do.  I could have done my ironing, but activities that required me to move out of sight of the Aga had lost their appeal.

The Systems Administrator had to go outside after lunch to split some more logs, but came in again as soon as that was done, saying that the cold air really aggravated the hole left by the departed molar.  Apparently an extraction like that, done on a tooth which has only just died and not had time to go loose in the jaw, may hurt a lot for up to a week even in the absence of infection.  You know you have an infection if the pain progresses to become excruciating.

poem for the day

I woke this morning to find that we'd had a light dusting of snow in the night.  A very light dusting, which I suppose is what you'd expect given the Met Office has us on a Level 3 Cold Weather Action Alert.  As the Daily Telegraph pointed out, that is one level below a National Emergency.  The thermometer outside is reading 0.9 degrees Celsius, and on the five day forecast it's going to drop to minus three overnight.  Minus three in the UK in January.  At night.  Who'd have thought it?

Unfortunately even that much snow and cold weather means I am not likely to see a great deal of gardening action this week.  Indeed, the highlight of today is probably going to be sliding down the lane to Waitrose to pick up some Click and Collect water glasses from John Lewis.  They have embossed bees on them, very pretty.  Our existing bistro tumblers are getting rather scratched to offer to visitors.  In the meantime I am writing the blog early, to put off the moment when I have to re-format the plant centre newsletter into boxes with pictures, which is the way the owner wants it done nowadays.  You will not find boxes with pictures in Cardunculus, no Sir.  If dense paragraphs of text are good enough for Caitlin Moran, they're good enough for me.

At the New Year I said that maybe Cardunculus concentrated rather on the Little House on the Prairie How to Build a Log Cabin side of things, and was a bit light on intellectual content and the inner life, so this morning I will share a poem with you.  I heard it on Radio 3 during Choral Evensong driving back from work on Sunday.  It seemed beautiful, in that half-concentrated-on way that poetry does when you're listening to it while negotiating a mini-roundabout involving the exit from a petrol station forecourt as well as the normal flow of road traffic, and oddly familiar.  I thought it might be by T S Eliot, and Googled the lines I could remember when I got home, without finding the poem.  I flicked through Eliot's collected works, again with no joy, so finally thought of looking at the Radio 3 website, which listed the readings as well as the music.

The poem turned out to be The Bright Field, by R S Thomas.

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it.  But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it.  I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it.  Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past.  It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

I became very enthusiastic about R S Thomas and thought I should get some more of his poetry, until I looked him up on Wikipedia, when my enthusiasm began to wane.  He was a Welsh Anglican priest, who believed fiercely in all things Welsh.  When I read that he was in favour of the burning of English-owned holiday homes in Wales, and turned against the project to re-introduce red kites when he discovered that some of the birds would be of non-Welsh genetic origin, I began to dislike him.  When I read that he was against modern technology, and that the only appliance ever allowed in his house was a vacuum cleaner, but he banished it because it was too noisy, I began to really dislike him.  I didn't suppose it was R S Thomas who crawled around on his hands and knees with a dustpan and brush and a damp cloth, trying to get the floors clean, after R S Thomas banished the vacuum cleaner.  No, I darkly suspect it was Mrs R S Thomas, while R S Thomas sat in his study writing beautiful poems about eternity and fulminating against the alien gene pool of the foreign kites.

My guess that the poem was by Eliot wasn't a bad one, though.  R S Thomas was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature, losing out to Seamus Heaney.  Thomas Stearns Eliot won it in 1948.

Addendum  Caution:  I found the words of the poem on somebody else's blog.  I'm not sure if I have The Bright Field in an anthology, or have just heard it on the radio before.  If I knew where to find a published text I'd have copied it from there, since poems on the web have a way of mutating.

health, safety and frozen hostas

The owner was on a health and safety drive this morning.  Indeed, she was yesterday afternoon, which was why she was auditing the contents of the First Aid box in the shop.  By today she had got on to the safe handling of fuel, rather timely after my conversation with the Systems Administrator yesterday evening when the SA wanted to know why I had come home smelling so strongly of paraffin.  The SA said then that by law we ought not to be handling heater fuel without nitrile gloves, since it was carcinogenic.  By this morning, and without any prompting from me, the owner had come to the same realisation.  I think there is some official initiative via the fuel distributors to make small businesses more aware of the issues surrounding the use of kerosene and heating oil, much to the disgust of the boss who is a fierce libertarian.

The owner was also concerned that my young colleague had been creosoting wearing her uniform coat when a set of overalls was supplied, since the coat would now give off noxious fumes and smell of creosote for months.  My colleague explained that it was so cold working outside that you really did need a coat, and that she had been wearing the overalls underneath it.  The owner said in that case to wear the overalls over the coat, but I don't think that's going to work, not unless they are a 54 inch chest size.

I had gone prepared and put my gardening radio in the car, ready to volunteer to continue tidying up the pots of herbaceous plants behind the polytunnel on The Other Side.  The manager seemed entirely happy not to have to think of things for me to do, and I spent a peaceful day scraping frozen moss off the hostas.  The Amadeus quartet playing Dvorak was a particular highlight, and the nice dollop of Dowland, then I was able to time my lunch break so that I was back just in time to catch The World At One.  After lunch it began to snow, initially in small dry flakes that didn't settle, and then in big, wet, sleety ones.

My poster for the snowdrop walk finally emerged into the light of day.  The boss had intercepted it when I e-mailed it over from home, where I composed it sitting at my kitchen table, and instead of simply giving it to the woman who works in the office to get on with, had sent it to the owner, who sat on it for over a week.  The poster took me twenty minutes to write, including finding a nice photograph of snowdrops on Google images, and a further twelve days for the logo to be inserted and the poster to be printed and laminated ready to be put up in the plant centre.  When I worked as a small companies fund manager, a recognised hazard for recently floated companies was that the original founder would be unable to delegate the quantity of decisions to the post-flotation management that needed to be delegated in order for the business to function smoothly.  Having now worked for a small business for nearly a decade I can attest from personal experience that this issue arises long before the flotation stage is ever reached.

Another aspect of the health and safety drive is that the owner is worried that the paths in the garden are so slippery.  She told the young gardener to rake up the fallen leaves more frequently, and move them further from the paths, and be sure to order grass seed in good time ready to re-seed the paths.  The young gardener is not convinced that any amount of raking and re-seeding is going to do the trick in some parts of the garden, where the paths are most heavily shaded.  The manager said the boss should start using bark paths.  I reminded him that the boss distrusted bark, in case it encouraged honey fungus.  I thought they needed to look at the plastic grids the National Trust and similar bodies use to reinforce their grass in heavily trodden areas, or those fine, sandy gravel paths much used by gardens open to the public.

It's a classic difficulty in opening gardens that features that worked perfectly well when it was a private space just used by family and friends, can't cope when visitor numbers rise to commercial levels.  The Systems Administrator and I have twice driven all the way over to see the gardens at Anglesey Abbey, and on both visits found key parts were cordoned off because it couldn't cope with the press of feet.  After the second trip I complained to the National Trust, who replied rather huffily that in order to remain true to Lord Fairhaven's design they had to restrict visitor numbers in some weather conditions.  I thought that if they were going to build a visitor centre the size of a battleship, as they have done, then they were going to have to modify the garden as well to cope with the numbers.  The boss, on a smaller scale, is going to have to start grappling with the same problem.

kerosene and creosote

As I was driving across the marshes on my way to work, I noticed that some of the gulls circling overhead had wings with white leading edges, and remembered from my bird watching trip that this was a marker for identification.  Unfortunately I couldn't remember which species of gull it denoted, but at least knowing that it matters is a start.  If I hunt through the bird books I should be able to work out which ones they were.  In fifty years of staring vaguely at seagulls I have never noticed before that some have extra-white strips along the front edges of their wings, a sort of white-on-white effect.  Truly, seeing is a cognitive process.

Trade once again was quiet.  It's not surprising.  It was a cold day, and who buys plants when the forecast is for imminent snow?  A few people did.  One couple bought a trolley load of shrubs and climbers, another over a hundred pounds worth of daphnes.  In the afternoon a plumpish young man with a tiny smudge of paint on one cheek bought a pear tree, and a definitely plump older man bought a medlar.  He rejected my polite offer to help him load it into his car, saying that he was decrepit but not that decrepit.

My young colleague volunteered for creosote duty.  She says she enjoys it.  I can see that you might, since the newly treated wood looks so very shiny and dark.  I myself have a soft spot for applying black tar oil varnish, only I would rather do it in September than January.  The smell of creosote was pretty strong, almost strong enough to mask the smell of kerosene, which we both got on our coats in the process of refilling the heater in the polytunnel.  I thought I hadn't noticed my male colleagues fill it yesterday, and although the tank was not empty, tonight was forecast to be cold.

The kerosene is stored in a fairly new, properly bunded oil tank near the house.  That's fair enough, since you couldn't get a fuel tanker into the plant centre.  The tank was bought at the same time as the heater, which replaced an old paraffin heater.  That had to be got rid of because it had begun to dump soot on the plants in the tunnel, and because the oil company wouldn't deliver any more paraffin to the old tank because they said it didn't meet environmental standards.  It didn't.  It wasn't bunded, for a start, and the tap dripped slightly even when turned off, which we dealt with by hanging a bucket under it.  The new tank is lockable and has a hand-pumped dispenser, which needs two people to use it, one to turn the pump handle and one to squeeze the trigger, unless it was one person with extremely long arms.  Kerosene has to be pumped into a jerry can, trundled to the bottom of the plant centre in a trolley, and poured into the heater by hand.  It is almost impossible to pour fuel out of a jerry can without some of it running down the side of the can.  We made three trips, kerosene duly running down the can on each trip, and since we couldn't hold the weight of the full can without bracing it on our knees, we soon got kerosene on our coats.  Still, it was easier than refuelling a boat at sea.

I ended up over-riding my hygienic scruples and serving some people with coffee, kerosene smelling clothes or no, since by that stage my colleague was kitted up for creosoting and it seemed even more wildly inappropriate that she should go in the kitchen than that I should.  I asked the customer to tell me if the coffee was too weak or too strong, since my primary expertise was plants and not coffee, but she said it was very nice.  I should think that inside she was laughing like a drain.  There are so few customers for refreshments at this time of year, the owner has given up even sending  cake out to the cafe, and we are down to packets of biscuits.

tidying in the tunnel

My car was lightly iced at twenty to eight this morning, including a thin layer of frozen condensation inside the windscreen.  The car thermometer believed it was a few degrees above freezing, but in the plant centre the paraffin heater in the hot tunnel was still blasting away.  I unplugged it, since I wanted to open the doors and there was no point in trying to heat the whole of Suffolk.

The manager's list of jobs to do included tidying up the remaining herbaceous plants in the plant centre, tidying inside the tunnels including watering anything that was too dry, and creosoting.  I didn't have any overalls or plastic gloves, and was not going to get creosote on my one pair of warm trousers (black fleece, irredeemably hideous but oh, so cosy) so that ruled out creosoting.  The tunnels sounded the best bet, out of the wind and with the prospect of some thermal gain if the sun came out at all.

Not many customers came, so while we were as nice as we could be to the ones that did, there was plenty of time to pick dead leaves off the plants in the tunnels, snip off mouldy shoots, and scoop fallen leaves and spilt compost off the floor.  There wasn't much mould, as we run a pretty tight and clean ship, but some of the usual suspects were afflicted.  Faded camellia flowers are always vulnerable to botrytis in the closed conditions of a polytunnel, and Cestrum are mould magnets at this time of year.  Fluffy fungus bodies coat their dead leaves and the tips of the stems and the affected parts have to be picked and pruned off.  It seems to be a generic Cestrum thing, since every one I've tried growing in the conservatory at home has behaved in the same way in winter.  In the summer they are fine.

There were quite a few dry pots, when I began to look closely.  The only water supply at this time of year is from a tap on the outside of the shop, since the main irrigation system has been drained so that it won't freeze and fracture on a cold night.  The tap on the shop is positioned immediately next to the exhaust flue for the boiler that runs the shop's heating, for reasons known to the boss's builders and quite unclear to me.  After positioning your watering can under the running tap it is best to take three paces back and turn the other way while you wait for it to fill, if you don't want to breathe the fumes.

There is an art to sweeping and watering in situ, which is to get a head start with the sweeping up and follow at distance with the watering.  That way, surplus water will not run on to the areas you haven't swept yet, and you will not get wet hands and knees.  In practice the most effective way of getting water into dry pots can be to soak them, and throughout the day I had three plants at any one time sitting in a pink plastic tub of water.  Callistemon tend to get dry in pots, which can be fatal since once the leaves crisp up the plant is a goner.  At that point they won't revive with watering, but have gone inexorably down their own Liverpool Care Pathway.  They make a lot of root quickly in a pot, another reason to soak them instead of uselessly sprinkling water on top of the compost which will merely run off again.

Cistus easily get dry in pots, though they are much harder to kill than Callistemon.  And the Correa or Australian fuchsias get rooty and dry in pots.  They bloom at this time of the year, with small, pretty, tubular cream, yellow or soft red flowers which hang uncharmingly on the plant after they have faded to brown.  Picking the dead ones off took quite a long time.  The leaves are small, oval, mid-green and undistinguished, and always seem to suffer slightly from sooty mould as if some small sap-sucking insect had attacked the plant at some point.  My Correa 'Peach Cream' at home behaves identically.

I had a long conversation about using ivy as a hedge with a man who needed to cover sixty metres of decaying willow fence that he was not going to replace.  That's the trouble with woven willow.  It looks utterly fabulous when new, but it is expensive and not all that long-lasting.  The man's face was familiar, and it was clear he knew who I was, so I found it difficult to concentrate fully on the ivy question because I was desperately trying to remember who he was, preferably before we got to the point where he placed an order for fifty Hedera hibernica and I had to confess that I couldn't remember his name.  In the end I was saved embarrassment by his saying he would go home to measure up and e-mail us on Monday to confirm the number of plants.  I helped him find something he wanted from the shop, we had a conversation about the unusual height of the water table where he lived and where I lived, and by the end of it I was practically certain I had worked out who he was.

A pleasant couple reserved five trees, and placed an order for a wild gean, and I promised to call them on Monday if the manager said we wouldn't be getting any Prunus avium this season.  I didn't ask them to pay today for the reserved trees, but probably should have, since the day's takings were pitiful.  Like I said, we were as nice as we could be to the customers that came in, but there weren't many of them.  The forecast of heavy snow overnight on Monday can't have helped persuade people that what they really needed to do on Saturday was buy garden plants.

an unsuccessful conclusion to an ongoing saga

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.