we christen the stage

Today was the day we tried out the new stage for real.  Six of us converged at the church after the morning service to put it up.  The ideal number would probably be three, though two could do it pretty comfortably, and as we all stood in each other's way and gave contradictory advice about which piece should go where next I thought that six was certainly too many.  But it is a new toy, and we all need to learn how it works.  The vicar, and the vicar's guide dog, and two other priests came to admire it, and we all agreed it was a very fine stage, and we'd be even more pleased with it once we'd seen it supporting a piano with our own eyes.

The only potential snag was that we had mislaid one of the bolts for attaching the steps to the front edge, but luckily the community across the road has a well stocked workshop and the guardian of the old stage was able to find a replacement.  I think he was an engineer in his working life.  At the practice session with the new stage he was talking to me about left hand threads as if that helped, and I realised that to an engineer the idea that anybody might find clockwise and anticlockwise confusing, particularly if they were looking at it upside down and had already been fiddling with it for ten minutes was completely alien.

When I next saw the stage it had a piano on it.  Success.

The performer for tonight's concert was the youngest and least established of the artists in this season's programme, a singer supported by a sponsorship scheme for selected musicians at the start of their careers.  The music society is signed up to the scheme, which entitles and obliges us to one and one only heavily subsidised concert per season.  Obviously we hope we'll manage to pick out the artist in the brochure who goes on to become a household name, then we can preen ourselves that we saw them here first.  Tonight's singer was pretty good, and that's according to some of the other members of the society who know more about classically trained singers than I do, as well as my untutored opinion.  The church was gratifyingly full for a relative unknown.  The only problem was that nobody knew quite when they were supposed to clap.  The music society's audience knows to follow the convention (which I'm all in favour of, though some people seeking to broaden the appeal of classical music condemn it as stuffy) of not clapping between movements, but there was a spatter of slightly tentative clapping between every song during the first half, until at the start of the second half she asked us (very nicely) to save our applause for the end of each cycle.

I preferred the Strauss she opened with to the Britten she ended on, but that says more about Benjamin Britten than her.  I didn't think much of his version of Waly, Waly, which he managed to conclude with the floating verse about how love is fine when new but fades away, instead of the more interesting and Waly, Waly specific lament that if the singer had known at the start how it was going to end she would have boxed her heart in a cask of gold and sealed it with a silver pin, which is way more interesting.  And Britten leaves out the verse in which the singer wishes her baby was born and sitting on its nurse's knee and she herself was dead and gone, the green grass growing over her.  That is the big reveal.  The problem isn't just that she's heartbroken, it's that she's pregnant.  I learned from the translation of the Strauss supplied in our programmes that waterlily translates literally in German as water rose.

So the new stage was well and truly launched.  Our previous page turner who had been very reliable for a couple of years had disappeared off to music college and we had a new one, presumably also recommended by one of the local music teachers as being good enough at sight reading to turn the pages at the right moment and responsible enough to be trusted to turn up.  Her mother told the membership secretary that it was the girl's first ever paid music job and apparently she was thrilled.

two trips to the garden centre

This morning I went and bought more mushroom compost to spread on my new crescent of flowerbed.  Eight bags went on remarkably quickly compared to applying compost to the established borders, when you are working around the crowns of the existing plants, and weren't enough to finish the job, so after lunch I went back and bought another eight bags.  In an ideal world I'd have designed the front garden so that there was somewhere for bulk loads to be tipped, but I didn't, so bags it is.  The local garden centre supplies it by the truck load, or by the thirty litre bucket, leaving a bottomless bucket in the yard so that customers can measure out their purchases. The bucket has had its bottom cut off, and the theory is that you stand it in your bag, fill it, and then shake the contents into the bag.  Following the recent rain the current load of mushroom compost is lumpy and about as sticky as treacle, and clumps together instead of shaking through the hole, so I stood my bags in the bucket and filled them until it looked about a bucket's worth. The garden centre supplies a plastic shovel as well, but I take my own stainless steel spade since life is too short to try and dig spent mushroom compost with a plastic shovel.

I noticed on my first visit that the garden centre had got both pot grown and potted Christmas trees.  The Systems Administrator and I had already agreed that this year we had better not get a full sized tree or put lights on it.  It's a shame, we both like Christmas trees, but the kittens are still very kittenish in many respects, and we were pretty sure they would want to climb the tree and chew the light cable.  Spending the festive season plucking cats out of the tree and pleading with them not to electrocute themselves, alternating with picking up the shattered remains of cherished baubles, sounded like hard work.  I had suggested that I could get a small tree and decorate it with the ornaments that would not break, with no lights, while the SA proposed putting lights along the top of the bookcase in the study.  A nice little pot grown tree could be just the thing.

I checked the plan with the SA at lunchtime before going back for the second load of compost and the tree.  The key thing to check is that your tree is pot grown and not merely potted.  These came with shiny tags promising that they had lived in pots from seedlings and been repotted several times.  That is what you need.  A potted tree has merely been dug out of the ground and stuffed in a pot.  This is likely to be a shock to its system from which it will not recover any the better for spending a couple of weeks in a warm room.  It may or may not survive, or drop half its needles in the meantime.  I spread the pot grown trees out a little so that I could see their shapes properly, and picked out the tallest, bushiest and most symmetrical one.  It was a very nice plant, almost three feet tall excluding its pot and about as much across, and I felt quite affectionate towards it as I put it in the car.  I shall nurture it very carefully next year, and if it does OK it can stand outside the front door next Christmas.  Not a bad morning's work, having an excuse to charge a new pet conifer to the housekeeping.

Meanwhile, the Systems Administrator managed to salvage some usable lengths of wood from the old pot shed floor, and has built an extra compost bin, and Mr Fidget caught a fully grown rat.  All in all we've had a productive day, though I don't suppose most people's idea of a nice trip to the garden centre includes loading two boot loads of steaming ordure into plastic bags.

back in the garden

I am not sure my account yesterday of why I was vaguely disappointed by the Picasso exhibition was very coherent, since I seemed to be simultaneously grumbling that it was hard work and complaining that it wasn't bigger.  My journey home had left me slightly jangled, and more so the knowledge that the trains had got a lot worse since then and that the Systems Administrator was still out there somewhere.  I think what I meant was that I would have liked some more paintings, big, colourful, energetic ones, in a show that was quite heavy on graphics, and the graphics to have included more of the beautiful fluidity of line Picasso displayed in the Vollard Suite.

The SA had gone for a curry with some old colleagues, and rang at ten fifteen to say that there were no trains and no information about when there would be any.  By then the internet was claiming that the lines into Liverpool Street had been reopened and services were resuming.  The SA finally got home well after midnight, the train having terminated early at Colchester leaving its sorry contingent of passengers who had hoped to travel further to pick up a replacement bus service.  The SA's car was not at Colchester but at Wivenhoe.  I don't entirely blame Greater Anglia for the fact that their wretched trains keep breaking down, since they are about a hundred years old and the company has ordered new ones now their franchise has been renewed.  I do blame them entirely for the abysmal lack of information every time anything goes wrong, which makes an already bad and stressful situation immediately worse.

But today was another day.  I finished digging up the edge of the lawn in the far bottom corner of the garden where the trees had grown out over it since the flowerbeds were designed about twenty years ago.  The SA was tired of trying to mow into that corner, bent double to duck under lowest branches of the golden deodar, and it looked scrappy.  The idea of the bottom lawn is that during the spring and summer the grass is allowed to grow long, with a mown path around the outside, and the path didn't work when you had to contort yourself like a limbo dancer to get under the trees.  It did not act as an invitation to circulate as a good garden should, and when we did walk around the lawn we ended up trampling into the edge of the long grass, which was messy.

It was terrible grass.  Patches of it peeled away in handfuls, needing almost no further digging, and when I did need to fork clumps out it came up easily, earth still as mere as builder's sand after goodness knows how many decades laid to turf.  I'd marked out what I thought was a fair curve with a length of rope a few weeks ago and glyphosated the strip around the edge that I didn't want, so it was obvious which bits to strip.  Compared to digging out the two rose beds lump by lump from the top lawn it was a quick job.  The rose beds took weekend after weekend of work, partly because I was reusing all the turf lifted to make a path to connect the top and bottom lawns.  You couldn't dignify the stuff in the far bottom corner by the term 'turf'.  Once I'd shaken off as much soil as I could the rest went in the brown recycling bin for the council green waste service to take away.

I began mulching the new strip of flowerbed with mushroom compost, but ran out.  I might go and buy another car load tomorrow before the next lot of rain.  I didn't go this afternoon, feeling that I'd done enough digging for one day, and instead went on weeding around the compost bins in the utility area.  The wire leaf bins have filled up with weeds, and given the time of year I need them to put leaves in.  'Tai-haku' has dropped all its leaves, which are still lying in neat, thick drifts on the lawn near the tree, and it would be a good idea to collect them before the next lot of wind blows through.  The wild gean by the septic tank and the little oak tree haven't really started shedding yet, but when they do that will be a lot more leaves than 'Tai-haku' produces.  It's a shame that I let goose grass grow over the leaf bins, so the next lot of leaf mould will be infested with its seeds, but there it is.  We do what we can.

a concert and an exhibition

I went to London today for the last of their series of lunchtime concerts with Lawrence Power.  This time he was playing with the Vertavo String Quartet, which once again I had never heard of if I were being honest about the extent of my musical ignorance.  But there are a great many string quartets in the world, and the Vertavo are from Norway, so I have some excuse.  Now I've seen them live I shall notice if they crop up on Radio 3.  The five of them played something Schubert wrote when he was only fourteen prefaced by something by Mark-Anthony Turnage that wasn't in the programme, followed by a short Beethoven fugue which segued directly into Brahms' clarinet quintet in B minor recalibrated by Brahms for the viola.  The last was utterly and sublimely beautiful, and the old work friend I went with pronounced himself highly satisfied with it, especially the first two movements.  I like LSO St Lukes very much indeed, and if I worked at Silicon Roundabout I would make sure my colleagues knew not to schedule any meetings for Thursday lunchtimes between 12.30 and 2.30 from October to May.  Alas, I have to ration myself as I can't get to London that often, and I haven't booked another one until February.

Then I went to the National Portrait Gallery to see the Picasso Portraits.  I hadn't managed to find anybody who wanted to see it with me, and though it's on until early February I thought I'd catch it rather than suddenly find I'd left it to the last minute.  The Daily Telegraph review said it was a Must See, the friend who came to today's concert wouldn't come because his wife wanted to see it, and Picasso was one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.  I'll bow out of any discussion about whether he was the greatest before it starts because I dislike rankings tables when it comes to art (or many other things).  But when I went to see the British Museum exhibit their recently acquired complete set of the Vollard Suite I found it very, very exciting.

Today's exhibition, not so much.  I have only now Googled it and seen that some others were a teeny bit underwhelmed.  One criticism is that there isn't as much in it as you might expect from a show that takes up all of the portrait gallery's ground floor rooms where they stage temporary exhibitions.  There are great big bits of blank walls between the pictures.  Complaining that an exhibition ought to have more in it feels rather vulgar, like eating at a fine restaurant and grumbling about portion sizes.  It smacks of buying books by the yard because they do furnish a room.  But with tickets costing nineteen pounds without concessions (well done, Art Pass) part of me expected more entertainment.  Quality is all very well but actually I do care about the width as well.  I'm vulgar that way.

Beauty is an equally dodgy topic.  Nowadays we are not supposed to demand beauty from art.  I have an unfortunate weakness for it, also colour.  Visual beauty does not preclude greatness, look at Turner.  Picasso ran through quite a lot of wives, mistresses and lovers in the course of his career, but while he may have appreciated female beauty in the flesh he wasn't concerned about painting it most of the time.  Many of the portraits in the exhibition are very indicative of his sitter's inner state, very energetic, very clever, but they are tiring to look at.  I looked, I mentally digested, I clocked the similarity of Tove Jansson's Moomin illustrations to Picasso's (by then or shortly to be) estranged wife (number two?) with their children, I spent some extra time with his paintings of his first wife, but I didn't linger.

I thought about calling into the Taylor Wessing photographic prize exhibition which opened today, but decided that after Picasso my capacity to absorb any more portraits was exhausted.  It's lucky I went home when I did, as the 16.44 I caught out of Liverpool Street was running half an hour late for most of its journey.  The guard made periodic announcements apologising that nobody had told him the reason for the red danger signals and promising to tell us more when he knew it, even appealing that if any passengers knew more via their devices then perhaps they could tell him.  But a mere half hour late was a bagatelle (and will just qualify for a Delay Repay claim if they don't try to say it was only 29 minutes) compared to what came later, when the 17.50 Norwich train broke down between Harold Wood and Brentwood, blocking a vital crossing so that no trains could divert around it and services out of Liverpool Street were suspended.

Addendum  The cats were not pleased that we had both been out all day and swarmed around the kitchen screaming at each other while I tried to make poached egg on toast.  Just as I put down part of a second tin for them the toast set off the burnt toast alarm and the cats scattered in panic and bolted out of the cat flap.  I have never understood why the alarm is apparently calibrated to sound at the first whiff of burnt toast, while the ground floor can fill with visible smoke from the wood burning stove blowing back if we try to light it when the wind's in the north and the alarm will not go off.  The house is made of wood, after all.  Not toast.

the stage arrives

The music society's new stage arrived.  We agreed to meet at nine in the church for a trial run putting it up, and as I drove past I could see the rest of the committee with the stage on its purpose built trolley, progressing up the road from the Chairman's house in a slightly wobbly procession. Once I'd parked and joined them I discovered the reason for the wobbles was that the wheels were not set quite right on the trolley so that it threatened to topple over where the road had a pronounced camber.  The man from the staging company who had come to supervise the handover pronounced himself not yet satisfied with the design, and said he would take the trolley back with him in his van for modifications, and it would be returned to us by early next week at the latest.

Putting the stage up was about as chaotic as you would expect from seven people who had never seen it before.  We could probably recoup the cost of buying it by offering team building mornings to local firms in which their staff would have to cooperate to erect it.  It took some time to establish which way round the 1.5 by 1.0 metre boards were supposed to go, and that the sensible place to start was by the foot of the pulpit, the steps to the pulpit being one of the immovable objects we had to work around.  Amid many cries of Move that one that way, and If you shift that one over we can slot this one in here, we got all eight boards lined up the right way round in a four by two array, and fastened together.  Only one leg needed chocking, which was quickly done once the Chairman had gone to fetch the bits of an old wooden wine box to use as packing.  Adjacent boards were held together with two bits of aluminium moulded to fit the profile of the edges of the boards and tightened with bolts and wing nuts once in position, and the steps at the front came as a single unit held in place with two captive bolts.

The fiddliest bit was applying the velcro strips along the front edge to hold the fabric valance which we had ordered in order to make our new stage look smart, though in fact it is hidden by pews for the most part.  The man from the staging company stuck it along the whole of the front edge in one long strip then we needed to cut it where the panels joined.  The Chairman said we needed scissors and I volunteered that I had some nail scissors in my handbag, but somebody else went to fetch the church scissors.  They turned out to be chunky kitchen scissors that were too big, and I produced the nail scissors, whereupon the rest of the committee were amazed and the Chairman said she thought I had been joking.  I don't know why.  I have a torch in my handbag as well, and a pen, a pencil and an eraser, and in the days of paper Sudokus I used to travel with a pencil sharpener.  We discovered a tiny design error when we tried to fit the valance behind the steps, which is the only section of valance the audience will be able to see unless they are sitting in the front pews, as the bolts supplied to fasten the steps to the front were too short once they had to go through the thickness of the fabric.  Unless somebody nips down to B&Q to buy longer bolts before Sunday then our young soprano and accompanist are going to have to manage on a stage without a skirt.  And we will need to make sure that next time we put the same boards the same way round at the front, unless we want to apply more velcro.  The man from the stage company left us with the rest of the roll just in case, but it should be straightforward as long as we stack the trolley in the right order.

Altogether it was a most ingenious system and felt reassuringly solid when I stood on it.  Once we had got used to it I reckon it would take a couple of people no more than half an hour to erect, tops.  Maybe three people to get the laden trolley up the ramp out of the church.  We didn't try that bit today because once we'd dismantled the stage again it was left stacked in a corner until Sunday's concert while the trolley went off for modifications.  There was one dissenting voice on the committee who was vehemently against the stage, on the grounds that we would never be able to move the fully loaded trolley, and it would be most galling if they turned out to be right, and that was the final hurdle at which the new stage project fell, after running such a promising race up to that point.

The old stage was still in the church awaiting volunteers to help move it back to its home across the road, and as the pieces of the old stage were stacked in the corner where we wanted to put the new stage, and the new stage was blocking the access needed for the trolley to transport the old stage, it all turned into one of those fox, goose and river puzzles.  The floor boards of the old stage really are horribly heavy and awkward, and as I helped lift them into the garden trolley we use to trundle them over to the commune and back one of the men on the committee hissed to me that he wasn't being sexist but I really shouldn't have to do that sort of thing.  I thought it was very sweet of him, though if he were to call round sometime when I was hedge cutting and see the Systems Administrator and I moving the Henchman platform around the garden he would understand why I was not fazed by the stage.  The old stage is really dreadfully heavy, though, and awkward to grip because the flats don't have any sort of a rim or frame to hook your fingers around when you lift them.

I have agreed to go back over on Sunday morning to help put the new stage back up again, this time for real.  I must remember to put a small pair of mole grips in my handbag, in case of any problems with the wing nuts.

unconventional cuttings

The kitchen window is turning into a plant hospital.  The Systems Administrator has noticed, and asked yesterday What's that, staring at the latest occupant with furrowed brow.  I asked whether the SA minded my having them there and the SA said No, not at all.  I could understand the SA's puzzlement, since it was a singularly unprepossessing and unpromising looking specimen.

It started with a couple of cuttings of Fuchsia boliviana.  This was one of the substitutes from Other Fellow Fuchsias, a frost tender upright bush capable of scrambling to prodigious heights according to their website.  It grew rapidly with huge furry leaves and sent up a second stem.  I hadn't planned on growing it, but became rather fond of it and started looking forward to the red tubular flowers.  Fuchsia flowers in their native lands are pollinated by humming birds, you know.

Unfortunately I took the website's advice that it would need a big pot too literally, too early, and moved it on to a seven inch pot or thereabouts over the summer.  When we got back from holiday the big furry leaves were drooping, a sign easily interpreted as meaning that the plant is short of water, but that can also signal root death from overwatering.  I can't blame the housesitters.  They did a jolly good job overall, faced with an array of plants with wildly different requirements capable of catching a professional nursery assistant out from time to time.  I nearly killed another of the fuchsias myself earlier in the year, but managed to save it by drying it out and keeping it on the dry side for a couple of months while it recovered.  I tried to do the same with F. boliviana, but to no avail, and I was soon able to lift both stems out of the pot, the roots having rotted entirely.

I left them propped up in the corner of the conservatory where it had been growing through a jasmine, until such a time as I should be down there with a compost bucket.  When I came to clear away the corpse some time later I noticed that the stem tips and the last couple of sets of leaves were still green and firm.  Nothing venture, nothing gain.  I cut them off, put them in a pot of compost and covered them with a plastic bag.  Mid October would not be my first choice of time to attempt to propagate a tender species fuchsia, especially after the source of cutting material had been languishing with no roots for several weeks, and I didn't fancy their chances in the greenhouse, so I put them on the kitchen window sill where the Aga would maintain a fairly steady and not too low temperature.

They remained green and perky, and the tips have even grown, though whether there is any activity at the bottom end of the cutting where it counts is a moot point.  I was annoyed to discover the other evening that they were being attacked by tiny aphids.  I sponged off as many as I could with a piece of damp kitchen towel, and today sprayed them with insecticide.  I am fairly sure that using pesticides on cuttings is not recommended, and as fuchsias weren't specifically mentioned on the label there's the risk that they may not like it, but it didn't seem sensible to leave them infested with sap sucking insects either.  A leaf fell off the smaller of the two today, which doesn't bode well.  We shall see.  If neither takes I might even buy another next year if Other Fellow Fuchsias have any more, as I have got quite keen on the idea of growing it by now.

The second casualty was the orange flowered Impatiens auricoma x bicaudata from Dibleys.  I went into the conservatory yesterday to check the watering (which does not want to be done too often at this time of the year, when a bit of benign neglect can come in handy) and found the collapsed remains of the plant on the floor next to its pot.  Puzzled and irritated, since I was fairly sure I had not overwatered it, I prodded a finger into the pot and unearthed a vine weevil grub.  Ah.  And likewise bother.  I went to fetch a bucket to clear away the remains, consoling myself with the thought that Dibleys did still list it, the last time I looked at their website, but as I was about to chop up the lower portions of stem to fit them more neatly into the bucket I noticed some strange, knobbly offshoots.  Outgrowths that looked remarkably like nascent roots.

The good old bizzy lizzy is of course a kind of impatiens.  They haven't been offered much in garden centres in recent years because they started suffering from their own special kind of downy mildew, but I grew them when I was a kid.  My mother was most obliging about letting me keep them on the kitchen counter, and cuttings rooted so easily you could do them in a bottle of water. I wondered if Impatiens auricoma x bicaudata would be similarly obliging.  Rather than use a milk bottle I stuck the likeliest looking piece in a pot of compost where it made a weird looking leafless cutting, two pinkish green fleshy stems reaching forwards like snail's horns.  I didn't put it in a plastic bag since I was afraid of something so juicy rotting to mush, and it didn't have any leaves to lose moisture anyway, but I did put it on the kitchen window sill because I thought that it too might enjoy the heat of the Aga more than the dank air of a frost free greenhouse.

Which is where the Systems Administrator noticed it.  It is very lucky I did not marry somebody houseproud, as I should have driven them quite mad or else to the divorce courts a long time ago.  I will let you know in due course if either specimen roots.

a relapse

The Systems Administrator returned from Cheltenham with a fresh cold, or the previous cold had revived itself.  The SA said it only came on during the latter part of the final day of racing, and so had not spoiled the trip.  I thought that standing about on a wet and chilly racecourse had probably contributed to the relapse, but it seemed churlish to labour the point.  That's the trouble with colds, once they start getting better you feel you have to get on with life.  The racing trip was agreed weeks ago with the SA's close friend and former colleague, and the hotel booked, and you can't go around cancelling things you have been looking forward to and letting down your friends on the grounds that you did have a cold and you are worried that if you go out you might get another one.

I am truly sorry for the SA's suffering.  It is a dismal business to give up days and weeks of your life in favour of sitting in a chair in front of the fire, nose streaming, chest tight and powers of concentration gone.  I am also mildly disappointed on my own account, since I was hoping the SA would fit the new windscreen wiper blades to my car and build me an extra compost bin which I need very badly, and I was looking forward to the SA hacking down some more brambles in the meadow before his recent enthusiasm for the project could start to wane.

A small part of me was relieved to find that I was not the only person to catch a relapsing cold. Not pleased, but quietly relieved, after the past two winters when people's reaction to the news that I had another cold 'What?  Another one?  You've only just had one!' felt as though it was growing steadily less sympathetic as the months dragged by.  Behold, I am not a solitary malingering freak. These things exist.  I very much hope that the SA's will not turn out to be an exact rerun and hang around until next April.  I fetched firewood in, so that the SA would not have to go out to the woodshed, and fed the SA on a nourishing lunch of curried parsnip soup and a nourishing supper of mince and pea curry followed by mincemeat and apple tart.  It's a shame we don't have any chicken stock on the go, but I'm sure that all that turmeric must be good for colds.

It was raining when I got up, to add to the general picture of winter decay, and I thought regretfully that perhaps I should have left the cleaning until today, but it had got to the point where I just wanted it finished.  I'm sure rain wasn't forecast for today at the point when I decided to spend yesterday cleaning.  The rain had passed by mid morning, so I was able to return to the brambles for another session with the pick axe.  It began again before it got dark, so I called it a day and went to pick up my click and collect order of John Lewis opaque tights from Waitrose, and stock up on firelighters which I forgot to buy the last time I was out.  Waitrose had run out of firelighters and I had to go to Tesco, where they were on special so I bought four boxes, plus some more cat food.  The man behind me in the queue said that I had an unusual basket of shopping.  I thought it was not so unfortunate as his basket, which contained a bottle of rum, a pack of four cans of beer and a couple of bars of chocolate.  But it seemed inappropriate to say so and I just said I'd forgotten to buy firelighters last time and now they were on special, and he said he thought I'd been planning some barbecued cat food.

When I got back from the supermarket the SA was fiddling with my keyboard and had just removed a piece of fluff from under the t key.  I think it's better than it was, though s seems a bit sticky now.  Alas.

more cleaning

As I'd started cleaning I thought I'd carry on, so today I cleaned the kitchen.  I did not have any great or interesting thoughts while I was doing it, which leaves me rather short of blog material. One of the kittens must have eaten a mouse straight after breakfast because I found a great streak of undigested sick by the television, with lumps of barely chewed up mouse in it.  This left me in a quandary for the rest of the morning since I didn't know which kitten it was that effectively hadn't had any breakfast, having sicked it all up again.

An intensely metropolitan friend, who rarely ventures outside the M25 except when she flies abroad on business, was talking some months back about getting a cat to deal with the mouse problem in her house.  I tried to explain to her why having cats did not mean that you never had to deal with dead mice and recommended an electric rat zapper, but she said I was grossing her out.  If the prospect of tipping an intact and definitely deceased mouse out of a metal tube upsets her then a haunch of mouse complete with tail and surrounded by sick is going to gross her out a lot more.  I don't think she got a cat.

The t button on my keyboard has got very stiff and keeps not registering.  I am hoping the Systems Administrator will be able to sort it out for me.  It is a particular nuisance because my email address has a t in it, and I have managed to buy something online while supplying invalid email details, meaning the confirmation email and any further correspondence won't reach me.  If there is a problem and an actual human being looked at the address supplied they could probably work out what was wrong with it.  I have tried wiggling the t key, but that doesn't seem to do any good. Perhaps the keyboard is full of cat fluff.  The laptop is only just over a year old and shouldn't have broken yet.

I did notice something mildly amusing the other day.  The woodland charity talk I gave at a church in Colchester was held in a meeting room also used by a preschool group, so as well as some tiny chairs and tables there were some child friendly displays on the wall, including the letters of the alphabet, each with an illustration, a is for apple, b is for ball and so on.  J was for jelly, to judge from the accompanying crenellated jelly mould shaped picture.  But does anybody make jelly in a mould nowadays?  Do people even have jelly moulds?  We certainly haven't, and we possess a stock pot and a potato ricer.  I tried to think of a concrete noun more suited to the life experience of today's three year old, but the first alternatives to spring to mind were equally archaic.  Jumbo, jim-jams.  Jogger would be good, or even jug would be better than jelly (though do people have jugs nowadays?  Most people use milk straight out of the bottle, unless they are making a real effort to be smart.  I use measuring jugs for cooking and a big jug if somebody gives me a bunch of tall flowers, and that's about it).

The stuck t will drive me mad.  I hope he Sysems Adminisraor can fix i.

useful tasks

It rained all day.  It was forecast to rain, and I'd made plans accordingly.  A stately progress through Colchester to do various errands and bits of shopping, followed by cleaning.  I grudge spending good gardening time indoors cleaning the house, so wet days are when I catch up, unless we've got people coming round and I am obliged to sacrifice myself.

A recent survey on the amount of housework people do and attempt to quantify its financial value has been doing the rounds in the papers recently.  I was surprised that it didn't include shopping, not fun shopping like mooching round a book shop if you like books, or a shoe shop if trying on shoes is your thing, but domestic duty shopping.  It takes ages.  I went into Halfords to buy a pair of new windscreen wiper blades since the rubber strip on the passenger side wiper of my car has started flapping about, and to the animal feed supplier to buy grain for the hens, and to the new Aldi to see what it was like, and to Tesco to buy the things that Aldi didn't stock, or at least I couldn't find them (turnips, Worcester sauce, suet, free range chicken, dried pulses of any description).  And I went to the bank, and to WH Smith to buy a 2017 diary, and visited The Range to get more pots for freezing soup and some adhesive labels for the pots (WH Smith didn't have any the right size).

In passing I tried on and bought a pair of boots that I have been eyeing up on the Schuh website. Rather frustratingly, they were advertising reductions on virtually every kind of boot they sold except for the ones that I wanted.  I could have waited to see if mine went on sale too, but my nerve cracked.  They are black and modelled on biker boots (though with much thinner leather than I imagine real protective motorbike boots have) and I have wanted a pair for about two years. Another survey declared that women over 53 should no longer wear jeans, though why any woman of any age should take any notice of the views of a bunch of random strangers, or perhaps self-selected ones who chose to complete the survey, beats me.  If they don't approve of jeans they probably don't approve of biker boots either.  Woman over 53, get thyself to Hotter.  I am sure that Jenny Eclair wears biker boots, or if she doesn't it is because she doesn't like them, not because she feels they are not age appropriate.

Of all these things only the boots could count as a personal indulgence and not a domestic chore, and the round trip took nearly four hours.  I am sure that buying turnips and poultry feed should count as housework.  When I got home the kittens were going stir crazy because they had been kept inside all morning by the rain, and Mr Cool was attempting to climb the ethnic rug that hangs on the hall wall to hide the dodgy plasterwork.

In the afternoon I cleaned the downstairs cloakroom and the ensuite bathroom.  The trim has come unstuck from the edge of the bath, and I cannot get it to snap back on again.  Housework shades into DIY.  And I fired off the latest salvo in an attempt to organise some of my old City colleagues to get together for lunch.  I have a theory that the time taken to organise a group of people to do anything increases exponentially with the number of people.  In this case the number is four, but one of them is away from the 10th December until the 20th, and I won't have any through trains between Christmas and the New Year, so we're already looking at January.

reclaiming the meadow

I spent an energetic morning digging bramble roots out of the meadow with a pick axe, where the Systems Administrator had cut them down, and musing on how things had come to this pass, when we were having to reclaim part of our own garden.  Garden restoration is only required following a failure of garden maintenance, according to one of the lecturers in historic gardens at Writtle when I was there.  Well, yes and no.  Even the most scrupulously maintained gardens can need refreshing every so often, as plants age and die or time and weather take their toll of built structures.  No amount of assiduous trimming and weeding will hold off the hand of time for all time.  In this case, though, we are fully justified in concluding that there has been a failure of maintenance, big time.

The question then is Why?  And does it matter, given that the garden is something I do solely for my own amusement.  It isn't a heritage landscape and it doesn't open to the public, so if parts of it are overrun with brambles it is nobody's business but our own.   The pat explanation for why the meadow ran out of control would be that the garden is simply too big.  That can't be the answer, though, because people manage larger areas than this by themselves, both garden owners who don't have outside help, and professional gardeners.  I am always interested to discover the number of gardeners responsible for the upkeep of any garden I visit.

It would be fairer to say that there is too much of the wrong sort of garden.  If I didn't insist on doing pots of tender plants and bulbs, and raising my own plants from seed, and having the sort of planting schemes with naturalised bulbs that require fingertip hand weeding, it would be easier to stay on top of all the big stuff all of the time.  But I like pots and propagating and even hand weeding, and it is my garden and the whole point of it is to do what I want to in it.  I could spend all my time strimming, and driving about on a lawnmower, and hoeing between clearly defined groups of big, beefy perennials in my borders once  a week to keep the weeds down, but I don't want to.

As I continued chopping and musing I decided the Systems Administrator's frozen shoulder had a lot to answer for.  The SA was out of action for any kind of heavy duty work with a saw, let alone working above waist height, for the best part of a year, which left me with all the hedges to do. Hedges are time consuming, there is no denying it, but when things reach the point where if you don't reduce the width of the hedge running the length of your drive by at least a couple of feet then you are never going to have another oil delivery, well, you cut the hedge.  It took me the best part of a month's gardening time to cut the Eleagnus back, and another great hunk of time the following year to get the hedge along the boundary with the lettuce field back under control. When you see pictures of large and fabulous gardens in glossy gardening magazines and the owners are said to do all the work themselves, look out in case there's a mention that they get somebody in to do the hedges and heavy work.  It makes a huge difference.

The two very cold winters we had on the trot three or four years ago played a part too, because they killed so much in the more formal part of the garden.  I had to largely remake the island bed after the first, because I'd lost so many less hardy shrubs, cistus and rosemary and pittosporum, then the following year the replacements were killed and I had to do it all over again.  Several hebes died, and olearia.  Digging out the roots took ages, and meanwhile weeds sprung up in the unexpectedly vacated ground where previously the shrubs had been doing a pretty good job of suppressing them.  Sorting out the back garden had to take priority over the meadow, which was rather left to its own devices, because you can see the back garden from half the windows in the house.

The meadow has a central strip of long grass with a path mown through it and shrubs and small trees to both sides, in the style of a very mini arboretum.  That was the idea, anyway.  We rapidly discovered that we couldn't let the grass continue around the shrubs, because mowing was impossible and it kept creeping up to their stems and suffocating them.  My idea was to have a ground covering layer instead of easy going, somewhat shade and drought tolerant woodland edge plants, but in recent years they have kept getting dug up or eaten by rabbits.  And yes, I could have had the grass going around every shrub and surrounded its base with a black plastic mulch mat to keep the grass off it, and then strimmed the grass, but I didn't want to.  I hate strimming.  The aging cats didn't help, as they stopped going that far, but I met two of the kittens up there today (plus Our Ginger, who seemed to be following Mr Cool.  They have a complicated relationship) so with any luck the rabbit problem will diminish for the next few years.  We need to mend the fence in places, though, where trees have fallen on it, and raise it in others.  The fence as originally built was to the recommended height for rabbit fencing, but we know they can jump over it because we've caught them on camera doing it.

And I'm sure some of the problems with the meadow are down to bad plant choices and poor design. Things that have not done so well as they ought to, or died outright, creating gaps for weeds and extra work and expense in replacing them.  I am not the first gardener to have fallen foul of mismatched ambition and encroaching scrub, and I won't be the last.  Frank Ronan in one of his end piece articles for Gardens Illustrated recently described his mixed border, which was downhill of an area of long grass where despite his best efforts weed seeds blew in and he could never keep up with the weeding even before he started living in the US for much of the year.

Happily, the Systems Administrator is back on the case chopping things down.  Rabbits do not eat primroses and they do not eat hellebores.  Or box.  I shall be planting a great many more.  I shall soon discover whether they eat Solidago rigida and Teucrium hircanum 'Purple Tails' because I've got a couple of trays of each just waiting to go in the ground.  Some of the original shrubs that have not been smothered by brambles or fallen trees have made quite good specimens.  I shall spend the winter evenings planning what else could go in the gaps.  Gardening is so much a process of learning by doing, however much you read about it at the beginning.

art

I went to Tate Britain today, to see the Paul Nash exhibition.  I like Paul Nash.  The first Nash painting I was aware of was his Landscape from a Dream which was used (cropped) for the cover art of my 1972 Penguin edition of GK Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, and from that beginning I gradually discovered that he was at various times a landscape painter and a war artist as well as a surrealist.  The Imperial War Museum owns some of his major war paintings, the Tate permanent collection holds some of his work, and The Dulwich Picture Gallery ran a very good exhibition in 2010, so there has been no shortage of opportunities to view over the past few years, but I'm always happy to go again.  The BBC is rerunning a documentary on his life first shown in 2014, which you have (at the time of writing) twelve days to view so you can even get the background to the current exhibition before you go.

As my companion for today's visit observed, it is pretty bad luck to end up serving as a war artist in two world wars.  Paul Nash's working life was bookended by world conflicts.  He had barely started his career when the Great War broke out, and he scarcely outlived the second war, dying from the asthma that had been steadily worsening for years at just fifty-seven.  As I now know from Wikipedia, the Egyptian stone hawk statue that he painted in Landscape from a Dream was placed on his grave.

An air of melancholy pervades the exhibition.  Obviously if you go to a show of work by a major war artist you can't expect non-stop laughs, and perhaps knowing more about his life than I did when I went to Dulwich coloured my view.  Plus, London on a drizzly afternoon the day after Donald Trump was announced as President elect of the United States is more of a downer than an upper.  Paul Nash did not have a happy life, one feels, with the enduring trauma of his experiences in the first war, his deteriorating health and deteriorating marriage, topped by another war.  His muted palette throughout and the empty, eerie strangeness of his surrealist period feel as though they were painted by a nervy, introspective character and are quite sombre or edgy works for the most part.  I still like them, though.  Whoever said that art always had to be cheerful?  Paul Nash was very good at trees and the sea, getting under their skin in a way that not every artist does.  I don't suppose his actual trees or the beach at Dymchurch looked like that, but he understood what they were about.  The war paintings are superb.

As we were there we went to see the Turner prize entries.  I still don't seem to be on the same wavelength as conceptual art, even after watching Dr James Fox's BBC programme about it and reading Grayson Perry's book based on his Reith lectures.  I tried hard to see the exhibits as art, or to put aside all notions of what art is and see them as something interesting, but to me they still looked like piles of junk and as if somebody was taking the piss.  One of the artworks was a vast pile of pennies, representing the amount of money the authorities deem the minimum necessary to support a family of four for a year, less one penny so it showed the annual income of a family below the poverty line, and my friend hissed that she had a terrible urge to surreptitiously add an extra penny then only tell the Tate at the end of the exhibition that she had ruined their artwork. Actually, the pennies were about the most fun thing in it.  My reaction to the first room full of junk was that I should submit the mess on my desk as an entry, or better still photograph my desk every day for a year to document the shifting mess and then submit the photographs.  But it would still not count as Art because I am not an Artist.

When I got home the only cat in evidence was Our Ginger, the kittens having got fed up with our both being out all day and disappeared off somewhere.  The first to reappear was Mr Fidget, carrying a very large mouse which he insisted on eating, before being copiously sick in the hall.

raining on the parade

It began to rain last night after I had gone to bed.  The Systems Administrator told me that when it started all three kittens hurried inside in quick succession, looking damp and irritated that their night's fun had been curtailed.  It was still raining when I got up, and the kittens' fractious air conveyed that this had been going on for quite long enough.  They are not used to long periods of rain.  During June when it was wet they were still kept inside, and since they were given free range of the garden there has only been a handful of wet days.

They ate their breakfast and then congregated by the glass front door.  Mr Fluffy stuck his head out of the cat door at one point, discovered that he was getting wet, and retreated to the kitchen, grizzling.  Eventually Mr Cool shouldered his way out, to reappear an hour later with soaking feet and the hairs of his back made wispy with moisture, carrying a small, wet and very dead mouse, which he ate.  Then he reposed in a box in the kitchen for a while before going outside and repeating the exercise.  Mr Fidget curled up on the chair in the hall for a while then played at banging the cat flap, pretending he had forgotten how to use it.  Only Our Ginger understood that there is nothing to be done about rain, and caring nothing for the US presidential election he lay down in front of the Aga and went to sleep.

I have lost all respect for the Americans.  We did not have the heart to listen to banshee lamentations and post match autopsies on The World at One and sat eating our Seasonal Soup Of The Day (What Leftover Vegetables Are Hiding In Your Fridge?) in near silence.  A celery stick, a brown onion (best before 9 September but still good), a carrot (fairly new), an odd leek left from making a chicken and leek pie, chicken stock from the same chicken that went into the pie, and some little pasta bows for soup from Tesco, if you want to know.  It was a good soup.  The secret's in sweating the onion and celery for a long time in butter, then putting the finely sliced leek in near the end so that it doesn't go slimy.

It was still raining after lunch.  Mr Cool disappeared back outside, Mr Fidget reverted to banging the cat flap, and Mr Fluffy nipped out then came to prance over my pile of Gardens Illustrated magazines with wet feet.  He was very resistant to having them dried on a piece of kitchen roll, and it is lucky that the magazine is printed on such shiny paper that I could wipe most of the damp and the mud off.  I have to go and give a garden club talk later.  Seldom have I felt less like going out and enthusing a room full of people, but I'm sure I'll like it when I get there.

gravel planting

The Systems Administrator gave some of the gravel back to me.  The return loop on the garden railway was deemed an engineering failure, the curve of the loop being too tight so that trains kept derailing and the total length of track being more than the SA could maintain.  Instead the little trains will go out and back up one side of the gravel behind the long bed, with some sidings, and the SA has been ripping up the extra track over the summer.  I get a bonus space, previously bisected by the turning loop, where I can find homes for some more sun and drainage loving plants.

First off the blocks was an agapanthus.  I think it is probably A. inapertus, but I am not quite sure. Originally it was in a pot, where it didn't do much, so I planted it in the gravel of the turning circle, optimistically shoehorning it into a gap where it was overshadowed by lavenders in the summer and still didn't do much.  While it was in its pot it lost its label, since when and until it does something more decisive I am not sure which sort of agapanthus it is.  It has slender leaves, more evergreen than some varieties, which fits the description of A. inapertus, and my records tell me I did have one in a pot, but I'd be more confident of the identification if it would flower.  I turfed all the agapanthus out of their pots into the ground a couple of years ago, apart from the fat leaved tender evergreen ones, after noticing how much better the ragtag and bobtail of mostly nameless seedlings were flowering in the gravel than their cossetted named cousins in pots.  Greenhouse space is always at a premium in the winter, so wasting it on plants that didn't even perform as well as the ones grown outside seemed silly.

The agapanthus lifted out of the ground much more easily than I was afraid it would, proof of how little it had done to establish itself since I planted it out.  I worked some mushroom compost into the planting hole and might have to go and water it occasionally in the summer, but I hope it will be happier in its new home.  The roots looked white and healthy enough, so with any luck it will get going next year.  A dark blue one and a white that were liberated at the same time flowered generously this year, after doing practically nothing in their pots.

Next in were five Rhodiola rosea, rooted from bits chiselled off a parent plant that is gradually disappearing under a conifer.  This used to be classed as a sedum, and has the same general vibe. From a central, fleshy, lumpy, pinkish-purple rootstock emerge radiating arms in spring, from which fleshy, grey, wavy edged leaves stick out at right angles.  At the end of each shoot is carried a tuft of small yellow flowers.  By this stage of the year the arms have shrivelled to thin wisps, and after I'd planted my first crown in the gravel I spent some time looking for it as it disappeared into the pinkish, brownish background of chippings.  I found it again after a fingertip search of the area, peering over the top of my gardening spectacles, eyes watering copiously in the cold wind.

I wanted to get them planted out now because I was worried about overwintering them in their small pots.  It's so easy to over water that sort of thing and find come spring that it has rotted, or else let it dry out completely in the attempt to not over water it and so kill it that way.  I was vaguely worried that they might be slightly tender and I might be pushing it planting them out in November but that is completely wrong according to Wikipedia.  In the wild they grow in the cold regions of the world including much of the Arctic, the Alps, the Carpathian Mountains, the Pyrenees and Iceland.  On that basis I am sure that north Essex will be absolutely fine.

I never realised until I Googled it just now that Rhodiola possesses all sorts of medicinal properties (or at least is credited with them).  For promoting physical and cognitive vitality, lightening your skin, promoting fat loss, combating hair loss, fighting depression, strengthening the nervous system, and balancing the body's stress response system, Rhodiola rosea is good for them all.  I am not sure it will cure housemaid's knee, but it seems it will treat everything else.

I was pushing my luck more with the latest batch of seed raised Belamcanda chinensis, now Iris domestica.  If we get a hard winter I may yet lose the lot, but I wanted to get them planted out for much the same reason.  I certainly couldn't leave them in their pots on the concrete, which meant finding them space in the greenhouse or one of the cold frames.  All are going to be stuffed to the gunnels as it is, and I risked the iris either rotting or dessicating.  The superb drainage provided by the gravel in the front garden has kept some potentially tricky characters like Morina longifolia going for years, and I thought the Iris domestica would be as safe there as anywhere.

a concert, a cold, more gardening

The concert was lovely.  I had not actually heard of either of the performers when I booked the tickets, but the prospect of cello sonatas by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms performed on nineteenth century instruments sounded delightful, a glimpse into the sound world of George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell and the Brontes with three composers I like.  And it was very good, and the friend I'd taken along enjoyed it wholeheartedly as well, which is always a plus.  I hadn't knowingly heard the Beethoven or the Mendelssohn before, though they may have been on Radio 3 and washed over me, but I have a recording of Mstislav Rostropovich playing the Brahms cello sonatas, which gave some insight into quite how different from the modern instrument the gut strings of the period cello sounded.  I like both, though at one level I enjoyed the unfamiliar works more last night because I wasn't comparing them to the version I was used to, an inversion of the usual rule that people like the familiar.

Boxford church was looking very lovely too, with light spilling out of its clerestory windows and its funny little spire illuminated.  I should have looked it up before going, as I now read that there are a number of good memorials, which we completely neglected to look at during the interval.  The heating worked on the principal that a man standing with one foot in a bucket of scalding water and the other in ice will on average be comfortably warm, so my seat was toasty but my friend was distinctly chilly, and the stage lights if you forgot yourself and looked up above the performers' heads were like something designed to elicit a confession, but the mood of the audience was amiable.  I've noticed that before at Suffolk Villages concerts.

The Systems Administrator has returned to the marital bedroom after a couple of nights coughing and spluttering in the spare room, and this morning admitted to no longer having a headache after several days of suffering.  Part of me feels rather mean that Mr Fidget at the first sign of illness was whisked off to the vet, while the SA was left to sweat it out with no more assistance than my buying some more Neurofen lemon meltlets when I was out.  I work on the basis that human beings have five temperatures, cold, normal, warm and clammy, really hot, and no longer making sense. If the patient hits five it's time to seek urgent medical help, but the SA never rose above the clammy stage this time round, and there is (as our GP practice manager points out monthly in the parish magazine at this time of year) nothing they can do for colds, not even nasty ones.

I finished digging out the surplus patches of Baptisia australis from the far rose bed, or at least I dug out as many roots as I could find and have my fingers tightly crossed that it will not regenerate from the bits that I missed.  Then I dug in some mushroom compost, bashed the biggest lumps of clay down into something more tilth-like, and planted some yellow aquilegia raised from seed, the three Geranium 'Rozanne' that have been sitting by the greenhouse for weeks, and a willow leaved gentian.  I have missed the Systems Administrator's garden input, as just before going down with the cold the SA offered to use some of the pile of thick and slightly rotten planks on the concrete to extend the row of compost bins.  I need an extra bin urgently as the others are full and we are at that time of the year when masses of compostable material comes off the garden.  Besides, I want to turn the contents of the existing bins and make sure they don't have rats living under them.  I am suspicious about signs of digging at one end.  Although I don't know what I should do if I actually found a live rat.  Scream and run or hit it with a spade?

winter iris

It has just begun to rain, driving me in from the garden.  I had better write my blog post now because I am going out later to a Suffolk Villages concert in Boxford and when I come in again then, like Caliban and The Sweeney, I shall want my dinner.  In truth there is not much to blog about.  I went to Waitrose, and then I did some gardening, and then it rained.  The End.

I have been tidying the Iris unguicularis under the south wall of the house.  This is the winter flowering iris, which you will find called Iris sylosa in some old books.  The first couple of flowers have already appeared, making me think I had better try and get it cleaned up ready for the main display and before I risk damaging the emerging buds poking about in it.  The flowers are a delight, of classic iris form, not too big, and carried over a period of months.  They are prone to attack by snails, but apart from that they are perfect.  The leaves, on the other hand, are a bit messy at best. They die so badly, and before they die completely they go yellow and brown at the tips and look rank.

It's the leaves that let down many monocotylenous plants (that's the ones with long strap shaped leaves).  Take the Watsonia that are living so happily in the gravel, at least until we get a cold winter.  Their ever-increasing clumps of dark green, sword shaped leaves would be quite handsome if only they would not fill up with dead brown ones needing to be cut out.  Questing Libertia peregrinans does the same thing.  I once saw my mother's eyes light up with speculative intent as they fell upon its charming, olive green and russet leaves, only to lose interest the moment she heard it required grooming.  Deciduous Agapanthus is more obliging, its leaves turning to mush no more substantial than the faded leaves of hyacinths in mid summer, but the iris hangs on to its old leaves for years, as they turn ever paler and wispier without ever actually shrivelling and disappearing.

The answer is patience and scissors.  If you work your way through the patch of iris, clump by clump, snipping and pulling the old leaves out and collecting up any other leaves that have blown in there plus the dead snail shells, and the live snails if you are so inclined, at the end of it the iris will look much better.  You will have lost a couple of hours of your life and may have backache and sore knees, but you may feel better too.  Nothing to do now except wait for the flowers.  Iris unguicularis does not like being moved.  It likes sun and to bake.  There are those who say you should cut the leaves to half their length in the summer to allow it to bake more thoroughly, but I have not found it likes that particularly, and it will not solve the cosmetic problem of the old leaves.  Baking, sharp drainage, maybe a little blood, fish and bone once in a blue moon, and to be left alone apart from a spot of annual grooming, that is what the winter flowering iris needs.

levelling the lawn

I had to come in from the garden at a quarter to four.  It was just too cold, with a brisk wind that went straight through my fleece and smock and cotton shirt and thermal polo neck, and through me.  Tomorrow is forecast to feel even colder, with showers.  Give it a week or so of colder weather and I suppose my metabolism will crank up to meet the challenge, but winter finally starting is a shock to the system.

I spent the morning trying to level the sunken paving slabs that cross the back lawn.  I laid them originally so that on frosty mornings I would be able to walk down to the bottom part of the garden to see the winter flowers without leaving black footprints on the frozen grass.  They make a visual connection between the two decks, and line up with the steps down from the front garden.  As a design feature I'm quite happy with them, in a low key, 1960s inspired, vaguely modernist sort of way that echoes the aesthetic of the 1960s, vaguely modernist but ramshackle house.

Unfortunately that sort of thing depends on precise geometry, and the slab path across the lawn has never been the same since the drain to the septic tank collapsed and the Systems Administrator had to hire a digger and excavate the back lawn.  The drain was buried a good six feet deep at the point where it fractured, and the mound of excavated spoil was enormous.  Of course it did not all fit back in the hole.  Excavated soil never does.  After we had filled the hole as best we could and relaid the turf the area of the erstwhile hole began to sink, and went on sinking.  I would top dress the depression with any leftover or discarded compost every now and then, but that didn't address the issue of the paving slabs, which had begun to tilt and sink as well.

So today I lifted half of them, added a fresh layer of sand to their holes, and relaid them.  Before lifting them I cut back the encroaching grass to neat straight lines with a half moon edger.  As I threw the offcuts of scrappy turf away I was disgusted to see that some of them were infested with root aphid.  If it is endemic in the lawn then what hope my pot plants?  Then I had to work out how to prise the slabs out of the lawn, since prudence told me that if I used the half moon edger as a lever then it would probably break.  In the end I hit upon the idea of using my old small hand fork, which is already broken since I snapped the central tine catching it on a root.

Fortunately I had a supply of builders' sand left over from a previous paving job, all bagged up in old compost bags outside the workshop.  It took a remarkable number of trips down to the back garden with buckets of sand to level all the slabs, as far as they would level.  The lawn is not entirely flat, but the path looked a great deal worse with a dip in the middle, and rather better once I'd adjusted the height and angle of the central slabs.  By then some of them stood proud of the surface of the lawn, which will be no good when lawn mowing recommences next year, and I top dressed between them and the sunken patch of lawn with old potting compost.  I have held off putting the compost from some of the pots of cosmos and zinnia on the compost heap especially for this purpose.

I rumpled the surface of the lawn vigorously, running my hand back and forth to get the blades of grass to stick up above the compost.  The middle of the lawn looked very brown when I'd finished, and I worried that my ministrations would kill the grass, before applying the reality check that's often useful in such situations, which is to ask myself whether if the plant concerned was a weed and I wanted to get rid of it, did I think that my proposed course of action would do the trick.  The answer is generally 'no' and was in this case.  The grass, which barely deserves the title of 'lawn', is definitely of the utility type with coarse leaved and some running grasses.  Fine turf it ain't, and while at the moment it looks very raw and unfinished, still I am sure that the grass will make its way up through the compost given time.  Ideally I'd have done the whole project six weeks ago when the grass would have had longer to recover before it got cold, but I didn't.  I must have been busy doing something else.

Smarter versions of the vaguely modernist look, made out of machine cut stone instead of Marshalls Heritage concrete stone-effect ready-made slabs, have been the default choice at Chelsea for about the past fifteen years, and are popular with garden designers doing private gardens, to judge from the ones featured in Gardens Illustrated.  Apart from the fact that it is going to date as surely as an avocado bathroom suite, it is an unforgiving style in terms of construction standard and finish, and we must hope that the customers shelling out well into five figures for their garden redesign do not have too many dodgy drains underneath, since the slightest dip or deviation shows up badly and looks dreadful.  From that point of view the cottage garden style is far more forgiving.

this season's roses

My order of roses from Trevor White arrived yesterday while I was out.  None of the roses in the garden look anywhere near dormant yet, but as commercial growers they clearly don't want to hang about.  I wonder if they use some sort of hormone spray to make them defoliate?  I'd had an email telling me the order had been dispatched so their arrival wasn't a surprise and I'd already bought an extra bag of compost and primed the Systems Administrator to keep an eye out for the delivery.

At one level it seems a great waste to buy healthy, freshly lifted rose bushes and pot them up instead of getting them back into the ground with the shortest possible interruption to their growth. But a couple of these are destined for the side of the wood where the Systems Administrator is still clearing out the brambles, or was before going down with The Cold, and the others are replacements for the ones that were supposed to be growing up into the hazels behind the deck in the back garden, only they died.  Whether or not doing the same thing over again and expecting different results is a definition of insanity, and whether or not Albert Einstein said it, I am not going to replant the replacements exactly as before and hope that they'll grow.  I think I have worked out why the first batch didn't take, which is that it is too dark immediately behind the deck.  Once they have grown a few feet they will be out of the shade and into the sun, and should do very nicely thereafter, just as 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' is rampaging up the wild cherry, but chicken and egg, until they have grown a bit they are in the dark and while they are in the dark they won't grow.  Plan B is to start them off in pots and plant them out once they have made some height up their canes.

It is a very good plan, provided they do grow.  A rooted cutting of 'Albertine' that was a present from a friend sat sulking in its pot and only sprang into life once planted out, when it trebled in size very quickly.  But at the plant centre we used to have to prune the pots of climbing roses as they became unmanageable on the beds otherwise.  I was hoping to see the manager at a Plant Heritage meeting to pick his brains about potting, since he once mentioned to me that they'd been potting Trevor White roses at the garden centre where he worked after leaving the plant centre, but he hasn't been along to the last few meetings.  I shall just have to water religiously, fertilise generously in the spring and hope for the best.

The roses came with good big chunky root systems.  The last plants I had from Trevor White were equally big, and I was very sorry about the two I managed to kill by degrees by planting them in the dark.  The roots were actually so generous that I was scraping around trying to find pots big enough for them, and a couple ended up in clay pots I was saving for the dahlias.  I don't see how my erstwhile manager could have fitted them into the standard two or three litre deep plastic pots that garden centres generally use for climbers, not unless they cut quite a lot of the roots off, which seems a waste.  If and when I next see him I must ask him about that as well.

In the afternoon it rained and that was the end of my gardening for the day.  I am afraid it says something about my enthusiasm for gardening versus housework that given a wet afternoon and the choice between washing my accumulated dirty plastic plant labels for re-use next season and cleaning the bathroom I opted for scrubbing labels.

a concert and an exhibition

I went to London today for a Radio 3 lunchtime concerts from LSO St Lukes.  This restored and converted formerly derelict church just north of the City is one of my favourite concert venues.  An hour's worth of chamber music is perfect.  I can concentrate for that long, and there's a full afternoon left afterwards to go and do something else.  The tickets are good value too, twelve quid for musicians of international standing, or just nine pounds if you book at least four concerts from the same series.  Presumably the cost is partly met by the BBC to provide programme material, though what you hear on the radio is no longer quite what you get on the ground.  Today's concert will be presented as the first of the current series with viola player Laurence Power when in fact it will be the second, and Radio 3's Fiona Talkington sometimes looks mildly embarrassed as she explains to the audience in the hall why the script she is about to read doesn't match their version of events.  I thought the BBC was supposed to have given up that sort of fudge, but I suppose it is a small deception.  I don't often get round to listening to the lunchtime concert on the radio since it seems unfair to impose it on the Systems Administrator who is not a chamber music fan, so I don't know if in the final edit they cut out the little interludes of tuning and coughing between movements.  At any rate, it is not a live broadcast.  A few years ago LSO the centre director of LSO St Lukes used to introduce the concert, but nowadays they wheel out a Radio 3 presenter and do interviews with the musicians.

Today was an all-Brahms programme from the last years of his career, his own adaptation for viola of his clarinet trio, and his reworking of an early trio for piano, violin and cello.  I liked them both very much, and since I liked the Brahms at the last Brightlingsea concert enough to have looked at what recordings were available I should probably invest in some more of his chamber music.  And I like the viola, and the cello.  There is something about the sound that penetrates to the core.  And Laurence Power is a very engaging stage presence, with a quick smile and lovely floppy dark hair.

Millionaire's Shortbread was on in the crypt cafe, and none of my neighbours fiddled with their programmes during the performance, so all in all it was a success.  From LSO St Lukes I went to the Royal Academy to see Abstract Expresionism, since my previous projected visit had morphed into a trip to an entirely different exhibition.  I was not sure beforehand if I liked Abstract Expressionism. I hadn't really seen very much in the flesh.  The Tate has Rothko's Seagram Murals, which I love, but according to the Art UK Discover Artworks website there are only seven publicly owned paintings by Jackson Pollock in the whole of the UK and only a single solitary one by Willem de Kooning.  By way of comparison, the site lists 114 for Rembrant van Rijn and 48 for Monet, so if the UK audience and I had not got our eye in for Abstract Expressionism that would be understandable.

Having seen them I am still not sure whether I like Abstract Expressionism, other than Mark Rothko, though I am happy to have seen the exhibition.  It is a big, important part of Western twentieth century art history and worth an hour and a half of anybody's time, though it is a big exhibition and an hour and a half is not really very long.  The trouble was, as I heard a young man mutter to his companion as they both stood contemplating a Jackson Pollock, it's exhausting to look at.  And it is, apart from the Rothkos which are as mysterious and calming as the ones in the Tate (and include some in a different palette).  Now there's no reason why art should not demand effort to look at it. One of Classic FM's irritating tics is their habit of presenting classical music as if its main role were to be calming.  Or relaxing, or smooth.  Art may be many things, but it is not necessarily relaxing, let alone easy.

But a dozen rooms of mostly very big paintings, largely bright or at least clashing except when they are black, and jagged or else restlessly wiggly, do tire you out after the first hour or so.  There is no repose for the eye (except for Rothko) and the RA have not provided any seats in most of the rooms.  I gave up and sat on the floor in front of the Rothkos, which seemed to start a bit of a thing as several other people sat down as well.  I thought they were paintings of their time and place, largely post-war New York, brash and big and noisy and masculine.  Being rural, quiet, small and female I didn't greatly relate to them.  That's not to do them down as art, they just weren't quite my kind of art, just as I am not keen on Alan Ginsberg and found On The Road one of the most annoying books I ever read.  They did make me think of the sort of works that get hung in the atriums of financial institutions, whose job is to signal the prestige of the organisation to an audience who are mostly passing through without stopping to look at them.  I read a comment once by a landscape designer that planting for the banks of dual carriageways had to be done in hundred yard blocks because nobody could take in anything more detailed than that while driving past, and that's what some of the biggest and brightest Abstract Expressionist canvases felt like, art for people who are going to pass it at speed.

Room ten was devoted to works on paper and photography.  One little pink tinged gouache in a gold frame caught my eye, whose delicate drawing had all the freaky fun and charm of Klee and which depicted what might have been a dancing chicken.  I read the label, and it was an early Rothko.

win some, lose some

There was a very light frost this morning, no more than a dusting on the grass by the chicken house and a layer of ice on the car windscreens.  It was not even enough to blacken the foliage of the dahlias, but I was glad I took the succulents into the conservatory a few days ago and had finished putting the pelargoniums in the greenhouse.  The nights are forecast to be chilly all this week, and I must remember to go and put the mouse guards over the entrances to the beehives before the bees can acquire any unwanted furry lodgers for the winter.

Mr Fidget went for his follow up appointment at the vet, and his temperature was back to normal. The top end of normal, at 39.1 degrees Celsius, but just within the normal range.  He presented a very different picture to the cat the vet saw on Monday, sprinting about the room when he wasn't being physically held down to have his temperature taken, and the vet thought that whatever he'd had, he was getting over it, though she reassured us that it was right to take him for the follow-up appointment even though he looked a picture of health.  We bought worm and flea treatment for the kittens while we were there so that she wouldn't feel she had totally wasted her first appointment of the day.

At lunchtime I discovered the wrapper of a packet of six wholemeal rolls I'd left on the kitchen worktop had been ripped apart and the tops of three of the rolls gnawed off.  We agreed that all bread would have to live in a cupboard in future, and I suddenly realised I'd had a lucky escape leaving the packet of emergency fruit cake by the coffee machine.  I don't think we are underfeeding the kittens.  Their backs feel exactly right, nicely covered, not bony but not fat, and the vet didn't express any anxiety about Mr Fidget's weight.  I'm afraid they are simply inveterate scroungers, especially Fluffy and Fidget.  Eating half a packet of wholemeal rolls does not even count as snapping up unconsidered trifles: those rolls were supposed to be our lunch.

The frost was not enough to end the autumn run of salvias.  Salvia involucrata 'Bethellii' is having a great year.  It makes a big plant, taller than I am, and is thick with bright sugar pink flowers at the end of every stem.  Down in the bog bed Salvia uliginosa is still blooming electric blue.  It is tall, not as tall as 'Bethellii' but inclined to flop, and likes to run gently at the root.  Unfortunately it has now hit the front of the bed and can run no further, while behind it is increasingly hemmed in by a vigorous Persicaria.  I see from my planting spreadsheet that I planted it a decade ago, so it has come through some pretty savage winters, two long and cold and at least one extremely wet.  I must see if I can chisel some little rooted bits from the front edge where they are going to waste, and pot them up with the view to starting another patch further back in the bed where it would have more space.  The Persicaria is going to need editing: it has over-run the Selinum wallichianum as well.

The Systems Administrator's cold has developed disastrously.  The SA had hoped to finish chopping down the brambles in the meadow this week after making such good progress last week, and admitted he now understood how I felt last winter, before deciding he didn't feel like any supper and retreating early to bed.

last meetings

This could be a short post, because it is late and Mr Cool is lying on my arm which makes typing difficult.  I fell over him earlier in the evening, or he cannoned off my legs, when I was trying to get ready to go out, and he ran out into the garden and would not believe that I had not tried to kick him deliberately, so now that he has forgiven me or forgotten all about it and come to sit next to me I don't have the heart to reject his advances.  It's getting tricky, though.  I am reduced to typing one handed and he keeps pressing enter and shifting me down a line, or he was until Mr Fluffy arrived and started boxing with him.

Mr Fidget seems better today.  He stood up and stretched on his pouffe this morning before eating some breakfast and disappearing into the eleagnus hedge.  I told him that he ought to be resting. He had better go back to the vet tomorrow and have his temperature taken again to check it is back to normal, but at tea time I found him and Mr Fluffy attempting to eat a piece of Battenberg cake the Systems Administrator had neglected to put away in its plastic box.

The SA has a cold and is much worse.  Swings and roundabout.

It has been a day for rounding off the year.  This afternoon I did my final woodland charity talk for 2016, or at least the last one I've got booked.  Last minute panic bookings are getting pretty unlikely now since many clubs have a Christmas party in December rather than a speaker, so that's probably it.  I can't remember exactly how many I ended up doing, and as Mr Cool is lying on my arm I can't get up to go and look in my diary, but it must have been about eight which from a standing start of having none booked at all as of the first of January was not bad going.  Today's talk was to a Christian ladies' fellowship group in Colchester.  They had warned me that while parking when I arrived would be easy, by the time their meeting finished the main hall would be awash with the babies and toddlers group and so it was.  One lively blond haired infant was crawling determinedly towards the main doors of the hall, and retrieved with a cry of 'Stanley, come here'.  The old names really are coming back into fashion.  I've seen a baby named Stanley.  

Mr Cool keeps pressing Enter so we'll give up on the last paragraph.  This evening was my garden club's final meeting of the year, with the AGM followed by a supper and quiz.  My normal policy is to only go to the AGM of anything when I am actually on the committee, but as they are a friendly lot I thought maybe I should try going at least once.  My college friend who has been a member for 

several years without ever attending the AGM agreed that if I went she would go too.  The committee had been to a huge amount of trouble, a really huge amount, with table cloths and flowers on every table, and candles, and a hot main course dished from the hall kitchen with remarkable speed as we went up table by table to collect our food.

Everybody was asked to bring a pudding, which sounded confusing in that surely there was going to be a lot of pudding left over unless everybody took tiny ones.  The membership secretary explained as if to a slightly slow child that people liked to try more than one pudding and took the left-overs home with them, and part of the answer turned out to be that most people can eat an awful lot of pudding when they put their minds to it.  I took Dan Lepard's cherry and polenta pudding because I'd done one recently and felt reasonably confident about it, and also because I didn't want anything too runny or squishy given it would have to travel twenty miles in the car.  I nearly lost it at the first pedestrian crossing when a cyclist shot in front of me at speed and without dismounting, but fortunately didn't hear the crash of cherry and polenta hitting the back of the driver's seat.  I only had to bring home two slices so honour was satisfied, though I had collected the last piece of somebody else's apricot sponge in my tin.  My tinfoil had disappeared too, but luckily I'd guessed that might happen and shoved a box of clingfilm in the car.

There was a crossword competition, one answer sheet per table, and my table was one of only three to get all the answers correct.  It was all down to teamwork.  I am pretty good at botanical Latin and the rest of the team came up with solutions to some of the left-field clues that stumped the other tables.  Modern poison = sugar, maybe not a tactful clue when everybody was about to eat so much pudding.

The AGM was mercifully brief and the committee was reelected en masse.  Very sensible of the chairman to keep a tight grip if she has a happy team that works, and not allow an entry point for any vexatious volunteers.  Democracy is a wonderful thing but you can have too much of it in a club setting.  Next year's programme was announced and sounds pretty good.  The accounts were circulated at the thrify rate of one copy per table, but we passed them around and I was interested to see how the club keeps afloat financially, which I had never quite understood given that annual membership is only twelve pounds and they don't do a monthly raffle or charge for tea.  Even the AGM supper was free, apart from the cost of the pudding ingredients.  The plant sale held in alternate years turns out to be crucial.  There wasn't one this year, but come next May the village pub has kindly agreed to let the garden club use its garden, and then we need to sell a lot of plants, really a lot of plants, in order to be able to afford the speakers that we do.