party season

We went to a Christmas party yesterday afternoon.  In London.  Four until seven, one welcoming glass of fizz on arrival, then smoked salmon nibbles and cucumber sandwiches, leading into tea and cakes.  The hostess was my old university friend, brought up in Germany, and the cakes were excellent.  She comes from Wuppertal, where they really know how to do cake.

She's been holding the Christmas tea party for years.  Once upon a time, her father used to dress up as Father Christmas for the benefit of her little daughter and the other children, who rushed around in great excitement, wearing party frocks that were far prettier than any of my dresses.  Nowadays, her daughter is a polite teenager, and the youngsters have their own quiet celebration in the privacy of her bedroom, while the oldies congregate below.  One of the former child guests is now in his final year at Balliol, and no longer goes to tea parties with his parents.  The guests are a mixture of former colleagues, neighbours, and other university friends, many of whom have also been going to the Christmas tea since its inception, so we have the strange connectedness of people who are happy to chat once a year, without ever having struck up an independent friendship outside the shared occasion of the tea.

There is an interesting mixture of people who are retired and glad of it, some who still work a bit but no longer regard it as the be-all and end-all, and those who remain fiercely competitive and work-focussed.  I can't contribute much to conversations with the latter.  If they remember anything about what I do, or did, they tend to think that I am a garden designer.  I never have been, but I suppose design scores more highly in the middle class pecking order than hands-on horticultural work.

My friends' parents, over from Germany for ten days, are always pleased to see me, and the other familiar faces.  They remember that I keep bees, and the name of our most forthcoming cat, who has been obliging in the past about letting their animal-mad grand-daughter fuss over him.  My friend is an only child, living a short haul flight away from them in what is, at least to her mother, a foreign city.  I think they find it comforting to think that she has friends there of long standing.

We haven't been every year.  When we both still worked, and the party was on a week day, there was a year when it was logistically impossible.  Two years it snowed and the trains packed up.  Last year she didn't ask us, I think worrying that it was too far to expect people to travel for tea, then this year she decided to simply invite us, and not second guess our feelings about travel.  With the overground from Stratford running every ten minutes on the North London loop, Islington is actually easier to reach than many parts of London, as long as it isn't snowing.  Originally we were going to make a day of it, and have lunch in the Systems Administrator's new favourite Turkish restaurant in Upper Street, before deciding we'd been out quite a lot, and would save that for another day.

Today we are hosting a Christmas lunch, having invited my parents, brother and his family over. Because we were out for half of yesterday for the tea party, they are getting ready made food. Sorry about that, folks.  We generally cook for guests from scratch.  That's partly because we generally cook from scratch anyway.  Maybe because I equate cooking with caring (though in that case the SA cares much more for me than I do for the SA).  Because I am frugal, and find it vaguely disturbing to pay £3.75 for about thirty pence worth of ingredients.  And I reckon my home-made puddings are better than shop ones, ditto my flans.  And when you have two people and five hens you are looking for any opportunity you can find to use some eggs.  And I like the ritual of the day before the party, making pastries, assembling the giant retro salad from a 1970s American vegetarian cookery book (you will never see anything like it anywhere else, but everybody eats it).  Given a full day in the kitchen I can produce a two course buffet for sixty people (on which basis I am never going to make my fortune in the catering trade).

Anyway, there wasn't time to do all that, and the point is to see people over Christmas, not cook for them.  The SA is out as I type, to buy fresh bread, and cat food, where stocks are dangerously low. I just hope the queues at the Co-op aren't too long.  For the guests to arrive before the host would be embarassing.

Christmas music, sacred and profane

We began listening to our collection of Christmas music yesterday evening.  It started off as one rumbustious folk album of seasonal music, which we used to listen to on Christmas Eve, then I bought a couple of CDs of carols, which were nice to have on Christmas Day, though I think that technically they are meant for Advent, so Christmas morning is too late.  Year by year the quantity of albums grew, until we realised that if we left it until Christmas Eve we were never going to get through all of them.

We kicked the season off with Thea Gilmore's Strange Communion.  This was something of a hit for her in 2009, and the track That'll Be Christmas has had a lot of Radio 2 airplay, so you may have heard it.  She is a fine songwriter, who deserves to be better known, but probably suffers from the marketing problem of not fitting into a tidy musical category.  Not really folk, not pop, not easy listening.

Then I sneaked in Trio Medieval doing Folk Songs, although it doesn't belong in the Christmas collection and has nothing to do with Christmas, or any other seasonal festivity.  They are a female trio, two from Norway, one Swedish, whose voices have an unearthly harmony which followed on very well from Thea.  And I love the album, and haven't listened to it much yet.  It needs decent speakers, the portable machine in the ironing room doesn't do it justice.  I first heard them on Radio 3 and was transfixed, and totally unable to work out what the music was, old or new, traditional or classical.

Then it was the Systems Administrator's turn to choose, so we got John Kirkpatrick's Carolling and Crumpets, following on from the concert.  His song about the Shropshire Wakes, which sound as though they were very jolly and incredibly drunken, includes a chorus about how young men and maids do come to shake their bums, a clear early reference to twerking.

Still to go in the box of CDs, in no particular order are firstly Karine Polwart's version of Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody.  It is a beautiful take on the song, slowed down and without the thumping percussion.  Who knew that Slade were making folk music, least of all Noddy Holder?  I bought it as a download, but copied to disc because I am hopelessly old fashioned.

Next is the choir of New College singing a Ceremony of Carols.  I think I bought a bargain offer of three albums from them for a knock down price.  It's a fairly highbrow selection, with quite a high proportion of Benjamin Britten, and I think I normally listen to it while the SA is busy in the kitchen doing things to the lunch.  It does have Bethlehem Down on it, which I love.

We've got The Pogues Fairytale of New York.  You can't have a Christmas album collection and not have that.  It's just boring having to leap up to change the disc so quickly.

Then there's another highbrow one from New College, called Carols from New College, and after that Christmas Music from St Pauls, which is reassuringly mainstream, and includes a pealing bell. After that comes A Peter Warlock Christmas, which I'll definitely have to play while the SA is otherwise engaged.

The original CD which started the whole thing off is The Waterson's Frost and Fire, a rerelease on disc of the whole of one of their vinyl albums on the Topic label, and parts of another.  It is a collection of ritual and magic songs.  Nobody else has come close to touching The Watersons in forty years, and when they are in full harmonic pelt they are about the wildest and most elemental thing you can imagine.  Frost and Fire includes The Bitter Withy, a song about how the infant Christ, insulted by some rich lord's children, makes a bridge out of the beams of the sun and lures them over it to their deaths.  An article in one of the papers recently included this among old carols that should be revived, but it doesn't sit easily with the modern commercial version of Christmas, and I can't see the C of E taking to it.  Frost and Fire is reserved until Christmas Eve, being a potent brew.

Next in the box is another Advent at St Paul's with the St Paul's cathedral choir in highbrow mode, including various bits after Palestrina, Byrd, Gibbons, and an organ Toccata on Veni Emmanuel. Then my new toy for Christmas 2013, as yet un-listened to, The Sixteen giving us an Early English Christmas, Christus Natus Est.  I have high hopes of that one.

Coope, Boyes and Simpson performing Fire and Sleet and Candlelight are following in the Watersons' footsteps, but without quite the Wuthering Heights elemental quality.  They are technically competent, but you have a slight suspicion that in their day jobs they might be sociology lecturers.  It's rollicking stuff, though, and we'll enjoy it.

Finally come yet more Christmas Carols from St Paul's Cathedral.  I think I visited their gift shop one year before Christmas.  This one has nice safe traditional carols, Away in a Manger, Once in Royal David's City, that sort of thing, not even anything as alternative and faintly pagan as The Cherry Tree Carol, another one the newspaper article wanted to see resurrected.  You can see why we need to start listening early.

christmas tidings

This morning I got round to hanging up the Christmas cards.  It's always a puzzle where to put them. The first to arrive go on the mantelpiece, but then I run out of space, not that we are so wildly popular, but the mantelpiece isn't that large, and they have to be moved anyway on Christmas Eve when the greenery comes in.  Some years I've pinned them to the pelmet above the monster window, but that's really too high up to see them properly, and it's quite hard work thrusting pins through the cardboard plus the furnishing fabric and lining.  We've tried standing them at the end of the dining table, since it's a generous six seater and there will only be two of us for Christmas lunch, but we need the table this year for a family do on Sunday, and in any case the cats always knock them over.  It's like playing at falling dominoes, how many cards can you topple with one swipe of a paw.

This year, for the second year running, they are hung over ribbons running between the wall light fittings, and taped to more ribbons hanging from the light fittings and down the banisters.  This time it's actually raffia, because I couldn't find any spools of ribbon in Waitrose or Tesco, and I had some red and pink raffia already.  A couple have dropped open rather annoyingly, so I'll need to go round with a few dabs of cellotape (or sticky tape, as they always called it on Blue Peter to avoid mentioning any brand names and giving them free advertising on the BBC).  I suppose the loving greetings inside, hand written by our friends and relations, should mean more to us than the pictures, but I quite like looking at the pretty side.

There is a small overflow section on top of the stereo speakers, which the cats will doubtless knock over more than once during the holidays.  If the last couple of deliveries before Christmas bring any more I'm not quite sure where they'll go.  If they were cards that hinge at the top then I could drape them over some picture frames, but those seem out of fashion at the moment.  Mind you, they can be a nuisance if you are trying to stand cards up, and you get one that is too weak to support itself and keeps opening out entirely, toppling its neighbours before and behind it.

We've had two for our neighbour who sold us the house, over twenty years ago.  The one that's only addressed to him I'll drop round.  The one addressed jointly to him and his wife, who died over a year ago, has gone tactfully in the bin.  One of our nieces sent us one, when we haven't sent her one (sorry Katie), but that's because she hasn't told us her current address, so she's had to make do with the joint greetings dispatched to the parental home.  News content has been a bit thin this year.  Friends in the north who always send a round robin did so this year, but they write very nice round robins, good factual stuff about what the family's been up to, with no gratuitous bragging.  A gardening friend from my Writtle days disclosed that she was now a grandmother, and that she had given up her job.  Both of these things were on the cards, given that her daughter was expecting, and that she worked for an unpleasant bunch of clowns.  I emailed congratulations, and we'll catch up properly in the New Year.

This evening the phone rang, and it was our neighbour who sold us the house.  Not with an invitation to Boxing Day drinks this time, alas, but with the news that another neighbour had died. Poor chap, he received cancer treatment a while back, but had been looking very frail in recent months, so one had a sense the thing hadn't gone away.  I feel very much for his family.  To lose anyone at any time is hard, and to have it fall just before Christmas, when you are deluged with expectations of joy and jollity, and will be every year for the anniversary, must be extra difficult.

carolling and crumpets

We went to the Harwich Electric Palace again last night.  It's beginning to become a habit, so much so that the Systems Administrator joked that maybe we should join.  We were not there this time to see a film, but for a folk concert.  The Electric Palace had booked John Kirkpatrick, a giant of the English folk scene who has been around for over three decades.  He does an excellent Christmas show, which I saw at the Colchester Arts Centre some years back with my dad.  It was so good, I wanted to take the SA, but the next time he came round to Colchester the gig was cancelled due to snow.  Suddenly, browsing through the Electric Palace's website, I saw that they'd bagged him.

It was not a well publicised concert.  The owner of Harwich's very nice Thai restaurant, where we had an early supper before the show, expressed surprise that we were off the Electric Palace, given that Wednesday is not a film night, and remained politely sceptical when we said we were going to a concert, since it wasn't on their December flyer.  However, when we got there, the grille in front of the lobby was open, and there was a small, cheerful queue.  By the time it got to eight o'clock, there was a respectable turnout, though the cinema was by no means full.  Most people seemed to know at least some of their fellow audience members, and it was clearly a community event, with raffle prizes laid out on a table in front of the stage, and a little boy running round and round the auditorium.

Having not been to a folk evening before, we didn't know what to expect, and whether there would be a support act or if we'd get the man himself at eight.  There was a prequel, an acapella quartet singing American hymns.  There was rather a lot of humming and pointing before each number, and I think they need to practice starting off a bit more.  You need to launch right in with conviction and gusto for that sort of thing.  The youngest of the four was an extremely pretty and lively teenage girl with a very expressive face, who might just turn out to be East Anglia's follow up to Ed Sheeran. You never know.

John Kirkpatrick had only brought three of the six squeezeboxes he is shown posing in front of on his website, plus a genuine orchestral triangle, but was as good as ever, and sang our favourite songs from his Christmas album Carolling and Crumpets, especially the one about the Christmas pudding, as well as some winter songs I hadn't heard him do before.  I'm not sure how many of the audience were dedicated folkies, and how many were supporters of the Electric Palace who thought they would like to hear some Christmas music, but everybody seemed happy enough.

They got the little boy to draw the raffle tickets, and he bellowed Yellow to the massed audience with great confidence, when asked by the raffle organiser (my guess is she was his granny) what colour the winning ticket was, but fell down on the numbers, since the only number he seemed to know was five.  There again, she told us, he was only three.  I won the last prize in the raffle, a packet of crumpets, which saved me the agony of choice.  The little boy presented them to me with great solemnity.  He'd been very eager to give them to one of the earlier winners, but the chap wanted the bottled beer.

I had a couple for breakfast, thinking how much I liked crumpets.  The chickens did pretty well out of our evening as well, since the restaurant owner asked us whether we wanted a doggy bag for any of our leftovers, so I came home with a box of fragrant jasmine Thai rice for them.

christmas tree

This afternoon we put the Christmas tree up.  Standing it securely in its pot turned out to be more of a performance than it sometimes is, not helped by the Systems Administrator's cracked rib.  I sawed a foot off the bottom with my new bow saw (memo to self, don't stint on replacement blades, a sharp saw is a wonderful thing) and we tried to wedge it in the centre of its stand, then I tightened the screws.  As soon as the SA let go of the trunk it toppled forwards.  We tried again with it lying down, pressing the trunk on the three pins in the middle of the holder and screwing it in place, but no luck.  Eventually, and with slight reluctance, I accepted that we (or rather I) was going to have to saw a large branch at the base off.  Relieved of its imbalanced limb, the tree then consented to remain upright, though to be on the safe side it is lashed to the handle of the veranda door with a piece of green gardening wire.

Then came the annual debate over the lights, which were the new lights versus which were the old ones.  My vote went to the two identical strings put away in separate Waitrose bags, which I'd found near the front of the wardrobe in the spare room, and which appeared to match the two packs of spare bulbs packed away on top of the baubles.  The SA was pretty sure we bought new lights last year, because the old ones wouldn't work if any of the bulbs were missing, and we'd run out of spare bulbs.  After a while the SA agreed that I was in charge, and had better have final say on the lights.

I normally decorate the tree.  There are families in which everyone does it together, but the SA is happy to retreat to a safe distance, only to reappear at the very end and pronounce the result delightful.  Which is the correct answer.  After years of practise I have the routine down to a fine art.  The lights go on first, obviously, once I've finished untangling them on the floor.  This lot didn't tangle themselves up as badly as some, and both strings worked first time.  I switch them off to arrange them, because I always find the annual Christmasnews  report about someone electrocuting themselves on their fairy lights so depressing, then once their on the tree I switch them on to check there aren't any strange dark holes, rearrange them if necessary, and turn them off to add the decorations.

I don't believe in fashion when it comes to Christmas trees.  Part of the point is to get the familiar things out every year, bringing back memories of where you bought them, and Christmases past. The decorations near the top go on before the others, because I need to push the step ladder in among the lower branches to reach the top.  The angel in a red dress with gauze wings gets pole position, while the fatter angel with tartan wings goes lower down.  Then the nicer and more fragile things go further up and to the sides, where they are unlikely to be accidentally swept off and broken.  The gaps are filled in with cheap and cheerful balls in red, gold and silver, and the most vulnerable branches at the base are decked with metal and straw ornaments that the cats won't break.  Our cats are getting too old to bother taking a swipe at them, but they do tend to like to sleep under the tree.

There is a set of long, slender glass drops in deep red, bought years ago from Heals, and a few clear glass ones with frosted stars on bought at the same time, but more of them have got broken. There are three huge, fat glass baubles I got in Cracow, on holiday with my parents.  There is a wooden jointed teddy bear, bought from the sadly defunct Shaker Shop in Marylebone.  I'm not convinced the Shakers went in for Christmas trees, but the whole thing is a cultural muddle anyway.  There's a giraffe angel with wings, and a sinister hanged black cat with a red scarf and mittens.  New for this year are the gingham stars from the Warner Textile Archive fair.  I like to buy a couple of new things each year, while sticking to the red and gold, Victorian Christmas meets Shaker homespun aesthetic.

It looks jolly nice, though I say so myself.  I must remember to put some water in the pot.

lost poems

There is quite a long article in the Telegraph about the poet Geoffrey Hill, nowadays Sir Geoffrey Hill, and Oxford professor of poetry.  He is, according to the article, arguably our greatest post-war poet.  I think the qualifying use of the word 'arguably' betrays a slight lack of conviction on the part of the author, since you could argue for anybody.  I could argue that Pam Ayres was our greatest post-war poet, though it might not be a very good argument, and you might not believe me. Certainly there is a consensus that his poetry is difficult.

I fell in love with one of his poems at school, so much so that I could almost recite it verbatim over twenty years later.  I did not remember the author or the title of the poem, and because I was a nicely brought up and deeply rule abiding child I did not do what lots of other people seem to have done, and hung on to my English Literature O level poetry textbook.  It went like this:

I will consider the outnumbering dead:
For they are the husks of what was rich seed.
Now, should they come together to be fed,
They would outstrip the locusts' covering tide.

Arthur, Elaine, Mordred; they are all gone
Among the raftered galleries of bone.
By the long barrows of Logres they are made one,
And over their city stands the pinnacled corn.

I have no idea why I liked it so much, apart from the fact that I was into Mary Stewart's Merlin chronicles at the time, and that I considered the poem to be utterly beautiful, as I still do.  The trouble with remembering poetry is that you can't be sure you've got it entirely right.  Nowadays, someone seems to have put most poems up somewhere on the internet, and a fragment typed into Google will generally get you where you want to go, though if you really want to be sure I'd double check afterwards in a book.  Poems on the web have a way of mutating like folk music, with small changes and alterations.

Back in the late 1990s the internet was not the fount of information which it has since become, and so I went and asked at the Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre.  They claim to be the most comprehensive and accessible collection of poetry from 1912 in Britain, but the bearded young man on the desk could not help me with my poem.  He thought it might have been Robert Lowell.  That was not a bad guess, given that according to the Telegraph's article, Geoffrey Hill's greatest poetic influences at Oxford during the 1950s were American.  A few years later, once I had the resources of Google, I found it, and discovered the identity of the author, and that it was called Merlin.

Google does not work infallibly for lost poems.  I am still searching for the full text of a barely remembered poem about the European author's geography teacher, a victim of war, heard once in translation on the car radio while driving through Hendon.  The next year the rascals of history murdered the teacher of geography, or words to that effect, has not proved a sufficient clue, though Googling it now brings up my query on the Poetry Library Lost Quotations page as the first search item.  It has still not had any replies since 11 October 2010.

end of an era

Today was my last day working at the plant centre.  After ten years of alternate weekend working it felt like time for a change.  The idea had been knocking around in my head for a while.  When the everyday begins to pall, and the minor details start to irritate you, it's generally time for a change of scene.  There were a couple of incidents that crystallised my decision, as there usually are in such cases.  For the Systems Administrator it was a barrage of abuse from a dealer on the fixed interest desk.  Mid-winter is a good time to stop, anyway, since there's little plant based action in January, just stock taking and creosoting, and it gives the owners time to recruit a replacement before the spring rush starts.

The question is, what to do next?  Starting from my front door and looking for horticultural based employers, there is the lettuce farm, the about-to-open branch of a landscaping company that seems to have been growing solidly to judge from their website, and the Chatto gardens, and that's within a two mile radius.  There's the woodland charity I've been volunteering for for a decade. There's Thompson and Morgan in Ipswich, one of my former plant centre colleagues and Writtle alumni works there.  Or I could take a year out and make a concerted effort to break into freelance garden journalism.  I could even do people's gardens.  I'm not very good at starting lawn mowers, but could be just the right person for ageing plant lovers, who want somebody that won't chop down their tree peony.

Before even going through tangible employment options, I need to work out what I want from work. Nobody goes into horticulture to become rich, that's for sure.  But do I mind weekend working?  I miss some social events because of it, but I've got used to having time off mid-week.  It fits in well with seeing some friends for whom weekends are family time, and as the SA is basically retired we can see each other any day of the week.  Would I be happy with five mornings a week?  The SA thought it would fit in well with the garden, which it would, but not so much with jaunts with friends or expeditions to London galleries.  Should I go back to full time work for a while, since the garden is relatively under control, and full time jobs tend to be better quality than part time?  How much does it matter knowing in advance which my working days will be?  Possibly quite a lot, or rather, it suits me very well to be able to arrange not to be working on particular days when I want to do something else.  Do I want to use more of my executive capabilities than I did as a plant centre assistant?  Or am I happy with skilled manual work that brings me into direct contact with plants and lots of time spent outside?  What do I feel about travel?  If the quid pro quo of a stimulating job involving meetings, presentations and negotiations is hours spent grinding around East Anglia's dire trunk roads in the rain and fog, it might not be worth it.  Could I afford to not work at all, or at least give something really wacky a try and see how it went?

The thing I am sure of is that life should be lived well.  The English middle classes are masters of deferred gratification.  It's been identified as a strong predictor in children for success in later life, how long they can hold off eating a sweet if they're told they'll get a second treat by waiting.  Work hard at the right school and you can go to the right university, which gets you on to the right graduate training scheme, then into the right job, at which you will work extremely hard.  You might end up with a house and a pension, and be able to enjoy your retirement in security.  Or you might not.  The one known, amidst all the unknowns and insecurity, is that your life is ticking by whatever you do.

As a child it feels as though there is still ages of time ahead.  Accidents happen to other people, the boy in my primary class who was knocked off his bicycle and killed, the girl at my convent school who had a fatal asthma attack, the two people in my year who committed suicide shortly after leaving school.  Then a school friend's lovely boyfriend who died in a car crash en route to the airport, the school twenty year reunion bringing the news that the sweetest girl in the class had died of breast cancer.  Melanoma, myeloma, pancreatic cancer, brain tumour, mysterious virus, dropping dead of a heart attack.  As you go through your forties and into your fifties, you see members of your own cohort, and people only a decade older, begin to go.  Life is precious, and not a given.  Each day should be spent well, with purpose and dignity.  Work is a significant part of how you spend your waking hours.  It doesn't have to be grand, but it should be satisfying.

the root of the question

The day started quietly, and I was able to get quite a long way further round the tree line, scooping up leaves and scraping slime off the Mypex fabric.  With my gaze largely limited to ground level, I had plenty of time to look at the pots and the lower parts of the trunks, and noticed how some of the crab apples were making adventitious roots from the first inch or two of stem.  They were all grafted varieties, and I made a mental note to try and remember to ask the manager about it in the morning.

Species crab apples can be apomictic, meaning that they set seed without sexual reproduction, which is genetically identical to the parent.  Again, I realised I didn't know how common this was among Malus, though I know (since checking on Wikipedia) that some other members of the rose family do it.  It matters to the nursery grower because if the plants reproduce sexually, and are in close enough proximity to related species to hybridize, then seed raised plants won't necessarily come true, and your only guarantee of making more of the same is vegetative propagation, which means grafting in the case of apples.  I'm sure I've been told that if you sow seeds of Malus transitoria you are pretty much guaranteed to get more M. transitoria, and not a cross between that and something else.  But if you were to grow a pip from a 'Cox' you would most definitely not get another 'Cox'.

The grafted apples were all named hybrids, hence the use of grafting.  The above ground roots were chubby little pinkish orange affairs, growing thickly on the first bit of the stem above the level of the compost.  I wondered why they were doing it, and whether it meant that the rootstock had been planted higher up in its container than it had originally developed in the open ground, and if so whether it should be buried deeper again on planting to cover the aerial roots.  The normal advice is to plant the tree to exactly the same depth as it was growing in the nursery.  Do not bury the trunk. Repeat, Do. Not. Bury. The. Trunk.

But I'm sure that in his lecture Tony Kirkham also warned us not to plant too shallow.  In fact, he said that the flare on the young tree's stem, the part just above ground level where the stem got fatter, should be left just above the soil surface, and that this would develop into the buttresses you see on mature trees.  Only some of the crab apples did not have any discernible flare, just the funny ruff of roots above the compost.  I must remember to ask.  It's so often the way, once you look closely at something, you realise that it's not nearly as neat and straightforward in practice as it sounds in theory.

Tony Kirkham himself admitted as much, since the first two or three metres of trunk of the ancient Giant Redwoods are indeed buried.  The trees are so old that since they started growing, the soil surface has slowly risen by that amount, burying the bottom portion of the trunk like a Roman pavement.

leaf litter

The fallen leaves of magnolias have to be their least attractive feature.  They are a dull shade of brown, thick, and slow to decay, smothering the smaller plants beneath them in a garden setting. Peter Smithers in his engrossing memoir recounts how, as the magnolias in his Swiss garden matured, he had to adjust the planting around them, and abandon attempts to grow some woodland treasures, and I've noticed the same effect at home from 'Charles Rafill', not that I had any woodland treasures to start with.  The old leaves of evergreen magnolias are even worse, collecting in great, stodgy, leathery heaps wherever the wind sends them.

They make every bit as much mess in a polytunnel in a nursery setting, so spending some time scooping them up from among the pots and off the path seemed a good idea.  Magnolias mostly have largish leaves and twiggy, intricate systems of branches, so not all the old leaves make it to the ground, and you have to pick them out of the crowns, moving carefully to avoid knocking too many buds off.  Some leaves refuse to fall, until you touch them, when they part from the twig at once and flutter down to add to the mess.

In general, leaves going brown and staying on the plant is a bad sign, since leaf drop in a healthy shrub is an active process.  The plant withdraws food and minerals that it's planning to keep from the leaves, and seals off the leaf stem from the twig by forming what botanists call an abscission layer.  The leaf then generally falls of its own accord, but failing that the lightest touch or puff of wind should detach it.  If the leaves go brown, but remain firmly attached to the stem, it generally means something's amiss.

The buds on the magnolias are already swelling, and some are discarding their furry outer cases. The new buds beneath are themselves pretty hairy.  It would be interesting to compare the progress of the ones in the polytunnel with other plants of the same variety growing in the open garden.  Are they ahead due to the extra warmth?  The vulnerability of their fat, swelling buds to frost is one of the things that makes spring flowering magnolias so nerve-wracking to grow, glorious triumph when it succeeds, but one unlucky night can ruin everything for another year.

After that I removed barrow load after barrow load of leaves from around the specimen trees, so that people wouldn't slip on them.  In contrast to the magnolias, the fallen leaves of sorbus, lime, amelanchier, birch, thorn, beech and liquidambar are already turning to mush.

I was reminded of the perils of slipping as I got home to see two bags of purchased firewood outside the front door.  Bought softwood logs are a bad sign, when you have several trees' worth of wood of your own.  The Systems Administrator slipped on a wet step outside the workshop the other day, and cracked a rib.  This is a home diagnosis, based on having done it before falling over on the boat so knowing what a cracked rib feels like, plus the resources of Dr Google.  There is nothing to be done for a cracked rib.  You can't strap it or help it, but just have to wait for it to recover.  The SA has promised me that the rib definitely is not broken, because it isn't moving, and that the SA doesn't have any of the symptoms of internal bleeding or anything to indicate that the problem is worse than a simple cracked rib.  Simple the rib may be, but overnight it became spectacularly painful, leaving the SA unable to chop wood.

I have said we had better staple chicken wire over the wooden steps where they get slippery.  We are not getting any younger, but we can try and eliminate obvious hazards.

tidings of joy and bleakness

It drizzled today.  I dropped the Systems Administrator off at the railway station, en route to a Christmas lunch with old colleagues, then spent the morning writing the last of the Christmas cards, and staring occasionally out of the kitchen window, marvelling at how nice it was to have a see-through window you could look out of.  One of my lost parcels turned up, delivered by a very cheerful driver who said he knew exactly where our house was, and somebody who didn't know the route must have picked the parcel up last time.  The other is being held by the Royal Mail in a post office which I thought had closed down, so I tried over the internet to rearrange delivery for next Tuesday, and hoped for the best.

The last Christmas cards to be sent tend to be the ones that take longer to write.  Scribbling as much of our news as will fit on the reverse of the picture is a pleasant enough task, as is filling in a few pages of Basildon Bond with tidings of the new windows, and the latest health of the cats, especially Our Ginger.  The ones destined for friends where you know, or fear, that something is amiss take a little more thought.  Have a Great Christmas and New Year doesn't really cut it when one of the recipients has just started another course of chemotherapy, and things aren't going well. I guess people grumble about the cost of stamps so much because we end up buying them all at once.  If you asked them whether they grudged spending a pound once a year to let people they didn't see so often know that they still remembered them, and liked them, and hoped one day to see them again, most would reply that of course they didn't.  The pointless cards are the ones to anyone you don't like or hope not to see again, in which case the cost of stamps has nothing to do with it.

The Christmas cards, and my next task, which was to finish writing up the minutes of the music society committee meeting, will scarcely support more than two paragraphs, so I will tell you about the film we watched the other evening.  It is called Sightseers, and came out late last year.  I must have heard about it on one of the BBC radio arts shows, because I added it to my spreadsheet of films I want to see (which my laptop has now eaten, or rather hidden away under a temporary file name in a secret directory somewhere.  When the Christmas party round is over I must get the Systems Administrator to find it for me, and show me how to look for it myself next time it happens).

Sightseers is a black comedy, described in some write-ups as a pitch black comedy, which is about right.  It begins with the dowdy daughter of a controlling mother setting off on a caravan holiday with her fairly new boyfriend, who seems nice enough and perfectly normal.  There is some very sharp dialogue, and we could be in Mike Leigh territory (it was a review of Sightseers that put me on to his early work Nuts in May, which is a masterpiece).  Then cracks start to appear.  The boyfriend is not so nice and laid back as we thought.  Then he runs somebody over in a museum car park.  Accidentally, according to the police, because they are allowed to continue on their holiday. The next death is not an accident.

And I can't tell you any more than that, without giving away the plot and spoiling it for you, but it is brilliantly done.  It is not laugh out loud funny, and reviews which claimed that are wrong.  Instead it is very, very bleak, while simultaneously extremely funny, and sad, and pulls off the difficult trick of making the audience empathise with leading protagonists who have by then done some appalling things, and are probably psychopaths.  At one point in the middle I briefly lost my nerve, and thought I had persuaded the SA to spend the evening watching a mere gore fest, but the film pulled it off.  The final plot twist is brilliant, and I didn't see it coming at all.  Afterwards we agreed that it was deeply weird, but would stick.  Several days later it has stuck, which I find the best test for a film.  Fish Tank, another low budget and almost unremittingly grim independent film which I inflicted on the SA, has stuck for both of us, whereas I honestly can't remember a thing about Oceans Eleven, except that it had George Clooney and Julia Roberts in it, and  I was bored throughout.

three exhibitions

I went to London today, to meet an old friend for an exhibition and some lunch.  The process of arranging this jaunt began back in September, but my friend, who was an early adopter of the iPhone, has since taken to responding to texts at a glacial pace, though he says he does it with everybody, and not just me.  The general effect is similar to that of trying to play postal chess with somebody ensconced in the rain forests of Papua New Guinea.  However, in a sudden flurry of messages earlier this week we finally settled on an exhibition, having fixed the date about three weeks ago, and at the appointed time he appeared behind me in the National Gallery ticket queue, looking as relaxed as if we'd last seen each other a week ago and not in March.

We were there for Facing the Modern: the portrait in Vienna 1900.  Quite a few of the portraits on display were painted well before then, and many others were later, and the newspaper critics have been pretty harsh about the way the exhibition is curated.  As an aesthetic experience, if you don't worry about any of that but just go and look at the paintings, it is very enjoyable.  Klimt, associated in my mind (and probably lots of other people's) with the mannered gold extravagance of The Kiss, initially painted highly detailed, polished portraits of almost photographic quality.  I never knew that.  There were quite a few pictures that I liked, and some that I found interesting without wishing I could take them home, and I see why patrons wanting a nice family group to decorate their house while demonstrating their wealth and good taste, might have been a tad nervous of some of the younger and more modern experimental painters.  I can't think that the two sisters staring glumly out of eyes like piss holes in snow were too thrilled with their image, unless they had progressive tastes.

After lunch we parted, and I set off to Tate Britain, to see Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists. The critics liked this one, more than the public seem to, since it was very empty.  Artist number one has standardised on one size of fairly small canvas, always used portrait fashion, and abstract arrangements of lines that reminded me of the Vorticists (Oh dear, Grayson Perry said artists hate that).  There were some interesting shadows, playing with the idea of whether the paintings were decorative surfaces in two dimensions, or representations of three.  The palette was not to my taste, but that's entirely subjective.  I wouldn't have been rushing to steal one in the confusion, if there'd been an emergency of some sort, but I thought they deserved respect.  Artist two paints mainly decaying buildings, and some abstracts, using thick oils and eschewing frames.  Again I found they inspired respect, but not affection, which was odd, since I am normally a sucker for ruins.  Artist three offered some mood boards, and an installation of painted 3-D rectilinear forms painted with green squiggles.  I moved swiftly on, but didn't find artist four any more comprehensible.  The final artist did largish oils of staircases, some with cats, and buildings, working mostly in monochrome shades of black and grey.  There was a grey tree that nodded vaguely in the direction of Mondrian (Oh dear, again).  The staircases were interesting, but sombre.  I left with the impression that painting in Britain now was rather dour.

I stopped on the way back at Somerset House, not to visit The Courtauld Gallery this time, but the exhibition of war art by Stanley Spencer.  These are normally hung in the purpose built 1920s Sandham Memorial Chapel near Newbury, now in the care of the National Trust, but can currently be seen free of charge in the Strand.  Spencer did military service in the Great War in the medical corps, and afterwards drew on his memories to paint a series of murals, thanks to the patronage of a couple who admired his work and wanted to help him in his career.  They ended up commissioning a chapel in memory of their son, for Spencer's panels to hang in.  I found them extraordinary and wonderful.  I know he is not everybody's cup of tea, some finding his work annoying, whimsical, or vaguely embarrassing, but I like it, while being able to detect its subsequent influence in some magazine illustrations and greetings cards which are indeed all of those things.  Spencer himself is sublime, full of colour and movement and gleeful observation of every day events and objects. Most of the murals depict hospital life, not actual hostilities, and the texture of the towels and gleam of light on the metal tea urns is done as wonderfully as in any interior of the Dutch Golden Age.  The great British public like Stanley Spencer too, and there were more people crammed into the three small rooms in Somerset House than there had been in the five large ones at Tate Britain.

sliding into winter

It's officially winter.  We've started feeding the birds.  While the long, mild autumn went on we left them to get on with it, telling each other that there was lots of natural food for them to eat, but yesterday I went and put seed on the table, and today the Systems Administrator filled up the fat ball container and the peanut holder.  The SA bought a fresh bag of peanuts to be on the safe side, rather than use up last year's, since peanuts can go off and become toxic to birds, and it would be a shame to poison ours under the guise of feeding them.

It didn't take the birds long to find the food.  Do some of them remember the drill from last year, or are they simply very observant?  Piles of mixed seed suddenly appearing on a wooden table and peanuts inside a metal cage are not at all natural.  So far we have had chaffinches, great tits, hedge sparrows and robins, and as I'm typing this the first long tailed tit has just turned up.  The low winter light puts a soft sheen on the pinkish breast of the chaffinch and the lemon yellow of the great tit, so that they look like something painted by Vermeer.  The blackbirds have taken a look at the table, but they tend to stick with berries and hips until they've exhausted the natural supply.

The robin would like to keep everything on the table for itself, and flies belligerently at the other birds, including rival robins.  Given that all robins look identical, I don't in fact know if it is the same robin trying to guard the table against all comers, or a succession of different ones taking it in turns to pose with the food.  A couple of dunnocks took advantage of one inter-robin squabble to slide in for a quiet turn on the table.  They are modest little birds, as self effacing as the robins are attention seeking, with brown bodies a shade slimmer than the tits, and pale buff undersides.

The house is almost as wintry as the garden, since the window fitters kept the doors open for most of the day.  I quietly closed the sitting room double doors at one point, as it was so cold, and they didn't seem to be going backwards and forwards to their van, but the next time I went past they had opened it again, and I realised that without the ventilation, the chemical smell of sealants became overwhelming.  The kitchen is icy despite the Aga, having been without a window for half the afternoon.

A great sense of quiet and privacy descended once the fitters had gone.  There were only two here today, now the monster window doesn't need shifting, and they were a nice, polite pair of lads who have done what looks like a very neat job.  But you can't relax with strangers in the house, even apart from the sound of heavy drills.  They have done what looks like a first class installation, and I am very pleased with it, but also relieved that they have finally gone away.  The whole project was only supposed to take half a day for both windows when the firm booked the date with us, so I should say that their estimator had misjudged that one badly.

windows D day

Tuesday 10th December was the rescheduled Day of the Windows.  I was relieved when once again the designated window fitting day was calm and dry, given that the larger of the failed windows takes up the entire end of the upstairs sitting room.  I knew they were still on target to come when I got home from work yesterday afternoon and found a pile of scaffolding by the chicken house.  It was the same type as ours, and I wondered briefly why the Systems Administrator had moved all the scaffolding, before clocking that it was hired in.  It seemed rather a waste to be hiring scaffolding when we already had some exactly the same on the premises, but I suppose Everest would not feel secure using strange kit they just picked up on the job, and their insurance presumably wouldn't cover them.

The window fitters were due from eight onwards, so I made sure I was up and about by then.  At nine the phone rang.  They had found their way as far as the lettuce farm, which was good going (and better than today's aborted DPD parcel delivery) and only needed instructions for the last bit. They were the advance guard, there to help lift the monster unit, so they sat in their van waiting for the other team to arrive, who had the actual windows.  Just to complicate their day, their van had a slow puncture.

At about ten the phone rang, and it was the second team calling to say they'd had problems with their van as well, but were now on their way.  I asked what we should do about the first van, and they said they'd ring them.  The team in the first van said they might as well get their tyre fixed while they were waiting, availed themselves of the System Administrator's compressor to temporarily reinflate it, and disappeared.

Eventually the second van turned up and the first van came back, so we were up to full strength of four fitters.  They moved some more furniture out of the way, spread dust sheets on the floor, and set about removing the old window from the sitting room.  Then nothing much seemed to happen for quite a while, and we gathered that they could not get it out.  The sitting room began to smell strongly of aftershave and frustration.

I am a coward about building works.  I don't mind the builders personally, I just didn't like the banging, or the tense air of unresolved difficulties, so went out for the afternoon, leaving the Systems Administrator to deal with it.  I nagged the SA into being lead manager on this one in the first place (I lead on vets and tree surgeons), partly because the SA is good at grappling with technical difficulties, and understands the social niceties of when to offer tea better than I do.  I got home two hours later to find a great deal of male bonding and Right Said Fred sitting down moments over cups of tea had gone on, as it had really been very difficult, first of all to get the old window out of the wall, and then to get the unit out of the building, because it was so heavy they were afraid to carry it down the stairs in case they slipped and broke something.  Eventually they had to resort to throwing it through the hole in the end of the house, but they managed to avoid the SA's satellite dish and my fig tree, so that was fine.  I'm glad I wasn't there, though.

After that there was an enormous amount of very heavyweight drilling.  We kept well out of the way in the study at the opposite end of the house, but could feel it vibrating through the walls.  The SA went to see how they were getting on, and discovered they were struggling to attach the window to the house, the walls being soft as butter in some places, and about as yielding as granite in others. That has been the SA's general experience when trying to put up any kind of hook or shelf over the years.

By quarter to four it was obvious they were not going to have time to do the kitchen window as well, but happily they too had worked this one out, and already booked another slot for tomorrow morning.  By nightfall the big window was securely in place, though still lacking some trim, and we could not admire the effect of the new, un-fogged unit, because it was dark, and the glass still had its layer of protective film on it.  It is a monster window, though, with an integral steel frame to stop it flexing in the wind, and a lifetime guarantee underwritten by the industry.  I'm sure it will be very nice when it's finished.

the beautiful light

The light at this time of the year is astonishingly beautiful, when we get calm, sunlit days such as today.  It brings into relief the thick bunches of pink berries on the Sorbus hupehensis, not yet eaten by birds (perhaps pink is not their favourite), and the rich, deep red crabs of Malus x robusta 'Red Sentinel'.  The leafless twigs of Cotoneaster cornubia are weighed down with fruit.  We normally think of cotoneasters as shrubs, reliable candidates for tricky sites and supermarket car parks, but C. cornubia will form a fine small tree, if trained early to a single stem.  It may prove evergreen, but ours aren't.  Perhaps they find life in a pot a trifle stressful.

Sweeping up leaves, my barrow could almost have served as the basis for the design of a scarf, a rich yet repetitive mixture of browns, ochres and yellows, scattered through with splashes of red.  It would be fun to be a textile artist, and find inspiration in the natural world.  Alas, the only person I knew who studied textile design at college ended up working for Haringey council.

A few plants are defiantly hanging on to their foliage.  A vivid patch of yellow proved to belong to Physocarpus opulifolius, while Itea virginica 'Henry's Garnet' is still almost fully clothed, its neat oval leaves having turned wine red.  I see that its entry on the excellent Missouri Botanical Garden website mentions as one of its noteworthy characteristics that it may keep its leaves until December, but I hadn't clocked that feature when I planted one at home, and it came as a nice surprise.  It turns out to be willing to live in shade and in boggy conditions as well.

The light made the most of the coloured stems around the place, the soft mustard yellow of the willow and brilliant scarlet of the Cornus.  At home, I was admiring on Saturday how it caught the cinnamon brown bark of the Arbutus x andrachnoides, and the flaking cream and brown trunks of the river birch.  It isn't just that you see stems better once the leaves have fallen, after all, the Arbutus is an evergreen.  There is definitely something in the quality of winter light.  Though it makes life tricky for photographers.  The Systems Administrator struggled yesterday to get a decent picture of our friends posed in front of the aquatic Christmas tree, as the contrast between light and dark was so severe.

By the time I drove home the sun was setting, and the sky in the west had turned a luminous shell pink, streaked with blue grey, the leafless trees silhouetted against it in mute, motionless grace. Winter can be depressing in those weeks when it is endlessly grey, and cold, but on days like today it feels like a right part of the turning seasons.  Pity those people in offices who missed the entire day, because it was still  virtually dark when they arrived, and the sun was long down by the time they came out again.

a fine time at the Fox

We met friends who live in London for lunch today, splitting the difference travel-wise, and going to a pub in Finchingfield, which takes a shade over the hour for us when I'm driving, and an hour and a quarter for them.  It fell to me to choose the pub, so I was relieved that today's was a nice one, The Fox Inn, complete with beams, log burning stove and real ale, tucked on the edge of the green.

Our friends have lived in London for thirty years, while rarely venturing out of it, except to go abroad.  That may not be unusual for north London middle class professionals.  I always get the impression from Giles Coren's restaurant column that he regards anywhere beyond the M25 with a fair amount of suspicion.  West Sussex might prove bearable, or perhaps Dorset or Cornwall at a push, while one has small children, but essentially London is where it's at.  Our friends are not English, or not wholly English.  He is an American, and returns to Oregon regularly, but I'm not sure he has ever been to Birmingham, let alone Wolverhampton or Bridlington.  Her father is English, but she grew up in Germany.  They have visited her relatives on the Welsh borders, and the home counties houses of friends and colleagues, and she's made it as far as Devon a couple of times, but her natural instinct is not to head out into the countryside at weekends.

Apart from the fact that it cut down everyone's travel time, they liked the idea of an English country pub on a Sunday lunchtime.  Which is fair enough.  Country pubs are one of the glories of English culture, when you can find a good one.  It became my job to find one, because while we don't live at that end of the county, we have got enough local knowledge to at least be able to look at the map, and know which the honeypot villages are that are likely to have the right kind of pub.  In the absence of a local contact who can recommend somewhere, my usual method is to tap the names of the more prosperous and picturesque villages in the right general area into Google with the word pub, and see what comes up.  Then it's a matter of deciding whether you like the look of them from their website, and checking a few reviews.

Massively ambitious menus with prices to match are a No.  So is anywhere that promises there is guaranteed to be something on the menu to delight your palette, or advertising a Gourmet Kitchen. And while I'm sure that explicit mentions of tasty food and professional staff are meant to encourage me, I find they have slightly the opposite effect.  Nobody sets out to provide tasteless food served by shambling amateurs on purpose, after all.  And photos showing wine glasses so large I could put my whole head in one are a red flag.  I'm not too keen on purple cushions either.  In the end you have to guess the vibe of the place, and cross your fingers that the food is reasonably nice.

The Fox Inn did me proud.  The staff kept the service flowing at just the right pace, there were no mix-ups over what we'd ordered, and the beer was well kept (so the Systems Administrator informed me.  I was driving).   Picturesque local colour was provided by the white geese that stood about in the road outside, holding up the traffic, and the group of people laboriously erecting a Christmas tree in the middle of the village pond.  We debated why they didn't just put it on the green, but without reaching any firm conclusion.  The food was fine.  Three of us had fish and chips, and two opted for the full Sunday roast.  I never bother with roasts in pubs, since the SA does such good ones at home, but I don't attempt to fry fish in batter, so tend to go for it when eating out.  There was nothing remarkable about the fish and chips, but it was competently done, though our friends' teenage daughter spurned the mushy peas.

I was marginally relieved when we arrived at Finchingfield and it looked like the picture on the pub's website, and a little more relieved when our friends walked into the bar.  A tiny part of me was worried in case I had confused Finchingfield with Feeringbury, or even Felsted, after looking at lots of pubs on the internet, and directed one or other of us to the wrong place.  It is the same irrational part of my brain that is afraid that one day I'll go to Hadleigh when I'm meant to be going to Halstead, or Braintree instead of Brentwood.  

a lovely day

It was a beautiful day, sunny, calm, and warm for the time of year.  I went to rake leaves off the back lawns, now they have mostly fallen off the trees, and saw that the Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' was in bloom.  I was at a friend's house the other day, and was envious that her 'Dawn' was already out, but she said it had been for a while.  Maybe ours has been too.  You can't really see it from the bathroom window.

The frosts have done for the top growth of the Dicentra scandens, which has turned brown and mushy.  I'll now be able to clear the remains out of the Magnolia stellata it scrambles over, before the magnolia buds are too advanced.  I'd better have a good look at how the shrub is doing, in case it resents its rather smothering summer companion.  When I planted the Dicentra, I had not realised it was going to produce so much vigorous growth in the course of a season.  I wish the various clematis I've planted to scramble over other shrubs would flourish half as well.

The huge leaves of Tetrapanax papyrifera 'Rex' have turned brown as well, and will soon fall.  It is an exotic looking thing, which produces gigantic, slightly felted leaves similar to those of a truly enormous fig, on thick, club-like stems.  Tetrapanax are very much at the tender end of what we can grow outside, and I was expecting mine to be cut to the ground in the past couple of winters, and sprout anew from the roots, but so far it has managed to bring its single stem through the winter, and I have noticed a sucker a little way from the base, exactly where I do not want another. They are used to great effect in the garden at East Ruston, and in Will Giles' exotic garden in Norwich, where I saw them sucker in just the same way.  I'd better try lifting the offshoot in due course, but instinct tells me that is not a job for December.

After lunch I turned my attentions to the front garden, so that I could let the chickens out.  They had very hopeful expressions (and if you want to know what a hopeful chicken looks like, you will have to try living with some, then you'll see), and they don't get out much in the winter.  I groomed dead leaves and twigs out of the gravel in the turning circle, and pulled up weeds, while they fossicked in the bottom of the eleagnus hedge, then came to see what I was doing.  The bronze leaved Libertia peregrinans is well named, peregrinans from the same root as peregrinate, or pilgrim.  It travels determinedly, not running crazily like couch grass, but insisting on moving on to fresh soil, while the original plant disappears.  In the gravel, mixed up with self seeding euphorbia and long term plantings of dwarf tulips, this is not a problem, but if I had been trying to get it to form a neat patch in a border, it would be.

Addendum  I was worried that my spell checker did not like 'fossicked' and checked the spelling on Wikipedia.  Turns out it is a mining term, found in Australia, New Zealand and Cornwall, and thought to come originally from the Cornish.  It carries the connotation of very small scale prospecting, perhaps carried out as a recreational activity, rather than for financial gain.  The equivalent term when searching for opals is noodling.

a London jaunt

The East Coast got off comparatively lightly last night.  We watched the news, and went to bed with a feeling of unease.  The coastal defences have been raised and strengthened after the disaster of 1953, but this was due to be the largest tidal surge since then, and how do you know when you have done quite enough?  The first house we ever owned had flooded in fifty-three, and with each successive move we have headed uphill.  It was a relief to come down in the morning, and discover that the death of Nelson Mandela was still dominating the news, since by implication that meant that England hadn't suffered wholesale flooding.  I suppose I had some clue by then, in that we weren't woken by the phone ringing in the small hours to tell us that my relatives had been flooded out of Wivenhoe.

We were almost caught out by the storms yesterday.  We went up to London for a pre-Christmas jolly we'd been planning for a while, a look round some galleries and ride on the river bus.  Was it still sensible to go, with storms forecast?  But the worst of the weather at that stage was in the north, not predicted to reach the south-east until evening, and if we started cancelling things because there was bad weather somewhere else, we'd scarcely do anything in the winter.  The last time I deferred a trip to London because of Met Office warnings, it was a bit windy and rainy, and that was all.  And yesterday was about the only day before Christmas when we were both free and neither of us was booked to go up to town on an adjacent day, so it was the ideal date.

Most of the travel worked wonderfully well.  We just got a train without hanging about at Colchester station, just caught our first river boat (admittedly that was from the pier by Tate Modern, and we knew what time it went), just caught our boat on the way back (that did entail a brisk trot when we could see the boat coming), and stepped straight on to a Circle Line tube when we didn't want to walk back from Tower Hill to Liverpool Street in the rain.  Only the mainline train almost let us down on the way home, with services from Clacton and Ipswich suspended, and a broken down intercity stuck in platform ten.  Information was scant, as it tends to be, and the 16.32 was shown on the indicator board as being On Time right up until 16.31:59, when it mysteriously disappeared from the board without further comment, like Trotsky being airbrushed out of Soviet history. Suddenly, after we'd been waiting for half an hour and were wondering whether to give up and decamp to a pub, a Colchester train was called.  We caught it, got seats, and the journey only took just over an hour.  Things got worse later on.

Soviet history was one of the things we went to see, since I'd noticed on their website that Tate Modern had a room devoted to Soviet era revolutionary posters.  The Systems Administrator is fascinated by that period of history, and the art, so we called in to have a look, after a snack in the members' room so that the SA could admire the view of Saint Pauls I'd raved about.  The SA agreed it was a good view, while being slightly less impressed than I was, because the SA's last job came with a desk giving a view straight out over the dome.  Never mind, the aerial view of the river was appreciated, with the barges, tugs and river services coming and going.  The posters were mostly reproduced in books the SA already has, but were a hit anyway, since it's always interesting seeing artwork in the flesh.  The titles are amazing, exhorting the workers to unite against the Fascists, achieve prosperity through manual labour, learn to read, and of course at all times revere the greatness of Stalin (or Lenin, or whichever great leader is in power at the time).  The mixture of languages and scripts is fascinating too, with German, English, Cyrillic, Arabic, and unfamiliar angular squiggles that must have come from somewhere in the Caucuses that neither of us could identify.  We both enjoyed the Soviet posters.  You will find them in room 5 on the second floor.

(My grandfather once decided that he was tired of Western capitalism, and went to ask at the Russian embassy how he could emigrate to the Soviet Union.  Thankfully, the ambassador told him that they had enough Jews already in Russia, and advised him to stay in England).

The river boat was good too.  For fifteen pounds we could have had a rover ticket and spent all day playing on it, going right down to Woolwich and up as far as Tate Britain, and we agreed that it would be fun to do that in the summer, when it was warmer, and wandering about outside more inviting.  You get a splendid view of Canary wharf, and to approach the world heritage sight of Greenwich from the river is a joy.

There's lots to do at Greenwich, we discovered, so I think we'll be back.  Yesterday we went to the National Maritime Museum, and started off with the temporary exhibition, Turner and the Sea. This was staged in a basement gallery I don't remember visiting before, which allowed easy circulation, was well lit, well ventilated, and altogether satisfactory.  It's a good exhibition, which has reviewed well, and it's interesting to see how Turner's own style evolved over forty years, and how his work drew on previous maritime artists, particularly the Dutch who invented the genre, and how it compared with his contemporaries.  Besides which, we are both interested in ships and the sea.  It runs until 21st April, and is well worth a visit.

The rest of the museum is free, so we looked at the display on the navy around the time of the Napoleonic wars, which I think is fairly new.  I remember reading something about it in one of the papers.  It is heavily Nelson branded, as you can imagine, and there is something very moving about looking at the very coat Nelson was wearing when he was fatally wounded, although by now it has been cleaned, conserved and neatly pressed, and apart from the tiny entry hole over one shoulder, there is nothing to show of its history.  The bullet lodged in poor Nelson's spine, though he lived long enough to hear the news that England was victorious.  It is a good display, which covers more ground than just the life and career of Nelson.  Most of my knowledge of the Navy in Napoleonic times comes from the novels of CS Forrester, but luckily they are pretty accurate about the day to day details, according to the SA, who has huge books by NAM Rodger on the subject.

Then we had a quick look at a smallish but interesting display about the Arctic convoys in WWII, and agreed that we'd like to come again to see the East India Company gallery.  I've been harsh about the Maritime Museum in the past, when they hid away all their ship models, and seemed to be devoting their space and energies to displays on global warming, but maybe that was a period of transition.  What we saw yesterday was very good, well laid out, with what felt like the right balance between artefacts and explanation, and a few playful touches to lighten the mood, like the quote from The Art of Coarse Sailing incorporated into an account of the Beaufort Scale inscribed on one wall (Force Eight: Public house sign blows down).

There looked to be all sorts of interesting things to do at Greenwich.  We've been to the observatory in the distant past, but not the Queen's House, let alone the more obscure delights such as the Fan Museum (said to do one of the best afternoon teas in London).  But time was getting on, and we were uneasily aware that bad weather was working its way down from the north and we had a train to deal with.

bad shepherds good

We went last night to see The Bad Shepherds at the Colchester Arts Centre.  It was the third time we've seen them live, and we have all their albums, so are clearly hardcore fans.  Their audience demographic seems to be shifting away from younger people, who were maybe there because they'd seen Ade Edmondson in Bottom, and were rather mystified by the Bad Shepherd's Irish folk stuff, towards oldies like us who know the songs from first time round.  Punk and New Wave, performed on trad Irish instruments, the sound tracks of my youth.  Perfect.

They would not work as a novelty act, or at least, they might have got one single out of it, but wouldn't be on their third album.  If you are going to put together a punk-folk band you can't treat it as a joke.  It is much better to recruit a two times winner of the All Ireland Fiddle Championships, and a uilleann pipes player and all round musician who has produced albums with Maddy Prior and Barbara Dickson and performed with Clannad and Status Quo.  Adrian Edmondson is a pretty competent vocalist and thrash mandolinist, after five or six years at the game.  You can hear the words, which is always a bonus.

Door opened at eight.  The first time we saw them, we queued for good seats, only to discover that it was a standing gig and there were no seats.  This time we arrived at half past, and still got some of the support act.  A man and a girl sang in close harmony into a single microphone, very sweet, and played the guitar, and banged a tambourine.  We found our beekeeping friends in the crowd, whose verdict was that when you'd heard one song you'd heard them all.  They'd arrived before us, and pretty much had heard them all, and he said he'd only counted four chords.  His son plays keyboards in an internationally successful Indie band, so I defer to his knowledge.  I just classified it as rather samey.

I'm not convinced by the rock and folk tradition of support bands.  There is a lot to be said for the classical system whereby a 7.30 pm piano recital means that at half past seven Alfred Brendel starts playing the piano, not that somebody else with Grade 8 piano certificate gets a go, and then finally at half past nine you get to hear the artist you actually came to listen to.  We had to wait until half past nine to hear the Bad Shepherds, but the fairly long interval gave us a chance to swap news with our friends, and for her to sign my two beekeeping cheques.  It says something about the Bad Shepherds' audience demographic that fellow fans were using the interval to sort out beekeeping association admin.  I don't suppose you get that at a Miley Cyrus gig.

Once they started, they kept it up a good clip with minimal chat, so we got most of the songs from the new album, and several from the previous ones.  There was only a little chaos early on, when Troy Doneckley broke two strings on his bozouki (by the 1970s it was well on the way to being adopted as a traditional Irish instrument) so they had to skip on to the numbers that didn't need the bouzouki while their roadie fixed it, then go back and do the ones they'd missed out.  Troy Donockley did seem to be demonstrating the opening bars of a couple of numbers to Ade Edmondson, who was fine once he'd got going, but sometimes looked as though he was struggling to remember where to start.  Maybe that was part of the stage act, or perhaps the jokes about how much they'd drunk were more statements of fact.  The clowning ended, at any rate, when Andy Dinan or Troy Donockley went off into their solo turns.  Dinan still sounded like an all Ireland champion, while Donockley sat completely still and bolt upright to play, eyes closed, suddenly looking nothing like Ade Edmondson's cuddly comedy sidekick, but utterly focused on the serious business of music.

The audience were appreciative but highly respectful.  There were a couple of grey haired folk pogoing and jigging around in ways that would have surprised their grandchildren, and a few little attempts to clap along to reels on the fiddle (it never works), but this time almost no talking, and certainly no hands held up to take pictures on the smart phone while spoiling the view of everybody behind.

The Bad Shepherds tour ends on December 14th at the appropriately named Shepherds Bush Empire.  I imagine Adrian Edmondson will have some fun with that one.  Highly recommended.

wearing my Treasurer's hat

Today turned into a beekeepers admin and drill day.  I had some bills to pay, and so needed to find a counter-signatory.  I've noticed that some clubs and societies operating a two signature rule circumvent it in practice, by leaving the Treasurer with a supply of cheques already signed by one person, for the Treasurer to complete and sign as needed.  I don't like that myself.  The point of requiring two signatures is that transactions should be checked by a second committee member, who can if necessary query them, a control nullified by giving full unquestioned power to issue cheques to the Treasurer, however convenient it might be sometimes.  And even though I know I'm not going to embezzle the beekeepers' money, and I think the members assume I'm financially honest, I might have got hold of the wrong end of the stick about something.  It's not a bad idea for somebody who has been on the committee for longer me to have the chance to say, Hang on a minute, why are we paying this?

Added to which, the Show Secretary and her husband are mates, and she is a professional cook who makes exceptionally good shortbread, so I'm happy to have an excuse to drop round for coffee, a biscuit, and a general chat.  One of the cheques is for me, and another is for her, but luckily I should see a third signatory at a gig tonight at the Colchester Arts Centre, who can sign the two cheques that we shouldn't.  I don't actually know if the bank would refuse to bank a cheque signed by the beneficiary, because the account was set up before my time and I've never asked them.  It might be OK.  As the Systems Administrator points out, our bank will process cheques from our joint account made payable to and signed by the SA, when the SA has paid for heating oil and so on. But again I don't feel it's good practice for an officer of a club to sign away money to themselves.

I have absent mindedly signed the cheque made payable to me, in among the pile of cheques, so I think I'll get a third signature to be on the safe side, and assume the third signing won't invalidate it.  I don't know what clubs with dual controls on money movements will do, the next time there is a push from the banking industry to abolish cheques and make all customers go digital.  There again, I don't know what people without computers will do.  I would never want to touch my bank account from my phone, not least because I wouldn't trust myself not to type the wrong digits on the little touch screen and send my payment goodness knows where.

The accounts spreadsheet turned out to be more out of date than I'd remembered.  I have been very careful about keeping the record of physical bits of paper up to date, sticking receipts and paying in slips on to A4 paper and filing it.  There are print-outs of the invoice for each month's room booking, and I've written the cheque number on each one and the date of the meeting on the cheque book stub.  There are improvised receipts for cash reimbursements to speakers, and show helpers who bought their own tickets, signed by the recipients (though the accountant who inspects our books will have no way of knowing whether I forged these).  I've got notes explaining every deposit, which is just as well, since each one tends to be a weird amalgam of income sources, show sales, entry fees, tea money, raffle takings, late membership fees, and odd amounts raised by members taking stands at local fairs.  Each individual transaction is pretty well documented, and I've been through them regularly, pulling together a report on the Tendring Show, and producing a Treasurer's report about every third committee meeting (if there hasn't been much activity I just tell them how much money we've got in the bank).  I've even checked a couple of times for cheques outstanding.  I just haven't input all the numbers into the spreadsheets that will generate my year end financial statement.

It seemed a good idea to start catching up with that.  The year end is less than a month away, and the AGM is held before the end of January.  Last year was the first time I'd grappled with the exercise, and the SA gave me a wide berth for the frozen day in January when I sat down at the kitchen table with my spreadsheets, and began to realise that I hadn't always recorded everything in a format that translated easily to the one required by the County Association.  I would like to avoid any similar panics in January 2014.  The rules of the Association limit the term of County Treasurer to three years in office, and I can honestly say that it has taken me at least the first year to really get the hang of it at Divisional level.

the uses and limitations of ivy

I scraped the last couple of buckets out leaf mould out of the wire bin today, wondering regretfully how such a huge pile of leaves could have rotted down to such a small volume of soil improver.  The wild gean in the back garden has suddenly dropped almost all of its leaves in the last couple of days, and I began raking those into piles on the top lawn, but they aren't nearly going to fill up the leaf bin.  I must have worked assiduously last year collecting chestnut leaves from the meadow.  It could be time to capture some more tomorrow, before these gale force north easterlies arrive, and blow them all into the wood.

The leaf mould went on the long bed, where under the encroaching ivy and Lychnis coronaria I've found some sorry-looking dwarf bearded iris.  They could do with lifting, the old portions chopping off, and the newer rhizomes replanting in refreshed soil, but though I generally follow the adage that the right time to do most jobs is when you have time to do them, even my enthusiasm faltered at the prospect of splitting bearded iris in December.  I cleaned and mulched that part of the bed, and decided to return to that particular task in the spring.  I think the correct time for lifting iris is after flowering, but I don't think these are going to flower without some attention.

Lychnis coronaria grows so well in the long bed that it has become a faintly terrifying weed.  Not completely nightmarish, because the seedlings pull up easily.  They are quite cute little grey rosettes, whereas the adult plants become tatty, with old dead leaves stuffed in among the new, and a bulging habit.  The flowers, pinkish white singles held clear of the foliage, are moderately pretty.  I should be grateful to it for growing in that bed with generosity and enthusiasm,instead of persecuting it, when normally I grumble about how hard it is to get things to grow, but Lychnis coronaria is not an especially lovely plant, and left unchecked forms great mats so dense and rampant that they compete with the shrubs they were supposed to be ground covering around.  As I weed I am regarding it as a weed, and removing every plant, but I know it will be back for years to come.

I have mixed feelings about ivy as a hedge.  I planted it originally to hide the wire netting I found necessary to stop rabbits from destroying half the plants in the bed.  An alternative would have been box, but I couldn't afford enough box, and worried about the long-term maintenance commitment of keeping it trimmed.  I can't remember the circumference of the long bed, and am not going to pace it out in the dark, but it must be well over two hundred feet.  The ivy covered the wire, though it took a few years, and looks quite pretty at times, but has its drawbacks. Professional designers occasionally recommend ivy on wire for places where a narrow evergreen hedge is needed.  They never mention its more roguish habits, though.  The ivy will go up the wire, but what it really, really wants is to set out across the ground.  Ground is good.  Ivy running across border soil can root as it grows, creating new plants independent of the original potful of roots you planted out.  Ivy likes that.

It will climb up the wire as well, and with diligent clipping you can keep it tight in, but after a few years of this treatment it will get the message and start forming mature, flowering growths.  I find mature ivy quite attractive, and even have a shrub of the yellow berried sort, planted deliberately, though it has never been the same since the snow of two or three years ago broke it open. However, flowering ivy leaves are different to the juvenile, climbing form, rounder and less markedly lobed, so you end up with a two-tone hedge, bits of it flowering and fruiting and bits not. The flowers and fruit are quite attractive, but the mature parts will need trimming, or the hedge is going to become taller over time and wider at the top.  It is difficult to trim mature ivy back without ending up with a lot of bare stems on display, and not much leaf.

The Ceanothus 'Puget Blue' at one end of the bed, by the unfortunately placed telegraph pole, surprised me by coming into bloom.  The whole shrub has a good scattering of flowers, just opening, with a slightly pinched air, as if they were beginning to realise there had been a mistake. It's interesting that a ceanothus is flowering now, but I'm not thrilled with the result.  It looks incongruous.  I've never been a fan of the How many flowers are blooming on Christmas Day? game, apart from the curiosity value.  Garden impact is provided by things doing well in their season.  The bright red crabs on Malus x robusta 'Red Sentinel' are beautiful, and look exactly appropriate for now.  I've been enjoying the Mahonia x media 'Winter Sun' which is just starting to go over, having flowered abundantly at its proper time.  The intense, pure blue flowers of 'Puget Blue' are in their element under a summer sky, but look out of place in grey December.

The robin watched everything with keen attention, perching on the aerial of my garden radio, and on the far side of the chicken house roof while I cleaned their roosting board.  As it was a nice afternoon (in the sense of being calm, not raining, and not unbearably cold) I let the chickens out for a run for a couple of hours when I'd cleaned the house, because they were looking at me with such hopeful expressions.  They ate a lot of grass and foraged busily in the dahlia bed and the turning circle, and were slow going back into their run after tasting freedom for the first time in several weeks.  It's lucky I remembered to go and shut their house as it got properly dark, because I found them queuing outside the pop hole, as I'd shut them out while I was cleaning it, then forgotten to open the door again.  They are bedded on rather posh, vaguely scented chopped hay stuff meant for horses at the moment, because that's all that Marriages had the last time I was there.  Normally I just buy basic wood shavings.

so many trees, so little space

National Tree Week 2013 has come and gone.  It ran from 23rd November to 1st December.  Early winter is the classic season for planting trees: as the saying goes, plant a tree before Christmas and ask it to grow, plant it after and beg it.  I hope their campaign stimulated some people to plant trees who might not have otherwise, though nowadays so many enterprises have laid claim to weeks or days that I quite regularly discover that it was potato week, or take your mother to work day, or some such, and I missed it.  There is probably an ingrowing toenails awareness month if you look hard enough.

My eye fell today on a beautiful tree I should dearly have liked to plant, called Malus trilobata 'Guardsman'.  As is often the way with plants, part of the clue is in the name.  It has three lobed leaves, quite unlike most apples, which at this time of the year go a wonderful, rich shade of red.  They are fairly large, as apple leaves go, and at a casual glance you could almost mistake it for a liquidambar.  I checked the anticipated ultimate height and spread on the label, and it only grows to around fifteen feet by six.  Aha, 'Guardsman'.  It is a narrow little tree.  How extremely sensible and useful for modern gardens, which seem to get smaller year by year, especially as it is by all accounts a fairly slow grower.

It doesn't flower until June, late for an apple.  I thought Malus hupehensis was one of the last, and that comes in about the second week of May (and has the scent of daffodils).  The fruit are apparently small and green, good for wildlife but not showy, by the sound of it.  Oh well, nobody's perfect.  It will take sun or light shade, which further increases its usefulness in a garden setting, since what with other trees, and buildings, plants that will tolerate light shade rather than insisting on day-long exposure to the sun are handy.

Alas, I don't have room for another tree, even a small one.  I have already killed poor 'Professor Sprenger' asking him to live in the nasty end of the long bed, which contains the most arid tract of soil in the entire garden.  I don't know quite what is wrong with that soil, and whether it is just one of those veins of burning gravel the Victorian farm valuer identified, or whether back in its apple orchard days it suffered a catastrophic weedkiller spillage.  Whatever the cause, my careful site preparation and subsequent diligent watering and feeding were not enough to save the Professor. Attempting to grow a tree in that spot was a last ditch effort to shoehorn another in, and there is simply nowhere for Malus trilobata 'Guardsman' to go.

That applies equally to Sorbus scalaris, with its fabulous divided leaves that make me think of prehistoric landscapes with dinosaurs wandering through them, and the lovely S. 'Copper Kettle'.  I saw 'Copper Kettle' at Hergest Croft in 2007.  I can be sure of the date, because it was the week of the run on Northern Rock, and the beginning of the banking crisis (or at least, the American system had been looking pretty hairy for a while, for those who worried about credit default swaps, but it was the start of the banking crisis visibly hitting the UK).  To see was to desire.  'Copper Kettle' has amber fruits, and is incredibly pretty.  And again, it doesn't grow too big.  But I definitely don't have room for any Sorbus, in fact they would be even more impossible to squeeze in than another Malus, since they require full sun, which rules out the edge of the wood, and not too dry soil, which rules out most of the garden.

The news on the home front when I got back was mildly disappointing, in that an electrical problem we thought we had tracked to source has opened up again.  Over the weekend, something was repeatedly tripping the main switch by the fusebox.  The Systems Administrator narrowed it down to one of the ring mains, which has a small but eclectic collection of lights and sockets on it. Unplugging the electric fire in the bedroom seemed to have done the trick, and allowed us to keep the rest of the circuit on, but this afternoon it started tripping everything out again, even without the fire.  Tomorrow the SA will have to play the game of disconnecting everything in turn on that circuit, which should in theory identify the culprit if it is an appliance.  Of course, it could be a fault in the house wiring.  I have given up resetting the clocks on anything except my alarm clock, while making a note to self to get one with a back-up battery plus the ability to reset the clock automatically when the power comes back on.  It's a reminder that the house, like us, is getting to that age where things can suddenly and randomly go wrong.

piece of cake

I had a piece of home made ginger cake in my lunch box.  I cooked it on Wednesday for Thursday evening's beekeeping meeting, since we'd decided to serve cakes to sweeten the pill of a lecture on beekeeping examinations (I did up to Module 5, before deciding I'd done enough exams for one lifetime).  It was a large cake, and I wasn't anticipating a massive turnout, but told myself that I could donate the surplus to my colleagues.  Then I ate a piece on Friday when I came in from gardening, and it was so nice that I decided that I'd keep it until after the weekend, so that I could have a slice myself each day, and they could have the last bit.  And by now what's left looks too small to be anything but a stingy gift.  And I want it.  A slice of that with a cup of tea, coming in at dusk after a hard day spreading mushroom compost, is just the thing to tide you over until supper.

It is out of a book called Cakes: regional and traditional, by Julie Duff.  It has been around for a while, and is published by Grub Street Press.  I don't actually remember why I bought it.  Obviously, I must have had a reason to, but it can't have been on the basis of a rave review in the papers, as it's not a new title.  Maybe it bobbed up as an Amazon recommendation, and had good reader reviews.  Or maybe I got it on the strength of Grub Street being good specialist food publishers, and me being interested in cake.  Julie Duff is well qualified to write a book on cakes, as the jacket blurb says that she runs an award-winning cake business, but she has not been in the Great British Bake Off (which I don't watch.  Just because I like making cakes doesn't mean I want to watch other people do it.  In a tent).  Nor has she got her own TV series, and as far as I know she is not a former model.  Cakes was shortlisted for the Glenfiddich Prize, without actually winning it, and that's as far as it goes.

Anyway, it has a whole chapter on gingerbreads and ginger cakes.  Julie Duff says in her introductory remarks that she is sorry not to include more ginger recipes (only thirteen) when it is a subject which could warrant a whole book.  I'd buy it, if she wrote it.  I went with Lancashire Gingerbread, because I wanted a big sticky cake, not a biscuit, and was too mean to use a recipe requiring a whole eight ounces of honey, since honey is subtle as well as valuable stuff, and easily masked by the flavour of ginger.

Lancashire gingerbread contains a vast amount of black treacle, plus golden syrup, plus muscovado sugar.  It has sultanas, mixed peel and marmalade.  It comes out very dark, very rich and very gingery, and like all ginger cakes the flavour improves with keeping, so that it is better now than it was on Thursday.  I will give you the quantities presently, and my one tip is to make sure you stir the mixture extremely well.  I was brought up to not over-beat cake mixtures, lest they rise too much in the middle, and my Lancashire gingerbread came out with a small amount of white speckling where the flour was still visible and not fully mixed.  Be brave, stir it more than you would a normal cake.

You need to sieve 450 grammes of plain flour with two heaped teaspoons of ginger, one teaspoon of ground cinnamon, one of mixed spice, and one level teaspoon of bicarb.  Stir the sultanas and peel into the flour.  Melt together 225 grammes of butter (I said it was rich), 350 grammes (truly) of black treacle,  225 grammes of dark muscovado sugar, 115 grammes of golden syrup, 150 millilitres of milk, and a tablespoon of marmalade.  Cool the mixture and stir in three large beaten eggs.  Add the sweet goop from the saucepan to the flour, beat it thoroughly with a wooden spoon (she does warn you), and cook in a lined 23 centimetre square tin for around an hour and a quarter at 180 C. I put a rack on the floor of the bottom warm oven of a four door Aga and stood the cake on that, with a solid shelf on the middle rungs to protect the cake from overhead heat, and the cake took a little over the one and a quarter hour mark, and cooked all the way through without the outsides burning first.  I didn't put greaseproof paper over it or anything.  Cool it in the tin.  It is a delicious cake, and it keeps for days.  Definitely five stars.

Addendum  Work was cr*p.  That's why I'm writing about cake.