There was a shoot on the estate today. We could tell that because there were only two radios left in the office for three members of staff. One of them was the boss's radio, which is permanently stuck on channel one since he dropped it and the knob that changes channels broke off. I like having that one anyway, because it can't accidentally twiddle itself to the wrong frequency in my pocket.
There were some classic examples of things that go wrong in a retail plant centre, or at least go wrong in ours. A couple arrived to collect two trees that had been paid for and reserved 'ages ago', except that the trees were not with the other reserved trees, and nobody had recorded any details of them in the book of reserved plants. Fortunately the couple remained extremely placid throughout, until one of my colleagues in a moment of real inspiration managed to find the lost trees. They were not anywhere we normally put reserved plants, but with the small collection of pot-bound trees that have been reduced to half price, with their prices cut off and reserved under the first names of the couple who had bought them, in about August. I mean, why wouldn't they be?
Later on another couple arrived to buy a tray with a picture of an elephant which we had ordered in for them specially. I knew we were trying to get hold of an elephant tray, which somebody wanted to give as a present to somebody else who liked elephants. My colleague who does orders for the shop had been so keen to get them their tray before Christmas that she had rung them to say it had arrived before the boss had given us a sales price for it, which left us with the task of working out a price. The paperwork that came with the tray had actually got a cost price to us on it, which is more than delivery notes usually do, but none of us had been told the gross mark-up we were supposed to use for shop items. We tried to work this out from the stock records on our computer, but it wasn't entirely obvious which columns did and didn't contain VAT. We decided that if we were to charge £29.99 for the tray we wouldn't be robbing our employer. However, by then the customers had decided it was not the right elephant tray, and didn't want it. The woman was convinced that the one she saw before had a lighter background. My guess is that there is only one design, and her visual memory is not that accurate.
Some customers were easier to please. A lovely old boy came to collect two lime trees as a present for his nephew. Last year he gave the nephew four Wellingtonias which are apparently doing very well. A mother and daughter who are regular customers came in for some mistletoe, and we wished each other happy Christmas and chatted about the gardening year and the floods.
A chap with the sort of thick Suffolk accent you don't often hear nowadays came in with his mobility scooter bound companion for coffee and cake. I summoned a colleague who is less squeamish than I am about serving food in compost-dusted clothes to do the refreshments, and it turned out that they knew each other from my colleague's previous job at Nottcutts, and that the old Suffolk boy and his wife had just come from there, having tried to get coffee and been turned away because the cafe was given over to Santa's grotto. They had a long chat about peat free compost, and the difficulties of looking after plug plants. The customer raises hundreds of these each year, and sells them in aid of the children's hospice, and as he talked about the illogicality of UK gardeners being banned from using peat when the Irish were still burning it in power stations, the folly of shipping coir half way around the world, and various articles on peat substitutes he'd read in the RHS magazine, it became clear that he was a more accomplished and thoughtful gardener than most of our customers. His last job before retirement was in the garden section of B&Q.
At the other end of the gardening spectrum, a customer possessed of a notable local garden and a double-barrelled surname paid for over two hundred pounds worth of shrubs with his Coutts credit card.
We struggled slightly with the last of the Christmas trees. Those that were left were mostly large, crooked and partially bald, and while some people bought them, there was a steady trickle of disappointed punters asking whether that was all that we had. One man even brought one back, after he'd got it home and realised that it was too large to fit into his house. Should have used a tape measure, mate. Someone rang up asking whether we had any good quality trees, to which my colleague could only answer truthfully that we had trees, but that they were not as bushy as Christmas trees usually are.
Saturday, 15 December 2012
Friday, 14 December 2012
a baking lesson
Today I nearly went to Cambridge, but didn't. I'd arranged to see a friend who lives in that direction, partly so that we could exchange Christmas presents before Christmas, and had suggested that I'd like to see Kettle's Yard. We agreed that we would go, subject to weather. The weather we were imagining at that stage was ice and snow, but by about Wednesday of this week the five day forecast was predicting torrential rain. I couldn't see the point of driving another hour from her house to Cambridge in the rain, waiting for a bus in the park and ride car park, which is a pretty windswept and godforsaken place that reminds you that Cambridge is on the edge of the fens, squelching around Cambridge in the wet and then standing at a bus stop in more rain for the return trip to the car. I suggested that maybe we should leave Cambridge until another day, and she replied that we could take a view on the day.
I arrived at her house in light drizzle to find coffee cups and posh panettone laid out on a tray. By the time we'd finished our second cup of coffee it was raining heavily. It was the sort of rain that would once have been described as coming down like stair rods. Nowadays nobody has stair rods and I'm not sure what the new benchmark comparison for rain is. Anyway, there was lots of it. I think she would have been game to go anyway, but she gave in gracefully when I repeated my view that while Kettle's Yard would be lovely and I wanted to go there at some stage, I didn't see the point of flogging around Cambridge in the pouring rain. We are both prone to chest infections, it's nearly Christmas, and why risk getting cold and wet to see something that we could see another day, when it was dry?
Instead we lit the fire, and settled down to a nice gossip, and after lunch she showed me her fail-safe version of bread, or at least the first stage of it. If I'd waited for the second proving and to see it cooked I'd just about be leaving now. This used a fifty-fifty mixture of wholemeal and white flour, rather than one hundred per cent wholemeal, and quick action yeast, which I've read about in the baking books but never cooked with, plus a slug of olive oil. One minute in the food processor replaces ten minutes of kneading, or rather four lots of one minute each, since she makes enough dough for four loaves at a time. (If you doubt that English is a challenging language for foreigners to learn, try saying the phrase 'enough dough' out loud, and despair).
The bread had rather a long time to rise, which it does in the boiler room, because we forgot about it, but she had previously told me that it didn't matter if you gave it two hours or even longer. She covers it with clingfilm rather than a damp cloth, and after the best part of three hours in the warmth of the boiler it was bursting out of the top of its bowl. The clingfilm peeled off beautifully anyway, without disturbing the surface, until she gave it a brisk thump, and the great puffball of dough subsided dramatically, with a sigh that released a beautiful whiff of raw organic bread. The second kneading will consist of a mere ten seconds per loaf in the food processor, then it will get a second rising, and into a hot oven.
I have never used a food processor. I've never owned one, my mother never had one, and so when I read recipes that tell me to whizz everything in a food processor I have to work out what you would do instead, if you were doing it by hand. The machine is very ingenious, and saves you some time. Against that it is noisy, and you have to wash the bowl out afterwards, so the net saving in time is not quite as much as you'd imagine. Whether to knead bread by hand is like asking whether you should dig your borders or vegetable patch. If you enjoy digging then dig, and if you don't then don't. I enjoy kneading bread, liking the rhythm and the quiet of it, and I have strong hands. But the food processor saves time and physical exertion, and I can see that if I were cooking more intensively, more frequently and for more people, then it could be very useful.
My friend was cooking in pounds and ounces, whereas I was making bread in grammes, and her four loaf recipe was larger than the one I was using, so I struggled to work out how the quantity of salt in her recipe compared to mine. I thought hers was saltier. As Cordelia famously observes, bread does need salt, but how much is very much a matter of personal taste and what you're used to. Bread is about the only thing I cook that I add salt to at all, and I find one teaspoon for 600 grammes of wholemeal flour is ample. My friend adds five teaspoons to three pounds of flour, which she has cut down from six as a concession to health, but finds any less makes bread insipid.
I have eaten her bread in the past. It was delicious. When I ate it I didn't know how much salt she put in, and it certainly didn't taste overly salty. It is a marvellous alchemy, making your own bread, and I shall try her recipe now I've seen it in action. It's true that the instructions for timings and temperatures were given in gas regulos, and we aren't on gas, so I'll have to improvise that bit. Done properly she promises me that it works every time. If you want to try it, you'll need 30 fluid ounces of water, give or take, for three pounds of flour, and two 7 gramme sachets of the quick action yeast.
I arrived at her house in light drizzle to find coffee cups and posh panettone laid out on a tray. By the time we'd finished our second cup of coffee it was raining heavily. It was the sort of rain that would once have been described as coming down like stair rods. Nowadays nobody has stair rods and I'm not sure what the new benchmark comparison for rain is. Anyway, there was lots of it. I think she would have been game to go anyway, but she gave in gracefully when I repeated my view that while Kettle's Yard would be lovely and I wanted to go there at some stage, I didn't see the point of flogging around Cambridge in the pouring rain. We are both prone to chest infections, it's nearly Christmas, and why risk getting cold and wet to see something that we could see another day, when it was dry?
Instead we lit the fire, and settled down to a nice gossip, and after lunch she showed me her fail-safe version of bread, or at least the first stage of it. If I'd waited for the second proving and to see it cooked I'd just about be leaving now. This used a fifty-fifty mixture of wholemeal and white flour, rather than one hundred per cent wholemeal, and quick action yeast, which I've read about in the baking books but never cooked with, plus a slug of olive oil. One minute in the food processor replaces ten minutes of kneading, or rather four lots of one minute each, since she makes enough dough for four loaves at a time. (If you doubt that English is a challenging language for foreigners to learn, try saying the phrase 'enough dough' out loud, and despair).
The bread had rather a long time to rise, which it does in the boiler room, because we forgot about it, but she had previously told me that it didn't matter if you gave it two hours or even longer. She covers it with clingfilm rather than a damp cloth, and after the best part of three hours in the warmth of the boiler it was bursting out of the top of its bowl. The clingfilm peeled off beautifully anyway, without disturbing the surface, until she gave it a brisk thump, and the great puffball of dough subsided dramatically, with a sigh that released a beautiful whiff of raw organic bread. The second kneading will consist of a mere ten seconds per loaf in the food processor, then it will get a second rising, and into a hot oven.
I have never used a food processor. I've never owned one, my mother never had one, and so when I read recipes that tell me to whizz everything in a food processor I have to work out what you would do instead, if you were doing it by hand. The machine is very ingenious, and saves you some time. Against that it is noisy, and you have to wash the bowl out afterwards, so the net saving in time is not quite as much as you'd imagine. Whether to knead bread by hand is like asking whether you should dig your borders or vegetable patch. If you enjoy digging then dig, and if you don't then don't. I enjoy kneading bread, liking the rhythm and the quiet of it, and I have strong hands. But the food processor saves time and physical exertion, and I can see that if I were cooking more intensively, more frequently and for more people, then it could be very useful.
My friend was cooking in pounds and ounces, whereas I was making bread in grammes, and her four loaf recipe was larger than the one I was using, so I struggled to work out how the quantity of salt in her recipe compared to mine. I thought hers was saltier. As Cordelia famously observes, bread does need salt, but how much is very much a matter of personal taste and what you're used to. Bread is about the only thing I cook that I add salt to at all, and I find one teaspoon for 600 grammes of wholemeal flour is ample. My friend adds five teaspoons to three pounds of flour, which she has cut down from six as a concession to health, but finds any less makes bread insipid.
I have eaten her bread in the past. It was delicious. When I ate it I didn't know how much salt she put in, and it certainly didn't taste overly salty. It is a marvellous alchemy, making your own bread, and I shall try her recipe now I've seen it in action. It's true that the instructions for timings and temperatures were given in gas regulos, and we aren't on gas, so I'll have to improvise that bit. Done properly she promises me that it works every time. If you want to try it, you'll need 30 fluid ounces of water, give or take, for three pounds of flour, and two 7 gramme sachets of the quick action yeast.
Thursday, 13 December 2012
my part in the Big Society
After a gap of twenty years or so since I was last on a committee, I have now found myself on two. The last time I was on a committee it was that of a sailing association. We were members, and I'd sent them some suggestions about their events and how they were run, which provoked the response 'With ideas like that you ought to be on the committee'. I joined it, and discovered that there was nothing tangible for me or any other new member of the committee to do. The officer's posts were all filled by people who, while they grumbled about how over-worked they were, had no intention of delegating anything, and the events were run on the basis of doing again what we did last year. After a year or two the Systems Administrator and I switched from that kind of sailing to a different boat, and drifted away from the association, and I gave up the committee, making a mental note to avoid them in future.
Roll the clock forward twenty years, and I am finding committee life fascinating as a study in human nature, and an object lesson in how not to get things done. The individual members, who have bothered to give up their evening to sit in a church hall or somebody's dining room when they could be at home watching Masterchef, have presumably gone there with good intentions, wishing to further the activities of the club or society. There is the odd E.F. Benson, Mapp and Lucia moment, when you can see people manoeuvre to foil someone else's pet project to which they object, but generally everyone has not gone there with the explicit aim of not getting things done. And yet the committee has to be one of the most effective mechanisms invented for converting human energy and ideas into noise, culminating in no action.
It is said that people don't value what they don't pay for. I'm sure that's true. One of my fellow beekeeping committee members would like to see us charge our beginners for their first swarm of bees, which we now give them for free, and charge more for lessons than we do. As she says, beekeeping is not a cost-free hobby, and if they can't or won't pay anything for their first bees they can't afford to keep them, and don't want them enough. To the chairman and officers of a committee, there is no cost to signing up a few extra committee members, or letting the old ones stay on indefinitely. At the beekeepers committee meetings we don't even get refreshments. The music society lives more graciously, with tea and cake, and an annual supper thrown in. But commercial organisations don't run themselves on the basis of assembling random groups of managers, half of whom have no specific duties or responsibilities, who then all discuss everything.
It is another characteristic of committees that the agenda tends to be the same at each meeting. Minutes of the last meeting, Chairman's report, Secretary's report, Treasurer's report. Anything that any of the supernumerary committee members might have been delegated to do will be covered under AOB, which always falls at the end of the meeting, when people are tired, concentration slipping and tempers shortening. But if the ad hoc project that the committee agreed at the previous meeting doesn't appear on the agenda for the next one, that reduces the incentive to get on with it. Perhaps everyone else will have forgotten, or nobody will want to talk about it. It was agreed at one beekeepers committee meeting that someone should prepare a welcome pack for new members, telling them what happened at our apiary meetings and so on, to encourage them to take part. The person who agreed to take on the job had in the past said we ought to have such a thing, which is why I volunteered him. Come the next meeting it wasn't on the agenda, the Chairman didn't mention it, nor the person who'd agreed to prepare the welcome pack, and I didn't have the heart. Like I said, I'm only the Treasurer. Two more meetings further on we are no closer to having a welcome pack.
Last night it was the turn of the ad hoc working group on publicity. We'd done exactly what the Chairman had asked us to do in her e-mail, got together and brainstormed, and someone had written up our ideas ready to present to the meeting. Publicity wasn't on the agenda. I e-mailed the Chairman and Secretary, cc my fellow brainstormers, to remind them that we were ready to talk about it, and publicity was scheduled for AOB.
A music society like ours books acts one to two seasons ahead, so at this time of the year we are in the later stages of finalising 2013-14, and starting to work on 2014-15. Booking a programme of just five concerts plunges you into a bewildering maze of contingent decisions. You don't want too many string quartets in the same season. One act you would like is very restricted as to dates. You want to schedule your most expensive and prestigious artists for the beginning and end of the season, to start and end with a flourish and so that the cheapest ones are booked for the depths of winter, when ticket sales are most likely to be hit by bad weather. You have to worry about the date of Easter, because people will be doing other things and you can't book the church then for a concert. Should you even attempt an oboe concert with continuo, which means borrowing a harpsichord from somewhere and paying for an extra musician in the form of a cellist, or should you just take the simple option and go for a piano? Do you like a particular quartet more than another enough to pay an extra five hundred pounds for them? Will a group based in Germany drop their charge to us if they have other concerts in the region so that their travel costs are amortised over several music societies? Should we drop the December concert date, because people have so many other things to go to in December, and move the fifth concert to spring when the weather might be nicer? The Bookings Secretary began to look more and more exhausted, and the Chairman became fractious. The Treasurer had to leave for another engagement.
Eventually we got on to the subject of publicity. Audience numbers for the young soprano were deemed disappointing, by the way, so the question of how to attract more people is getting more urgent. Our suggestions on what we might try doing uncovered a deep strand of pessimism in the rest of the committee. There was no point in trying to attract a younger audience, because they weren't interested and didn't have time and couldn't afford it. There was no point in trying to attract more older people because they didn't like driving at night and couldn't afford it. Everybody had too many other things to do. Our posters were not eye-catching enough but more attractive, eye-catching posters would be too expensive to print. People didn't take any notice of posters. Our kind of audience wouldn't use Facebook or Twitter so there was no point in starting to use those. If we did use them we needed to find a younger person to do it for us. We needed media cover, but reviewers ignored us when we sent them brochures and free tickets. Giving our existing season ticket holders vouchers for free tickets to bring a friend, in the hopes that they might become regular attendees, was a good idea but some of the concerts were already full. If we used a ticketing agency how would we know how many tickets we had sold?
After the publicity we galloped through the menu for the fund raising supper concert and the date of the next committee meeting. The only firm decision made around the table on publicity was that one person would try to persuade the local paper to cover a piano master class we are sponsoring, and the small coup we have pulled off in persuading Marina Warner to come and do our annual lecture. As we were getting up from the table I asked the Chairman if she would like me to start approaching local branches of the U3A to advertise the concerts to their music appreciation groups. She replied loftily that everyone could do anything they liked. Which I very much doubt. I don't know what my Vires are, but I'm sure I don't have to go very far before I'm Ultra them.
Roll the clock forward twenty years, and I am finding committee life fascinating as a study in human nature, and an object lesson in how not to get things done. The individual members, who have bothered to give up their evening to sit in a church hall or somebody's dining room when they could be at home watching Masterchef, have presumably gone there with good intentions, wishing to further the activities of the club or society. There is the odd E.F. Benson, Mapp and Lucia moment, when you can see people manoeuvre to foil someone else's pet project to which they object, but generally everyone has not gone there with the explicit aim of not getting things done. And yet the committee has to be one of the most effective mechanisms invented for converting human energy and ideas into noise, culminating in no action.
It is said that people don't value what they don't pay for. I'm sure that's true. One of my fellow beekeeping committee members would like to see us charge our beginners for their first swarm of bees, which we now give them for free, and charge more for lessons than we do. As she says, beekeeping is not a cost-free hobby, and if they can't or won't pay anything for their first bees they can't afford to keep them, and don't want them enough. To the chairman and officers of a committee, there is no cost to signing up a few extra committee members, or letting the old ones stay on indefinitely. At the beekeepers committee meetings we don't even get refreshments. The music society lives more graciously, with tea and cake, and an annual supper thrown in. But commercial organisations don't run themselves on the basis of assembling random groups of managers, half of whom have no specific duties or responsibilities, who then all discuss everything.
It is another characteristic of committees that the agenda tends to be the same at each meeting. Minutes of the last meeting, Chairman's report, Secretary's report, Treasurer's report. Anything that any of the supernumerary committee members might have been delegated to do will be covered under AOB, which always falls at the end of the meeting, when people are tired, concentration slipping and tempers shortening. But if the ad hoc project that the committee agreed at the previous meeting doesn't appear on the agenda for the next one, that reduces the incentive to get on with it. Perhaps everyone else will have forgotten, or nobody will want to talk about it. It was agreed at one beekeepers committee meeting that someone should prepare a welcome pack for new members, telling them what happened at our apiary meetings and so on, to encourage them to take part. The person who agreed to take on the job had in the past said we ought to have such a thing, which is why I volunteered him. Come the next meeting it wasn't on the agenda, the Chairman didn't mention it, nor the person who'd agreed to prepare the welcome pack, and I didn't have the heart. Like I said, I'm only the Treasurer. Two more meetings further on we are no closer to having a welcome pack.
Last night it was the turn of the ad hoc working group on publicity. We'd done exactly what the Chairman had asked us to do in her e-mail, got together and brainstormed, and someone had written up our ideas ready to present to the meeting. Publicity wasn't on the agenda. I e-mailed the Chairman and Secretary, cc my fellow brainstormers, to remind them that we were ready to talk about it, and publicity was scheduled for AOB.
A music society like ours books acts one to two seasons ahead, so at this time of the year we are in the later stages of finalising 2013-14, and starting to work on 2014-15. Booking a programme of just five concerts plunges you into a bewildering maze of contingent decisions. You don't want too many string quartets in the same season. One act you would like is very restricted as to dates. You want to schedule your most expensive and prestigious artists for the beginning and end of the season, to start and end with a flourish and so that the cheapest ones are booked for the depths of winter, when ticket sales are most likely to be hit by bad weather. You have to worry about the date of Easter, because people will be doing other things and you can't book the church then for a concert. Should you even attempt an oboe concert with continuo, which means borrowing a harpsichord from somewhere and paying for an extra musician in the form of a cellist, or should you just take the simple option and go for a piano? Do you like a particular quartet more than another enough to pay an extra five hundred pounds for them? Will a group based in Germany drop their charge to us if they have other concerts in the region so that their travel costs are amortised over several music societies? Should we drop the December concert date, because people have so many other things to go to in December, and move the fifth concert to spring when the weather might be nicer? The Bookings Secretary began to look more and more exhausted, and the Chairman became fractious. The Treasurer had to leave for another engagement.
Eventually we got on to the subject of publicity. Audience numbers for the young soprano were deemed disappointing, by the way, so the question of how to attract more people is getting more urgent. Our suggestions on what we might try doing uncovered a deep strand of pessimism in the rest of the committee. There was no point in trying to attract a younger audience, because they weren't interested and didn't have time and couldn't afford it. There was no point in trying to attract more older people because they didn't like driving at night and couldn't afford it. Everybody had too many other things to do. Our posters were not eye-catching enough but more attractive, eye-catching posters would be too expensive to print. People didn't take any notice of posters. Our kind of audience wouldn't use Facebook or Twitter so there was no point in starting to use those. If we did use them we needed to find a younger person to do it for us. We needed media cover, but reviewers ignored us when we sent them brochures and free tickets. Giving our existing season ticket holders vouchers for free tickets to bring a friend, in the hopes that they might become regular attendees, was a good idea but some of the concerts were already full. If we used a ticketing agency how would we know how many tickets we had sold?
After the publicity we galloped through the menu for the fund raising supper concert and the date of the next committee meeting. The only firm decision made around the table on publicity was that one person would try to persuade the local paper to cover a piano master class we are sponsoring, and the small coup we have pulled off in persuading Marina Warner to come and do our annual lecture. As we were getting up from the table I asked the Chairman if she would like me to start approaching local branches of the U3A to advertise the concerts to their music appreciation groups. She replied loftily that everyone could do anything they liked. Which I very much doubt. I don't know what my Vires are, but I'm sure I don't have to go very far before I'm Ultra them.
Wednesday, 12 December 2012
ice
The Systems Administrator got up this morning to go to the loo, and hurried back to bed saying it was jolly cold out there. I wondered whether I could get away without taking a shower, but decided that would be the start of the slippery slope to becoming Dylan Winter (who walked the length of Offa's Dyke with two horses, one of which unexpectedly gave birth in the night. One priceless dialogue ran thus. Winter to shopkeeper: Excuse me, may I ask you something? Shopkeeper: Yes. Winter: Do I smell? Shopkeeper: Yes, you do, rather. Dylan Winter's other greatest line was: I've just done something really stupid. I've set my tent on fire. There was also the time on a canal barge trip when the horse fell in the canal. He was one of my favourite ever radio journalists).
The weather station in the sitting room told me that it was minus four and a half degrees Celsius outside, when I got downstairs after having my shower. Actually, the shower wasn't too bad. I have been experimenting this winter and not using the electric blanket, the theory being that the cold will stimulate my metabolism to crank up a gear and generate more heat. It seems to be working, though I wear thermals as a matter of course, even indoors. I had to defrost the chickens' water, and there was a deputation waiting by the bird table.
The cats have decided they do not like Felix. They liked it yesterday, and last week, but as of this morning they do not like it. The fat indignant tabby ate her's, which made me think it could not be off, since the fat tabby is the most suspicious cat I have ever met, with a highly developed sense of self preservation, and if she thinks cat food is safe to eat then it almost certainly is. Our Ginger had a nibble as well, but the big tabby and the black cat just stared at the Felix, and ran away. This is a nuisance, as it is on special offer in Tesco and we have several packs in stock. The Systems Administrator had to get a pallet of Whiskas, to keep them going until they have forgotten that they don't like Felix.
The countryside looked very beautiful, with a vivid blue sky, low but bright sun, and tiny ice crystals glittering on every twig and seed head. The wind turbine was not turning at all. You do have admit that's a drawback of wind power. It's the coldest day of the year, and the electricity generator has stopped working. I should have rushed out and taken photographs for you, but I am not very good at photography, and the internet is already stuffed full with pictures of frost. The best pictures are on radio anyway, so you can use your imaginations. I walked down to the post box to post my Christmas cards, those that aren't being handed over in person or stuffed through people's doors when I'm passing, and little pieces of ice fell from the lime trees as I passed under them.
I set out to make more bread. This will be the third lot, the second having come out like real bread as well. I'm now on to a new bag of flour, and the dough came out significantly wetter, even though I measured all the ingredients as precisely as before. It mystifies me when the authors of bread books get very strict about how you should weigh the water down to the last gramme for greater accuracy and not just measure it in a jug, since the moisture content of flour varies from one batch to another. I didn't add extra flour, thinking I would see how the wetter dough came out. I still don't have the hang of how long bread is going to take, and vaguely imagined we'd be able to have one of these loaves with the soup for lunch, before realising that would mean having a very late lunch.
After lunch the Systems Administrator had to go outside and chop more wood for the stove. By chop I mean split and saw some of the stack that's seasoning into small enough pieces to fit in the stove, rather than the forestry equivalent of the cookery instruction for jugged hare to first catch your hare (I have just noticed how much alliteration there is in the penultimate phrase. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Beowulf don't pack in any more than that).
I tracked down addresses for my cousin and the defector to south London, and wrote a Christmas card to my old horticultural tutor. The SA did not want to go for a proper walk, because the tooth is still sensitive to cold air. The two cats remained on hunger strike faced with the Felix. Later on I will have to drive very carefully to a music society committee meeting. That's about as exciting as it gets at this time of year, when the thermometer is below freezing.
The weather station in the sitting room told me that it was minus four and a half degrees Celsius outside, when I got downstairs after having my shower. Actually, the shower wasn't too bad. I have been experimenting this winter and not using the electric blanket, the theory being that the cold will stimulate my metabolism to crank up a gear and generate more heat. It seems to be working, though I wear thermals as a matter of course, even indoors. I had to defrost the chickens' water, and there was a deputation waiting by the bird table.
The cats have decided they do not like Felix. They liked it yesterday, and last week, but as of this morning they do not like it. The fat indignant tabby ate her's, which made me think it could not be off, since the fat tabby is the most suspicious cat I have ever met, with a highly developed sense of self preservation, and if she thinks cat food is safe to eat then it almost certainly is. Our Ginger had a nibble as well, but the big tabby and the black cat just stared at the Felix, and ran away. This is a nuisance, as it is on special offer in Tesco and we have several packs in stock. The Systems Administrator had to get a pallet of Whiskas, to keep them going until they have forgotten that they don't like Felix.
The countryside looked very beautiful, with a vivid blue sky, low but bright sun, and tiny ice crystals glittering on every twig and seed head. The wind turbine was not turning at all. You do have admit that's a drawback of wind power. It's the coldest day of the year, and the electricity generator has stopped working. I should have rushed out and taken photographs for you, but I am not very good at photography, and the internet is already stuffed full with pictures of frost. The best pictures are on radio anyway, so you can use your imaginations. I walked down to the post box to post my Christmas cards, those that aren't being handed over in person or stuffed through people's doors when I'm passing, and little pieces of ice fell from the lime trees as I passed under them.
I set out to make more bread. This will be the third lot, the second having come out like real bread as well. I'm now on to a new bag of flour, and the dough came out significantly wetter, even though I measured all the ingredients as precisely as before. It mystifies me when the authors of bread books get very strict about how you should weigh the water down to the last gramme for greater accuracy and not just measure it in a jug, since the moisture content of flour varies from one batch to another. I didn't add extra flour, thinking I would see how the wetter dough came out. I still don't have the hang of how long bread is going to take, and vaguely imagined we'd be able to have one of these loaves with the soup for lunch, before realising that would mean having a very late lunch.
After lunch the Systems Administrator had to go outside and chop more wood for the stove. By chop I mean split and saw some of the stack that's seasoning into small enough pieces to fit in the stove, rather than the forestry equivalent of the cookery instruction for jugged hare to first catch your hare (I have just noticed how much alliteration there is in the penultimate phrase. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Beowulf don't pack in any more than that).
I tracked down addresses for my cousin and the defector to south London, and wrote a Christmas card to my old horticultural tutor. The SA did not want to go for a proper walk, because the tooth is still sensitive to cold air. The two cats remained on hunger strike faced with the Felix. Later on I will have to drive very carefully to a music society committee meeting. That's about as exciting as it gets at this time of year, when the thermometer is below freezing.
Tuesday, 11 December 2012
seasonal greetings and reciprocal obligations
What was I saying about living closer to the seasons in the countryside? I wasn't expecting there to be such a thick frost this morning, since I didn't even have to de-ice my windscreen last night leaving the restaurant, and that was at gone ten. Although the sun shone brightly all morning, it didn't make an appreciable impact on the ice, which stayed crustily on lawn and gravel, and rimed the outlines of the grasses, leaves and seed heads the way frost is supposed to according to the photographs in the glossy gardening magazines. The thermometer eventually crept up to four degrees, but it felt cold. I suppose four degrees is cold.
The Systems Administrator disappeared to London for lunch, leaving me to wait for a parcel that Citylink tried to deliver yesterday while we were both out. The contents of the parcel are for me, and my waiting in a quid pro quo for the time a couple of weeks ago when the positions were reversed. I could have stomped about the frozen gravel in the front garden cutting down aster stems and chopping icy strands off the ivy hedge, but it gradually dawned on me that I didn't want to. It just felt too cold.
Instead I ordered our Chelsea tickets. The website said that all day tickets for the Tuesday were down to limited availability, but let me buy two. Phew. I know that Chelsea sold out this year, but I didn't expect there to be a problem buying tickets before Christmas, when the show isn't until May. After an internal struggle I opted to have them posted to us, which will produce spasms of anxiety from late March until they arrive, in case the post office has lost them, but will avoid queuing to collect them on the morning provided they do arrive. I will probably have smaller spasms of anxiety between now and late March in case I should have opted to pick them up at the venue, but I didn't know how slow the queue would be, and had visions of the day getting off to a bad start as we hung around outside the show for ages while other happy visitors streamed past us, and our chance to visit the small gardens early as we always do slipped away. Permitting oneself to worry at all about either of these problems is extremely un-mindful.
Then I returned to the Christmas card list. Nowadays sending cards is fraught with alternatives and the possibility of bad choices, almost as worrying as buying Chelsea tickets. Should I send a card to the great and gracious lady gardener? I like her. I would be quite happy to have her think that I am thinking of her fondly, albeit briefly, at Christmas. I have enough cards and I shall be driving past her house en route to a music society meeting. But then maybe she will feel that I have created a reciprocal obligation, and she will not be driving past my house, and might feel she had to spend fifty pence on a stamp. I know that some of my friends have agreed not to send each other cards, so perhaps I shouldn't burden a relative stranger with the need to send me one. But she might like to get a card, and feel it didn't matter if she didn't send me one, or deliver it to the plant centre and save a stamp, or not grudge a stamp in the circumstances. I have no idea.
I write the cards by dint of going through the address book systematically so that I don't forget anybody. The first name in the book was the chap that the Systems Administrator is lunching with today. I asked whether if I gave the SA the card to take it would reach our friend's home, or whether it would remain in either the SA's pocket or the friend's pocket, not to be found again until after Christmas when it would be squashed as well as out of date. The SA agreed that all of these outcomes were highly likely and that I had better post it.
Going all the way through your address book makes you think about the state of your friendships, which is probably reason enough for the custom of annual cards to persist. Entries in our address book are always written in pencil. People move, they divorce, they die, so that the book becomes steadily messier and more illegible, and it is depressing to see the crossed out names of one's late friends and relatives when trying to look up a phone number. Better to be able to erase out of date entries. Every so often the book gets so tatty we start a new one, but shove the old one in a drawer. It was nice to have to dig out the old book, to look up the addresses of old school friends of the SA whom we saw at the party back in the summer, and while I was at it I copied their details over to the new book, now that we are back in contact.
I saw that in the case of one friend who separated from her partner last year I had crossed their joint address out very neatly and written her new one in underneath. Was I hoping that the break might not be final? They are seeing each other again, cautiously, so my sense that it might not be over yet was not misplaced. I found the addresses of a couple of acquaintances, a friend of a friend and a former work associate, where intermittent contact has not quite kindled into friendship. The question whether or not to send them a piece of coloured cardboard is really about whether to try again, or decide it hasn't worked. Somebody who moved out of the marital home, met somebody else very quickly, moved in with her without divulging his new address, and communicated the fact of their engagement by group text. A card to his office doesn't seem appropriate. Compared to that, chasing down the addresses of my young cousin, who I vaguely think is in the process of moving house, and our oldest nephew, who has never been a card sender but since we went to his wedding I feel he and his new wife should be on our card list, is merely an administrative problem.
I dropped the neighbours' cards around on foot, since it was such a beautiful afternoon that I fancied the walk, and I would like not to be the last to send them for once. One of them was at home, and invited me in for a chat, where we rejoiced over the demise of the quarry plans. He and his late wife were very suspicious of us commuting London people when we first moved in, but two decades later relations have mellowed.
I have had to set the heaters in the greenhouse and conservatory again tonight, the second time this year. Ten days to go until the shortest day, following which the saying goes that when the days begin to lengthen, then the cold begins to strengthen.
The Systems Administrator disappeared to London for lunch, leaving me to wait for a parcel that Citylink tried to deliver yesterday while we were both out. The contents of the parcel are for me, and my waiting in a quid pro quo for the time a couple of weeks ago when the positions were reversed. I could have stomped about the frozen gravel in the front garden cutting down aster stems and chopping icy strands off the ivy hedge, but it gradually dawned on me that I didn't want to. It just felt too cold.
Instead I ordered our Chelsea tickets. The website said that all day tickets for the Tuesday were down to limited availability, but let me buy two. Phew. I know that Chelsea sold out this year, but I didn't expect there to be a problem buying tickets before Christmas, when the show isn't until May. After an internal struggle I opted to have them posted to us, which will produce spasms of anxiety from late March until they arrive, in case the post office has lost them, but will avoid queuing to collect them on the morning provided they do arrive. I will probably have smaller spasms of anxiety between now and late March in case I should have opted to pick them up at the venue, but I didn't know how slow the queue would be, and had visions of the day getting off to a bad start as we hung around outside the show for ages while other happy visitors streamed past us, and our chance to visit the small gardens early as we always do slipped away. Permitting oneself to worry at all about either of these problems is extremely un-mindful.
Then I returned to the Christmas card list. Nowadays sending cards is fraught with alternatives and the possibility of bad choices, almost as worrying as buying Chelsea tickets. Should I send a card to the great and gracious lady gardener? I like her. I would be quite happy to have her think that I am thinking of her fondly, albeit briefly, at Christmas. I have enough cards and I shall be driving past her house en route to a music society meeting. But then maybe she will feel that I have created a reciprocal obligation, and she will not be driving past my house, and might feel she had to spend fifty pence on a stamp. I know that some of my friends have agreed not to send each other cards, so perhaps I shouldn't burden a relative stranger with the need to send me one. But she might like to get a card, and feel it didn't matter if she didn't send me one, or deliver it to the plant centre and save a stamp, or not grudge a stamp in the circumstances. I have no idea.
I write the cards by dint of going through the address book systematically so that I don't forget anybody. The first name in the book was the chap that the Systems Administrator is lunching with today. I asked whether if I gave the SA the card to take it would reach our friend's home, or whether it would remain in either the SA's pocket or the friend's pocket, not to be found again until after Christmas when it would be squashed as well as out of date. The SA agreed that all of these outcomes were highly likely and that I had better post it.
Going all the way through your address book makes you think about the state of your friendships, which is probably reason enough for the custom of annual cards to persist. Entries in our address book are always written in pencil. People move, they divorce, they die, so that the book becomes steadily messier and more illegible, and it is depressing to see the crossed out names of one's late friends and relatives when trying to look up a phone number. Better to be able to erase out of date entries. Every so often the book gets so tatty we start a new one, but shove the old one in a drawer. It was nice to have to dig out the old book, to look up the addresses of old school friends of the SA whom we saw at the party back in the summer, and while I was at it I copied their details over to the new book, now that we are back in contact.
I saw that in the case of one friend who separated from her partner last year I had crossed their joint address out very neatly and written her new one in underneath. Was I hoping that the break might not be final? They are seeing each other again, cautiously, so my sense that it might not be over yet was not misplaced. I found the addresses of a couple of acquaintances, a friend of a friend and a former work associate, where intermittent contact has not quite kindled into friendship. The question whether or not to send them a piece of coloured cardboard is really about whether to try again, or decide it hasn't worked. Somebody who moved out of the marital home, met somebody else very quickly, moved in with her without divulging his new address, and communicated the fact of their engagement by group text. A card to his office doesn't seem appropriate. Compared to that, chasing down the addresses of my young cousin, who I vaguely think is in the process of moving house, and our oldest nephew, who has never been a card sender but since we went to his wedding I feel he and his new wife should be on our card list, is merely an administrative problem.
I dropped the neighbours' cards around on foot, since it was such a beautiful afternoon that I fancied the walk, and I would like not to be the last to send them for once. One of them was at home, and invited me in for a chat, where we rejoiced over the demise of the quarry plans. He and his late wife were very suspicious of us commuting London people when we first moved in, but two decades later relations have mellowed.
I have had to set the heaters in the greenhouse and conservatory again tonight, the second time this year. Ten days to go until the shortest day, following which the saying goes that when the days begin to lengthen, then the cold begins to strengthen.
Monday, 10 December 2012
countdown to Christmas
Trade ticked along in the plant centre, and I struggled to get to grips with our e-mail system. It's not as though I'm a technophobe who doesn't like using computers, but the plant centre has a weird network that I really don't understand and nobody has ever successfully explained to me, or even tried unsuccessfully to explain. There are multiple e-mail addresses going to different inboxes, a hierarchy of incoming messages so that many of them arrive on the boss's computer who can then redirect them internally, and some computers can't see what messages have been sent on other computers. The owner has recently introduced a procedure for deleting messages once they have been replied to, to try and make sure that incoming missives don't sit around unanswered for days, but it makes picking up on a previous correspondence confusing, to say the least. The whole thing operates on Outlook, a programme I don't use at home.
I needed to find the past e-mails between a customer who had been asking about the availability of various Euonymus and one of my colleagues, because she rang up wanting to buy two each of the varieties he had said we'd got. Unfortunately that was last week, and by today one variety had sold out, but she accepted a substitute when offered one. Our standard mail order delivery charge for an order worth that much was supposed to be twenty per cent of the value of the plants. Neither my colleague who packs the parcels nor the manager knew whether that was going to cover it, but since that's what we say on the website we rounded it up to the nearest five pounds and hoped for the best. The manager said to me anxiously that this was all a bit make it up as you go along, wasn't it, and I agreed that it was. My colleague spent part of the afternoon constructing three strange, dalek shaped parcels. We'll discover in due course if we can really have those shipped to Kent for thirty five pounds.
The gardeners went to cut some more Christmas trees, the owner explaining that she hadn't said before that there would be more because then people wouldn't have bought the first ones. The second scraping of the barrel was not really any worse than the first, and some of the trees were pretty good, though on the large side. However, some were what you could term individualistic takes on the concept of a Christmas tree.
I think the schools must have broken up for the holidays, as the children were around. The girl has started wearing her hair up, and looking quite grown up, but appeared a child again all of a sudden when she came into the plant centre mid afternoon asking whether we'd seen the dogs, because she had lost both of them. We hadn't, but the manager went to help look for them, and they turned up on the far side of the car park. The older one had been digging, but knew she shouldn't have been, and kept wiping her nose on tufts of grass as they came back towards the house. I think that the parental wrath if the daughter had lost both dogs would have been pretty fearsome. I hear the younger dog is not a good influence on its mother, since it is barely house trained and gets away with all sorts of things, which makes the older one think that in that case she can do that too.
I am shortly heading out again for an evening with my colleagues, since it is our staff Christmas meal. Knowing that trade had been tough my colleagues suggested to the owners that we'd be quite happy to have a DIY party, with everyone bringing something. I wouldn't have minded making cheese straws, or nibbles of fish on rye, or even aubergine boreks. However, the owners said it would be easier to go out. I am not sure why it ended up being tonight, and one person can't go because he is going to his aunt's care home's Christmas party, but someone wouldn't have been able to go whenever it was held. I ought to be at a beekeepers' committee meeting, but decided I'd already gone the extra mile for the beekeepers this autumn. The village pub was fully booked, so we have ended up going to a rather nice hotel just across the river. The last thing the local economy needs is small businesses pulling in their horns at the expense of other small businesses, so from a macro-economic point of view it's just as well we're going. And I am looking forward to my parsnip soup and Blythburgh pork.
I needed to find the past e-mails between a customer who had been asking about the availability of various Euonymus and one of my colleagues, because she rang up wanting to buy two each of the varieties he had said we'd got. Unfortunately that was last week, and by today one variety had sold out, but she accepted a substitute when offered one. Our standard mail order delivery charge for an order worth that much was supposed to be twenty per cent of the value of the plants. Neither my colleague who packs the parcels nor the manager knew whether that was going to cover it, but since that's what we say on the website we rounded it up to the nearest five pounds and hoped for the best. The manager said to me anxiously that this was all a bit make it up as you go along, wasn't it, and I agreed that it was. My colleague spent part of the afternoon constructing three strange, dalek shaped parcels. We'll discover in due course if we can really have those shipped to Kent for thirty five pounds.
The gardeners went to cut some more Christmas trees, the owner explaining that she hadn't said before that there would be more because then people wouldn't have bought the first ones. The second scraping of the barrel was not really any worse than the first, and some of the trees were pretty good, though on the large side. However, some were what you could term individualistic takes on the concept of a Christmas tree.
I think the schools must have broken up for the holidays, as the children were around. The girl has started wearing her hair up, and looking quite grown up, but appeared a child again all of a sudden when she came into the plant centre mid afternoon asking whether we'd seen the dogs, because she had lost both of them. We hadn't, but the manager went to help look for them, and they turned up on the far side of the car park. The older one had been digging, but knew she shouldn't have been, and kept wiping her nose on tufts of grass as they came back towards the house. I think that the parental wrath if the daughter had lost both dogs would have been pretty fearsome. I hear the younger dog is not a good influence on its mother, since it is barely house trained and gets away with all sorts of things, which makes the older one think that in that case she can do that too.
I am shortly heading out again for an evening with my colleagues, since it is our staff Christmas meal. Knowing that trade had been tough my colleagues suggested to the owners that we'd be quite happy to have a DIY party, with everyone bringing something. I wouldn't have minded making cheese straws, or nibbles of fish on rye, or even aubergine boreks. However, the owners said it would be easier to go out. I am not sure why it ended up being tonight, and one person can't go because he is going to his aunt's care home's Christmas party, but someone wouldn't have been able to go whenever it was held. I ought to be at a beekeepers' committee meeting, but decided I'd already gone the extra mile for the beekeepers this autumn. The village pub was fully booked, so we have ended up going to a rather nice hotel just across the river. The last thing the local economy needs is small businesses pulling in their horns at the expense of other small businesses, so from a macro-economic point of view it's just as well we're going. And I am looking forward to my parsnip soup and Blythburgh pork.
Sunday, 9 December 2012
reduce, recycle, reuse
We had a roast chicken last weekend. The Systems Administrator bought the largest possible free range one, so it cost something over ten pounds. It did two helpings of roast chicken, and then the rest of the breast meat made a chicken, leek and mushroom pie that lasted us for two meals. The brown meat went into an English curry, one made with Schwartz mild curry powder, and the carcass was simmered overnight, yielding enough stock for two lunch's worth of soup, and a small pudding basin of scrap meat for the cats. Eight main course's worth of meat, the basis of four helpings of soup and about fifty pence worth of cat food isn't bad for a tenner.
The stock was cooked overnight in the simmer oven of the Aga. In fact I forgot all about it, and only remembered mid-morning when the smell of boiling chicken began to permeate the kitchen. If you don't have a range of some sort and have to put the oven on specially then making stock is not a virtually cost free activity, something I think cookery writers who urge the poor to buy chickens and get multiple meals from them should acknowledge. Though if you planned it right you could simmer a week's worth of stew and chile con carne at the same time. I picked the carcass over carefully, since chicken bones are not good for cats, though probably not so lethal after they have been cooked for about sixteen hours. The boiled flesh looked horrid, slimy and quite revolting, but the cats loved it. They seem to like it better than the odd tiny scrap of roast chicken we have slipped them from time to time. But who am I to say that slimy is bad? Maybe when you evolved to eat raw meat, and have grown up eating tinned cat food, slimy is just what you fancy.
Today's soup was to be mushroom, after we both enjoyed the home made mushroom soup at my cousin's birthday lunch. The only time I made mushroom soup previously, it came out a strange and off-putting shade of green, but looking at the professionally made soup in Aldeburgh I decided that that was what mushroom soup looked like, some of the time. I compared recipes from The Good Housekeepers, Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book and a paperback book of soups published by Pan in 1967, and decided that the general principle was to include some onion for flavour, some flour for thickening, and to add some cream at the end, so that's what I did. The Pan book suggested including two egg yolks and a shot of sherry, but that seemed a bit much for lunch, given it was already going to contain stock, butter and cream, and I didn't have any sherry and didn't want to be stuck with two egg whites. I did try asking the Systems Administrator enthusiastically if the SA fancied learning to make mushroom soup, since it was a lovely morning and I'd really rather have been out in the garden than in the kitchen, but the SA just stared at me bitterly and said No, not this particular morning. The effects of the dentist's novocaine have worn off, and the dying remnants of the nerve that the dentist couldn't reach to drill out are spectacularly painful.
I wouldn't say today's soup was as nice as the one in the hotel, though it was pretty good. Perhaps it needed a slug of sherry. For my next act I shall make leek and potato, since we've got a left over leek. I was amused to see in last night's episode of The Sopranos that I have the same sort of blender as mafia boss Uncle Junior.
By the time you get to my age you are recycling fashion, as well as chicken remnants, if you have spent your life buying clothes on the basis of getting well made things that were never the outrageous height of fashion to start with. Sometime back in the 1990s there was a craze for fake fur hats. I bought a Gilly Forge number in Liberty, in a soft black with a deep yellow quilted lining. It was cut like an enormous cloche, and you rolled up the hem according to how low over your forehead you wanted the hat to come. The fashion passed after a couple of years, and Gilly Forge fur hats began to look distinctly last year. Old hat, in fact. I put it regretfully in a drawer. Fast forward the best part of two decades, factor in the Downton effect and the film version of Anna Karenina, and gigantic fur cloche hats look entirely acceptable. And I already have a vintage one, with the added advantage I know it has been on no head but my own.
The stock was cooked overnight in the simmer oven of the Aga. In fact I forgot all about it, and only remembered mid-morning when the smell of boiling chicken began to permeate the kitchen. If you don't have a range of some sort and have to put the oven on specially then making stock is not a virtually cost free activity, something I think cookery writers who urge the poor to buy chickens and get multiple meals from them should acknowledge. Though if you planned it right you could simmer a week's worth of stew and chile con carne at the same time. I picked the carcass over carefully, since chicken bones are not good for cats, though probably not so lethal after they have been cooked for about sixteen hours. The boiled flesh looked horrid, slimy and quite revolting, but the cats loved it. They seem to like it better than the odd tiny scrap of roast chicken we have slipped them from time to time. But who am I to say that slimy is bad? Maybe when you evolved to eat raw meat, and have grown up eating tinned cat food, slimy is just what you fancy.
Today's soup was to be mushroom, after we both enjoyed the home made mushroom soup at my cousin's birthday lunch. The only time I made mushroom soup previously, it came out a strange and off-putting shade of green, but looking at the professionally made soup in Aldeburgh I decided that that was what mushroom soup looked like, some of the time. I compared recipes from The Good Housekeepers, Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book and a paperback book of soups published by Pan in 1967, and decided that the general principle was to include some onion for flavour, some flour for thickening, and to add some cream at the end, so that's what I did. The Pan book suggested including two egg yolks and a shot of sherry, but that seemed a bit much for lunch, given it was already going to contain stock, butter and cream, and I didn't have any sherry and didn't want to be stuck with two egg whites. I did try asking the Systems Administrator enthusiastically if the SA fancied learning to make mushroom soup, since it was a lovely morning and I'd really rather have been out in the garden than in the kitchen, but the SA just stared at me bitterly and said No, not this particular morning. The effects of the dentist's novocaine have worn off, and the dying remnants of the nerve that the dentist couldn't reach to drill out are spectacularly painful.
I wouldn't say today's soup was as nice as the one in the hotel, though it was pretty good. Perhaps it needed a slug of sherry. For my next act I shall make leek and potato, since we've got a left over leek. I was amused to see in last night's episode of The Sopranos that I have the same sort of blender as mafia boss Uncle Junior.
By the time you get to my age you are recycling fashion, as well as chicken remnants, if you have spent your life buying clothes on the basis of getting well made things that were never the outrageous height of fashion to start with. Sometime back in the 1990s there was a craze for fake fur hats. I bought a Gilly Forge number in Liberty, in a soft black with a deep yellow quilted lining. It was cut like an enormous cloche, and you rolled up the hem according to how low over your forehead you wanted the hat to come. The fashion passed after a couple of years, and Gilly Forge fur hats began to look distinctly last year. Old hat, in fact. I put it regretfully in a drawer. Fast forward the best part of two decades, factor in the Downton effect and the film version of Anna Karenina, and gigantic fur cloche hats look entirely acceptable. And I already have a vintage one, with the added advantage I know it has been on no head but my own.
Saturday, 8 December 2012
the innocent ear
I went last night to a concert organised by the music society. We had a young soprano and accompanying pianist, performing some lieder, a Handel oratorio and some Donizetti, before easing off the high culture in the second half with a Britten setting of a humorous poem by Auden, a little song from The Tempest arranged by Arne, some traditional Tyneside songs, and a few hits from the shows. Given a straight choice between that and curling up in front of series three of The Sopranos with a bottle of red and a Chinese takeaway, I'd probably have given high culture a miss and saved myself a drive, but since I have a season ticket I have taken the view that I might as well sample everything on offer and broaden my musical horizons. Besides, I had a hunch it wasn't going to be our best attended event of the year, and as a member of the committee felt a vague sense of obligation that I should go and try and make one row look a little fuller. I did not take the Systems Administrator, who given the choice between an evening of lieder and another dose of root canal surgery would have found it a hard call.
The audience was on the sparse side. I don't know whether that is because quite a few of our regulars share my general lack of enthusiasm for young sopranos, or just that the music society is competing with lots of other events in the run up to Christmas. The act was comparatively cheap to book, since they are sponsored by a charitable scheme that supports young artists at the start of their careers, but against that we did have to hire a piano. My guess is that the chairman and bookings secretary would have liked a few more bums on seats, but I'll find out at the next committee meeting. Those that did come I mostly recognised as hard core, season ticket holders who support everything. They were very polite, even clapping the person credited with doing the large floral arrangement on the stage, so it's difficult to tell how much they enjoyed it.
I struggle to judge lieder, and Handel arias, on two levels. One is that they are so unfamiliar I'm really not sure whether I like them or not. It's like being confronted with some elaborate piece of Chinese art in a museum, and not being able to say whether it is beautiful or ugly, because it is so far from my normal frames of reference. And I know that I am utterly unequipped and incompetent to judge the performance, and say whether it is being done well or badly, because I have so little idea what it's supposed to be like. It's a strange feeling.
When I go into a garden for the first time, I form a view pretty quickly whether I like it or not. That's an aesthetic and emotional judgement. At the same time, and without having to think about it consciously, I'm forming an idea of what the garden is about and how it works. When it was made, by what sort of people, for what purpose, how space is organised, what plants are used, how they are trained, how the garden is maintained. It exists in the context of many other gardens, and carries meanings about history, taste, fashion, status and wealth. I've probably read about the garden before my visit, if it is a famous garden open to the public rather than a friend's private space. I'll start analysing how it works, and why I like or don't like aspects of it, and take notes, and probably try and read more about it later on.
Faced with lieder I am like the garden visitor who doesn't know about gardens. I might notice appreciatively that there are a lot of flowers, giving plenty of colour, and decide I don't much like the modern sculpture, and that would be about it. And with the young soprano there was plenty of colour. She acted more than singers of traditional folk generally do, smiling, grimacing and pouting as the plot dictated. I still find the classically trained female soprano voice so alien that I couldn't say if it was beautiful, or ugly. I certainly didn't instinctively respond to her the way I do to Dido's Lament when that comes up on the radio, or some counter tenors, but whether that was because I'm not familiar with or don't particularly like sopranos, or because she wasn't a great example of the type, I couldn't tell you.
I read an intriguing article in one of the papers a while back, about the truly innocent ear. Sadly I didn't keep the reference, so can't give you the link. Some psychologists asked musical experts to judge recordings of various classical musical performances, and gave them a photograph of the performer. A given performance scored more highly when the performer was smartly dressed in their photo than when they were in jeans. And Joshua Bell, who can fill the world's largest and grandest classical venues with his violin, played largely unnoticed when he went busking on the Washington Metro system. The video recording of the passengers hurrying by showed that only 7 out of 107 people who passed stopped for more than a minute. A little boy who tried to listen was dragged away by his accompanying adult. Context shapes our perceptions of art. Perhaps my judgement when visiting gardens is not as objective as I think.
The audience was on the sparse side. I don't know whether that is because quite a few of our regulars share my general lack of enthusiasm for young sopranos, or just that the music society is competing with lots of other events in the run up to Christmas. The act was comparatively cheap to book, since they are sponsored by a charitable scheme that supports young artists at the start of their careers, but against that we did have to hire a piano. My guess is that the chairman and bookings secretary would have liked a few more bums on seats, but I'll find out at the next committee meeting. Those that did come I mostly recognised as hard core, season ticket holders who support everything. They were very polite, even clapping the person credited with doing the large floral arrangement on the stage, so it's difficult to tell how much they enjoyed it.
I struggle to judge lieder, and Handel arias, on two levels. One is that they are so unfamiliar I'm really not sure whether I like them or not. It's like being confronted with some elaborate piece of Chinese art in a museum, and not being able to say whether it is beautiful or ugly, because it is so far from my normal frames of reference. And I know that I am utterly unequipped and incompetent to judge the performance, and say whether it is being done well or badly, because I have so little idea what it's supposed to be like. It's a strange feeling.
When I go into a garden for the first time, I form a view pretty quickly whether I like it or not. That's an aesthetic and emotional judgement. At the same time, and without having to think about it consciously, I'm forming an idea of what the garden is about and how it works. When it was made, by what sort of people, for what purpose, how space is organised, what plants are used, how they are trained, how the garden is maintained. It exists in the context of many other gardens, and carries meanings about history, taste, fashion, status and wealth. I've probably read about the garden before my visit, if it is a famous garden open to the public rather than a friend's private space. I'll start analysing how it works, and why I like or don't like aspects of it, and take notes, and probably try and read more about it later on.
Faced with lieder I am like the garden visitor who doesn't know about gardens. I might notice appreciatively that there are a lot of flowers, giving plenty of colour, and decide I don't much like the modern sculpture, and that would be about it. And with the young soprano there was plenty of colour. She acted more than singers of traditional folk generally do, smiling, grimacing and pouting as the plot dictated. I still find the classically trained female soprano voice so alien that I couldn't say if it was beautiful, or ugly. I certainly didn't instinctively respond to her the way I do to Dido's Lament when that comes up on the radio, or some counter tenors, but whether that was because I'm not familiar with or don't particularly like sopranos, or because she wasn't a great example of the type, I couldn't tell you.
I read an intriguing article in one of the papers a while back, about the truly innocent ear. Sadly I didn't keep the reference, so can't give you the link. Some psychologists asked musical experts to judge recordings of various classical musical performances, and gave them a photograph of the performer. A given performance scored more highly when the performer was smartly dressed in their photo than when they were in jeans. And Joshua Bell, who can fill the world's largest and grandest classical venues with his violin, played largely unnoticed when he went busking on the Washington Metro system. The video recording of the passengers hurrying by showed that only 7 out of 107 people who passed stopped for more than a minute. A little boy who tried to listen was dragged away by his accompanying adult. Context shapes our perceptions of art. Perhaps my judgement when visiting gardens is not as objective as I think.
Friday, 7 December 2012
reprieved
It looks as though Frating will not get a gravel quarry. The draft report was published today, to be signed off by the council next week and then sent off to the Secretary of State for approval next year, and Frating's name was not on the list. The Systems Administrator saw the news in the local paper while waiting at the dentist's.
It isn't time to put out the bunting and cheer in unalloyed joy just yet. I've seen enough other parishes be told that quarrying applications were quashed, only for the applications to spring up again or the rejection be challenged. I won't consider we're completely out of the firing line until the list of approved Essex sites has been finalised and authorised at the highest level, and the parish of Frating is not on it.
The SA was not utterly surprised to be left out. Potential new quarrying locations under consideration were scored on various factors and ranked, and Frating came very near the bottom of the list, around thirtieth out of thirty. The main point in our favour, as a site for gravel extraction, was that we are on the east side of Colchester and so handy for the Bathside Bay container port development. Plans for that was recently kicked back into the long grass, but I don't know if it made a difference to the quarry decision, as a friend who has lived in these parts for longer than we have assures me that it has been rumbling around for the past forty years, and the life of the quarry was to have spanned twenty.
The quarry, had it gone ahead, would have removed ten per cent of the entire land area of the parish, taking out the centre, between the original Frating and the newer Frating Green, which is by degrees appropriating the name of Frating. We should probably start calling ourselves Old Frating. Or Frating Original. Pretty much every property in the parish would have been affected by planning blight, to a greater or lesser extent. Maybe that played a part in the final decision. Extending existing quarries is rough on the people who live near them, but not as costly in terms of aggregate blight as hitting a whole new parish.
The quarry was due to operate for twenty years, once it started. One of my anxieties was that if it had been approved, since this was a county wide long term minerals plan, work might not have begun for years, pending the reactivation of the port development plans. While this would have been a relief on a day to day basis while we lived here, if we had needed to sell potential buyers would have imagined the worst about the noise, and the traffic, and the dust. Plus the quarry was supposed to be turned into a nature reserve at the end of its life, but there would always have been a lingering fear that when it came to that point it might have been used as a landfill site instead, or to house some region wide recycling facility, as has been threatened at a neighbouring village.
Maybe our environmental objections played a part in getting our parish dropped off the list. We warned of the risk to ancient woodland if the effect of keeping the new quarry pumped free of water was to cause the water table to drop. Maybe the argument that this was farmland that ought to be used for growing food had some effect. I very much doubt that those sorts of considerations made a blind bit of difference. Assuming that Frating stays off the list and it is all signed and sealed next Tuesday, my guess is that we were saved by the fact that we are east of Colchester and most economic development in Essex isn't. Location, location, location.
Sometimes I have worried we chose our house unwisely, and should have paid up for a smaller property somewhere more upmarket, within the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty along the Stour or in a village protected by listings and heritage value. But nowadays nobody is safe. High speed rail links, pylons, wind farms, solar farms, airport expansions. You can be in the most remote part of Britain, or the commuter heartlands of the Chilterns, and still come under the cosh.
Meanwhile, the Systems Administrator's second visit to the dentist resulted in the tooth being pronounced dead and the nerve drilled out, to be packed with antibiotics and temporarily capped. The SA is relieved to be making progress towards a diagnosis and solution, but otherwise rather sore, now the anaesthetic's worn off.
It isn't time to put out the bunting and cheer in unalloyed joy just yet. I've seen enough other parishes be told that quarrying applications were quashed, only for the applications to spring up again or the rejection be challenged. I won't consider we're completely out of the firing line until the list of approved Essex sites has been finalised and authorised at the highest level, and the parish of Frating is not on it.
The SA was not utterly surprised to be left out. Potential new quarrying locations under consideration were scored on various factors and ranked, and Frating came very near the bottom of the list, around thirtieth out of thirty. The main point in our favour, as a site for gravel extraction, was that we are on the east side of Colchester and so handy for the Bathside Bay container port development. Plans for that was recently kicked back into the long grass, but I don't know if it made a difference to the quarry decision, as a friend who has lived in these parts for longer than we have assures me that it has been rumbling around for the past forty years, and the life of the quarry was to have spanned twenty.
The quarry, had it gone ahead, would have removed ten per cent of the entire land area of the parish, taking out the centre, between the original Frating and the newer Frating Green, which is by degrees appropriating the name of Frating. We should probably start calling ourselves Old Frating. Or Frating Original. Pretty much every property in the parish would have been affected by planning blight, to a greater or lesser extent. Maybe that played a part in the final decision. Extending existing quarries is rough on the people who live near them, but not as costly in terms of aggregate blight as hitting a whole new parish.
The quarry was due to operate for twenty years, once it started. One of my anxieties was that if it had been approved, since this was a county wide long term minerals plan, work might not have begun for years, pending the reactivation of the port development plans. While this would have been a relief on a day to day basis while we lived here, if we had needed to sell potential buyers would have imagined the worst about the noise, and the traffic, and the dust. Plus the quarry was supposed to be turned into a nature reserve at the end of its life, but there would always have been a lingering fear that when it came to that point it might have been used as a landfill site instead, or to house some region wide recycling facility, as has been threatened at a neighbouring village.
Maybe our environmental objections played a part in getting our parish dropped off the list. We warned of the risk to ancient woodland if the effect of keeping the new quarry pumped free of water was to cause the water table to drop. Maybe the argument that this was farmland that ought to be used for growing food had some effect. I very much doubt that those sorts of considerations made a blind bit of difference. Assuming that Frating stays off the list and it is all signed and sealed next Tuesday, my guess is that we were saved by the fact that we are east of Colchester and most economic development in Essex isn't. Location, location, location.
Sometimes I have worried we chose our house unwisely, and should have paid up for a smaller property somewhere more upmarket, within the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty along the Stour or in a village protected by listings and heritage value. But nowadays nobody is safe. High speed rail links, pylons, wind farms, solar farms, airport expansions. You can be in the most remote part of Britain, or the commuter heartlands of the Chilterns, and still come under the cosh.
Meanwhile, the Systems Administrator's second visit to the dentist resulted in the tooth being pronounced dead and the nerve drilled out, to be packed with antibiotics and temporarily capped. The SA is relieved to be making progress towards a diagnosis and solution, but otherwise rather sore, now the anaesthetic's worn off.
Thursday, 6 December 2012
ice
I set the greenhouse and conservatory heaters last night for the first time this winter. A hard overnight frost was forecast, and the remains of yesterday's snow looked pretty crunchy on the lawn when I peered out of the bathroom window this morning. The cats were gathered in the hall waiting for their breakfast, watchful and alert, and the chickens' water had frozen. We are certainly aware of the shifting seasons, living here. Not for us the centrally heated, street-lit sameness of city life, where we might just about notice whether it was still light when we left the office, but no more. Frost and snow alter the shapes of our days.
It took some time with a jug of hot water and some careful tapping to break the drinker lid free of the bottom half, so that I could refill it. When we started keeping chickens I bought a plastic water dispenser, and one frosty morning I struck it absent mindedly, trying to get it to come apart, and the plastic fractured in the cold. When I broke the base of the second plastic one, trying to knock ice out of it, I switched to galvanised iron. The iron drinker cost approximately three times as much, but will outlast my chicken keeping days and still be going strong as an heirloom to pass to our nephews or great-nephews or nieces, should any of them choose to keep hens.
The postman brought our first Christmas card, another sign that the season of glad tidings and joy to all men is getting closer. This was a real card from an actual person, not just some company we've done business with during the year, saying something like Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year from all at Buggins Bathrooms. When I worked in the City we used to receive cards from the stockbrokers we dealt with, signed by all of the members of each team, or as many of them as were around on signing day, and some of the names would have us scratching our heads as to who on earth so-and-so was. We in turn sent out piles of cards, some with multiple signatures. I could never work out whether the whole exercise was cynically commercial and entirely pointless, or whether a tiny desire for human contact still clung on, amidst concerns about commissions, generous allocations in the next sure-fire new issue, and golf day invitations.
A friend was wondering to me whether it was still worth sending cards, with the price of stamps being so expensive, and when we use e-mail and text for almost everything else. If I like somebody enough to want them in my life the rest of the year then I don't grudge them 80 pence or a quid at Christmas to show them that I'm thinking of them, and I have bought our cards. And you can't put texts on the mantelpiece. So if you know me and you get a card then it means something. If you don't get a card it might mean that the post office has randomly delivered it to the wrong house.
We lit the stove in the study, but by lunchtime the thermometer still only read nineteen degrees. That is three degrees more than the HSE suggests as the minimum for indoor workplaces where the work is not physical, so in theory warm enough, but in practice not very warm. We were burning poplar, which is not proving the most flammable firewood, at least after only six months' seasoning. It smoulders with a low, sulky flame, and is reluctant to get going, so after lunch the Systems Administrator put some pieces of old fence post on the fire. These got it to go so well that my legs began to prickle with heat sitting in my usual chair.
By the time it got dark there was still a lump of frozen snow on the rear windscreen of my car, although it is parked in full sun with the rear windscreen facing south. The outside temperature had crawled up to two degrees. It is supposed to rain hard this evening, which would get rid of the last of the snow, but there are no signs of it yet.
It took some time with a jug of hot water and some careful tapping to break the drinker lid free of the bottom half, so that I could refill it. When we started keeping chickens I bought a plastic water dispenser, and one frosty morning I struck it absent mindedly, trying to get it to come apart, and the plastic fractured in the cold. When I broke the base of the second plastic one, trying to knock ice out of it, I switched to galvanised iron. The iron drinker cost approximately three times as much, but will outlast my chicken keeping days and still be going strong as an heirloom to pass to our nephews or great-nephews or nieces, should any of them choose to keep hens.
The postman brought our first Christmas card, another sign that the season of glad tidings and joy to all men is getting closer. This was a real card from an actual person, not just some company we've done business with during the year, saying something like Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year from all at Buggins Bathrooms. When I worked in the City we used to receive cards from the stockbrokers we dealt with, signed by all of the members of each team, or as many of them as were around on signing day, and some of the names would have us scratching our heads as to who on earth so-and-so was. We in turn sent out piles of cards, some with multiple signatures. I could never work out whether the whole exercise was cynically commercial and entirely pointless, or whether a tiny desire for human contact still clung on, amidst concerns about commissions, generous allocations in the next sure-fire new issue, and golf day invitations.
A friend was wondering to me whether it was still worth sending cards, with the price of stamps being so expensive, and when we use e-mail and text for almost everything else. If I like somebody enough to want them in my life the rest of the year then I don't grudge them 80 pence or a quid at Christmas to show them that I'm thinking of them, and I have bought our cards. And you can't put texts on the mantelpiece. So if you know me and you get a card then it means something. If you don't get a card it might mean that the post office has randomly delivered it to the wrong house.
We lit the stove in the study, but by lunchtime the thermometer still only read nineteen degrees. That is three degrees more than the HSE suggests as the minimum for indoor workplaces where the work is not physical, so in theory warm enough, but in practice not very warm. We were burning poplar, which is not proving the most flammable firewood, at least after only six months' seasoning. It smoulders with a low, sulky flame, and is reluctant to get going, so after lunch the Systems Administrator put some pieces of old fence post on the fire. These got it to go so well that my legs began to prickle with heat sitting in my usual chair.
By the time it got dark there was still a lump of frozen snow on the rear windscreen of my car, although it is parked in full sun with the rear windscreen facing south. The outside temperature had crawled up to two degrees. It is supposed to rain hard this evening, which would get rid of the last of the snow, but there are no signs of it yet.
Wednesday, 5 December 2012
snow
It wasn't supposed to snow overnight. Yesterday evening, as I was planning the week ahead, I warned the Systems Administrator that since overnight frost was forecast I might do a run to the dump first thing today, so if I'd disappeared when the SA got up, that was where I'd probably gone. Instead, when I pulled up the bathroom blind to see how much frost there was on the lawn, I discovered it was covered with a thin layer of snow. Reader, I cursed.
It is one of the signs of middle age. I will still run if I'm in a hurry, or sit on the floor if there are no chairs, but I don't enjoy snow. Particularly light dustings in North Essex. Snow is ghastly stuff. It breaks limbs off plants, squashes them out of shape, and kills or maims Southern hemisphere evergreens, that seem to detest snow sticking to their leaves. It brings all useful work in the garden to a standstill, since you cannot do anything in snow. You can't see the ground, or the weeds, can't see what you're treading on, can't see the shape of shrubs properly to prune them, can't do anything. Melting snow is the wettest substance on the planet. A centimetre thick layer of snow on an overcast, murky morning doesn't even have the saving grace of heart-stopping beauty, because it doesn't transform the landscape.
In places where it snows properly they must make themselves sick with laughter when they look at how we cope with it. A trawl round the papers on-line while eating porridge showed that Stansted was shut. Too snowy, you see. They might have had as much as two centimetres further inland. The A12 was shut by accidents close to where I work, another reason for customers who were thinking they might visit the plant centre to decide not to bother today. There were traffic jams in Colchester, including near the main railway station, and reports of a bus sliding backwards into a parked car in Chelmsford.
I'd been thinking about going up to London at some stage, to catch various exhibitions. There is Lely at the Courtauld, The Life and Death of Henry Stuart at the National Portrait Gallery, The Northern Renaissance at The Queen's Gallery, a small free exhibition about the family in art at Tate Britain, and a little display of recently acquired pictures at the Garden Museum. Two or three of these would make up a very nice day out, and I'd like to get the Lely and Lost Prince in fairly soon, in case we do get real snow, since both close in mid-January. And I could look at the Christmas lights and the window displays. Heck, I could even do some shopping.
Trains from Colchester into London were still running normally, as far as I could tell from the internet, but experience teaches that going anywhere near Colchester railway station when it's snowing is a bad idea. The station is reached via one of the most congested and potentially gridlocked roundabouts in Colchester, if not Essex, and the final approach route to the station car park, and two of the key roads off the roundabout, are quite steep. In snow the whole area is a trap, one of those places where you could easily spend an hour or two not moving. If, when you finally escaped, a bus had not yet slid into your car, you would count yourself lucky. In the Systems Administrator's final years of commuting the SA took to travelling from Wivenhoe, despite the smaller number of trains and frequent need to change, after too many evenings when it took three quarters of an hour just to get out of the car park even when it wasn't snowing. Anyway, I didn't trust the latest franchise holder not to screw the trains up at any minute, given a bit of snow as an excuse.
I did sort through and tidy up the piles of paper that had accumulated in the kitchen and on my desk like flotsam at the high water mark. Garden magazines, begging letters from our former college and the SA's school, beekeeping magazines, little pieces of paper with notes of important things to do scribbled on them, clothing catalogues, gift catalogues, free fliers about kitchens and central heating, marketing literature from an American investment management group I don't much like, charity Christmas appeals, bank statements, dividend counterfoils and one ridiculous cheque for less than two pounds for a tiny shareholding acquired passively when it spun out of something else, old shopping lists, garden guides left over from our holiday awaiting filing since I always keep garden guides, a glossy guide to the Morpeth bagpipe museum, two copies of the Mercury's brochure because they did post me one after I'd picked one up in person, a postcard from my cousin, a pension scheme annual funding statement as required by statute, exhibition leaflets from my last couple of trips to London which I won't keep, notes for the music society marketing supper meeting, the report and accounts of a local horticultural society of which I am not a member, but they gave me a copy anyway when I spoke at their annual meeting and I kept it for future reference. It shows how much they paid to have their silver trophies valued, something I am keen the beekeepers should do.
We accumulate a dreadful amount of paper, and that's after signing up to the direct marketing preference scheme. Even when you opt out of receiving mail shots from new companies, that doesn't stop firms you've ever dealt with previously from sending you brochures, but just because I bought a pair of kilim covered pouffes two years ago doesn't mean I want to buy a furry hot water bottle cover or a scarf for £75 now. I put aside the free magazine from Cheltenham Racecourse for the SA to have a look at, but that went straight in the bin. I have to admit, though, that quite a lot of the paper was accounted for by things I had voluntarily picked up with my own hands, or even paid for.
Addendum The Systems Administrator's tooth might be on the mend. The SA was convinced it was a root canal problem, but the dentist thought it was probably just a lost filling. The SA has a temporary filling, with an appointment to go back for a permanent one in two weeks, when the tooth has had time to settle down, or at once as an emergency if the toothache goes on getting worse. Going outside in the cold aggravates things so that it is difficult to tell if it is getting worse or not, but on the basis that it didn't hurt at all first thing this morning when the SA woke up, I should say the dentist was right and a new filling might do the trick. The SA is more hawkish, but the dentist did say the nerve could take a week to calm down.
It is one of the signs of middle age. I will still run if I'm in a hurry, or sit on the floor if there are no chairs, but I don't enjoy snow. Particularly light dustings in North Essex. Snow is ghastly stuff. It breaks limbs off plants, squashes them out of shape, and kills or maims Southern hemisphere evergreens, that seem to detest snow sticking to their leaves. It brings all useful work in the garden to a standstill, since you cannot do anything in snow. You can't see the ground, or the weeds, can't see what you're treading on, can't see the shape of shrubs properly to prune them, can't do anything. Melting snow is the wettest substance on the planet. A centimetre thick layer of snow on an overcast, murky morning doesn't even have the saving grace of heart-stopping beauty, because it doesn't transform the landscape.
In places where it snows properly they must make themselves sick with laughter when they look at how we cope with it. A trawl round the papers on-line while eating porridge showed that Stansted was shut. Too snowy, you see. They might have had as much as two centimetres further inland. The A12 was shut by accidents close to where I work, another reason for customers who were thinking they might visit the plant centre to decide not to bother today. There were traffic jams in Colchester, including near the main railway station, and reports of a bus sliding backwards into a parked car in Chelmsford.
I'd been thinking about going up to London at some stage, to catch various exhibitions. There is Lely at the Courtauld, The Life and Death of Henry Stuart at the National Portrait Gallery, The Northern Renaissance at The Queen's Gallery, a small free exhibition about the family in art at Tate Britain, and a little display of recently acquired pictures at the Garden Museum. Two or three of these would make up a very nice day out, and I'd like to get the Lely and Lost Prince in fairly soon, in case we do get real snow, since both close in mid-January. And I could look at the Christmas lights and the window displays. Heck, I could even do some shopping.
Trains from Colchester into London were still running normally, as far as I could tell from the internet, but experience teaches that going anywhere near Colchester railway station when it's snowing is a bad idea. The station is reached via one of the most congested and potentially gridlocked roundabouts in Colchester, if not Essex, and the final approach route to the station car park, and two of the key roads off the roundabout, are quite steep. In snow the whole area is a trap, one of those places where you could easily spend an hour or two not moving. If, when you finally escaped, a bus had not yet slid into your car, you would count yourself lucky. In the Systems Administrator's final years of commuting the SA took to travelling from Wivenhoe, despite the smaller number of trains and frequent need to change, after too many evenings when it took three quarters of an hour just to get out of the car park even when it wasn't snowing. Anyway, I didn't trust the latest franchise holder not to screw the trains up at any minute, given a bit of snow as an excuse.
I did sort through and tidy up the piles of paper that had accumulated in the kitchen and on my desk like flotsam at the high water mark. Garden magazines, begging letters from our former college and the SA's school, beekeeping magazines, little pieces of paper with notes of important things to do scribbled on them, clothing catalogues, gift catalogues, free fliers about kitchens and central heating, marketing literature from an American investment management group I don't much like, charity Christmas appeals, bank statements, dividend counterfoils and one ridiculous cheque for less than two pounds for a tiny shareholding acquired passively when it spun out of something else, old shopping lists, garden guides left over from our holiday awaiting filing since I always keep garden guides, a glossy guide to the Morpeth bagpipe museum, two copies of the Mercury's brochure because they did post me one after I'd picked one up in person, a postcard from my cousin, a pension scheme annual funding statement as required by statute, exhibition leaflets from my last couple of trips to London which I won't keep, notes for the music society marketing supper meeting, the report and accounts of a local horticultural society of which I am not a member, but they gave me a copy anyway when I spoke at their annual meeting and I kept it for future reference. It shows how much they paid to have their silver trophies valued, something I am keen the beekeepers should do.
We accumulate a dreadful amount of paper, and that's after signing up to the direct marketing preference scheme. Even when you opt out of receiving mail shots from new companies, that doesn't stop firms you've ever dealt with previously from sending you brochures, but just because I bought a pair of kilim covered pouffes two years ago doesn't mean I want to buy a furry hot water bottle cover or a scarf for £75 now. I put aside the free magazine from Cheltenham Racecourse for the SA to have a look at, but that went straight in the bin. I have to admit, though, that quite a lot of the paper was accounted for by things I had voluntarily picked up with my own hands, or even paid for.
Addendum The Systems Administrator's tooth might be on the mend. The SA was convinced it was a root canal problem, but the dentist thought it was probably just a lost filling. The SA has a temporary filling, with an appointment to go back for a permanent one in two weeks, when the tooth has had time to settle down, or at once as an emergency if the toothache goes on getting worse. Going outside in the cold aggravates things so that it is difficult to tell if it is getting worse or not, but on the basis that it didn't hurt at all first thing this morning when the SA woke up, I should say the dentist was right and a new filling might do the trick. The SA is more hawkish, but the dentist did say the nerve could take a week to calm down.
Tuesday, 4 December 2012
collecting the tree
We fired up the truck this morning, and went to get the Christmas tree. We even remembered to measure the height of the ceiling in the place where we want to put the tree, and take the tape measure with us so that we could measure the trees, which was extremely organised for us, since we have in the past been out to buy curtains without first having measured the window. In the days when we both used to work in offices, and used to get given the sort of psychometric tests beloved by firms running executive training sessions, and which cause our friends who are professional academic psychologists to raise their eyebrows in a sceptical manner, we both scored rather lowly on what was termed the Completer-Finisher dimension. The executive trainers described Completer Finishers as being the people who dot the i-s and cross the t-s. And measure Christmas trees, and windows.
Other than my lack in the i dotting and t crossing department, I always had a remarkably balanced personality. My highest score was for openness to new experiences, and I was moderately creative, although worryingly for my last City employers my creativity score fell during the period that I was working for them. The Systems Administrator was pretty balanced as well, which is probably why we jog along so happily.
The heater in the truck has not worked since we've had it, having packed up at some point in the quarter of a million miles it covered before the Systems Administrator bought it umpteenth hand. This is not a problem as long as you only drive it in the sort of weather where you are not going to need to defrost the windscreen during the journey, and as long as you wrap up warm. It needed some welding done at its last MoT, as it has at every previous one, but apart from that is going fine, and the mechanic at the local garage told the SA that it was a much better bet than more recent models, since while the chassis is gradually being replaced weld by weld, the transmission and engine are good for another 250,000 miles. The garage does of course have a vested interest in the truck coming in for an annual spot of welding. The SA is a keen student of twentieth century history, including both World Wars and the Russian Revolution, so can imagine we are taking part in some campaign as we rattle across the countryside in our incredibly noisy vehicle, with its lack of heating and heavy, somewhat imprecise gear shift. I enjoy sitting at height and being able to see over the hedges. Today I saw two flocks of lapwings, one beside the A120 and another on the marshes by the river Stour.
We found a nice bushy tree without any bald patches, that would just fit in the space if we took the bottom 20 centimetres off the trunk, and which had its main branches starting more than 20 centimetres from the base so we wouldn't have to sacrifice half the tree. I expected that by the time I got to the till to pay for the tree a scruffy neer-do-wells alert would have reached the staff via the bush telegraph. My colleague in the shop was aware of the truck, but assumed it belonged to the local who normally cuts holly boughs for Christmas in the arboretum.
The tree is now safely tucked away out of the wind in the garage, carefully balanced on top of the lawn tractor, since the garage is rather full. It is too early to put it up. There was one year that we left the tree lying down in a shed which the cats liked to go and lie in, when they wanted to get out of the house and take a breather from the presence of the other cats, and when we came to put the tree up the smell of pine resin could not totally mask the fact that the cats must have taken offence at having a strange tree dumped in their shed, and had scent marked it.
Other than my lack in the i dotting and t crossing department, I always had a remarkably balanced personality. My highest score was for openness to new experiences, and I was moderately creative, although worryingly for my last City employers my creativity score fell during the period that I was working for them. The Systems Administrator was pretty balanced as well, which is probably why we jog along so happily.
The heater in the truck has not worked since we've had it, having packed up at some point in the quarter of a million miles it covered before the Systems Administrator bought it umpteenth hand. This is not a problem as long as you only drive it in the sort of weather where you are not going to need to defrost the windscreen during the journey, and as long as you wrap up warm. It needed some welding done at its last MoT, as it has at every previous one, but apart from that is going fine, and the mechanic at the local garage told the SA that it was a much better bet than more recent models, since while the chassis is gradually being replaced weld by weld, the transmission and engine are good for another 250,000 miles. The garage does of course have a vested interest in the truck coming in for an annual spot of welding. The SA is a keen student of twentieth century history, including both World Wars and the Russian Revolution, so can imagine we are taking part in some campaign as we rattle across the countryside in our incredibly noisy vehicle, with its lack of heating and heavy, somewhat imprecise gear shift. I enjoy sitting at height and being able to see over the hedges. Today I saw two flocks of lapwings, one beside the A120 and another on the marshes by the river Stour.
We found a nice bushy tree without any bald patches, that would just fit in the space if we took the bottom 20 centimetres off the trunk, and which had its main branches starting more than 20 centimetres from the base so we wouldn't have to sacrifice half the tree. I expected that by the time I got to the till to pay for the tree a scruffy neer-do-wells alert would have reached the staff via the bush telegraph. My colleague in the shop was aware of the truck, but assumed it belonged to the local who normally cuts holly boughs for Christmas in the arboretum.
The tree is now safely tucked away out of the wind in the garage, carefully balanced on top of the lawn tractor, since the garage is rather full. It is too early to put it up. There was one year that we left the tree lying down in a shed which the cats liked to go and lie in, when they wanted to get out of the house and take a breather from the presence of the other cats, and when we came to put the tree up the smell of pine resin could not totally mask the fact that the cats must have taken offence at having a strange tree dumped in their shed, and had scent marked it.
Monday, 3 December 2012
Christmas trees and customers
What a difference a day makes, or rather, a change in direction of airflow. Yesterday my car was iced by the time dusk fell, while this morning I woke to the sound of rain drumming on the roof. The rain had eased off by the time I arrived at work, but water continued to ooze out the atmosphere through the morning, even in the odd moments when the sun looked as though it was thinking about trying to break through.
There was a mouse in the traps under the bird food, bringing the total up to eight including the one caught on Saturday, when my colleague who competes in triathlons in his spare time declared that it was disgusting and that I would have to deal with it. I fixed him with my best Paddington Bear hard stare and said that I did not do dead mice, and our younger colleague got rid of the body. I think he has formed an exaggerated notion of my decrepitude, since later on when I offered to load a medium sized shrub into the car of one of our regular customers who walks with a crutch, he asked whether I was OK doing that. I was fairly sure he was being solicitous and not sarcastic, so reassured him that yes, I was fine, but didn't tell him that in my spare time I lift 20 kilo bags of chicken food.
There will be Christmas trees this year. The gardeners went to cut them first thing, and the older gardener warned me to reserve mine soon, since there wouldn't be a second cutting. There were quite a few trees in the first batch, mostly on the large side and rather odd shaped, but not noticeably worse than they have been for the past couple of years. They are an absolute bargain at twelve pounds a pop, provided that you have a high ceilinged room to put them in, since the majority of them wouldn't fit into most modern houses. The owner believes that this problem can be overcome by removing the top, but that ruins the shape of a tree. You have to keep an eye on the base as well, since some have branches coming from so low down they would prevent you from fixing it into its stand, and if you removed them you would find you had lost half the canopy. The gardeners had cut great hunks of mistletoe as well, and holly boughs, though there aren't many berries this year. Either they never set due to the weather, or the birds have already eaten them.
The morning was very quiet. I had a nice chat with a famous Suffolk based garden designer about which oaks and liquidambars we had in stock, and another with a charming old boy from Lavenham who wanted a clematis variety as a Christmas present for his daughter-in-law that we had never heard of and suspected didn't exist and that she had got her plant names in a muddle, and another with a second designer who sounded both elderly and posh, and was after a shrub we have been trying to obtain for her for months without success, and still can't get. She knew Hugh Johnson of Tradescant column fame, and thought she might try and beg a couple of suckers from his specimen, so I mentally filed away the information that Maytenus boaria suckers when mature. All of this scored highly on the quality of human interaction scale, while putting nothing through the till.
Later on things lot busier. The older gardener, bringing holly into the shop, warned us that there were a couple of diddicoys in the car park. Political correctness has not yet reached all parts of rural Suffolk. They did have a very scruffy van, which they had parked in a stupid place, but they turned out to be French garden contractors who spent over three hundred pounds on plants. They were followed by a not spectacular but steady stream of retail customers. While the manager was at lunch a man arrived wanting to sell us fence posts, imported from Estonia. He had brought in a specimen post, which he gave to me together with details of his business, but when he suggested that he could go out to his van and bring in samples of the other nine sizes of post as well, I persuaded him not to, saying that I thought we could get the general idea at this stage from the one.
The manager had had an unpleasant encounter with one of our customers when he was queuing for the checkout at Tesco with his wife and children. She barged past them to get to the front of the queue to ask the man on the till whether they had any consomme, and was very reluctant to believe him when he said he didn't know, since he only worked on the checkout. She did not recognise the manager, who nearly remonstrated with her for pushing his wife and daughter, but didn't in case she told the owners that he had been rude to a customer. I pointed out to him that she would never admit to them that she had been shopping in Tesco, and not Waitrose.
There was a mouse in the traps under the bird food, bringing the total up to eight including the one caught on Saturday, when my colleague who competes in triathlons in his spare time declared that it was disgusting and that I would have to deal with it. I fixed him with my best Paddington Bear hard stare and said that I did not do dead mice, and our younger colleague got rid of the body. I think he has formed an exaggerated notion of my decrepitude, since later on when I offered to load a medium sized shrub into the car of one of our regular customers who walks with a crutch, he asked whether I was OK doing that. I was fairly sure he was being solicitous and not sarcastic, so reassured him that yes, I was fine, but didn't tell him that in my spare time I lift 20 kilo bags of chicken food.
There will be Christmas trees this year. The gardeners went to cut them first thing, and the older gardener warned me to reserve mine soon, since there wouldn't be a second cutting. There were quite a few trees in the first batch, mostly on the large side and rather odd shaped, but not noticeably worse than they have been for the past couple of years. They are an absolute bargain at twelve pounds a pop, provided that you have a high ceilinged room to put them in, since the majority of them wouldn't fit into most modern houses. The owner believes that this problem can be overcome by removing the top, but that ruins the shape of a tree. You have to keep an eye on the base as well, since some have branches coming from so low down they would prevent you from fixing it into its stand, and if you removed them you would find you had lost half the canopy. The gardeners had cut great hunks of mistletoe as well, and holly boughs, though there aren't many berries this year. Either they never set due to the weather, or the birds have already eaten them.
The morning was very quiet. I had a nice chat with a famous Suffolk based garden designer about which oaks and liquidambars we had in stock, and another with a charming old boy from Lavenham who wanted a clematis variety as a Christmas present for his daughter-in-law that we had never heard of and suspected didn't exist and that she had got her plant names in a muddle, and another with a second designer who sounded both elderly and posh, and was after a shrub we have been trying to obtain for her for months without success, and still can't get. She knew Hugh Johnson of Tradescant column fame, and thought she might try and beg a couple of suckers from his specimen, so I mentally filed away the information that Maytenus boaria suckers when mature. All of this scored highly on the quality of human interaction scale, while putting nothing through the till.
Later on things lot busier. The older gardener, bringing holly into the shop, warned us that there were a couple of diddicoys in the car park. Political correctness has not yet reached all parts of rural Suffolk. They did have a very scruffy van, which they had parked in a stupid place, but they turned out to be French garden contractors who spent over three hundred pounds on plants. They were followed by a not spectacular but steady stream of retail customers. While the manager was at lunch a man arrived wanting to sell us fence posts, imported from Estonia. He had brought in a specimen post, which he gave to me together with details of his business, but when he suggested that he could go out to his van and bring in samples of the other nine sizes of post as well, I persuaded him not to, saying that I thought we could get the general idea at this stage from the one.
The manager had had an unpleasant encounter with one of our customers when he was queuing for the checkout at Tesco with his wife and children. She barged past them to get to the front of the queue to ask the man on the till whether they had any consomme, and was very reluctant to believe him when he said he didn't know, since he only worked on the checkout. She did not recognise the manager, who nearly remonstrated with her for pushing his wife and daughter, but didn't in case she told the owners that he had been rude to a customer. I pointed out to him that she would never admit to them that she had been shopping in Tesco, and not Waitrose.
Sunday, 2 December 2012
one of our trees is missing
My drive to work through the back lanes of the Tendring peninsular and across Constable country was very beautiful, with brilliant winter light shining across the freshly ploughed fields, and birds silhouetted against a blue sky. Winter can be a lovely season in the UK, when it is not raining, or foggy.
The day got off to a quiet start, cleaning up yet more trolleys of herbaceous plants which I had remembered to put under cover yesterday afternoon, so that they were not frozen. In fact, the trolley load which had been in an unheated greenhouse was slightly frozen. The irrigation system has been drained down for the winter, to avoid the risk of the pipes freezing and bursting, and a tub of water left in the polytunnel on the far side of the car park for dunking any stray dry pots was covered in a layer of ice.
The mood was only slightly soured by an outstanding till error from last Wednesday. It was nothing to do with me, because I wasn't there, but preyed on the mind of my colleague who had been in that day, then not again until this morning. We really ought to have modern tills that record which staff member processed each transaction, as nobody could remember or was owning up to this particular muddle.
Nerves became more jangled after the owner called over the radio to say that she had reserved two willow trees for somebody who was coming in today to collect them, so could we get them ready by the till. My colleague who was already stressed about the till error went to get them, and came back saying she could only find one. I went to have a look, as did my other colleague, and we too drew a blank.
The normal procedure with reserved plants is that they are taken off sale, unless they are large specimens too heavy to lift. We used to put labels on reserved trees with the customer's name on, and leave them where they were, but too many reserved plants were found to have mysteriously vanished when people came to collect them, and we had to conclude that other customers, if that was the last specimen left, were not above removing the name tag and adding the reserved plant to their own shopping. This was always embarrassing, and doubly so when it happened to people who had driven all the way from Romford or Norfolk. However, the owner had left the reserved willows out for sale with the other trees instead of putting them in the special area for reserved trees.
The owner was first of all disbelieving, and then cross, that one of her reserved trees had vanished. She found a couple of alternatives that her friend might accept instead of the second willow, and said that if not we would have to order another willow, and that we were to apologise profusely. The three trees stood outside the back of the shop all day waiting for the owner's friend, who did not come to collect her willows after all.
Fellow members of the hunting, shooting, fishing and landowning fraternity do like to feel that they are getting a personal service from the proprietors, but it would be so much more efficient if they would just deal with the plant centre staff like all the other customers. We know what we're doing. Reserved plants are more likely to end up safely put aside, and an order placed in the normal way during working hours and written down on the main list with all the other orders is honestly much more likely to be met than one placed verbally at a chummy dinner party.
Later on the owner discovered that the dishwasher had not been working since last week, and that nobody had told her. I'd got to the end of the list of herbaceous plants to clean up by that point, and had to go outside and deadhead pansies in the twilight until she'd gone, to escape from the escalating level of stress in the shop.
When I left to go home at a quarter past four I had to scrape a thin layer of ice off the car windscreen. That's a record so far for this winter.
The day got off to a quiet start, cleaning up yet more trolleys of herbaceous plants which I had remembered to put under cover yesterday afternoon, so that they were not frozen. In fact, the trolley load which had been in an unheated greenhouse was slightly frozen. The irrigation system has been drained down for the winter, to avoid the risk of the pipes freezing and bursting, and a tub of water left in the polytunnel on the far side of the car park for dunking any stray dry pots was covered in a layer of ice.
The mood was only slightly soured by an outstanding till error from last Wednesday. It was nothing to do with me, because I wasn't there, but preyed on the mind of my colleague who had been in that day, then not again until this morning. We really ought to have modern tills that record which staff member processed each transaction, as nobody could remember or was owning up to this particular muddle.
Nerves became more jangled after the owner called over the radio to say that she had reserved two willow trees for somebody who was coming in today to collect them, so could we get them ready by the till. My colleague who was already stressed about the till error went to get them, and came back saying she could only find one. I went to have a look, as did my other colleague, and we too drew a blank.
The normal procedure with reserved plants is that they are taken off sale, unless they are large specimens too heavy to lift. We used to put labels on reserved trees with the customer's name on, and leave them where they were, but too many reserved plants were found to have mysteriously vanished when people came to collect them, and we had to conclude that other customers, if that was the last specimen left, were not above removing the name tag and adding the reserved plant to their own shopping. This was always embarrassing, and doubly so when it happened to people who had driven all the way from Romford or Norfolk. However, the owner had left the reserved willows out for sale with the other trees instead of putting them in the special area for reserved trees.
The owner was first of all disbelieving, and then cross, that one of her reserved trees had vanished. She found a couple of alternatives that her friend might accept instead of the second willow, and said that if not we would have to order another willow, and that we were to apologise profusely. The three trees stood outside the back of the shop all day waiting for the owner's friend, who did not come to collect her willows after all.
Fellow members of the hunting, shooting, fishing and landowning fraternity do like to feel that they are getting a personal service from the proprietors, but it would be so much more efficient if they would just deal with the plant centre staff like all the other customers. We know what we're doing. Reserved plants are more likely to end up safely put aside, and an order placed in the normal way during working hours and written down on the main list with all the other orders is honestly much more likely to be met than one placed verbally at a chummy dinner party.
Later on the owner discovered that the dishwasher had not been working since last week, and that nobody had told her. I'd got to the end of the list of herbaceous plants to clean up by that point, and had to go outside and deadhead pansies in the twilight until she'd gone, to escape from the escalating level of stress in the shop.
When I left to go home at a quarter past four I had to scrape a thin layer of ice off the car windscreen. That's a record so far for this winter.
Saturday, 1 December 2012
an unlikely story
It was cold this morning, and I went to work dressed for the weather. A camisole, three long sleeved t-shirts, my uniform cambray shirt, fleece, thermal leggings, fleece trousers, fleece scarf, fleece hat. I was glad of them as I picked fallen petals off the camellias in one of the polytunnels and snipped little dead twigs off the acers. This is worth doing partly because the plants look fresher and nicer and so are more likely to sell, and also because the dead flower heads act as magnets for botrytis, while acers are vulnerable to coral spot, a fungal disease that starts as orange pustules on dead wood, but can then spread to living. Actually, acers aren't above a bit of botrytis either. It came as a surprise at around ten o'clock to hear rain drumming on the polytunnel roof. I thought we were in for a cold, bright day, but evidently not.
The phone rang, and it was a woman calling about our advertisement in the East Anglian Daily Times. Had I seen it? I hadn't seen it, since I don't buy a paper before work, let alone have time to read one. I expected her question to be a preamble to some underlying query about hedging, or fruit trees, but it turned out that she was calling to check that we knew that our advertisement for a Wreath Making Day had gone to press as Reef Making. I presume that the owner dictated the wording of the advert over the phone to somebody who could neither spell nor was prepared to bring an iota of intelligence to the job of advertising sales. I thanked my informant and promised to let the owner know, if she hadn't already found out.
Later on another woman rang wanting to speak to the manager, and then when I explained he didn't work at weekends, the person responsible for advertising. I think she was looking forward to teasing the manager, and it rather took the wind out of her sails that I already knew about the error. Later still the manager rang, having been told about the mistake and wanting to know whether anybody else had mentioned it. We ought to get several free ads out of that cock-up, though looking on the bright side at least people might have noticed the advertisement.
The owners were shooting, and had left us only two radios between three members of staff, so that when I tried to call today's tea shop volunteer to make a hot drink for somebody he didn't reply, and while I was hunting for him she left. My hands were filthy with compost from dibbling around in the camellias and acers, and cleaning up pots of herbaceous plants prior to tucking them away in a polytunnel for the winter, and I really didn't want to serve food.
Tonight I am heading out again for a friend's concert. She sings with a local choir, and I said ages ago that I'd go to her concert. Having not seen each other for a while we have ended up going out together two nights running, as yesterday we went to a jazz night. It is held in a local hotel cum golf club and health club, and I knew we must be in Suffolk because the main function room was occupied by a black tie dinner for the Turkey Breeders Association. It wasn't very good organisation to go for consecutive nights, but when we booked the jazz I didn't know when the concert was, and she only made the connection recently. Jazz is not really my thing, so when the task of choosing which gig to go to fell to me, I resorted to searching for You Tube clips of all the bands on the programme, and went for the one that sounded least like jazz. I chose Christine Tobin, an Irish singer touring her latest project, to put some of the poems of WB Yeats to music, with a line-up consisting of double bass, cello, piano, and guitar. The guitarist was rather good, as far as I could tell, and she had a gutsy voice. Odd sections passed me by, veering too far for my taste into Radiophonics Workshop territory, though I think at least one of those was accidental, because I could see the guitarist signalling frantically at the man on the sound desk. It wasn't my normal sort of music, but I wasn't bored. I am not at all sure where she ranks in the pantheon of jazz.
Tonight we get Mozarts's Requiem (I think). I like that, though not normally enough to drive all the way to Frinton on a Saturday night in a working weekend. But I said I'd go, and sometimes part of the function of friends is just to be there. When it gets to the interval, and the performers spill forward to say hello to their friends and relations in the audience, it is nicer to have a friendly face or two in the pews than to be left chatting to your fellow choir members until they are suddenly claimed by their families. At last year's concert a few of us from work made a party of it, but this time someone has a school concert to attend, and another was so scathing about the soloists last time that our friend didn't have the heart to invite her again.
I feel rather mean leaving the Systems Administrator for yet another evening, on the other hand if I stay in it will not make the toothache go away. The SA proposes to watch War Horse while I'm out, which I don't want to see.
The phone rang, and it was a woman calling about our advertisement in the East Anglian Daily Times. Had I seen it? I hadn't seen it, since I don't buy a paper before work, let alone have time to read one. I expected her question to be a preamble to some underlying query about hedging, or fruit trees, but it turned out that she was calling to check that we knew that our advertisement for a Wreath Making Day had gone to press as Reef Making. I presume that the owner dictated the wording of the advert over the phone to somebody who could neither spell nor was prepared to bring an iota of intelligence to the job of advertising sales. I thanked my informant and promised to let the owner know, if she hadn't already found out.
Later on another woman rang wanting to speak to the manager, and then when I explained he didn't work at weekends, the person responsible for advertising. I think she was looking forward to teasing the manager, and it rather took the wind out of her sails that I already knew about the error. Later still the manager rang, having been told about the mistake and wanting to know whether anybody else had mentioned it. We ought to get several free ads out of that cock-up, though looking on the bright side at least people might have noticed the advertisement.
The owners were shooting, and had left us only two radios between three members of staff, so that when I tried to call today's tea shop volunteer to make a hot drink for somebody he didn't reply, and while I was hunting for him she left. My hands were filthy with compost from dibbling around in the camellias and acers, and cleaning up pots of herbaceous plants prior to tucking them away in a polytunnel for the winter, and I really didn't want to serve food.
Tonight I am heading out again for a friend's concert. She sings with a local choir, and I said ages ago that I'd go to her concert. Having not seen each other for a while we have ended up going out together two nights running, as yesterday we went to a jazz night. It is held in a local hotel cum golf club and health club, and I knew we must be in Suffolk because the main function room was occupied by a black tie dinner for the Turkey Breeders Association. It wasn't very good organisation to go for consecutive nights, but when we booked the jazz I didn't know when the concert was, and she only made the connection recently. Jazz is not really my thing, so when the task of choosing which gig to go to fell to me, I resorted to searching for You Tube clips of all the bands on the programme, and went for the one that sounded least like jazz. I chose Christine Tobin, an Irish singer touring her latest project, to put some of the poems of WB Yeats to music, with a line-up consisting of double bass, cello, piano, and guitar. The guitarist was rather good, as far as I could tell, and she had a gutsy voice. Odd sections passed me by, veering too far for my taste into Radiophonics Workshop territory, though I think at least one of those was accidental, because I could see the guitarist signalling frantically at the man on the sound desk. It wasn't my normal sort of music, but I wasn't bored. I am not at all sure where she ranks in the pantheon of jazz.
Tonight we get Mozarts's Requiem (I think). I like that, though not normally enough to drive all the way to Frinton on a Saturday night in a working weekend. But I said I'd go, and sometimes part of the function of friends is just to be there. When it gets to the interval, and the performers spill forward to say hello to their friends and relations in the audience, it is nicer to have a friendly face or two in the pews than to be left chatting to your fellow choir members until they are suddenly claimed by their families. At last year's concert a few of us from work made a party of it, but this time someone has a school concert to attend, and another was so scathing about the soloists last time that our friend didn't have the heart to invite her again.
I feel rather mean leaving the Systems Administrator for yet another evening, on the other hand if I stay in it will not make the toothache go away. The SA proposes to watch War Horse while I'm out, which I don't want to see.
Friday, 30 November 2012
frost
Frost covered the grass when I pulled up the blind in the bathroom this morning and looked out over the back garden. I wasn't surprised, since I'd had to defrost my car when I set out at half past six last night to go to the beekeepers' monthly meeting. That went OK. The turnout wasn't high, but those who did come made an effort to participate, though I think they'd rather have had the lecture about top-bar hives. The beekeepers are generally kindly, curious and patient people, which is probably why I'm still involved in the society after thirteen or fourteen years. The magazine of the British Beekeepers Association slightly took the wind out of our sails by publishing a one page crib guide to honey labels in the latest magazine, two days before our quiz and group discussion, but that couldn't be helped.
The frost meant that there was no great rush to get outside, since I couldn't walk on the grass to get access to any of the beds in the back garden, and you can't weed frozen ground. If I were designing a garden for a keen gardener who was not at liberty to pick and choose their gardening weather, for example somebody with a full time job who wanted to garden at weekends, I would definitely think about providing all-weather access to most areas. Sweeps of grass look great, and are cheap to construct compared to hard landscaping, but they render great chunks of the garden out of bounds for most of the morning in frosty weather. The pattern of melting ice as the morning progressed illustrated which parts of the garden catch the sun, and which are permanently shaded at this time of year. There is starting to be a little too much shade, and we need to reduce the height of the boundary hedge at some point this winter, and remove some low branches from the wild gean.
After lunch I let the chickens out for a run and went on cutting the Eleagnus hedge by the drive. The hens decided en masse to cooperate less fully than they did yesterday, and disappeared behind the hedge where I couldn't see them, and the fox wouldn't be able to to see me. I hoped the sound of human activity and the Radio 5 Live film programme would act as a deterrent. They busied themselves fossicking under the little oak tree for a while, searching for things to eat among the dead leaves. The rooster is not all that keen on the back garden, and sat on the gravel in the front where he could see me, looking peeved, until I gave him some sultanas. Then one of the hens frightened herself and ran back to the chicken house, and the rest of them trooped round from the back and spent the rest of the afternoon foraging near the chicken house, where I could see them.
As I added to the pile of prunings along the side of the drive I began to worry that it would end up blocking the front door, which would be rather hard on the post man. The Systems Administrator was going to have a session with the tractor moving prunings to the bonfire area, but has been struck down with toothache. Cold air makes it much worse, as do cold and hot food. Having Googled the symptoms, the SA assures me that these are the classic signs of root canal trouble, and has made a dentist's appointment, but could not get one until Monday afternoon. In the meantime outside work is off limits, and the piles of prunings will have to remain until Tuesday.
The frost meant that there was no great rush to get outside, since I couldn't walk on the grass to get access to any of the beds in the back garden, and you can't weed frozen ground. If I were designing a garden for a keen gardener who was not at liberty to pick and choose their gardening weather, for example somebody with a full time job who wanted to garden at weekends, I would definitely think about providing all-weather access to most areas. Sweeps of grass look great, and are cheap to construct compared to hard landscaping, but they render great chunks of the garden out of bounds for most of the morning in frosty weather. The pattern of melting ice as the morning progressed illustrated which parts of the garden catch the sun, and which are permanently shaded at this time of year. There is starting to be a little too much shade, and we need to reduce the height of the boundary hedge at some point this winter, and remove some low branches from the wild gean.
After lunch I let the chickens out for a run and went on cutting the Eleagnus hedge by the drive. The hens decided en masse to cooperate less fully than they did yesterday, and disappeared behind the hedge where I couldn't see them, and the fox wouldn't be able to to see me. I hoped the sound of human activity and the Radio 5 Live film programme would act as a deterrent. They busied themselves fossicking under the little oak tree for a while, searching for things to eat among the dead leaves. The rooster is not all that keen on the back garden, and sat on the gravel in the front where he could see me, looking peeved, until I gave him some sultanas. Then one of the hens frightened herself and ran back to the chicken house, and the rest of them trooped round from the back and spent the rest of the afternoon foraging near the chicken house, where I could see them.
As I added to the pile of prunings along the side of the drive I began to worry that it would end up blocking the front door, which would be rather hard on the post man. The Systems Administrator was going to have a session with the tractor moving prunings to the bonfire area, but has been struck down with toothache. Cold air makes it much worse, as do cold and hot food. Having Googled the symptoms, the SA assures me that these are the classic signs of root canal trouble, and has made a dentist's appointment, but could not get one until Monday afternoon. In the meantime outside work is off limits, and the piles of prunings will have to remain until Tuesday.
Thursday, 29 November 2012
working at height
I spent another morning squelching around the back garden, pruning, weeding, and picking fallen leaves out of gravel with my fingertips. The sheer volume of material needing to be removed before spring is quite staggering, and shows what a bit of rain can do. I can't tell you the year's rainfall total to date at this moment, since that's one of the pieces of data waiting to be retrieved from the Systems Administrator's hard disc, but from a recent chat with a friend who gardens locally I think we've already had over 700 mm, compared to average annual rainfall of around 500 mm. And to think that back in the spring we were surrounded by hosepipe bans.
Despite the fact that parts of my back garden have turned into a swamp, and I can feel every footstep sink into the soil, 700 mm of rain is not very much by UK standards. DEFRA and the Met Office are both rather coy about giving me a table of UK averages, at least within the amount of time I have to spare to look for the data, but in a slightly old Guardian article I found a table of UK annual rainfall for the past one hundred years. I shouldn't rely on newspaper articles for that sort of information, otherwise I'll be caught out by statistics like The Daily Telegraph's shock revelation only 100 cod left in the North Sea (correct answer only forty three million cod left in the North Sea), but according to the Guardian there were only four years in the past century when the UK as a whole scored less than 900 mm. OK, the year isn't over yet, but here am I thinking that over 700 mm is more than enough, thank you very much. The UK average is inflated by places like Crib Goch in Snowdonia (thirty year annual average 4,473 mm), but it makes me wonder how people in other parts of the country ever manage to do any gardening at all, or alternatively how I manage to grow anything in a usual semi-arid year. To put 900 mm of rainfall in context, that is what Beirut gets in an average year.
My feet got very cold kneeling or treading carefully in the borders, and after lunch I decided I'd let the chickens out for a run. I saw them the other day trying to peck through the wire at the tussocks of grass outside their chicken run, and thought that they would enjoy the exercise, and some greenery would be good for them. I was planning to combine guarding the chickens with cutting the Eleagnus x ebbingei hedge along the drive, as the Systems Administrator made a beautiful job of the lower half a while back, but hadn't got round to doing the upper part, leaving the hedge looking worrying top heavy and liable to be bashed by every parcel van. I'd reminded the SA about the hedge a couple of times, to be told it was on the SA's list of things to do, and my general maxim is that if you remind someone about something more than twice, it ceases to be reminding and becomes nagging. Sometimes you need to nag people, but not about a hedge.
The hedge always used to be my department anyway, before the SA retired. I got the step ladder out, and began to realise that it had grown a lot since the last time I trimmed it. The SA found me wobbling around on the top of the steps, and asked if I would prefer to use the Henchman. I agreed that would probably be safer. The Henchman is a wonderful thing, consisting of an aluminium platform with a safety rail round three sides of it, supported on four extremely stable flared legs, that bolt in place with cross braces so it can't wobble, collapse or tip in use. The SA bought ours at the Chelsea Flower Show years ago, and it makes working at height a great deal safer. It is light enough for one person to be able to drag it along level ground single handed, though two of you would be needed to manoeuvre it through a border. It has flat, circular feet to spread the weight, which are hinged in all directions, so after moving it you need to check that these are flat on the ground. Apart from that it is a doddle to use.
If I were ever asked to write a book about managing a large garden, for garden owners who have to do everything themselves rather than employing a gardener, one of the things I should stress is the value of investing at the outset in the right equipment. Tractor, trailer, hedge cutting equipment. You can waste a great deal of time and effort, and end up getting yourself into situations which are objectively speaking quite dangerous, trying to care for two acres with kit that would be perfectly adequate for a third of an acre suburban plot. Our next purchase will probably be a post wacker, a heavy, hollow, metal cylinder with handles on each side that you put over the top of a fence or tree post and drop repeatedly, a process much less likely to result in serious injury or death than the alternative method of one person holding the post while the other person hits it with a sledge hammer
Alas, nobody has talent spotted me at a woodland talk and said I should be the new face of television gardening, and we don't go to the sort of dinner parties where one of us might be sitting next to the gardening editor of the Observer, or Frances Lincoln, who upon hearing about our delightful garden and my inimitable prose style would sign me up, so I probably won't be asked to write the book. But you read it here first. Buy the right kit, it's easier in the long run.
Despite the fact that parts of my back garden have turned into a swamp, and I can feel every footstep sink into the soil, 700 mm of rain is not very much by UK standards. DEFRA and the Met Office are both rather coy about giving me a table of UK averages, at least within the amount of time I have to spare to look for the data, but in a slightly old Guardian article I found a table of UK annual rainfall for the past one hundred years. I shouldn't rely on newspaper articles for that sort of information, otherwise I'll be caught out by statistics like The Daily Telegraph's shock revelation only 100 cod left in the North Sea (correct answer only forty three million cod left in the North Sea), but according to the Guardian there were only four years in the past century when the UK as a whole scored less than 900 mm. OK, the year isn't over yet, but here am I thinking that over 700 mm is more than enough, thank you very much. The UK average is inflated by places like Crib Goch in Snowdonia (thirty year annual average 4,473 mm), but it makes me wonder how people in other parts of the country ever manage to do any gardening at all, or alternatively how I manage to grow anything in a usual semi-arid year. To put 900 mm of rainfall in context, that is what Beirut gets in an average year.
My feet got very cold kneeling or treading carefully in the borders, and after lunch I decided I'd let the chickens out for a run. I saw them the other day trying to peck through the wire at the tussocks of grass outside their chicken run, and thought that they would enjoy the exercise, and some greenery would be good for them. I was planning to combine guarding the chickens with cutting the Eleagnus x ebbingei hedge along the drive, as the Systems Administrator made a beautiful job of the lower half a while back, but hadn't got round to doing the upper part, leaving the hedge looking worrying top heavy and liable to be bashed by every parcel van. I'd reminded the SA about the hedge a couple of times, to be told it was on the SA's list of things to do, and my general maxim is that if you remind someone about something more than twice, it ceases to be reminding and becomes nagging. Sometimes you need to nag people, but not about a hedge.
The hedge always used to be my department anyway, before the SA retired. I got the step ladder out, and began to realise that it had grown a lot since the last time I trimmed it. The SA found me wobbling around on the top of the steps, and asked if I would prefer to use the Henchman. I agreed that would probably be safer. The Henchman is a wonderful thing, consisting of an aluminium platform with a safety rail round three sides of it, supported on four extremely stable flared legs, that bolt in place with cross braces so it can't wobble, collapse or tip in use. The SA bought ours at the Chelsea Flower Show years ago, and it makes working at height a great deal safer. It is light enough for one person to be able to drag it along level ground single handed, though two of you would be needed to manoeuvre it through a border. It has flat, circular feet to spread the weight, which are hinged in all directions, so after moving it you need to check that these are flat on the ground. Apart from that it is a doddle to use.
If I were ever asked to write a book about managing a large garden, for garden owners who have to do everything themselves rather than employing a gardener, one of the things I should stress is the value of investing at the outset in the right equipment. Tractor, trailer, hedge cutting equipment. You can waste a great deal of time and effort, and end up getting yourself into situations which are objectively speaking quite dangerous, trying to care for two acres with kit that would be perfectly adequate for a third of an acre suburban plot. Our next purchase will probably be a post wacker, a heavy, hollow, metal cylinder with handles on each side that you put over the top of a fence or tree post and drop repeatedly, a process much less likely to result in serious injury or death than the alternative method of one person holding the post while the other person hits it with a sledge hammer
Alas, nobody has talent spotted me at a woodland talk and said I should be the new face of television gardening, and we don't go to the sort of dinner parties where one of us might be sitting next to the gardening editor of the Observer, or Frances Lincoln, who upon hearing about our delightful garden and my inimitable prose style would sign me up, so I probably won't be asked to write the book. But you read it here first. Buy the right kit, it's easier in the long run.
Wednesday, 28 November 2012
two gardens
The ground in the back garden is so wet, it squelches when I walk on it, which makes me feel guilty about treading on the borders. It's an insoluble problem, since the only way that everything needing pruning, trimming, cutting down, tying in, leaf sweeping and weeding will get done at all is to keep at it through the winter. There simply isn't time to wait for the borders to dry out.
The rambler roses that are covering the bank between the top and bottom lawns, and making a pretty good job of it, are also trying to spread forwards across the border along the top of the bank. This contains some shrub roses, which are not strong enough to compete with the questing branches of the ramblers. I've been working along the back of the bed, disentangling pieces of rambler and honeysuckle from poor old 'Buff Beauty' and 'Gloire de Dijon' to give the shrubs airspace. Roses hate being shaded by other plants growing into them, and the shaded branches will often die. It isn't always obvious which stem originates from which plant, so pruning out the unwanted growths of the ramblers isn't a job to be hurried, or done in bad light. Dead stems have accumulated inside the bank, since the ramblers' growth habit is to pile new growth upon old, and I'm pulling those out where I come across them. So far I have avoided spiking myself, poking myself in the eye, or cutting though a stem and then realising that it supported a great mass of growth that I wanted to keep. I've been working into the bed from both ends, and have about a two metre section in the middle still to go.
I've started pruning the David Austin roses in that bed as I come to them. I don't know when the exact optimum time is to do that, but in our garden roses get pruned at any point between November and February when I have time to do it and weather conditions are suitable for me to get outside. I don't take the David Austin roses down hard, as I might with a floribunda or hybrid tea, but besides taking out the dead wood I reduce their height. They can be prone to wind rock, when the effect of the plant thrashing around in strong winds is to create a depression in the soil all around the base of the stem. This is liable to fill with water, and the water can easily freeze, none of which does the plant any good at all. By the end of the morning piles of prunings were collecting all over the lawn, waiting for the Systems Administrator to cart them off to the bonfire.
As a change from pruning I did a stint trimming the fading leaves of the Brunnera macrophylla from the opposite bed, together with shabby Acanthus leaves and the brown remains of peonies. I scraped up as many of the fallen rose leaves as I could without also scraping up all the straw mulch. I don't spray for blackspot, reasoning that if a rose can't live healthily without doses of fungicide then I'll get rid of it and find something that can, but I do try to help garden hygiene along by collecting the fallen rose leaves and taking them to the tip rather than putting them in the compost bin at home.
The first snouts of bulbs are already appearing here and there, and seedlings with long, thin seedling leaves like an emerging carrot, which experience teaches are baby Orlaya grandiflora. This is a delightful white umbellifer, used with great success by Tom Stuart Smith at Chelsea a few years ago, which does much better when allowed to self seed than if raised in pots and transplanted. The drawback to using an effective mulch is that while it cuts down weeding, it also reduces the scope for successful self-seeding, so I was anxious not to waste any of the emerging Orlaya. It is a desperately labour intensive form of gardening, doing the sort of hand weeding that requires you to be able to recognise plants and weeds at the seedling stage, but it is the only way of achieving a certain kind of garden effect. As the great and gracious lady gardener with whom I am now on lunching terms said, it takes a lot of work to achieve a relaxed and natural looking garden.
In the afternoon I went to visit a gardening friend who has gone down the opposite route, of wildflowers and native trees. She and her husband had the opportunity to buy the field next to their house a year ago, which has thrown their retirement plans into some disarray, but the opportunity was the flip side of a threat, since there was a risk that otherwise the land would be developed for housing. The centre of the field is still rented to a neighbouring farmer, who is growing turnips on it this winter, but she is establishing a wide wildlife strip around the edge, which the farmer kindly offered to sow for her if she bought the seeds, and she has planted bulbs of bluebells, snowdrops and fritillaries. There are some good oaks on the boundary, and she is planting further strips of hawthorn and yew in the corners. They have seen barn owls, tawnies and little owls. Plans are afoot to separate the field from the garden proper with a modern day ha-ha, the vertical face lined with sandbags instead of stonework, so that the view from the house will stretch unbroken to the horizon. Clearing dead elm out of the hedge she accidentally wacked herself in the eye last week, when a branch she was dragging to the bonfire site sprung up and hit her in the face, so she is on two different antibiotics and unable to drive for a fortnight, but she is undeterred. Once you have got the gardening bug then mud, rain, cold and the odd trip to accident and emergency are no reason to give up.
The rambler roses that are covering the bank between the top and bottom lawns, and making a pretty good job of it, are also trying to spread forwards across the border along the top of the bank. This contains some shrub roses, which are not strong enough to compete with the questing branches of the ramblers. I've been working along the back of the bed, disentangling pieces of rambler and honeysuckle from poor old 'Buff Beauty' and 'Gloire de Dijon' to give the shrubs airspace. Roses hate being shaded by other plants growing into them, and the shaded branches will often die. It isn't always obvious which stem originates from which plant, so pruning out the unwanted growths of the ramblers isn't a job to be hurried, or done in bad light. Dead stems have accumulated inside the bank, since the ramblers' growth habit is to pile new growth upon old, and I'm pulling those out where I come across them. So far I have avoided spiking myself, poking myself in the eye, or cutting though a stem and then realising that it supported a great mass of growth that I wanted to keep. I've been working into the bed from both ends, and have about a two metre section in the middle still to go.
I've started pruning the David Austin roses in that bed as I come to them. I don't know when the exact optimum time is to do that, but in our garden roses get pruned at any point between November and February when I have time to do it and weather conditions are suitable for me to get outside. I don't take the David Austin roses down hard, as I might with a floribunda or hybrid tea, but besides taking out the dead wood I reduce their height. They can be prone to wind rock, when the effect of the plant thrashing around in strong winds is to create a depression in the soil all around the base of the stem. This is liable to fill with water, and the water can easily freeze, none of which does the plant any good at all. By the end of the morning piles of prunings were collecting all over the lawn, waiting for the Systems Administrator to cart them off to the bonfire.
As a change from pruning I did a stint trimming the fading leaves of the Brunnera macrophylla from the opposite bed, together with shabby Acanthus leaves and the brown remains of peonies. I scraped up as many of the fallen rose leaves as I could without also scraping up all the straw mulch. I don't spray for blackspot, reasoning that if a rose can't live healthily without doses of fungicide then I'll get rid of it and find something that can, but I do try to help garden hygiene along by collecting the fallen rose leaves and taking them to the tip rather than putting them in the compost bin at home.
The first snouts of bulbs are already appearing here and there, and seedlings with long, thin seedling leaves like an emerging carrot, which experience teaches are baby Orlaya grandiflora. This is a delightful white umbellifer, used with great success by Tom Stuart Smith at Chelsea a few years ago, which does much better when allowed to self seed than if raised in pots and transplanted. The drawback to using an effective mulch is that while it cuts down weeding, it also reduces the scope for successful self-seeding, so I was anxious not to waste any of the emerging Orlaya. It is a desperately labour intensive form of gardening, doing the sort of hand weeding that requires you to be able to recognise plants and weeds at the seedling stage, but it is the only way of achieving a certain kind of garden effect. As the great and gracious lady gardener with whom I am now on lunching terms said, it takes a lot of work to achieve a relaxed and natural looking garden.
In the afternoon I went to visit a gardening friend who has gone down the opposite route, of wildflowers and native trees. She and her husband had the opportunity to buy the field next to their house a year ago, which has thrown their retirement plans into some disarray, but the opportunity was the flip side of a threat, since there was a risk that otherwise the land would be developed for housing. The centre of the field is still rented to a neighbouring farmer, who is growing turnips on it this winter, but she is establishing a wide wildlife strip around the edge, which the farmer kindly offered to sow for her if she bought the seeds, and she has planted bulbs of bluebells, snowdrops and fritillaries. There are some good oaks on the boundary, and she is planting further strips of hawthorn and yew in the corners. They have seen barn owls, tawnies and little owls. Plans are afoot to separate the field from the garden proper with a modern day ha-ha, the vertical face lined with sandbags instead of stonework, so that the view from the house will stretch unbroken to the horizon. Clearing dead elm out of the hedge she accidentally wacked herself in the eye last week, when a branch she was dragging to the bonfire site sprung up and hit her in the face, so she is on two different antibiotics and unable to drive for a fortnight, but she is undeterred. Once you have got the gardening bug then mud, rain, cold and the odd trip to accident and emergency are no reason to give up.
Tuesday, 27 November 2012
waiting
Most of my Christmas shopping arrived yesterday, in three separate deliveries. Last week DPD sent an e-mail saying that one of the parcels would arrive on Friday, and would I ensure that somebody was there to sign for it. On the morning of the due day they nailed the time slot down to between 11.32 and 12.32, which wasn't very convenient as I had a haircut booked in Colchester. The Systems Administrator hung about, but nothing came, and when I checked the tracking information on-line at the end of the day it said that the parcel had gone back to the depot, because they couldn't find the address. Given that the house has been in the same place since the 1950s, and we are regular internet shoppers, this seemed rather lame for a professional delivery company, but there you go. The previous time that DPD delivered anything they took two goes, and after the second I found a scrunched-up piece of paper in the drive, which turned out to be a map of how to find our house. You'd think they'd keep a crib book of hard-to-find addresses on each route.
When I got in from work yesterday I enquired how the SA's day had been, as sympathetic spouses and partners do. The reply was that the SA had mended the stove in the study (an inspection plate fell out. The SA can't see how it ever stayed put in the first place), watched some racing, and gone for a walk in the front garden waiting about for my parcels, with a warning that we were low on milk because the SA hadn't been out. One package came at lunchtime and another late afternoon. It seems rather hard to have to spend the day hanging around for your own Christmas present to be delivered, but that's the downside of internet shopping. At about half past six there was the faint whisper of what could have been a distant train, or wheels on the gravel, and it was the third and final parcel, looking very lonely as it was the last box left in a long wheelbase transit.
Meanwhile the beekeepers committee won't decide what we are doing for Thursday's monthly meeting. A couple have said that they won't be able to be there at all, which is fair enough, as people do have work and family commitments. The others have mostly remained silent, and it has fallen to the membership secretary to try and chivvy them along, simply because she maintains the e-mail contacts list for members. If ever a body of people was in urgent need of leadership, this one is. I suppose I will feel duty-bound to go on Thursday, simply because I am an officer of the society by dint of being Treasurer, and it seems wrong for members to turn up and find nobody there, but at the current rate of progress there is going to be nothing going on. They don't read cardunculus, by the way.
Nor do the committee members of the music society, where I am waiting for confirmation that tonight's get together to talk about publicity is on. The Systems Administrator, trying to organise the day's meals, asked me whether I was going out tonight, and I had to confess that I didn't know, since I hadn't heard from my prospective hostess and felt rude chasing her. In fact I have now chased her, and all I could suggest about supper was to make something with flexible portion sizes that would keep, so that if I went out this evening my share could be recycled as tomorrow's lunch.
There is something about being in limbo and not knowing what you are doing later that is peculiarly unsettling. Should I start compiling a quiz? The weather forecast was for rain, but it is not raining very much. Should I go out into the garden? The excellent Buddhist principle of mindfulness would say that I shouldn't worry about it. Enjoy the rest of the morning, and the afternoon, and see what if anything turns up. Excellent principles can be very hard to apply in practice. I don't like waiting about in a state of uncertainty. I suppose it is time to start practising, since the older I get the more of it I'll probably have to do, one way and another.
When I got in from work yesterday I enquired how the SA's day had been, as sympathetic spouses and partners do. The reply was that the SA had mended the stove in the study (an inspection plate fell out. The SA can't see how it ever stayed put in the first place), watched some racing, and gone for a walk in the front garden waiting about for my parcels, with a warning that we were low on milk because the SA hadn't been out. One package came at lunchtime and another late afternoon. It seems rather hard to have to spend the day hanging around for your own Christmas present to be delivered, but that's the downside of internet shopping. At about half past six there was the faint whisper of what could have been a distant train, or wheels on the gravel, and it was the third and final parcel, looking very lonely as it was the last box left in a long wheelbase transit.
Meanwhile the beekeepers committee won't decide what we are doing for Thursday's monthly meeting. A couple have said that they won't be able to be there at all, which is fair enough, as people do have work and family commitments. The others have mostly remained silent, and it has fallen to the membership secretary to try and chivvy them along, simply because she maintains the e-mail contacts list for members. If ever a body of people was in urgent need of leadership, this one is. I suppose I will feel duty-bound to go on Thursday, simply because I am an officer of the society by dint of being Treasurer, and it seems wrong for members to turn up and find nobody there, but at the current rate of progress there is going to be nothing going on. They don't read cardunculus, by the way.
Nor do the committee members of the music society, where I am waiting for confirmation that tonight's get together to talk about publicity is on. The Systems Administrator, trying to organise the day's meals, asked me whether I was going out tonight, and I had to confess that I didn't know, since I hadn't heard from my prospective hostess and felt rude chasing her. In fact I have now chased her, and all I could suggest about supper was to make something with flexible portion sizes that would keep, so that if I went out this evening my share could be recycled as tomorrow's lunch.
There is something about being in limbo and not knowing what you are doing later that is peculiarly unsettling. Should I start compiling a quiz? The weather forecast was for rain, but it is not raining very much. Should I go out into the garden? The excellent Buddhist principle of mindfulness would say that I shouldn't worry about it. Enjoy the rest of the morning, and the afternoon, and see what if anything turns up. Excellent principles can be very hard to apply in practice. I don't like waiting about in a state of uncertainty. I suppose it is time to start practising, since the older I get the more of it I'll probably have to do, one way and another.
Monday, 26 November 2012
solo in the plant centre
I arrived at work to be greeted by the boss, who told me he had some bad news for me. I wondered whether this was that I was going to be put on short time until March, but it turned out to be that I was going to be on my own in the plant centre, as both the manager and my colleague who normally works on Mondays had called in sick. The owner asked hopefully whether one of the other part timers wouldn't be in, but since she was one of the people the manager was due to lay off until spring as of last week at the owner's instructions, the answer to that question was No.
When I opened up the shop I discovered a very tall, thin parcel at the back of it, which was obviously some tree packaged up and ready to go out by mail order. I thought our normal height limit for parcels was four feet, but somebody must have been feeling lucky, or talked nicely to the delivery company. The parcel had a name on it, but no address, and I sighed mentally and resigned myself to having to hunt around for the paperwork later on, so that I could work out what to do with it. At about nine o'clock a smiling van driver in a luminous green vest appeared, saying that he had come to pick up a parcel but it wasn't in the usual place. I showed him the package in the back of the shop, and the names tallied, but I had to dolefully confess that I didn't have an address label. He said that he did, and produced one printed out with the address and consignment number, which he stuck on the box. He left with my fervent thanks ringing in his ears, having done his Sir Galahad deed for the day.
By ten I'd picked up all the plants that had fallen over in the wind, and was starting to feel a little dull, when the phone began ringing. The first call was from a woman, who from her voice I guessed was quite young, wanting to know whether we had Quercus x hispanica. I went to see, and found we had one plant of a named variety, but none of the straight species. It turned out that she wanted forty. I guessed she was calling from a landscape company. I don't know where you would go to buy forty Quercus x hispanica, but I don't think any retail plant centre would keep that number of them in stock, ready to sell just like that. We normally sell around five a year. Landscapers do tend to give impossible plant sourcing tasks to very young members of staff who don't understand the market or know what they're doing, and it wastes their time and ours. The most entertaining request was from the man who rang, with no hope in his voice, asking whether we had around forty plants of Berberis 'Georgei' in seven and a half litre pots. I explained that unfortunately we hadn't been able to obtain that one for some time, and indeed had a list of over twenty customers waiting for plants if only we could get them, so I rather doubted whether there were forty Berberis 'Georgei' for sale in the country at that moment. He said he had begun to suspect as much, and in a way was grateful, as I'd given him ammunition to go back to the landscape architect and explain that they'd have to rethink that part of the planting plan.
A few customers looked as though they might have liked tea, but the owner had given me dispensation not to open the cafe. Apart from the hygiene aspects, operating the till, and the telephone, and finding plants for people, and doling out advice on which plant to choose, is more than one person can do, without trying to do refreshments as well. It was pretty quiet, and customers were very good about waiting to be served, and my friend in the office helped out with the phone, but you can't run an operation like that smoothly with just one person. The owner came out in the late morning to cover while I had some lunch, but then had to be somewhere else by one o'clock, so I had one twenty minute break in a seven and three quarter hour day. It felt like quite a long one.
When I opened up the shop I discovered a very tall, thin parcel at the back of it, which was obviously some tree packaged up and ready to go out by mail order. I thought our normal height limit for parcels was four feet, but somebody must have been feeling lucky, or talked nicely to the delivery company. The parcel had a name on it, but no address, and I sighed mentally and resigned myself to having to hunt around for the paperwork later on, so that I could work out what to do with it. At about nine o'clock a smiling van driver in a luminous green vest appeared, saying that he had come to pick up a parcel but it wasn't in the usual place. I showed him the package in the back of the shop, and the names tallied, but I had to dolefully confess that I didn't have an address label. He said that he did, and produced one printed out with the address and consignment number, which he stuck on the box. He left with my fervent thanks ringing in his ears, having done his Sir Galahad deed for the day.
By ten I'd picked up all the plants that had fallen over in the wind, and was starting to feel a little dull, when the phone began ringing. The first call was from a woman, who from her voice I guessed was quite young, wanting to know whether we had Quercus x hispanica. I went to see, and found we had one plant of a named variety, but none of the straight species. It turned out that she wanted forty. I guessed she was calling from a landscape company. I don't know where you would go to buy forty Quercus x hispanica, but I don't think any retail plant centre would keep that number of them in stock, ready to sell just like that. We normally sell around five a year. Landscapers do tend to give impossible plant sourcing tasks to very young members of staff who don't understand the market or know what they're doing, and it wastes their time and ours. The most entertaining request was from the man who rang, with no hope in his voice, asking whether we had around forty plants of Berberis 'Georgei' in seven and a half litre pots. I explained that unfortunately we hadn't been able to obtain that one for some time, and indeed had a list of over twenty customers waiting for plants if only we could get them, so I rather doubted whether there were forty Berberis 'Georgei' for sale in the country at that moment. He said he had begun to suspect as much, and in a way was grateful, as I'd given him ammunition to go back to the landscape architect and explain that they'd have to rethink that part of the planting plan.
A few customers looked as though they might have liked tea, but the owner had given me dispensation not to open the cafe. Apart from the hygiene aspects, operating the till, and the telephone, and finding plants for people, and doling out advice on which plant to choose, is more than one person can do, without trying to do refreshments as well. It was pretty quiet, and customers were very good about waiting to be served, and my friend in the office helped out with the phone, but you can't run an operation like that smoothly with just one person. The owner came out in the late morning to cover while I had some lunch, but then had to be somewhere else by one o'clock, so I had one twenty minute break in a seven and three quarter hour day. It felt like quite a long one.
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