a damp day

It was a damp day, too damp to work outside and anyway I am nursing my potential cold while it decides whether it is turning into a proper thing or not.  I feel rather clammy, and definitely not like contending with damp.  Instead I spent the day going through the piles of magazines, catalogues, leaflets and other accumulated paper on my desk, reading some, rereading others, and binning quite a few.  I don't know why Peruvian Connection have sent me quite so many catalogues given how infrequently I buy anything from them nowadays, though somewhere in the secondary pile of paper on the kitchen table I know there is their most recent mailing, which is exactly the same as the previous one but has a code to get free delivery until Christmas.  Their t shirts are initially expensive but eventually cheap on a cost per wear basis because they last so long without coming apart or morphing into a shape bearing no resemblance to mine.  I am still wearing some I bought from Peruvian Connection before we bought this house, which dates them to some time before August 1993.

One of the magazines was the annual report of The Barn Owl Trust.  Alas, 2016 has not been a good year for barn owl breeding.  The Trust blames the cool, damp spring which meant that nesting started late.  Life has not been good for barn owls generally in recent years, with loss of habitat and food, too many barn conversions and loss of nesting sites, and road traffic accidents.  A terrifying proportion of young barn owls are killed on roads before ever managing to breed themselves.  I always feel very warm towards The Barn Owl Trust and would volunteer for them if they weren't based in Ashburton, Devon.  As it is I pay my subscription and each year I buy our Christmas pudding from them.  They are excellent puddings, made by a small firm in the Lake District whose marketing strategy is to distribute their puddings through charities.  I ignore the annual articles in the press giving ideas for a change from Christmas pudding.  Why would I want a change?  I like Christmas pudding and we only have it once a year.

An article in one of the beekeeping magazines reminded me that having left most of my bees with a super of their own honey to feed them over the winter instead of taking all the honey and giving them sugar syrup, I ought to have removed the queen excluder that prevents the queen from going up into the super so that she can't lay there.  Otherwise, if the entire cluster of bees moves up to use the stores in the super the queen will be left behind and will die of cold.  So far it hasn't been that cold and anyway they should still have plenty of stores down in the brood box so no harm has been done yet.  I am left wondering what I then do in the spring if the queen has taken up residence in the super and started laying eggs there.

An advertisement in the RSPB magazine for plain wool cardigans looked quite hopeful.  Good quality, pure wool cardigans in a single block colour, no stripes or patterns or extraneous buttons or sparkly bits that are supposed to make them fun but are just annoying, are surprisingly difficult to find.  I like merino, which is soft but wonderfully hard wearing and tends not to bobble.  Cashmere may carry its aura of luxury but it has a price tag to match and is not hard wearing at all.  I had a look at the advertiser's website, mentally dismissed the cardigans with brass buttons (such a waste), and bookmarked the site for later, since when it has been stalking me across various news websites.

Tomorrow is supposed to be dry and sunny and we are supposed to be going candle making.  Fingers crossed.

fair warning

Sometimes you discover something new, and have the oddest feeling that it is very familiar.  Not a false memory, exactly, because you know that it is new to you.  It's just that you feel as though you must have known it for a very long time already.

So it is with my new musical enthusiasm, The Rails, which seems a strange and not particularly catchy name for a very catchy duo.  Presumably it has some significance to them, though I find myself mentally prefacing it with the word Off.  They are Kami Thompson and her husband James Walbourne, and she is the daughter of Richard and Linda Thompson.  I must have heard a track by them on the Radio 2 folk show at some point and liked it enough to add the album to my Amazon wishlist, where it sat for months until a cheap used copy of it popped up on offer from a third party vendor and I bought it.

And they sound uncannily like Richard and Linda Thompson used to back in the 1970s.  Really, really uncannily like.  Kami Thompson has a glorious voice and it is the dead spit of her mum's, a lucky inheritance for her since while Richard Thompson was one of the superlative songwriters and guitar players of the late twentieth century he wouldn't claim that his singing voice had ever been his principal claim to fame.  And James Walbourne is a fabulous guitarist who has been in all sorts of bands, including the Pretenders.  Only on this album he sounds so much like Richard Thompson that if I didn't know it was a 2014 release by somebody else I'd think the album must be some rediscovered Richard Thompson tracks.  The chord progressions, the riffs, it's pure Richard Thompson.

And between them they write very good songs.  Maybe not quite up to the standard of 1952 Vincent Black Lightning but good songs, songs that tell stories, songs in which the characters have narrative arcs or things gradually develop in a direction you don't expect, clever songs with a pungent and poetic use of language.  And thanks to Kami Thompson being a fine singer you can hear all the words so you get the full benefit (which is just as well because the paper insert in the CD box has several moody photos but no lyrics).

The album is called Fair Warning.  As well as Kami Thompson and James Walbourne it features Eliza Carthy on fiddle on quite a few tracks, and maintains a good, tight folk-rock sound throughout.  I have been playing it on repeat when it has been my turn to cook, and I am absolutely delighted with it.  But also disoriented, because it sounds so much like revisiting a part of my past that never actually happened.  Should I think less of it because it is not an original sound?  And does it make a difference if a family dynasty is carrying on an artistic tradition rather than a complete stranger coming along and ripping it off?  I don't know, but I don't honestly care.  I'm just terribly pleased with the album.

decorative and fine arts

I went this morning to a lecture about the Byzantine origins of Santa Claus, which was the seasonal offering of the Colchester branch of the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies. When I first became involved with the music society I was puzzled that so many members appeared to be involved in flower arranging, until discovering that what they were talking about was not NAFAS but NADFAS, which I'd never heard of.  After a while they said that I ought to join.  I demurred, thinking that I already had enough things to be getting on with, though I did go along to one lecture on the history of Russian Art, signed in by a friend, and enjoyed it.

At the start of this year they told me I really ought to put my name down because the waiting list was getting longer, so I forked out a fiver (deductible from the first year's subscription) to go on the list, thinking that if I made my way to the top in two or three years that would be fine.  This morning I discovered that I was up to number six so who knows, maybe next year I might be in without resorting to Kind Hearts and Coronets tactics.

Santa, like most myths, seems to have some basis in ancient reality.  There was an early bishop of Myra in modern day Turkey, Saint Nicholas, whose story became conflated with another slightly later bishop of somewhere else also called Nicholas.  Throughout the middle ages they, by now he, amassed various acts of charity and rescue to their credit, gradually shifting their or his emphasis from distressed sailors to needy children, and the red bishop's cloak and mitre began to morph into the modern day Santa outfit.  Indeed, one could make a case (entirely spurious but amusing) for Batman's origins dating back to the Renaissance paintings of Saint Nicholas appearing in dreams, flying.  The lecturer didn't, though she did highlight the probability that Sweeney Todd owed something to the later, gruesome stories of three young men being murdered by an innkeeper (later butcher) and sold as meat before being restored to life by Saint Nicholas.

The reindeer apparently pop up out of nowhere in the mid nineteenth century, while Rudolph is a twentieth century addition.  I don't remember ever actually believing in Father Christmas even as a small child, having been highly sceptical from a tender age.  We got stockings but I don't think my parents tried very hard to convince us that they were brought by a strange fat man who came down the chimney and had reindeer parked on the roof.  Perhaps half a century before the current academic theory they had already concluded that it was not a good idea to lie about these things to their small children.  Even now I couldn't name Vixen, Blixen and co without looking them up on Wikipedia, while I always thought Rudolph frankly naff.  But the stained glass of Chartres and Bourges cathedrals depicting the deeds of Saint Nicholas was beautiful, the expressions of the participants amazingly vivid.

The society was dishing out next year's programme at the meeting, and the list of lectures looked rather good.  I'm beginning to hope I do get in next year.

leaf collecting

It is preposterously warm for the time of year.  The Mahonia x media 'Winter Sun' was thick with foraging bees today, and as I drove down the lane early this evening to go to my music society committee meeting a bat fluttered overhead.

I have been gathering leaves, now that I have two empty and weed free leaf bins to put them in. Weed free apart from the seeds, that is.  I fear that the next batch of leaf mould, and probably the one after that, is going to be infested with a cargo of goose grass and possibly nettles.  One year's seeding, seven years' weeding, is how the saying goes, but it can't be helped.

The Systems Administrator dug the leaf vacuum cleaner out of the garage and showed me how it worked.  I thought it could blow the leaves into big piles which I could then scoop up, but instead it sucks.  And chops the leaves up, the Systems Administrator informed me proudly.  Blowing would have been good, because then I could have picked up the leaves without raking up lots of grass and weeds in the process, but I was willing to give vacuuming a go.

I didn't take to it.  I don't like vacuuming the house, and vacuuming up leaves felt too much like outdoor housework.  It was noisy, and I kept getting the electrical cable wrapped round things. The leaves, the grass, the weeds and everything else was wet with dew, causing the leaves to stick to the ground so I never got a clean sweep of an area.  It was a fiddle emptying the collected leaves out of the machine's zip-up bag, and of course between trips to the leaf bin I had to lug the collected leaves about with me and by the time the bag was full it was quite heavy.  It made my forearm ache trying to hold the nozzle of the machine at the right angle to the ground, and every so often I'd collect a stick across the mouth of the vacuum cleaner which stopped the leaves going in, and I'd have to switch off and wait a moment for the whole lot to fall away from the nozzle.

All this was ungrateful of me, when the SA had troubled to get the machine out for me, but I'm glad I was able to try it and even gladder not to have bought one before discovering that I didn't like it. After I'd sucked up some chestnut leaves from the meadow and worked out that at that rate of progress it was going to take me all day, and vacuumed the fallen leaves off the steps to the conservatory which was worth doing because they were getting slippery, and tried to vacuum up the birch leaves that were resting on the prostrate juniper but without much success, and had a go at the wild cherry leaves on the top lawn, I gave up with the machine.  I was pretty sure that I could rake leaves off the lawn by hand faster than I was getting them by suction.

I switched to hand raking, but not for too long because it was starting to get dark and I had to go to the committee meeting.  The art of hand raking is not to do it for too long at a stretch, so that you don't sprain anything, then it is good exercise and will give the muscles of your arms and trunk a healthy work-out.  And meanwhile you can listen to the birds and distant traffic and think about life.  Raking monastery gravel is after all a form of meditation, but you couldn't make that claim for using a leaf vacuum machine.

a question of priorities

I went on weeding around the compost bins today.  I'm not sure it was the most urgent task to do in the garden, but then I'm not sure what the most urgent thing is.  Probably to plant the tulip bulbs salvaged from last year's pots and still sitting in a box in the garage.  They are suppose to be going into the square, box edged bed that originally held the Systems Administrator's hybrid tea roses, but is gradually being given over to other kinds of shrub as I remove the roses that have not done well. The shell pink 'Sight Saver' has made a valiant effort given its rather meagre and sandy quarters, and bronze pink 'Belle Epoque' battles on, but neither of the two red varieties did at all well.  'Remembrance' never made anything except miserable little bushes despite my attempts to cosset them.  I even replaced one failed specimen, but they were all evicted a couple of years ago and I gave the space to Buddleja fallowiana var. alba, which finds the sand more to its liking than the roses ever did.  'Ingrid Bergman' is slated for the same fate this winter.  I am still debating what to do with the gap, but an Indigofera could be in the frame.  Or Daphne 'Eternal Fragrance'.  Or there might be room for both.  The standard 'Iceberg' in the centre of the bed was a miserable failure and gave way to a wisteria on a scaffolding pole at the same time as 'Remembrance' went.
 
So the tulips are meant to be going into the gap around the edge between the box hedge and the shrubs.  I have trimmed quite a lot of the box, which was done in the summer but got whiskery again, but then I diverted into tidying the compost area.  It was partly because as the Systems Administrator has been very obliging about mending the compost bins I thought I'd better show some interest in that part of the garden, but largely because I needed access to the leaf bins, since the other urgent task is to rake up leaves.  In fact, perhaps that is more urgent than planting the tulips.

There are two reasons to rake leaves.  One is if they will cause damage left where they are.  They do, if they are lying on the lawn or on the crowns of herbaceous plants that carry next year's growth buds at soil level where they can rot if left under heaps of wet leaves for too long, rather than safely underground.  The other reason to rake up leaves is if you want them to make leaf mould.  In our garden the second reason is almost more compelling than the first, since the first good gale of wind after leaf fall carries them off into the wood and they trouble the lawn and the crowns of the asters no more.  The ditch bed, on the other hand, will take all the leaf mould I can throw at it as I try to convert its formless mixture of sand and silt into the sort of humus rich soil that woodland flowers would be truly happy in.

I have raked three or four big bags' worth of leaves up so far from the little oak tree by the daffodil lawn.  It is being very coy about dropping them, so that while they started falling a good couple of weeks ago and by now a lot have come off, there are still plenty remaining on the tree.  That's rather dull, as it means I'll end up raking the same area of the lawn again.  I have my eye on the supply of chestnut leaves in the meadow, if I can collect them without raking up too much grass in the process.  The Systems Administrator does have a leaf blower, bought in a moment of enthusiasm a few years ago, so maybe I should get that out.  I suggested that if the Systems Administrator fancied a spot of leaf collecting I'd be very happy to see the bins filled, but the SA just looked at me.  It may be that with the bramble bashing and the compost bins I've had my lot.

lost and found

There was a frost again this morning, not deep but enough for a treacherous layer of ice to have formed on the pond.  I pressed experimentally against it, and after a moment's resistance a triangular section broke away under my fingers.  Mr Fidget came bustling over to investigate, and we hurriedly smashed the ice before he could try walking on it, the Systems Administrator's preferred method being to hit it with a tree stake while I went for lifting the edge up with a garden fork until it snapped.   I don't trust cats to understand ice.  The grey tabby used to take great pleasure in walking out to the middle of the frozen pond where she would sit, looking superior and ferocious, and if there is an accident waiting to happen I don't trust it not to happen to Mr Fidget. He came in from the garden yesterday evening after dark with a lump scratched out of his nose.

The frost meant another truncated gardening day.  I was just getting ready by mid morning to make a start on the next stage of the compost project when one of our neighbours appeared on his bicycle, carrying a small parcel.  It was from Amazon, addressed to the SA, and our neighbour had found it in his house.  It was jolly good of him to bring it round.  I do wish people whose job it is to deliver things wouldn't do that.  The SA got sufficiently nervous about the Amazon delivery service a month or two back to experiment with having things delivered to the post office instead, but became discouraged after getting stuck in a lengthy queue a couple of times.

I busied myself while the garden thawed out sorting out more of the mess on my desk, and am becoming increasingly suspicious that the December issue of one of the garden magazines I subscribe to is not anywhere in the muddle, raising the dark possibility that it got shoved through somebody else's letter box.  This has happened in the past.  Mind you, I was convinced that one of my RHS magazines was missing and then found that with super efficiency I'd already filed it in the box with the others.

I did not find any rats in the final compost bin.  There was evidence of past digging and tunnelling, as I suspected from the fact that some compost had been dug out of the bin, but the rats themselves were long gone.  No nest, no obvious droppings.  I have been lining the bottoms of the bins with chicken wire as I've gone along, so that they won't be able to dig in from underneath, and I might buy another roll with a fairly fine grade mesh and staple it to the outside of the bins so that rats can't chew their way in through the sides.  The problem is that the lowest planks tend to rot, and once there is the beginning of a way in rats will enlarge it.  Fortunately Mr Cool and Mr Fidget are both now patrolling the compost area, Mr Cool passing today and inspecting me with a calm and level glance before continuing on his way.

I did find seven bags' worth of usable compost in the bottom of the final bin, fully rotted, dark and crumbly.  Mindful of the fact that it has had rats in it I will not be handling it with bare fingers, but I don't do that anyway.  Once it is spread on the borders I daresay exposure to the frost, rain and sun will kill any germs fairly quickly, and I won't put it anywhere near anything we are proposing to eat.  Once again the romantic view of home made compost as exemplified by the two hundred and fifty pound bin doesn't match up to the grubby reality.  What are you supposed to do with your compost if you think rats have been in it?

I also found a cyclamen corm buried deep in the bin, plump and alive with a tuft of roots on one face and two small and optimistic shoots on the other.  It must have been one of the slightly tender potted ones from a previous year, that I must have thrown out because it looked dead after its summer rest.  I potted it up in the greenhouse and will wait to see what it does next.  It's not the first thing I've found nursed back to life by the moist, dark warmth of the compost heap.  Some old sections of ginger lily root I discarded when I was repotting the original plants, because they didn't have any visible buds and I had plenty of other sections of root to choose from, emerged from their slumbers and sent out new shoots once consigned to the bin.

a musical tea party

Part of the music society's charitable mandate is to encourage young musicians.  I don't normally have much to do with young musicians, since one of the advantages of not having children is that you don't have to listen to school orchestras or feign the slightest interest in the soundtrack of Frozen or the music of Justin Bieber.  I have not heard a school orchestra since the last time I attended a prize giving as a teenager at my own school, and in general I'd be quite happy if musicians could spring forth fully formed from the Royal College of Music like Athena from the head of Zeus.

But it is good to encourage young people, and after all various people were encouraging to me when I was young and trying out singing and acting.  And if you belong to a club it's generally better to join in wholeheartedly and sign up for everything rather than trying to cherry pick the parts you think you'll like.  You may sit through a few talks or concerts you didn't greatly fancy, but you'll get to know your fellow club members far better than if you just drop in or out as the mood takes you.  So when the music society decided to stage a short afternoon concert for school age performers followed by tea I said I'd go.

In fact the young performers were all very sweet, and one girl in particular had a lovely voice that she hadn't quite learned how to use yet but had the potential to do all sorts things, choral singing, folk or jazz.  She was not doing A level music or planning on it as a career, but music is a great hobby.  They were all girls.  Is it that not as many boys study classical music, or that they won't turn out to a tea party?

The Chairman had made cheese scones for the tea afterwards, and I had my first mince pie of the season.  My contribution was a honey cake, which this time I did not leave unattended for any time at all so Mr Fidget could not get at it.  There was Earl Grey tea as well as builders, and little sandwiches, and some kind of gluten free tart, and another cake which was pronounced afterwards to have been delicious.  Sadly, I missed that one but I had a jolly good go at the scones.  They won't keep, you know.  Everybody seemed to enjoy themselves, and by the end of it I'd picked up an invitation to a lecture on Thursday about the origins of Santa Claus.

When I got home the house smelled delightfully of bolognese sauce and the Systems Administrator had mended the back of the next compost bin where the planks had sprung.  All in all it has been a productive Sunday.

emergency laundry

I woke up this morning, and tried to decide how my potential cold was doing, and whether the fact that my feet were cold was an ominous symptom or just down to the fact that they were poking out of the end of the duvet.  There are some nasty things about.  A friend I was hoping to see at yesterday's carol concert never made it because she spent the day in bed feeling extremely cold and rather dizzy.  The Systems Administrator let Our Ginger into the bedroom, as he was howling in the corridor, and then went off for a shower leaving me with Our Ginger lying on my chest and roaring.  Then I spoilt it for everybody by letting in Mr Fidget, who was squeaking very loudly outside the door, followed by Mr Fluffy.  They ran about the room and then bounced on the bed, while Our Ginger sulked at having his special private time interrupted, refused to sit on my chest any more and stopped purring.

I became suspicious when the Systems Administrator went downstairs and Mr Fidget did not follow for his breakfast but remained sitting on the sheepskin rug by my side of the bed.  Normally Mr Fidget is off like a rocket at the prospect of food, and he was not so much sitting as crouching. With deep foreboding I shifted Mr Fidget aside to discover a copious pool of pee in the middle of the rug.

I can't really blame him for not understanding that he was not supposed to pee on the rug.  When he used to live in the study he was supposed to pee in a large seed tray of vermiculite.  He has only been allowed in the bedroom a handful of times, and the difference between two inch pile wool and vermiculite is not so very great.  They are both white and absorbent and able to hide what you've done, the rug and the litter tray about the same size, both towards the corner of the room concealed by furniture.  Only I wish Mr Fidget would not be so feral.  Mr Cool doesn't seem to have any difficulties working these things out.

It was no good lying in bed considering my cold next to a pool of cat pee while it worked its way through to the carpet.  Fortunately the skin side of the rug is fairly waterproof and I was able to bundle up the rug and tip its contents down the sink without it dripping everywhere.  Probably the loo would have been better but I didn't have that long to think about it, and anyway the rug needed rinsing pronto and I left it soaking while I had breakfast, after which I had the unenviable task of washing it.  I'd been thinking about doing that for a bit, since it was getting grubby from my filthy gardeners' feet walking over it each night, but in an ideal world I'd have brushed it first, and it would not have been impregnated with cat pee.

My advice would be not to end up in a situation where you have to hand launder a sheepskin.  It takes ages, and the wool curls once wet and traps any solid lumps of dirt that might have been in there before you started.  Obviously people with perfectly clean and tidy houses and no pets, who do not come in from the garden with bits of the garden sticking to them or if they do have a shower before going to bed, will not have bits of twig, leaf, Strulch, grass seeds and compost fragments in their bedside rug.  Gardeners, people with workshops, hewers of wood and drawers of water, will know that in our grubby and hobby based worlds of earth stuff does get trodden in, and some of it makes it beyond the turtle mats in the hall.

Now the sheepskin is drying in the laundry.  It smells fine, no trace of cat pee and not especially of wet sheep, but the wool has stuck together in punk tufts.  Whether I can restore the fluffiness of yore remains to be seen.

Once I'd finished laundering the sheepskin I decided my cold wasn't too bad, and went and turned the contents of the next compost bin.  I did not find any rats.

advent service

I woke up this morning, cautiously emerged from the warmth of the electric blanket and divested myself of the chintz pyjamas, and provisionally decided that yesterday's threatened cold had not developed.  So far.  To be on the safe side I spent the morning going through old gardening magazines with Mr Fluffy.  Whether the non-appearance of the cold was down to having kept warm and rested or whether it was never destined to turn into a real cold, who can say?  Or perhaps it is biding its time and will come on in a day or two.

So I was able to go to my advent service, held at a church in Colchester.  The local custom appeared to be to park on the pavements, which were very wide, so I did the same while feeling bad about it.  The church was twentieth century, as I had guessed it would be, and heated, which I'd hoped it would be, and had a couple of very nice modern stained glass windows.  It was so toasty that I was able to take off my coat.  When we got to the carols I was rather croaky on the high notes and had to admit to myself that the lurking potential cold had not entirely gone away.

The two hymns we sang by Charles Wesley were immeasurably better than the modern ones, but there was an excellent update of The Journey of the Magi which I liked so much I badgered the organisers over tea to tell me who wrote it.  They couldn't remember off the tops of their heads, but I managed to find it when I got home by dint of typing Journey of the Magi into Google and ignoring all the links that were obviously to TS Eliot.  The poem turned out to be by a poet and performance artist called Godfrey Rust, who I had honestly never heard of.  Copies of his collected works are available on Amazon, where I discovered that people who bought them also bought The Journey: Daily meditations for Lent (fair enough, Godfey Rust's work has a religious dimension), Benjamin Grovsenor's Dances, and NeilMed Sinus Rinse 120 Refill Sachets.  Just occasionally algorithms let you down.

Then there was a lovely tea at which I sampled more different kinds of cake than was really justified on a day when I hadn't done anything arduous at all, and somebody liked my pink dress and scarf.  As I bought the scarf about twelve years ago and the dress within the past three weeks it goes to show the practical advantage of remaining fixated on the same shade of dark raspberry irrespective of fashion.

Addendum: The journey of the Magi by Godfrey Rust

The journey of the magi (cont.)

Coming as they did from the first century
they had a few problems with London traffic
and were seriously misled by signs
to the Angel and Kings Cross. 

Inquiring diligently about the star
they were referred to Professor Brian Cox,
who thought it was amazing
while smiling in a constant and strangely unsettling way.

In Harrods the camels
made a mess all over Soft Furnishings.

On the Underground
commuters glared at No Smoking signs
as incense wafted gently through the carriages,

and when the great day came
they saw the entire voting population
slumped on sofas by four o'clock,
rendered senseless by too much
dead poultry and the Queen,

while over Liberty's and Hamley's
the flickering angels sang
Glory to God in the High St

and they found him,

with the inns full up again,
in the old familiar place,
bringing their unregarded gifts
to the empty stable
of the human heart
where the infant Christ is born
again and again and again.

ominous signs

As I was cooking the supper last night I began to feel as though I might be getting a cold.  Shivery, achy, with a touch of sore throat and a scintilla of a snivel.  I went to bed early with the electric blanket cranked up to three and wearing pyjamas instead of just a camisole.  They are from the Museum Selection catalogue in a cheerful vintage design of pink and green chintz, only when I first got them the Systems Administrator said that they made me look as though I was dressed as a sofa.

This morning when I woke up I remembered that the previous night I'd thought I might be getting a cold, and tried to work out how that was going.  Things didn't feel too bad while lying under the duvet with the electric blanket, but felt less good once I'd got as far as the bathroom.  My heart sank, filled with dread lest it should turn into a rerun of last year's cold, and the year before, and hang around intermittently until May.  Probably it will not be as bad as that.

It's unfortunate that at the moment I'm reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain set in an alpine TB clinic where stays are measured in months and years, not weeks.  Only in translation, since I don't know more than half a dozen words of German.  I read Buddenbrooks a few years back in a spirit of enquiry while more than half expecting it to be very heavy going indeed.  A boyfriend at Oxford who had to read it as part of his Modern Languages grumbled that Thomas Mann kept going on about what shaped nose everybody had and it is true, he does, but Buddenbrooks turned out to be a thoroughly good read nonetheless.  And so is The Magic Mountain which has a sprightly tone, not what I might have expected from a novel of nearly a thousand pages by a German winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.  I once tried to read Voss a long time ago when I was Interrailing, another long book by a Nobel laureate, and it was so crashingly dull that I left it unfinished in a waste bin on a German railway platform.  I digress.  I have just got to the part of The Magic Mountain where the hero who thought he was simply visiting his cousin in the clinic has himself been diagnosed with TB, which is not the sort of plot arc to make the reader feel that their incipient cold will be over in a jiffy.

So I have done nothing today except sit close to the Aga and look for Christmas shopping ideas on the internet in a desultory way, accompanied by Mr Fluffy who spent the day lying on the kitchen table.  Tomorrow I am supposed to be going to a carol service followed by a tea party, and on Sunday I am supposed to be going to another tea party, and after that a gentle trail of modest amusements stretches away to Christmas.  It would be a real bind to end up missing them, or else shivering and snivelling my way through while generously sharing my germs with my friends and acquaintances.

a real frost

It was properly cold last night.  Not as cold as Oxfordshire where the thermometer hit minus 8 C, but forecast to be cold enough for me to set the heaters in the greenhouse and the conservatory when I came in from the garden.  It was a relief when I went out this morning to switch them off again to find all the plants still above freezing and that nothing had collapsed, defoliated or turned to mush in the night.  I don't know how cold it got here because I don't have a max-min thermometer, but my phone told me it was minus 2 in my location when I got up.  I think that was a generality for the area, since it wasn't as though the phone had popped outside to check.

The garden did look very pretty with the frost on it, under a blue sky.  If we get another frost before all the seed heads disintegrate I must persuade the Systems Administrator to photograph them, or at least photograph those it is possible to get to without walking on the lawn.  If you are going to take cold weather gardening seriously then you need surfaces you can walk on during freezing spells without spoiling them.  This precludes the lawn.

The trouble with frost from a gardening point of view is that you can't do much until it's gone.  You can prune woody stems if you've a mind to, indeed Christopher Lloyd waxed lyrical about the joys of rose pruning in cold weather, when you would not feel the thorns and could look at the streams of red with detached amazement.  But you cannot weed because the surface of the ground is solid, you cannot walk on the grass, you probably can't rake leaves because they will be either frozen to the ground or else lying on the grass, you cannot plant anything because the surface of the ground is solid and you absolutely must not bury any frozen lumps around the roots of your new plant, or they will take an age to thaw, chilling its roots all the while.

The frost was slow to shift even with the sun on it and I had to defrost my car before I could go to Tesco.  By the time I got back things were looking a little damper and more flexible, though you could see the hollows where the sun didn't quite touch by the bowls of frost still lying.  I decided it was a morning for getting on with trimming the ivy hedge.  I feel I must be on the home straight with the ivy, though generally when I feel that it turns out to mean there are only about two days' worth of work to go.  That's the trouble with frosts, they make an already short gardening day even shorter.

By mid afternoon the gravel had thawed nicely and I was able to scoop up leaves and pull out tufts of creeping sorrel as a change from the ivy.  But by four it was too dark to see what I was doing and jolly cold.  I think we will get a light frost tonight, but not enough to be worth setting the heaters.

let them eat cake

I arranged to call round to see my parents this morning, after calling in on a friend who has drummed up demand for some jars of honey among her colleagues to drop the jars off.  Living where we do, sales at the gate are a non-starter, and the farm shops all have regular arrangements with one of the local commercial bee farmers, while I just have some spare jars from time to time. Next year if the weather's bad or the bees aren't in a cooperative mood I might not have any.

I thought that as I was visiting my parents I would make them a cake.  Home made honey loaf with our own honey and our own eggs.  I thought they might like a cake, and I enjoy baking.  I made it yesterday afternoon after coming in from the garden.  The cake has to be allowed to cool in the tin, and I put the tin carefully away in a cupboard on a pile of plates where the cats could not get at it.  They like cake, especially Mr Fidget and Mr Fluffy.

I was not due at my friend's house until ten.  At half past nine I started getting ready to go out, changed out of my Birkentocks into shoes I could drive in, printed off a couple of honey recipes I'd typed out for my friend's son who is a keen baker, transferred eight labelled jars of honey into a box with convenient internal divisions that had previously held cat pouches (it was the only box I could find that hadn't already had a cat sitting in it), put two boxes of eggs and the recipe sheets into a shopping basket, wrapped the cake in a freezer bag and put that in the basket, and decided to nip to the loo before going out.

When I returned to the kitchen Mr Fidget was in the shopping basket, and had chewed through the freezer bag and gnawed a hole in the side of the cake.  I was jolly cross.  In fact, I was discouraged.  I try to do something nice for other people and that is what happens.  It was not two hours after Mr Fidget's breakfast, and how the hell did he even know that the cake was in the shopping basket?  I put the cake back in the cupboard to sort out later and went to put my coat on. When I returned to the kitchen for the second time Mr Fidget was back in the shopping basket, and had bitten the end off one of the egg boxes and crumpled up the pieces of paper, so I had to find a new box for the eggs and reprint the recipes.  By then I was running ten minutes late.

I examined the cake properly when I got back.  Most of it was still protected by the freezer bag, so I cut away the margins of the bit Mr Fidget had chewed, and put the cake in a box.  He appeared to have eaten part of the paper liner as well as the cake.  I have promised to make a cake for a tea party the chairman of the music society is doing on Sunday, so I had better take better care of that one.

Addendum  The cake, should you wish to try it, is very easy and creates minimal washing up.  Melt five ounces of butter, six ounces of honey and four ounces of soft brown sugar with a tablespoon of water in a reasonable sized saucepan.  Whisk in two eggs, making sure the melted butter mixture isn't hot enough to curdle them.  Stir in seven ounces of self raising flour, whisking it if necessary to break up the lumps of flour.  Cook in a lined loaf tin at 180 C for fifty minutes to an hour.  Cool in the tin.  Protect from cats.

free range

This afternoon I let the hens out for a run.  This was more momentous than it sounds, since it was the first time we'd let the new Speckeldies out of their enclosure.  I'm not entirely sure how that happened.  I know we didn't set out with any intention of not free ranging the new hens, and it goes to show how a situation can creep up on you by degrees.

We got the new little chickens only a short time before getting the new kittens in May, and at that stage they were far too small and too timid to risk letting them out into the garden.  Then we were very busy with the kittens, or perhaps the kittens were more appealing and the new hens did not command the attention they would have otherwise.  My last cold lingered on well into May, while the foxes grew ever bolder, sauntering past the front door well before the stage of the evening when the hens would have gone back into their run.  Although the fox menace is always there when you keep chickens it peaks in June and July when the vixens have cubs and are desperate to feed them.  I don't know why we didn't let the hens out in August, except that by then we'd got into the habit of not letting them out, then in September we were about to go on holiday and it seemed mean to dangle the prospect of freedom in front of them then snatch it away again.  Since then I've been meaning to start releasing them while being so busy around the garden that I've kept putting it off.

But yesterday as I saw them staring at the grass on the other side of the wire I thought I really must let them out.  They don't need to be out all day, but a couple of hours of scratching around unearthing things to eat and nibbling on leaves cheers them up.  I warned the Systems Administrator that I planned to release them, so that it would not come as a shock if it got to dusk and I had to confess that I'd let the hens out and lost one of them.  I hoped the kittens would not bother them, but the SA was sure that the kittens would be fine.

The old lady Maran was out of the pop hole like a racehorse on the starting line at Newmarket, followed by one of the little hens.  I can't honestly tell the Speckeldies apart now they've grown, apart from one who is more silver than the others, so I don't know if it was the Maran's original partner in crime or if one of the youngsters was particularly outgoing.  The others took a while to summon the courage to venture beyond the run, and stood for a time pecking grass through the pop hole, but they came out eventually.  And Mr Fidget and Mr Cool turned up.

Mr Fidget and Mr Cool thought that having the hens running around the front garden was the most amazing thing they had seen since the first time they saw Our Ginger.  Unfortunately I could not tell whether their intentions towards the hens were pure.  How do you tell whether a fit young cat, that is slinking along on his belly stalking a hen, merely wants to look at it or is timing his moment to jump on it and bite the back of its skull?  I did not know whether the cats could kill a hen in a single leap before I could intervene.  I did not know whether the hen would react to any aggression from the cat by giving it a good kicking.  I did not want any accidents involving scratched eyes.  All of our previous cats gave the chickens a wide berth, but thinking back to when the last cats were first introduced to the hens we had a rooster at that point, so they learned respect early.  The anxious tabby weighed a stone at his peak and was so long he could stand on his hind legs and rest his chin on the dining table, and I have seen him run away from a broody hen.  But Mr Fidget and Mr Cool seemed altogether too interested.

I had to stop putting the dahlia pots away in the greenhouse to watch the livestock.  The hens did not seem at all concerned about the cats.  Were they better at gauging the situation than I was, or was it simply that they had not been attacked so far and hens are not very imaginative?  The smallest hen managed to wander away from the others, and as Mr Fidget crept up on her from one direction while Mr Cool took a detour round the pond to sneak towards her from the other, my nerve cracked and I scooped up Mr Fidget and shut him in the house, warning the SA that I was shutting the cat in because I was worried about their attitude to the hens.

The old lady Maran and her little mate went and scratched around in the back garden, so then I had two lots of chickens to keep an eye on together with the dubious attentions of Mr Cool.  Eventually I managed to catch Mr Cool, and shut him indoors as well.  Finally I persuaded the breakaway party in the back garden to rejoin the main body of hens in the front, and after that we all had quite a nice time until it got late enough for me to chivy them back into the run.  Mr Fluffy showed up before they'd gone inside, but he was not interested in the hens at all and sat on the drain cover by the front door.  We discovered later he'd lost a mouse down there.

I did not like to drag the SA out to help with the chickens, because letting them out was my idea and it was very chilly and the SA  has a chest cold and was trying to keep warm.  So the SA did not see the kittens in full hen stalking mode, and was inclined to think that they were simply fascinated by the chickens and would not actually attack them.  I suppose the kittens are used to seeing the hens in their enclosure, while all other creatures they encounter in the garden run away from them, so free ranging chickens was a huge novelty.  But I don't trust them, especially Mr Fidget who we know has progressed to killing adult rats and who tried to chase the Airedale off when it came calling, until it chased him.

gravel gardening

There was a slight hiatus in the great compost turning project, because I went out for the day on Friday and meanwhile the Systems Administrator was unable to get out to buy any more long screws because by mid-morning the lane was blocked in both directions by road mending equipment.  But yesterday I painted the repairs to the latest bin to be emptied, and this morning I turned the contents of the next bay along into the empty one.  I did not find any rats.  I painted the newly empty bin with dark brown wood stain and asked the SA hopefully if the SA could repair the front, which I had discovered was not so much retaining the contents of the bin as resting on it.  The SA muttered ominously that there weren't many usable lengths of plank left in the stack on the concrete, and I kicked myself that it never occurred to me to scrounge my parents' old decking when they had it renewed in the summer.  I am sure the SA will manage to find something to fix the front of the bin, but it could be nip and tuck by the time we get to the end of the row, as I saw this morning that the next one along has sprung three planks at the back.

Then, as it was quite warm for the time of the year, I spent the rest of the day weeding the garden railway, and managed to find useful homes for five of my tray of twenty-four rooted sedum cuttings.  They are Sedum album 'Coral Carpet', which grown outdoors in sunlight has leaves of a nice reddish bronze, but grown in a slightly shaded greenhouse in late November goes an unremarkable shade of green.  The leaves are tiny, fat and juicy, and it makes steadily spreading mats grown in the gravel that should halt most seedling weeds in their tracks.  It roots ridiculously easily.  I bought one plant in 2014 and could by now have hundreds of them if I wanted to.  I have not tried propagating it from a single leaf, but the tiniest pieces stuck in compost will root in no time, and I don't think I have ever had a single one die.

All sedums are not equally obliging.  I stuck a divided tray with small cuttings of  Sedum oreganum at the same time, and every one of them shrivelled and died.  I have got it to take in the past using larger and thicker sections of stem, but it didn't respond at all well to having the last inch or so nipped off and put in compost.  It doesn't tolerate over watering in its pot, either, even when rooted, and will show its unhappiness by dropping all it leaves.  Generally sedums are very easy to propagate, but it goes to show that it's worth testing your method on a particular variety before going all out and taking loads of cuttings.  I reused the S. oreganum tray for a dark red, prostrate form left over from my experiments with a green roof on the pot shed, whose name unfortunately got lost during the period it was on the roof.  I now have some in pots and more growing in the gravel, and it seems happy with both situations.  I haven't tweaked any of the cuttings yet to see if they're taking, but it normally roots very obligingly.

I picked leaves out of the gravel as I went, now that they are mostly off the trees, and dead headed some of the prostrate thymes I hadn't already done, and reflected once again how gravel gardening is not a low maintenance option.  Or at least, if you use it as a purely decorative mulch on top of Mypex fabric and are able to rake up the leaves, it could be a lower maintenance option than true gravel gardening.  You have to not mind the sight of bits of Mypex popping up round the edges of your planting holes, and you won't get the effect of things self seeding or be able to grow any dwarf bulbs (unless you cut so many holes in the Mypex that it might as well not be there).  But spreading a couple of inches of gravel on top of the soil will not suppress weeds, on the contrary it will provide a wonderful seed bed, and if the area is anywhere near any deciduous trees or shrubs or hedge then at this time of the year you will find dead leaves lodged in every little drought loving miniature pink and thyme plant.

The new generation of cats do seem to have brought the rabbit problem near the house back under control, and I didn't find any freshly nibbled pinks.  Next year we might get some more flowers from the railway garden, and I might buy some more plants to help fill the gaps.  The last trio of prostrate veronica I planted vanished within days, and that kind of thing puts you off rather.

more live music

I have just got back from another concert, this time a piano trio at Brightlingsea Studio Music.  I'm afraid it wasn't an unqualified success, as I am jolly cold, and heard too much of the piano and not enough of the strings.  After giving the venue three goes, which seems a fair sample, I'm beginning to feel it is a bit too hit and miss.

The ticket said 7.30 for 8.00 and as I arrived at 7.30, wondering if I should have gone earlier to get a decent seat, I was taken aback by the length of the queue.  After last time when I managed to tuck myself in a corner with a view of both musicians and had a nice time, I was afraid that this time I was going to be back to peering through the banisters, or worse.  On the other hand the queue didn't start moving for another five minutes, which was quite long enough to be standing outside in the dark next to Brightlingsea Creek.

I thought for a moment I would still get a seat in the back row, as three were empty, but as I approached from one end I saw that the chair nearest to me was already bagged by a cardigan, and meanwhile a woman with a companion in tow had got in at the other end.  The stairs looked full, and I opted for the garden room opening on to the main studio, which was lined with green plastic garden chairs.  An elderly chap sat down in one of the other green plastic chairs and began to fuss about where various youngsters could sit so that they would be able to see.  I wasn't going to be able to see either, but that didn't seem to be an issue.  The organiser came and addressed the room, asking us not to allow our handbags to scratch the piano.  Since the elderly chap didn't have a handbag I presumed he was talking to me.  For good measure, he told me not to lean on the lid when I went out.  I told him that I wasn't going to touch his piano and began to feel that wasn't much of a way to spend Saturday night.

At eight he began to address the room while a couple of women talked loudly, telling us how much work it was each time to rearrange the furniture, and I began to feel slightly more unwelcome than I had before.  Yes, hosting any kind of event is generally hard work, but it is incumbent on the host not to say so.  Your guests may express their appreciation, if they are nice, and tell you how much work you must have done and how grateful they are, and you may gracefully lap up their thanks. At five past the trio appeared, and at ten past eight we finally got going.

When the musicians sat down the cellist had his back to me, and all that I could see of the violinist was his hair and his shoes, and once they began to play it was clear that the sound balance was all wrong, as except in the quietest passages I was getting too much piano.  In the loudest passages I was getting really quite a lot too much piano and almost no violin at all.  Then I began to realise quite how cold the annexe was.  On closer inspection it appeared to be made out of perspex and plywood, while the floor looked as though it had been a patio until somebody put a home made garden room on it.  There didn't seem to be any heating, and in the interval I put my hat on.  An elderly lady came and told the elderly chap she had found a seat for him, and off he went.  I didn't know anybody there to chat to, so I stayed put.

We were joined in the second half by a young man and his grandmother, who had evidently found sitting on the stairs in the first half too uncomfortable.  The twenty minute interval ran to twenty-five, and my heart sank slightly when the pianist's introduction to the Tchaikovsky programmed for the second half mentioned that it lasted for forty-five minutes.  As soon as the musicians had taken their second bow I fled, handbag held at knee level and on the opposite side of my body to the piano, ignoring some faint squeaks from the host.  I didn't care whether he was going to close the piano lid or make more speeches by that stage.  I was cold and wanted to go home.

As to the musicians, they were the Busch Trio.  They played late Haydn, Dvorak, and Tchaikovsky. They tour extensively in Europe and have played in the Wigmore Hall and I think they are up and coming and are probably good, only I was sitting in the wrong place to hear or see them properly. I'm not sure I'll persist with Brightlingsea Studio Music.  Being able to hear live chamber music only five miles down the road ought to be a good thing, in theory, but if I've got to arrive forty minutes before the concert starts to get a tolerable seat and maybe spend fifteen of those minutes queuing outside in the cold and the dark, it all starts feeling too much like hard work.  For the cost of a ticket I could buy a new CD, with balanced sound instead of a preponderance of piano, and listen to it in a warm room sitting in a comfortable chair.

London again

I was back in London today, this time for my aunt's lunchtime cello concert.  A couple of trips ago it took so long to get out of Colchester's north station car park that, hemmed in by vast SUVs on all sides, I lost track of how far round the roundabout I'd gone and in the dark turned off earlier than I meant to, so last time I tried going from Wivenhoe.  There is only one London train per hour after the rush hour, with the 10.23 being the earliest service I can use my Network card on.  The 11.23 would have been cutting it rather fine for a 1.05 concert, even one in the City, so the 10.23 it was.

The concert was in St Mary-at-Hill off Eastcheap, and looking at the map to see what else was around there I'd spotted Saint Margaret Pattens in nearby Rood Lane.  I always enjoy nosing around churches, and I'd never visited St Margaret Pattens. Rebuilt by Wren after the Great Fire and pretty much undamaged by the Blitz, I read that it had the only conventional spire of any church by Wren and the interior included some seventeenth century canopied pews.  Those had to be worth half an hour of anybody's time.

I didn't take much notice of the other visitors as I pondered the painting over the altar and wondered where the stairs led to, until one tall, thin figure wavering between two pews caught my attention and I realised it was my uncle.  His eyesight is not up to much nowadays, and it took him a moment to realise that it was me.  I discovered that somehow, as my aunt wrestled to get her cello case, stool, music and other paraphernalia through the barriers on the tube, he had become separated from her.  And that, having been taking his lead from her up to that point, he was not sure precisely which church the concert was happening in.  St Mary-at-Hill is only just across Eastcheap and around the corner from Saint Margaret Pattens, so I led him there, thankful that Eastcheap didn't have more traffic as it took him a while to cross the road, partly because by now he can't see where he is putting his feet.  My aunt was mightily relieved at his appearance, explaining that she had lost him.  I explained that I had found him again.  It was really very odd and I wouldn't have believed it as a plot device in a film.

The programme was Beethoven and Rubbra.  I think it was the same Beethoven sonata that Sebastian Comberti played at Boxford, but am not utterly sure since I don't have a great memory for classical music unless I've got a recording and have listened to it a lot.  The Rubbra I didn't know at all, though I think I could get into it with sufficient listening.  My uncle is jolly keen on Rubbra who was his tutor at Oxford.

St Mary-at-Hill is enormous inside, much bigger than you would expect from the size of Lovat Lane. It too made it almost intact through the Blitz before being allowed to partially burn down in 1988, so the handsome domed ceiling is actually a late twentieth century reconstruction.  A gigantic organ takes up a large part of the west wall.  The pews have all been stripped out and replaced with orange chairs, which makes the space multi-functional but according to my aunt gives a similar acoustic to playing in a railway station.

After the Rubbra and once my aunt had packed up her kit and I had managed to shoehorn a box of eggs into the bag with her music stand and her mat, we went for a coffee with a friend of theirs who was some sort of many times removed cousin of my aunt, and then I went to the Tate to see their exhibition of Wilfredo Lam.  Wilfredo Lam was a Cuban surrealist (or at least a Cuban artist. The jury is out as to whether he was really a surrealist).  I had never heard of him until the Tate released details of this year's exhibitions, but if you asked most people to name any Cuban artists, Surrealist or otherwise, you would end up with a pretty short list.

His father was Chinese, his mother of African and Spanish descent, and they were both supportive of his ambition to be an artist, so he was able to study in Spain for several years and then moved to Paris where he was taken under the wing of Picasso.  He married but his wife and first child both died young.  He was caught up in Vichy France and spent months waiting to get a boat out.  He returned to Cuba, then in the 1950s returned to Europe, considering himself a citizen of the world. There are photographs of him scattered through the exhibition, and a five minute short film about him at the end that interposes archive film with interviews with his son, and he seems to have been a popular figure in the art world, tall, good looking and energetic.

The gallery notes say that as a young artist he greatly admired Goya, and started off wanting to be a portrait painter.  The earliest works are highly figurative, skillfully done.  A still life of fruit and flowers on a table and a brown tinted view of houses on a hillside to me showed the influence of Cezanne.  Then he fell under the spell of Matisse.  That is not my opinion but the considered view of the Tate curator.  I liked his Matisse blue view from a window, which was a pretty convincing Matisse apart from the fact that it was the work of a Cuban Chinese-Spanish-African.  Then he fell under the spell of Picasso, and never really got out from under it.  He had a brief and perfectly credible stint as an Abstract Expressionist, but returned to the strange, angular, horse-headed, hoof-footed, multi-breasted dream creatures of his post-Guernica Picasso stage, though Wilfredo Lam's dream creatures are curiously nonthreatening, with added shades of Miro.  In fact, I am not sure what they are saying, except that life is strange and amusing and not dangerous.

I liked all of it.  He was good at what he did.  The single thing I liked the most was actually a tiny drawing, more of a comic sketch, of an elaborate dog with a small cat standing on its back, the cat's back drawn up into an arch.  And next to it the elaborate doodle of a turtle with a series of smaller creatures stacked on top of it, the smallest and topmost one of which is brandishing a cocktail glass if you look closely.  Alas, the shop didn't have postcards of them, just as they never have reproductions of the picture you liked the best.  The only trouble was that it felt as I went round that the things he was doing well had already been done, by and large.

The exhibition was not very crowded.  Most people don't seem to want to go and see a Cuban Surrealist they have not heard of.  Come to that, none of the three friends I tried the idea on wanted to come with me, even with the lure of free entry using the Tate member plus guest card. It is on until the 8th of January, if you want to go and see for yourself.

make your own compost

The Systems Administrator made an extra compost bin using some sections of the planks from the old pot shed floor that were not too rotten, and a stray fence post that was lying about.  I painted it with the odd end of a tub of wood preservative left over from the garden railway, and found a couple of short lengths of chicken wire that must once have been fastened round shrubs to keep the rabbits off them that were just long enough to fit across the bottom and staple to the sides so that rats would not be able to dig their way in.  I was rather pleased with the bin, which cost us nothing, and after giving the wood stain a day to dry off I turned the contents of the next door bin into it.

The neighbouring bin was made out of recycled decking, and already had a wire bottom.  The SA fastened a couple of planks that had come loose at the back with a fresh batten, and I painted that bin as well, except that two thirds of the way across the outside of the bin at the back I ran out of stain.  The following day I was able to turn the contents of the neighbouring bin into the newly refurbished one.  Then I had to invest some money in the compost bin restoration project and buy a new tub of preservative.  This afternoon I painted the bits of the freshly emptied bin that had not rotted away, and asked the SA to mend the large hole in the back.  There should be some more serviceable wood among the old floor boards.

I am out tomorrow, but on Saturday morning if it's dry I will paint the SA's repairs and fasten wire across the base of the empty bin, then in the afternoon turn the next heap and so on until I get to the end of the row.  I don't know if the preservative really makes much difference given that unlike a garden fence the sides of the bins are going to be in constant contact with a heap of damp and decaying compost, and you traditionally avoid setting your wooden fence in direct contact with the soil, but it seemed worth the effort to try to make them last as long as possible.  And it gives the outside of the bins a sort of pleasing visual unity, in a bodged and rustic way.  You can get very fancy with compost bins.  The plant centre used to sell fancy ones shaped like oversized traditional beehives painted in a fetching shade of duck egg blue, and the John Lewis website will sell you a beehive composter (though its corners owe more to the art of the log cabin) for £159.  But I am now up to six compost bays, and five of them are already full.  That would be a lot of money to spend on compost bins.  Actually, I think I am going to need a seventh but I thought that if I finished tidying up the rest of the utility area first to show that I was serious, maybe then afterwards if the compost still hadn't rotted down I could ask the SA very nicely to see if one more bin's worth of planks could be salvaged from the pile.

I have a dark suspicion that rats are or have been living in or under the bins at the far end, towards which I am gradually working my way.  I have been digging the as yet uncomposted plant remains out of each bin with a fork, wearing gloves, wellington boots and at least two layers of clothing on all limbs, keeping a keen eye out for rats.  I haven't seen any yet, but there is a suspicious hole and something has been digging.  Of course some of it could be moles in search of worms.  I pulled the weeds out of one of the wire netting leaf bins while I was at it, and there was a mysterious mound of earth topped with nettles.  I removed them gingerly, but did not find any rats, moles or anything else except a vast quantity of stones.  Molehills are sometimes trumpeted as sources of good, tilled and aerated soil but I'm afraid that depends on the quality of the soil the moles are digging in.  In our garden they are mainly a source of stones.

I don't know why the contents of the bins hasn't rotted down more.  The usual mixture of old flower stems, spent potting compost, poultry litter from the hen house, vegetable peelings from the kitchen and a few light woody prunings went in, but they haven't done much.  We don't add grass cuttings because the lawns are so weedy, so the compost is probably a bit light on nitrogen, and I wonder if it was too dry over the summer since we had barely any rain for the best part of ten weeks.  I could water it.  I could add something like 6X concentrated poultry manure to boost the nitrogen content, though rather like building the bins I grudge spending money on making the compost.  I could just wait.  And persuade the Systems Administrator to build yet another bin.

your views are important to us

Our postman is no slouch.  He came early this morning to beat the resurfacing works in the lane, so early that we had not opened the gate for him.  He brought my pink dress, which I have not tried on yet since I was too idle to change out of my gardening clothes and now I am avoiding even opening the parcel until I am fresh out of the shower, and a letter from the National Gallery.

The letter was a puzzle.  It was a two parter, part fund raising appeal and part something else, in a nice thick Basildon Bond envelope that I am sure was not the cheapest envelope they could have bought that would have done the job.  I was not sure what to make of the part that was not a fund raising appeal, or whether it was even genuine or really intended to warm me up for the request for money.  Apart from the fact that I have booked tickets for temporary exhibitions from time to time, I did give them the last of the cash on my CAF account towards the appeal to buy Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks, and I have got a National Art Pass, so I can see how they could easily have got hold of my details.  It is a pity that in their attempt to personalise the whole thing they addressed me by a weird mashup of the nickname I am always called by and my middle initial, which I do use but only with my proper first name, so ending up with a combination I never call myself by and nobody who knows me personally would think of using either.

Apart from money, their archivist wants me to 'contribute to the rich tapestry of stories so that generations to come can connect the history, heritage and significance of our great national institutions to their own lives.  Please write to tell us why you love the Gallery and what these wonderful paintings mean to you'.  By way of illustration he enclosed a perfectly nice postcard of a seventeenth century Dutch portrait of a boy with a little essay on the back by somebody called David about why he liked the National Gallery, and a piece of paper headed up with the weird mashup of my name plus my full postal address, on which I was supposed to write my own short essay to be added to the archive.  Or I could email them.

This seems to be a thing nowadays.  The Radio 3 breakfast show includes a slot for a listener to explain why they love the piece of music Radio 3 is about to play.  The woodland charity, totally unbidden, sent me a spiral bound notebook in which I am supposed to invite people to write down their memories of trees.  Or they can do it online.  You cannot leave an art exhibition now without passing a noticeboard on which people have written their thoughts about the exhibition on postcards, unless there was an interactive touch screen inside the exhibition for them to record their thoughts.  I rarely listen to the Radio 3 breakfast show because I find the presenters annoying, nor have I asked anybody to write anything in the spiral bound book.  I don't stop to read the postcards.  And I don't know who David is so why do I care about his favourite picture?

Sometimes it is nice to know what other people think.  If I'm at a gallery with a friend I am interested in their reaction to the art, because I'm interested in them.  And sometimes they have spotted something I haven't.  But if I'm about to listen to a piece of music it really doesn't help to know that somebody I don't know and am never going to meet likes it because it was the first piece they played in the school orchestra, or they heard it fifty years ago on their first date with the person they are now married to.  Those are lovely memories for them.  For me, not so interesting. If a music critic were to tell me that the music was booed at its first performance, or suppressed by Stalin and not played in public for a quarter of a century after it was written, that would be an interesting bit of historical context.  If they were to tell me that the violins would repeat in the third movement the theme first introduced in the opening bars by the horns, I could strain to listen out for it and I might learn something about the music.  Knowing that a complete stranger first heard it when their university friend played it to them on a wind-up gramophone and so it reminds them of their friend (or the HMV dog) really doesn't matter.

I'm not anti all customer feedback.  We found the excellent curry house in Barnard Castle by dint of looking on Tripadvisor and seeing it was the most recommended local eatery by a country mile, and sure enough it was very good.  Buying clothes online it's useful to know if other customers found the cotton thin, the shade of blue darker than it looked on the screen, or the sizing so huge they had to go down one from their usual size.  Especially when several people agree that the material was practically transparent, the blue surprisingly dark or the boots enormous.  If a book has numerous reviews on Amazon you can generally work out quite a lot about what sort of a book it is, even if you ignore the reviewer's conclusions, just as you ignore comments that the blue or the boots were lovely, because their idea of loveliness might not be yours.

I don't know what the National Gallery will do with the pieces of paper, or the emails.  Will they archive them properly, with an index, or just shove them in boxes until they end up in a skip in twenty years' time?  Archiving and storage are not cheap.  I thought that on balance I'd rather the gallery put its finite curatorial resources into researching or restoring some of the actual artworks they've got sitting in storage.  Who knows, there might be another School Of that turns to be a By. The archivist invited me to give permission for my words to be published, with or without my name and details, or to say how long I would like it to be closed from public view (which makes it sound quite exciting, like Cabinet papers).  Only I have a dark suspicion it is actually rather pointless.

But maybe it is mainly an exercise to make me feel they are listening to me, like the email from the Tate with an email address I could respond to if I didn't use Facebook, only when I did respond the message was bounced back because it was invalid.  There is a detective story by Dorothy L Sayers in which the murder victim, who believes something about themselves which it would be a plot spoiler to reveal, is sent a coded message by their murderer arranging to meet them (and, as it turns out, murder them).  Lord Peter Wimsey on discovering the message points out that the first bit, that panders to the victim's belief, is sloppily coded, but the part relating to the meeting is highly accurate.  Ergo, it was the meeting that mattered to whoever wrote the message.  I remember the story sometimes when I am not sure what is going on in a given situation: what part of the situation is the other party paying attention to, because that's the thing that's important to them.

I really don't know what the National Gallery wants this time, my views or my money.  It doesn't really matter, since they are not getting either of them, the views because I don't see who would be interested in them, and the money because the CAF account is long emptied and since quitting the City my Art Pass and my Tate membership are as much as I can manage.

Addendum  Of course, what is cardunculus if not my views on life addressed to people who don't know me?  But since it has scarcely gone viral it is largely read by people who do know us.  And it quite often contains useful snippets of gardening or cookery advice garnered from first hand experience.  And it is all done for free in my spare time, without the aid of Basildon Bond envelopes or the salary of a professional archvist.

no through road

The Systems Administrator returned from the supermarket and announced that they are finally repairing the potholes in the lane.  I was thinking only yesterday that they had been taking their time about it.  Coloured paint marks appeared round the holes and crumbling edges months ago, but then nothing further happened other than the paint slowly fading, until about six weeks ago a second set of paint marks appeared, this time in white.  They too were beginning to wear off, and I was beginning to wonder when the council would actually send people to mend the road instead of merely reassuring us that they knew about the problem.

The lane is not very big and as such can't be expected to be a high priority on the council's list, but it is the only means of access to the half dozen or so houses and farm business units stretched along its length, and the further half dozen houses on the lettuce farm.  Plus the lettuce farm itself, whose articulated lorries can't be helping the state of the lane, but which pays its taxes and probably expects passable road access in return.  In fact, the lane carries much heavier traffic than a dozen houses and a couple of farms would generate because it is used as a cut through by drivers wanting to avoid the inconvenient traffic lights on the main road.  They slow things down considerably in the rush hour because there is no room for any right hand turning filter lanes, so once the car at the head of the queue wants to turn right that's probably it for that phase of the lights, everybody else in the queue having to wait to try their luck on the next go once the right hand turner has scuttled across on amber as the lights change.

Anyway, the lane is now being mended so hurrah for that.  The pot holes along the edges were getting to the tyre menacing stage, and the non-residents using it as a short-cut do have an unnerving tendency of charging along it at forty, as if they did not expect anybody else to be using it, and to show no signs of slowing down or pulling over when they meet me coming the other way. Friends who live along other lanes tell me that this is a general phenomenon of modern rural life, not confined to our lane.  Why I am supposed to climb half way up the verge in my poor old Skoda while they motor past at speed in their BMWs I do not know.  It can't be purely classist based on make of car because they do the same to a friend who drives a rather slinky black Jaguar.  I sometimes wish we still had the Landrover or the truck, then I could just stop in the middle of the road and wait to see if they could stop too.

Meanwhile, Storm Angus and its aftermath has caused the Orwell Bridge to be closed for twelve hours, bringing the whole of Ipswich to gridlock.  It made the Radio 2 traffic bulletin as well as the East Anglian Daily Times.  The trouble is that the Orwell crossing is the lowest bridging point on the river Orwell.  It carries the traffic not just for Woodbridge, Lowestoft, Great Yarmouth and all points north up the coast but for Felixstowe docks as well.  Felixstowe is the UK's busiest container port and while the train takes some of the strain, quite a lot still goes by road.  Direct all that road traffic through the centre of Ipswich and the result is predictable chaos.  I can't see any solution, short of building a new dual carriageway north of Ipswich to link the A14 and A12.  Which is not going to happen.  In the meantime the Orwell Bridge looms more than 40 metres high over the river and is closed in high winds, at which point the east coast is cut off.

The postman did not come, what with the Lane Closed signs, and nor did any deliveries.  The SA is waiting for a new chainsaw blade and I am expecting a pink dress.  A middle aged lady one, corduroy, with pockets.

more live music

This is a late post, and will be a brief one, as it being late I should like to go to bed soon.  We have just got back from seeing Blazin' Fiddles at the Colchester Arts Centre.  They didn't end their set until gone eleven, having expressed their regret midway through the second half that they had only just discovered that the arts centre had a curfew, and they finished in such a whirl of energy that it was easy to believe they were just warming up.  Looking at their touring schedule it was actually their fifth night in a row of performing, and they have at least another week before they get a break, on a mad route that takes them all over the country.

They are a Scottish band and have been going for ages although by now only one of them was in the original lineup, and they are famous if you are into folk music, otherwise you have almost certainly not come across them.  I'd only heard them on the radio but had a hunch they would be fun live, and they were.  There are four fiddlers, from Orkney, Shetland, Inverness and Nairn, or as the founder member put it, two Viking goddesses and two Highland trolls, plus a keyboard player and a multi-instrumentalist who is mainly tethered to her guitar.

They alternated between the fast and noisy and the slower and quieter in about the right ratio for a gig.  The wall of sound produced by four top notch traditional fiddle players going flat out and backed up by keyboard and guitar is impressive but could get samey over an entire evening, while you'd feel cheated if the whole concert had consisted of demure solos and duets.  I didn't think about it at the time but the Systems Administrator has pointed out that their fiddles were all fitted with wireless mics, which is how they could all walk around the stage without ending up with a muddle of cables like a maypole dance gone wrong.

It was my third live musical encounter inside a week, and provided an interesting contrast to the other two.  Last night, lieder in a consecrated church, tonight wild Highland music in a deconsecrated one.  It's good to support live music.