spring surge

The promised rain did not materialise, meaning that fairly soon I am going to have to get the hose out and water the railway garden.  Instead it is grey, heavy and humid, with an odd damp chill in the air like the onset of sea fog, except that it is too early in the year and not hot enough for sea fog.  It has given the Systems Administrator a headache.

The garden is in full growth now.  As Stephen Lacey writes in one of his books, he aims for there to be no bare soil in his borders by June unless something has died.  Ours are getting to the point where I can see where the gaps are.  I am cautious about bothering to plant some of them until the rabbit situation is under control, but after watching the kittens rampaging about the study today I think that problem is in hand.

Unfortunately with the surge in spring growth come the shoots of horsetail.  The edges need trimming as well, but I am leaving both of them until after Chelsea to conserve my energies. Ignore any garden articles telling you that you can get rid of horsetail by covering it with black plastic for a year.  You can't, but equally it isn't a reason to move house the moment you discover it.  It is not a strongly competitive plant, and the leaves don't make an appearance until May so you can enjoy early displays of small bulbs and suchlike undisturbed.  The trick after that is to cram your borders with leafy and not too low growing stuff, which will hide that year's regrowth once you've pulled the top of the horsetail off once or twice.  It is a nuisance, but not the end of gardening as we know it.

Poor old late flowering Selinum wallichianum is being overshadowed by the various Thalictrum, which flower much earlier and come into growth correspondingly sooner in the year.  The Selinum is a member of the carrot family.  I first saw it in full bloom in September at Trentham outside Stoke-on-Trent, covered in insects, and luckily found a gardener who could tell me what it was.  In great enthusiasm I bought one from Beth Chatto, and then two more, and slotted them into gaps in the front of the bog bed, but I hadn't thought about when in the year it would do its growing.  As it is the Thalictrum gets a head start, and the Selinum is left with no air space.  There is now a gap left when I cleared out the old remains of a rampant iris that was ever moving on to pastures new, so I could get a couple more Selinum to go in the space.  And perhaps I should try cutting down the Thalictrum as soon as it has finished flowering.  It doesn't make a particularly attractive or durable winter skeleton, but I don't know if it would respond to an early post flowering chop by making some nice new basal leaves, like Alchemilla mollis or many of the hardy geraniums do.  There is an easy way to find out.

The rabbits have been eating my asters, despite my most recent efforts with Grazers.  I am cross, but I look at the athletic kitten asleep on the window sill and console myself that they are going to have another think coming, very soon.

kittens

In the past couple of days the kittens have started to venture on to my lap.  This is a big step for them, metaphorically speaking.  It took them a couple of days to stop hiding behind the furniture when we came into the room, then they started to look at us from a safe distance but were wary if we made any movement towards them, though we scooped them up when we could to initiate some physical contact.

Then they started to sit near us, and would allow themselves to be stroked if they were feeling brave.  Mr Fluffy, who hissed at us each time we touched him or tried to touch him in the early days of our acquaintance, discovered that he loved being stroked, and was soon roaring his approval, laying his tiny fluffy body out on the arm of my chair.  One of his brothers, who is the most energetic of the three, also grew to like human touch and would purr if I stroked him as he lay on the by now rather battered footstool at my knees.  The third, most athletic and aloof of the trio, consented to be stroked at times, and even came and hovered at the edge of the love fest if I were making a fuss of his brothers, but I could see that he still didn't get it.

Now Mr Fluffy and the energetic kitten are starting to make the first move, clambering slightly gingerly into my lap, where Mr Fluffy is keen on nuzzling my fleece before chewing the tag on the zip.  His brother likes to nibble my clothes, and my fingers, though not painfully.  They have also started walking across my laptop, which is problematic.  I don't want to rebuff their advances at this stage, but in the long run I don't want them in the habit of stomping on my keyboard.  As it is one of them has managed to open the Chrome help page, which I never knew existed, and to open an unfamiliar search page which I think must have been something to do with Microsoft.  The term entered in the search box was Everything.

The aloof and athletic brother has mastered the art of jumping straight up to the window sill in a single bound.  I haven't seen either of the others do that yet, they still take a circuitous route via the stool and the armchairs.  He is not brave enough to settle in my lap, but has walked across it a few times, and across the keyboard, as if en route from desk to window ledge.  This morning he lingered for a few seconds before continuing on his way.  I don't think he is ever going to be a cuddly cat, but he may come to like us on his own terms.

cats and rabbits

Our Ginger has given up with baby rabbits, and switched to mice.  This is disappointing, since there is a whole family of juvenile bunnies frolicking in the rose beds.  The Systems Administrator took a couple of shots at them from the bedroom window, but without success.  I am not happy about the rabbits, but with any luck the cavalry is on the way in the form of the least cuddly kitten, an athletic creature who has already mastered the art of slinking with his body close to the ground. He and the most energetic, outgoing one are racing about the room taking it in turns to carry a screwed up piece of paper with a string tail clamped in their jaws.  I might have to make them a new one soon.  I am not sure whether Mr Fluffy is a born hunter but that's fine, he can sit in my lap and purr while the action heroes are patrolling the garden.

I have been planting out low growing Sedum in the railway garden, raised from cuttings.  I shall take more cuttings as soon as there's room in the greenhouse, when I've shifted the tender stuff out. The Sedum album 'Coral Carpet' which I rooted in an eight by six divided tray last year and planted out around the model buildings as tiny plugs has taken and is spreading well in its unpromising position on a raised bank of pure sand in semi shade.  The SA mounded the earth up in places around the railway to make the topography more interesting.  It does, but the soil in the front garden gets unbelievably dry to begin with.  Heap it up and add root competition from a field hedge for good measure and I was really not sure what could be expected to grow.  I didn't know whether the Sedum would cope with the shade of the hedge, but it doesn't seem to mind.  And rabbits don't seem to eat it.

Box is good for unpromising dry shady spots, though now that box blight is a problem you might prefer not to depend on it.  It was looking very yellow and dreadful, and the SA muttered that it was no good there, but the SA had not weeded, fed or watered it since planting it.  Between us we cleared the grass from around it last year, and I dosed it with fish, blood and bone.  This year it is looking much happier.

The heathers I planted last year are not looking so good.  They are not turning brown and dying, but nor are they growing.  They are going to need watering this summer, to try and get them going. If they can get their roots down they'll be fine.  If not they will die and we'll have to think of something else.  Rabbits don't seem to eat heather either.

Nor do they eat Arenaria montana, which is growing prodigiously well.  The clue's in the common name, mountain sandwort.  It likes sand.  It is seeding itself around so generously that if I were trying to grow fine alpines I would be terrified of it.  Since I am mainly trying to find anything reasonably pretty and not too large to cover the area of the railway garden to reduce the amount of weeding I am on balance grateful to the sandwort.  It has narrow, dark green leaves, and single white flowers that are out now.  It makes quite dense patches once it gets established, and is a useful groundcover if you happen to have a large area of sandy soil and want something low growing.

Rabbits do eat pinks, which is particularly annoying since I put in a lot of smart named varieties from Whetmans last year.  Their growing instructions said to cut the pinks back in the autumn, which the rabbits did for me, but I don't want them continuing into the spring.  Rabbits also eat eat prostrate Veronica, and they love Iberis sempervirens.  And Pulsatilla.  And dwarf Penstemon. Things will start to change from July, though, when we unleash the kittens of mass destruction.

the herb pot project phase two

The robins have fledged in the pot shed.  I had to go in this morning because I needed a pot, and there was a little brown bird in the nest, no red breast, which must have been a youngster.  When I went back in the afternoon for another pot the nest was empty, but a scruffy brown bird suddenly shot erratically up the shed.  I don't know how many babies the parents brought off successfully, since I've rather left them to it since discovering they were in there.  Perhaps it was only the one. They are messy nest builders, robins.  There were piles of leaves and vegetation in three other pots besides the one they finally nested in, and the Systems Administrator said there was an abandoned half-built nest in the workshop.

Meanwhile the rabbits have eaten the hollyhocks by the blue shed, or at least something has grazed most of them down to leafless stalks, and I think it was rabbits.  A few other things in the area had been eaten down as well, and I'm not aware of a hollyhock stripping caterpillar.  I don't mind as much as I would have now that it's only a couple of months to go until the new ant-rabbit squad will be out on patrol.  I'm still cross, though.  I like hollyhocks and I grew those plants from seed.  It's a lot of effort to go to waste, with the sowing, the pricking out, the growing on and the planting, only for a pest to munch through the lot.

My Lewisia pot project is finally planted up.  I ran into a snag, since having ordered enough plants for two pots, I discovered when I came to plant up the second that I could not physically get the Lewisia leaves through the holes in the pot.  It is a very arty pot, bought years ago from a pottery in Manningtree, but instead of removing a disc of clay from each planting hole the potter had cut a slit, and pushed the lower edge of the cut outwards to make a lip, and the upper edge inwards. The arcs of clay protruding into the pot made it impossible to bring the crown of the plants flush with the inside surface of the pot.  Wedging the root balls at an angle sloping away from the hole might have worked for a trailing plant, but was no good for a rosette former like a Lewisia.  I broke a few of the fleshy leaves of one plant experimenting, before realising I would have to pull the plants half to bits to plant them through the sides of that pot.

I decided the answer was to buy another pot, though the project was beginning to balloon out of hand because I'd then have three herb pots.  Herb pots are not so much in fashion as they were twenty years ago, but I hoped I'd find one lurking in a corner at one of the local nurseries.  I struck lucky at my first stop, the Clacton Garden Centre, finding a nicely shaped pot with only four holes in the sides, but a wide enough top for the remaining five plants.  It looked as though it had been in stock for virtually twenty years, price label long dropped off, a patina of lichen and a thick layer of pine needles inside.  I resigned myself to a wait at the till, or alternatively to trying a bit of haggling and offering ten quid for it.

The man who served me said he would go and check the price, and disappeared.  His colleague, seeing me standing there after a couple of minutes, asked if I needed help and I explained that his colleague had gone to look up the price of the antique pot.  The price, when the first chap returned, was £9.99, remarkably close to my guess of a tenner (unless he couldn't find a price in the office but thought that £9.99 sounded less made up than ten pounds).  I remarked that £9.99 had been worth more in those days, and bore my ready weathered trophy away in triumph.  It is a long time since you could buy a thirty centimetre by thirty centimetre herb pot for under ten pounds.

It looks well planted up, and I have high hopes of the scheme.  It was noticeable, though, how much growth the first lot of plants had made since being moved into a bigger container compared to the second lot which had sat in their seven centimetre pots on the hot concrete, even though they'd been kept regularly watered.  The latter were flowering more, which I take to be a sign of stress.  I will report in due course how they did next.  Meanwhile I have a spare herb pot sitting under the greenhouse bench.  The moral of the story is to inspect your materials more carefully before starting these projects.  I blame the robins, discouraging me from rummaging freely in the pot shed.

pelargoniums

My order of rooted pelargonium cuttings arrived from Fibrex Nurseries this morning.  It's that time of year, when boxes of little newly raised plants are being sent all over the country.  I knew to expect the pelargoniums this week because they put on their website that orders would be sent out in the week starting 16 May.  The cut-off date for ordering for spring delivery from the full range of the catalogue was mid April, and I made sure to get my order in before then.  Not very long before, admittedly.

I love pelargoniums.  To be clear, I am talking about the tender, semi-shrubby plants originally from southern Africa, not the hardy garden geraniums, though most of the time I call them geraniums like almost everybody does.  I have liked them since childhood.  I like handling them.  I like their smell, and the good natured way that most will root so easily from cuttings.  I find a meditative satisfaction in picking off the old leaves, the way they come away neatly from the stalk and the plant looks so tidy afterwards.  I like the colours the flowers come in, reds, purples, pinks and whites, and the range of flower sizes and shapes from gigantic, ruffled formal affairs straight out of a Victorian conservatory to tiny, wild five pointed stars.

I have a motley collection, mostly bought in garden centres, some souvenirs of garden visits, some gifts, a few survivors from previous forays into the world of the specialist geranium nursery, some with names and some without.  They have to be over-wintered frost free, and some types seem to cope better with life in my greenhouse over the winter than others.  Scented leaf varieties do pretty well, as do those Uniques I've tried, which are similar to the scented leaf brigade but with better flowers and less interesting leaves.  Regals have been a struggle.  I've just ordered two, and am going to try them this time in the conservatory.  The Fibrex website says they don't require full sun, unlike most pelargoniums, and perhaps they will like winter better in there than in the greenhouse.

I used to be keen on the ivy leafed sort, as grown trailing down the front of Swiss chalets, but they tend to become overwhelmed in the muddle of pots by our pond, and overwinter badly.  I went through a phase of loving the rosebud sort with their double flowers, but now find myself more drawn to the tiny flowered species and species hybrids.  I have got slightly bored of the bright scarlet zonals as stocked in a garden centre near you, though I am nursing along a rather poorly specimen of the old variety 'Paul Crampel' which has been very reluctant to make roots, in the hope that it will yield some cuttings and I can start again.  I have a couple of cheerful variegated types which out of flower I am apt to muddle up,  In flower it's obvious which is which, since 'Wilhelm Langguth' has fat, bright cherry coloured blooms while 'Frank Headley' is starrier and salmon pink.

Fibrex are first class.  They are old pros who have been exhibiting at Chelsea for years.  Indeed, they hold a Royal Warrant, suppliers of pelargoniums to HRH The Prince of Wales.  I ordered six plants and got the six I'd chosen, no problem.  They were lovely bushy plants for all that they were only recently rooted cuttings.  I am just psyching myself up to trudge out through the rain to the greenhouse and pot them up.  I would recommend Fibrex Nurseries to anybody.  You will not be disappointed.

not quite how to do mail order

My order of violas arrived today.  They were dispatched yesterday, so I knew to expect them today or tomorrow, and was pleased that they came fairly early this morning, partly because it meant I no longer had to wait around for the van, and because it meant they hadn't spent too long in transit.  And the weather hasn't been too hot in the past couple of days, and the delivery company had kept the box the right way up and not squashed it.  So far, so good.

I ordered the plants on 6 March.  The suppliers, an earnest young couple who met at Wisley and featured on last year's Chelsea TV coverage, had bought out an established viola grower.  They did a beautiful stand at Chelsea, and their website looked pretty good, with full online ordering and payment, nice photos, and as far as I recall a detail I hadn't seen before, which was that items you'd added to your basket were flagged on the main catalogue pages, so that as you browsed through you could see what you'd already chosen without having to go to the shopping basket.  I was impressed.

A month went by.  The website said they only dispatched plants between late March and late June, so I wasn't too bothered by the delay.  Once it got to the first week of April I checked on their website to see what it said about sending orders out, and was rather puzzled to find my basket still live on the screen four weeks after I'd ordered, or at any rate paid, only by now several items in it were marked as out of stock.  Puzzled, I emailed to check that the order was in hand and ask when they might be sending the plants, adding that I hadn't liked to hassle them as I knew they were only a small outfit.  Their reply could be interpreted as sounding either harassed or ratty, depending on whether you were feeling charitable or entitled.  They were sending orders out as fast as they could and as a rough guide orders received after Christmas would be sent out in April or May, in the order in which they were placed.  I was left none the wiser as to why my basket still contained items, or how much of what I'd ordered was by now out of stock, and decided to leave it and see what turned up.

On Sunday lunchtime somebody rang to say that my order would be dispatched tomorrow.  I expressed my pleasure.  Some of the items were out of stock and they would have to substitute with something similar, was that all right?  Her tones suggested that I was supposed to say that of course it was all right, much as I might if a friend trying to book concert tickets couldn't get us in to the event we most wanted to see and was proposing we go to something else instead.  I said that I would take the substitutes given that all the violas had been pretty and I preferred to spread the cost of delivery over a reasonable number of plants, though obviously I'd have preferred to have the varieties I'd chosen and not something different.  She began to explain how some of the stock plants hadn't come back as strongly as hoped and so they hadn't been able to take as many cuttings as anticipated, and how difficult it was knowing how many plants to produce.  I thanked her for her call and returned to cooking the lunch.

I'd ordered ten plants, all different, since I thought I'd try my own hand at cuttings to bulk up those Viola cornuta varieties I planned to use in the borders.  The box, when unpacked, contained ten pots, all nice healthy plants, well grown, bushy, green, mildly squashed from being backed in two layers on their sides but with no structural damage.  Stood in the fresh air out of hot sun for a day I was sure they'd be fine.  Five of the ten were not what I'd ordered.  I was mildly disappointed. A couple of substitutions, fair enough, but half the entire order?  Maybe they should only put plants up on their website once they had cuttings rooted in and growing on.  As it was they almost might as well offer five violas of our choosing, all different.  Or if they were going to amend orders to that extent perhaps it would be graceful to slip in an extra free plant, by way of apology.

I settled down with my laptop and a cup of tea to find out what the substitute varieties looked like, and found that most of them didn't seem to be on the viola firm's website.  I think they must have taken down varieties they weren't going to have again this season, as I couldn't find all my originally ordered plants there either.  That would save potential customers the disappointment of preferring varieties they couldn't have, but sent me surfing the net in search of photos and descriptions, which quickly led me to a Scottish nursery offering a pretty wide range of violas, even if they didn't show at Chelsea.  I bookmarked the site for future reference.

So was it a good retail experience?  Well, yes and no.  They look good healthy plants, and the substitutes all sound close enough that I'll probably like them.  But half of them weren't what I ordered, I had to pay for them six weeks ago, and I didn't feel I'd been especially well kept informed in the meantime.  Would I use them again?  Yes if they had varieties I wanted, though I'd order in autumn for spring delivery with a firm note that I did not want substitutes.  Do I feel any sense of customer loyalty?  None whatsoever.

pets in brief

Once again Blogger has eaten my entire post, just as I thought I'd finished.  The whole body of the text was highlighted blue, and then vanished except for the last two letters I'd typed.  Once again I have no idea what combination of keys I touched to make that happen.  The Systems Administrator suggested I could write it in Word and then copy and past, which indeed I could, but it is a faff.

I don't have the heart to repeat myself so all I will say is that the kittens are growing.  We seem to have a cheerful confident one, a cute fluffy one, and a cool one, like a boy band.  But we must be careful not to label them at a young age.  Perhaps Mr Fluffy will grow into a really elegant cat, and his current habit of bouncing off the furniture is just a phase.

Our Ginger still doesn't like them.  He went and hid under the stairs this morning.

The Systems Administrator is the old lady Maran's new best friend.  She followed the SA all the way up the garden and back to the chicken house when it was time to go in.

pets old and new

A watched pot never boils.  And an unwatched pot will surely boil over, especially if it's split peas. I am having another go at making pease pudding, this time having bought some bacon to give it that authentic hammy flavour in the absence of a hock bone.  After sending rivulets of scummy water down the outside of the pan several times I am now sitting at the kitchen table to keep an eye on the peas while they simmer, to make sure they are actually simmering without boiling themselves dry and covering the Aga in white scum in the process.  In Norway they could get a whole television episode out of that idea, watching dried peas cook.  I don't know what it is about split dried pulses that they are so reluctant to boil gently.  Lentils are almost as bad.

We have been trying to introduce Our Ginger to the concept of kittens, carrying him in to the study so that he can see them and then telling him how wonderful he is until he grumbles so much that we have to retreat, then bribing him with cat treats and long lap sessions to try and make kitten contact a rewarding experience overall.  He has not yet managed longer than two minutes, and he hisses at them very rudely.  They stare up at him in wonderment and don't seem to mind him hissing.  At least so far he has consented to be placated after each encounter and not stormed off into the garden in a dudgeon, but there is a way to go yet.

The kittens have grown amazingly in the nine days we've had them.  They still have pointy kittenish tails, but are unmistakably on the way to being young cats.  They are beginning to enjoy being stroked, as long as they are approached at the right moment when they have exhausted themselves by galloping round and round the room and wrestling each other, and not while they are trying to play.  Indeed, they have all purred in response at some point.  They are all very curious about us, sniffing our feet and legs if we sit down and staring up at our faces.  Compared to day one when two of them managed to disappear inside the bookcases, and day two which they spent mostly hiding behind the furniture, they have made good progress and are on the way to becoming pets rather than semi-wild animals that have somehow got penned up inside somebody's house.

One of their current crazes is to sleep in my filing rack, one in the bottom tray and two in the top. There was a crash from the study yesterday, and when I went to investigate I found they had managed to knock the Systems Administrator's filing basket to the ground.  They have begun to unpick the seat of my bamboo and seagrass footstool as well.  Pets.  Who'd be without them?

Addendum  The last remaining Speckeldy hen has gone broody.  This leaves the old lady Maran, who has outlived all but one of the next generation of chickens that were bought partly to keep her company, with nobody to flock with.  A companion who insists on sitting in the egg box in the dark all day is not much of a companion at all.  We ordered some more Speckeldies a few weeks ago, before the current one went broody, since hens are social animals and you don't want to risk being left with just one.  The new hens are due to arrive on Wednesday, and I don't suppose the old lady will think much of them in the short run, any more than she did of the last lot.  She got used to them in time.

late post

This will be a very short blog post because there are only ten minutes left to write it.  We have been watching the Eurovision Song Contest, and before that I was cooking the supper.  I was rather touched and amazed that the Ukraine won.  Depending on how world events go then staging the competition in Kiev next year could be tricky.  The Systems Administrator suggested that they might have to get Lyse Douset to present it.

Today I heard the first cuckoo of spring.

a visit to Coggeshall

This afternoon I went with my parents to see Coggeshall Abbey.  I hadn't known there was an abbey at Coggeshall, and in truth there isn't much of it left, and that's in private ownership, but the owner had kindly agreed to lay on a tour plus tea for the Friends of the Minories.  It was not a coach trip, though, but a get-yourself-there outing, and since my parents don't drive I supplied the wheels and they the tickets.

We called at the National Trust's Grange Barn first.  I hadn't known that existed either, having not read my National Trust membership guide carefully enough, but when I spotted it on Google maps while trying to find the abbey it looked like a handy place to stop.  Given the unpredictable nature of Colchester's traffic and the A12 it's always a good idea to aim to be early to events with a fixed starting time, to reduce the chance of being late, and I thought we could look at the barn if the traffic was running freely, and would have a margin for delay before the main event if it wasn't.

It is a very fine barn.  It was almost lost in the 1970s when that sort of thing wasn't so highly regarded and a change of ownership saw it allowed to fall into dereliction with a view to housebuilding.  The locals rallied round, permission to demolish the barn or build houses was withheld, the locals got it rebuilt and in the 1980s transferred it to the National Trust.  The majority of the timbers are still the originals, but the roof tiles came from a London council estate that was being demolished and happened to have tiles that were a good match, stylistically speaking.  I enjoyed looking at the barn, and was grateful to the National Trust volunteers who cheerfully agreed we could leave the car in their car park, which was nowhere near full, rather than risk parking 'in the lane' at the abbey.

Parking in the lane looked like chaos when we arrived at the abbey and I was very glad not to be taking part, though in fact everybody had miraculously sorted themselves out by the time we walked back to the barn.  The abbey church is long gone, and all that remains is a cloister house (or it might have been the guest house, the experts are still arguing about it), a short brick built arcade with room above, and the abbot's lodging.  There is some very nice Medieval brickwork including some specials, moulded shaped bricks used for doorways and arches, which the proud owner told us had worn far better than the stonework and was of vastly superior quality to Tudor brickwork.

Part of the original buildings morphed into a farmhouse after the Reformation, and then had the luck to be owned by families who mismanaged their affairs to the extent that they could not afford to improve or update it.  Many pretty Georgian frontages across Essex hide a far earlier building behind them, but not at Coggeshall Abbey.  It is still late Medieval.  The current owners bought the place eighteen years ago, and have been lovingly restoring and patching up the house and buildings ever since.  We were shown a couple of rooms which were almost straight out of Wolf Hall, with panelling and vast, log-eating fireplaces.  There is a pretty garden too, with a fabulous weeping lime, and a fold of the river Blackwater, and a carpenter's workshop housed under yet more medieval beams (plus corrugated roof) with a carpenter who can make or mend anything.  Just downstream was the only Grade I listed watermill in Essex, though that belonged to somebody else and wasn't part of the tour.

Then we had tea in the garden, and my only criticism would be that two hours is longer than a guided tour should last.  People get tired and are ready for their tea and cake.  The organiser murmured that she had not realised the tour would take quite so long, but you see the owner was an enthusiast.  He and his wife have had help from various grant making bodies to try and stick the whole place back together and keep it going, and I'm very grateful that other people have the energy to take on projects like that.  I couldn't face it myself.

storm in a shoe

By now you have probably heard about the London temp who was sent home from her first day at work for not wearing high heels.  I read about it yesterday in The Guardian.  She didn't dispute the right of businesses to have a dress code or the need for reception staff to look neat and businesslike, she just didn't see why in this day and age formal flat shoes wouldn't fit the bill.  Her role included showing visiting clients to their meeting rooms, and she didn't want to have to do that wearing two to four inch heels through a nine hour working day.  And only female staff were expected to undergo this particular discomfort.  Her outsource company employers initially laughed at her, then asked her to go and buy some shoes with heels, then sent her home without pay.

Right is entirely on her side.  Every kind of orthopoedic specialist or podiatrist will tell you that spending long hours in heels over two inches high is not good for people's health.  The strains it puts on the knees, legs and lower back can contribute towards arthritis.  Your feet will probably hurt long before the day is out.  Habitual heel wearing can cause your calf muscles to shrink so that it hurts to wear flats, meaning it will hurt to do any normal activity needing flat shoes, which includes most forms of exercise.  Heels throw your weight forward in the shoe, which is apt to do horrid things to your toes, producing corns, bunions, outer toes permanently twisted over their neighbours.  Some women enjoy wearing heels, some even have the knack of walking in them. They are entirely free to wear them, but nobody should be forced into them five days a week.

The outsource company's dress code is juniorist as well as sexist.  When I worked as a fund manager at a fairly senior level I wore court shoes with the lowest heel I could find, or if I was wearing a trouser suit I might wear flats.  Never, ever did the investment director or head of marketing or anybody else take me aside and say that really for the next client presentation I must buy some taller shoes, or blame a lost pitch on my inadequate one and half inch heels.  When I met Marjorie Scardino or Stephanie Shirley I didn't peer at their feet before deciding whether I should take their business acumen seriously: I listened to what they had to say.  Professional women at a senior level are not required to function as dolly birds, so why should more junior staff be?  The key skills of somebody on reception are to be polite and organised, get visitors' names right and make sure they get to the correct meeting rooms and that their hosts know they are there.  To look after them if there's any kind of glitch or delay to their meeting.  To be nice, vibrant, cheerful, and give a good impression of the firm for which they are the first point of contact for the office visitor.  None, absolutely none of this requires that they sway up and down corridors in shoes they aren't comfortable in.

The rejected temp, having thought about the issue and compared notes with her friends, did something rather wonderful.  In a world where whistle blowers are still as likely to be punished as rewarded she started an online Downing Street petition.  It's still legal in the UK for a company to require female members of staff to wear high heels at work against their will. Dress code laws should be changed so that women have the option to wear flat formal shoes at work, if they wish. Current formal work dress codes are out-dated and sexist. When I signed it last night it was up to over fourteen thousand signatures.  By this morning it had hit sixty thousand. By the time I came in from the garden it had risen above a hundred and ten thousand.  Getting through the hundred thousand mark means that it now has to be debated in Parliament, where if I were a male MP I would be very careful about trying to make any kind of joke on the subject.

Go on, sign the petition.  Let's get it to the million signature mark, and eradicate one little bit of institutionalised sexism.  There are loads more serious issues facing women than their shoes, but progress comes one step at a time.   You will find the link here.

The client company PwC have tried to distance themselves from the row, saying they had not set the dress policy and were not aware of it.  That's not really an excuse since when you outsource something you should either know the details of what is being done on your behalf, or manage to delegate to somebody who is going to do it properly.  But I think their speedy repudiation of the high heels requirement shows which way the wind is blowing.  Time to judge women employees on their ability to do the job, not to conform to a particular stereotype of sexiness while in pain and storing up future health problems.

stage notes

My music society is thinking about buying a lightweight modular stage system.  It's something we've talked about for ages.  The existing stage is extremely strong and very heavy.  It lives in the commune opposite the church, who use it as well in exchange for housing it, and the volunteer who has been in charge of putting it up and taking it down for years has decided that as he enters the second half of his eighties it is all getting too much.

A new stage with components light enough that anybody could handle them seemed a good investment, and brochures were collected and compared.  Ultimately the project failed because none of the stages seemed guaranteed to take the weight of a grand piano.  By no means all of our concerts even feature a piano, but it seemed galling to invest in a stage system we couldn't always use.  We discussed not having a stage, but the audience is used to seeing the musicians at the front of the church, and honestly if you couldn't see them it wouldn't be as much fun, that one step further towards thinking you might as well simply buy the CD and listen at home as many times as you liked instead of going to see them live.  We debated finding alternative venues, but the church is very beautiful and atmospheric and there wasn't anything else quite like it.

Then somebody found that one of the temporary stages on the market could carry a piano, as long as additional boards were used under the legs to spread the weight.  The stage, constructed of steel tube and ply, was certified to take a load of up to 750 kilos per square metre.  A grand piano weighs between 600 and 1,200 pounds, according to Wikipedia.  Provided we used the extra boards and didn't leave the entire weight of the piano bearing down on three small points then the modular stage should be fine with it.  Or at least, that's what the stage manufacturer's brochure said.

Human nature, presented with a new idea, tends to look first for what is wrong with it, and there were a couple of people who did not really believe that the stage could support a piano, or that we would be able to manoeuvre the instrument on and off the stage without it collapsing, but in the end we agreed that we would in principle invest in some new staging, provided that our piano hire company was happy with the concept, and that other local customers would confirm the staging was robust and easy to use.

It was reading the small print of the quote that I realised that small charities were at a disadvantage compared to other kinds of customer.  The cost of a stage large enough to accommodate a string quartet or piano trio was around three thousand pounds, plus VAT.  The manufacturer's standard terms required payment in advance.  If I were spending that much on a piece of equipment I'd put it on my credit card, then if the supplier went bust before I'd received my goods I would probably, after some negotiations with my bank, get my money back.  Small registered charities don't have VISA cards.  I pointed out the theoretical risk to the rest of the committee.  It was probably very slight, but we ought to know that we were running it.

We couldn't see any way round it.  The chairman thought the company had been in business for a long time, and the treasurer said that was the way of the world nowadays.  I asked the Systems Administrator for advice when I got home, since the SA used to keep a beady eye on other people's money moving around for a living, and the SA said that the supplier would not have a client fund account, indeed could not, because they only existed in financial service companies while in an ordinary commercial business all money went into the same pot in the event of failure, to pay off the creditors in their legally specified order.  Larger commercial companies paid to insure against the risk.  Our best bet was to satisfy ourselves as best we could that the supplier was reputable and well established, and to pay as close to their required date as possible so that we were at risk for the shortest possible time.

It seems harsh, though.  Bigger commercial customers can insure against the risk, private buyers can insure via their credit cards, but little charities are left exposed.  I thought that wanting a one hundred per cent prepayment seemed greedy anyway when it was an off-the-shelf, modular system, not something bespoke.  It wasn't as though we were going to have a massively expensive granite worktop cut to size and then say we didn't like the colour and didn't want it.  The SA pointed out that the company was on risk otherwise of non-payment, and were probably dealing with some quite flaky and undercapitalised customers in the entertainment industry.  I still think a fifty per cent deposit would be fairer.

for their own good

Poor little cats.  They were taken today for their jabs against feline leukemia and cat flu (part one) and are now looking very seedy.  One of them has been sick, and another has a dodgy tummy, and we feel desperately mean because this morning they were so happy and bouncing with energy.  But it is for their own good in the long term to be vaccinated.

They were a big hit with all the staff on reception at the vets, and the vet herself, who by coincidence was the same partner who vaccinated the Main Coones seventeen years ago.  That thought made all of us feel rather old.  To our surprise the three kittens weighed almost exactly the same, though one looks so much bigger and another slightly smaller than the one we would have said was in the middle.  They were extraordinarily well behaved, maintaining their composure in the waiting room when surrounded by rather noisy dogs, and toddling placidly around the examination table instead of trying to disappear under the furniture.  I hope that by tomorrow they don't hold their experiences against us.

Our Ginger was not pleased to see them return to the house, and sulked furiously.  We are trying a plug-in diffuser recommended by the vet which sprays cat happy hormones about the house. Synthetic pheromones mimic the scent cats leave when they rub their faces on the furniture or your legs, said to be scientifically proved to reduce stress in kittens and adult cats and help them adjust to new surroundings or a new pet.  Well, that's what it says on the box.  I'd never heard of it, but it turns out the Systems Administrator had read about it on internet forums.  I wouldn't take those as gospel, but we've known the vet for a long time and on the strength of her advice we were prepared to give it a go.  Our Ginger is now asleep and snoring, an improvement on awake and sulking.  It can't have helped that it rained all day, so he was stuck in the house and reminded of the horrible rug rats in the next room, instead of being able to patrol around the garden.

so far, so good on the cat front

I have rebooted my computer.  After eating my blog post yesterday evening it swallowed up the first half of an email I was writing this afternoon, leaving me with nothing but the last letter I'd typed, which was an s.  Not very helpful.

The warmer weather is bringing things on at such a pace that even the rabbits can't eat all of them, and I was relieved to see shoots on all three Dictamnus albus var. purpureus, a slowly spreading herbaceous species that I really didn't want repeatedly chewed down to stumps so that I lost a year's growth.  It is a graceful plant, as slow growers often are, with glossy green leaves and upright spikes of pale mauve, five petalled, starry flowers with darker purple veins and a bunch of protruding stamens.  It secretes volatile oils which according to gardening legend can be ignited on a hot, calm day, though I have never felt the urge to set fire to my plants.  From this derives its common name of burning bush plant, or in the US the inelegant name of gas plant.  Its botanical name is all back to front, since most plants in the wild are purple, as mine are, but the first one seen and named happened to have white flowers.  They were given the name Dictamnus albus, leaving the more usual purple form with the qualifying var. purpureus tagged on the end.

We have both spent quite a lot of time sitting with the kittens trying to socialise them, alternating with sitting with Our Ginger so that he doesn't feel left out.  The kittens like playing with a piece of paper dangled above their heads on a length of kitchen string, and have two settings at the moment, galloping about and completely crashed out.  They still don't give any signs of actively enjoying being handled, but as I type this one is curled up on the footstool in front of me, another is stretched out on the hearthrug and the third is asleep behind my chair.  That's an advance on Saturday when they spent their day mostly trying to hide behind the furniture.  The Systems Administrator has removed all surplus trailing cables, raised the remaining ones as far as possible, and clad the lowest ones in plastic duct.  Those tiny teeth are sharp as needles.

We brought Our Ginger in to look at them for two minutes this morning, firmly clasped in my arms. He stopped purring when he saw the first kitten, and I could feel his body tense.  They just looked at him, and after two minutes he'd had enough, and we took him back to the kitchen and bribed him to be happy with cat treats.  This afternoon he wanted to come in when we opened the door, sniffed the kittens' food, and stared at two of them while they stared back, holding their ground on the hearth rug.  A kitten hissed first, Our Ginger consented to be soothed by us, and we retired with him for a cup of tea on the terrace, where he started to purr again.  So far, so good.  I hope.

I have registered them with our vet and we are going for their first jabs tomorrow.  As I told one of them, he'll be official then.  He'll have papers.

slow death of a broom

Blogger has just eaten my post as I was editing one final sentence about my neighbour's tulips, and I really don't have the heart to repeat myself.  The bare bones of it were that I have been removing the Genista aetnensis from the turning circle, that is clearly dying from wind rock and leaning out over the pond at a mad angle, and the garden looked better with it than without it.  It has left me with some self-sown replacements that are a better shape than their parent.  Was that because they don't like being raised in pots and then transplanted?

Several of the flower stems on tulip 'Elegant Lady' have broken three to four inches below the flower.  My neighbour was complaining about the same thing happening to his tulips a few weeks back.  Why was that?  It hasn't been that windy in the past couple of days.  Was it the sudden heat causing a sappy growth spurt?  The Darwins have now gone over so the combination was a failure anyway.

Originally there were some thoughts about the Great Storm of 1987, but that will have to keep for another time.

pets and livestock

We woke early this morning.  I lay in bed, thinking that I couldn't decently get up and start crashing around in the shower before half past six so as not to disturb the Systems Administrator, and then the SA said It's no good, I'm awake, and we got up.  As the SA said, getting on with mending the bookcases seemed more sensible than lying in bed thinking about how to do it.  The broken trim has now been cobbled back into place so that the kittens can't get back in, and while the Systems Administrator will make a tidier job of it in due course, at the moment the bookcases have a distinctly Frankenstein air.  That wasn't bad going for three very small cats, when we have had to take a jemmy to several grand's worth of bespoke home office furniture within six hours of their arrival.

I went to check the bees this morning.  It ha beens too cold to open the hives until recently, and I should have inspected them as soon as the weather warmed up, but I was out and then yesterday it was the great drama of the kittens under the fitted bookcase.  The bees have not read the books. Two colonies that had bees filling their supers to bursting and should have had more space added several days ago did not show any signs of swarming, while a third that had some bees up in the super but still had tonnes of space had made the beginnings of several queen cells, with eggs laid in them to show that they were serious and not just playing about.  Bees are funny things, inconsistent from one season to the next.  One of the colonies that has got off to a racing start did nothing in particular last year, just trundled along.

The kittens began to explore their surroundings once they had been reinstalled in the study, where their routine is to come out from the corner where we have put their bed, food and litter tray, explore, and then retreat to the corner, though they are not very interested in the bed and prefer to sit in the bottom bookshelf which the SA has cleared for them.  They began to eat, which was a relief since they scarcely ate anything yesterday, and to play intermittently in a more kittenish way, and had a good wash which they needed after yesterday, especially the two that went inside the bookcases.  They still do not appear to enjoy being handled at all, but at least they are learning to associate us with the appearance of food.  I hope they will grow friendlier, otherwise we have just committed ourselves to a decade and a half of very hands-off cats.  We still have no idea about names.

Our Ginger liked the left-over helping of food out of a pouch rather than a tin so much that we have promoted him to pouches.  They scarcely work out any more expensive given that I kept having to throw half eaten tins away, and it seems diplomatic not to leave him suspecting that the kittens are getting nicer food than him.  We are leaving them to grow more confident about their surroundings before we introduce Our Ginger to their new world in the study, which leaves us dividing our time between them and him.  I am sure he knows they are in the study, but he has given up sitting outside the door if we're in there and seems happy to wait for us in the hall.  Getting them to all spend the evening in the same room will be a whole other exercise, but we'll cross that bridge in due course.  The lovely lady at the feral cat and kitten rescue centre seemed confident it could be done, and she has many more years' experience of looking after cats than either of us, let alone the righteous young woman at the other rescue place.

hello kitties

The death of the old lady tabby meant that we were free to get kittens.  We could never have inflicted kittens on her: she hated any change to her routine, and would have loathed the rumpus of kittens, and the adult cats they grew into.  Our Ginger, on the other hand, moved into a house where there were already four adult cats so has a track record of seeking out company.  We thought that so long as we made sure to make a huge fuss of him post kitten that he would probably come round to the idea, and might even enjoy the companionship in time.

I went to the cat rescue centre in Colchester to put my name down for kittens, duly equipped with photographic identification and proof of address less than three months old, as required on their website, and was given a form to fill in.  Did I live on an A or B road?  Did I own my house?  Did it have a secure back garden?  Did I have my landlord's agreement to get a cat?  Did everybody in the household want a cat?  Why did I want kittens and not an adult cat?  Did my house have a cat flap or was I prepared to fit one, and did I undertake to keep my cat indoors at night and to provide an indoor litter tray at all times.  I filled in the form, lying in places (none of our previous cats have wanted to use an indoor litter tray as long as they were in any condition to stagger out into the garden).

The young woman who took my form was discouraging about the idea of introducing kittens to an adult cat, saying that in her view it was not a good idea.  I looked into her bright, sharp, righteous little face and felt a deep sense of weariness.  I was fairly sure I had taken responsibility for my first pair of cats before she was born, or at any rate while she was still at primary school.  They did not want to see my passport or bank statement, not at the moment.  The only kittens they had were only two weeks old, and they did not offer to show them to me.  They would ring me.  I left, feeling fairly sure that I would not be getting kittens from the Colchester cat rescue.  Nobody I know has ever managed to obtain an animal from them.

The next stop was the vet, where I tried to buy a fresh pack of combined flea and tapeworm dab-on-the-neck treatment for Our Ginger.  The receptionist looked at her records and explained apologetically that she could not sell them to me, because they were prescription only and they had not seen Our Ginger in the past year.  Would I like to make an appointment to bring him in for a check-up?  My sense of weariness deepened.  Our Ginger does not like going to the vet, and as he seems happy enough at the moment I was not sure I wanted to subject him to a check-up.  At his age it seemed unlikely to stop at checking his heart and looking at his teeth.  I had visions of blood tests, resulting in dismal warnings of age related conditions that we could not do anything about, all at vast expense.  I invoked that great middle aged lady get-out clause that I would have to speak to my husband, and would ring them.

I had more luck when I explained that they needed to remove the old lady tabby from their records, and that I was now on the hunt for kittens if they knew any other clients who had some.  One of her ladies that very morning had said that she had so many kittens, and I left with a name and phone number.  This turned out to be the kitten and feral cat rescue centre based in Alresford, whose website I'd seen without giving it priority among the plethora of Essex cat rescue organisations. The woman who answered the phone said that yes, she had two litters ready for homing, though she had to warn me that they were all black or black and white.  That was fine by me: we have had three black cats over the years and they have all been wonderful pets.

Slightly stunned that she had kittens ready now, rather than tiny ones for July, I arranged to go round at five so that we could sort ourselves out first, and then had to ring her back shortly afterwards apologising that I wasn't thinking straight, but could we choose the kittens today and collect them on Friday when we would both be at home to look after them and our existing cat.  As the Systems Administrator had spotted when I told him about the appointment, I had a garden club meeting that evening and was going to London for the next two days, so it was not the best moment to take charge of kittens.  We went round at half past two, with a clear plan to choose two boys, preferably short haired because long haired cats fur can be a problem as they get older and can't groom themselves, and we wanted nice, friendly, outgoing kittens that would make sociable cats.

Both litters were adorable.  There were three black and white brothers in one pen, nine weeks old and big for their age, two of them semi long haired, and none of them especially friendly.  The shelter owner assured us that they were lovely with her, the problem was that they had been born in the rescue centre and were not used to strange people.  Ideally they needed to be in a proper home as soon as possible.  The other pen held four much smaller, sleek, short haired, sociable kittens, three boys and a girl, pure black or with small white markings around the face.  We dithered.  We dithered some more.  The shelter owner said she would step outside and let us discuss it.   The Systems Administrator was terribly drawn to the black and white biggies, because they promised to make large cats and the SA likes big cats.  Yes, they were a bit wild but would soon settle down.  The little black ones were so friendly, they would soon find homes.  The black and white litter were awfully pretty, but how to choose?  The fluffiest one that hissed at me soundlessly showing his tiny teeth was the prettiest.  Who was going to be left behind, alone in his pen?  I said the fatal words: I suppose we could take three.

We took all three.  As the SA said, that boosted the future rodent control force by fifty per cent. They came with a dowry of the kind of cat food they currently eat, three plastic balls to play with, and the phone number to get a voucher to have them neutered for twenty pounds each at a vet of our choice.  We showed them to Our Ginger when we got back, and the fluffy hissing one hissed at him, so Our Ginger hissed back, before managing to get into the study where they will live for now and ostentatiously scarfing down all their food.  They spent the morning hiding behind a cupboard, until we moved it forwards enough to get behind it, and then under a desk, and climbing into the bookcases.  We left them in peace some of the time, and managed to catch each one to pet it a couple of times to start their socialisation process, until we went in to check on them after tea and found that two had completely disappeared.

We looked under the furniture and in the bookshelves and the places where a kitten could easily climb, with no success.  It was a locked room mystery.  The door had been shut.  The window was only ajar behind a wooden slatted blind.  We tried to think whether there could be any other ways of getting out of the room or connections to the kitchen, given that the layout has been altered over the years.  It gradually and horribly dawned on us that the kittens must have managed to get behind the fitted bookcase.  It has a neat hole cut in the back at one end to allow access to the electric socket that was there before the bookcases were fitted, and once we looked closely we realised there was a small gap at the bottom of the trim at the end where the shelves didn't reach right up to the wall.  The SA prised away a piece of the bottom trim at the end that was not against the wall, and shining a torch along the floor we could just see a black shape that eventually moved.

It was a kitten, but only one, so where the hell was the other?  Had it managed to climb up the gap between the back of the bookcase and the wall?  And how did we persuade the kitten to come out, when it didn't like us?  We could have left it there until it was starving, but that would have been stressful for all parties.  We couldn't take the trim off the bottom of the front of the bookcase because it had the weight of the shelves and all the books pressing down on it.  We tried menacing the kitten from the door end with a drain rod with socks tied on the end, to see if it would pop out of the gap in the trim by the wall, but it stayed firmly put.  In the end the Systems Administrator flapped a ruler noisily through the hole at the wall end and it came close enough to the missing trim at the door end for me to haul it out, though by then I think it wanted to be rescued.  That was Hissing Sid, but there was still no sign of the other one, which after lunch had consented to sit on the SA's chest for a time and even stared into his face.

The SA removed part of the vertical trim from the gaps between the case and the walls at both ends, which broke into pieces since it was only faced chipboard.  No signs of the other kitten in the gap between the back of the case and the wall, when we shone torches in there.  It was not on top of the bookcase either in the gap between the case and the ceiling, when the SA prised a piece off the end cornice.  We turned our attentions to the other bookcase, which also has an access hole for the electric socket, and when we took the end bottom trim out there under the lowest shelf at the furthest end was the last kitten, and again we could not remove the bottom trim along the front because it was wedged in by the weight of books, so had to rip the end vertical trim out and try to shoe the kitten out of the gap with the drain rod.  At the first attempt it stayed put, and was equally resistant to be shooed out the other way when we waved a length of hosepipe through the gap opened up by removing the vertical end filling piece.  I thought it might look like a snake, but while the kitten came towards the gap we'd opened up, it stayed just over arms length from the end of the bookcase.  At the second rodding attempt it hopped out through the vertical gap, and hid under the stove while the SA quickly blocked up the holes in the bookcases so that it couldn't disappear back underneath, before we managed to catch it.

The kittens are now locked in the downstairs loo for the night with their food and their litter tray. The loo seat is down, the window is shut.  We are collapsed in the study and Our Ginger is sitting in my office chair washing noisily.  So much for the idea of introducing them to each other as soon as possible and carrying on in a normal fashion so that Our Ginger doesn't feel left out.  I am absolutely shattered.  The kittens are probably traumatised, but they should be safe in the loo.  The SA will have to rebuild the bookcases in the morning then we can move the kittens from the loo back into the study and try again.

another jaunt

I went to London again today.  I had a ticket for a lunchtime concert at LSO St Lukes, my last of the present season, which was booked ages ago, and it just so happened that yesterday was the only day that suited both my friend and me to go to Dulwich before the Astrup exhibition closed.

It was the final concert in their series Elgar Up Close, featuring Elgar's chamber music, which is generally less well known than his orchestral and choral works.  Certainly I didn't recall having ever heard his String Quartet on radio 3, though that doesn't prove a lot because I don't have a great memory for classical music.  I hadn't heard of today's musicians either, the Elias Quartet, which again doesn't prove much since my knowledge of the world of string quartets is patchy.  They are relatively young and were BBC New Generation Artists a few years ago.

Anyway, from my starting point of ignorance I liked them, and the Elgar, and the Purcell Fantasias that preceded it.  They gave us an encore too, of two Scottish tunes, at which my folkie's ear pricked up, for with the first we finally got to something that I recognised.  The second violin took the lead for the folk encore, and looking him up on their their website I see that he grew up in the Scottish highlands. son of a Gaelic singer and teacher, so while he went on to study at the Royal Northern College of Music he was singing traditional music from when he could speak.  You can hear the concert as the Radio 3 lunchtime concert on Friday 13 May, though I don't know if that will include the encore.

Thence to the British Museum where Sicily: culture and conquest has now opened.  It focuses on two periods in Sicily's history, the era of Greek and Phoenician rule, and the eleventh century conquest by the Normans and subsequent golden age.  Stories of the Mediterranean melting pot are generally fascinating, and Sicily's history is as complex as any.  In fact, it is surely crying out for Simon Sebag Montefiore to make a series on it.  Some of the artefacts produced during both periods were quite lovely, though none so beautiful as the Myota charioteer loaned by its Sicilian museum owner to the British Museum for the duration of the Olympics.  In this show it appears only as a photograph.  This exhibition still has plenty of time to run, until mid August, and it is well worth seeing.

Addendum  Our Ginger caught two rabbits in the night, leaving one laid out in front of the television and the other lying disembowelled on the lawn.  The Systems Administrator tells me that this afternoon as the SA sat out on the terrace, Our Ginger strode past purposefully, and reappeared fifteen minutes later with a third small rabbit clamped in his jaws, which he deposited in front of the TV, where they both admired it for a bit before the SA tidied the body away.

south of the river

Today I went to the Dulwich Picture Gallery.  Dulwich is still a pig to get to from north Essex, because London Bridge station has still got building works and so you have to work your way round by tube from Liverpool Street to Victoria before heading out of central London again, and it takes ages.  I had a salutary experience on the tube, finding my western liberal tolerance and rational attitude to risk might both be merely skin deep, as we hopped on to a train only to find that the opposite side of the carriage was occupied by a woman in full length black Islamic robe and head covering, who instead of sitting facing the other passengers was standing facing the wall, while fiddling with a rucksack on the seat in front of her.  I was quite ashamed at how relieved I was when she got off at the next stop.

Dulwich is as ever an island of bourgeois loveliness in the great sea of south London.  The reason for making the pilgrimage was the current temporary exhibition, which ends on 15 May, of the works of a little known Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup.  It is according to the gallery website the first major exhibition of his work in London, and indeed the world, outside Norway.  He was active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century before dying of pneumonia at the age of only 47. Like Grieg, the damp of his native country did not suit him, and like Grieg he couldn't bear to leave.  Astrup didn't even settle in Oslo where he might have found more patrons and a touch of cosmopolitan life, but returned to his village in the countryside, married, had children, tended his garden with a particular penchant for growing rhubarb, and painted the mountains, the lakes, the marsh marigolds, the trees, his family and his house.

I really liked his work.  It shows enormous feeling for his native landscape and the scenes of his childhood.  Not especially innovative, or dazzlingly technically brilliant, but imbued with spirit.  In fact, not unlike Emily Carr, another foreign artist almost unknown in the UK to be featured at Dulwich.  He made beautiful woodcuts and linocuts as well.  I have no idea why Andrew Graham-Dixon's recent series on Scandinavian art for BBC 4 left him out, ending his survey of Norwegian painting with Munch.  I was too mean to buy the book, but almost wish I had, as I should have liked to know more about who might have influenced him.  He studied in Paris and Berlin, and I thought I detected echos of Manet and Gaugin and Van Gogh in his work.

From the Dulwich Picture Gallery it is not a very long walk to the Horniman Museum, and the first half is through Dulwich Park, which is very nice, though the second half is along the south circular and is not so pretty.  The Horniman has a good reputation, and I was curious to see it, plus according to their website we could get the overground back from Forest Hill instead of looping back to Victoria.  My companion was amenable to the suggestion, but I still felt responsible for that part of the expedition, and was left with a vague feeling that the Horniman had let me down.  It is not clear where you should go even when you get there, so we walked round three sides of a square getting from the main road to the museum building, and once we'd entered the museum lobby it wasn't at all obvious what there was to see.

We took pot luck with natural history, and found ourselves in a room full of mahogany display cases full of stuffed dead things, interspersed with the fragmented remains of animals.  I find stuffed animals awfully depressing, and it's possible nowadays to explain an armadillo's skin without killing the armadillo to do it.  The Stubbs portrait of a kangaroo recently saved for the nation by the Art Fund was good, that he did entirely from other people's descriptions without ever having actually seen one, but neither of us liked the taxidermy, apart from the sign requesting us not to touch the walrus or sit on the iceberg, which had a grim charm.  Then we looked at some photos of Rio, which gave way to photos of Romania and back to Rio, and then a subterranean room of stuff collected by Mr Horniman because it was interesting.  A torture chair from the Spanish inquisition that was probably mocked up in the nineteenth century, though possibly out of genuine bits of earlier instruments of torture, glass cases of poor dead blue butterflies, puppets, ceremonial masks. Loads of random things.  I began to experience the vague sense of growing claustrophobia I felt going around the National Trust's preposterously overstuffed Snowshill Manor.

We agreed that the Horniman had done us a nice cup of tea but we were glad we hadn't made a special trip just to see it, and beat the retreat towards Forest Hill, pausing only to look a a magnificent and totally empty conservatory, now isolated from the rest of the museum but who knows, perhaps originally attached to Mr Horniman's house, that he filled steadily with his collection until there was no more space and he and his family had to move out into rented accommodation.  We could have hired the conservatory for our function, had we wanted to hold a function in south London.  After I got home I received an email from my friend, whose partner grew up in Dulwich, saying that there was more to the Horniman than that and we had missed bits of it. All I can say is, they should get some better signs.

garden club night

Tonight was the monthly meeting of my garden club.  The topic was cut flowers, and I'd assumed it would cover what we could grow at home to pick, lists of useful perennials, annual varieties for cutting, and so on.  Instead it turned out to be mainly a demonstration of flower arranging.

I am not really a devotee of the floral arts, especially when props and weirdly twisted lengths of twig start being involved.  It was an awful disappointment when we went to Salisbury cathedral and the interior was cluttered up with flower arrangements.  Plonking some cut stems in a jug is about as far as I normally get, and even then I have to be careful with the design of the jug and where I put it, or a cat will knock it over.  Traditional straight sided pitchers with a base wider than the top are just about OK, but the tall, rectangular Rosenthal vase with a barley sugar twist in it has to sit on the mantel piece.

It is oddly fascinating watching somebody else stick stems in oasis and twist phormium leaves into loops, even when you are fairly sure you are not going to do it yourself.  The first arrangement was one the florist had done for the Royal Box at the Derby, or rather designed on the same principle, which was that you stuck an enormous number of mostly fairly dainty flowers vertically into a round of oasis, beefed up with a few tulips, until it looked like an ultra-floral version of Durer's Great Piece of Turf.  I was fairly sure I wouldn't be copying the band hiding the side of the oasis block, which had overlapping Stachys byzanitina leaves stuck to it like fish scales, but sticking the stems into the oasis didn't look difficult, and an arrangement using an assortment of this and that sounded easier to achieve than one requiring numerous large perfect flower heads.

The next arrangement was described as being more contemporary, which meant five each of globe allium heads and tulips backed by twisted phormium leaves, in a home made cellophane and oasis container covered in bullrush leaves.  I think the point of casing the whole contraption in cellophane is that then you can give it away without having to explain to the recipient that the flowers are a gift but actually, when they die you'd like the container back.  I was fairly sure I would not be arranging alliums and tulips in a vertical column, and absolutely certain that I would not be surrounding them with rehydrated pink water retaining granules.

The final demonstration was of a hand-held bouquet, one of those things that an expert makes look easy and is almost certainly pretty difficult without a lot of practice.  You choose a central stem then arrange the rest of the flowers and foliage in a spiral around it, so that the flowers fall out from the centre in a graceful fashion while their stems splay outwards like the head of a besom broom.  Tied securely at the waist, if you can then manage to cut the stems straight through it will stand up on the squared-off ends.  Dressed with several layers of thin glittery fabric and cellophane, and with the stems tied into another big square of cellophane filled with water, it becomes a go-anywhere bouquet with its own inbuilt jug.  I was impressed, but will probably still be taking hostess presents of eggs or honey rather than hand tied bouquets for the foreseeable future.

Then we were all given a little pot of sandy compost and invited to take our own cuttings from the pots of reliable, almost cast iron guaranteed plants brought along.  We'd been warned beforehand to bring sharp knives, which had me hunting around for my gardening knife.  I'd done my best to sharpen it before going out and had doubts about the quality of the edge, but it sliced through my chosen two stems of Monarda 'Saggitarius' very well.  I am a coward about using a gardening knife and was completely hopeless at my brief introduction to grafting at Writtle because I was always scared of cutting my thumb, but the Monarda was very soft and I managed to tidy the stems into presentable cuttings while holding my pot of compost between my knees without mishap.  Some organised person had even brought small plastic bags for us to cover out pots of cuttings before going home.

The final touch was to raffle the three flower arrangements, tickets being dished out free and gratis, one each, and as my number was second out of the basket I am now the proud (or at least amazed) owner of the Great Piece of Turf.  Not being a regular user of oasis I really didn't know how much to water it when I got home, and so at the moment it is rather inelegantly displayed on a thick pile of newspaper on a large plastic bag, so that I wouldn't find in the morning that I'd watered the dining table.  It will be very interesting to see how long the various components survive.  I can imagine the olive twig and the tulips might do quite well, but I never imagined parsley leaves as material for flower arranging, and the cowslips were wilting before I left the hall.

little creatures

There are robins nesting in the pot shed.  I found the nest by accident last week, when I flung open the doors meaning to put the accumulated jumble of pots outside the shed back on the shelves, and a small bird flew to the other end and stared at me resentfully.  It was a robin.  It would be.  It is impossible to move outdoors here at this time of year without a robin watching you, and I sometimes wonder why Western culture assumes they are cheerful.  Ours verge on the Hitchcockian.

The nest was entirely obvious, a messy pile of fine twigs and mossy stuff in a black plastic flowerpot.  A second, disintegrating pile of untidy vegetation suggested that the robins had discarded their first attempt and were going with the Mark II version.  I hastily shut the door, and resigned myself to tidying away the pots another day.

I do need to go into the pot shed from time to time.  Clearing the pots off the concrete can wait a couple of weeks, but I'm reluctant for the robins to take all my other pots hostage, plus a bag of 6X and new and unopened bale of sawdust I bought for the henhouse.  The next time I went into the pot shed it was to retrieve the herb pots, and glancing at the nest while trying not to appear as if I was looking I saw the robin safely in it, regarding me beadily.  I think we can reach a modus vivendi whereby I only open one of the double doors, not the one on the side of the shed where the nest is, and only to get really necessary things out.

From the robin's point of view it's a pretty good nest site, cat proof, pretty much magpie proof since they don't go poking around in the sheds, dry, not going to heat up too much on hot days.  It is a lot better than my greenhouse, where they nested for two years running and I had to try not to water them while worrying that they would cook when the sun came out.  Last year they used the Systems Administrator's workshop, and the babies nearly got squashed at the point when they left the nest and were wandering about on foot, as young robins do for a day or two before they start to fly.

Addendum  Our Ginger caught a young rabbit this morning.  I missed it, but the SA tells me that Our Ginger was very insistent that he must be allowed to bring it into the house, and then growled at the SA when the SA tried to take it from him.  Not wanting to discourage Our Ginger from rabbiting, the SA left him with it in front of the television, where Our Ginger simply sat looking at his trophy.  It turned out he didn't want to eat it, but had worked up an appetite for a little snackerel out of a tin.

industrial history in Suffolk

After our visit yesterday to the cricket bat willow grower we went on to The Long Shop Museum at Leiston, to make a day of it.  The Systems Administrator hadn't been there for a long time, and I'd never been at all.  It is an industrial museum based in what was for several generations the family business of the Garretts, an enterprising lot who count Elizabeth Garrett Anderson among their number, and who from a modest start making rural implements like sickles developed into traction engines, portable steam engines, ploughing machines, trolley buses and the like.  You will still see the Garrett name plate at many a steam fair.  The eponymous long shop of the museum houses the UK's first production line and is Grade II listed.

It is a sweet and slightly jumbly museum, with lots of shelves and cabinets of bits and pieces, and displays about this and that.  I'd have liked a little more of the social history of business, how many people it employed in its peak years and what percentage of the working population of Leiston that represented.  I might have been a little more confused than I would have been otherwise because they were hosting a one day works in wartime and vintage fair event, so some of the permanent exhibits were tucked away behind extra tables holding demonstrations of carrot jam, while lots of volunteers in 1940s clothes and WWII military uniforms wandered happily around.

One advantage of going on a day when they had an event was that some of the engines were in steam.  A traction engine originally built for export to Spain and still carrying her Spanish name stood quietly hissing and dripping, wheels carefully chocked so she was not going anywhere, but the smell and the noise were still fun.  But the high point was the steam shunting engine Sirapite, a strange hybrid between a steam engine and a traction engine and the only one left of its kind in the world.  The company bought it to shunt wagons from their works up their private light railway to the main line, after an unfortunate incident with a horse, and it remained in use until 1962. Yesterday it was in steam, and joy of joys we were given a ride on the footplate for two trips across the yard.  The yard is not very big, but we could still feel how quickly it picked up speed and stopped again, and get a good view of the firebox and the extremely rudimentary instruments (steam pressure.  Er, that's it).  The design is part traction engine because it incorporates a flywheel, and the driver clarified that yes, to go into reverse meant changing the direction of the flywheel and so losing all the energy stored in it.  But as he said, in normal use it wasn't changing direction so frequently.  The museum has managed to buy back some of the original route of the light railway and has just been given planning permission to restore it and run steam and horse driven wagons along it.  I didn't actually discover this during the visit, among the wartime songs and carrot jam, but read about it afterwards on the Ipswich local paper's website.

I am not entirely sure what I think about the Garretts, but I suppose they were of their time.  In some ways they were enlightened employers, making gestures such donating money for instruments so that the works could start a brass band,  and bequeathing funds in a will for every employee to receive a new overcoat.  But when the workforce tried to unionise and bring their working week down from 59 to only 55 hours per week, the Garrett of the day sacked the lot of them and only re-employed those he did not consider dangerous.

Leiston has a tiny role in UK art history, for it was at Leiston that the artist John Piper first met the future Myfanwy Piper, when they were both invited to stay with a mutual friend at Sizewell and he offered to pick her up from the station.  Unfortunately the station is no longer there, but I saw the place where it had been.

Addendum  It was the Radio 2 Folk Awards last week, and to my satisfaction Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman won the award for Best Duo.  I told the SA when I booked our tickets to see them at the Colchester Arts Centre that they were good and there it is, they are the best, officially.

from sapling to cricket bat

Today we went on a guided tour of a cricket bat willow farm, organised by the Suffolk volunteer committee of the Art Fund.  I'd been hoping their programme of events might include the chance to see gardens not normally open to the public, as it did last year only they were oversubscribed and my cheque was returned with apologies, but this year there were no secret gardens on offer. However, cricket bat willow production sounded just the ticket for a pair of retired small company fund managers with a passion for trees (me) and cricket (the Systems Administrator).

Essex and Suffolk account for three quarters of all UK cricket bat willow production, and there are only four growers nationwide.  Our host today started off in what he imagined would be a part-time diversification from the family farm near Woodbridge, buying out a local grower who wanted to retire.  Twenty-nine years later he's growing patches of willow across the country.  Sometimes he supplies young trees to landowners and they do all the work thereafter until he buys the finished trees back, but increasingly he and his team of three plant and maintain the trees as well, renting the land.  With increasing field sizes farmers are finding they have odd headlands and corners they can't do anything else with and might as well get some income from, but they don't have the workforce or expertise to tend the trees themselves.

It takes a good while before you get any cash out of a willow plantation.  The trees are grown from cuttings, so first of all you have to produce your cutting material, which you do by planting fat living willow posts about three inches across, and harvesting their long whippy side shoots the following year.  You choose your propagating material from your best trees, and correct spacing at this stage will ensure the side shoots don't fork or have large side shoots themselves.  The side shoots are stuck in the ground at their final spacing ten metres apart, working from December through to February assuming you can get on the land, bearing in mind willows grow on damp ground.

As the young trees grow you have to clean their stems to a height of about twelve feet.  If large side branches are allowed to develop they will leave knots, which will reduce the value of the timber.  Once you know that the difference in sale price between a top quality and a bottom quality cricket bat blank is around forty-five pounds versus a fiver, you can see that keeping up quality is key.  The trees are ready to harvest when the trunk is fatter at breast height than the span of a grown man's arms, about 56 inches.  It takes an average of eighteen years to reach that size.  So you are looking at around two decades from the start of production until you have anything to sell.  Willow is a fibrous wood requiring careful handling during felling, otherwise it will split, and twenty years of investment will be reduced to a pile of not very good firewood.  A fully grown tree should yield enough material for about thirty bats.

What is counted a good quality piece of wood is a strange mixture of the scientific and the arbitrary.  Closer grains coming from a slower grown tree is objectively speaking better because it will be mechanically stronger than a coarser grained wood.  Uniform whiteness is also prized, on the other hand, and that is purely cosmetic.  Professional cricket players know that areas of brown staining make no difference to the playing qualities of the bat.  The manufacturers have their tricks, such as using strategically placed stickers to cover up cosmetic irregularities.

Once felled each trunk should yield five sections each capable of being divided into several bats' worth of pieces.  Our host debarked one for us, and a puddle of sap formed beneath.  It's a wet wood.  The initial cleaving is done by hand or using a mechanical splitter, rather than a band saw, to ensure the grain runs straight down the bat.  Then the blanks are roughly shaped on one saw bench, and finished to a uniform profile on a second, before being kiln dried over six weeks to get the moisture content down.  They are so wet to start with that the air in the kiln has to be constantly circulated and the excess moisture condensed out, or the wood would go mouldy in the heat.  The end grain of each blank is sealed with wax before drying, to make sure the moisture is lost evenly over the whole piece.

Ninety per cent of the finished blanks are exported, largely to India, so there's a little slice of rural Suffolk doing its bit towards the UK's balance of payments.  We were both absolutely fascinated.

We saw something else fascinating but terrible.  Walking down from the timber yard to one of the host's own plantations by the Deben our route took us through a small area of mixed woodland.  It had been stripped of most of the good trees before his father bought the farm, and he'd been replanting it.  Many of the young trees were ash, and eighty per cent of them were dead.  At a casual glance you might not have realised that anything was wrong, since it's a little early for ash to have leafed up anyway, but he pointed out the vertical cracks in the bark, and patches of faintly pinkish discolouration in the bark near the base of the trees.  So that's ash dieback, Chalara fraxinia.  I have seen it with my own eyes.  I dutifully sprayed Mr Muscle kitchen cleaner on the soles of my boots when I got home, but it was a mainly symbolic gesture.  It's on its way, ash dieback, on the wind, on the feet of birds, the tyres of vehicles.  No wood is an island.

goodbye puss

We are a one cat family.  Yesterday evening at twenty past eight the short indignant tabby made brief scrabbling noises at the back of the study and quietly died.  It was not a total surprise.  She wouldn't eat her breakfast yesterday, or her cat treats, and was not tempted even when I opened a different flavoured tin.  By the middle of the day her breathing became too visible, as she sat in one of her favourite places in the middle of the hall doorway.  I stopped to stroke the top of her head each time I passed by, and she purred.  Later on she became fidgety, wandering from room to room, and no longer responded to being tickled.  She had the look of a cat that was not long for this world.

She was seventeen years old, the short indignant tabby, and had outlived her brother and the two Maine Coones that we got at the same time in the summer of 1999.  We always said she would be the last cat standing out of that cohort.  She was a good doer, never suffered from a septic bite in her life, partly because she was too sensible to get into fights or stick her feet down rat holes.  In the past couple of years she appeared to become completely deaf, and there were a few accidents, but not so many that clearing them up ever became a big issue.

She disliked strangers, disliked sitting on laps, distrusted grass and the great outdoors.  I never saw her catch a mouse or bird in her life.  Inside the house she lived mainly in the hall, the kitchen and the study, rarely venturing upstairs.  She liked sunbathing on the concrete on warm days.  She liked us.  On cold or wet days when I sat at the kitchen table she would lie at my feet, purring,   Sometimes she would lie under my chair, and I would have to be very careful each time I got up not to tread on her or push the legs of the chair into her.  Small, self-contained, fierce, loyal, she lived her life on her own terms.

It was a good exit.  Cats are stoical animals and it is difficult to tell when they are in pain, but she was eating normally and going outside when she wanted the loo until the day before she died.  She didn't have to undergo the stress of the cat basket and the car journey and the vet's waiting room with its strangers and dogs for that final appointment.  We were around.  Our Ginger, with whom she got on in a grudging sort of way, was around.  She was here, and then she wasn't.  It was still just light enough last night to bury her at the bottom of the garden next to the big anxious tabby, decently shrouded in a pillowcase.  I miss her small, independent, trusting presence, lying in doorways and dark corridors and believing implicitly that neither of us would step on her.

how to do mail order: version 2

Today's post brought me another mail order delivery of plants, this time of fuchsias which I'll use in pots by the front door and in the conservatory.  I like fuchsias, and have been writing down the names of varieties that caught my eye at Chelsea for years without doing anything more about it than buying a few of whatever the local garden centre had on offer.  And with the rabbits taking such a toll of the herbaceous planting in the open garden, pots close to the house where the rabbits are unlikely to venture seem an increasingly attractive option until such a time as we can eliminate the bunny menace.

The fuchsias came as plug plants, little rooted cuttings in mesh growing tubes ready for potting up, as is often the way when buying from a specialist grower who offers a huge choice.  My pelargoniums when they arrive will be plugs though I think that supplier goes one better and roots cuttings to order, and Dibleys send out their Streptocarpus and Begonia as plugs.  I found the firm by chance on the internet.  I was all set to use a Suffolk supplier, only they did not list a variety with small red flowers called 'Katjan' which I had fallen completely in love with at Chelsea, for reasons I couldn't explain.  The other firm that exhibited at Chelsea last year didn't appear to do mail order (though it beats me why not, when they went to the bother and expense of staging a Chelsea exhibit and fuchsia plugs are relatively straightforward to send by post).  Hunting online for alternative suppliers of 'Katjan' I found one, a chap in Gloucestershire whose website said he had started the business as a retirement project because he liked fuchsias.

His list ran to over eight hundred varieties, all illustrated and comprehensively described, and although I'd not heard of him, let alone seen him at Chelsea, I was pretty sure he was genuine. Nobody goes to that much trouble to fake a website selling fuchsia plugs at £2.25 each, and Paypal are currently taking the buyer's side in the case of complaint, from what I've read in the papers.  I was prepared to risk half a dozen plugs plus standard delivery.

I placed the order on April 25, and the plants arrived today.  That's pretty quick.  He emailed yesterday to say they'd been dispatched, so the Post Office twenty-four hour service worked fine, cost £4.41 for up to six plants.  The supplier recommended special delivery as being the most reliable way of making sure the plants arrived the next day, but apart from costing £8.36 it meant the hassle of having to be around to sign for the parcel.  The plants were securely packaged, clearly labelled and in good physical condition.

That's the good news.  The bad news is that two of the six were substitutes.  For a third of your order to be not actually what you chose yourself is not great.  Fortunately 'Katjan' was included, otherwise I'd have been quite annoyed given that was the reason I'd gone to him in the first place.  I am sure I agreed to accept substitutes, since I didn't want to end up paying the postage for only two or three plants.  It's worth thinking about your strategy regarding substitutes when placing any order for mail order plants.  Nowadays if there's one thing in particular that I want, or that makes up a large part of the value of the order, while the others are plants that I do want but could probably get elsewhere, I tend to specify that I'll cancel the order if they can't do the key element. Otherwise, you risk ending up with something that you don't want as much as the thing you originally chose, or else paying a delivery charge out of proportion to the list of plants they are able to supply.

The substitutions were reasonably intelligent without necessarily producing what I wanted.  Instead of a red and purple single flowered bush fuchsia he'd sent a semi-trailing variety in a similar colour scheme.  I didn't like it quite as much as the one I'd chosen, but as part of a collection of pots by the front door I'm sure it will be fine.  The other substitution was trickier.  I'd selected a species introduced into western cultivation in 1832, having pink flowers with green tips which tended to flower in the winter months.  I liked the look of it, and thought it would be an interesting counterpart to the Correa in the conservatory, popularly known as the Australian bush fuchsia, which also blooms in the winter with pink and yellowish green tubular flowers.  Instead I was sent a different historic variety, which produces very long, bright red, tubular flowers at the usual time of year rather than in winter, and which is said to need a very large pot in time because it grows nearly 4 metres tall.  I daresay I can fit it in somewhere at the back of the conservatory, where it can be a friend for climbing fuchsia 'Lady Boothby', and as a bonus the berries are apparently good to eat and suitable for making pies or jam, but it is not really what I had in mind.

Presumably by way of compensation for the substitutions he sent me two extra plants free of charge, both hardy fuchsia varieties, one with graceful purple and magenta flowers, and the other with rather chunky white flowers quite unlike anything else in my order, and which I can't immediately imagine anywhere in the garden.  I potted it up anyway, not having checked to see what it was at that stage, and haven't unpotted it because I don't like to be cruel to plants, and perhaps it will grow on me, or I will suddenly see how I could use it.  It is said to like sun, so maybe it could be a companion for the purple and white potted dahlias?  Meanwhile the pink and green flowered lovely which I would really rather have liked is still shown on the website as being available from late April.

So that was my fuschsia online buying experience, eight healthy looking plants for under two pounds each inclusive of delivery, most or all of which I wouldn't have found in my local garden centre, one of which I particularly wanted and half of which I didn't choose myself.  If you want to give it a whirl the firm is called Other Fellow Fuchsias.  It is named after a fuchsia variety called Other Fellow, which the owner particularly likes.  I wasn't grabbed by its description, but it's a funny thing, what makes people like some plants more than others.