a musical interlude

I made it to the music society concert, and the huge expensive thyme infused throat sweets preserved my decency and I did not cough, and the hall was jolly cold although the heating had been on.  We all sat there in our coats, while the pianist appeared perfectly comfortable in a sleeveless dress.  A friend told me she would be feeling OK because of the adrenaline, but I hope she didn't get chilled.

The concert opened with a suite by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre.  Born twenty years before JS Bach, she performed at the court of the Sun King aged five, published her first set of suites for harpsichord at the age of twenty-two, and was the first woman to have an opera performed at the Academie Royale de Musique.  Radio 3 chose her as the Composer of the Week back in 2015 as part of their celebration of International Women's Day, which was when I first came across her.  Sadly, their enthusiasm for one of the greatest French Baroque composers didn't seem to last beyond the need to find some female composers for Women's Day and she's had little airplay since, or at least not when I've been listening.  I would say I like the French Baroque, except that an unkind person could point out that I have no recordings of it beyond a cassette of Lully somewhere in a drawer, but nonetheless I do like the French Baroque and was delighted by the pianist's choice of opening number.

Then we had some Beethoven that was new to me and also to the friend sitting next to me, Sonata No. 4 in E flat major.  It was big and muscular and brilliant, one of those pieces of music I find easier to respect than to love.  Beethoven quite often has that effect on me, which says more about me than Beethoven.

After the interval we had a newly written piece by Kim Ashton, a selection from Ornithology, which was inspired by birds and unabashed by the fact that Charlie Parker already used the title.  This afternoon's birds were the goldfinch, the kestrel, and a third bird I didn't know.  I tried hard to listen with an open mind, while aware that my preconception was that I was not going to like it, but I'm afraid none of it seemed to me to have anything to do with goldfinches or kestrels.  If forced to guess I'd have said that it was about Brutalist architecture or collapsing icebergs or a series of lorries breaking down on the M25.  I am afraid I am hopelessly middlebrow and modern classical music is wasted on me.

Then we had two Fauré Nocturnes, perhaps chosen as a contrast or palate cleanser after the birds, romantic and effusive.  I have no recordings of any of his work except the Requiem, which I adore. Every so often I think I should get some more, and then I hear some and remember that on the whole I don't like late nineteenth and early twentieth century French music very much.  We finished up with three movements from Igor Stravinsky's Petroushka, except that that wasn't quite the end because we got a little piece of Scarlatti as an encore.  The Scarlatti was wonderful.  In my secret heart if we could have just have stuck to Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and Scarlatti for the whole concert, and maybe slipped in a bit of Antonio Soler and even some Handel, I'd have been entirely happy, but that probably wouldn't have suited the majority.

rest cure

I spent a second day sitting very quietly and keeping warm, apart from when I nipped down to the village to post a couple of things in time for the morning collection, and stock up on cough sweets. I don't really believe in cough medicines, and anyway coughing will help clear the gunk out of my lungs, but I am going to a piano recital tomorrow afternoon and I absolutely mustn't cough during that, or at least only during the applause.  I got a packet of thyme based lozenges for the concert, and a little bag of Fisherman's Friends which I've been necking down today.  Original menthol and eucalyptus flavour, as featured in Michael Portillo's Great British Railway Journey, made in Fleetwood in Lancashire.  I'd forgotten how much I liked them, and wish I'd bought a bigger tube now.

My chest feels much better than it did a couple of days ago, which is good news except that I am forced to conclude that trying to resume the activities of normal life makes it worse.  It's just as well I'm not currently employed by a plant nursery.  How would you explain that yes, it is a full month since you were in bed with flu, but you still can't work outside for any length of time or stand all day or talk nicely to lots of people without feeling as though you are going down with full blown bronchitis and pneumonia?  At the plant centre they did the stock take in January which meant days on end of sitting in a plastic chair in an unheated plastic tunnel leafing through an Excel printout with frozen fingers.  I'd have had a major relapse.

We watched a sci-fi romance last night, the 2011 release The Adjustment Bureau starring Emily Blunt and Matt Damon.  I caught up with a review last summer five years after the event when I was listening to podcasts of the Kermode and Mayo film review programme from before the time the Systems Administrator introduced me to it, and noted it down as something that was fun but not too deep or demanding.  There are times, like when you have a foul bronchial cough, that you don't want to have to process anything too meaningful, and so we saved Brooklyn for another day.  When I asked if we could have The Adjustment Bureau last night I was going on the note I'd made of the podcast which said it was light, snappy and funny, but forgotten the specific details.  The romance turned out to be between a dancer and an up-and-coming American politician, which gave it an extra frisson on the day of Donald Trump's inauguration.  The film was just what Mark Kermode said it would be and we both enjoyed it.  Matt Damon is always likable and heroic, Emily Blunt was lively and funny, and there were mysterious agents wearing fedoras.  It is based (probably rather loosely) on a story by Philip K Dick and so a first cousin to Blade Runner.

The only trouble with keeping a list of films to watch at some point based on reviews is maintaining a balance between genres.  You trust the critics to weed out a lot of dross, though the odd good release may get overlooked in the process, but they are limited for space in their columns and do tend to go for the heavyweight films, dealing with serious issues and packing a big emotional punch.  If you aren't careful you end up on a Friday evening with a choice between grim and grimmer.  There have been a few times when we've looked hopefully through our little pile of LoveFilm envelopes and realised we had an unalloyed miseryfest.  Nowadays we make sure we have a mixture, something thrillerish, something funny, some serious social commentary.  The hardest category to keep topped up is comedy, because comedy is hard to do well.

I'm not sure we'll be bothering with LaLa Land, despite the near universal adulation.  I love Singin' in the Rain, but neither of us are general fans of musicals, or jazz.  A musical about a brattish jazz musician, with singing and dancing which even its admirers admit are not as good as the singing and dancing in Singin' in the Rain, doesn't sound as though it would be in either of our wheelhouses. It has got an awful lot of people going, though, including Bryony Gordon learning to dance in a yellow dress.  As the owner of a yellow raincoat I can warn anybody thinking of buying a butter yellow sundress that pollen beetles find the colour irresistibly attractive.

three steps forward, two back

Alas, whatever bug I have had has lodged in my chest.  I have been hacking away since the New Year with what is rather disgustingly known as a productive cough, and by yesterday afternoon it was letting me know that there was still an underlying infection associated with that cough.  Cue lassitude, tight chest, prickling face, sore throat, and the sinking realisation that there was nothing to be done except rest indoors in front of the Aga or the stove with a regular supply of warm drinks. And there was me actually daring to arrange to meet some friends next week for coffee. Fortunately I probably can't go too far wrong sitting in the cafe at the Acorn Village for an hour, drinking coffee and maybe eating a cake if everybody isn't on a New Year diet, but it is getting very demoralising.  Today was a beautiful, calm, sunny day, the garden is full of jobs that need doing, and I didn't do any of them except check the mousetrap by the hyacinths in the greenhouse.  It had another mouse in it, and the hyacinth leaves had been chewed.

This is the stage at which in the good old days one would have gone to the doctor, demanding a prescription for antibiotics 'in case there was a secondary bacterial infection' and the GP would probably have acquiesced, in case there was and to get one out of the surgery.  Nowadays with doctors acutely aware of the looming threat of widespread antibiotic resistance, and health boards monitoring practice's prescribing habits, there is little point.  The NHS does not want to see people who have had a mild chest infection for a few weeks following flu, in the absence of other exciting symptoms like unexplained weight loss.  There is no evidence to say that I have any bacterial infection.  And antibiotics are fierce things.

I have been to see my GP a couple of times in the past decade requesting antibiotics, once when I'd been bitten on the wrist by a stray cat and again when I lodged a thorn deep in my knuckles while weeding around a rose.  I didn't like the look of the rose wound as soon as I'd done it, and nor did the doctor.  I was sent on my way with a week's supply of pills big enough for a horse, and a warning to seek medical attention immediately if red streaks started appearing up my arm.  I took the full course of pills, and red streaks did not appear up my arm, and I was very grateful to have escaped a series of progressively higher amputations before dying of blood poisoning anyway, but the pills made me feel rotten.  Really, really down.  It's a bad idea to start randomly killing off bits of your gut flora unless you have to, since it is intimately linked to your mental state as well as your digestion.  And while I have a weak chest my digestion is absolutely splendid.

So there is nothing to be done except drink tea and take things very easy until I feel better or the weather warms up, and the weather is not going to warm up any time soon.  I was going to take a turn with the cooking, instead of which the Systems Administrator volunteered to carry on until next week and set off to the supermarket while I sat in the kitchen reading gardening magazines and playing with Mr Fluffy.  Meanwhile I am painfully aware of all the things outside that need pruning, weeding, tying up and cutting back, and that I still haven't dosed the bees for varroa.  It is all very, very dull.

fogged up

When I went into Colchester before Christmas I had a new battery fitted to my wristwatch, which had stopped.  For the past few years I've been to the little stall in what used to be Williams and Griffin, and was relieved to discover that it had survived the transition to Fenwick.  They have always been pleasant and efficient, with no hint of capriciousness. I used to go to a jewelers in Eld Lane that was part of the Co-Op group and that I felt on that basis ought to be reputable, until they suddenly announced they would not open any watch to change the battery unless they were agents for that brand.  I fled from another Colchester jewelers without letting them touch my watch when in reply to my query whether they could change the battery in a gold watch the two girls behind the till looked at each other and one said sportingly that she didn't mind giving it a go.

Watches are personal.  My gold watch was a present from the Systems Administrator.  It is a small and absolutely plain Accurist and I always wear it on an absolutely plain slim leather strap.  The glass has got lightly scratched over the years, which I suppose I could have replaced if I felt that strongly about it, and it loses time slightly, but I am very fond of it.  It is a testament to how well the SA knew my tastes, because a small plain watch was exactly what I wanted.  Come weddings, funerals, posh parties and any other rare social occasions when I can dress up in clothes that are not cat proof and the Accurist will be silently ticking away losing infinitesimal amounts of time on my wrist.

My other watch is for gardening, country walks and other activities where the gold watch might get damaged.  It is a Mondaine which I saw featured in the Guardian, and instantly fell in love with the second hand.  And the red strap, but straps can be changed.  It was the second hand that did it for me.  It is based on the Swiss railway clock, red, and the tip ends in a little red circle.  The rest of the face is very, very plain.  A total design classic, in fact.  Psychologists may argue that buying things does not in the long run make people happier, and in general they are right, but I felt enormously cheerful when I yielded to temptation and bought the Mondaine, and the red second hand (and the strap) still cheer me up each time I look at them.

According to a snippet on today's Today programme, watches are an example of a dying art form, because in the future everybody will have the time on their smartphones.  Maybe, maybe not. Things have a habit of sticking around for longer than you think they're going to.  Radio is still with us decades after the invention of television, and Colchester is even going to have a new Curzon cinema and perhaps an out of town multiplex.  I don't take my smartphone into the garden with me, and anyway it doesn't have a red second hand, and there are lots of social situations where sliding a quick glance down at your wrist seems more tactful than whipping out your phone.

It was the Mondaine that needed a new battery in December.  Watch batteries are not cheap, which makes running two watches even more of an eccentric indulgence.  Never mind, it was worth it to get that second hand ticking forwards again.  Except that when I got home I found the watch had fogged up.  It had looked fine in the warm air of Fenwick's basement, but moisture condensed out of the air inside it as soon as it got cold.  I tried putting it in the airing cupboard to dry, but alas, the woman in the shop had done a very thorough job of resealing it.  It has been in the airing cupboard for most of the six weeks since the new battery was fitted, but when I put it on this morning it fogged up again in the time it took me to let the hens out.

It is now back with the menders.  The woman on the little stand was apologetic, and had various theories as to how it could be fixed, but none of them could be done on the spot.  That means I'll have to go back into Colchester, which is a bore, since normally I save up all business in town until I have a haircut, which is only once every six weeks.  I must remember that it wouldn't really be easier to rely on the smartphone to tell the time, though.  Even apart from the fact that I like the Mondaine it would only be easier relying on the phone up to the point where I dropped it or knelt on it and broke it.

a mysterious affair

As I went out to let the hens into their run this morning I was puzzled by the sight of something white lying in the drive half way along the eleagnus hedge.  It took a while to sort the hens out because their water needed topping up but had frozen solid in the dish of their galvanised drinker, and I had to melt the ice before I could get the lid off.  Then I went to investigate the mystery white thing.

It was a dead cat.  A white cat with a couple of patches of brown fur on its left side.  They were quite unusual markings and I was sure that I had not seen it before.  It was not a regular visitor to the garden.  It was lying stretched out on its right side, eyes open, mouth open, tongue protruding, and it was quite dead.

I retreated to the house and shut the glass door and the cat door to keep our cats in while I thought about the situation.  I was upset.  I like cats, and here this one was lying dead in our front garden, and somebody somewhere might be worrying that it hadn't come home last night.  But where had it come from, how had it got here, and what had it died of?  If I had seen it by the side of a road I'd have said it had been hit by a vehicle, but we are nowhere near any road.  It was inconceivable that last night after it got dark somebody drove round our turning circle and ran over a strange cat. Had it been poisoned?  Or had some malevolent nutter left a dead cat in the drive?  That really didn't seem very likely either.  But poisoning was not a comfortable thought.  Would that be accidental poisoning from rodenticide, or deliberate poisoning with antifreeze?  It does happen. And last summer somebody was shooting pet cats in Great Bentley and West Bergholt.  The police even got involved, though I never read that anybody was caught or charged.

The Systems Administrator put the dead cat in a box in the pot shed, and agreed that the best thing to do was to ring up the RSPCA.  The cat might be microchipped, in which case its owner could be informed if it still had one, and we were hoping somebody might be able to give us some clue as to cause of death.  The RSPCA don't always get a good press and I feel slightly cautious of them, but I couldn't think who else to ask.  The woman who answered the phone at the local center sounded extremely kind and sensible, though, and said that the two most likely causes of death were road traffic accident and accidental poisoning.  I explained quite how far we were from a road, but she said that if it had been injured but not killed outright it might have had a very strong instinct to try and go home but collapsed en route.  They were not able to send anybody out, but if we could take it to any vet they would check for a microchip free of charge and contact the owner.  Or the RSPCA could do it.

That sounded a much better idea.  Our vet was incredibly busy the last time we went there, and the thought of turning up with a mystery dead cat in a box and no appointment did not appeal.  In fact I suppose you would leave the dead cat in the car while you went inside and explained to the receptionists what the problem was, since you probably shouldn't take the corpse into the waiting room along with other people's kittens waiting to be vaccinated, when you didn't even know what it had died of.  And so we ended up driving to Colchester with a dead cat.  If it had been our cat we would have wanted to know what had happened to it, even though the news was bad, rather than be left not knowing and nursing ever fainter hope that it might turn up.  And I rather selfishly still hoped the RSPCA would be able to give us some more idea of the cause of death.

We saw two people, both volunteers, and they both sounded confident that the poor cat had suffered a head trauma and made it as far as our drive before collapsing.  It did have a trickle of blood on the  right hand side of its head where it had been lying, though the SA couldn't tell if that was from a head wound or had come out of its mouth.  If the RSPCA staff were right it was the best outcome we could hope for as far as our own cats went.  Not rogue cat poisoners or heavy handed idiots somewhere in the locality with no idea how to lay rat poison properly.  And not a fox, which was the Systems Administrator's fear.  The cat was a neutered tom, quite old but in fair condition, though the ragged state of its ears indicated it had led a fairly feral existence, according to the RSPCA.  And it was microchipped, using an obsolete system they couldn't check online, but a phone call later they were able to tell us it was registered to a property up the road. So perhaps it had been trying to go home, poor thing.

We left it with them, and the sad task of contacting its owners.  I felt quite jangled for the rest of the morning and our cats seemed out of sorts, though whether that was the presence of the dead cat or the shock of being locked in was hard to say.  Mr Fidget went and sat in the wash basin in the downstairs cloakroom and wouldn't come out.

going out

I went to my AGM this morning.  It was the first time I'd been out socially for a month.  In fact, I could pretty much list every face to face conversation I've had with anybody in the past month, apart from the Systems Administrator.  I had that unpleasant conversation with the neighbours between Christmas and the New Year about their dogs coming into our garden.  I went to the Highwoods Tesco on New Years Day and had a chat with the young lad on the till about cats, and called at the filling station where I spoke to confirm which pump I was at and that £45.88 sounded right.  I called in at Beth Chatto's shop where the assistant and I agreed that it was jolly chilly, and at Budgens where I said that yes, that that was all that I wanted, that being a loaf of bread and a couple of pints of milk.  I went to Waitrose, although I can't remember what we talked about at the till.  Maybe by then the novelty of talking to people was wearing off.  And took in a parcel for the Systems Administrator delivered by an Eastern European who did not want a signature, and spoke to the postman a few times, and the dustman who called a day early.  And I exchanged emails and texts with a few people (well, six) and rang up the waste recycling firm to report that my brown garden bin had not been emptied.  And that was it, the sum total of my human contacts in four weeks.  It would be pitiful, like one of those newspaper stories about isolated old people, if it were not that it was quite as many people as I could cope with.

The AGM was very properly conducted.  Turnout was over ninety per cent.  I had been warned that attendance was expected unless you had a very good excuse indeed, and took heed, making it the only AGM of any club I have ever belonged to which I have ever been to unless I was actually on the committee.  The constitution was read out in full, because that is one of the requirements of the constitution.  It ran to three pages, so the Chairman, the Treasurer and the Membership Secretary took one each.  I was pretty much with the Chairman for the first page, but by the time we got to the rules governing whether a national meeting was quorate they were beginning to lose me.  The Picts, by now Scots (living in brackets).  I am all in favour of clubs having proper constitutions and sticking to them, though, especially when they say that all committee posts must be rotated after a sensible period, having seen at first hand what can happen when one or two people become entrenched.

The outline programme of entertainments for the following year sounded interesting, and we had a very nice lunch, so it was a morning well spent.  I was exhausted by the end of it, which I hadn't expected.  How tiring can it be to sit in a room with some friendly people and then eat lunch?  As the NHS website says about flu, you'll usually start feeling better after about a week although you may feel tired for much longer.

computer says no

I hope Google's driverless cars will be more stable than their browser.  Chrome has crashed repeatedly over the past few days.  Once it crashed and I'd killed it using the task manager it refused to relaunch until I'd restarted my laptop, which in turn meant I kept having to close any spreadsheets I had open plus log back into my email account once I'd rebooted, which was a double bore since BT asks you for your email address and password, and then sends you to a screen with desultory bits of news that you don't want and that they want you to make your homepage, and make you input your details all over again.  I could not blame the browser problem on any particular website since it seemed to crash irrespective of what I was doing at the time, and as my laptop is less than eighteen months old and is otherwise behaving perfectly normally I don't think it's my computer.  I blame Google.

This afternoon the Systems Administrator uninstalled and reinstalled Chrome, while managing to save all my bookmarks.  I'm relieved about the bookmarks.  Some of them would be quick to recreate but some I would struggle to remember if they weren't there on the list: obscure plant nurseries, online sources of plant and garden related information, useful clothes and shoe shops, open gardens noted down from magazine articles that we might visit if we were ever on holiday in the area, information about art and churches, the websites of off-the-beaten track museums. Apart from my spreadsheets and documents my favourites what makes my laptop mine, otherwise I might as well just be using a terminal in the local library.

Wrinkles remain to be ironed out the next time the SA is on the case.  My laptop no longer thinks I am entitled to read The Times, when the SA added my address to his subscription a couple of months ago.  It went against the grain to pay money to Murdoch (though the SA has never felt similarly squeamish about Sky Sports) but the SA felt the need of an alternative viewpoint to balance the world views of the Guardian and the BBC.

When I came to write tonight's blog post the machine demanded that I log in to Blogger, and wanted my Google password.  I was stumped.  Google to me still means the search engine, even though I know they do lots of other things (including hosting this blog).  You don't have a password for Googling.  I hoped a prompt question might come up to tell me which password I was supposed to be remembering, but it didn't, and I had to click the box to say I had forgotten it.  Google sent me a six digit code that let me choose another one, and then I was straight into the blog, so maybe they wanted the password I created when I set the blog up.  I could remember that, and now I've had to change it.

Anyway, I'm in now, and I was going to tell you that I trimmed the box hedge around the hybrid tea roses and started pruning them, and was going to plant the tulips that should have been planted in November, only I never got that far and ended up picking up soggy cherry and birch leaves off the bottom lawn instead.

cleaning

I cleaned the kitchen.  I told the Systems Administrator yesterday that I was planning to and that there was no implied pressure for the SA to join in.  I really couldn't face the idea of cleaning until a couple of days ago, and if the SA still couldn't that was perfectly OK, except that I was not going to not clean so as to not make the SA feel guilty.  When I was a child one of our many mother's helps used to start crashing around doing housework after my parents got back from their day at the university.  My father insisted that she only did it to annoy him.  Perhaps she was trying to demonstrate how hard she worked.  She was not a very bright woman, and we were brattish children, and it can't have been very pleasant for her living in an academic house where brightness was prized above all other attributes.  I developed a taste for soda bread under her charge, and absorbed the lesson that you should be careful how you do domestic chores around other people.

The SA understood that there was no passive aggressive subtext to my outburst of cleaning, and asked slightly nervously what that was, pointing to a strange purple brown smear underneath his end of the kitchen table.  I said that I was fairly sure it was a piece of cherry compote that one of us had trodden on and not cat shit, based on the purplish tinge and its position right next to the table leg where I'd been cooking.  I think it was squashed cherry on the kitchen floor, but the brownish patch in the downstairs corridor that I've been walking past for days while refusing to look at it too closely was definitely mouse blood.  I wiped it away, along with the spaghetti shaped dark loop near the letter box and several black-brown splashes, while the SA gallantly cleaned up the pile of fresh cat sick from the chair in front of my desk.

I love cats but it cannot be denied that they make a mess.  They hunt, they bring their dead things in, and leave little puddles of blood and tiny entrails on the floor, sometimes with a garnish of grass stems.  They eat the things they catch, or else they bolt their meals down too fast, and then they are sick.  Or they don't eat the things but leave them for you to find, maybe tastefully laid out in front of the telly or perhaps hidden under a chair as a surprise.  They walk around outside on the wet muddy ground and then leave footprints on the furniture.  They moult.  Their fur will stick to everything, but especially anything with an electrostatic charge, like an electric Aga.  This is why our house has no carpets downstairs and only one rug of any value (and that has been put away upstairs since the kittens arrived), and why every chair we possess is made of wood or else covered in leather (or at least plastic imitation leather) which can be wiped, if necessary with disinfectant. No chintz, no throws.  I used to know somebody whose partner after one visit here asked her when they were going to get a cat.  Her hall and her sitting room had champagne pink fitted carpets. You could tell it just wasn't going to happen.

the road to recovery is paved with housework

So Jaywick did not flood.  By the time we went to bed last night it looked as though it wasn't going to, after high tide had passed without incident at a string of places further up the coast, apart from a few isolated properties, and when I flicked the radio on this morning and at three minutes past eight the Today programme was already talking about Donald Trump I knew there couldn't be any major English floods to report.

The day was bright and cold, the wind able to cut through several layers of clothing with no trouble at all.  The Systems Administrator went out for half an hour to cut more firewood, while I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and that I was staying by the Aga.  Tomorrow is forecast to be milder and damp.  Hurrah.  It could finally get rid of the lumps of frozen snow still littering the garden, and then next week I might get something done.

I announced that tomorrow I was going to clean the house as I finally felt strong enough to face it and the weather forecast for Sunday was horrible while for next week it was quite good, and the SA offered to do the vacuuming.  The house has reached that tipping point of scuzziness, unbelievably dirty even by our standards, while I feel fit enough both to care and to do something about it. When you are at your most ill you don't mind what state the kitchen floor is in.  Then you do notice but can't summon the energy to do anything about it.

When you are both unwell at once you discover how low cleaning comes in the hierarchy of domestic needs.  You have to feed your animals, however little you feel like getting out of bed. You have to open the chicken house in the morning and shut it at night, and by the second or third day somebody has to go into the run to refill their water.  Luckily we had emergency reserves of cat food in the form of a large box of pouches we bought before going back to tinned food for their main meals, otherwise we would have had to buy cat food.  Human beings can exist for days if needs be on baked beans, tinned rice pudding, and whatever cheese is in the fridge, even if meals do end up resembling something out of a bizarre cookery challenge, but you can't expect your cats to live on jam and ryvita.

Apart from the need to buy cat food, it is nice to have milk for tea and so a trip to a supermarket comes fairly high up the list, once one of you feels fit to drive.  And once you start feeling like proper cooked food again then somebody has to cook it.  And then the need to do some laundry kicks in because otherwise you are going to run out of clean socks and knickers.  And unless you have a big and beautiful stack of firewood all ready chopped into logs small enough to fit in the stove somebody has to cut up some of the large lumps of wood that were left outside the workshop, if not drag more out of the actual wood.

So washing the kitchen floor and wiping the kitchen units and the Aga comes a very long way down the list, but tomorrow could be the day.

comfort eating

The lunchtime high tide has been and gone without the sea over topping the coastal defences at Jaywick.  As the morning advanced the risk receded in the judgement of the council and the police, leading to some confusion among the residents according to the local paper as people who had previously refused to leave decided that they or their family members did now want to go up to the reception centres and found that transport had been withdrawn.  Now the authorities are worried about tonight's tide, when of course it will be dark.  The trouble is, the more false alarms there are, the less likely anybody will be to take warnings seriously.  At least the council has learned from the last attempted evacuation, when people were not allowed to take their pets and some refused to leave without them.

Our first house in Essex was flooded to a couple of feet back in the big floods of 1953.  We bought it anyway, but since then we've gone uphill with each move.  I like the sea, and rivers, but am very happy not to live too close to either of them.  Delightful converted old watermills give me the willies.  Who now understands the complex system of water management that once fed them, and is it being maintained properly?  In our sandy fastness we are battered by the wind, but not water.

There was thin, barely frozen snow lying in patches on the lawn when I got up, and the merest skim of ice on the pond.  Then it snowed with big, wet flakes, and the kittens stared at it appalled through the windows as if it was the most terrible thing that they had ever seen.  Then it rained and melted most of the snow.  Hurrah.  But I did not dare to attempt to get to Dulwich when there had been snow in London with the possibility of more to come, and so I shall miss their Dutch Golden Age artist I should have liked to see.  I feared that would be the case once I didn't manage to get there before the trains shut down for Christmas.  The first couple of weeks of the New Year so often seem beset with illness and horrible weather.

By way of consolation I made waffles for lunch.  The Systems Administrator gave me a waffle iron for my birthday a couple of years ago, and I haven't used it as much as I'd have liked.  I did ask for a waffle iron, so it was not a case of being ambushed by an unwanted kitchen gadget, but the couple of times I did use it the waffles were flabby and disappointingly insubstantial, like a cross between a pancake and a cotton waffle weave blanket.  I thought the answer was to try making a yeast based batter instead of using what was essentially pancake batter with added bicarbonate of soda, but that meant mixing the batter right in the middle of the morning when I'm generally busy doing something else.

Today, watching sleet blow horizontally across the roof of the conservatory, it seemed a good morning for experimenting with batter and so I followed the recipe for My Mother's Waffles in Ruth van Waerebeek's The Taste of Belgium.  Or at least, I followed it reduced by two thirds.  Ruth van Waerebeek's mother must have wanted to make an awful lot of waffles.  The batter, enriched with quite a lot of melted butter and sugar, looked much more substantial than the aerated pancake mix I'd tried before, and bubbled convincingly as it sat on top of an upturned baking tin on the warming plate of the Aga for its requisite hour of proving, while Our Ginger, who had been sitting on the warming plate himself, sat outside the kitchen door and howled.

My first pair of waffles were slightly overcooked on the underneath, and I was too stingy with the batter for one of the second so it didn't manage to fill the iron completely and the top didn't get toasted.  I overfilled the plates for one set and the excess batter oozed out and dripped over the kitchen worktop, but by the end I was definitely getting the hang of them.  Our iron is the sort that makes two fairly substantial square waffles rather than a round of eight small ones, and I found you have to be bold and add slightly more batter than you might if you were worried about it leaking.

We ate them with whipped cream and my January store cupboard version of fruit compote, made with tinned cherries in some of their juice lightly set with cornflour and pepped up with some cherry jam.  My inner Gwyneth Paltrow told me that this was not healthy eating, but that's tough. We had bean stew last night.  It was sleeting and blowing half a gale and we have both been ill, and sometimes you need a treat.

I was pleased with the waffles, and so was the Systems Administrator who likes cherries.  You can serve them more modestly with melted butter, or I should think they would work with bacon or ham, in which case you could cut back on the sugar.  One thing puzzles me, though.  They do not come close to the waffles I remember from childhood holidays in Brittany, where I was first introduced to the delights of gaufres, which sounded like 'goffs' to my English ears.  You could get them freshly cooked from street stalls, lightly dusted with icing sugar, and I remember them being crisper and more melting than my home made efforts.  Is my memory at fault after forty years, as it is about so many other things?  Otherwise, what is the secret?

awaiting the arctic blast

We are getting quite blasé about the Chinooks and the Systems Administrator no longer comes hurrying out of the house for a closer look at the sound of them.  I did halt from my weeding to gaze up as one passed close to the garden this morning, flying really low, and reflected on how different a Chinook must look depending on your point of view.  To us they appear interesting, if noisy, while to an injured soldier awaiting evacuation from the battlefield they represent rescue, to a member of the Taliban a threat, or a target.

A different noise made me look up later in the morning, and it was the dustmen.  I was confused since the Tendring District Council website definitely said that rubbish would be collected on Friday this week, and then back to normal collections in the week starting 16 January.  I went rushing into the house to grab the kitchen bin, and came out again to find one of them walking up to the house. I asked if they were collecting recycling as well and did I have time to go and get my paper, and he said that I did, and that they were trying to do as much as possible today.  That would seem a very sensible idea if they are afraid of the weather messing up their round tomorrow, except that most people don't put their rubbish out twenty-four hours in advance.  It was only a matter of luck that I happened to be there and hear the dustcart and was able to go and get the relevant bins.  I didn't really understand how they thought their preemptive strike is going to work, but left it to my friendly dustman to worry about.

At lunchtime the rain arrived, and that was my gardening done for the day.  It has rained all afternoon, to the great disappointment of Mr Cool who keeps going outside, getting wet, and coming in again, incredulous and indignant that it is still raining.  Poor Mr Cool.  He brought me a mouse a couple of days ago while I was weeding, and I told him that I did not want his dead thing, and I think his feelings were hurt.  He came in this morning with another mouse and gave it to Mr Fluffy, who was more appreciative.

As I looked out of the study window at the rain this afternoon I suddenly realised that the witch hazels were out.  They must have just opened.  I wandered around the back garden yesterday and didn't notice them then.  They pull the same trick every year, and I sometimes panic that they have been flowering for days without my appreciating them.  The season of a witch hazel is not very short, but it is not so long you want to miss half a week of it.  Down in the ditch bed Viburnum x bodnantense 'Charles Lamont' was studded with its pink flowers when I walked around the garden.  I actually smelt it before I saw it.

The trouble with looking at the ditch bed is that I mainly see that the jobs that need doing.  The leaves of the hybrid hellebores need cutting off.  The latest crop of goose grass seedlings needs pulling up.  The overhanging willow branches need cutting back before the snowdrop leaves can grow any taller so that our trampling feet don't damage them.  Half the herbaceous perennials in the bog bed remain to be cut down, and an iris which has grown far too large for the space needs digging out.  I might replant part of it contained by a large bottomless pot, or I might not, but I don't want it advancing in all directions for another year.  It has already overcome a blameless pink flowered Sanguisorba that lay in its path.

I do hope we don't get snow.  I know that what I hope for has no bearing at all on what weather we get, but snow is loathsome stuff when you are a gardener, breaking down shrubs and lying in icy lumps that keep you off the borders for days, quite apart from the fact that the nearest road to ever see a gritting lorry starts about a mile from our house.  Please let it be rain and not snow.  I should not grumble, though.  People are being evacuated from Jaywick because of the risk of flooding.

experiments with cyclamen

I am beginning to make progress with my display of Cyclamen cilicium.  This was the third species of garden cyclamen I tried after starting off with C. hederifolium and C. coum, which are the two you are most likely to encounter in a garden centre.  The former presents its flowers above naked soil in the autumn, and by now the flowers are long gone but the clusters of leaves have appeared. They have scalloped edges not unlike an ivy leaf (the clue's in the name) and are often patterned with handsome splashes of silver.  If you choose your plant in leaf you can make sure you pick out a good form, though if you are worried about flower colour you might want to try and find some while they are in flower, since they could be white or any shade of pink.

Cyclamen coum flowers later, generally around now.  Their leaves are shaped like rounded hearts without the scalloped edges of the ivy leaved cyclamen, and might have interesting silver patterns, or be pale silver all over, or just plain green.  They make wispier plants than C. hederifolium, which make dense and chunky circles of foliage once established, and I think the reason why you are advised not to plant the two species together in the same area is that C. coum can be smothered by its more domineering neighbour.  Both like shade, with C. hederifolium being particularly tolerant of dry shade according to shade plant specialists Long Acre Plants.

Both grew for me pretty well around the shady edges of the lower lawn in the back garden, and even began to seed into the lawn, until as is the way with plant lovers I began to wonder about the other species.  I wasn't interested in those that would only survive in the UK under glass, not having an alpine house and having plenty of other things to worry about, but according to my books and the catalogues of various people selling cyclamen, C. cilicium was more tolerant of sun than many, and was fairly hardy.  My eye fell upon a patch of gravel in front of the house where nothing else was growing.  East facing, the cyclamen would get sun for half the day and some residual warmth and protection from the building, and anyway we are in a fairly warm corner of the country.

I started with a few, which is how I often try out new plants.  If they tell you that they are very happy you can propagate them or buy some more, and if they never come up, rapidly die, or languish miserably then you know not to waste any more expense and effort.  Unless you really want them, that is.  My usual rule is that if it dies twice I'm not trying again, though I made an exception for the notoriously difficult to establish Romneya coulteri and it was a case of third time lucky.  The Romneya is now running and rampaging through its bed as Californian tree poppies are supposed to do, when they survive at all.

The first few Cyclamen cilicium did well enough for me to persist with the experiment, though they were not very exciting for the first few years.  In appearance they are quite like C. coum with the same rounded leaves, which are agreeably patterned in silver.  The flowers are supposed to be a tad smaller and I think that mine are are.  They range in colour from pale pink to a stronger shade, and come out in autumn.  From tentative and weedy beginnings my biggest plants are now quite substantial with well furnished rosettes of foliage, and (which is what prompted me to write about them) they are blooming again now, having had one flush before Christmas.

The horticultural trade is plagued with muddle and misidentifications, and not being a cyclamen expert I wouldn't be utterly surprised if I were ever to show my plants to somebody who was to be told that they were not true C. cilicium as found in the wild in their native Turkey, but some kind of hybrid, or even that a tuber or two of C. coum had slipped in by mistake.  But they do cope with half sun, and they do flower in autumn when they are supposed to.  Whatever they are, they are very pretty.  I was sufficiently encouraged by my first foray into growing them to buy more in subsequent years.

The extraordinarily cheap tubers I got from Peter Nyssen turned out to be cheap for a reason, as things so often are: they were dried and dormant, because dried and dormant is what Peter Nyssen sells.  I should not have been surprised.  The books generally advise not drying cyclamen out but buying them as growing plants.  I planted them, not entirely sure which way up most of them should go, and they didn't all take.  If I were doing that again I'd probably start them off in pots and then plant them out as growing plants, then at least I could turn any over that I'd got the wrong way up.  The following year I got some more in active growth, I think from Broadleigh Bulbs.  The RHS website lists twenty suppliers, so they are not that hard to track down, only you are unlikely to come across them without seeking them out.

The whole cyclamen by the front door project was in danger of being derailed last summer when we first let the kittens out, and they adopted the gravel by the front door as their litter tray.  We managed to put them off by watering the whole area with a solution of peppermint shower gel, but I'm not sure whether any tubers got dug up, or if any succumbed to the nitrogen rich stream of kitten pee and poo, or indeed the dosing with peppermint shower gel.  It is vicious stuff.  I bought it originally for showering, but the Systems Administrator rejected it outright after the first use and the only time I tried washing with it tender parts of my anatomy smarted painfully.  The best plants now are growing around the legs of an iron stand holding a terracotta oil jar, where the cats couldn't get at them.

Overall it has been a slow process.  The first few plants went in as long ago as 2009, and I started trying to bulk them up into a proper display a couple of years ago.  Losses have been heavy. Growing conditions must be tough quite apart from the cat litter episode, since while the drainage is good the soil is woefully low in humus, and being under gravel the tubers don't get regularly mulched, let alone dressed with chopped pine needles as some websites suggest.  They do get some supplementary water over the summer as they are fairly close to the roots of a Pileostegia I'm trying to encourage.  But while it has been slow, this winter I feel I'm getting there.  I might even buy a few more if I see them, to fill the remaining gap, and maybe stick some ornamental iron plant stakes among them to prevent any more lavatorial incidents.  And I should remember to go and inspect the plants as they finish flowering, in case they have set seed.

military matters and weeding

The military have been busy today, with three Chinooks flying low over the countryside.  This time the local paper picked up on the story, unlike the times when the deep thud of something being exploded makes the whole house rattle and the Systems Administrator jokes that they must have found a big one in the back of the cupboard.  The Chinooks are with the RAF's 28 Squadron, over this week from their base in Oxfordshire to practice moving men and materials around the battlefield with Colchester's 16 Air Assault Brigade.  The Chinooks are impressive in a massive, stately way and it's interesting to find out what they're doing for once.

A large, fat, dark greenish grey military plane of some kind flew past between us and the lettuce tunnels, low and incredibly loud.  I thought vaguely it must be some sort of bomber, and then that it didn't look vintage and I don't think we do bombing like that nowadays, so I asked the SA, who hadn't seen it but said it must have been the new European transport aircraft, the A400M, that was being rough field landing tested up at Woodbridge last year.  A picture of it had found its way into the article about the Chinooks, though with no explanation from the paper as to what it was, but the SA said the two flypasts were nothing to do with each other.

Another article in the Times confirmed that there was a virus induced outbreak of what was described as a lingering cough, and quoted several doctors imploring the public to ignore the advice on the NHS website to seek medical advice for coughs lasting more than three weeks, so long as they were otherwise feeling generally better and not suffering from breathlessness or unexplained weight loss or coughing up blood.  That sounds like us, gradually feeling generally better but still coughing, and far from unexplained weight loss I am suffering from entirely explained weight gain from inactivity and too much consolatory ice cream.

Making the most of the warmer weather before the next icy blast arrives I got on with weeding and deadheading in the gravel planting in the middle of the turning circle (which gave me a ringside view of the A400M, while the SA missed it).  Another attractive but slightly terrifying self seeder is fennel.  I grow the bronze sort and as I admire the silhouette of its flat topped, radiating clusters of seed heads in early winter, I can never quite forget that every one is poised to present me with a crop of new little fennels that will have to be pulled out of the gravel by hand.  Fennel is a tap rooter, and new plants rapidly become resistant to being pulled up, the leaves breaking away in your fingers and leaving the little white root to shoot anew.  It is particularly difficult to grub out when it seeds between paving slabs.  I have read of people who use the feathery young foliage as a companion to spring tulips but then cut it down so as not to have to deal with the seed heads, but the sulphur yellow flowers and then the architectural outline in autumn are attractive.

Inspecting the gravel close up as I weeded confirmed that I needed to order a couple of bags and top up the thin bits.  The garden would easily take three or four bags, but I don't want to commit to spreading out more than two at a time.  The spot where I would like to have them set down, just inside the entrance so that the lorry doesn't have to manoeuvre inside the garden, is unfortunately blocked by brambles and a thicket of sea buckthorn shoots that have sprung up in the past year.  I am getting exasperated with the sea buckthorn, since great lumps of the original plants that were supposed to be providing a screen at the boundary seemed to die late last summer, and meanwhile the roots are advancing into the drive and trying to conquer new territories.  I wish it would just stay where I'd put it and do the job it was supposed to do.  I don't want the gravel lorry in the garden because I need to trim the eleagnus hedge before we have any more lorries, and I am further away from being able to order gravel than ever if I have to cut the whole hedge first.

As it is a great lump of hedge needs tying in and tidying up where it got caught in the wing mirror of a huge truck whose driver obstinately tried to drive up to the house, instead of stopping at the gate and walking up to the front door.  I presume he thought he was saving himself some time, but it took him so long to back out and he made such a hash of it that he'd have been far better off stopping short.  Once he'd finally extracted himself from the garden and opened the back of the enormous truck it was entirely empty except for one eight by four foot sheet of modelling foam that the SA had bought online.  It is much cheaper bought in bulk, apparently.  There were a couple of pallets which I thought the driver might have given me after he'd made such a mess of my hedge, but he said No.

dead heading

Rain was forecast for later, but later is not the same as now, and I managed to get some more weeding and chopping down done before it arrived at lunchtime.  In an ideal world I'd leave all the old flowering stems for another month or six weeks so that the birds could eat the seeds, but there wouldn't be time to tidy every border in the second half of February.  And the first snouts of bulbs are already starting to push their way through the gravel, so I need to get it weeded before they get too tall and vulnerable to being trodden on, and certainly before the iris start flowering.  Last year I didn't manage to get it done in time, and felt rather wistful as the bulbs had their annual weeks of glory surrounded by mess.

It is a slow process, apart from having to grub up the wretched weedy vetch, as I go round deadheading before cutting the old flowering stems down.  They are destined for the compost heap, but I don't want the compost full of Agapanthus and Dierama seeds because the heap won't get hot enough to kill them.  That sounds ungrateful.  Who could object to having more elegant South African flowers for free?  Indeed, I love both of them, but that's not to say I want them scattered through every border I ever use the compost on.  Both are prolific self seeders, the seeds of the Agapanthus like pointed black peppercorns and the Dierama seeds solid, glistening, orange-brown, angular bodies a bit smaller than a match head.  The old flower heads both went in an old compost bag ready to go in the brown council recyling bin, along with the spent flowering stems of the evening primroses.  Even so I shall be hauling dozens of unwanted Dierama seedlings out of the gravel.

The evening primroses self sow with irrepressible enthusiasm.  I don't know for sure what species they are, since I grew them from seed collected from plants growing on the beach at Dunwich.  Or rather, I grew their ancestors and they have kept going ever since by seeding, for they are biennials.  They fit the description of Oenothera biennis, originally a north American species but one which is widely naturalised in temperate regions elsewhere, according to Wikipedia.  I like them.  They grow enthusiastically in the gravel with no supplementary watering or feeding, which is more than you could say of about ninety-nine per cent of plants offered for sale in the average garden centre, and they flower over a long period from high summer into autumn.  The flowers are yellow, but since I am not somebody who regards disapproval of yellow flowers as a badge of good taste that doesn't matter.  I have seen goldfinches feeding on the seeds in late winter, which is nice. But they do seed.  Boy, do they seed.  Fat little lettuce coloured rosettes of leaves come up in abundance all over the gravel and have to be prised out several times every year.  I am not even taking the old flowering stems up to the bonfire heap this time, to avoid having a new colony forming near the compost bins, but snipping them up in situ and stuffing them straight into the bag of rubbish.

I will not groom the dead, brown leaves out of the Watsonia pillansii for now.  This is another South African, and I think the gravel is drier than it would like since leaves always seem to be going brown.  Either they are too dry or they are incorrigably messy growers.  They have self sown as enthusiastically as the Dierama since I first planted them out a couple of years ago, but I won't start counting my chickens until some of the babies have reached flowering size.  Watsonia is not the hardiest thing for a UK garden, and I shall leave the old leaves in place to help protect the crowns until spring.

rain sonata

I am still enchanted by the cello transcription of the Brahms violin sonata No. 1 in G major, Op. 78. I heard it performed at one of the local music societies, and found the opening tune of the first movement delightful, and strangely familiar since I didn't have a recording of it and didn't think it got that much airtime on Radio 3, let alone Classic FM.  It felt like something Mendelssohn might have written after his trip to Scotland, lilting and folk inspired.  Perhaps that was why it seemed familiar, not because I knew the sonata itself but because it reminded me of something else?  It took a little digging to find a recording of the cello transcription that wasn't appended to practically the whole of Brahms' music for cello at a correspondingly hefty price, but Maria Kliegel on Naxos obliged and somebody kindly gave me a copy for Christmas so I have been listening to it virtually on a loop while cooking.

I mentioned my new found enthusiasm to my uncle the retired Radio 3 producer, who approved of the Brahms and of Maria Kliegel.  I loved Maria Kliegel's verdict on her career with Naxos.  Her friends were rather sniffy about her going to work for a budget label, asking whether she couldn't record for Deutshe Grammophon.  It was not that simple, she had told them, and anyway, years later all her recordings were still in print.

I am beginning to think that the reason why it sounded familiar might be that it gets used in all sorts of TV soundtracks, so I have heard bits of it without ever knowing what they were.  I thought I recognised a snippet in the final episode of Simon Sebag Montefiore's history of Vienna, by way of illustrating late nineteenth century Viennese culture.  I should probably get a recording of the original version for violin now.  The little tune is a total earworm, but at least I know what it is.  It took me ages and a fruitless trawl through the entire waltzes of Chopin to track down the waltz used in the soundtrack of Waltz with Bashir, which in the end it turned out to be by Schubert and not Chopin at all, though looking on the bright side I ended up with Stephen Hough's excellent Chopin disc which I enjoyed anyway, after the initial disappointment that it didn't contain the tune I was looking for.

Today was much warmer.  It wasn't just me that thought so: the bees were out foraging on the mahonia.  I decided that if it was warm enough for the bees to fly it was warm enough for me, and spent a few useful hours tidying up the gravel planting in the middle of the turning circle.  The first spikes of bulb foliage are already appearing, and the sooner it is done the better, quite apart from the fact that I still haven't managed to sow the Tulipa sprengeri seeds I was given.  I should have sown them as soon as I got them, since the seed is said to germinate better fresh, but there didn't seem any point until I had weeded the ground where they were going.

My top nuisance weed in the gravel at this time of year is a fine leaved and innocent looking wild vetch.  When small it looks so elegant and delicate you could be tempted to leave it, but if left it forms great smothering mats of foliage while the flowers are nothing to write home about.  The roots are extremely reluctant to pull out of the ground even when the plants are tiny, and it takes careful weeding to extract the vetches without pulling up all the emerging seedlings of Nigella damascena.

a reading day

Today was forecast to be warmer than yesterday, and I had thought I might finally get outside, but when I stuck my nose out first thing to do the chickens it felt as cold and raw as ever.  Worse than yesterday, if anything, because it was very lightly drizzling.  Looking again at the weather forecast I realised that while I'd checked whether rain was likely and how warm it was expected to be, I had ignored the forecast relative humidity, which was set to stay between 99% and 97% for the entire day.  The resulting weather was like being stuck inside a cloud, cold, damp, and incredibly raw.

It's lucky I was given mostly books for Christmas.  I have been reading PLANT published by Phaidon, a beautifully produced collection of botanical art covering the past fifteen hundred years (with a few prehistoric examples), and spanning both Western and Asian traditions.  It includes a vast variety of techniques, including wood block prints, water colours, lithographs, the results of electron microscopy hand tinted in bright colours, dried and pressed flowers, weird and marvellous prints made using the actual leaf as the printing block, the effect of laying samples on light sensitive paper, and techniques I hadn't even heard or thought of.  The pictures facing each other in each pair of pages have been chosen to complement each other in some way, perhaps two different treatments of the same subject made hundreds of years apart, or related subjects such as two different fruits, or similar visual approaches to different subjects, or pictures made for the same purpose.  It is printed on lovely, thick, glossy paper and is a reminder of why for some subjects a physical book is infinitely nicer than reading or seeing the image on a screen.  So far I have managed to guard it against Mr Fidget taking a bite out of the dust jacket or Mr Fluffy planting a large, hairy footprint on any of its pages.

It is impossible to absorb over two hundred pages of botanical images in one go and so I have been alternating with Rachel Roddy's Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome.  I put in a request for it after following her column online in the Guardian, since she writes the sort of edible sounding recipes involving half a dozen ingredients rather than fifteen or twenty including several I would have to buy specially, assuming I could find them in Colchester, and would probably never use up before they dried up, lost their flavour or went off.  You can tell I am not a natural fan of Yotam Ottolenghi.  But I have cooked one of Rachel Roddy's vegetable recipes out of the Guardian and it worked.  She says that the ethos of Roman cooking is very close to that of her northern English grandmothers, and cites Jane Grigson's vegetable book as one of her seminal influences, which reinforces my instinct that I am going to enjoy cooking her kind of food.

Meanwhile, after stretching the lamb curry Systems Administrator made on Wednesday to two evenings, and discovering a pair of pizzas in the freezer that needed eating up, it really is my turn to cook.  I have a pair of pork chops that have been sitting in the fridge looking at me each time I opened the door since I bought them on the morning of New Year's Day.  I was supposed to do them earlier in the week and cried off, pleading lack of energy, but they are only good until today.  I don't suppose they will actually go off at the stroke of midnight, but still it's time to rouse myself and do something with them.  Probably simmer them with onions and a couple of sage leaves, and serve them with some of the forbidding parsnip mountain that's still lurking in the fridge.

twelfth night

It was another day for not going outside more than you had to.  There was no frost on the grass when I woke, but the air was savagely cold on my face and in my lungs when I went to open the hen house. The flu has left me with a hacking cough, which according to the NHS website is not uncommon, and the cure is rest, warmth, plenty of fluids, and time.  The GP cannot do anything to hasten recovery and does not want to see me, not unless I start running a fever or go blue.  Neither of these things have happened so I am stuck indoors, drinking tea.  It's a waste when there is so much to be done in the garden, but there it is.

I took the Christmas cards down, sorting them out between out the ones with glitter that can't go in the paper recycling and the rest that can.  I still couldn't work out who one of them was from.  I would have hazarded a guess, and the card was sold in aid of the RSPB when I know the person I might have guessed at is a keen bird watcher, if it were not that she had sent me another card, clearly legible and with her news taking up the left hand half of the inside.  And the mystery card was addressed to both of us with the Systems Administrator's name first, while she generally addresses her card to me and had done so again this year.  Somebody wishes us well, but I really don't know who.

Somebody else had sent us two cards, presumably having had to write them in more than one batch and having not kept a list, but that doesn't matter, not like the story in the Guardian by the pseudonymous Widower of the Parish who received a card addressed to Adam and Helen wishing them the best Christmas and New Year ever! from somebody who had actually been present at his wife's funeral earlier in the year.  Things can feel rushed at Christmas, but that is a fairly basic failure of mindfulness.  I suppose they will now be smothered in remorse, if they read his column.

Only one of the neighbours bothered with a card (not the Airedale owners).  Maybe cards are ceasing to be a thing.  I have heard that it is so among the younger generation.  We don't even have postal addresses for some of our nieces and nephews.  It came as a surprise to me that one of them had a baby this summer, though not so to the Systems Administrator who looked unsurprised when I read the announcement included in her parents' card and said Ah, yes, I think I knew that.  The SA is less inclined to talk about people behind their backs than almost anybody else I have ever met, which is in many ways an admirable and endearing trait given that about ninety per cent of anything said behind people's backs is bitchy at one level or another, but it can make it difficult for me to keep up sometimes.

Meanwhile I am half way through writing a letter to an old friend whose card indicated that all had not been plain sailing in past couple of years.  It must have been three or four years since we've seen each other, but she was happy with my suggestion that we should try and meet sometime in 2017.  On the basis that she probably gets several hundred work related emails a day I thought an actual hand written letter in a paper envelope might be likelier to get noticed.

Addendum  In the afternoon I made a Victoria sandwich.  That came out quite well, but the ricotta with honey I had for breakfast was really vaguely horrid, dry and not a patch on Greek style yogurt. After putting the tail end of two white sliced loaves and the desiccated fourth quarter of the chocolate sponge in the food recycling bin I think we have finally pretty much cleared out the last of the Christmas food.  If you are both going to be ill try not to do it with a stuffed fridge.

poultry care and a cheese conundrum

As I went out this morning to let the hens into their run, I saw the two straw bales next to it that the Systems Administrator moved last night and remembered I'd said I'd put them inside first thing while the hens were still in their house.  I don't like strawing down when the hens are out, partly because I worry about them making a break for freedom through the open door, and partly because I worry about Mr Cool or Mr Fidget nipping inside to further their acquaintance with the hens.  Now we're in government ordained poultry lockdown because of bird flu I don't have to worry about whether or not I should let the hens out for another tour round the garden.  They do enjoy eating grass and scratching up my flowerbeds, but I do not trust Mr Cool's and Mr Fidget's intentions towards them.

The straw goes some way towards cheering them up, since they can poke about in it looking for insects.  Plus, it helps keep their feet clean which is better for their health and in turn helps keep the eggs clean.  Finding a source of small bales is always a problem, and I might start saving thin woody prunings to go on the floor of the run to help stop it being churned to mud, but at the moment we do have some straw.  One of the bales had burst in transit, and the door of the hen run doesn't open fully due to general age, decrepitude and possibly a basic design flaw (it opens with about as much ground clearance as your average domestic door in a house, only your average house floor is not covered in grass that keeps growing).  I got most of the straw in, but quite a lot stayed strewn around the grass outside or stuck to my front.  The hens liked it anyway.

After lunch I roused myself to clean their droppings board and put down fresh sawdust.  They should appreciate that as well, once they go to bed and notice what I've done.  I was pleased to see an article in the Times extolling the intelligence of hens.  I have long thought they were quite bright animals.

Apart from that, although the sun was shining, it was too cold to do anything outside.  I stuck my nose out a couple of times, drawn by the blue sky and sunshine and lurking suspicion that it was not healthy to go on doing nothing indoors for ever.  After all, look where that got Colin in The Secret Garden.  But the cold air hurt my chest, my muscles ached, and I had to admit that gardening was going to have to wait to another day.  Yesterday it was not so cold, and in the middle of the day I managed to finish wiring up the base of the compost bins, and refill our brown bin with nettle roots so that it should be all ready for when collections finally resume.  And I deadheaded the little pots of cyclamen and pansies by the front door, and cut down the dead stems in half of the dahlia bed. But yesterday it didn't feel this cold.

Instead I had a look online for ideas to use up ricotta, but didn't get very far.  Approximately half of all recipes for ricotta also include spinach.  The Systems Administrator is allergic to spinach.  Quite a lot are for cheesecake, but I wasn't sure whether we'd manage to eat a whole cheesecake, even supposing I'd felt like cooking one.  Quite a lot more were for lasagne, which was the original plan, but I didn't really feel like messing about with layers of sauce or stuffing pasta tubes, though I suppose the unlikely sounding Brussels Sprouts Lasagne offered by the Huffington Post might have killed two birds with one stone, if the Christmas sprouts are still edible.  I certainly wasn't going to start deep frying doughnuts, which was one popular suggestion from the Italian repertoire.  Quite a few recipes demanded fresh strawberries: not in this house in January.  The possibilities widened after the SA suggested he might go shopping tomorrow, in which case I would not be limited to the ingredients in the fridge, on the other hand buying lots of extra food so that I could use up a pot of cheese that in my heart of hearts I didn't want to cook with felt perverse.  Baking it with an egg and some sugar and vanilla and quietly eating it myself for breakfast with some honey (ignoring the serving suggestion of dishing it up with figs) might be easiest.  Or maybe just eat it with honey, and ignore the baking bit.

eat it up

We are still eating our way through the great pile of Christmas food.  It just goes to show what a gargantuan amount we must normally manage to tuck away between Christmas Eve and the first couple of days of the New Year, since we were both starting to ail by the time we shopped this Christmas, and only got what felt like the bare minimum so that if we rallied enough to celebrate we wouldn't find we were lacking the basics.  Imagine the conversation: Do you remember where in the fridge you put the chipolatas?  I can't see them.  Oh, I didn't bother to get any, didn't think we'd want them.

At lunchtime the Systems Administrator ate the last of the large expensive piece of dead pink pig.  I was all hammed out by then.  We had sliced ham with fresh French stick for lunch on Monday, toasted French stick with ham and cheese for lunch on Tuesday, and more cold ham for supper yesterday evening.  I like ham in moderation, but by that stage I didn't see it as food so much as an invitation to bowel cancer by nitrate.  I'd been all set to slice the last bit thinly and freeze it for future use in pancakes or flans, but the SA likes preserved pig.  A lot.

The ham was best before 4 January, so we dealt with it in the nick of time.  Yesterday we had mozzarella for lunch, originally bought some time in the third week of December with the intention of making lasagne.  That's making everything, including the pasta.  In the event I didn't have the energy and we ate some frozen pasta sauce instead with dried penne.  The mozzarella was best before 3 January, and I had uneasily remembered its presence some time on Monday.  Served with tomatoes roasted in olive oil it made a respectable lunch, only we had to pretend that the toasted white sliced bread was sourdough or ciabatta.

There is still a pot of ricotta also originally intended for the lasagne, best before 7 January so I have three days to work out what to do with it.  So far my mind is a blank.  I read a recipe in the Rachel Roddy book of Roman cooking I was given for Christmas for turning it into pasta sauce, which I thought sounded nice, but the Systems Administrator looked very dubious when I mentioned it.  That was bad psychology.  If you are cooking never give the rest of the family the chance to object to a new idea in advance.  Just dish it up, preferably when they are hungry, and anyway if they are nice and polite people they won't feel able to grumble unduly.

Instead of more dead pig for lunch I began on the Christmas brie, best before 7 January and actually just about right now, whereas it felt very hard the last time I found it in the fridge.  We should manage to finish it tomorrow, but I think the left over quarter of chocolate sponge is a goner, and I'm not optimistic about the last of the sprouts, while there's a bag of parsnips looking distinctly sweaty, and a green pepper somewhere I haven't had the heart to exhume.  Food waste is another casualty of illness.  You aren't as hungry as you normally would be, you don't feel like cooking, and your careful plans about how you are going to use up the ends of everything (especially when there are only two of you) unravel.

checking the bees

After lunch I steeled myself to go and check the bees.  I did not really feel like fiddling about with beehives.  It was cold, and it would have been much better not to disturb them.  And I'd rather not have gone out in the cold myself.  But just as I went down with flu I had realised that I'd left their food stores set up wrong, and then a few days ago an email arrived from the government national bee unit warning of the risks of starvation.  Apparently the unseasonably mild weather before Christmas might have led them to use more energy than they normally would have, and starving colonies had been reported.

I was really pleased with myself in the autumn that I remembered to fit the mouse guards to the hives in good time, and after all these years keeping bees you'd think I'd know how to set up their winter stores.  The problem came because this year I decided to allow most of the hives to keep some of their own honey for winter.  I'd already harvested as much as I was likely to use, give away, or sell, and last year when I took the last almost full super of honey off each hive at the end of the season and extracted it, the honey fermented in storage.  That seemed a waste, so this year I left the supers on longer for the bees to make sure the honey was absolutely ripe and finished, and then I realised that the bees had already been on the ivy.  Ivy honey tastes absolutely disgusting, at least to humans, so in the end I decided it was better to leave it with them than take it off and then laboriously feed them sugar syrup instead.  Their own honey is probably more nutritious anyway.

What I failed to do was think through how they were going to get to it.  In the summer beehive the queen bee lives in the big brood box at the bottom of the hive, laying eggs, and the worker bees store any surplus honey in the supers above.  The queen is prevented from going up into the supers to lay eggs by a metal frame cunningly designed so that the smaller worker bees can crawl through it but the larger queen can't.  In the depths of winter the bees clump together for warmth, and the whole clump gradually moves over the frames inside the hive, eating the honey (or sugar) stored there.  If the only food left is above the metal frame the cluster of bees will go to it, and the queen will be left behind down in the brood box, where she will starve if she doesn't freeze first.  I should have taken the metal frames out.

This gently preyed on my mind once I didn't feel so ill that I didn't care.  Then the bee unit email niggled away, until I thought that now I was not so ill I had better go and take a very quick look, remove the queen excluders, and feed any colonies that were light on stores.  The prospect did not fill me with delight, nor having to unscramble the results in a couple of months time if the queen had moved upstairs and started laying.  But I had weeks to work out how I was going to do that, whereas the bees could be dying of cold or starvation by tomorrow morning, so wearing a thermal hat under the hood of my bee suit I set off, armed with hive tool, ekes, bags of fondant and a pair of scissors.  I didn't bother with a smoker.  I didn't think the bees would be that keen to come out, and I wasn't planning on keeping the hives open for longer than about three seconds.

The good news was that all the hives had live bees in, and every cluster was still down in the brood box.  Of course I can't be sure that they've been down there all the time, and I won't know if I still have a live queen in every colony until the spring, but my hunch is that they have been living on the stores in the brood boxes and have not abandoned their queens.  One cluster was right at the top of the frames and began to come out to see what was happening as I disturbed the hive, which was a nuisance.  I didn't want them catching cold, and they were in the way as I tried to clear lumps of brace comb so that the super would sit directly on top of the brood box without leaving a draughty crack between the two.  Still, perhaps they were poised to move upstairs and perhaps my tardy intervention has saved their queen.  Who knows?  Perhaps I have squashed her.

Every hive felt heavy enough.  I didn't feel I should ignore the government advice, but I wonder whether bees really waste their stores moving around to no good purpose in mild winter spells. Bees have been perfecting the art of how to be bees for tens of millions of years.  Their foraging behaviour in the field is so efficient that it has been used as the basis for modelling the optimal routes for delivery vans.  Does such a marvellously efficient creature use extra energy to no good purpose fiddling around just because it is a nice day, or do they work out there's precious little forage to be had and that it's still dark most of the time and stay put in their clusters?

winter watering

I roused myself today to check the pots in the greenhouse and the conservatory.  I hadn't done any watering since before Christmas, and while I thought that most things would still be OK, I was beginning to think that it would be a shame to find too many desiccated remains when I finally returned to the garden.  The greenhouse is practically impassable because I hurriedly shoved a lot of pots and trays in there some time in mid December when particularly wet and cold weather was imminent, thinking I'd sort them out later, and later hasn't come yet.

Winter watering is tricky.  The manager at the plant centre used to drain down the irrigation system for winter, and only fire it up occasionally on days when he was there.  The stated reason was to prevent the pipes splitting in the frost, and I'm sure that was one motivation for draining it, but I'm equally certain the other was to prevent over-keen members of staff from over-watering the pots in the tunnels.  Watering can feel like a satisfying way of spending a couple of hours at work, especially if the alternative is standing outside when it's only a few degrees above freezing and trying to scrape weeds off frozen pots.  But most plants in containers use water very slowly at this time of year.  Drench them now when they don't need it and their roots may rot away before they ever manage to dry out.

Of course the flip side is the root ball allowed to sit too dry over winter so that the plant quietly dies before spring ever arrives.  I have managed to kill plants, mostly my own, by both methods though I am probably more of an under-waterer than an over-waterer.  Anyway, today I decided it was time to go and make an inspection.  Most things didn't look too bad.  I gave a stingy amount to some of the pelargoniums up on the greenhouse staging, and a couple of evergreen shrubs in the conservatory that looked dry, but most pots didn't need watering.

The light was flashing on the electric rat zapper in the greenhouse, and when I looked inside there was a dead mouse.  Goodness knows how long that had been there.  It had chewed the emerging leaves of some hyacinths under the staging, or one of its friends or relations had, but there was no further damage to the tray of Clivia seedlings that was the mouse's target last time, and was why I moved the zapper from the top of the sealed cases of small bulbs to the other end of the bench.  It looked as though nothing had managed to get into the propagating cases, but I wasn't breaking the gaffer tape seals to find out.  I threw away the mouse and reset the trap, but it began to buzz faintly and I had to swap it with the one that's been drying in the laundry room over Christmas.  The price of electric rat zappers has gone up in recent months, perhaps a casualty of Brexit, and it is annoying to have to adopt a one on, one off system with them.  I should prefer to deploy all three at all times.  As it is there is one on permanent duty by the chicken food bin in the garage, meaning I don't have a spare to put down in the conservatory.  (Anybody who does not understand my hatred of mechanical traps still has twenty days to catch David Sedaris's essay on the subject on Radio 3).

I discovered to my annoyance that the potted Christmas tree that never was had lost its pot.  I moved it into the greenhouse before Christmas so that it should not blow over and break any of its branches, standing it in a seed tray balanced across the edges of three dahlia pots because I was so short of space, and its pot must have dropped off the root ball as I lifted it, and I must have not noticed in my declining state.  The root ball didn't feel too dry, and the needles hadn't assumed that dull tone that tells you that something is going badly wrong with a conifer, but it can't have done it any good to sit without a pot for over a fortnight.  Heigh ho.

happy new year

We dined on New Year's Eve on corned beef hash, while watching the last episode of Simon Sebag Montefiore's three-parter on the history of Vienna, and at half past ten I went to bed and read a couple of pages of the RHS history and use of fifty garden tools before going to sleep long before midnight.  I should have sent a photo of the hash to the Guardian for their selection of underwhelming New Year's Eve photos.  We'd have been in good company: I saw this morning that quite a few of the photos that were included featured cats.  Actually, I have never been a great fan of New Year celebrations even when not convalescing from flu, and I like corned beef hash.

The Systems Administrator pointed out yesterday that the large and expensive lump of pink pig meat I bought what seems like weeks ago to eat as part of the Christmas lunch we never cooked was not gammon but ham.  I am not sure I had really grasped there was a difference, but by the time I bought it I was beginning to sink.  Apparently there is, the ham being already cooked.  The SA said never mind, we could eat it for lunch with some nice bread, except that as in the Irish joke about eggs and bacon we did not have any bread, except for half a week old white sliced loaf.

According to a useful list on the local paper's website of supermarket opening hours over the festive season the Highwoods branch of Tesco was due to open on New Year's Day, and so I set off.  Twenty minutes after opening the store was very quiet, the aisles mostly filled by people looking as though, like me, for one reason or another they hadn't bothered with any celebrations the night before.  By the time I finished my shopping the store was considerably busier and the customers on average looked more fragile, and it had started to drizzle.  Still, well done Tesco, for not merely being open but for maintaining normal stocks of milk and firelighters.  You would never have guessed that the annual ritual of panic buying had just been and gone, if it weren't for the sad, left-over, penguin-shaped novelty boxes of biscuits, their currency quite devalued now it is 1 January and not 23 December.

Then I spent the rest of the day looking at the Chiltern Seeds 2017 catalogue and dreaming of all the wonderful plants I could grow, while trying to temper the dream with the reality of how little space there is in the greenhouse, and the fact that I have already ordered some seeds from Derry Watkins' Special Plants nursery and some more from Mr Fothergill because a friend invited me to join in with her garden club bulk discount order.  The internet provided another useful reality check.  The delightful prospect of lots of lovely little plants of Dodecatheon meadia faded once I read on the Missouri Botanic Garden website that propagation from seed was slow and difficult. And I have thrown away enough ungerminated pots of daphne and clematis seed to have put me off spending £2.95 a packet on them.

looking ahead

As my thoughts drifted ahead to 2017, and by way of amusing myself because it was too cold and damp to think about going outside (or rather I was still too busy getting over the flu for the degree of cold and damp that there was), I spent the afternoon thinking about where we might go on next year's holiday.  Now choosing a place is a difficult matter, it isn't just one of your holiday games. Going anywhere is a major undertaking, with the cats to be fed, the hens to be shut in and let out, the thousand and one things in pots to be watered, and the bees poised to swarm between April and August.  And since packing in the City careers early, a week in Dorset is a more realistic prospect than three weeks in Latin America.  In fact, a week somewhere in the UK each year is as much as we run to nowadays.

So choosing where and when to spend the week is a big decision, and doing the research is part of the fun.  We want somewhere with enough gardens, industrial museums, ruins, art galleries, steam engines and architecture to keep us busy for a week without too much driving about.  And a holiday let sleeping two with dedicated parking.  And preferably some scenery.  That leaves most of the UK as a potential destination, since our island is positively bulging with heritage and scenery, though as we discovered last year holiday lets can be thin on the ground in parts of southern England where house prices have gone particularly bonkers.

My method, honed by years of practice, is to pick on an area where I feel there should be plenty to do, and list everything I can find on a spreadsheet, grouped around a nominal centre.  It left me thoroughly confused the year we went to Dorset when I had categorised the attractions according to their location relative to Dorchester and we didn't stay in Dorchester but outside Blandford Forum, so all my carefully noted approximate distances and directions were wrong.  Only when I am sure I have found enough gardens and museums and notable views to provide at least a week's worth of entertainment do I pitch the idea to the Systems Administrator, so that the SA cannot declare that there would not be enough to do and take against the area.  It took me a couple of years to reintroduce the concept of Dorset, after mentioning it without sufficient preparation causing the Systems Administrator to recoil from the prospect of driving for hours at a stretch  along tiny roads as we progressed from one distant garden to the next.

Once we have an agreement in principle then if we manage to find a cottage (which we never did in Sussex) I refine the spreadsheet, adding details of which days of the week things are open and their opening times, and then it becomes a juggling act to visit all the nearby attractions on the same day and in the right order so that you don't pitch up first at the one that doesn't open until eleven.  We have got pretty good at it.

At this stage I'm still working from the road atlas, the 2016 National Trust guide, the 2017 Art Fund Guide, and Google.  Google Maps are good for finding where places are when you absolutely can't spot Little Sniddly but useless for journey planning because the main roads are too indistinct by the time you've zoomed any distance out.  Understanding main roads is imperative, since a separation of thirty miles can be a quick half hour along a dual carriageway, or a grinding hour and a quarter down a minor A road studded with villages all campaigning unsuccessfully for a bypass.

Our road atlas is quite old, which doesn't matter greatly from the point of view of where places are, given the modest pace of road building in Britain, but does bring home the pace of change when it comes to tourist attractions.  I don't know what a hopeful sounding railway was doing to get itself a symbol on the 2004 Great Britain A to Z road atlas, but it certainly isn't open to the public now.  Actually, I hadn't realised the atlas was quite that old.  Maybe I should get a new one.

I'm not impressed by the number of tourist websites which tell so little about the place they are supposed to represent that it is easier and quicker to look on Wikipedia.  The National Trust, I'm afraid, is a repeat offender.  The pages for each individual property manage to include remarkably little information, and for hard facts about when it was built, in what style, if it is still there or burned down some time in the 1920s, whether there is a park and so on you get loads more on Wikipedia.  I don't count the Trust's exhortations to visit the Courtyard Cafe or ideas for activities to amuse the kids.  One thing the English countryside is not short of nowadays is cafes, and we aren't proposing to take any kids on holiday.  The visitBath website is unhelpful along the same lines.  Top ten Must Dos (ranging from visit the Roman baths to eat in an independent restaurant), top ten Must Sees (including visiting Stonehenge).  Bath is a UNESCO world heritage site (though its future is under review following some block-headed redevelopment) and a straightforward list of the main buildings, streets and museums would be a good starting point.

Little preserved railway websites that tell you all about the Santa Special but don't seem to include a map anywhere so that you can see how much actual track there is are another thing.  Generally the answer is that the track is rather short, otherwise they would make more of a feature of it, but there's also an element of enthusiasts so bound up in their interest that they haven't managed to take a step back and think what they need to tell other people about it, who currently know absolutely nothing.  Fortunately for an overview there's Wikipedia again.

fog

I am beginning to feel the first twinges of boredom.  I'm sure that has to be a good sign.  Boredom, or the inchoate desire to be doing something different to what you are doing, is supposed to be a stimulus to creativity in children.  More to the point, it implies desire.  One of the signs of being properly poorly is having no desire to do anything, or nothing beyond lying down in a dark quiet room, or staring out of the window.

There wasn't much to stare at today, because the fog never lifted.  I could see as far as the irregular outlines of the trees at the bottom of the garden, which looked quite atmospheric and mysterious in an Atkinson Grimshaw sort of way, but that was it.  I certainly couldn't see as far as the wind turbine, not that I especially wanted to see it.  The effect of Gothic suspense was slightly undermined by the fact that noise carries very well in damp air and so the sounds of the farm and whichever main road happened to be downwind of us today were clearly audible, but the Systems Administrator reported after going out to collect some firewood that the mist was swirling through the trees in the wood in a very atmospheric fashion.

The poor old postman called mid morning, and I sympathised about the fog, and he said that it was getting worse and scrunched off into the murk.  It was getting worse, definitely a day to spend convalescing with some Christmas books.  I have now very diligently read about the gardens of London, and the history of the park, and using self seeding plants, and they were all very good, but I can't keep up the pace all weekend.

Our Ginger was not going out, not in this weather, and spent the morning lying in the kitchen wearing his bitchy resting face.  Mr Fidget insisted on walking out to the middle of the frozen pond after breakfast, until I smashed the ice, which was a rerun of what he insisted on doing yesterday. I'd like to think that he had an instinctive understanding about the dangers of thin ice, but I have my doubts.  Mr Fluffy spent most of the day sleeping in a box, while Mr Cool sat on the bird table for the second day running.  He waited very patiently for a long time, but no birds came, and he had to eat some of the bird food as a consolation prize.

The Systems Administrator watched the first hour of the two hour DVD on modern freight trains that I gave him for Christmas.  Various of my friends had asked me what I was getting the SA for Christmas, and most seemed unconvinced by the merits of Big Freight, but just because their husbands wouldn't want it doesn't mean the SA didn't.  The SA said it was very good, only two solid hours of freight would be a bit much in one sitting.  The trouble with having bought it is that I am now on Videoscene's mailing list, and set to be hearing about the latest thing in rail DVDs weekly for the rest of the year.