The big anxious tabby was very sick on the kitchen floor. He made a strange whooping noise from behind the table, in front of the Aga, and then began to heave. Lumps of chicken appeared, and then gobbets of cat food. He had the chicken for his lunch, after I'd picked over the carcass of a roast bird that had boiled overnight for stock, and I noticed that he seemed not to have bothered to chew it.
He is an old beastie, and I worry when he throws up in case it is a sign of something wrong with him. But on this occasion it may have been a simple failure to masticate. The Systems Administrator suggested that maybe chicken is too rich for him, but I'm not sure about that. It was simmered for over twelve hours, and must be about as bland as you could get. His next meal had better be very, very small. It is a job keeping weight on him while keeping it off Our Ginger, a snapper up of unconsidered trifles and other cats' unfinished dinners if there ever was one.
Meanwhile, the SA and I have both lost weight since the start of the year. We have not adopted the 5:2 diet, or the 4: 3 diet, or the Atkins or Dukan, or ceased to consume sugar in any form (the latest fashion, it seems. Even the monkeys at Paignton Zoo are on a low sugar diet). We haven't gone for meal replacements, or the California Diet as achieved through the illegal use of amphetamines. We haven't been doing fifteen second bursts of intense physical activity to boost our metabolisms, or forsworn alcohol for January.
Instead we are on a diet which every expert and journalist who expresses any views on the subject now seem to agree Does Not Work. It is called the Eat Less Diet. It began as an involuntary process, because I spent the first eight days or so of 2014 feeling sick. I wasn't actually sick, but always felt as though I might be, so eating less came naturally. The SA soon joined me, equally involuntarily. After spending over a week eating only tiny meals, or no meals at all, and absolutely not fancying a drink, we found our stomachs had shrunk, and we didn't want to eat as much as before. Food that would previously have served for one or two meals was suddenly enough for two or three.
I helped things along a little by donating an unopened box of chocolates left over from Christmas that had to be eaten by the end of January to my father's cousin's hospital. Apart from that we cooked meals from our usual repertoire, albeit the plainer end of it, once we were cooking. We started gingerly with corned beef hash, which stretched to three meals when in the past we've demolished a tin in one sitting. The Systems Administrator made a very plain pasta sauce, which ran to three goes then we had to chuck the last bit out, and I roasted a chicken which yielded two hot and one cold portion of breast meat, plus a retro 1970s curry that stretched to lunch as well as supper.
I suppose I haven't eaten a lot of sugar. I ate one chocolate when I gave the box to my cousin, two teaspoons of honey when I felt as though I was getting a sore throat, and a shortbread finger after my talk at the ladies' club, and put a spoon of syrup in my porridge one morning when there wasn't enough milk for muesli. I had a slice of ginger, date and apricot loaf for lunch at the V&A, and it tasted horribly sweet. The only time I've actually opened a sugar jar was this morning, when I needed a tablespoon for some pitta bread, since the recipe had sugar in it, but at the rate of two millilitres per helping of bread I think that's neither here nor there. I have eaten several oranges, some apples stewed with raisins but no refined sugar, some dried fruit in the muesli, some tomato ketchup, and probably some sort of tinned soup or beans, though I can't honestly remember which, and drunk some red wine and a small quantity of gin, so there has been sugar in the mix, but not a lot. We don't normally have puddings or biscuits anyway.
I don't know how much weight I've lost since I didn't weigh myself on New Year's Eve before the lurgi struck, but at eight and half stone am within a pound or so of being as light as I've been at any time in the past thirty-five years. The great thing about the Eat Less Diet (especially when kick started by a gastric bug) is that it doesn't make you think about food and drink all the time. You don't have to prepare anything special, and nothing is forbidden, so there is no guilt. It's a shame that modern opinion says that it doesn't work.
Thursday, 16 January 2014
Wednesday, 15 January 2014
not so black as it's painted
The world seems astonishingly wet. The near side of my car is covered in dark splashes of mud from wheel arch to rear passenger window, which I picked up at some point yesterday travelling to Great Bardfield. I am not even sure when, though it was probably somewhere along the lane I took to cut back to my route after I missed a turning and found myself heading for Sudbury. It morphed by degrees into a very small lane, complete with a ford which by yesterday was happily dry, since the depth gauge on the footbridge went up to six feet, and the road sign at its mouth saying Not Suitable for Heavy Goods Vehicles was true in a literal sense, but understated the case about as badly as Wainwright's description of the Wastwater Screes as being best not attempted in high heels. Anyway, I must have clipped a ferociously muddy puddle at some point.
Weeding tufts of grass out of the gravel, where they have encroached over the edge, I found a hidden puddle, each tuft coming up dripping. The sandy soil in the top part of the garden is workable after any amount of rain, but I wouldn't fancy my chances on the clay in the back.
The Systems Administrator ventured out briefly in search of something to clear congested sinuses, and took the pharmacist's advice to stick with a nasal spray rather than decongestant pills that might clear your facial passages, but knock you out in the process. According to the pharmacist there is a lot of it about, and the strain of cold currently doing the rounds does have the nasty trick of reigniting with a fresh round of symptoms, just as the sufferer thought they were getting over it.
The evenings are getting longer, which is some compensation for the damp and disease. I didn't finish picking leaves out from the hellebores in front of the oil tank until a quarter past four, and could still see perfectly well to put the dustbins out at gone half past. I don't share the popular prejudice against January, as reported in the newspapers, that it is an awful month, with everybody feeling broke and flat after the jollities of Christmas, or an insane time to try and cut back on alcohol or lose weight, since January is so miserable that the only things to get you through it are booze and cake. True, the SA has a very nasty cold, but between us we have also had particularly dire colds or flu that I can remember in April, June, August and October.
In the front garden, the winter flowering cherry must have taken my critical words to heart, and has produced a sudden flush of small, very pale pink blossoms, while the back garden is alive with birds flitting about. The light yesterday was wonderful, and the countryside north of Chelmsford exquisitely pretty, while today was quite warm enough to work comfortably outside, and not windy at all. True, January can be a difficult month when it snows, but so can the summer months when it rains endlessly.
Weeding tufts of grass out of the gravel, where they have encroached over the edge, I found a hidden puddle, each tuft coming up dripping. The sandy soil in the top part of the garden is workable after any amount of rain, but I wouldn't fancy my chances on the clay in the back.
The Systems Administrator ventured out briefly in search of something to clear congested sinuses, and took the pharmacist's advice to stick with a nasal spray rather than decongestant pills that might clear your facial passages, but knock you out in the process. According to the pharmacist there is a lot of it about, and the strain of cold currently doing the rounds does have the nasty trick of reigniting with a fresh round of symptoms, just as the sufferer thought they were getting over it.
The evenings are getting longer, which is some compensation for the damp and disease. I didn't finish picking leaves out from the hellebores in front of the oil tank until a quarter past four, and could still see perfectly well to put the dustbins out at gone half past. I don't share the popular prejudice against January, as reported in the newspapers, that it is an awful month, with everybody feeling broke and flat after the jollities of Christmas, or an insane time to try and cut back on alcohol or lose weight, since January is so miserable that the only things to get you through it are booze and cake. True, the SA has a very nasty cold, but between us we have also had particularly dire colds or flu that I can remember in April, June, August and October.
In the front garden, the winter flowering cherry must have taken my critical words to heart, and has produced a sudden flush of small, very pale pink blossoms, while the back garden is alive with birds flitting about. The light yesterday was wonderful, and the countryside north of Chelmsford exquisitely pretty, while today was quite warm enough to work comfortably outside, and not windy at all. True, January can be a difficult month when it snows, but so can the summer months when it rains endlessly.
Tuesday, 14 January 2014
volunteering day
This is going to be a short blog post, because it's late. Today was a day of volunteering. I wasn't too impressed by a piece I heard on Radio 4 that claimed that government definitions of volunteering were now so broad that they included, for example, attending your child's sporting fixtures. If true that sounded like a desperate attempt to puff up the numbers of people now contributing to the Big Society. My contribution to the social good consisted of a woodland charity talk to a ladies' social club (I got the impression they might have been a renegade WI) and a beekeepers' committee meeting, so I was contributing actively and not merely supporting.
The ladies were a nice bunch, and met in Great Bardfield. I'd never been to Great Bardfield before, and managed to get lost on the way, despite it being only two miles down the road from Finchingfield, where we had lunch just before Christmas. Fortunately I'd left plenty of time, partly in case I got lost, and also so that I'd have time to find Edward Bawden's house. He lived there for years, while Eric Ravilious was his lodger for a time. Indeed, so many artists have lived there that the village lent them its name as the Great Bardfield Artists. More recently Grayson Perry grew up there (according to Wikipedia). It is a very pretty and prosperous looking village, and conjures up a different image of Grayson Perry's youth to when he describes himself as a Chelmsford boy.
I found Brick House easily enough, since it is slap bang in the middle of the village, a short step down from the town hall where the meeting was held. To my disappointment there was no heritage plaque. I wondered whether the village lacked a local society to sponsor such things, or whether the current owners of the house preferred not to invite strangers to come and gawp at their frontage. Presumably the owner of a building has to grant permission for commemorative plaques to be put up.
The talk went off OK, though I find the current script quite difficult to remember, much more so than the beekeeping and gardening talks that I wrote myself. I guess it is always easier to go through something you have designed to express your own thoughts in the order they naturally occur to you than to have to follow somebody else's idea. I've contemplated trying to rework it, but have so far felt defeated by the project, given that I'm limited to reordering the slides I've been given, unless I go out and start making major efforts with a camera. Then I have to start worrying about image sizes, and how to superimpose text, and the whole thing seems too difficult. Because I find the script confusing I spent the morning mugging up on it, hence no blog before lunch.
I shouldn't have left printing my papers for the committee meeting until I got back from doing the talk, since my laptop played up, the printer played up, and when I emailed the spreadsheet I was trying to print to the Systems Administrator, Excel crashed on the SA's laptop as well. Hence there was no blog before supper either. The meeting was rather jolly, with such a good attendance that we scarcely fitted into the Chairman's conservatory, especially as his dog decided to join us. It was very well behaved, but it is a Rhodesian ridgeback and absolutely vast. When the dog decides to stop moving all anyone can do is pick their way round it.
I trust that David Cameron himself would consider that enough community involvement for one day. And that's enough blog too.
The ladies were a nice bunch, and met in Great Bardfield. I'd never been to Great Bardfield before, and managed to get lost on the way, despite it being only two miles down the road from Finchingfield, where we had lunch just before Christmas. Fortunately I'd left plenty of time, partly in case I got lost, and also so that I'd have time to find Edward Bawden's house. He lived there for years, while Eric Ravilious was his lodger for a time. Indeed, so many artists have lived there that the village lent them its name as the Great Bardfield Artists. More recently Grayson Perry grew up there (according to Wikipedia). It is a very pretty and prosperous looking village, and conjures up a different image of Grayson Perry's youth to when he describes himself as a Chelmsford boy.
I found Brick House easily enough, since it is slap bang in the middle of the village, a short step down from the town hall where the meeting was held. To my disappointment there was no heritage plaque. I wondered whether the village lacked a local society to sponsor such things, or whether the current owners of the house preferred not to invite strangers to come and gawp at their frontage. Presumably the owner of a building has to grant permission for commemorative plaques to be put up.
The talk went off OK, though I find the current script quite difficult to remember, much more so than the beekeeping and gardening talks that I wrote myself. I guess it is always easier to go through something you have designed to express your own thoughts in the order they naturally occur to you than to have to follow somebody else's idea. I've contemplated trying to rework it, but have so far felt defeated by the project, given that I'm limited to reordering the slides I've been given, unless I go out and start making major efforts with a camera. Then I have to start worrying about image sizes, and how to superimpose text, and the whole thing seems too difficult. Because I find the script confusing I spent the morning mugging up on it, hence no blog before lunch.
I shouldn't have left printing my papers for the committee meeting until I got back from doing the talk, since my laptop played up, the printer played up, and when I emailed the spreadsheet I was trying to print to the Systems Administrator, Excel crashed on the SA's laptop as well. Hence there was no blog before supper either. The meeting was rather jolly, with such a good attendance that we scarcely fitted into the Chairman's conservatory, especially as his dog decided to join us. It was very well behaved, but it is a Rhodesian ridgeback and absolutely vast. When the dog decides to stop moving all anyone can do is pick their way round it.
I trust that David Cameron himself would consider that enough community involvement for one day. And that's enough blog too.
Monday, 13 January 2014
last chance to see
I went today to the V&A to see a couple of exhibitions that end this coming Sunday, Pearls and Masterpieces of Chinese Painting. I'd been meaning to go for ages, and even tried to line up one friend to come with me to see Pearls as long ago as last October, but they were ill and the proposed trip to London never materialised. Then life seemed to get very busy, December was so stormy that the trains could scarcely be depended on to run, and in the New Year I was ill. Now I've been, and there's so little time for you to go that there's not much point in my saying too much about the exhibitions, since if I make them sound lovely you may curse that you missed them, while if I make them sound dreary then who cares about them anyway?
Pearls was good but very crowded, and I can think of ways it could have been staged differently to speed up the flow while allowing people to see more of the exhibits. The V&A has borrowed a lot of jewellery, really a lot, and since I love pearls I was very keen to see them. There are also some portraits of people wearing pearls, and an introductory section about how natural pearls are formed, and some interesting displays on pearl diving, and a later section on the artificial pearls industry, but the actual gems are the real draw.
The snag is that they are artfully displayed in what look like nineteenth century safes, with the doors open, obviously. I was never quite sure whether they were real safes, or if they had been built specially for the occasion, since there were an awful lot of them, but you weren't allowed to touch them to see if they were heavy enough to be real. Pearls in a black lined cabinet look sublime, but the layout meant that only about three people could look at each display at any one time. Visitors were stacked nose to tail as we politely shuffled around, but I spent a long time looking at the outsides of the safes while I waited my turn to get into a position where I could see inside. If the jewellery had been mounted in big perspex cabinets, with a dark cloth down the middle to provide a suitable background, we could all have spent more of our time looking at the exhibits and less looking at the furniture.
Masterpieces of Chinese Painting was altogether less crowded, and interesting in a visually subdued way. The exhibition starts with Buddhist religious art dating from the first millennium, then moves on to landscapes and flower paintings that to my untutored Western eye were more obviously Chinese. There are some splendid, vigorous, practically cartoonish dragons, and I was very taken with one large picture of a pomegranate tree, chrysanthemum, magpie and rooster. My main difficulty was that the light level needed to preserve the exhibits was so low that in some of them I really couldn't see the tiny boat, figures, donkey, or whatever detail the caption told me was important. A small and talkative American (or Canadian?) man made such determined efforts at conversation that I was not entirely sure whether he was simply lonely, or actually trying to chat me up.
I quite like the V&A, when I make the effort to get there. It is not really so very far, only a few stops further down the Piccadilly line than Piccadilly itself, or if I hadn't been running slightly late this morning I might have walked across the park from Hyde Park Corner. I'm not fond of it in the same way as I am of the British Museum, but that's probably because it isn't part of my regular stamping ground, and if I went oftener, and was more familiar with the layout (the internal signs are not great) I daresay I'd love it.
Pearls was good but very crowded, and I can think of ways it could have been staged differently to speed up the flow while allowing people to see more of the exhibits. The V&A has borrowed a lot of jewellery, really a lot, and since I love pearls I was very keen to see them. There are also some portraits of people wearing pearls, and an introductory section about how natural pearls are formed, and some interesting displays on pearl diving, and a later section on the artificial pearls industry, but the actual gems are the real draw.
The snag is that they are artfully displayed in what look like nineteenth century safes, with the doors open, obviously. I was never quite sure whether they were real safes, or if they had been built specially for the occasion, since there were an awful lot of them, but you weren't allowed to touch them to see if they were heavy enough to be real. Pearls in a black lined cabinet look sublime, but the layout meant that only about three people could look at each display at any one time. Visitors were stacked nose to tail as we politely shuffled around, but I spent a long time looking at the outsides of the safes while I waited my turn to get into a position where I could see inside. If the jewellery had been mounted in big perspex cabinets, with a dark cloth down the middle to provide a suitable background, we could all have spent more of our time looking at the exhibits and less looking at the furniture.
Masterpieces of Chinese Painting was altogether less crowded, and interesting in a visually subdued way. The exhibition starts with Buddhist religious art dating from the first millennium, then moves on to landscapes and flower paintings that to my untutored Western eye were more obviously Chinese. There are some splendid, vigorous, practically cartoonish dragons, and I was very taken with one large picture of a pomegranate tree, chrysanthemum, magpie and rooster. My main difficulty was that the light level needed to preserve the exhibits was so low that in some of them I really couldn't see the tiny boat, figures, donkey, or whatever detail the caption told me was important. A small and talkative American (or Canadian?) man made such determined efforts at conversation that I was not entirely sure whether he was simply lonely, or actually trying to chat me up.
I quite like the V&A, when I make the effort to get there. It is not really so very far, only a few stops further down the Piccadilly line than Piccadilly itself, or if I hadn't been running slightly late this morning I might have walked across the park from Hyde Park Corner. I'm not fond of it in the same way as I am of the British Museum, but that's probably because it isn't part of my regular stamping ground, and if I went oftener, and was more familiar with the layout (the internal signs are not great) I daresay I'd love it.
Sunday, 12 January 2014
one step forward, one step back
I have been making good progress weeding the bed by the oil tank. The shrub planting pre-dates the tank, since we discovered when we had the new condensing boiler fitted to replace the hated Stanley that under the latest building regulations we were obliged to get a bunded tank, and that it had to be further from the house than our existing one. It was lucky that there was space to tuck the new tank in behind an existing Mahonia x media 'Winter Sun', a white flowered Japanese quince, and some coloured stem dogwoods, which screened it pretty well from the outset.
The shrubs are underplanted with hellebores, which are just coming into bloom, hence my desire to get the bed neat and tidy in time for one of its peak periods of display. It is not the easiest bed to weed, partly because it is normally surrounded with a picket fence to stop the chickens from straying down the side of the wood when they're let out for a run, so if you notice a few weeds, you can't just step in and grab them but have to undo the fence panels from their supports. Also, the Cornus sucker and layer themselves, so that there's not much space to wriggle in among them, whilst being very careful about your eyes. Their sideways growing, slender and supple young twigs are among the best I know for sliding in behind spectacles and scraping the unwary eyeball. And while the Mahonia is a wonderful shrub, a valiant strong grower whose yellow flowers before Christmas are beautiful, the dead leaves are hard and prickly and almost as unappealing to handle as fallen holly leaves.
By the end of this afternoon I'd almost finished scooping Mahonia leaves out from among the hellebore stems, and pulling up goose grass seedlings, and next time I'm out there I should be ready to get a bootful of manure and mulch the bed, then I can put the chicken fence back up. The chickens could see me working near their run, and were not impressed that on a nice afternoon they were not allowed out for a wander, to eat grass and scratch up worms and insects and do all the things that temporarily free range chickens do. I had cleaned their roosting board and put fresh sawdust in their nesting box, but they were not impressed by that. They wanted to go for a walk.
Before I could do any of this I had to go grocery shopping, since the Systems Administrator's cold has taken a turn for the worse. The SA mentioned a fresh sore throat yesterday morning, but optimistically put it down to sleeping on his back and breathing through his mouth. By dusk the sore throat was accompanied by a new outbreak of running nose and general sense of woe, and by evening the SA admitted defeat, and we had to miss Miles Jupp's sell-out gig at the Arts Centre, which I had tickets for. I did feel a selfish twinge of regret that if the SA had admitted to being that poorly earlier in the day then I might have found someone to take the tickets, or even go with me, since the SA went to bed at eight and wouldn't have missed me. I'm not sure that is the response of a really nice person, but it's hard to be really nice all the time. Congratulations to everybody who is, and the rest of you can take comfort in knowing that you are not alone in your human frailty.
I made celery and cheese soup for lunch, using some of the chicken stock out of the freezer, which is supposed to be good for colds. You slice the celery very thinly, simmer it for a long time in butter, cook in stock, add some milk if you realise you haven't got enough stock, flavour with a generous splash of fresh lemon juice if you fancy the idea and have a spare lemon, and pour it over some grated cheese in the bottom of the bowl. For supper we are having another chicken, on the basis that it is comforting, digestible, provides useful leftovers, and I know how to cook it. And a lot of vegetables. I'm sure that vegetables are good for colds. My normal high level of respect for the autonomy of the individual has taken a back seat, and the SA is under strict instructions to keep warm, and go on taking it easy for at least a couple of days after starting to feel properly better, instead of setting off for long walks in the cold. The SA agreed to this very meekly, a sign he is truly not well.
The shrubs are underplanted with hellebores, which are just coming into bloom, hence my desire to get the bed neat and tidy in time for one of its peak periods of display. It is not the easiest bed to weed, partly because it is normally surrounded with a picket fence to stop the chickens from straying down the side of the wood when they're let out for a run, so if you notice a few weeds, you can't just step in and grab them but have to undo the fence panels from their supports. Also, the Cornus sucker and layer themselves, so that there's not much space to wriggle in among them, whilst being very careful about your eyes. Their sideways growing, slender and supple young twigs are among the best I know for sliding in behind spectacles and scraping the unwary eyeball. And while the Mahonia is a wonderful shrub, a valiant strong grower whose yellow flowers before Christmas are beautiful, the dead leaves are hard and prickly and almost as unappealing to handle as fallen holly leaves.
By the end of this afternoon I'd almost finished scooping Mahonia leaves out from among the hellebore stems, and pulling up goose grass seedlings, and next time I'm out there I should be ready to get a bootful of manure and mulch the bed, then I can put the chicken fence back up. The chickens could see me working near their run, and were not impressed that on a nice afternoon they were not allowed out for a wander, to eat grass and scratch up worms and insects and do all the things that temporarily free range chickens do. I had cleaned their roosting board and put fresh sawdust in their nesting box, but they were not impressed by that. They wanted to go for a walk.
Before I could do any of this I had to go grocery shopping, since the Systems Administrator's cold has taken a turn for the worse. The SA mentioned a fresh sore throat yesterday morning, but optimistically put it down to sleeping on his back and breathing through his mouth. By dusk the sore throat was accompanied by a new outbreak of running nose and general sense of woe, and by evening the SA admitted defeat, and we had to miss Miles Jupp's sell-out gig at the Arts Centre, which I had tickets for. I did feel a selfish twinge of regret that if the SA had admitted to being that poorly earlier in the day then I might have found someone to take the tickets, or even go with me, since the SA went to bed at eight and wouldn't have missed me. I'm not sure that is the response of a really nice person, but it's hard to be really nice all the time. Congratulations to everybody who is, and the rest of you can take comfort in knowing that you are not alone in your human frailty.
I made celery and cheese soup for lunch, using some of the chicken stock out of the freezer, which is supposed to be good for colds. You slice the celery very thinly, simmer it for a long time in butter, cook in stock, add some milk if you realise you haven't got enough stock, flavour with a generous splash of fresh lemon juice if you fancy the idea and have a spare lemon, and pour it over some grated cheese in the bottom of the bowl. For supper we are having another chicken, on the basis that it is comforting, digestible, provides useful leftovers, and I know how to cook it. And a lot of vegetables. I'm sure that vegetables are good for colds. My normal high level of respect for the autonomy of the individual has taken a back seat, and the SA is under strict instructions to keep warm, and go on taking it easy for at least a couple of days after starting to feel properly better, instead of setting off for long walks in the cold. The SA agreed to this very meekly, a sign he is truly not well.
Saturday, 11 January 2014
winter flowers
I wandered around the garden this morning, to see what was new. In the past couple of days the winter iris, Iris unguicularis, have come into flower. The plants are honestly rather tatty, with a tangle of old brown leaves at the back of the bed, and new leaves emerging in front of them, and I realise I should have been along the row and tidied them up before they started blooming, but I didn't. The flowers aren't looking all that great either, quite a few having already collapsed from rain or old age, while something has been eating holes in some of the petals.
I have picked one to describe to you. It has three upstanding petals, in a colour that is more violet than blue, veined with purple. They have slightly ruffled edges, and if given one to identify in total isolation without the benefit of the rest of the flower, I might have guessed it came from a clematis. Inside them are three small, narrow, light purple strips of petal-like texture, ends forked liked snakes' tongues and fused at the base, whose botanical role I don't honestly know, though I presume they are some part of the reproductive arrangements. The tips of the three outer petals droop over in typical iris fashion, and their bases are white, with a central yellow stripe and broken mauve veining. The flower has a faint but delicate scent, akin to hyacinths, but not nearly so free on the air. To smell it at all I have to stick my nose right in and sniff.
Some of the orange flowered Hamamelis are out, but not the yellow ones. I didn't put my face to those, but from the vantage point of the edge of the lawn I couldn't smell any scent at all. It was cold and quite windy when I walked around, not the best circumstances for enjoying winter fragrance.
The buds of the oriental hellebores are showing colour, and on some plants the flower stems have elongated. So far they don't seem to have been hit by rodents or muntjac to anything like the same extent as last year. The buds of Pulmonaria rubra, which is always the first of the pulmonarias to open, are showing a glint of soft red. They were grazed off last year as well. There are a few primroses out, and one cowslip. The hazel catkins are looking very fine, though in places I slightly wish they wouldn't, because I need to cut the hedge, and don't like cutting a fine crop of catkins off when they are such a good winter pollen source for insects.
And that's about it. There are fat leaf and flower buds aplenty, but not much is actually out yet. The young winter flowering cherry, planted at the top of the garden where the drainage is sharp to replace the one towards the bottom of the garden which ended up sitting half in a swamp when the water table moved, has not flowered at all yet this winter, so far as I've noticed. The scent of the iris is growing stronger, however, now that it's been in the warmth of the kitchen for half an hour.
I have picked one to describe to you. It has three upstanding petals, in a colour that is more violet than blue, veined with purple. They have slightly ruffled edges, and if given one to identify in total isolation without the benefit of the rest of the flower, I might have guessed it came from a clematis. Inside them are three small, narrow, light purple strips of petal-like texture, ends forked liked snakes' tongues and fused at the base, whose botanical role I don't honestly know, though I presume they are some part of the reproductive arrangements. The tips of the three outer petals droop over in typical iris fashion, and their bases are white, with a central yellow stripe and broken mauve veining. The flower has a faint but delicate scent, akin to hyacinths, but not nearly so free on the air. To smell it at all I have to stick my nose right in and sniff.
Some of the orange flowered Hamamelis are out, but not the yellow ones. I didn't put my face to those, but from the vantage point of the edge of the lawn I couldn't smell any scent at all. It was cold and quite windy when I walked around, not the best circumstances for enjoying winter fragrance.
The buds of the oriental hellebores are showing colour, and on some plants the flower stems have elongated. So far they don't seem to have been hit by rodents or muntjac to anything like the same extent as last year. The buds of Pulmonaria rubra, which is always the first of the pulmonarias to open, are showing a glint of soft red. They were grazed off last year as well. There are a few primroses out, and one cowslip. The hazel catkins are looking very fine, though in places I slightly wish they wouldn't, because I need to cut the hedge, and don't like cutting a fine crop of catkins off when they are such a good winter pollen source for insects.
And that's about it. There are fat leaf and flower buds aplenty, but not much is actually out yet. The young winter flowering cherry, planted at the top of the garden where the drainage is sharp to replace the one towards the bottom of the garden which ended up sitting half in a swamp when the water table moved, has not flowered at all yet this winter, so far as I've noticed. The scent of the iris is growing stronger, however, now that it's been in the warmth of the kitchen for half an hour.
Friday, 10 January 2014
catching up with myself
Finally my brain seems to be emerging from the fog that started to envelop it at the end of last year. This morning I looked again at the beekeepers' accounts, and they still made sense, as far as I could see. Emboldened, I emailed them off to my scrutineer, crossing my fingers that she would still be able to inspect them. You never know what's going to happen in people's lives: last year she had to go into hospital, and I ended up driving one dark night down to Clacton to hand the file over to an obliging Rotarian friend of somebody else on the committee. Clacton seafront after dark, with a strong wind blowing, snow forecast, and the lights of the Gunfleet windfarm shining sullenly out of the gloom has to be one of the most desolate spots in Essex.
Then I sent my list of ideas so far for a music society stand at the local agricultural show to the society's Secretary. She replied fairly swiftly, saying that she liked some of them, though she was not circulating them to the full committee at this stage. My money would be on us not doing it, if I were a betting sort of person. Too much trouble for too uncertain a reward, and it's difficult to put together a decent stand without spending at least some money on it.
After that I suited up and went to see the bees. I have a terrible confession to make, which shows me up as a lax and bad beekeeper. I had not put my mouseguards on. A mouseguard is a device you put over the entrance to a beehive, which allows the bees to go in and out, but prevents mice from getting in. I use metal strips with bee sized circular holes in them. Mice will take up residence in a beehive for the winter, if they can, finding it warm and cosy with a ready supply of high calorie mouse food. You would think the bees would sting the blighter to death, but they don't necessarily. I suppose if it is cold and they are all clustered together, they won't break ranks to go after the mouse. Mouseguards are therefore traditionally fitted in the autumn, as part of the winter preparations.
Except that last autumn it was abnormally warm, and then very windy and wet, and as one thing and another cropped up I simply did not get round to doing it. Finally today it was calm and sunny enough, and I was sufficiently compos mentis, to risk going and disturbing them. You don't want to be messing around with boxes of bees when you aren't fit to manage them properly. It will not do either of you any good. I thought that if I lifted each hive off its floor and stood it temporarily on a spare stand, I could look at the floor and check for any signs of mouse droppings. True, I have my bees on open mesh floors, but I didn't think that every single piece of mouse poo would land conveniently narrow end downwards and drop through the floor of the hive. If mice were already in there, I thought I'd see something to alert me to start investigating further. Obviously, I didn't want to start pulling the frames apart unless I absolutely had to, since the bees are trying to keep warm at this time of the year.
Every hive had a nice, solid cluster of bees in it, and all the hives were heavy with stores, so I must have fed them enough last autumn to keep them going so far, and didn't need to open any of my packets of fondant. As I lifted each in turn, the clusters began to break up, and bees came out to see what the rumpus was about. They hadn't chosen to fly, on a day like today, but they could when they needed to. There were absolutely no signs of mice, so I stuck the guards on with numerous drawing pins, feeling that fate had been kind to me.
After that it was my turn to be unkind to the bees, or at least cruel to be kind. One of the treatments against the varroa mite, now that they have developed resistance to the first generation of anti-mite chemicals, is to drizzle dilute oxalic acid over the bees. Evidently it is more toxic to mites than bees, but even so the bees don't like it. You use the acid in winter, when there is little or no brood in the hive, and according to the bee inspector who came to talk to one of our beekeeping meetings, I should have done this in November. I was aiming to do it just before Christmas, as instructed by the local commercial beekeeper who is my tutor when it comes to oxalic acid, but then it was so wild and windy, I didn't. Finally today I did. The bees do not like having acid trickled over them, and became quite agitated, and I felt sorry for them, on the other hand varroa is fatal to the colony, if it builds up.
When I got back to the house I asked the Systems Administrator to come and see whether I had bees on me, before I took my suit off. The SA said yes, there were twenty or so on my back and the top of my head, and wanted to brush them off with a little twig. I protested that it was too far for them to fly back to the hive, and that they would be in a pissy mood after being dosed with acid, but the SA persisted, and got stung in the neck. I felt remorseful about that as well, although it will be a reminder not to mess around with them. I don't touch them unless I'm fully suited up. Fortunately the SA got the sting out very quickly, which is what you must do with a bee sting, and after a quarter of an hour was not showing any signs of any reaction except a very local one.
In the afternoon I went to see my father's cousin, who was looking very well for an eighty-five year old who has just had a major operation under general anaesthetic, and seemed pleased to be visited by a family member. He asked whether I had made a special trip, and I explained that I thought I'd better go and see him in hospital before they let him out. The round trip to Aldeburgh is almost a hundred miles, which makes it difficult to be such a dutiful relation as I could be if he were closer.
Then I sent my list of ideas so far for a music society stand at the local agricultural show to the society's Secretary. She replied fairly swiftly, saying that she liked some of them, though she was not circulating them to the full committee at this stage. My money would be on us not doing it, if I were a betting sort of person. Too much trouble for too uncertain a reward, and it's difficult to put together a decent stand without spending at least some money on it.
After that I suited up and went to see the bees. I have a terrible confession to make, which shows me up as a lax and bad beekeeper. I had not put my mouseguards on. A mouseguard is a device you put over the entrance to a beehive, which allows the bees to go in and out, but prevents mice from getting in. I use metal strips with bee sized circular holes in them. Mice will take up residence in a beehive for the winter, if they can, finding it warm and cosy with a ready supply of high calorie mouse food. You would think the bees would sting the blighter to death, but they don't necessarily. I suppose if it is cold and they are all clustered together, they won't break ranks to go after the mouse. Mouseguards are therefore traditionally fitted in the autumn, as part of the winter preparations.
Except that last autumn it was abnormally warm, and then very windy and wet, and as one thing and another cropped up I simply did not get round to doing it. Finally today it was calm and sunny enough, and I was sufficiently compos mentis, to risk going and disturbing them. You don't want to be messing around with boxes of bees when you aren't fit to manage them properly. It will not do either of you any good. I thought that if I lifted each hive off its floor and stood it temporarily on a spare stand, I could look at the floor and check for any signs of mouse droppings. True, I have my bees on open mesh floors, but I didn't think that every single piece of mouse poo would land conveniently narrow end downwards and drop through the floor of the hive. If mice were already in there, I thought I'd see something to alert me to start investigating further. Obviously, I didn't want to start pulling the frames apart unless I absolutely had to, since the bees are trying to keep warm at this time of the year.
Every hive had a nice, solid cluster of bees in it, and all the hives were heavy with stores, so I must have fed them enough last autumn to keep them going so far, and didn't need to open any of my packets of fondant. As I lifted each in turn, the clusters began to break up, and bees came out to see what the rumpus was about. They hadn't chosen to fly, on a day like today, but they could when they needed to. There were absolutely no signs of mice, so I stuck the guards on with numerous drawing pins, feeling that fate had been kind to me.
After that it was my turn to be unkind to the bees, or at least cruel to be kind. One of the treatments against the varroa mite, now that they have developed resistance to the first generation of anti-mite chemicals, is to drizzle dilute oxalic acid over the bees. Evidently it is more toxic to mites than bees, but even so the bees don't like it. You use the acid in winter, when there is little or no brood in the hive, and according to the bee inspector who came to talk to one of our beekeeping meetings, I should have done this in November. I was aiming to do it just before Christmas, as instructed by the local commercial beekeeper who is my tutor when it comes to oxalic acid, but then it was so wild and windy, I didn't. Finally today I did. The bees do not like having acid trickled over them, and became quite agitated, and I felt sorry for them, on the other hand varroa is fatal to the colony, if it builds up.
When I got back to the house I asked the Systems Administrator to come and see whether I had bees on me, before I took my suit off. The SA said yes, there were twenty or so on my back and the top of my head, and wanted to brush them off with a little twig. I protested that it was too far for them to fly back to the hive, and that they would be in a pissy mood after being dosed with acid, but the SA persisted, and got stung in the neck. I felt remorseful about that as well, although it will be a reminder not to mess around with them. I don't touch them unless I'm fully suited up. Fortunately the SA got the sting out very quickly, which is what you must do with a bee sting, and after a quarter of an hour was not showing any signs of any reaction except a very local one.
In the afternoon I went to see my father's cousin, who was looking very well for an eighty-five year old who has just had a major operation under general anaesthetic, and seemed pleased to be visited by a family member. He asked whether I had made a special trip, and I explained that I thought I'd better go and see him in hospital before they let him out. The round trip to Aldeburgh is almost a hundred miles, which makes it difficult to be such a dutiful relation as I could be if he were closer.
Thursday, 9 January 2014
it's accounts time
After breakfast I thought that it was time to tackle the beekeepers' accounts. I tried hard through last year to stick all receipts and invoices into a file as I went along, and enter them properly on a spreadsheet, so that in theory all I'd have to do in January was update the last few entries when the December bank statement arrived, and then the totals for every category of income and expenditure should drop out neatly at the bottom of each column. If only. Last year the process took at least two days, and the atmosphere in the kitchen as I sat at the table grappling with Excel and searching for lost paying-in slips was so fraught that the Systems Administrator was afraid to enter.
Mind you, last year was the first year I did them, and I'd made the error of recording all the information based on the format used by the previous Treasurer, and not the one I found needed to use to present the Divisional accounts to the County, when I looked in the Treasurer's handbook. Second time around I hoped it would all be slicker. Although if I were County Treasurer I'd be looking to issue all divisions with a non-modifiable template into which they had to slot their own results, so that they could be amalgamated automatically.
My own make-it-up-as-you-go-along spreadsheets are only too easily modifiable, and there's the risk of forgetting mid way through the year how I intended information to flow through them at the start of the process. The accounts of a little, local society tend to be small, but messy, so that a single payment of £19.60 can cover the cost of some stamps, a pint of milk, and printing menus for the annual dinner, which all fall into different expense categories, and a deposit of £260 could be mostly takings from a local show, but include one stray subscription. My ideal was that I would break each transaction down into its constituent parts as I entered them on the spreadsheet, then use the accounting powers of Excel to derive all totals. That way, the final grand totals for everything ought to correspond perfectly with the subtotals and the cash flow for each month, without my managing to type two different versions of the same number on to different schedules.
It almost worked. Divisional subscriptions were the hardest to keep track of, since members make a single payment at the start of the year which covers their national subscription, county subscription, divisional subscription, a basic level of bee disease insurance, and may also include a donation towards research, a donation towards education, a divisional donation, and supplementary insurance. There are both single and dual members, who do not pay exactly twice the county or national rate of a single member, plus Friends who do not pay a national subscription or get insurance. The membership forms include details of every sub category except for the split between division, county, national and basic insurance. The County Treasurer sends invoice for county and national subs in spring and autumn, and I did check his calculations at the time, likewise worked out the basic BDI when I sent off the cheques for disease insurance. I ended up deriving divisional income as the amount left over when I'd totted up total subs, and taken national and county ones and the bee disease insurance off, which felt back to front when divisional income is likely to be the category of subscription income the divisional members are most interested in at the AGM.
Subscription errors did not help, an erroneous overpayment in 2013, and a bouncing cheque, and I spent a while fiddling about with a balancing item of £41.50. When I described the problem to the SA, the SA said Aha, a failed trade, and recounted how in the City days, trades that didn't settle would be reversed out of the day's payments and receipts, to be settled a day or three later, only with no narrative description of what they were, and sometimes for good measure the broker would amalgamate five or six together. Then it was a matter of looking through the list of all failed trades with that broker, and seeing if you could find any combination of numbers which added up to the required total. Compared to that, ten pounds plus thirty-one pounds fifty didn't sound too bad.
I think I have now got an internally consistent income and expenditure account and balance sheet. I think. Before emailing the spreadsheets to my independent reviewer and asking if I can take the file over this weekend for her to have a look, I'd better sleep on it, and have one check in the morning, in case I have gone quite mad, or there are inconsistencies that I've missed.
Wednesday, 8 January 2014
a small step
I was booked in for a haircut this morning. On balance I thought I was probably fit to go, if I washed my hands scrupulously before going out, and avoided breathing on the hairdresser. Fortunately, cutting somebody's hair is an activity you do while standing behind them, and immediately after washing their head, so she was probably at no more risk from me than she would be using public transport, or going to a supermarket, or anywhere else where she would be breathing the same air as a lot of post-viral strangers. If it had been the dentist I might have tried to rearrange, just to be on the safe side. I don't actually know whether I am infectious, or stopped being so days ago and was at my most virulent before I even had any symptoms. None of the friends and relations I've spent time with in the past ten days have reported going down with it, so it can't have been too wildly infectious.
Driving the car felt like a big adventure, and my knees felt faintly wobbly as I tottered down Colchester High Street. I began to wonder if it had been rather ambitious to go out, on the other hand, you start losing muscle mass within forty-eight hours of ceasing to take exercise, so after six days of moving no further than between my bed and the chair in front of the stove, fresh air and exercise was going to be a shock to the system.
I'd seen in the local paper that the former clock museum, Tymperleys, had finally found a tenant and a new purpose. The recent history of Tymperleys has caused rather a rumpus. It is a Tudor house, updated in Georgian times (though not very much) which was left to the borough. The council ran it as a clock museum, then closed it citing funding pressures, causing a local outcry, especially in the light of the amount they have spent on the wretched Firstsite (a banana shaped new gallery with almost no vertical walls, for conceptual art, which opened late, over budget, and has scarcely held any decent exhibitions since it did open. It was without a curator for six months, and certainly hasn't ever tried to add my contact details to any marketing list, despite my being natural fodder for them with my ingrained gallery habit).
Anyway, the council fiddled around looking for alternative uses for Tymperleys, amidst demands it be accessible to the public, and a row about shared access that scuppered one tea room plan. Now it has been let on a 125 year lease to the couple who run Layer Marney Towers, with the intention of fitting it out as a tea room and venue for dinners and receptions. It was open for viewing today and yesterday, the new tenants and council representatives being available to answer questions. I didn't have any questions, though I'd have been interested to know how they resolved the access question, if my head hadn't felt as though it were stuffed with cotton wool, but since I'd been too idle and disorganised to go and see it when it was a clock museum, I thought I'd go and cast my eye over the Tudor beams while I could. They are very nice, and I look forward to visiting again once it's a tea room. There are quite a few clock museum related 1980s excrescences to strip out first. The plan is to follow the London restaurant fashion and have a glass fronted kitchen on full display, so from the garden you will be able to see the staff making tea and cutting up cakes. The new owners were very loud, enthusiastic and hospitable, and offered me coffee and cake, but at the prospect I began to feel bilious again.
While I was in Colchester I managed to track down some Worcester sauce, in Gunton in Crouch Street. The Systems Administrator has been trying to buy it in Tesco or the Co-op for weeks, but there seems to be a north Essex wide shortage of the stuff. They only had it in small bottles, so I bought two (and nothing else). The woman on the checkout did not seem to find this in any way surprising.
When I got home the SA said Good haircut, which is the correct answer. The SA has rallied sufficiently to go out for a short walk this afternoon. I ate my lunch, and contemplated all the things I needed to start doing, like the beekeepers' annual accounts, and circulating the minutes of the last music society meeting, and thinking about how we could make a stand exciting enough to be given a free slot at the local agricultural show, plus which of three up and coming young artists we would like to book for a concert, when the sound quality on my laptop makes them all sound as though they were busking a long way away. And my tax return, and employment situation. After three cups of tea I decided that making it to Colchester and back had been tiring enough for one day, and that I would return to these questions in the morning. My colleague at the music society got it spot on when she said viral things can be very debilitating.
Driving the car felt like a big adventure, and my knees felt faintly wobbly as I tottered down Colchester High Street. I began to wonder if it had been rather ambitious to go out, on the other hand, you start losing muscle mass within forty-eight hours of ceasing to take exercise, so after six days of moving no further than between my bed and the chair in front of the stove, fresh air and exercise was going to be a shock to the system.
I'd seen in the local paper that the former clock museum, Tymperleys, had finally found a tenant and a new purpose. The recent history of Tymperleys has caused rather a rumpus. It is a Tudor house, updated in Georgian times (though not very much) which was left to the borough. The council ran it as a clock museum, then closed it citing funding pressures, causing a local outcry, especially in the light of the amount they have spent on the wretched Firstsite (a banana shaped new gallery with almost no vertical walls, for conceptual art, which opened late, over budget, and has scarcely held any decent exhibitions since it did open. It was without a curator for six months, and certainly hasn't ever tried to add my contact details to any marketing list, despite my being natural fodder for them with my ingrained gallery habit).
Anyway, the council fiddled around looking for alternative uses for Tymperleys, amidst demands it be accessible to the public, and a row about shared access that scuppered one tea room plan. Now it has been let on a 125 year lease to the couple who run Layer Marney Towers, with the intention of fitting it out as a tea room and venue for dinners and receptions. It was open for viewing today and yesterday, the new tenants and council representatives being available to answer questions. I didn't have any questions, though I'd have been interested to know how they resolved the access question, if my head hadn't felt as though it were stuffed with cotton wool, but since I'd been too idle and disorganised to go and see it when it was a clock museum, I thought I'd go and cast my eye over the Tudor beams while I could. They are very nice, and I look forward to visiting again once it's a tea room. There are quite a few clock museum related 1980s excrescences to strip out first. The plan is to follow the London restaurant fashion and have a glass fronted kitchen on full display, so from the garden you will be able to see the staff making tea and cutting up cakes. The new owners were very loud, enthusiastic and hospitable, and offered me coffee and cake, but at the prospect I began to feel bilious again.
While I was in Colchester I managed to track down some Worcester sauce, in Gunton in Crouch Street. The Systems Administrator has been trying to buy it in Tesco or the Co-op for weeks, but there seems to be a north Essex wide shortage of the stuff. They only had it in small bottles, so I bought two (and nothing else). The woman on the checkout did not seem to find this in any way surprising.
When I got home the SA said Good haircut, which is the correct answer. The SA has rallied sufficiently to go out for a short walk this afternoon. I ate my lunch, and contemplated all the things I needed to start doing, like the beekeepers' annual accounts, and circulating the minutes of the last music society meeting, and thinking about how we could make a stand exciting enough to be given a free slot at the local agricultural show, plus which of three up and coming young artists we would like to book for a concert, when the sound quality on my laptop makes them all sound as though they were busking a long way away. And my tax return, and employment situation. After three cups of tea I decided that making it to Colchester and back had been tiring enough for one day, and that I would return to these questions in the morning. My colleague at the music society got it spot on when she said viral things can be very debilitating.
Tuesday, 7 January 2014
a bigger bang
The army has been clattering away today on the ranges. The patter of machine gun fire and the repeated deeper rattle of something that might have been a rarden cannon, the isolated pops of rifles or small arms fire, and something so big it made the house shake and brought the Systems Administrator scurrying downstairs to see if there was somebody at the front door.
Yesterday the Royal Navy had to carry out controlled explosions on 'about nine' anti-aircraft shells washed ashore at Westcliffe-on-Sea, part of Southend-on-Sea. There was a photo on the BBC Essex website of a chunky little explosion, half a mile from the seafront. The shells were described as being corroded but still live.
It looked like quite a bang, but as nothing compared to the one we'd get if the SS Richard Montgomery ever went up. The media is spasmodically interested in the Montgomery. The BBC ran a story last June, questioning whether its presence ruled out an airport in the Thames estuary, but in general it doesn't get much of a mention. Those in favour of Boris Island, or the Thames Hub Airport on the Isle of Grain, seem to believe that the wreck of the Richard Montgomery is a boring technical detail, which could easily be dealt with during the course of airport construction. Wikipedia's list of bullet points giving the disadvantages of a Thames estuary airport puts it in twelfth place, behind the incidence of fog and the risk of bird strike.
Could it be easily dealt with? Who knows? Nobody, really, not even Boris, or Sir Norman Foster, because nobody knows what happens to 1400 tonnes of nitroglycerine explosive after it has been submerged in seawater for seventy years, and that is what was on the SS Richard Montgomery when she sank. Laden with munitions and waiting to form part of a convoy, she dragged her anchor, touched on a sandbank off the Medway, stuck, and broke her back as the tide ebbed and before salvage crews could remove all her cargo. And there she stays. There is an exclusion zone around her, marked with buoys, and at low water her masts still stick up above the water. We have sailed past her, and it is a desolate, eerie, spine-chilling and skin-creeping spot.
The explosives are reckoned to be live and unstable, though by now their original operating mechanisms may well be rusted away. Nobody knows whether attempts to move them would trigger an explosion, and there doesn't seem to be any way of finding out, short of trying it and seeing what happens. It's not as though there is another ship containing nitroglycerine that's been marinading in sea water for seventy years, in a more convenient position, that we could practice on first. If someone were to design a computer model of what should happen, they would have no means of verifying it. Estimates of the damage that would occur if the SS Richard Montgomery went up vary wildly. The resulting wave could be sixteen feet high, or four feet, depending on who you believe. Local legend has it that the blast would flatten the Isle of Grain power station (though that was mothballed a while back anyway so it might not matter so much) and smash every window in Southend.
You can see why Boris doesn't want to think about it.
Yesterday the Royal Navy had to carry out controlled explosions on 'about nine' anti-aircraft shells washed ashore at Westcliffe-on-Sea, part of Southend-on-Sea. There was a photo on the BBC Essex website of a chunky little explosion, half a mile from the seafront. The shells were described as being corroded but still live.
It looked like quite a bang, but as nothing compared to the one we'd get if the SS Richard Montgomery ever went up. The media is spasmodically interested in the Montgomery. The BBC ran a story last June, questioning whether its presence ruled out an airport in the Thames estuary, but in general it doesn't get much of a mention. Those in favour of Boris Island, or the Thames Hub Airport on the Isle of Grain, seem to believe that the wreck of the Richard Montgomery is a boring technical detail, which could easily be dealt with during the course of airport construction. Wikipedia's list of bullet points giving the disadvantages of a Thames estuary airport puts it in twelfth place, behind the incidence of fog and the risk of bird strike.
Could it be easily dealt with? Who knows? Nobody, really, not even Boris, or Sir Norman Foster, because nobody knows what happens to 1400 tonnes of nitroglycerine explosive after it has been submerged in seawater for seventy years, and that is what was on the SS Richard Montgomery when she sank. Laden with munitions and waiting to form part of a convoy, she dragged her anchor, touched on a sandbank off the Medway, stuck, and broke her back as the tide ebbed and before salvage crews could remove all her cargo. And there she stays. There is an exclusion zone around her, marked with buoys, and at low water her masts still stick up above the water. We have sailed past her, and it is a desolate, eerie, spine-chilling and skin-creeping spot.
The explosives are reckoned to be live and unstable, though by now their original operating mechanisms may well be rusted away. Nobody knows whether attempts to move them would trigger an explosion, and there doesn't seem to be any way of finding out, short of trying it and seeing what happens. It's not as though there is another ship containing nitroglycerine that's been marinading in sea water for seventy years, in a more convenient position, that we could practice on first. If someone were to design a computer model of what should happen, they would have no means of verifying it. Estimates of the damage that would occur if the SS Richard Montgomery went up vary wildly. The resulting wave could be sixteen feet high, or four feet, depending on who you believe. Local legend has it that the blast would flatten the Isle of Grain power station (though that was mothballed a while back anyway so it might not matter so much) and smash every window in Southend.
You can see why Boris doesn't want to think about it.
Monday, 6 January 2014
goodbye Christmas
We have taken down the Christmas decorations. I'm now no longer sure whether, in purely superstitious terms, this ought not to have been done the previous day, but yesterday I was convinced that 6th January was the proper date. The Systems Administrator didn't seem to have a firm view one way or another, so it is evidently not a matter of great concern in north Wales.
I always have mixed feelings about seeing the tree go, on the one hand regret, that the pretty tree is gone for another year, and on the other hand relief, because in all honesty it has ceased to be so pretty, and started to shed needles all over the floor. I managed to get all the decorations off without dropping any of the glass baubles. I told myself as I unpicked them that they were only things, and that if I broke one it wouldn't be the end of the world, while knowing that if I did smash any of the more precious ones I should be deeply upset.
I didn't trust myself to wobble around on top of the stepladder, so the SA removed the topmost decorations that I couldn't reach standing on a dining chair, partly by the expedient of simply cutting some of the top branches off with secateurs. Of course that isn't an option while you're putting the tree up. The poor, bare remains were carried out into the garden in a trail of pine needles, though they won't be wasted, since I'll shred the carcass at some point to make a nice, acid mulch for the blueberries.
Everything else has gone too. The Christmas cards into the paper recycling, after copying out any new addresses into the address book, plus the names of people's children where I haven't already written them down. In a world where every third child seems to be called Ellie or Ollie, it's difficult to keep track, or to remember which ones are Lucie with an i e not a y, and whether Madison has one d or two. The cards with glitter have gone into the general rubbish, in case glitter is not recyclable. The giant candle holder has gone back into the spare bedroom (note to self: buy new giant candle for next year). The red tablecloth and the white lace tablecloth are in a heap next to the laundry basket, waiting for me to scrape and iron* the wax drips out of them, and darn the hole where a match got accidentally dropped on the lace one. For next Christmas we might be real devils and splash out on a new tablecloth.
The SA swept up a great quantity of pine needles, to save the vacuum cleaner, which does its best but has a hard life with all the cat fur, and is not so young as it was. Then the SA vacuumed the sitting room, and the litter of needles down the stairs and through the hall, and then in a burst of energy vacuumed the bedroom, and came back to find more pine needles had appeared in the sitting room where there hadn't been any twenty minutes previously. The greenery has all gone from the mantelpiece, and the ivy stems and flashing lights from the stairs.
There is still a heap of wax on the mantelpiece, where one of the church candles suddenly went into melt-down, but I think I'll save scraping that up until I'm feeling a trifle stronger. In the meantime, after reading through a couple of my old Art Fund magazines, I've decided that the pile of books and pair of pewter plates on the sofa do not mean that the room is a mess. On the contrary, they are an art installation.
*With a warm iron and a great deal of kitchen roll. It's a good idea afterwards to use the iron on some old t-shirts you are not desperately fond of, before using it on a favourite piece of silk or other fine fabric.
I always have mixed feelings about seeing the tree go, on the one hand regret, that the pretty tree is gone for another year, and on the other hand relief, because in all honesty it has ceased to be so pretty, and started to shed needles all over the floor. I managed to get all the decorations off without dropping any of the glass baubles. I told myself as I unpicked them that they were only things, and that if I broke one it wouldn't be the end of the world, while knowing that if I did smash any of the more precious ones I should be deeply upset.
I didn't trust myself to wobble around on top of the stepladder, so the SA removed the topmost decorations that I couldn't reach standing on a dining chair, partly by the expedient of simply cutting some of the top branches off with secateurs. Of course that isn't an option while you're putting the tree up. The poor, bare remains were carried out into the garden in a trail of pine needles, though they won't be wasted, since I'll shred the carcass at some point to make a nice, acid mulch for the blueberries.
Everything else has gone too. The Christmas cards into the paper recycling, after copying out any new addresses into the address book, plus the names of people's children where I haven't already written them down. In a world where every third child seems to be called Ellie or Ollie, it's difficult to keep track, or to remember which ones are Lucie with an i e not a y, and whether Madison has one d or two. The cards with glitter have gone into the general rubbish, in case glitter is not recyclable. The giant candle holder has gone back into the spare bedroom (note to self: buy new giant candle for next year). The red tablecloth and the white lace tablecloth are in a heap next to the laundry basket, waiting for me to scrape and iron* the wax drips out of them, and darn the hole where a match got accidentally dropped on the lace one. For next Christmas we might be real devils and splash out on a new tablecloth.
The SA swept up a great quantity of pine needles, to save the vacuum cleaner, which does its best but has a hard life with all the cat fur, and is not so young as it was. Then the SA vacuumed the sitting room, and the litter of needles down the stairs and through the hall, and then in a burst of energy vacuumed the bedroom, and came back to find more pine needles had appeared in the sitting room where there hadn't been any twenty minutes previously. The greenery has all gone from the mantelpiece, and the ivy stems and flashing lights from the stairs.
There is still a heap of wax on the mantelpiece, where one of the church candles suddenly went into melt-down, but I think I'll save scraping that up until I'm feeling a trifle stronger. In the meantime, after reading through a couple of my old Art Fund magazines, I've decided that the pile of books and pair of pewter plates on the sofa do not mean that the room is a mess. On the contrary, they are an art installation.
*With a warm iron and a great deal of kitchen roll. It's a good idea afterwards to use the iron on some old t-shirts you are not desperately fond of, before using it on a favourite piece of silk or other fine fabric.
Sunday, 5 January 2014
a German garden
The Systems Administrator woke up this morning feeling sick, and by early afternoon had given up and gone back to bed. That's back to square one, then, after three days. I merely felt very, very tired, until I'd eaten a bowl of muesli, after which I felt delicately and persistently nauseous. Whatever this bug is, it's a nasty one, not spectacularly, vomit-inducing, feverishly nasty like the norovirus, but debilitating.
To distract myself I've been reading Elizabeth and her German Garden, a minor classic first published in 1898, and much reprinted since, including by Virago. I picked my copy up ages ago at a second hand bookstall at some National Trust property or other, and it has been sitting on a shelf waiting for the right moment. The book has been heavily anthologised, so that passages seemed oddly familiar, even though I was reading it for the first time.
The author, Elizabeth von Arnim, was married to a Prussian count, although brought up in England. This, her first book, describes her life on his country estate, where her great pleasure lay in restoring the garden, though she was also a fond mother to their three (at that stage) daughters, born in rapid succession and referred to, rather ickily, as the June baby, the May baby and the April baby. They were then aged five, four, and three. Goodness knows what Dorothy Parker would have made of it.
The gardening bits of the book are actually the least interesting, since Elizabeth knew very little about gardening when she started, and social convention didn't allow her to do much of it herself. We mainly hear her laments and self-reproof that she is so ignorant, mingled with effusions about how much she loves the garden which I should think Dorothy Parker would have responded to much as she did to Christopher Robin (Tonstant Weader thwowed up). There are lists of the flowers she grew, which are interesting from an historical point of view, and confirmation that Prussia is a tough place for garden making (sandy soil, summer droughts, cold winters).
What lifts Elizabeth and her Garden into the first rank of light literature are her sly, sometimes acidic asides and observations about late nineteenth century middle class German life. Her neighbours, house guests, governess and husband are gently but mercilessly lampooned, together with the social expectations of what women are allowed or expected to do. Under the periodically gushing prose lurks a very sharp and protofeminist mind and wicked sense of humour.
In the light of that it is not so surprising that she went on to publish another twenty books, and had a three year affair with H.G. Wells, married Bertrand Russell's older brother, ran away to America, and had a romance with a much younger man who named his only daughter in her honour.
To distract myself I've been reading Elizabeth and her German Garden, a minor classic first published in 1898, and much reprinted since, including by Virago. I picked my copy up ages ago at a second hand bookstall at some National Trust property or other, and it has been sitting on a shelf waiting for the right moment. The book has been heavily anthologised, so that passages seemed oddly familiar, even though I was reading it for the first time.
The author, Elizabeth von Arnim, was married to a Prussian count, although brought up in England. This, her first book, describes her life on his country estate, where her great pleasure lay in restoring the garden, though she was also a fond mother to their three (at that stage) daughters, born in rapid succession and referred to, rather ickily, as the June baby, the May baby and the April baby. They were then aged five, four, and three. Goodness knows what Dorothy Parker would have made of it.
The gardening bits of the book are actually the least interesting, since Elizabeth knew very little about gardening when she started, and social convention didn't allow her to do much of it herself. We mainly hear her laments and self-reproof that she is so ignorant, mingled with effusions about how much she loves the garden which I should think Dorothy Parker would have responded to much as she did to Christopher Robin (Tonstant Weader thwowed up). There are lists of the flowers she grew, which are interesting from an historical point of view, and confirmation that Prussia is a tough place for garden making (sandy soil, summer droughts, cold winters).
What lifts Elizabeth and her Garden into the first rank of light literature are her sly, sometimes acidic asides and observations about late nineteenth century middle class German life. Her neighbours, house guests, governess and husband are gently but mercilessly lampooned, together with the social expectations of what women are allowed or expected to do. Under the periodically gushing prose lurks a very sharp and protofeminist mind and wicked sense of humour.
In the light of that it is not so surprising that she went on to publish another twenty books, and had a three year affair with H.G. Wells, married Bertrand Russell's older brother, ran away to America, and had a romance with a much younger man who named his only daughter in her honour.
Saturday, 4 January 2014
architectural essays
I still don't feel brilliantly well, though looking on the bright side, the weather is so foul I wouldn't be gardening anyway even if I were as fit as a fiddle, or a flea. It's a good thing that I don't have any strong views on the symbolic role of the New Year in fashioning a fresh start, since 2014 seems to be starting largely without me.
I have been consoling myself with my stack of unread books, and am now on Gavin Stamp's Anti-Ugly. Gavin Stamp is an architectural historian, who I must admit I had never heard of until this Christmas. Anti-Ugly is a collection of essays originally published in the Apollo magazine, which I'm afraid I'd never heard of either. Apparently it's been around since 1925 and is internationally well regarded, so that shows what a hopeless philistine middlebrow I am. From the website it looks quite good, rather as does the London Review of Books, though I'm not sure I'm going to subscribe to either of them. I scarcely manage to get through all of my gardening magazines as it is, and the Art Fund one, plus those from the National Trust and the RSPB, and I already hear about more up and coming art shows than I manage to visit.
Anti-Ugly is published by Aurum Press, whose existence I'd also failed to register until last autumn, when I started getting given books published by them. Turns out they are from the same stable as Frances Lincoln, who do good illustrated gardening books. Their website page for Gavin Stamp doesn't actually include Anti-Ugly, but it only came out in 2013, so maybe they'll get round to adding it soon.
The essays started off as two page spreads, or a trifle longer, as we get them in the book without the magazine editor's cutting down to length. They are about British, mostly English, buildings and architects, about what is, or was, or might have been. Stamp is a lively and opinionated author, heaping praise and abuse on his subject matter in generous measures, and his writing does what any good criticism should, and makes me want to go and look at the original subjects. Where they still exist, that is. Much opprobrium is piled on the twentieth century developers who bulldozed so much of London in the name of progress, but Brunel's 1845 Hungerford Suspension Bridge was destroyed in 1862.
However, I could still go and see Sedding's Arts and Craft Holy Trinity Church in Sloane Street, and reading the book made me realise that though I have walked many times past Hawksmoor's last church, Saint George's Church, Bloomsbury, I have never stopped to go in. Now that most churches have websites it's easy enough to find out what the visiting arrangements are, if any, and it seems that St George's should be open most afternoons, subject to a volunteer warden being available. I haven't been into Christ Church, Spitalfields for over twenty-five years, either, not since dragging the Systems Administrator off to some after-work Monteverdi.
The illustrations are limited to small, matt photographs, but that isn't a problem. The book repeats itself a little, for which Stamp apologises in the foreword. Since the work originally appeared in a monthly magazine, spread over the years 2004 to 2013, some repetition of the author's views on some subjects is inevitable. In 2011 the reader might not be expected to remember that back in 2005 the author said he admired Hawksmoor, or Vanbrugh, whereas reading the essays all stacked together most people will know what they were told the previous day. My only criticism is that there is no index.
I have been consoling myself with my stack of unread books, and am now on Gavin Stamp's Anti-Ugly. Gavin Stamp is an architectural historian, who I must admit I had never heard of until this Christmas. Anti-Ugly is a collection of essays originally published in the Apollo magazine, which I'm afraid I'd never heard of either. Apparently it's been around since 1925 and is internationally well regarded, so that shows what a hopeless philistine middlebrow I am. From the website it looks quite good, rather as does the London Review of Books, though I'm not sure I'm going to subscribe to either of them. I scarcely manage to get through all of my gardening magazines as it is, and the Art Fund one, plus those from the National Trust and the RSPB, and I already hear about more up and coming art shows than I manage to visit.
Anti-Ugly is published by Aurum Press, whose existence I'd also failed to register until last autumn, when I started getting given books published by them. Turns out they are from the same stable as Frances Lincoln, who do good illustrated gardening books. Their website page for Gavin Stamp doesn't actually include Anti-Ugly, but it only came out in 2013, so maybe they'll get round to adding it soon.
The essays started off as two page spreads, or a trifle longer, as we get them in the book without the magazine editor's cutting down to length. They are about British, mostly English, buildings and architects, about what is, or was, or might have been. Stamp is a lively and opinionated author, heaping praise and abuse on his subject matter in generous measures, and his writing does what any good criticism should, and makes me want to go and look at the original subjects. Where they still exist, that is. Much opprobrium is piled on the twentieth century developers who bulldozed so much of London in the name of progress, but Brunel's 1845 Hungerford Suspension Bridge was destroyed in 1862.
However, I could still go and see Sedding's Arts and Craft Holy Trinity Church in Sloane Street, and reading the book made me realise that though I have walked many times past Hawksmoor's last church, Saint George's Church, Bloomsbury, I have never stopped to go in. Now that most churches have websites it's easy enough to find out what the visiting arrangements are, if any, and it seems that St George's should be open most afternoons, subject to a volunteer warden being available. I haven't been into Christ Church, Spitalfields for over twenty-five years, either, not since dragging the Systems Administrator off to some after-work Monteverdi.
The illustrations are limited to small, matt photographs, but that isn't a problem. The book repeats itself a little, for which Stamp apologises in the foreword. Since the work originally appeared in a monthly magazine, spread over the years 2004 to 2013, some repetition of the author's views on some subjects is inevitable. In 2011 the reader might not be expected to remember that back in 2005 the author said he admired Hawksmoor, or Vanbrugh, whereas reading the essays all stacked together most people will know what they were told the previous day. My only criticism is that there is no index.
Friday, 3 January 2014
a sick story
I spent the morning feeling sick. The Systems Administrator was sick. I rallied myself sufficiently to go out and check the watering of the pots in the greenhouse and conservatory, and found that mice had excavated almost all the pots of crocus and fritillary bulbs. I really don't have the energy to think of anything amusing to say about that.
Later on I felt less sick, and ate a toasted roll that was not even stale despite being several days old, thanks to the miracles of modern preservatives in commercial bread. So much for making my own in 2014. The Systems Administrator ate a packeted soup and some crisps without being sick, so we are evidently on the mend. I rallied even more, after a nap, and put out the dustbins, except for the paper recycling, since there is half a gale blowing, if not a full one, and it would only blow all over the garden. We never did find the lid of the dustbin, but I don't think the paper recycling would be so discreet.
The wind has blown one of the replacement acrylic sheets out of the roof of my greenhouse. The good news is, it has not broken, so tomorrow if we are feeling stronger we can go and put it back in again. Onwards and upwards. At least the start to my New Year has been both low calorie and teetotal.
Later on I felt less sick, and ate a toasted roll that was not even stale despite being several days old, thanks to the miracles of modern preservatives in commercial bread. So much for making my own in 2014. The Systems Administrator ate a packeted soup and some crisps without being sick, so we are evidently on the mend. I rallied even more, after a nap, and put out the dustbins, except for the paper recycling, since there is half a gale blowing, if not a full one, and it would only blow all over the garden. We never did find the lid of the dustbin, but I don't think the paper recycling would be so discreet.
The wind has blown one of the replacement acrylic sheets out of the roof of my greenhouse. The good news is, it has not broken, so tomorrow if we are feeling stronger we can go and put it back in again. Onwards and upwards. At least the start to my New Year has been both low calorie and teetotal.
Thursday, 2 January 2014
good and not so good
I went to London today for another look at the Paul Klee exhibition at Tate Modern, this time with my mother and my nephew. He is just coming up to eight, and so far has a true artist's eye, and I was pleased that the chap on the door of the exhibition gave us each a booklet, without quibbling about whether a child would want one. As we walked around I realised that the smaller and more detailed pictures were hung inconveniently high up from the viewpoint of a seven year old. He seemed to like them anyway, though he got more immediately excited about a large abstract expressionist painting in the permanent collection that we passed by afterwards.
Children that age have minds like sponges, so the more decent stuff they can see, the better. You notice language being absorbed at a rate of knots as well, my nephew quizzing me about any new words or unfamiliar uses of old ones, then trying them out himself later in the conversation. Today's new use was 'flooding' to mean the tide is coming in, rather than water in all the wrong places as seen on TV, but when over tea back at my parents' house he picked up on 'bunfight', my mother took him home before I could explain it. Probably just as well. It sits well enough in the vocabulary of a slightly old fashioned and eccentric aunt, but might not be the thing for a small boy who doesn't want to court social ostracism in the playground.
It was a relief to make it safely to London and back without my faint suspicion that I might be going down with something turning into a certainty. For several days now I have been intermittently hit by the feeling that I was really not awfully well, accompanied by occasional headaches and spells of nausea. As this has persisted even on days when I haven't touched a drop, I don't think it's a simple case of over-indulgence. Getting home tonight, I discovered the Systems Administrator has now got the same thing, only worse. If cardunculus disappears from the blogosphere for a day or two, that'll be the reason. It is a most inconvenient time to go down with a bug, just as the New Year is starting, and I am supposed to be organising myself and deciding what I am going to Do Next.
To anybody I have seen in the past four or five days, may I say that I have tried as hard as I could not to breathe on you, and have been washing my hands like crazy at every available opportunity. If I have given you the lurgi then sorry about that.
Children that age have minds like sponges, so the more decent stuff they can see, the better. You notice language being absorbed at a rate of knots as well, my nephew quizzing me about any new words or unfamiliar uses of old ones, then trying them out himself later in the conversation. Today's new use was 'flooding' to mean the tide is coming in, rather than water in all the wrong places as seen on TV, but when over tea back at my parents' house he picked up on 'bunfight', my mother took him home before I could explain it. Probably just as well. It sits well enough in the vocabulary of a slightly old fashioned and eccentric aunt, but might not be the thing for a small boy who doesn't want to court social ostracism in the playground.
It was a relief to make it safely to London and back without my faint suspicion that I might be going down with something turning into a certainty. For several days now I have been intermittently hit by the feeling that I was really not awfully well, accompanied by occasional headaches and spells of nausea. As this has persisted even on days when I haven't touched a drop, I don't think it's a simple case of over-indulgence. Getting home tonight, I discovered the Systems Administrator has now got the same thing, only worse. If cardunculus disappears from the blogosphere for a day or two, that'll be the reason. It is a most inconvenient time to go down with a bug, just as the New Year is starting, and I am supposed to be organising myself and deciding what I am going to Do Next.
To anybody I have seen in the past four or five days, may I say that I have tried as hard as I could not to breathe on you, and have been washing my hands like crazy at every available opportunity. If I have given you the lurgi then sorry about that.
Wednesday, 1 January 2014
happy New Year
We ended up watching Silver Linings Playbook instead of Apocalypse Now Redux. The latter is a truly brilliant film, and the only war film I like, but it is heavy going. Besides the subject matter, it has a running time of 202 minutes, and didn't seem quite the things for someone still suffering from cracked ribs and a cold. Silver Linings Playbook comes in a whole eighty minutes shorter, and is a rom com, practically light viewing, apart from the fact that it also deals with mental illness.
It won Jennifer Lawrence an Oscar for Best Actress, after she was nominated for an earlier film Winter's Bone. I am a huge Jennifer Lawrence fan, and look forward to American Hustle coming out on DVD. In the meantime, Silver Linings Playbook is pretty good. In fact, the early scenes in which the bipolar character is at his most manic and deluded are almost painful to watch, if you have known people suffering from any kind of up and down mental disorder.
So that was our New Year's Eve. We managed to stop the cats eating the cheese, or walking on it, though they made it impossible to nibble at tiny slivers throughout the film, unless we were prepared to put them out of the room for the duration. Instead we had to eat as much cheese as we thought we wanted, fairly rapidly, then pause the film while we put the rest safely away in the fridge. It seemed antisocial to lock the beasties out, when we had the stove lit.
Today was extremely windy, and it poured with rain. I'd have liked it to be nice, so that I could have done some symbolic New Year's Day gardening, but it wasn't. There again, I am still trying to work out whether I am going down with a version of the cold. I do hope not, since I am supposed to be going to London tomorrow and was hoping to go and visit my father's cousin on Friday, now we've discovered where he is following his operation. It would not be a good and compassionate act to go and breath germs all over an eighty-five year old who is convalescing from hip replacement surgery.
Tuesday, 31 December 2013
out with the old, in with the new
Christmas has pretty much been cleaned out of the fridge. The ham yielded one last round of sandwiches, and the chicken a final cold cut with bubble and squeak, before the carcass was boiled for stock, picked over, and the carefully de-boned meat given to the cats. The big anxious tabby got one odd left-over sausage as well. The extra large bargain bag of Brussels sprouts, much too big for two people but it was pre-bagged and cost a pound and I had a lot of other things to worry about, yielded up a second serving of freshly cooked sprouts as well as the bubble. We still haven't started on the cheese, and there are some small oranges and half a box of politically incorrect dates left, but everything else has been eaten, mince pies, pudding, rum butter, the lot.
Total wastage, half a tin of Paxo and half a tray of pork and chestnut stuffing, which is a shame but down to the size they come in, too much for two, even if you like cold stuffing (I do, Systems Administrator not so keen). One slice of bacon that got slightly dessicated in the great Christmas lunch scramble. A mystery pork pie found in the vegetable compartment of the fridge, dated best before 16th December. The left-overs from the second lot of sprouts haven't been consigned to the food waste recycling bin yet, but I'm not sure when we're going to eat them, so perhaps they should provisionally count. I found a packet of date expired poppadums in the cupboard, which were not bought as festive fare so perhaps shouldn't be included in the wasted Christmas food total, even though it is Christmas, and they are about to be chucked out. And that's it. I shall permit myself to feel smug amidst the outbreak of media breast-beating about uneaten food at Christmas, before having to admit that even if I have not participated in the waste, I have certainly taken part in the over-consumption.
And now the new year beckons, and the Telegraph and the Guardian and the Independent and even the good old BBC are full of advice on what to do about it. What to wear to my New Year's Eve party, why I should not go to a party, why not to expect to enjoy the party, how to kiss somebody at the party, where I could go if I am not going to a party but want to go somewhere, why I should give up drink for January, why January is a dreadful time to give up anything, ten ideas for resolutions, why resolutions are a thoroughly bad idea, and how we are about to be over-run with Bulgarians and Romanians.
Let's see. We are not going to a party because we have not been asked to one. Haven't been for years. I don't think that's because our friends and relations, despite the fact that they are all planning to host marvellous parties, have decided not to invite us. I rather think they aren't holding parties, or at least, those of them that live within walking distance of each other's houses might be going around to share a ritual bottle of champagne, but that's about it. We do not live within walking distance of any of our friends and relations, or at least not the sort of distance we'd want to walk after a party.
Since we'll be at home, we'll probably wear the same clothes we normally wear at home in the middle of winter. That is, something fairly warm that the cats can moult on, claw at and dribble over without disaster. In my case, almost certainly the same thick Norwegian sweater that I'm wearing now, and have had for ages, long before Scandi crime drama became de rigueur on the TV. Good, that solves that problem. The question of having someone to kiss is very conveniently solved by my having married them nearly thirty years ago. Now that's what I call forward planning, though since the SA still has a cold, now going spectacularly chesty, we'll probably skip that bit. Instead, the SA can stare longingly at the tip of my nose and go No, I won't kiss you.
My first specifically 2014 related act will probably be to switch over to next year's calendar tomorrow morning. Then I will probably go on writing 2013 on cheques for several weeks. I thought that in 2014 I might have another go at making my own bread, try and make a routine of it. Of course I need to get my employment situation sorted out, and depending on what I'm doing I might manage to grow some vegetables (next year in Jerusalem). I will make a list of the art exhibitions I want to visit, and set about catching up with various people. I must not leave it too long before visiting my newly bereaved friend. Some time in January I must do my tax return. I will let the Romanians and Bulgarians take care of themselves. And perhaps resolve not to spend more than half an hour each day reading the websites of the Telegraph and the Guardian and the Independent and the good old BBC.
Happy New Year.
Total wastage, half a tin of Paxo and half a tray of pork and chestnut stuffing, which is a shame but down to the size they come in, too much for two, even if you like cold stuffing (I do, Systems Administrator not so keen). One slice of bacon that got slightly dessicated in the great Christmas lunch scramble. A mystery pork pie found in the vegetable compartment of the fridge, dated best before 16th December. The left-overs from the second lot of sprouts haven't been consigned to the food waste recycling bin yet, but I'm not sure when we're going to eat them, so perhaps they should provisionally count. I found a packet of date expired poppadums in the cupboard, which were not bought as festive fare so perhaps shouldn't be included in the wasted Christmas food total, even though it is Christmas, and they are about to be chucked out. And that's it. I shall permit myself to feel smug amidst the outbreak of media breast-beating about uneaten food at Christmas, before having to admit that even if I have not participated in the waste, I have certainly taken part in the over-consumption.
And now the new year beckons, and the Telegraph and the Guardian and the Independent and even the good old BBC are full of advice on what to do about it. What to wear to my New Year's Eve party, why I should not go to a party, why not to expect to enjoy the party, how to kiss somebody at the party, where I could go if I am not going to a party but want to go somewhere, why I should give up drink for January, why January is a dreadful time to give up anything, ten ideas for resolutions, why resolutions are a thoroughly bad idea, and how we are about to be over-run with Bulgarians and Romanians.
Let's see. We are not going to a party because we have not been asked to one. Haven't been for years. I don't think that's because our friends and relations, despite the fact that they are all planning to host marvellous parties, have decided not to invite us. I rather think they aren't holding parties, or at least, those of them that live within walking distance of each other's houses might be going around to share a ritual bottle of champagne, but that's about it. We do not live within walking distance of any of our friends and relations, or at least not the sort of distance we'd want to walk after a party.
Since we'll be at home, we'll probably wear the same clothes we normally wear at home in the middle of winter. That is, something fairly warm that the cats can moult on, claw at and dribble over without disaster. In my case, almost certainly the same thick Norwegian sweater that I'm wearing now, and have had for ages, long before Scandi crime drama became de rigueur on the TV. Good, that solves that problem. The question of having someone to kiss is very conveniently solved by my having married them nearly thirty years ago. Now that's what I call forward planning, though since the SA still has a cold, now going spectacularly chesty, we'll probably skip that bit. Instead, the SA can stare longingly at the tip of my nose and go No, I won't kiss you.
My first specifically 2014 related act will probably be to switch over to next year's calendar tomorrow morning. Then I will probably go on writing 2013 on cheques for several weeks. I thought that in 2014 I might have another go at making my own bread, try and make a routine of it. Of course I need to get my employment situation sorted out, and depending on what I'm doing I might manage to grow some vegetables (next year in Jerusalem). I will make a list of the art exhibitions I want to visit, and set about catching up with various people. I must not leave it too long before visiting my newly bereaved friend. Some time in January I must do my tax return. I will let the Romanians and Bulgarians take care of themselves. And perhaps resolve not to spend more than half an hour each day reading the websites of the Telegraph and the Guardian and the Independent and the good old BBC.
Happy New Year.
Monday, 30 December 2013
storm in a bookcase
The bookshelf crisis is getting too acute to be ignored. Things have been getting tight for some time now, with new additions having to be stuffed horizontally into the shelves on top of the existing books, and tottering heaps starting to collect on the study floor. I've suggested to the Systems Administrator a couple of times that it was getting to the point where we needed to start building shelves in the third spare bedroom. Which decodes as the SA needing to build them, or my needing the SA to do so, since you would not rest anything heavier than a magazine on a shelf put up by me.
We already have bookshelves running round three sides of the ironing room, and two sides of one of the spare rooms, as well as two walls of the study. In truth, there isn't much space in the second spare room that isn't taken up by windows, or fitted cupboards, other than the wall that the head of the bed rests against. The SA has always been rather resistant to building shelves across the beds, perhaps fearing a Leonard Bast style fatal incident, and this time did not seem at all keen on putting up any more shelves at all. I began to grasp the awful truth, that we might need to edit the books.
I have already been through one round of editing, by dint of tidying away some bulky series into plastic boxes and shoving them under the ironing room bed. As I explained at the time, I was not insisting of getting rid of the almost complete sets of Dick Francis or Patrick O'Brien, and they would be there all neatly boxed up and ready to slide out from under the bed if wanted, they just didn't need to be on display in the ironing room twenty-four seven, waiting for one of us to pluck a volume from the shelves. The SA did seem slightly offended at first, asking plaintively why none of my books were being banished under the bed, but accepted that it made sense. A few of the massive airport thriller paperbacks, bought in the days of commuting, were even sent to the charity shop, the SA admitting that they weren't so well written anybody would want to read them a second time (and if you did, they were now very cheap on Kindle where you could turn the font size up).
It isn't just unnecessary books taking up space in the ironing room. There are box files, and crates of lever arch files containing my old Writtle notes, and financial records going back to the year dot. Some of those are clearly highly necessary, but others really not. I don't honestly need a file of credit card statements from the nineties, for an account that I closed in 2000. And do I need my Writtle notes and coursework? Principles of mechanisation definitely not, nor the introduction to science module. But garden history? And do the beekeepers need to keep accounts going back years? But do I need to obtain the committee's approval before throwing them out? Does the SA want a box of receipts and paperwork relating to a boat we no longer own?
Throwing out old stuff feels laborious out of all proportion to any objective measure of the labour involved. I shredded my old card statements, aware it was probably an unnecessary precaution, as a 1997 gold card statement wouldn't honestly be of much use to any would-be identity thief. They brought back some memories, though. I used to spend more having my hair cut fifteen years ago than I do now, and I spent much more on clothes. Petrol bought at an Aberystwyth garage must have meant a trip to visit my parents. The name of one shop that appeared several times baffled me utterly, and I still can't think what it sold or where it was, unless it was the shoe shop near the office. Working in an office was quite expensive, what with suits and handbags and court shoes and haircuts, not to mention the season ticket. I felt vaguely plaintive as the evidence of my previous gilded lifestyle went through the shredder, even though I can't have looked at those statements in around thirteen years, since I filed them and put the folder in a box. If I suddenly achieve fame late in life (which is unlikely) my biographer will wish that I'd kept them. Or if I go senile, my carer could have used them to try and trigger memories of my youth.
Old chicken feed paper sacks come in handy when you have a lot of clearing out to do. The shredded statements were followed by some of the less appealing Writtle notes, plus, in a fit of bravado, two cheque books for a bank account that no longer exists, since the beekeepers closed it several years ago and are not even with the same bank any more. I put my old children's books in the boxes so liberated, along with Terry Pratchett and Miss Read (to show that it is not only the SA's books that get put in boxes). Then I obtained the SA's permission to take the large black bin bag full of the SA's old, white, formal, double cuffed Thomas Pink shirts, none of which have ever been worn since the SA retired from office life, to the recycling centre.
After that I had to stop for a rest. I needed the SA's input on which thrillers could go to the PDSA bookstall, or at least under the bed, which is not a question you should bully anyone else into deciding on while they have a cold and a cracked rib. But in any case I was exhausted. I don't even want to think about what it will be like if and when we have to move house.
We already have bookshelves running round three sides of the ironing room, and two sides of one of the spare rooms, as well as two walls of the study. In truth, there isn't much space in the second spare room that isn't taken up by windows, or fitted cupboards, other than the wall that the head of the bed rests against. The SA has always been rather resistant to building shelves across the beds, perhaps fearing a Leonard Bast style fatal incident, and this time did not seem at all keen on putting up any more shelves at all. I began to grasp the awful truth, that we might need to edit the books.
I have already been through one round of editing, by dint of tidying away some bulky series into plastic boxes and shoving them under the ironing room bed. As I explained at the time, I was not insisting of getting rid of the almost complete sets of Dick Francis or Patrick O'Brien, and they would be there all neatly boxed up and ready to slide out from under the bed if wanted, they just didn't need to be on display in the ironing room twenty-four seven, waiting for one of us to pluck a volume from the shelves. The SA did seem slightly offended at first, asking plaintively why none of my books were being banished under the bed, but accepted that it made sense. A few of the massive airport thriller paperbacks, bought in the days of commuting, were even sent to the charity shop, the SA admitting that they weren't so well written anybody would want to read them a second time (and if you did, they were now very cheap on Kindle where you could turn the font size up).
It isn't just unnecessary books taking up space in the ironing room. There are box files, and crates of lever arch files containing my old Writtle notes, and financial records going back to the year dot. Some of those are clearly highly necessary, but others really not. I don't honestly need a file of credit card statements from the nineties, for an account that I closed in 2000. And do I need my Writtle notes and coursework? Principles of mechanisation definitely not, nor the introduction to science module. But garden history? And do the beekeepers need to keep accounts going back years? But do I need to obtain the committee's approval before throwing them out? Does the SA want a box of receipts and paperwork relating to a boat we no longer own?
Throwing out old stuff feels laborious out of all proportion to any objective measure of the labour involved. I shredded my old card statements, aware it was probably an unnecessary precaution, as a 1997 gold card statement wouldn't honestly be of much use to any would-be identity thief. They brought back some memories, though. I used to spend more having my hair cut fifteen years ago than I do now, and I spent much more on clothes. Petrol bought at an Aberystwyth garage must have meant a trip to visit my parents. The name of one shop that appeared several times baffled me utterly, and I still can't think what it sold or where it was, unless it was the shoe shop near the office. Working in an office was quite expensive, what with suits and handbags and court shoes and haircuts, not to mention the season ticket. I felt vaguely plaintive as the evidence of my previous gilded lifestyle went through the shredder, even though I can't have looked at those statements in around thirteen years, since I filed them and put the folder in a box. If I suddenly achieve fame late in life (which is unlikely) my biographer will wish that I'd kept them. Or if I go senile, my carer could have used them to try and trigger memories of my youth.
Old chicken feed paper sacks come in handy when you have a lot of clearing out to do. The shredded statements were followed by some of the less appealing Writtle notes, plus, in a fit of bravado, two cheque books for a bank account that no longer exists, since the beekeepers closed it several years ago and are not even with the same bank any more. I put my old children's books in the boxes so liberated, along with Terry Pratchett and Miss Read (to show that it is not only the SA's books that get put in boxes). Then I obtained the SA's permission to take the large black bin bag full of the SA's old, white, formal, double cuffed Thomas Pink shirts, none of which have ever been worn since the SA retired from office life, to the recycling centre.
After that I had to stop for a rest. I needed the SA's input on which thrillers could go to the PDSA bookstall, or at least under the bed, which is not a question you should bully anyone else into deciding on while they have a cold and a cracked rib. But in any case I was exhausted. I don't even want to think about what it will be like if and when we have to move house.
Sunday, 29 December 2013
supermarket shambles
The Systems Administrator went out this morning, to buy more coal, and some fresh rolls. The first I knew of it was when I heard the car leaving. I protested when the SA got back that I'd have been happy to go, but the SA replied that he'd felt like going out. I can see you might want a chance of scene. While in the Clacton branch of Tesco the SA had tried to use some of our two-for-one vouchers for Finest wine, which have to be exchanged before the end of the month. I'd have preferred a double-your-vouchers offer on cat food, since we always need cat food, and the cats will not be tempted by knowing it was free to eat extra, but there wasn't a pet food option, and we don't need any electrical goods or Tesco clothing.
The SA left it to the eleventh hour to swap the normal vouchers for double value wine ones, despite my frequent reminders. These might almost have constituted nagging, except that when somebody offers you fifty quid's worth of free wine it would be foolish to miss out on it through lack of organisation. Then the SA caught a cold, leaving the vouchers still unused with, now, two days to go. Today's initial attempt to use them met with only mixed success, since Tesco's till failed to recognise two of the bottles the SA had chosen as Finest, despite their being clearly labelled as such. With a queue mounting and the poor young lad on the checkout sweating, the SA gave up and paid for them in the normal way. They came up on the receipt as rose, which they weren't.
Investigating the contents of the fridge to see what we could eat up for lunch, I thought I'd better check the dates on the cheese, or at least the soft ones. I bought rather a lot of cheese, since the original plan was to have a cheese and wine fest on Boxing Day evening while watching a film. Actually, we were going to watch the director's cut of Apocalypse Now, which might not be everybody's choice of festive viewing, but is one of our favourites, and gets a periodic outing on high days and holidays. In view of the SA's cold we agreed to save the film and the cheese for another time, but I was not sure how long the cheese would last.
The use by date on the box of Petit Pont l'Eveque was 11.12.2013, which caused me to do a double take. I bought the cheese with the main Christmas shop, on 23rd December, meaning that it was already twelve days out of date when Tesco sold it to me. I did check the dates on the chicken, and the sausages, and the pork and chestnut stuffing, and the bacon, and the cream, and the milk, and the clementines, very carefully, and made sure they would all still be good until at least 25th December, and preferably later. I had not thought to check every individual piece of cheese. Lo, the bastards at Tesco managed to sell me one that wouldn't merely not last until Christmas, but was already well past its sell-by date as it trundled down the conveyor belt at the checkout.
I do still have the receipt in my handbag, as it happens. It does not name the Petit Pont l'Eveque, merely says cheese. I could go all the way over to Highwoods with the SA when the SA goes to spend the rest of the wine vouchers, and take the cheese, and the receipt, and stand in a queue at customer services, and insist that the date expired cheese is one of the nameless cheeses on the receipt, and refuse to leave until I got a refund. I could. It would be very dull, and stressful, and I would be using up my time at less than the minimum wage. Ergo, it's not worth it.
Everything the newspapers say about Tesco having lost the plot is true. The SA believes that the Highwoods branch is better managed than the Hythe one, but I should say they are as bad as each other. I would have liked to do the main Christmas shop at Waitrose anyway, except that I knew their car park would be a complete riot, and the queues for the tills two hours long, since it isn't a very big store. Next year, once the Christmas rush is over, I'll be free to go where I like, and it is increasingly unlikely to be Tesco.
The SA left it to the eleventh hour to swap the normal vouchers for double value wine ones, despite my frequent reminders. These might almost have constituted nagging, except that when somebody offers you fifty quid's worth of free wine it would be foolish to miss out on it through lack of organisation. Then the SA caught a cold, leaving the vouchers still unused with, now, two days to go. Today's initial attempt to use them met with only mixed success, since Tesco's till failed to recognise two of the bottles the SA had chosen as Finest, despite their being clearly labelled as such. With a queue mounting and the poor young lad on the checkout sweating, the SA gave up and paid for them in the normal way. They came up on the receipt as rose, which they weren't.
Investigating the contents of the fridge to see what we could eat up for lunch, I thought I'd better check the dates on the cheese, or at least the soft ones. I bought rather a lot of cheese, since the original plan was to have a cheese and wine fest on Boxing Day evening while watching a film. Actually, we were going to watch the director's cut of Apocalypse Now, which might not be everybody's choice of festive viewing, but is one of our favourites, and gets a periodic outing on high days and holidays. In view of the SA's cold we agreed to save the film and the cheese for another time, but I was not sure how long the cheese would last.
The use by date on the box of Petit Pont l'Eveque was 11.12.2013, which caused me to do a double take. I bought the cheese with the main Christmas shop, on 23rd December, meaning that it was already twelve days out of date when Tesco sold it to me. I did check the dates on the chicken, and the sausages, and the pork and chestnut stuffing, and the bacon, and the cream, and the milk, and the clementines, very carefully, and made sure they would all still be good until at least 25th December, and preferably later. I had not thought to check every individual piece of cheese. Lo, the bastards at Tesco managed to sell me one that wouldn't merely not last until Christmas, but was already well past its sell-by date as it trundled down the conveyor belt at the checkout.
I do still have the receipt in my handbag, as it happens. It does not name the Petit Pont l'Eveque, merely says cheese. I could go all the way over to Highwoods with the SA when the SA goes to spend the rest of the wine vouchers, and take the cheese, and the receipt, and stand in a queue at customer services, and insist that the date expired cheese is one of the nameless cheeses on the receipt, and refuse to leave until I got a refund. I could. It would be very dull, and stressful, and I would be using up my time at less than the minimum wage. Ergo, it's not worth it.
Everything the newspapers say about Tesco having lost the plot is true. The SA believes that the Highwoods branch is better managed than the Hythe one, but I should say they are as bad as each other. I would have liked to do the main Christmas shop at Waitrose anyway, except that I knew their car park would be a complete riot, and the queues for the tills two hours long, since it isn't a very big store. Next year, once the Christmas rush is over, I'll be free to go where I like, and it is increasingly unlikely to be Tesco.
Saturday, 28 December 2013
the great outdoors
Today I finally got outside to work in the garden. Originally I said I was going to resume gardening on Boxing Day, but it was still very windy, wet, and uninviting, and I could not decide whether I was going down with a cold as well, so I spent the day on the sofa, reading Sinclair McKay's book The Secret Life of Bletchley Park. It was actually a birthday present, but I didn't get round to reading it immediately. Then yesterday it was still damp, so apart from my run to the dump I spent the day on the sofa reading Ursula Buchan's book A Green and Pleasant Land: how England's gardeners fought the second world war. That was a Christmas present from the SA. They were both very interesting, and made rather a good pair, dealing with the same period of history but from wildly differing viewpoints. The SA refuses to believe that the Nazis every dropped Colorado beetles on the Isle of Wight to sabotage the UK's wartime farming effort, though, even if a retired entomologist from the British Museum did tell Ursula Buchan so.
By this morning the wind had dropped and the sun had come out, I didn't appear to be developing a cold, and the outdoors seemed suddenly inviting. I raked up the fallen leaves from the young oak outside the dining room window, which should have been done weeks ago, but there wasn't time, and went on trimming the back of the eleagnus hedge. I am fairly sure this is not a job for December, but I didn't manage to get it finished in the autumn. Now the first daffodil leaves are emerging in the lawn, and this is an area I need to finish getting tidied up pronto, so that I can stop walking on it before the bulbs are too far advanced.
Then I need to work out a proper maintenance schedule. That sounds rather pompous, as most private gardeners probably don't consider that they have any such thing, but I need a plan for when to cut the lawn, and when to cut the hedge, given that the lawn can't be cut from early spring until mid June at the earliest because of the daffodil leaves, I can't cut the hedge while the grass is long because the lawn gets trampled down and looks unsightly, and the hedge grows jolly fast. I'm not even sure how many times a year we cut the front face, along the drive, but think we have a nibble at it several times a year, when it is starting to block the turning circle too badly, or if we are expecting an oil delivery.
My RHS book of pruning and training says that Eleagnus x ebbingei should be cut in late summer, but then you sacrifice the flowers, which come in autumn, and are unshowy but delightfully scented of clove carnations, besides being attractive to bees. I wonder whether the answer is to give the daffodil lawn two cuts, one in June when the oxeye daisies have finished, and again in the autumn, and to give the back of the hedge an annual fairly hard chop in mid summer. One to ponder upon.
While I was out there I tidied some of the lower branches from the young oak, using the new bow saw. There is a strange and terrible pleasure in cutting up wood with a sharp saw, and I can see how it would be easy to overdo it and remove more than you meant to. Though I have heard it said that most people are too timid when pruning. I cut up the thicker prunings for firewood, I was so pleased with the saw. I'll shred the lighter twigs to use as mulch round the compost bins, and have started shredding those eleagnus prunings that will go through the shredder, to add to the compost heap. It seemed no more trouble than carting them off to the bonfire, and the compost heap wants all the sustenance it can get.
The forecast for tomorrow is for more of the same, before the next storm blows in. I hope so. I was shocked, when I came to write up my gardening notebook, to see that today was apparently the first day I'd spent in the garden since December 7th, but having flicked through my diary I think it probably was. Seeing people, work, getting ready for Christmas and Christmas itself, seem to have used up three weeks without the garden getting a look-in. No wonder it is constantly a project in progress, and is never tidy.
By this morning the wind had dropped and the sun had come out, I didn't appear to be developing a cold, and the outdoors seemed suddenly inviting. I raked up the fallen leaves from the young oak outside the dining room window, which should have been done weeks ago, but there wasn't time, and went on trimming the back of the eleagnus hedge. I am fairly sure this is not a job for December, but I didn't manage to get it finished in the autumn. Now the first daffodil leaves are emerging in the lawn, and this is an area I need to finish getting tidied up pronto, so that I can stop walking on it before the bulbs are too far advanced.
Then I need to work out a proper maintenance schedule. That sounds rather pompous, as most private gardeners probably don't consider that they have any such thing, but I need a plan for when to cut the lawn, and when to cut the hedge, given that the lawn can't be cut from early spring until mid June at the earliest because of the daffodil leaves, I can't cut the hedge while the grass is long because the lawn gets trampled down and looks unsightly, and the hedge grows jolly fast. I'm not even sure how many times a year we cut the front face, along the drive, but think we have a nibble at it several times a year, when it is starting to block the turning circle too badly, or if we are expecting an oil delivery.
My RHS book of pruning and training says that Eleagnus x ebbingei should be cut in late summer, but then you sacrifice the flowers, which come in autumn, and are unshowy but delightfully scented of clove carnations, besides being attractive to bees. I wonder whether the answer is to give the daffodil lawn two cuts, one in June when the oxeye daisies have finished, and again in the autumn, and to give the back of the hedge an annual fairly hard chop in mid summer. One to ponder upon.
While I was out there I tidied some of the lower branches from the young oak, using the new bow saw. There is a strange and terrible pleasure in cutting up wood with a sharp saw, and I can see how it would be easy to overdo it and remove more than you meant to. Though I have heard it said that most people are too timid when pruning. I cut up the thicker prunings for firewood, I was so pleased with the saw. I'll shred the lighter twigs to use as mulch round the compost bins, and have started shredding those eleagnus prunings that will go through the shredder, to add to the compost heap. It seemed no more trouble than carting them off to the bonfire, and the compost heap wants all the sustenance it can get.
The forecast for tomorrow is for more of the same, before the next storm blows in. I hope so. I was shocked, when I came to write up my gardening notebook, to see that today was apparently the first day I'd spent in the garden since December 7th, but having flicked through my diary I think it probably was. Seeing people, work, getting ready for Christmas and Christmas itself, seem to have used up three weeks without the garden getting a look-in. No wonder it is constantly a project in progress, and is never tidy.
Friday, 27 December 2013
not even for ready money
This Friday, sandwiched between Boxing Day and the weekend before the New Year, is supposed to be the day the world starts going back to work, but it isn't really, or at least, the world is making a very half hearted attempt at working. The Systems Administrator went to our nearest Co-Op in search of vital supplies, principally medication for a fresh cold that popped up out of the blue on the evening of Christmas Day. I nominated various things we were getting low on, milk and matches, and requested some butter and some leeks, so that I could make part of the leftover chicken into a pie. The SA returned after a while, but without the leeks, explaining that there were none to be had in the Brightlingsea Co-Op, not even for ready money.
By then I'd realised that we were running low on both coal and wood. We do possess a lot of wood, somd of it seasoned, but since it is mostly in the form of large logs, and some of it is half a mile away from the house, and half of that is on the wrong side of a stream, it is useless for present purposes, while the SA is blowing and streaming like a walrus, on top of the cracked rib. I volunteered to go to the friendly local garden centre to stock up.
I swung down to Clacton via our local farm shop to see if they had any leeks, but they weren't open. Nor was the garden centre, so it was just as well I'd loaded the car with bags of garden rubbish to go to the dump, so the journey was not wasted. It wasn't wasted: I had so many bags of weeds waiting to go to the tip, I'd run out of empty bags. I returned via the other farm shop, which was closed, and the local Tesco Express, which was open but didn't have any leeks. Never mind, I'm sure that chicken pie will be very nice with onions and carrots, or perhaps tomorrow one of us will galvanise ourself to go to a supermarket.
I finally got two bags of coal and one of logs from a convenience store. The coal was displayed in a sort of wire trolley cum cage, from which it took me ages to extract it, while getting my hands covered in coal dust in the process. The SA said afterwards that I should have gone inside and asked nicely, and they'd have opened the cage for me. There were no visible prices for the fuel, and I wasn't given an itemised receipt, but the total came to more than I would have believed possible. I suppose that't what you pay for their being open at all on Friday 27th December.
Addendum Before all this happened I listened to Desert Island Discs after breakfast while tidying up in the kitchen. The guest was Miranda Hart, and one of her choices, in fact her top choice, was Morecombe and Wise singing Bring Me Sunshine, which she said was so happy it made her laugh every time she heard it. For the first time ever, I paid attention sufficiently to catch some of the words, and was rather surprised. I didn't think it sounded happy at all, rather, I thought it set out a terribly bleak manifesto for a relationship.
Make me happy through the years never bring me any tears...Life's too short to be spent having anything but fun...Be light hearted darlin all day long keep singing me a happy song...
Granted, people who always moan about everything, criticise everybody, and generally refuse to look on the bright side are not the most fun to be with. A companion who can rise to the occasion, meet upsets with equanimity, and generally greet life with enthusiasm is greatly preferable to being stuck with a Moaning Minnie. But never bring me any tears, or have anything but fun? Be perpetually skipping around singing happily like Fotherington Thomas, all the time? Even when faced with bereavement, redundancy, financial catastrophe, a terminal medical diagnosis, or the latest world news from Syria and Southern Sudan? Forget all that dear, and don't expect any sympathy from me, I really don't want to hear about it. You just bring me some sunshine.
By then I'd realised that we were running low on both coal and wood. We do possess a lot of wood, somd of it seasoned, but since it is mostly in the form of large logs, and some of it is half a mile away from the house, and half of that is on the wrong side of a stream, it is useless for present purposes, while the SA is blowing and streaming like a walrus, on top of the cracked rib. I volunteered to go to the friendly local garden centre to stock up.
I swung down to Clacton via our local farm shop to see if they had any leeks, but they weren't open. Nor was the garden centre, so it was just as well I'd loaded the car with bags of garden rubbish to go to the dump, so the journey was not wasted. It wasn't wasted: I had so many bags of weeds waiting to go to the tip, I'd run out of empty bags. I returned via the other farm shop, which was closed, and the local Tesco Express, which was open but didn't have any leeks. Never mind, I'm sure that chicken pie will be very nice with onions and carrots, or perhaps tomorrow one of us will galvanise ourself to go to a supermarket.
I finally got two bags of coal and one of logs from a convenience store. The coal was displayed in a sort of wire trolley cum cage, from which it took me ages to extract it, while getting my hands covered in coal dust in the process. The SA said afterwards that I should have gone inside and asked nicely, and they'd have opened the cage for me. There were no visible prices for the fuel, and I wasn't given an itemised receipt, but the total came to more than I would have believed possible. I suppose that't what you pay for their being open at all on Friday 27th December.
Addendum Before all this happened I listened to Desert Island Discs after breakfast while tidying up in the kitchen. The guest was Miranda Hart, and one of her choices, in fact her top choice, was Morecombe and Wise singing Bring Me Sunshine, which she said was so happy it made her laugh every time she heard it. For the first time ever, I paid attention sufficiently to catch some of the words, and was rather surprised. I didn't think it sounded happy at all, rather, I thought it set out a terribly bleak manifesto for a relationship.
Make me happy through the years never bring me any tears...Life's too short to be spent having anything but fun...Be light hearted darlin all day long keep singing me a happy song...
Granted, people who always moan about everything, criticise everybody, and generally refuse to look on the bright side are not the most fun to be with. A companion who can rise to the occasion, meet upsets with equanimity, and generally greet life with enthusiasm is greatly preferable to being stuck with a Moaning Minnie. But never bring me any tears, or have anything but fun? Be perpetually skipping around singing happily like Fotherington Thomas, all the time? Even when faced with bereavement, redundancy, financial catastrophe, a terminal medical diagnosis, or the latest world news from Syria and Southern Sudan? Forget all that dear, and don't expect any sympathy from me, I really don't want to hear about it. You just bring me some sunshine.
Thursday, 26 December 2013
blowup and back-up
Google is frighteningly good nowadays. We were trying last night to remember the title of a 1960s film about a photographer who realises he may have witnessed and photographed a murder. Not only could we not remember what the film was called, we couldn't think who had directed it, or recall the name of the star. I remembered that at one point he bought an aeroplane propeller in an antique shop (it was an arty film), and that the main character was rather good looking, but didn't think either of those details would be of any use as search terms. I thought that it featured a young Jane Asher, but checking her filmography didn't produce anything.
While the Systems Administrator went off to watch the Christmas special of Downton Abbey, I typed film photographer murder into the Google search box and bingo, there it was, three of the top five results referring to Blowup, directed by Michaelangelo Antonioni and starring David Hemmings. Turns out that Jane Birkin was in it, not Jane Asher, along with Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles and Peter Bowles. It won the 1967 Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. I should think it would be a film you could safely claim to like in hip metropolitan circles and expect to win cultural brownie points, though you might need to be able to remember a bit more about the plot than knowing that David Hemmings buys a propeller.
How spooky is it, though, that out of all the digitally stored information of the past forty-seven years, Google knows that I am on about a 1966 art film? The other two results in the top five were a 2004 horror film, and a 2013 Daily Mail article about the shooting of an Egyptian photographer. There must be thousands upon thousands of stories that combine those three terms in a perfectly plausible manner, the deaths of numerous war photographers for starters, and I didn't even think to include the fact that I was looking for something dating from the 1960s, and not anything recent. How well does Google know the inside of my head by now, and what would come up for other people typing the same three words into their computers?
Meanwhile, I have finally done something I've been meaning to do for ages, and saved every file on the computer to a memory stick. The internal power system of the SA's laptop failed suddenly and completely a while back, and the SA ended up forking out a hundred quid for the contents of the hard drive to be professionally retrieved. Following this episode, the SA bought us each a memory stick for back-up purposes. Mine sat on my desk for a long time, because I did not know how to save every file, except by selecting each one individually and saving it in turn. Then I could not find the stick. Then I tidied up my desk, and found the stick again, so every now and then we would have a conversation in which I said the SA must show me how to save everything, without my ever picking a moment when it was actually convenient for the SA to do so.
The SA was an early adopter of computing. We still have the early 1980s Amstrad tucked away somewhere in the spare bedroom, that was the SA's at Oxford. I was not an early adopter. I am not technophobic, I will happily use a computer, to gratify my curiosity about 1960s film titles or maintain a blog, but I am not truly at all interested in the inner workings of the computer, any more than I am interested in what happens under the bonnet of my Skoda. I have the Skoda serviced at the correct intervals, and if it breaks down I call the AA. I am not proud of my massive indifference to technology. I can see it would be better, more useful and safer, to know more about the machinery that underpins my daily life. As my old tutor said, you don't have to like it, you just have to be able to do it. My weakness lies in charging around doing the things I do like, while thinking I will get round to learning the dull things later.
If you put two people together in a house, and one is of a kindly disposition and understands how technical stuff works, while the other is faintly bored by anything technical and not too proud to ask for help, you can pretty much predict the outcome. So it is that after thirteen years of owning a computer, I still didn't know how to save all the files at once. In fact, it was worse than that. I was looking for the Excel spreadsheet of interesting sounding films I wanted to watch, which the computer had saved to a temporary address and then hidden, and did not know how to look for it properly. The SA had to talk me through how to use the file handler, so I thought that could be the moment to ask about the universal saving as well.
The spreadsheet of films seems gone beyond recovery. Even the SA had to admit that it seemed no longer to exist, which shows how sensible it would be to back up the other files, and how foolish I have been to go un-backed up for so long. The selecting and saving everything took practically no time at all. It is terrifying how much you can put on one memory stick, and how easy they are to lose.
While the Systems Administrator went off to watch the Christmas special of Downton Abbey, I typed film photographer murder into the Google search box and bingo, there it was, three of the top five results referring to Blowup, directed by Michaelangelo Antonioni and starring David Hemmings. Turns out that Jane Birkin was in it, not Jane Asher, along with Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles and Peter Bowles. It won the 1967 Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. I should think it would be a film you could safely claim to like in hip metropolitan circles and expect to win cultural brownie points, though you might need to be able to remember a bit more about the plot than knowing that David Hemmings buys a propeller.
How spooky is it, though, that out of all the digitally stored information of the past forty-seven years, Google knows that I am on about a 1966 art film? The other two results in the top five were a 2004 horror film, and a 2013 Daily Mail article about the shooting of an Egyptian photographer. There must be thousands upon thousands of stories that combine those three terms in a perfectly plausible manner, the deaths of numerous war photographers for starters, and I didn't even think to include the fact that I was looking for something dating from the 1960s, and not anything recent. How well does Google know the inside of my head by now, and what would come up for other people typing the same three words into their computers?
Meanwhile, I have finally done something I've been meaning to do for ages, and saved every file on the computer to a memory stick. The internal power system of the SA's laptop failed suddenly and completely a while back, and the SA ended up forking out a hundred quid for the contents of the hard drive to be professionally retrieved. Following this episode, the SA bought us each a memory stick for back-up purposes. Mine sat on my desk for a long time, because I did not know how to save every file, except by selecting each one individually and saving it in turn. Then I could not find the stick. Then I tidied up my desk, and found the stick again, so every now and then we would have a conversation in which I said the SA must show me how to save everything, without my ever picking a moment when it was actually convenient for the SA to do so.
The SA was an early adopter of computing. We still have the early 1980s Amstrad tucked away somewhere in the spare bedroom, that was the SA's at Oxford. I was not an early adopter. I am not technophobic, I will happily use a computer, to gratify my curiosity about 1960s film titles or maintain a blog, but I am not truly at all interested in the inner workings of the computer, any more than I am interested in what happens under the bonnet of my Skoda. I have the Skoda serviced at the correct intervals, and if it breaks down I call the AA. I am not proud of my massive indifference to technology. I can see it would be better, more useful and safer, to know more about the machinery that underpins my daily life. As my old tutor said, you don't have to like it, you just have to be able to do it. My weakness lies in charging around doing the things I do like, while thinking I will get round to learning the dull things later.
If you put two people together in a house, and one is of a kindly disposition and understands how technical stuff works, while the other is faintly bored by anything technical and not too proud to ask for help, you can pretty much predict the outcome. So it is that after thirteen years of owning a computer, I still didn't know how to save all the files at once. In fact, it was worse than that. I was looking for the Excel spreadsheet of interesting sounding films I wanted to watch, which the computer had saved to a temporary address and then hidden, and did not know how to look for it properly. The SA had to talk me through how to use the file handler, so I thought that could be the moment to ask about the universal saving as well.
The spreadsheet of films seems gone beyond recovery. Even the SA had to admit that it seemed no longer to exist, which shows how sensible it would be to back up the other files, and how foolish I have been to go un-backed up for so long. The selecting and saving everything took practically no time at all. It is terrifying how much you can put on one memory stick, and how easy they are to lose.
Wednesday, 25 December 2013
merry Christmas, one and all
Merry Christmas, every body. As usual, I have woken up before the Systems Administrator, so will write a quick blog entry now. I don't suppose I'll feel like doing one later, and in any case I generally adhere to the rule never to press a button labelled Publish or Send on any device connected to the internet after having had anything to drink. It's a good principle, which would save a lot of hassle if universally followed, and extended to mobiles, texts and Twitter.
I have put the SA's presents under the tree, and spread out the red tablecloth and the white lace tablecloth on the dining table, and dug out the giant candle we use at Christmas. I have washed up last night's debris, apart from two frying pans which are still soaking, and emptied the dishwasher. I have put a lump of butter in a bowl to soften at room temperature, so that later I can make the rum butter. In a few minutes I might peel the carrots. Maybe even the potatoes.
The SA cooks lunch. The SA does most of the cooking anyway, and knows how to make all the components of a roast happen at the same time without having a nervous breakdown. I can do puddings, bakery goods, and boiled things, but roasts are outside my comfort zone. We are having a chicken. We like chicken and it is the right size, while neither of us are all that keen on the taste of turkey, and the birds are much too large for two people. We used to dutifully buy a Norfolk Bronze, struggle with the leftovers, and feel terribly guilty at the amount we threw away, before realising we didn't have to have a turkey. People have suggested duck, or beef, or goose, or pheasant, or a turkey crown, but you can't have cranberry sauce with beef, and I couldn't be bothered to track down a turkey crown that was guaranteed free range. And anyway, we like chicken more than turkey, while the SA doesn't like game. I might volunteer to cook a duck, one of these days, and see if the SA finds it too fatty when it's done properly, but I'm not messing around with that for Christmas lunch.
The funeral went off OK. The church was almost full, and the village hall afterwards, and everybody rose to the occasion. The widow was marvellously composed, their daughter who gave one of the addresses had mastered the art of talking and crying simultaneously, there was an impressive turnout of classic cars, and some mourners had battled through very difficult journeys just to get there, given the storms and travel chaos. It's a small world. I met one of my father's cousin's friends at the refreshments afterwards, but she hadn't heard any more than I had about how he was doing.
I am afraid the prospect of going to the funeral spoiled my concentration yesterday morning, as when I looked at yesterday's blog entry in the afternoon I saw I'd muffed the headline. It should of course have read nine lessons and carols, not lessons and lessons. In best Guardian style this article has now been amended.
I have put the SA's presents under the tree, and spread out the red tablecloth and the white lace tablecloth on the dining table, and dug out the giant candle we use at Christmas. I have washed up last night's debris, apart from two frying pans which are still soaking, and emptied the dishwasher. I have put a lump of butter in a bowl to soften at room temperature, so that later I can make the rum butter. In a few minutes I might peel the carrots. Maybe even the potatoes.
The SA cooks lunch. The SA does most of the cooking anyway, and knows how to make all the components of a roast happen at the same time without having a nervous breakdown. I can do puddings, bakery goods, and boiled things, but roasts are outside my comfort zone. We are having a chicken. We like chicken and it is the right size, while neither of us are all that keen on the taste of turkey, and the birds are much too large for two people. We used to dutifully buy a Norfolk Bronze, struggle with the leftovers, and feel terribly guilty at the amount we threw away, before realising we didn't have to have a turkey. People have suggested duck, or beef, or goose, or pheasant, or a turkey crown, but you can't have cranberry sauce with beef, and I couldn't be bothered to track down a turkey crown that was guaranteed free range. And anyway, we like chicken more than turkey, while the SA doesn't like game. I might volunteer to cook a duck, one of these days, and see if the SA finds it too fatty when it's done properly, but I'm not messing around with that for Christmas lunch.
The funeral went off OK. The church was almost full, and the village hall afterwards, and everybody rose to the occasion. The widow was marvellously composed, their daughter who gave one of the addresses had mastered the art of talking and crying simultaneously, there was an impressive turnout of classic cars, and some mourners had battled through very difficult journeys just to get there, given the storms and travel chaos. It's a small world. I met one of my father's cousin's friends at the refreshments afterwards, but she hadn't heard any more than I had about how he was doing.
I am afraid the prospect of going to the funeral spoiled my concentration yesterday morning, as when I looked at yesterday's blog entry in the afternoon I saw I'd muffed the headline. It should of course have read nine lessons and carols, not lessons and lessons. In best Guardian style this article has now been amended.
Tuesday, 24 December 2013
nine lessons and carols and a funeral
It's Christmas Eve. Time for the final stage of the ritual preparations. On Christmas Eve morning, the Systems Administrator finally decorates the mantel piece with holly and ivy. The birds have not generally left us many holly berries by now, but rose hips make a colourful substitute, and the Malus 'Red Sentinel' is laden with small, bright red apples and won't miss a few twigs. The SA is very clear that this cannot be done before Christmas Eve. The tree is allowed to come in earlier, but that's a Germanic import. The SA's mother was Welsh, and was strict on such matters. You must not bring ivy into the house before Christmas Eve, and you must never give a knife. If somebody does give you one (I suppose nowadays it might be a pruning knife, or a set of chef's knives, or a multi-bladed Swiss army pocket knife) you must pay them a penny for it.
The prohibition on putting decorations up too early extends to the flashing fairy lights that the SA will run up the bannisters, but not until today. I don't suppose ancient Welsh custom and superstition had anything to say on the subject of LEDs, but they are shrouded in ivy as well. Which looks very pretty and hides the wires. One thing we do have lots of is ivy. There is a reason why Christmas decorations are traditionally red and green, which is that that's what's growing outside for the picking.
At three I shall listen to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. Even when I worked in London, the office generally packed up by noon, and if I was lucky with the trains I could still get home just in time for it. I like the music, and although I lapsed as an Anglican before even making it as far as confirmation, I like the readings. I like the reassuring sameness of it, the way the representatives of the townsfolk and of the college get their turn, the being told a story I've heard a lot of times before. Sitting by the fire, looking at our giant decorated Ent, with the holly and ivy on the mantelpiece, and the bannisters twinkling manically, that feels like the heart of Christmas. On Christmas Day itself, once you've unwrapped the presents and eaten the lunch, you feel the whole thing has peaked before the day is over.
But before then, I have to go to a funeral. A friend's husband died, twelve days ago, and their church has found them a date this side of Christmas for the funeral, which is today. Twelve noon. I feel terribly for her, and their children (by now adults). As I wrote before, to lose anyone is bad, but to do it at this time of the year must be even worse. She and her children will have their memories of Christmas Eve, and whatever it was they did together as a family, and putting out their Christmas stockings, and opening them, and now it will always be the day of their father's funeral, and the anniversary will come at a time just when you are expected to be especially jolly and sociable.
I didn't know her husband terribly well. She and I met through beekeeping, and found we had many other tastes and interests in common, so struck up a friendship outside the beekeeping association. I met him to chat to at various beekeeping events over the years, teas and barbecues, and at the annual agricultural show, and once a large group of us went for supper in a country pub, and he told an extremely funny story about finding out that one of their pet cats and dogs had let a live rat loose in their kitchen, which had taken up residence above their electric grill, whereupon he went into the hall to fetch his grandfather's sword to despatch it. He was the sort of faintly posh person who regarded it as entirely normal to keep his grandfather's sword in the hall.
I remember him smiling often, an amiable smile as if the world was a very entertaining place, which gave him an air of relaxed alertness. He liked classic cars, and was clever at making and mending things. By profession he was a maritime lawyer, though it wasn't something he talked about, at least at beekeeping meetings, and I only found out when my friend told me that he had checked through the terms and conditions of our Thames barge birdwatching trip, and didn't think much of them. I got the impression he had his own wide circle of friends, and was a very popular man. They seemed a happy and extremely well-matched couple, and I should think she will miss him dreadfully.
He'd been ill for years, one of those drawn-out illnesses where a bone marrow transplant bought a few years respite, then the creeping onset of tiredness and other symptoms signalled a relapse. Then followed bouts of chemotherapy so fierce he wasn't strong enough to complete them. His funeral will be in his village church, followed by refreshments in the village hall. I have never been to a funeral in a church before, but have been to the village hall quite a few times, for poultry shows, to my one and only attempt at Zumba, and a couple of WI meetings where I've been the star turn, talking about the woodland charity. Now I'm going there for funeral baked meats. It is all desperately sad.
The prohibition on putting decorations up too early extends to the flashing fairy lights that the SA will run up the bannisters, but not until today. I don't suppose ancient Welsh custom and superstition had anything to say on the subject of LEDs, but they are shrouded in ivy as well. Which looks very pretty and hides the wires. One thing we do have lots of is ivy. There is a reason why Christmas decorations are traditionally red and green, which is that that's what's growing outside for the picking.
At three I shall listen to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. Even when I worked in London, the office generally packed up by noon, and if I was lucky with the trains I could still get home just in time for it. I like the music, and although I lapsed as an Anglican before even making it as far as confirmation, I like the readings. I like the reassuring sameness of it, the way the representatives of the townsfolk and of the college get their turn, the being told a story I've heard a lot of times before. Sitting by the fire, looking at our giant decorated Ent, with the holly and ivy on the mantelpiece, and the bannisters twinkling manically, that feels like the heart of Christmas. On Christmas Day itself, once you've unwrapped the presents and eaten the lunch, you feel the whole thing has peaked before the day is over.
But before then, I have to go to a funeral. A friend's husband died, twelve days ago, and their church has found them a date this side of Christmas for the funeral, which is today. Twelve noon. I feel terribly for her, and their children (by now adults). As I wrote before, to lose anyone is bad, but to do it at this time of the year must be even worse. She and her children will have their memories of Christmas Eve, and whatever it was they did together as a family, and putting out their Christmas stockings, and opening them, and now it will always be the day of their father's funeral, and the anniversary will come at a time just when you are expected to be especially jolly and sociable.
I didn't know her husband terribly well. She and I met through beekeeping, and found we had many other tastes and interests in common, so struck up a friendship outside the beekeeping association. I met him to chat to at various beekeeping events over the years, teas and barbecues, and at the annual agricultural show, and once a large group of us went for supper in a country pub, and he told an extremely funny story about finding out that one of their pet cats and dogs had let a live rat loose in their kitchen, which had taken up residence above their electric grill, whereupon he went into the hall to fetch his grandfather's sword to despatch it. He was the sort of faintly posh person who regarded it as entirely normal to keep his grandfather's sword in the hall.
I remember him smiling often, an amiable smile as if the world was a very entertaining place, which gave him an air of relaxed alertness. He liked classic cars, and was clever at making and mending things. By profession he was a maritime lawyer, though it wasn't something he talked about, at least at beekeeping meetings, and I only found out when my friend told me that he had checked through the terms and conditions of our Thames barge birdwatching trip, and didn't think much of them. I got the impression he had his own wide circle of friends, and was a very popular man. They seemed a happy and extremely well-matched couple, and I should think she will miss him dreadfully.
He'd been ill for years, one of those drawn-out illnesses where a bone marrow transplant bought a few years respite, then the creeping onset of tiredness and other symptoms signalled a relapse. Then followed bouts of chemotherapy so fierce he wasn't strong enough to complete them. His funeral will be in his village church, followed by refreshments in the village hall. I have never been to a funeral in a church before, but have been to the village hall quite a few times, for poultry shows, to my one and only attempt at Zumba, and a couple of WI meetings where I've been the star turn, talking about the woodland charity. Now I'm going there for funeral baked meats. It is all desperately sad.
Monday, 23 December 2013
between meals
The lunch went off pretty smoothly. The miniature sausages were a sad disappointment, refusing to turn brown and sizzle even in a hot oven, they merely exuded juice while remaining resolutely grey and flabby. We decided to leave them out, given that there seemed to be plenty of other food. Wrapped in tinfoil and stashed away in the fridge, the Systems Administrator will try using them tonight as the basis of a toad-in-the-hole. The Thai spicy meatballs were a hit, and the cheese souffles were pronounced very cheesy. The miniature filo tarts were the least popular, which is fair enough, as they came out of the oven mysteriously damp, and looked it. The apple strudel tasted great, and after I'd first let the top catch and then failed to decant it from the tinfoil tray in one piece, it looked so knackered it could easily have been homemade. Kate Reddy distressing shop-bought mince pies with a rolling pin had nothing on it.
The children behaved absolutely impeccably. They sat down to eat their lunch, talked to the grown-ups, played with the cats, and spontaneously offered to help clear the table, then asked if they could go and play in the garden. I told them not to drown themselves in the pond and to keep out of the wood, because there was an unsafe fallen tree, and my mother kept a discreet eye on them under the guise of taking a cigarette break, but they were fine. They seemed happy running about, decorating the SA's secret deck with twigs, and waving a long bamboo pruning outside the dining room window.
It is not a particularly dangerous garden, but neither is it designed to be safe for children, and I can think of several ways a determined child could come unstuck. It would be very easy to climb on to the conservatory roof, for starters, since the conservatory is fifteen feet downhill of the house, putting the top of its roof at the same level as the ground floor window sills. I don't know whether the polycarbonate sandwich is up to carrying the weight of a ten year, but if it isn't, it's a good thirteen foot drop on to concrete below. I think my brother's wife was more worried about what damage the children might do to the garden, but I assured her that really, at this time of the year, unless they were armed with pruning equipment there was very little they could do.
The cats behaved beautifully as well. Our Ginger is always good with visitors, to the point where he has been mentioned by name in several Christmas cards. Even my London German friend's father asks after Our Ginger. However, the big anxious tabby normally vanishes as soon as visitors arrive, and yesterday he allowed himself to be stroked and looked positively amiable, as far as a yard long stone of dribbling,bony Maine Coon with a hardwired expression of acute anxiety ever can look amiable. My younger niece said without conviction that he had tried to eat her hand, but I promised her that he hadn't, and that he must like her since he normally ran away from visitors.
Only the fat indignant tabby refused to play. She disappeared from her box in the hall as soon as anyone other than us came in through the front door, as is her custom. Normally she reappears within a quarter of an hour of visitors leaving, but yesterday there was still no sign of her after several hours. She didn't seem to be anywhere in the study, or answer when called from the doorstep, and a quick inspection of places she might conceivably have got locked in revealed nothing. Finally, at gone seven, she flounced through the hall, paused to glare at me, and vanished for the rest of the evening. She must have been hiding and sulking in the study until then, before deciding to make a break for it. In the morning there she was, sitting by the food dishes, still looking faintly disapproving. We can't not ask people round because it upsets the cat.
This morning I did The Big Shop. The SA was initially intent on going, as cook and officer in charge of food shopping, but I volunteered. This was partly out of altruism, since the SA doesn't want to be pushing a laden trolley around with a cracked rib. It was also a calculated plan to preserve domestic harmony. I am terribly fussy about what we have, much more so than the SA, and thought that if anyone didn't get the right stuffing, or enough of the right kind of cheese, or the wrong kind of biscuits, it had better be me, then there would be no recriminations as I'd have only myself to blame. There was a year I managed to pick up red currant jelly instead of cranberry sauce, and the SA was remarkably forbearing about it, which is partly due to the SA's sweet nature, and also because the SA doesn't especially like cranberry sauce. I am fanatically keen on everything being exactly the same as it always is. The Carr's water biscuits must be plain, and on no account have added black pepper, though this year I am lobbying for the addition of a roast onion along with the sprouts and carrots. I did pretty well, except that I had to settle for chestnut mushrooms for Christmas eve supper instead of the large portobello ones, and when I got home the SA commented that I had bought politically incorrect dates. I didn't notice they were from the Israeli occupied West Bank. Oh dear.
The children behaved absolutely impeccably. They sat down to eat their lunch, talked to the grown-ups, played with the cats, and spontaneously offered to help clear the table, then asked if they could go and play in the garden. I told them not to drown themselves in the pond and to keep out of the wood, because there was an unsafe fallen tree, and my mother kept a discreet eye on them under the guise of taking a cigarette break, but they were fine. They seemed happy running about, decorating the SA's secret deck with twigs, and waving a long bamboo pruning outside the dining room window.
It is not a particularly dangerous garden, but neither is it designed to be safe for children, and I can think of several ways a determined child could come unstuck. It would be very easy to climb on to the conservatory roof, for starters, since the conservatory is fifteen feet downhill of the house, putting the top of its roof at the same level as the ground floor window sills. I don't know whether the polycarbonate sandwich is up to carrying the weight of a ten year, but if it isn't, it's a good thirteen foot drop on to concrete below. I think my brother's wife was more worried about what damage the children might do to the garden, but I assured her that really, at this time of the year, unless they were armed with pruning equipment there was very little they could do.
The cats behaved beautifully as well. Our Ginger is always good with visitors, to the point where he has been mentioned by name in several Christmas cards. Even my London German friend's father asks after Our Ginger. However, the big anxious tabby normally vanishes as soon as visitors arrive, and yesterday he allowed himself to be stroked and looked positively amiable, as far as a yard long stone of dribbling,bony Maine Coon with a hardwired expression of acute anxiety ever can look amiable. My younger niece said without conviction that he had tried to eat her hand, but I promised her that he hadn't, and that he must like her since he normally ran away from visitors.
Only the fat indignant tabby refused to play. She disappeared from her box in the hall as soon as anyone other than us came in through the front door, as is her custom. Normally she reappears within a quarter of an hour of visitors leaving, but yesterday there was still no sign of her after several hours. She didn't seem to be anywhere in the study, or answer when called from the doorstep, and a quick inspection of places she might conceivably have got locked in revealed nothing. Finally, at gone seven, she flounced through the hall, paused to glare at me, and vanished for the rest of the evening. She must have been hiding and sulking in the study until then, before deciding to make a break for it. In the morning there she was, sitting by the food dishes, still looking faintly disapproving. We can't not ask people round because it upsets the cat.
This morning I did The Big Shop. The SA was initially intent on going, as cook and officer in charge of food shopping, but I volunteered. This was partly out of altruism, since the SA doesn't want to be pushing a laden trolley around with a cracked rib. It was also a calculated plan to preserve domestic harmony. I am terribly fussy about what we have, much more so than the SA, and thought that if anyone didn't get the right stuffing, or enough of the right kind of cheese, or the wrong kind of biscuits, it had better be me, then there would be no recriminations as I'd have only myself to blame. There was a year I managed to pick up red currant jelly instead of cranberry sauce, and the SA was remarkably forbearing about it, which is partly due to the SA's sweet nature, and also because the SA doesn't especially like cranberry sauce. I am fanatically keen on everything being exactly the same as it always is. The Carr's water biscuits must be plain, and on no account have added black pepper, though this year I am lobbying for the addition of a roast onion along with the sprouts and carrots. I did pretty well, except that I had to settle for chestnut mushrooms for Christmas eve supper instead of the large portobello ones, and when I got home the SA commented that I had bought politically incorrect dates. I didn't notice they were from the Israeli occupied West Bank. Oh dear.
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