There is something slightly infra-dig about buying plants in flower. It smacks of the impulse purchase, the oh-I-must have that reflex of the naive gardener who buys a plant without knowing where they are going to put it. It implies ignorance or lack of imagination, an inability to visualise what the plant will look like when it is in flower. True gardeners lay out their borders in late September, when the soil is lovely and warm and their new plants have months to root into the surrounding soil before the rigours of the next dry spring. Such gardeners are superior beings who can plan ahead, confident of conjuring beauty from the uninspiring pots of semi-dormant twigs they are arranging in their borders. They do not end up with gardens that flower almost entirely between Easter and June, because that is when they went to the garden centre and fell in love with whatever was out at the time.
Such is received wisdom in the horticultural trade, and I am guilty of thinking such thoughts about customers who buy the plants in full bloom that we have cunningly arranged just inside the entrance to catch their eye, the plant centre equivalent of sweeties at the till. And I have been such a gardener, often, having a highly developed propensity to conceive violent passions for new plants. But we in the trade should not mock so readily. It may be a bad idea to buy a plant about which you know nothing, whose needs for sun, shelter or a reliable supply of moisture your garden will be totally unable to meet, but buying something when you can see the flowers has its good points. Or rather, choosing its exact position in your garden and planting it at a time when you can see how it is going to look with its neighbours can save you from some horrible errors.
I have made such an error. A couple of years ago I planted a salmon pink flowered Chaenomeles speciosa 'Geisha Girl' in the entrance bed by the way in. This was not a purchase made on impulse and in complete ignorance. I had a pretty good idea that it would grow there, since I have several other ornamental quince in the garden, and know they cope with the sandy soil and the wind. I had seen and admired the flowers, so was not disturbed that they were a shade of pink that has a fair amount of orange in it. Some people dislike orange-pink, but I like it myself. I'd checked on the dimensions of the shrub, and knew it would fill the space it was destined for pretty well, not growing too large.
What I had utterly failed to take into account, when I planted it out of its flowering season, was how it would look in bloom against other plants flowering nearby. I put it next to a Japanese crab, Malus floribunda, a small, round-headed tree with clouds of small, apple pink blossoms in spring. I have always been very fond of Japanese crab apples since childhood. This one would probably prefer better soil, and not to have been planted on a site where there was previously an apple orchard, but it battles along. Unfortunately nowadays it battles against the ornamental quince as well as the miserable soil. The two of them flower at exactly the same time, and large salmon pink flowers against small shell-pink ones is about as bad a combination as you can imagine. It doesn't even have the panache of a violent Christopher Lloyd clash. It is just bad. Each plant diminishes the beauty of the other. It is simply horrid.
I believe that Harold Nicolson told Vita Sackville-West that the reason why she was such a good gardener was that she had the courage to abolish ugly or unsuccessful plants ('believe' in this context means that I can't remember which book this comes in, and am not going to spend an hour trying to find the reference, but I'm pretty sure that he said it). I don't want to abolish the crab, or the quince, but one of them is going to have to move, and clearly it's not going to be the tree. The Chaenomeles has been in for around three years, and the top growth has developed nicely, which makes me nervous about how large the root system now is. I suspect that digging it out will be a more protracted and brutal task than it appeared on Gardeners World, the last couple of times I watched and they moved mature shrubs. It is also a task that should have been done a month ago, since the leaves are starting to emerge, but a month ago it was snowing. I really don't want to leave it another season, which means it has to be done now.
The question was where to put it. We have been here for nearly twenty years, and the borders in the front and back gardens are quite full. Friends are incredulous when I say I don't have room for more plants, saying I have a huge garden and that can't possibly be true. It is a large garden, but even so there aren't lots of empty spaces waiting to be filled with a long lived shrub growing to one and a half metres tall and wide. Plus I needed to find a space where the salmon pink flowers would not clash with their new neighbours. To make that mistake once is forgiveable, to make a habit of it would be just sloppy.
I tried to convince myself there was room at the south end of the long bed, but there wasn't really. The quince would have ended up overwhelming an inoffensive potentilla, I'd have had another pink-on-pink combination, and the quince and the crab would still have been close enough to appear in the same view from most viewpoints. Leaving the problem to mull while I got on with some weeding the solution occurred to me, which was to liberate the space from its current occupant, something that really had fallen into the ugly and unsuccessful category. It was not always so. Years ago I raised a lot of the purple leaved version of the common sage from cuttings, and used it as ground cover in part of the long border. Soft greyish-purple is a good foil for other plants, and the sage combined well with all sorts of neighbours. However, it is not the longest lived plant. Mine have not died, because they have renewed themselves by rooting where the branches touched the soil, but the original cores are woody and unattractive, and the whole patch has spread to cover a larger area than was ever envisaged at the outlet.
The answer was now clear. Make a space in the sage, in fact get rid of all the sage, and see what treasures were being overwhelmed by the rooting branches. Refresh the soil, replant the space with the Chaenomeles and maybe one or two other feature shrubs. There is space for the Chaenomeles between a topiary yew (dark green) and a white flowered Spiraea, where it should be safe from further hideous clashes. Then maybe get some more sage, but not so much of it. It will feel rather wasteful buying it, but I failed to take cuttings last year, and I know that in a few weeks time I will be able to pick up young plants in 9cm pots from work for not very much money. They will grow rapidly, and young plants are far more attractive than old, tired, gnarly ones.
There is a general lesson to be learned. Planting spaces in a garden are not just the tracts of bare earth, but the outgrown patches of old plants that have ceased to be as attractive as they once were, or have spread to take up more room than they deserve. This approach can be overdone. If you keep changing your mind about too many things then even a twenty year old garden won't have that comfortable air of establishment, because nothing has been allowed to grow to maturity, or even a tad beyond. A tiny air of relaxed, overblown over-maturity here and there gives a garden character, a sense of reassuring permanence. Ripeness is all.
Thursday, 7 February 2013
Wednesday, 6 February 2013
under investigation
Our local hospital is among those being investigated in the wake of the Stafford Hospital report. Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust is one of the five found to have a persistently high death rate over the past two years. That's rather depressing, particularly as it sits halfway along one of the most dangerous roads in Britain, but doesn't come as a particular surprise, and I suspect the problems go back far longer than two years.
About ten years ago someone I know was on holiday over a bank holiday weekend when they began to experience severe pain in one of those parts of the body that it is not considered nice to discuss in public. They are entitled to their privacy, and I won't say who they were or how I knew them, but this is a story of someone known to me personally, not just a tale about a friend of a friend. They returned from holiday, and saw their GP first thing on Tuesday morning, GPs not operating on Bank Holiday Mondays. The GP diagnosed an anal abscess and said that it was too serious to be treated in a GP's surgery, and they were to go straight to A&E. The GP would telephone ahead so that they would be seen immediately.
The seeing immediately bit worked very well, and the GP's diagnosis was confirmed. The patient needed surgery. It was after the admission to Colchester General Hospital that things began to unravel. The patient was by then in what they described as the most intense pain they had ever experienced, and the doctor who saw them prescribed a strong painkiller, but instead of being given pain relief they were sent to sit in a side room. And left there for an hour, during which time no hospital staff paid them any attention at all. After an hour the patient's companion went to look for a doctor or nurse, to find out whether the patient could have something now for the pain. It turned out that they had not been given relief, because the injection had to be given when they were lying down, and the wards had not called to say a bed was available.
Eventually a bed was found. By then the patient had begun to run a temperature and was showing symptoms of incipient blood poisoning. The surgeons would not operate while the patient had such a temperature, and the medical staff tried to control the developing septicemia with drugs. The patient had been put on nil by mouth as soon as they were admitted, but was not attached to a saline drip despite the fact that they were running a fever.
The temperature abated, but surgery was delayed again as the air ambulance brought in more urgent surgical cases (from a crash on the A12, as it happens). It was only when the nurses changed shift at nine in the evening that it occurred to one of the nurses on the new shift that the only fluid the patient had received since going to bed the previous evening was a glass of orange juice before going to the GP's surgery that morning.
Finally the abscess was operated on by whatever general surgeon was on duty at eleven or twelve at night. The initial surgery failed to heal, and required a second operation, this time with a consultant specialist in bowel surgery. The second operation was a success, however, the patient learned that if the abscess had progressed another centimetre before treatment, it would have attacked the patient's anal sphincter, and they would quite probably been left permanently incontinent.
It might be that things have improved in the past decade, and that this story has no bearing on Colchester General's excess death rate in the past two years, but I wouldn't count on it. In the meantime, as Jane Eyre put it, I must keep in good health. And not die.
About ten years ago someone I know was on holiday over a bank holiday weekend when they began to experience severe pain in one of those parts of the body that it is not considered nice to discuss in public. They are entitled to their privacy, and I won't say who they were or how I knew them, but this is a story of someone known to me personally, not just a tale about a friend of a friend. They returned from holiday, and saw their GP first thing on Tuesday morning, GPs not operating on Bank Holiday Mondays. The GP diagnosed an anal abscess and said that it was too serious to be treated in a GP's surgery, and they were to go straight to A&E. The GP would telephone ahead so that they would be seen immediately.
The seeing immediately bit worked very well, and the GP's diagnosis was confirmed. The patient needed surgery. It was after the admission to Colchester General Hospital that things began to unravel. The patient was by then in what they described as the most intense pain they had ever experienced, and the doctor who saw them prescribed a strong painkiller, but instead of being given pain relief they were sent to sit in a side room. And left there for an hour, during which time no hospital staff paid them any attention at all. After an hour the patient's companion went to look for a doctor or nurse, to find out whether the patient could have something now for the pain. It turned out that they had not been given relief, because the injection had to be given when they were lying down, and the wards had not called to say a bed was available.
Eventually a bed was found. By then the patient had begun to run a temperature and was showing symptoms of incipient blood poisoning. The surgeons would not operate while the patient had such a temperature, and the medical staff tried to control the developing septicemia with drugs. The patient had been put on nil by mouth as soon as they were admitted, but was not attached to a saline drip despite the fact that they were running a fever.
The temperature abated, but surgery was delayed again as the air ambulance brought in more urgent surgical cases (from a crash on the A12, as it happens). It was only when the nurses changed shift at nine in the evening that it occurred to one of the nurses on the new shift that the only fluid the patient had received since going to bed the previous evening was a glass of orange juice before going to the GP's surgery that morning.
Finally the abscess was operated on by whatever general surgeon was on duty at eleven or twelve at night. The initial surgery failed to heal, and required a second operation, this time with a consultant specialist in bowel surgery. The second operation was a success, however, the patient learned that if the abscess had progressed another centimetre before treatment, it would have attacked the patient's anal sphincter, and they would quite probably been left permanently incontinent.
It might be that things have improved in the past decade, and that this story has no bearing on Colchester General's excess death rate in the past two years, but I wouldn't count on it. In the meantime, as Jane Eyre put it, I must keep in good health. And not die.
Tuesday, 5 February 2013
more chainsaw work
It wasn't too windy when I got up, but when I checked the Colchester five day forecast over breakfast I discovered that the wind was due to return by lunchtime. I thought I might as well have another go at pruning and tying in the climbers under the veranda before the gales resumed, since progress last time was limited to setting up the step ladder and watching it blow over. An elder bush has taken root behind the house, which I don't mind, since it provides a handy support for the honeysuckle to climb up and the flowers are very pretty, but it has grown so large it obscures the view, and branches are growing out over the barbecue.
I was sawing laboriously through a large stem, perched at the top of the steps and wondering whether I needed a new, sharper pruning saw, when the Systems Administrator appeared round the corner complete with chainsaw, saying that we'd better have another go at this hedge before the wind got up. This was an unexpected pleasure, since the SA doesn't generally do gardening before lunchtime. The SA had suggested after breakfast (or rather after the morning cup of tea, since the SA doesn't generally do breakfast) that we could get on with the hedge after lunch, and my response had been that it was forecast to be too windy after lunch. I love people who can take a hint.
The SA isn't reducing the whole hedge to a flat top, as if it had been cut with a mechanical flail. That would look too harsh, and would anyway be impossible since we can't reach all of it from our side. The stems nearest the front, that the SA can reach from the Henchman platform, have been cut to the same height they were reduced to last time, around 4 metres, while some fat trunks in the centre have been reduced to about waist height. The overall effect is to bring down the average height, and considerably reduce the density of the top third of the hedge. It still looks natural and informal, and doesn't create a hard line between the garden and the surrounding landscape, but it should cast a lot less shade on the garden. Certainly, looking at the enormous pile of prunings we'd produced and imagining each branch covered in leaves, the effect should be to admit much more light.
A sad but necessary task while the chainsaw was out was to reduce a contorted willow in the bog bed down to a low stump. It used to be tremendously pretty, with curly orange branches weaving around each other in a delightful haze, but then a few years ago the slender leaves and smallest twigs began to turn black. After researching the subject of black dieback in ornamental willows I had a nasty suspicion that it was suffering from a type of anthracnose, a fungal disease that attacks willows. I cut out the affected twigs, a fiddly job which took a very long time, but more twigs kept dying. The SA cut the willow's branches back hard, and I sprayed the sawn stumps with fungicide, but as it sprouted new growth the same black lesions appeared. I had to regretfully admit that the plant would have to go, since a small multistemmed pollard crowned with weak and dying stems is no use to anyone. I can't face digging the stump out, and will take the risk of leaving it to rot in situ.
We moved on to the tricky question of how to reduce a large branch on one of the native, wild willows along the ditch, that is sagging lower and lower over the garden, without it dropping on the shrubs growing beneath and destroying them. The answer is to cut it off in small sections. I am one of those people recently described by the head of UK Sport as physically illiterate, being practically unable to catch anything, but I can catch twiggy branches of willow when they are dropping on a Magnolia stellata. I'm not taking the risk of a larger lump of tree falling on my head, but cut into short lengths the falling logs brushed past the magnolia stems without breaking them. The odd bud may have been knocked off, but I can live with that. The wind got up before we'd finished with the willow, and began to thrash the branches around so that they bound on the saw and it was dangerous to go on. It quite suited the SA to stop by then, since both of the SA's wellington boots have split, so after working in the bog bed the SA had wet and very cold feet.
The vast heap of sawn branches reduced to a surprisingly small number of bags of chippings once put through the shredder. That's a pity, since I need lots of woody shreddings to try and make a weed-proof mulch round the compost heaps. The fatter branches will saw up into an equally pathetic quantity of logs, which once seasoned will keep the stove going for all of two evenings.
Addendum The SA ordered some new boots at lunchtime. You can get everything on Amazon.
I was sawing laboriously through a large stem, perched at the top of the steps and wondering whether I needed a new, sharper pruning saw, when the Systems Administrator appeared round the corner complete with chainsaw, saying that we'd better have another go at this hedge before the wind got up. This was an unexpected pleasure, since the SA doesn't generally do gardening before lunchtime. The SA had suggested after breakfast (or rather after the morning cup of tea, since the SA doesn't generally do breakfast) that we could get on with the hedge after lunch, and my response had been that it was forecast to be too windy after lunch. I love people who can take a hint.
The SA isn't reducing the whole hedge to a flat top, as if it had been cut with a mechanical flail. That would look too harsh, and would anyway be impossible since we can't reach all of it from our side. The stems nearest the front, that the SA can reach from the Henchman platform, have been cut to the same height they were reduced to last time, around 4 metres, while some fat trunks in the centre have been reduced to about waist height. The overall effect is to bring down the average height, and considerably reduce the density of the top third of the hedge. It still looks natural and informal, and doesn't create a hard line between the garden and the surrounding landscape, but it should cast a lot less shade on the garden. Certainly, looking at the enormous pile of prunings we'd produced and imagining each branch covered in leaves, the effect should be to admit much more light.
A sad but necessary task while the chainsaw was out was to reduce a contorted willow in the bog bed down to a low stump. It used to be tremendously pretty, with curly orange branches weaving around each other in a delightful haze, but then a few years ago the slender leaves and smallest twigs began to turn black. After researching the subject of black dieback in ornamental willows I had a nasty suspicion that it was suffering from a type of anthracnose, a fungal disease that attacks willows. I cut out the affected twigs, a fiddly job which took a very long time, but more twigs kept dying. The SA cut the willow's branches back hard, and I sprayed the sawn stumps with fungicide, but as it sprouted new growth the same black lesions appeared. I had to regretfully admit that the plant would have to go, since a small multistemmed pollard crowned with weak and dying stems is no use to anyone. I can't face digging the stump out, and will take the risk of leaving it to rot in situ.
We moved on to the tricky question of how to reduce a large branch on one of the native, wild willows along the ditch, that is sagging lower and lower over the garden, without it dropping on the shrubs growing beneath and destroying them. The answer is to cut it off in small sections. I am one of those people recently described by the head of UK Sport as physically illiterate, being practically unable to catch anything, but I can catch twiggy branches of willow when they are dropping on a Magnolia stellata. I'm not taking the risk of a larger lump of tree falling on my head, but cut into short lengths the falling logs brushed past the magnolia stems without breaking them. The odd bud may have been knocked off, but I can live with that. The wind got up before we'd finished with the willow, and began to thrash the branches around so that they bound on the saw and it was dangerous to go on. It quite suited the SA to stop by then, since both of the SA's wellington boots have split, so after working in the bog bed the SA had wet and very cold feet.
The vast heap of sawn branches reduced to a surprisingly small number of bags of chippings once put through the shredder. That's a pity, since I need lots of woody shreddings to try and make a weed-proof mulch round the compost heaps. The fatter branches will saw up into an equally pathetic quantity of logs, which once seasoned will keep the stove going for all of two evenings.
Addendum The SA ordered some new boots at lunchtime. You can get everything on Amazon.
Monday, 4 February 2013
monkey puzzle
There was a delivery of plants lined up outside the office from our new Dutch supplier, the one that sent us some extremely nice deciduous Euonymus last autumn. They didn't look like much, just little pathetic heaps of twigs, but I was very curious to know what they all were. Unfortunately the boss went out for the day without printing the labels, so I couldn't spend a happy albeit chilly morning fastening those on while taking the time to read them.
I did get to spend some time Googling the reproductive habits of monkey puzzles, which is something I'd happily do in my spare time even if I weren't being paid for it. A potential customer e-mailed to ask whether we had any, and stated her preference for a female tree if possible. I didn't know that male and female cones were borne on separate plants, since the general rule of thumb with conifers is that they are carried on the same plant, often with the female cones nearer the top and the male ones lower down, to reduce the chances of self-pollination. Checking Hillier's dictionary before taking to the internet confirmed that our potential customer was correct, and Araucaria araucana runs contrary to the usual rule for conifers, with male and female strobili generally being carried on different plants. Generally, but not invariably. The sex life of the monkey puzzle leaves room for ambiguity.
The manager didn't think he'd ever seen monkey puzzle plants for sale labelled as specifically male or female. He didn't believe they fruited at all until they were around thirty years old, and told me to go and check this, and compose some suitable reply to the would-be owner of a female tree. Wikipedia said that they didn't fruit until they were between twenty and forty years old, which meant that it had to be true, but I checked for corroborating evidence on a couple more sites, just to be on the same side.
The seeds turn out to be enormous, and edible. I think I should have known that they were edible, since I had a vague feeling that the first plants grown in England were raised from seed pocketed by a plant hunter in the course of a dinner. On the other hand, the cones might have been part of the table decorations rather than the menu. According to my researches, the seeds are nutritious and do or did form a staple part of the diet in some areas of Chile, being rich in starch and tasting pleasantly of pine nuts. If it weren't that the trees take between twenty and forty years to come into production it would be worthwhile planting them commercially.
It sounds as though fresh seed germinates readily, while there are difficulties over taking cuttings, including the fact that cuttings taken from horizontal growing side branches refuse to make upright growing new plants. I think that is fairly standard conifer behaviour. If the bulk of young plants in commerce are seed raised, as opposed to cuttings or grafts taken from stock plants of known sex, that would explain why you never see young plants labelled as male or female. Apparently they are indistinguishable until they start flowering.
The owner broke the news to me officially that the manager told me unofficially last week, but I wasn't sure I was supposed to know, that the people who ran the cafe are not coming back. It was unlucky for them that they started in the worst year in decades for the horticultural trade, but they didn't make much of an effort, swanning in half an hour or an hour after we'd opened, and leaving half way through the afternoon. Unfortunately it puts the onus of running the cafe back on us. While some of my colleagues are fairly happy dishing out tea and cakes, I know a couple that aren't, and certainly I have no desire to operate a tea shop. I don't want to do it at all, I wouldn't apply for a job doing it, and I particularly don't want to do it in tandem with nursery work. It is embarrassing serving food while covered in compost and with dirt rimmed nails, and we'd get about one star out of five on the new catering hygiene ratings. Maybe not even one star.
One till packed up mid-morning as well. It suddenly locked, refusing to do anything except bleep when the manager pressed any key. Turning it off and on again had no effect. Advancing the receipt and journal paper rolls freed it, but later on it froze and beeped again when I was on the telephone to somebody who was trying to pay for some trees. The manager thinks a key is stuck down. I switched to the other till in mid phone call, but we it really is time for the owner to buy some new ones.
Now it is February we work until five, something I forgot to mention to the Systems Administrator beforehand. Going into the office at the end of the day I was struck by a monumentally and staggeringly awful smell, a rank stink of excrement or decay. It had been fine in there half an hour previously, when I went up to send an e-mail. The boss blamed the dog, which had rolled in something disgusting. I suppose they will have to wash the dog to get the source of the smell off, which will be a revolting job, much worse than just having to hose a bit of sick out of the SA's shoes.
I did get to spend some time Googling the reproductive habits of monkey puzzles, which is something I'd happily do in my spare time even if I weren't being paid for it. A potential customer e-mailed to ask whether we had any, and stated her preference for a female tree if possible. I didn't know that male and female cones were borne on separate plants, since the general rule of thumb with conifers is that they are carried on the same plant, often with the female cones nearer the top and the male ones lower down, to reduce the chances of self-pollination. Checking Hillier's dictionary before taking to the internet confirmed that our potential customer was correct, and Araucaria araucana runs contrary to the usual rule for conifers, with male and female strobili generally being carried on different plants. Generally, but not invariably. The sex life of the monkey puzzle leaves room for ambiguity.
The manager didn't think he'd ever seen monkey puzzle plants for sale labelled as specifically male or female. He didn't believe they fruited at all until they were around thirty years old, and told me to go and check this, and compose some suitable reply to the would-be owner of a female tree. Wikipedia said that they didn't fruit until they were between twenty and forty years old, which meant that it had to be true, but I checked for corroborating evidence on a couple more sites, just to be on the same side.
The seeds turn out to be enormous, and edible. I think I should have known that they were edible, since I had a vague feeling that the first plants grown in England were raised from seed pocketed by a plant hunter in the course of a dinner. On the other hand, the cones might have been part of the table decorations rather than the menu. According to my researches, the seeds are nutritious and do or did form a staple part of the diet in some areas of Chile, being rich in starch and tasting pleasantly of pine nuts. If it weren't that the trees take between twenty and forty years to come into production it would be worthwhile planting them commercially.
It sounds as though fresh seed germinates readily, while there are difficulties over taking cuttings, including the fact that cuttings taken from horizontal growing side branches refuse to make upright growing new plants. I think that is fairly standard conifer behaviour. If the bulk of young plants in commerce are seed raised, as opposed to cuttings or grafts taken from stock plants of known sex, that would explain why you never see young plants labelled as male or female. Apparently they are indistinguishable until they start flowering.
The owner broke the news to me officially that the manager told me unofficially last week, but I wasn't sure I was supposed to know, that the people who ran the cafe are not coming back. It was unlucky for them that they started in the worst year in decades for the horticultural trade, but they didn't make much of an effort, swanning in half an hour or an hour after we'd opened, and leaving half way through the afternoon. Unfortunately it puts the onus of running the cafe back on us. While some of my colleagues are fairly happy dishing out tea and cakes, I know a couple that aren't, and certainly I have no desire to operate a tea shop. I don't want to do it at all, I wouldn't apply for a job doing it, and I particularly don't want to do it in tandem with nursery work. It is embarrassing serving food while covered in compost and with dirt rimmed nails, and we'd get about one star out of five on the new catering hygiene ratings. Maybe not even one star.
One till packed up mid-morning as well. It suddenly locked, refusing to do anything except bleep when the manager pressed any key. Turning it off and on again had no effect. Advancing the receipt and journal paper rolls freed it, but later on it froze and beeped again when I was on the telephone to somebody who was trying to pay for some trees. The manager thinks a key is stuck down. I switched to the other till in mid phone call, but we it really is time for the owner to buy some new ones.
Now it is February we work until five, something I forgot to mention to the Systems Administrator beforehand. Going into the office at the end of the day I was struck by a monumentally and staggeringly awful smell, a rank stink of excrement or decay. It had been fine in there half an hour previously, when I went up to send an e-mail. The boss blamed the dog, which had rolled in something disgusting. I suppose they will have to wash the dog to get the source of the smell off, which will be a revolting job, much worse than just having to hose a bit of sick out of the SA's shoes.
Sunday, 3 February 2013
hedges
I discovered this morning that one of the cats had been sick in the Systems Administrator's heavy walking shoes in the night. In all the tidying up they were left in the hall next to the cat flap, and the culprit must either have not made it out through the door in time, or just thought the corner of the hall was a good place to be sick. When I was a teenager you used to be able to buy those incredibly cheesy 'Love Is...' cartoon posters in Athena (remember Athena?) but I don't believe there was ever one that read 'Love is hosing cat sick out of your partner's shoes'. There should have been.
Dealing with the shoes got me nicely in the mood to clean out the chicken house. It badly needed doing, and I would have done it last week if it hadn't been so windy. Scooping up three sackfuls of sawdust mixed with chicken shit is a pleasanter job when flakes and fragments of it are not going to blow everywhere. For those of you who have not seen inside a chicken house, and may not have thought about their design, chickens instinctively roost at night. If you provide them with a perch they will spend the night sitting on it, unless they are very old and doddery, and while they roost they crap, quite a lot. You therefore build the house with a roosting board under the perch, which keeps the rest of the house relatively free of droppings, and you can clean the board and put fresh sawdust on it more frequently than you change the sawdust in the rest of the house. Today I cleaned the whole house while I was at it, since the sawdust on the floor was starting to look a bit grotty, and I always do the nest box when I'm doing the roosting board. They are pretty good about not crapping in the nest box, but they tread dirt in there on their feet, and you obviously want the eggs to be sitting on pristine sawdust until you collect them. The dirty litter goes on the compost heap, where by the time it has finished composting it is not offensive at all.
After lunch we started on the boundary hedge. We managed to get the Henchman to the back of the border, by dint of collapsing it and sliding it under the branches of a couple of large shrubs that form part of the back row in that bed. The feet are individually adjustable so that you can level it off to stand safely on a slope. The hedge is a mixture of hawthorn, dogwood and field maple, and I can't remember how many years it is since we last took the top out, but they have shot up a good 3-4 metres above the point where we cut them last time.
We can never know what somebody else sees, when they look at the same thing that we are looking at. The SA asked me where I wanted the hedge to be cut, and I said to about the same height as we did it last time. The shrubs had regrown with multiple leaders at the point where they were cut last time, so the previous cutting line was clearly visible within the hedge as a sort of ripple. Clearly visible to me, that is, but not to the SA, until I'd explained what we were looking at. If you are interested in woody plants, you see in their present form the evidence of how they have been trained in the past. If you are less involved in plants and armed with a chainsaw, you see a thicket of branches that need reducing. If we'd been looking at a steam engine the SA would have known the significance of every piece, while to me it would have been a jumble of metal and oil drips.
The operation was a joint effort, with the SA cutting and me clearing. Each piece of debris had to be carried forward through the border without smashing any of the shrubs in the bed, or treading on anything. Some of the occupants of that border are large enough to look after themselves, but a small and precious Acer aconitifolium that only went in last autumn, and a little Drimys lanceolata, could have been destroyed by a misplaced boot or carelessly wielded log. There was one alarming moment when a rather large branch fell unexpectedly on a camellia, but no serious damage.
It was too much to do in one afternoon. By quarter past four the light was going, the SA's arms were starting to ache, and we'd had to cut the electric saw out of one branch that closed on it, and reset the chain which had slipped. The half hour before dusk, when visibility is poor and you're getting tired, is a prime time for gardening accidents, and we called it a day. There is at least another afternoon's work to do in the back garden, with the rest of the hedge and a large willow branch that's hanging too low over the ditch bed. Following that the hedge along the side of the meadow needs cutting back. I'd better hope for some more dry and not too windy days.
Addendum Muntjac have eaten most of the buds out the Mahonia japonica in the back garden, the flowers from the hellebores in the ditch bed, and half the leaves of some of my saxifrages. The SA suggested I could try a deer scarer. You can get battery operated ones, I think triggered by infrared, that you tune to a speech radio station, and the sound of human voices are supposed to scare them away. I can forgive the cats for incidents like this morning's episode with the shoes, but I really do loathe those ruddy little deer with a passion.
Dealing with the shoes got me nicely in the mood to clean out the chicken house. It badly needed doing, and I would have done it last week if it hadn't been so windy. Scooping up three sackfuls of sawdust mixed with chicken shit is a pleasanter job when flakes and fragments of it are not going to blow everywhere. For those of you who have not seen inside a chicken house, and may not have thought about their design, chickens instinctively roost at night. If you provide them with a perch they will spend the night sitting on it, unless they are very old and doddery, and while they roost they crap, quite a lot. You therefore build the house with a roosting board under the perch, which keeps the rest of the house relatively free of droppings, and you can clean the board and put fresh sawdust on it more frequently than you change the sawdust in the rest of the house. Today I cleaned the whole house while I was at it, since the sawdust on the floor was starting to look a bit grotty, and I always do the nest box when I'm doing the roosting board. They are pretty good about not crapping in the nest box, but they tread dirt in there on their feet, and you obviously want the eggs to be sitting on pristine sawdust until you collect them. The dirty litter goes on the compost heap, where by the time it has finished composting it is not offensive at all.
After lunch we started on the boundary hedge. We managed to get the Henchman to the back of the border, by dint of collapsing it and sliding it under the branches of a couple of large shrubs that form part of the back row in that bed. The feet are individually adjustable so that you can level it off to stand safely on a slope. The hedge is a mixture of hawthorn, dogwood and field maple, and I can't remember how many years it is since we last took the top out, but they have shot up a good 3-4 metres above the point where we cut them last time.
We can never know what somebody else sees, when they look at the same thing that we are looking at. The SA asked me where I wanted the hedge to be cut, and I said to about the same height as we did it last time. The shrubs had regrown with multiple leaders at the point where they were cut last time, so the previous cutting line was clearly visible within the hedge as a sort of ripple. Clearly visible to me, that is, but not to the SA, until I'd explained what we were looking at. If you are interested in woody plants, you see in their present form the evidence of how they have been trained in the past. If you are less involved in plants and armed with a chainsaw, you see a thicket of branches that need reducing. If we'd been looking at a steam engine the SA would have known the significance of every piece, while to me it would have been a jumble of metal and oil drips.
The operation was a joint effort, with the SA cutting and me clearing. Each piece of debris had to be carried forward through the border without smashing any of the shrubs in the bed, or treading on anything. Some of the occupants of that border are large enough to look after themselves, but a small and precious Acer aconitifolium that only went in last autumn, and a little Drimys lanceolata, could have been destroyed by a misplaced boot or carelessly wielded log. There was one alarming moment when a rather large branch fell unexpectedly on a camellia, but no serious damage.
It was too much to do in one afternoon. By quarter past four the light was going, the SA's arms were starting to ache, and we'd had to cut the electric saw out of one branch that closed on it, and reset the chain which had slipped. The half hour before dusk, when visibility is poor and you're getting tired, is a prime time for gardening accidents, and we called it a day. There is at least another afternoon's work to do in the back garden, with the rest of the hedge and a large willow branch that's hanging too low over the ditch bed. Following that the hedge along the side of the meadow needs cutting back. I'd better hope for some more dry and not too windy days.
Addendum Muntjac have eaten most of the buds out the Mahonia japonica in the back garden, the flowers from the hellebores in the ditch bed, and half the leaves of some of my saxifrages. The SA suggested I could try a deer scarer. You can get battery operated ones, I think triggered by infrared, that you tune to a speech radio station, and the sound of human voices are supposed to scare them away. I can forgive the cats for incidents like this morning's episode with the shoes, but I really do loathe those ruddy little deer with a passion.
Saturday, 2 February 2013
guests
It was a good lunch. A key rule of enjoying any meal you are hosting is that the food should not require too many last-minute interventions in the kitchen, and should be capable of keeping without spoiling until the party has reached the point where food is required. On that basis I tend to serve my friends and relations boiled things or cold things, and the Systems Administrator opted for roast pork. It isn't meant to be eaten pink so there's no anxiety about over-cooking pork, and it will sit happily for ages once done. Beef was ruled out on the pinkness issue, and because although the SA's yorkshire puddings are excellent, they need too much supervision and demand to be eaten when ready. It was a good piece of pork, and the roast potatoes were fluffy and crisp, the crackling crunchy but not teeth-breaking, and the vegetables cooked through but still with some bite to them. My contribution was pudding, lemon syllabubs and a raspberry shortcake. Everybody had one pudding and some tried both. I only had one, but was part of the minority that still had room for a sliver of cheese.
It isn't natural to eat that much at lunchtime, and we very rarely do. You certainly don't have the energy to do anything for the rest of the afternoon, or what's left of it by the time you've stacked the dishwasher and washed the things that have to be done by hand. But we don't all see each other very often, and it was a party.
Our Ginger loves parties. He loves all human contact, and cannot imagine that anybody doesn't love him, so a room full of extra laps to sit on, and new legs to cover in white and ginger fur, is very heaven. We shut him into the outer hall while we served lunch, and apart from that he was a constant presence. The big tabby is not too keen on visitors, but is extremely interested in the concept of roast pork and cheese, so he had to go out as well, otherwise we'd never have got all the food safely to the table. Trying to get a meal from the kitchen at one end of the house to the dining table at the other end of the house is like solving the problem of the fox, the goose and the boat across the river at the best of times. The big tabby and Our Ginger sat in the outer hall throughout lunch, staring accusingly through the glass door, Our Ginger doing his Simon's Cat act of scrabbling his paws on the glass when he saw anyone coming.
The original mogs disappeared for the duration. We confessed to currently having four cats, when anyone asked, but we could easily have got away with only owning up to two, if we'd remembered to rearrange the food dishes and baskets in the hall to back up our story. Within half an hour of the family departing the originals were back, without any apparent sign of resentment. Indeed, to make up for his lonely day the black cat has now settled down beside me on the sofa, something he doesn't do very often, and is purring.
His sister has taken up residence in the middle of the kitchen table. It is her new craze, and she's been doing it for a few days now. She used to divide her time between lying in the doorway between the inner and outer halls, and lounging on the office chair in front of my desk. We have got used to treading carefully through the half of the doorway that isn't taken up with the cat, and I have learnt to crouch in front of the desk when I need to plug my laptop into my printer. She doesn't like being moved, and she is a creature of strongly held opinions. Her expression from the middle of the kitchen table is thunderous. So far I have managed to budge her up to one end in the mornings so that I can eat breakfast, but she doesn't like sharing her space with the computer. The SA is hopeful that when the weather warms up she will go out more. I am afraid that it will not be very convenient not being able to use the table, but remember that we managed for years without one.
It isn't natural to eat that much at lunchtime, and we very rarely do. You certainly don't have the energy to do anything for the rest of the afternoon, or what's left of it by the time you've stacked the dishwasher and washed the things that have to be done by hand. But we don't all see each other very often, and it was a party.
Our Ginger loves parties. He loves all human contact, and cannot imagine that anybody doesn't love him, so a room full of extra laps to sit on, and new legs to cover in white and ginger fur, is very heaven. We shut him into the outer hall while we served lunch, and apart from that he was a constant presence. The big tabby is not too keen on visitors, but is extremely interested in the concept of roast pork and cheese, so he had to go out as well, otherwise we'd never have got all the food safely to the table. Trying to get a meal from the kitchen at one end of the house to the dining table at the other end of the house is like solving the problem of the fox, the goose and the boat across the river at the best of times. The big tabby and Our Ginger sat in the outer hall throughout lunch, staring accusingly through the glass door, Our Ginger doing his Simon's Cat act of scrabbling his paws on the glass when he saw anyone coming.
The original mogs disappeared for the duration. We confessed to currently having four cats, when anyone asked, but we could easily have got away with only owning up to two, if we'd remembered to rearrange the food dishes and baskets in the hall to back up our story. Within half an hour of the family departing the originals were back, without any apparent sign of resentment. Indeed, to make up for his lonely day the black cat has now settled down beside me on the sofa, something he doesn't do very often, and is purring.
His sister has taken up residence in the middle of the kitchen table. It is her new craze, and she's been doing it for a few days now. She used to divide her time between lying in the doorway between the inner and outer halls, and lounging on the office chair in front of my desk. We have got used to treading carefully through the half of the doorway that isn't taken up with the cat, and I have learnt to crouch in front of the desk when I need to plug my laptop into my printer. She doesn't like being moved, and she is a creature of strongly held opinions. Her expression from the middle of the kitchen table is thunderous. So far I have managed to budge her up to one end in the mornings so that I can eat breakfast, but she doesn't like sharing her space with the computer. The SA is hopeful that when the weather warms up she will go out more. I am afraid that it will not be very convenient not being able to use the table, but remember that we managed for years without one.
Friday, 1 February 2013
the imperfect housewife
It was raining this morning when I woke up, but that was fine. It was forecast to rain, and I was planning on doing the cleaning anyway. I started with the kitchen, which I always do anti-clockwise, starting to the left of the Aga. This might not be the best plan, since it means doing the Aga at the end, by which time I am thoroughly fed up with cleaning. On the other hand, cleaning the Aga is one of those jobs that is capable of expanding to fill the time available, so maybe it is best to leave it until last.
I thought the kitchen couldn't be too bad, since I had a quick wipe round the other day, including the Aga, because the man who services the boiler was coming. He is always delightfully cheerful, his charges are remarkably low, and the boiler so far has not broken down under his ministrations, so it seemed only polite to hoover up the cat fluff and wash the kitchen floor in honour of his visit.
The sinks took a bit of doing. In fact, they still aren't very shiny. I blame this on the fact that our water is laden with minerals that have a special affiliation for steel. I scrubbed away with a green scourer and quantities of bicarbonate of soda and Mr Muscle, but couldn't face getting the limescale remover out. I'm sure it's a scientifically proven fact that chemical cleaning products are bad for you.
After lunch I took a break from cleaning and nipped over to the beekeepers' Membership Secretary's house so that she could countersign a couple of cheques before she disappears on holiday for a fortnight. I come across societies that circumvent their requirement to have two signatures on cheques by the co-signatory signing several blank cheques at a time, for the treasurer to use as required, but that makes me uncomfortable. It would be more honest just to tell the membership that you want to go over to one signature only, if you're going to do that.
Though I say I nipped over, it would be more accurate to say that I drove over very carefully, since yesterday I discovered the front near side tyre on my car had gone flat. I fear it was a casualty of the numerous potholes that have sprung up in recent weeks. The Systems Administrator fitted the spare for me, and I must order a replacement, but am now driving ultra-cautiously, and slowing right down each time I see a potentially pothole-concealing puddle. I realise that this is typical behaviour in the aftermath of an accident, as documented by LTC Rolt in Red For Danger (which everyone should read. Its messages go far beyond the history of railway safety) and that as the weeks and months go by I will get gradually less careful of my tyres, until I find I've spoiled another.
The Membership Secretary gave me a cup of tea, and by the time I got home the SA had washed the kitchen floor, which was kind, since I was expecting to do that when I got back. The remaining stretch of kitchen, which included a set of wall cupboards with glazed doors as well as the Aga, seemed to remain obstinately sticky with odd bits of cat fur attached despite a lot of scrubbing. The SA, seeing me wiping furiously at the cupboard doors which had collected thin and apparently ineradicable lines of grease around each window, said reassuringly that it was only family, and went to wash the downstairs cloakroom, though I promised that was on my list of things to do, once I'd finished the Aga.
I wouldn't win any prizes for housekeeping, but console myself with the thought that a perfectly clean and tidy house is a sign of a wasted life. We are scrupulous about the important things, and have never given ourselves food poisoning in thirty years. The last time I had that was after lunch at the Savoy.
I thought the kitchen couldn't be too bad, since I had a quick wipe round the other day, including the Aga, because the man who services the boiler was coming. He is always delightfully cheerful, his charges are remarkably low, and the boiler so far has not broken down under his ministrations, so it seemed only polite to hoover up the cat fluff and wash the kitchen floor in honour of his visit.
The sinks took a bit of doing. In fact, they still aren't very shiny. I blame this on the fact that our water is laden with minerals that have a special affiliation for steel. I scrubbed away with a green scourer and quantities of bicarbonate of soda and Mr Muscle, but couldn't face getting the limescale remover out. I'm sure it's a scientifically proven fact that chemical cleaning products are bad for you.
After lunch I took a break from cleaning and nipped over to the beekeepers' Membership Secretary's house so that she could countersign a couple of cheques before she disappears on holiday for a fortnight. I come across societies that circumvent their requirement to have two signatures on cheques by the co-signatory signing several blank cheques at a time, for the treasurer to use as required, but that makes me uncomfortable. It would be more honest just to tell the membership that you want to go over to one signature only, if you're going to do that.
Though I say I nipped over, it would be more accurate to say that I drove over very carefully, since yesterday I discovered the front near side tyre on my car had gone flat. I fear it was a casualty of the numerous potholes that have sprung up in recent weeks. The Systems Administrator fitted the spare for me, and I must order a replacement, but am now driving ultra-cautiously, and slowing right down each time I see a potentially pothole-concealing puddle. I realise that this is typical behaviour in the aftermath of an accident, as documented by LTC Rolt in Red For Danger (which everyone should read. Its messages go far beyond the history of railway safety) and that as the weeks and months go by I will get gradually less careful of my tyres, until I find I've spoiled another.
The Membership Secretary gave me a cup of tea, and by the time I got home the SA had washed the kitchen floor, which was kind, since I was expecting to do that when I got back. The remaining stretch of kitchen, which included a set of wall cupboards with glazed doors as well as the Aga, seemed to remain obstinately sticky with odd bits of cat fur attached despite a lot of scrubbing. The SA, seeing me wiping furiously at the cupboard doors which had collected thin and apparently ineradicable lines of grease around each window, said reassuringly that it was only family, and went to wash the downstairs cloakroom, though I promised that was on my list of things to do, once I'd finished the Aga.
I wouldn't win any prizes for housekeeping, but console myself with the thought that a perfectly clean and tidy house is a sign of a wasted life. We are scrupulous about the important things, and have never given ourselves food poisoning in thirty years. The last time I had that was after lunch at the Savoy.
Thursday, 31 January 2013
wind
The Met Office had got it right, although it was one of those days when you wished they hadn't, since it was blowing an absolute hooley. I had to dismiss the idea I'd had of finishing pruning and tying in the climbers under the veranda, a notion which had lasted for about the length of time it took me to fetch the step ladder. I put the step ladder down at the back of the border, and it blew over.
Strong wind is incredibly distracting, in a way that goes beyond the immediate impact of being buffeted. I can feel myself becoming stupider and more clumsy under its influence, more likely to tread on things I didn't mean to step on, or make pruning cuts I immediately regret. I think it is partly the noise, which if you live next to a wood is intense, like being near the sea. It calls up some primeval fear of being drowned, or crushed, and the knowledge that you are robbed of your sense of hearing and some predator or person could creep up behind you, is unsettling at some deep level. Added to that is the more immediate frustration as piles of prunings blow away or your tub of weeds tips over, and the nuisance of flailing branches waiting to grab you by the sleeve, or poke you in the eye.
I ended up hand weeding. Clear of whipping branches or trees that could fall on me, already at ground level so I couldn't fall over or off anything, not using any tool more lethal than a border fork or a pair of secateurs, and not trying to make any structural decisions, it seemed a wind-proof task. It was. There may have been things I hadn't thought of that could have gone wrong, but they didn't. Safe, just not very nice, and not totally effective. The gale made my eyes water, which meant that I couldn't see what I was doing as well as I might have, especially when the tears fell on the inside of my spectacles. Every so often I'd have to stop and wipe my glasses, which meant that after a while they were faintly smeared with mud. I found myself having to put my face very close to the earth from time to time, to look at individual weeds. I pulled up annual grass, and clover, and plantains, and baby goosegrass, and a gazillion tiny ivy seedlings, and little brambles, and small nettles, and scraped up quantities of moss. The moss is a sign of sour, acid, hungry soil.
The weeds were only bad in the top part of the near rose bed where I'd laid a set of paving slabs to indicate a path through to the back of the bed for maintenance, and planted some bulbs, and not replaced the Strulch. It goes to show how effective the Strulch is, and reminds me that I need to buy some more. In fact, I need a lot more, which is a pity, since it will be expensive, and buying composted straw mulch is not nearly so exciting as buying plants. It is a sign of increasing gardening maturity to make oneself spend an appreciable proportion of one's garden budget on the soil, and a lesson I was slow in learning.
By four o'clock I was getting horribly cold, and decided to call it a day. Sunday's forecast is now for it to be mostly dry, and the wind should have blown through by then. We might yet get a crack at the hedges.
Strong wind is incredibly distracting, in a way that goes beyond the immediate impact of being buffeted. I can feel myself becoming stupider and more clumsy under its influence, more likely to tread on things I didn't mean to step on, or make pruning cuts I immediately regret. I think it is partly the noise, which if you live next to a wood is intense, like being near the sea. It calls up some primeval fear of being drowned, or crushed, and the knowledge that you are robbed of your sense of hearing and some predator or person could creep up behind you, is unsettling at some deep level. Added to that is the more immediate frustration as piles of prunings blow away or your tub of weeds tips over, and the nuisance of flailing branches waiting to grab you by the sleeve, or poke you in the eye.
I ended up hand weeding. Clear of whipping branches or trees that could fall on me, already at ground level so I couldn't fall over or off anything, not using any tool more lethal than a border fork or a pair of secateurs, and not trying to make any structural decisions, it seemed a wind-proof task. It was. There may have been things I hadn't thought of that could have gone wrong, but they didn't. Safe, just not very nice, and not totally effective. The gale made my eyes water, which meant that I couldn't see what I was doing as well as I might have, especially when the tears fell on the inside of my spectacles. Every so often I'd have to stop and wipe my glasses, which meant that after a while they were faintly smeared with mud. I found myself having to put my face very close to the earth from time to time, to look at individual weeds. I pulled up annual grass, and clover, and plantains, and baby goosegrass, and a gazillion tiny ivy seedlings, and little brambles, and small nettles, and scraped up quantities of moss. The moss is a sign of sour, acid, hungry soil.
The weeds were only bad in the top part of the near rose bed where I'd laid a set of paving slabs to indicate a path through to the back of the bed for maintenance, and planted some bulbs, and not replaced the Strulch. It goes to show how effective the Strulch is, and reminds me that I need to buy some more. In fact, I need a lot more, which is a pity, since it will be expensive, and buying composted straw mulch is not nearly so exciting as buying plants. It is a sign of increasing gardening maturity to make oneself spend an appreciable proportion of one's garden budget on the soil, and a lesson I was slow in learning.
By four o'clock I was getting horribly cold, and decided to call it a day. Sunday's forecast is now for it to be mostly dry, and the wind should have blown through by then. We might yet get a crack at the hedges.
Wednesday, 30 January 2013
cutting back
My original plan for today was that we would cut back the boundary hedges that separate our garden from the lettuce farm, and the neighbour's field. For weeks the air has periodically resounded with the grinding, crashing sound of the surrounding farmers cutting their hedges with huge mechanical flails, and one by one the lanes have acquired a shorn look as the roadside hedges were cut. At work in the plant centre I've been able to hear mechanised hedge cutters crunching through the hedgerows of Suffolk. It's time to get on with it, before the sap rises too far, and the birds start choosing their nest sites.
If you don't keep a hedge trimmed then after a few years it goes bare and see-through at the bottom, and turns into a row of scrappy trees. For ultimate hedge thickness we would lay it, but don't. It is planted between two runs of rabbit wire, which would get horribly in the way, we wouldn't want to live with no effective hedge for a couple of years while it grew back, and we are not trying to produce a stock-proof enclosure. Cutting it will suffice.
We cut our hedges not with a mechanical flail but with loppers and, for the fatter stems, a chain saw. This is why we, or rather the Systems Administrator, has to cut the hedge, since I don't do chain saws. The SA has not been on a formal course, but has got the protective chaps, the gloves, boots and visor, and after nearly twenty years of learning by doing is probably reasonably safe, though not qualified. We have the henchman platform for working at height, and go about the whole thing quite sensibly. Yesterday, when I saw that today was forecast to be dry, I asked whether tomorrow (today) we could cut the boundary hedges. The SA agreed, with a slightly cautious expression as if we were making a provisional arrangement, and this morning I found out the reason for the caution, which was that it was blowing half a gale of wind.
When I looked at the weather forecast I'd fixated on whether or not it was going to rain, but hadn't taken predicted wind speed into account. Wobbling around on a metal platform two metres above the ground wielding a chain saw and trying to cut through branches which are themselves waving around in the wind is clearly not a good idea, and I had to sadly agree that we'd defer the hedge cutting to another day. I was hoping that maybe we could do it tomorrow, but according to the Met Office five day forecast tomorrow is going to be much like today, with a predicted wind speed of around twenty miles per hour, and gusts double that.
This is how the gardening timetable slips. On Friday it is forecast to pour with rain. On Saturday we have family coming to lunch, then on Sunday it's supposed to rain again, and on Monday I have to go to work. That puts us practically at the end of the first week of February before you know it, which is how the hedges didn't get cut properly last year, and why the task is all the more urgent this time round.
In the meantime I busied myself with pruning shrub and species roses in the bed behind the house, which I call the near rose bed to distinguish it from the far rose bed on the other side of the lawn. Pruning consists mainly of cutting out the dead wood. I occasionally tip back very tall shoots to stop them from becoming too straggly, but they aren't like hybrid teas that you cut hard down. Some varieties make it very clear which are the quick stems and which the dead, since the live ones are a nice bright shade of green while the dead ones are mottled brown. Others require you to pay close attention, since all the stems are brown and twiggy and the buds are tiny, and you have to look carefully to see which stems are even browner, drier, and devoid of the small red leaf buds that are a sign of life. In fact, I need a good light to do those, to avoid chopping off parts of the bush that on closer inspection turn out to be perfectly fine. Bright sunlight like we had today is helpful, as long as you don't stand facing the sun, in which case you won't see a thing.
Each time I found a dead piece I traced back down the stem until I found a live branch, or in some cases to ground level, to cut out the whole of the dead section. New growth is straight and unbranching, and tends to be more upright. Old growth is elaborately branched, and tends to fall outwards from the bush. It typically dies first at the tip, and I take out the ends of the older branches over a season or two, until the point comes when I need to remove them completely. When you start pruning, each plant seems almost impossibly twiggy and congested, then as the pile of prunings mounts on the ground behind you, the bush starts to appear more open, and greener, as if it were more alive. Which, in percentage terms, it is.
I was itching to reduce the willow leafed bay, which is getting far too big for its boots and the spot where I have asked it to grow, also a Cryptomeria which would be more delightful if it were kept in check. However, when I checked the month long forecast with the SA I discovered the Met Office were warning of the possibility of below average temperatures in the second half of February. Better to leave the bay and the conifer until the textbook time and do them in March. Pity, though.
If you don't keep a hedge trimmed then after a few years it goes bare and see-through at the bottom, and turns into a row of scrappy trees. For ultimate hedge thickness we would lay it, but don't. It is planted between two runs of rabbit wire, which would get horribly in the way, we wouldn't want to live with no effective hedge for a couple of years while it grew back, and we are not trying to produce a stock-proof enclosure. Cutting it will suffice.
We cut our hedges not with a mechanical flail but with loppers and, for the fatter stems, a chain saw. This is why we, or rather the Systems Administrator, has to cut the hedge, since I don't do chain saws. The SA has not been on a formal course, but has got the protective chaps, the gloves, boots and visor, and after nearly twenty years of learning by doing is probably reasonably safe, though not qualified. We have the henchman platform for working at height, and go about the whole thing quite sensibly. Yesterday, when I saw that today was forecast to be dry, I asked whether tomorrow (today) we could cut the boundary hedges. The SA agreed, with a slightly cautious expression as if we were making a provisional arrangement, and this morning I found out the reason for the caution, which was that it was blowing half a gale of wind.
When I looked at the weather forecast I'd fixated on whether or not it was going to rain, but hadn't taken predicted wind speed into account. Wobbling around on a metal platform two metres above the ground wielding a chain saw and trying to cut through branches which are themselves waving around in the wind is clearly not a good idea, and I had to sadly agree that we'd defer the hedge cutting to another day. I was hoping that maybe we could do it tomorrow, but according to the Met Office five day forecast tomorrow is going to be much like today, with a predicted wind speed of around twenty miles per hour, and gusts double that.
This is how the gardening timetable slips. On Friday it is forecast to pour with rain. On Saturday we have family coming to lunch, then on Sunday it's supposed to rain again, and on Monday I have to go to work. That puts us practically at the end of the first week of February before you know it, which is how the hedges didn't get cut properly last year, and why the task is all the more urgent this time round.
In the meantime I busied myself with pruning shrub and species roses in the bed behind the house, which I call the near rose bed to distinguish it from the far rose bed on the other side of the lawn. Pruning consists mainly of cutting out the dead wood. I occasionally tip back very tall shoots to stop them from becoming too straggly, but they aren't like hybrid teas that you cut hard down. Some varieties make it very clear which are the quick stems and which the dead, since the live ones are a nice bright shade of green while the dead ones are mottled brown. Others require you to pay close attention, since all the stems are brown and twiggy and the buds are tiny, and you have to look carefully to see which stems are even browner, drier, and devoid of the small red leaf buds that are a sign of life. In fact, I need a good light to do those, to avoid chopping off parts of the bush that on closer inspection turn out to be perfectly fine. Bright sunlight like we had today is helpful, as long as you don't stand facing the sun, in which case you won't see a thing.
Each time I found a dead piece I traced back down the stem until I found a live branch, or in some cases to ground level, to cut out the whole of the dead section. New growth is straight and unbranching, and tends to be more upright. Old growth is elaborately branched, and tends to fall outwards from the bush. It typically dies first at the tip, and I take out the ends of the older branches over a season or two, until the point comes when I need to remove them completely. When you start pruning, each plant seems almost impossibly twiggy and congested, then as the pile of prunings mounts on the ground behind you, the bush starts to appear more open, and greener, as if it were more alive. Which, in percentage terms, it is.
I was itching to reduce the willow leafed bay, which is getting far too big for its boots and the spot where I have asked it to grow, also a Cryptomeria which would be more delightful if it were kept in check. However, when I checked the month long forecast with the SA I discovered the Met Office were warning of the possibility of below average temperatures in the second half of February. Better to leave the bay and the conifer until the textbook time and do them in March. Pity, though.
Tuesday, 29 January 2013
a trip to Britain's oldest recorded town
I had to go into Colchester for a haircut this morning. Last week the news websites were running stories about how hairdressers are among the happiest people in their work, along with gardeners. The stories were based on the findings of a survey conducted by City and Guilds, and are not new. Googling the phrase 'hairdressers happiest workers' brought up versions from May 2005 and June 2008 at top of page one, though in 2008 the poll was led by beauticians, and gardeners didn't get a mention. I considered my hairdresser carefully, to see if she seemed like the happiest person I knew. She always seems on a very even keel, though it is difficult to gauge someone else's mental state when they are concentrating on your hair, and you have taken your glasses off so you can't see their face.
Explanations of why hairdressers, beauticians and gardeners are so happy vary from one article to another. Some reporters say that it is down to having autonomy over your working day and control of how you do your job, others that it makes people happy to make other people look good. That wouldn't explain the happy gardeners, but maybe by extension making a garden look good has the same effect. The survey finds that people doing vocational jobs are happier than white collar workers. Funny, that, in a survey conducted on behalf of an organisation supplying vocational qualifications.
After the haircut I called at the opticians and got them to adjust my glasses, which had become so loose they were in severe danger of sliding off my face each time I looked down. That's another thing that can't be done over the internet, though the Systems Administrator has just ordered a cheap pair of back-up spectacles on-line. I prefer the reassurance of buying my glasses in person from someone who will measure how far apart my eyes are, and make sure the arms of my spectacles don't feel as though they are pressing down on one ear. Then as I was in town I called at the library, the Minories art gallery and the independent bookshop in the High Street, and asked nicely if they would put up one of my posters for the next music society event, or let me put one up.
Apart from that I couldn't think of anything I wanted in Colchester. I read a depressing report recently in one of the local papers about how the council in Manningtree were preparing to soften planning regulations to allow empty shops to be converted to hairdressing salons, or restaurants, or offices, or banks, but not housing. Any alternative use had to be one that provided employment. In this part of the world we have too many shop premises, hence the vacant ones on every high street, and not enough housing. Employment is clearly desirable, but there must be a limit to how many restaurants and hairdressers the inhabitants of north east Essex can support. And when did you last hear of a bank opening branches? Allow some of the surplus retail space to be redeveloped as residential, bring more people to live in the centres of our towns, and you will push up demand for town centre food shops, newsagents, and cafes. Plus creches, dry cleaners, secure mail boxes for people who can't ask for their internet shopping to be left in the porch, and other business models we haven't thought of yet. Forget pop-up shops and community hubs as a long term solution. They aren't going to bring in enough money to keep the roof of their erstwhile shop water-tight. We already have community hubs in the form of public libraries, and we can barely afford to keep those open.
In the afternoon I should have been going to Pilates, but my teacher is ill, so I pruned the buddleias instead. It is practically February, and not forecast to be cold in the next few days, after which it will be February and the textbook time to do it. The leaves of daffodils are emerging in the borders, and I am starting to feel a great sense of urgency to get things pruned, weeded and mulched, before the great spring surge of growth starts in earnest. Rain is forecast later in the week, alas.
Explanations of why hairdressers, beauticians and gardeners are so happy vary from one article to another. Some reporters say that it is down to having autonomy over your working day and control of how you do your job, others that it makes people happy to make other people look good. That wouldn't explain the happy gardeners, but maybe by extension making a garden look good has the same effect. The survey finds that people doing vocational jobs are happier than white collar workers. Funny, that, in a survey conducted on behalf of an organisation supplying vocational qualifications.
After the haircut I called at the opticians and got them to adjust my glasses, which had become so loose they were in severe danger of sliding off my face each time I looked down. That's another thing that can't be done over the internet, though the Systems Administrator has just ordered a cheap pair of back-up spectacles on-line. I prefer the reassurance of buying my glasses in person from someone who will measure how far apart my eyes are, and make sure the arms of my spectacles don't feel as though they are pressing down on one ear. Then as I was in town I called at the library, the Minories art gallery and the independent bookshop in the High Street, and asked nicely if they would put up one of my posters for the next music society event, or let me put one up.
Apart from that I couldn't think of anything I wanted in Colchester. I read a depressing report recently in one of the local papers about how the council in Manningtree were preparing to soften planning regulations to allow empty shops to be converted to hairdressing salons, or restaurants, or offices, or banks, but not housing. Any alternative use had to be one that provided employment. In this part of the world we have too many shop premises, hence the vacant ones on every high street, and not enough housing. Employment is clearly desirable, but there must be a limit to how many restaurants and hairdressers the inhabitants of north east Essex can support. And when did you last hear of a bank opening branches? Allow some of the surplus retail space to be redeveloped as residential, bring more people to live in the centres of our towns, and you will push up demand for town centre food shops, newsagents, and cafes. Plus creches, dry cleaners, secure mail boxes for people who can't ask for their internet shopping to be left in the porch, and other business models we haven't thought of yet. Forget pop-up shops and community hubs as a long term solution. They aren't going to bring in enough money to keep the roof of their erstwhile shop water-tight. We already have community hubs in the form of public libraries, and we can barely afford to keep those open.
In the afternoon I should have been going to Pilates, but my teacher is ill, so I pruned the buddleias instead. It is practically February, and not forecast to be cold in the next few days, after which it will be February and the textbook time to do it. The leaves of daffodils are emerging in the borders, and I am starting to feel a great sense of urgency to get things pruned, weeded and mulched, before the great spring surge of growth starts in earnest. Rain is forecast later in the week, alas.
Monday, 28 January 2013
chilly Monday
I wasn't expecting my car's windscreen to be iced over this morning, having vaguely imagined that the thaw, having started, would continue. Fortunately the traffic at the potential Monday morning bottleneck where the road has to get over and under the railway was extremely light. You never know how that road's going to be. One week you sail straight through, the next you spend fifteen minutes queueing to get under the bridge. The weather has opened up some evil potholes, though. There is a long, deep one on what is already a nasty corner on the A133, which looks as though it is just waiting for some luckless motorcyclist to put a wheel down it.
The owner was very cheerful that trade had been so busy yesterday. Yesterday was the first time since I've worked there that I didn't process any cash transactions at all, only credit and debit cards, and the owner was equally happy that the till had been completely correct, and that the daily reconciliation had taken only a couple of minutes. She went so far as to announce that I was 'marvellous'. This was the first time in nine and a half years that I've been considered marvellous, and I asked if I could have it in writing, but she wasn't going that far.
She had a present for the young gardener, a bag of eight hundred tie-on aluminium labels for the garden. They are used in conjunction with clear, stick on labels, which the young gardener has been preparing over the past couple of weeks while it's been snowy. He spent most of this morning sitting in the cafe sticking the clear labels to the metal tags, and the afternoon attaching them to the plants in the garden with bonsai wire. The trouble with tie-on labels on shrubs is that on specimens that are regularly pruned, the label tends to end up on a branch that's cut off and put on the bonfire by mistake, while on specimens that are not pruned the label gradually disappears inside the shrub as it grows, given that woody plants make new growth from buds on the existing branches. That isn't the only logically possible way of making new growth, and lawn grass and daffodils do it differently, the tip of each leaf remaining the tip while extra growth takes place at the bottom. Occasionally I have to explain this to customers who are having difficulty visualising how a tree is going to develop, and imagine that the junctions existing branches make with the trunk will get higher as the tree grows. They won't.
The most urgent task for the manager and me was to finish the shrub stock take, so it is strange that we didn't start on that until getting on for half way through the working day, at twenty to twelve. The manager had to collate the results of some of the other stock takes, to give the woman who works in the office something to work with, inputting the data into the computer. A mail order customer rang wanting to add a plant to his existing order, which set off a panic about why his existing order that was packaged up on Saturday for collection today was still sitting in our garage at half past ten, instead of being a delivery van on its way to him. Incoming e-mails had to be read and replied to. Our compost suppliers rang up about a delivery of compost, which we need this week because three lots of potting are due to arrive imminently.
The fairies, or rather the weekly van that brings seasonal things in flower, had called very early before we were even there, and left our order of trays of hellebores, primroses, and tiny bulbs, the latter not quite out yet. We put the display tables by the front entrance back together, now the creosote substitute has dried, and I priced up the pots and arranged them in an artistic and enticing fashion, with some coloured stemmed dogwoods and winter flowering viburnums in the middle, to add height and because the hellebores and bulbs alone weren't enough to cover the tables. Looking at the primrose flowers and the fat buds of the irises I felt a surge of enthusiasm about getting back out into the garden. The sun was shining at that point.
By the time we got on to the stock take it was getting windy, and by lunchtime it was spitting with rain. I stock took the shrubs under the canopy outside the shop while the manager was at lunch, and when he got back we moved on to the heated polytunnel. It is heated in the sense that at night we switch on a gigantic paraffin heater, not in the sense of being heated at three o'clock in the afternoon. As I sat in my green plastic chair working my way alphabetically through pages of Excel spreadsheet, with random excursions to other parts of the alphabet each time the manager got to an odd shrub that was out of order, it began to feel as though the blood was congealing in my feet.
When I got home I had some cocoa, and then some tea, and then some more tea. Still, looking on the bright side I'm not due back now until 4 February, and given it's a January year end they should have finished the stock take before then.
Sunday, 27 January 2013
signs of life in the horticultural trade
Last night's rain melted the remaining snow nicely, with only the odd tiny patch skulking here and there as I drove to work. There were some huge puddles in the back lanes, though. I was alone in the plant centre for the first hour, since my young colleague is on holiday, and was beginning to wonder whether the rumour that the manager had booked one of the other part-timers to come in was true, when she appeared. She is a useful but not quite perfect substitute for my young colleague, since she normally works behind the scenes potting and weeding, and while she will operate the tills she doesn't do telephones.
She announced her intention of going to pot bulbs until we got busy or I wanted my tea break, and disappeared across the car park. I thought I might as well get on with the stock take, and went on working my way along the shrub beds through Chaenomeles, Cornus, and Corylus. By the time I got to Enkianthus the rising wind was starting to flap the pages of the spreadsheet about rather aggressively each time I turned over, but I kept going until the phone calls started, and I found myself trying to run around the plant centre in search of Metasequoia glyptostrobides in half a gale of wind, with the phone in one hand and the flapping spreadsheet in the other, while needing a third to turn plant labels the right way up to read them. That was the end of my stock taking for the day, though I thought I'd done quite well getting to the end of Prunus.
The Metasquoia man turned up with his wife, and bought the yellow leafed version 'Gold Rush', which he hadn't previously heard of but liked the sound of, along with three Sorbus and some fertiliser. Someone else came to collect three trees which had been reserved for her since early October, though to be fair she had rung us a couple of times since to ask if we could keep them a bit longer. A couple from Islington arrived via Beth Chatto, having asked there what other nurseries there were in the neighbourhood and been sent to us. They hadn't quite known what to expect, but liked what they saw, and bought a Magnolia tripetala, roses and Sarcococca. Trying to remember what had been stock taken, meaning that sales had to be written down, and what hadn't, made the whole process more complicated than it would have been otherwise.
An elderly lady who had moved house fairly recently, and employed a gardener on our recommendation, was delighted with her gardener and equally delighted with the garden design and build firm the gardener had in turn recommended. Phew. It would have been rather embarrassing if she'd said the gardener we recommended was completely useless. She wanted a standard bay tree in a pot, and chose the particular specimen she liked, which was already planted in a different pot as one of a pair used to grace the cafe earlier in the year. She wanted us to plant up the pot and deliver pot and plant to Colchester. My colleague said the pot was not that heavy and look, she had already lifted it, and took the bay and the new pot away across the car park for re-potting, while I charged on the basis of a standard delivery to Colchester. After the elderly lady had gone my colleague reappeared, saying cheerfully that she didn't think one person could lift the bay in its new pot, since the pot lacked a rim to grip, and the whole thing had come out unexpectedly heavy. Though, she added, she had put plenty of crocks in the bottom. I felt rather crushed that I hadn't charged for a double person delivery, then it occurred to me that the gardener could simply un-pot the bay again, put some of the compost in a bucket, and transport the whole lot in three parts for final assembly at the other end.
My most entertaining customer of the day was my first, who wanted some plants for a tub at work. It turned out that he worked on the tugs in Felixstowe harbour, and that work was not even an office, but a small flowerbed he'd made out of an old box somewhere on the deck of the tugboat. He said his colleagues thought he was mad, but he loved his plants. He was blase about the dangers of his trade, saying that he only worked inside the harbour. Even so, the forces involved are huge, as the memorial in Ramsgate to the crew of an overturned tug testifies. I hope his crocus survive to flower. They don't have the strongest flower stems.
My new horticultural fact for the day is that male and female flowers of sweet bay, Laurus nobilis, are carried on different plants. I never knew that until a customer asked about it, and I looked it up. You don't generally grow bay for the berries.
She announced her intention of going to pot bulbs until we got busy or I wanted my tea break, and disappeared across the car park. I thought I might as well get on with the stock take, and went on working my way along the shrub beds through Chaenomeles, Cornus, and Corylus. By the time I got to Enkianthus the rising wind was starting to flap the pages of the spreadsheet about rather aggressively each time I turned over, but I kept going until the phone calls started, and I found myself trying to run around the plant centre in search of Metasequoia glyptostrobides in half a gale of wind, with the phone in one hand and the flapping spreadsheet in the other, while needing a third to turn plant labels the right way up to read them. That was the end of my stock taking for the day, though I thought I'd done quite well getting to the end of Prunus.
The Metasquoia man turned up with his wife, and bought the yellow leafed version 'Gold Rush', which he hadn't previously heard of but liked the sound of, along with three Sorbus and some fertiliser. Someone else came to collect three trees which had been reserved for her since early October, though to be fair she had rung us a couple of times since to ask if we could keep them a bit longer. A couple from Islington arrived via Beth Chatto, having asked there what other nurseries there were in the neighbourhood and been sent to us. They hadn't quite known what to expect, but liked what they saw, and bought a Magnolia tripetala, roses and Sarcococca. Trying to remember what had been stock taken, meaning that sales had to be written down, and what hadn't, made the whole process more complicated than it would have been otherwise.
An elderly lady who had moved house fairly recently, and employed a gardener on our recommendation, was delighted with her gardener and equally delighted with the garden design and build firm the gardener had in turn recommended. Phew. It would have been rather embarrassing if she'd said the gardener we recommended was completely useless. She wanted a standard bay tree in a pot, and chose the particular specimen she liked, which was already planted in a different pot as one of a pair used to grace the cafe earlier in the year. She wanted us to plant up the pot and deliver pot and plant to Colchester. My colleague said the pot was not that heavy and look, she had already lifted it, and took the bay and the new pot away across the car park for re-potting, while I charged on the basis of a standard delivery to Colchester. After the elderly lady had gone my colleague reappeared, saying cheerfully that she didn't think one person could lift the bay in its new pot, since the pot lacked a rim to grip, and the whole thing had come out unexpectedly heavy. Though, she added, she had put plenty of crocks in the bottom. I felt rather crushed that I hadn't charged for a double person delivery, then it occurred to me that the gardener could simply un-pot the bay again, put some of the compost in a bucket, and transport the whole lot in three parts for final assembly at the other end.
My most entertaining customer of the day was my first, who wanted some plants for a tub at work. It turned out that he worked on the tugs in Felixstowe harbour, and that work was not even an office, but a small flowerbed he'd made out of an old box somewhere on the deck of the tugboat. He said his colleagues thought he was mad, but he loved his plants. He was blase about the dangers of his trade, saying that he only worked inside the harbour. Even so, the forces involved are huge, as the memorial in Ramsgate to the crew of an overturned tug testifies. I hope his crocus survive to flower. They don't have the strongest flower stems.
My new horticultural fact for the day is that male and female flowers of sweet bay, Laurus nobilis, are carried on different plants. I never knew that until a customer asked about it, and I looked it up. You don't generally grow bay for the berries.
Saturday, 26 January 2013
a tale of two stocks
Nobody seemed to mind that I didn't make it into work on Monday. The manager didn't make it in either, and my young colleague who normally works on Mondays was on holiday, so the gardener had to look after the shop for the day. There were no customers, but he couldn't have done any gardening anyway. To judge from the limited number of footprints and trolley tracks in the remaining snow in the plant centre, we didn't have many customers all week. The peacocks had left trails of arrow-shaped prints, three large toes pointing forwards and one pointing back.
If it's late January it must be stock taking time. I volunteered to get on with the trees and shrubs section, and neither of my co-workers tried to wrestle the clip-board out of my hands. They were finishing the stock take in the shop, which was a marginally warmer place to be than outside in the polytunnel. On the other hand, having done the rest of the shop stock take they were familiar with the layout of the stock list, whereas it would have taken me about five minutes of paper shuffling to find every single bag of bird food, dibber, Gertrude Jekyll vase and kneeling mat. And I hate the shop stock take. The list of possible stock items runs to about sixty pages of Excel spreadsheet, which are arranged according to supplier, so that half the time it is not at all obvious where in the spreadsheet you should be looking for galvanised plant supports, or brown plastic saucers, or whatever it is. Half the time the manufacturer's stock codes are not entered on our computer, and it's a challenge to match the products and their packaging to the descriptions on our system.
Apart from the fact that it can get chilly I don't mind spending a day counting trees and shrubs. It's a chance to look at them closely, and having to distinguish between 'Gilt Edge' versus 'Gold Splash' or whatever it may be forces me to notice the differences between varieties, instead of mentally lumping them together as variegated. By the end of business I'd stock taken all the trees and shrubs in the warm tunnel, and got as far as Caragana arborescens on the shrub beds.
As for last night's supper, the Savoy cabbage was delicious, boiled until just wilted and finished with a knob of butter. Savoy cabbages are so beautiful, with their elaborately veined and textured leaves. I must try and convert the Systems Administrator to Savoy cabbage, which is nothing like the boiled slime of the days of school dinners that left the SA with an implacable hatred of cabbage. The chestnuts got about six out of ten for taste, but a maximum of two for presentation, since they looked terribly like something the cats might have sicked up on the hearth rug. Little pieces of bacon and greenish slices of celery stood out among the crumbling lumps of chestnut, while the slug of port specified by the recipe gave the entire dish a vomit-pink tinge.
I was ambivalent about the pheasant. I'm not sure it was even fully defrosted when I started cooking, despite having got it out of the freezer before lunch. I almost never cook frozen meat, and don't have any feel for timings. Nor do I know how to tell whether a pheasant is cooked. I ate one breast when I thought it was probably ready, by which time the chestnuts had been sitting around for a bit too long, and it tasted sort of all right, but not delicious. I'd rather have had chicken. Or cheese. Or even lentils and rice with fried onion. At least I didn't find any shotgun pellets. I lost my nerve about the rest of the bird, and decided to boil the whole thing for stock. I ate some soup once at a friend's house which was truly wonderful, and she said it was made with pheasant stock. I left the stock simmering overnight, but when I looked at it this morning the pheasant and the liquid didn't seem to have combined forces very much, the carcass still seeming remarkably solid and the stock distinctly on the watery side. I shoved it back in the simmer oven and went to work. By this evening things were looking more hopeful. Of course, if I put the stock in the freezer then that defeats the object of getting the pheasant out of it.
If it's late January it must be stock taking time. I volunteered to get on with the trees and shrubs section, and neither of my co-workers tried to wrestle the clip-board out of my hands. They were finishing the stock take in the shop, which was a marginally warmer place to be than outside in the polytunnel. On the other hand, having done the rest of the shop stock take they were familiar with the layout of the stock list, whereas it would have taken me about five minutes of paper shuffling to find every single bag of bird food, dibber, Gertrude Jekyll vase and kneeling mat. And I hate the shop stock take. The list of possible stock items runs to about sixty pages of Excel spreadsheet, which are arranged according to supplier, so that half the time it is not at all obvious where in the spreadsheet you should be looking for galvanised plant supports, or brown plastic saucers, or whatever it is. Half the time the manufacturer's stock codes are not entered on our computer, and it's a challenge to match the products and their packaging to the descriptions on our system.
Apart from the fact that it can get chilly I don't mind spending a day counting trees and shrubs. It's a chance to look at them closely, and having to distinguish between 'Gilt Edge' versus 'Gold Splash' or whatever it may be forces me to notice the differences between varieties, instead of mentally lumping them together as variegated. By the end of business I'd stock taken all the trees and shrubs in the warm tunnel, and got as far as Caragana arborescens on the shrub beds.
As for last night's supper, the Savoy cabbage was delicious, boiled until just wilted and finished with a knob of butter. Savoy cabbages are so beautiful, with their elaborately veined and textured leaves. I must try and convert the Systems Administrator to Savoy cabbage, which is nothing like the boiled slime of the days of school dinners that left the SA with an implacable hatred of cabbage. The chestnuts got about six out of ten for taste, but a maximum of two for presentation, since they looked terribly like something the cats might have sicked up on the hearth rug. Little pieces of bacon and greenish slices of celery stood out among the crumbling lumps of chestnut, while the slug of port specified by the recipe gave the entire dish a vomit-pink tinge.
I was ambivalent about the pheasant. I'm not sure it was even fully defrosted when I started cooking, despite having got it out of the freezer before lunch. I almost never cook frozen meat, and don't have any feel for timings. Nor do I know how to tell whether a pheasant is cooked. I ate one breast when I thought it was probably ready, by which time the chestnuts had been sitting around for a bit too long, and it tasted sort of all right, but not delicious. I'd rather have had chicken. Or cheese. Or even lentils and rice with fried onion. At least I didn't find any shotgun pellets. I lost my nerve about the rest of the bird, and decided to boil the whole thing for stock. I ate some soup once at a friend's house which was truly wonderful, and she said it was made with pheasant stock. I left the stock simmering overnight, but when I looked at it this morning the pheasant and the liquid didn't seem to have combined forces very much, the carcass still seeming remarkably solid and the stock distinctly on the watery side. I shoved it back in the simmer oven and went to work. By this evening things were looking more hopeful. Of course, if I put the stock in the freezer then that defeats the object of getting the pheasant out of it.
Friday, 25 January 2013
from Russia with honey
The Systems Administrator greeted the news that I had offered to house the beekeepers' library in the spare bedroom with a look of mute suffering, combining an I hope you haven't bitten off more than you can chew sort of expression with fear that we would be liable to beekeepers dropping in at odd hours to borrow books. The last time I saw quite that look on the SA's face was the Christmas I announced that my brother had given us a goat, in the brief interval before the penny dropped that this was a remote charitable goat somewhere in the developing world, and not a bleating animal tethered in our garden. I explained that it was only some boxes of books, and I would e-mail the list out to members for them to collect at the monthly meetings.
The SA is otherwise fascinated by the workings of the beekeepers, and frequently describes them in terms of post-revolutionary Russia. The local association is apparently a perfect Soviet, being a self-organising autonomous group at the bottom of the hierarchy. Occasionally, if I get home from a particularly tetchy and non-productive committee meeting, the analogy switches to The Sopranos.
The Soviet comparisons sometimes extend to other areas of life, since one day recently when I was well wrapped up to go out in a thigh length leather coat with sheepskin cuffs and collar that I've had for years, and a close fitting grey knitted woollen hat, the SA said approvingly that it was a great coat, and I looked like a Russian partisan going out to fight the Nazis, only I needed a sub-machine gun tucked under my arm. I think it's a pretty good coat myself, though I'm fairly sure the original sales line in the 2000 Boden catalogue wasn't an invitation to look like a WWII Russian partisan.
Meanwhile, the SA has escaped to Cheltenham with a great mate. As the SA said, I'm going to be out at work this weekend anyway, and they've been eyeing up this meeting for a long time. What was already set to be a good meeting has now acquired a superlative race card, since several races cancelled due to snow in the past couple of weeks have been rescheduled for tomorrow. The Irish horses will be over in force, and may be fitter than the English contenders, since it hasn't snowed over there so training won't have been interrupted. At one point there seemed to be a risk that the races would be pushed back until Sunday, but by then the SA and the SA's great mate had discovered that there was rugby in Bath on Saturday, so they were covered either way. I don't grudge them the trip. It's nice to be allowed one's own space now and then.
In the SA's absence I'm attempting to cook a pheasant that's been lurking in the freezer for rather a long time. We were given it, but the SA finds game too rich. I have never cooked a pheasant before, and this one may be too dry after spending ages in the deep freeze, but I don't suppose it's poisonous. I've got a Savoy cabbage as well, and some frozen chestnuts I'm cooking with bacon and celery. I might listen to a baroque violin CD of Andrew Manze playing Pandolfi while I eat them.
The SA is otherwise fascinated by the workings of the beekeepers, and frequently describes them in terms of post-revolutionary Russia. The local association is apparently a perfect Soviet, being a self-organising autonomous group at the bottom of the hierarchy. Occasionally, if I get home from a particularly tetchy and non-productive committee meeting, the analogy switches to The Sopranos.
The Soviet comparisons sometimes extend to other areas of life, since one day recently when I was well wrapped up to go out in a thigh length leather coat with sheepskin cuffs and collar that I've had for years, and a close fitting grey knitted woollen hat, the SA said approvingly that it was a great coat, and I looked like a Russian partisan going out to fight the Nazis, only I needed a sub-machine gun tucked under my arm. I think it's a pretty good coat myself, though I'm fairly sure the original sales line in the 2000 Boden catalogue wasn't an invitation to look like a WWII Russian partisan.
Meanwhile, the SA has escaped to Cheltenham with a great mate. As the SA said, I'm going to be out at work this weekend anyway, and they've been eyeing up this meeting for a long time. What was already set to be a good meeting has now acquired a superlative race card, since several races cancelled due to snow in the past couple of weeks have been rescheduled for tomorrow. The Irish horses will be over in force, and may be fitter than the English contenders, since it hasn't snowed over there so training won't have been interrupted. At one point there seemed to be a risk that the races would be pushed back until Sunday, but by then the SA and the SA's great mate had discovered that there was rugby in Bath on Saturday, so they were covered either way. I don't grudge them the trip. It's nice to be allowed one's own space now and then.
In the SA's absence I'm attempting to cook a pheasant that's been lurking in the freezer for rather a long time. We were given it, but the SA finds game too rich. I have never cooked a pheasant before, and this one may be too dry after spending ages in the deep freeze, but I don't suppose it's poisonous. I've got a Savoy cabbage as well, and some frozen chestnuts I'm cooking with bacon and celery. I might listen to a baroque violin CD of Andrew Manze playing Pandolfi while I eat them.
Thursday, 24 January 2013
the annual general meeting
I have survived my first AGM as the beekeepers' Treasurer. Indeed, in fourteen years of membership I had never previously been to the AGM. I was worried before the event in case anyone quizzed me too hard about the breakdown of membership fees between money retained at the local level, and subscription income raised on behalf of the county and the national association and passed over to them during the course of the year. All I've done is pay the invoices sent to me by the County Treasurer, but I don't understand the relationship between the breakdown the way I did it for 2012, and the way the previous Treasurer did it in 2011. Fortunately nobody asked about that. I had a fall back position, if I had been given a hard time from the floor, of agreeing sadly that I was an inadequate Treasurer, and suggesting that my inquisitor might like to take the job on.
Everything else passed smoothly as well. The new Chairman is in place, as is the new Vice Chair, Technical Officer and Librarian. The new Librarian is me. I haven't told the Systems Administrator about that yet. We have so many books in the house already, a few dozen more won't make any difference, and since I go to most meetings I'm well placed to dish them out to people who want to borrow them. Mostly, nobody does, but there again most members don't know that we have a library. The space under the spare bed where I thought I could house the library in plastic boxes is currently occupied by an old mattress that got shoved there to get it out of the way, so I am going to have to own up to being the new Librarian since I'll need the SA's help to take it to the dump. It's probably good to be forced to get round to getting rid of the mattress.
A new member who joined at the start of this year was slightly startled to find himself volunteering to join the Committee as New Members' Representative. When a group of people have belonged to a club for years they don't always realise what new members might find confusing or intimidating, so having someone on hand in Committee meetings to put the newcomer's point of view seemed a good idea. Apart from him, and one volunteer from the floor who I don't remember ever meeting before in my life, other appointments were sewn up well in advance, and there wasn't even the ritual of proposing and seconding that the music society goes through.
After the formal proceedings we had a tutorial on how to run a public honey tasting hygienically, from the member who runs the tasting at the Tendring Show. If you don't watch your visitors very carefully it can rapidly become horribly insanitary, with people dipping spatulas they have licked into a second jar, or dropping dandruff into the pot while inspecting it. She runs a very tight ship at the Show, and is extremely firm with would-be tasters, but the more I hear about the things that can go wrong, the less I fancy public tastings of most food-stuffs. It's like those Bombay Mixes they offer in takeaways while you wait for your order. Best not, stick to eating them at home with your friends.
The next Committee meeting is scheduled for 14 February. The new Chairman is fizzing with ideas about name badges, fixing meetings further in advance, new joiner's packs and all the things that have been talked about while making zero progress since I've been on the Committee. None of us minded it being on Valentine's Day, which must say something about the stage of our lives we've all reached.
Everything else passed smoothly as well. The new Chairman is in place, as is the new Vice Chair, Technical Officer and Librarian. The new Librarian is me. I haven't told the Systems Administrator about that yet. We have so many books in the house already, a few dozen more won't make any difference, and since I go to most meetings I'm well placed to dish them out to people who want to borrow them. Mostly, nobody does, but there again most members don't know that we have a library. The space under the spare bed where I thought I could house the library in plastic boxes is currently occupied by an old mattress that got shoved there to get it out of the way, so I am going to have to own up to being the new Librarian since I'll need the SA's help to take it to the dump. It's probably good to be forced to get round to getting rid of the mattress.
A new member who joined at the start of this year was slightly startled to find himself volunteering to join the Committee as New Members' Representative. When a group of people have belonged to a club for years they don't always realise what new members might find confusing or intimidating, so having someone on hand in Committee meetings to put the newcomer's point of view seemed a good idea. Apart from him, and one volunteer from the floor who I don't remember ever meeting before in my life, other appointments were sewn up well in advance, and there wasn't even the ritual of proposing and seconding that the music society goes through.
After the formal proceedings we had a tutorial on how to run a public honey tasting hygienically, from the member who runs the tasting at the Tendring Show. If you don't watch your visitors very carefully it can rapidly become horribly insanitary, with people dipping spatulas they have licked into a second jar, or dropping dandruff into the pot while inspecting it. She runs a very tight ship at the Show, and is extremely firm with would-be tasters, but the more I hear about the things that can go wrong, the less I fancy public tastings of most food-stuffs. It's like those Bombay Mixes they offer in takeaways while you wait for your order. Best not, stick to eating them at home with your friends.
The next Committee meeting is scheduled for 14 February. The new Chairman is fizzing with ideas about name badges, fixing meetings further in advance, new joiner's packs and all the things that have been talked about while making zero progress since I've been on the Committee. None of us minded it being on Valentine's Day, which must say something about the stage of our lives we've all reached.
Wednesday, 23 January 2013
I shop therefore I am
The snow is melting. I switched the heaters off yesterday in the greenhouse and conservatory, and was relieved today when I got up to see that the Met Office had got it right, and the temperature was already comfortably above freezing. The thaw is maddeningly slow, though, and there are still great patches of wet slush covering the gravel, borders, ivy hedges, lawns, and practically everything else in the garden that I'd like to work on.
The newspapers have been debating whether or not the cold snap will be enough to push the UK into a triple dip recession. My initial reaction was that of course foul weather hits economic activity. We cancelled our pub lunch last weekend, and there are lots of people, from the roofer on the news (can't do people's roofs in this weather) to the spate of gardeners on Ken Bruce's Popmaster (ditto), who have not been able to get on with their jobs.
Then I began to wonder how much economic activity had been lost for all time, versus deferred or displaced. After all, our lunch has not actually been cancelled, but rescheduled for early March. True, tables left unfilled last weekend can't be filled retrospectively, but perhaps when we finally go the pub will be busier than it would have been otherwise. Maybe the roofers and gardeners will end up doing the same amount of work in total during 2013, but doing more of it in the summer, when they might have preferred shorter working weeks, and taking an enforced holiday now.
Certainly being stuck indoors only a mouse click away from Amazon and the Boden catalogue has pushed up my level of consumption from where it would have been given milder weather. If I'd had a solid week's gardening I reckon my total expenditure would probably have been twenty pounds' worth of well rotted manure. Maybe double that if things were going well and I had time to go back for a second car load. As it is I have ordered three books, two CDs, some jeans and a cardigan.
Seasonal Spanish Food arrived today, and looks promising. It's by the owner of Brindisa, whose Borough Market outlet I used to visit when I saw more of my former City colleagues, and the food was always very good. The book reviewed well. Large numbers of new copies have started to appear in the on-line remainder bins, which is normally the point to strike. I held off for too long with some of the titles on my wish list, and saw prices rise again when the glut passed. A paperback copy of An Omelet and a Glass of Wine which was described as new has a signature inside the front cover and a distinctly shelf worn look, and would have been more accurately described as used but in good condition with no annotations. That's the trouble with Amazon book vendors. If I were spending a lot of money I'd go direct to a specialist I trusted, but for a fiver I can't be bothered to make too much of a fuss.
The beguilingly titled How to Tune a Fish is from a Northern Irish band Beoga. I bought another of their CDs on the strength of hearing one track on the Radio 2 folk programme back in the reign of Mike Harding, and it was great fun. I am optimistic that the Systems Administrator will enjoy How to Tune a Fish, whereas I know that Philip Glass's violin concerto will have to be a solitary pleasure. The SA's response at being expected to sit through the whole of that would be comparable to my feelings at being asked to watch the whole of a Grand Prix. You know intellectually that other people enjoy these things, but imaginatively you have no idea why. Philip Glass has not arrived yet.
The cardigan looks very hopeful. It is in merino wool, a splendid and hard wearing, non-pilling fibre that has gone infuriatingly out of fashion. I ordered it to go with a dress I bought last year, that has a pattern of rose pink, off-white, dark blue and duck egg green on a greyish blue ground, and turned out to be utterly impossible to match to anything. I spent half an infuriating day trawling the length of Oxford Street trying to find any jacket or cardigan that matched the colours in that dress. Indeed, most of the cardigans I looked at were designed with such skinny arms that they obviously weren't meant to be worn over anything that already had sleeves. I have no idea why the jackets in last year's Boden catalogue seemed to be designed with no reference whatsoever to the colour or style of their dresses, or why most shops cling to the fiction that we never need an outer layer for warmth over our dresses in the rainy and windy season that passes for the English summer. Blue is a notoriously difficult colour to reproduce, and I was not at all confident about matching the dress to a cardigan only seen on-line, but I have draped the cardigan over the dress on a hanger and it seems OK. I need to see the colours together in daylight, and will try it on tomorrow morning when the bedroom is a little warmer, since I don't really fancy peeling off my two layers of fleece now.
The jeans were a compromise between ambition and necessity, since I am slightly fatter than I was before Christmas, but down to one pair of very tired ones from Marks and Spencer. My legs could be more streamlined than they are, but I don't think they are very likely to drop an entire dress size from here, so I might as well order new trousers now rather than in two months time, when I will still be the same size, give or take, and the only remaining stock will be in horrible colours in size 6 or 16.
The newspapers have been debating whether or not the cold snap will be enough to push the UK into a triple dip recession. My initial reaction was that of course foul weather hits economic activity. We cancelled our pub lunch last weekend, and there are lots of people, from the roofer on the news (can't do people's roofs in this weather) to the spate of gardeners on Ken Bruce's Popmaster (ditto), who have not been able to get on with their jobs.
Then I began to wonder how much economic activity had been lost for all time, versus deferred or displaced. After all, our lunch has not actually been cancelled, but rescheduled for early March. True, tables left unfilled last weekend can't be filled retrospectively, but perhaps when we finally go the pub will be busier than it would have been otherwise. Maybe the roofers and gardeners will end up doing the same amount of work in total during 2013, but doing more of it in the summer, when they might have preferred shorter working weeks, and taking an enforced holiday now.
Certainly being stuck indoors only a mouse click away from Amazon and the Boden catalogue has pushed up my level of consumption from where it would have been given milder weather. If I'd had a solid week's gardening I reckon my total expenditure would probably have been twenty pounds' worth of well rotted manure. Maybe double that if things were going well and I had time to go back for a second car load. As it is I have ordered three books, two CDs, some jeans and a cardigan.
Seasonal Spanish Food arrived today, and looks promising. It's by the owner of Brindisa, whose Borough Market outlet I used to visit when I saw more of my former City colleagues, and the food was always very good. The book reviewed well. Large numbers of new copies have started to appear in the on-line remainder bins, which is normally the point to strike. I held off for too long with some of the titles on my wish list, and saw prices rise again when the glut passed. A paperback copy of An Omelet and a Glass of Wine which was described as new has a signature inside the front cover and a distinctly shelf worn look, and would have been more accurately described as used but in good condition with no annotations. That's the trouble with Amazon book vendors. If I were spending a lot of money I'd go direct to a specialist I trusted, but for a fiver I can't be bothered to make too much of a fuss.
The beguilingly titled How to Tune a Fish is from a Northern Irish band Beoga. I bought another of their CDs on the strength of hearing one track on the Radio 2 folk programme back in the reign of Mike Harding, and it was great fun. I am optimistic that the Systems Administrator will enjoy How to Tune a Fish, whereas I know that Philip Glass's violin concerto will have to be a solitary pleasure. The SA's response at being expected to sit through the whole of that would be comparable to my feelings at being asked to watch the whole of a Grand Prix. You know intellectually that other people enjoy these things, but imaginatively you have no idea why. Philip Glass has not arrived yet.
The cardigan looks very hopeful. It is in merino wool, a splendid and hard wearing, non-pilling fibre that has gone infuriatingly out of fashion. I ordered it to go with a dress I bought last year, that has a pattern of rose pink, off-white, dark blue and duck egg green on a greyish blue ground, and turned out to be utterly impossible to match to anything. I spent half an infuriating day trawling the length of Oxford Street trying to find any jacket or cardigan that matched the colours in that dress. Indeed, most of the cardigans I looked at were designed with such skinny arms that they obviously weren't meant to be worn over anything that already had sleeves. I have no idea why the jackets in last year's Boden catalogue seemed to be designed with no reference whatsoever to the colour or style of their dresses, or why most shops cling to the fiction that we never need an outer layer for warmth over our dresses in the rainy and windy season that passes for the English summer. Blue is a notoriously difficult colour to reproduce, and I was not at all confident about matching the dress to a cardigan only seen on-line, but I have draped the cardigan over the dress on a hanger and it seems OK. I need to see the colours together in daylight, and will try it on tomorrow morning when the bedroom is a little warmer, since I don't really fancy peeling off my two layers of fleece now.
The jeans were a compromise between ambition and necessity, since I am slightly fatter than I was before Christmas, but down to one pair of very tired ones from Marks and Spencer. My legs could be more streamlined than they are, but I don't think they are very likely to drop an entire dress size from here, so I might as well order new trousers now rather than in two months time, when I will still be the same size, give or take, and the only remaining stock will be in horrible colours in size 6 or 16.
Tuesday, 22 January 2013
iron kingdom
The iron kingdom of the title is not Essex, which is thawing out quite nicely, despite the continued doom-laden weather predictions with today's lunchtime news. It is Prussia. My auto-didactic long march through Iron Kingdom: the rise and downfall of Prussia 1600-1947 has finally reached page 688, The End. Prussia was dissolved as a nation, and history came to a stop.
History was dreadfully badly taught at all the schools I attended, when it was taught at all. At infants school we did the hypocaust. Underfloor central heating, Roman style. I don't remember any history being taught at the convent school. Aged eleven to thirteen, history lessons consisted of being read facts and dates about the voyages of Columbus, and Acts of Parliament pertaining to women's property rights and the female franchise, which we were required to write down in notebooks using a system of abbreviations of our own devising. The notebooks were then marked for neatness and comprehensibility. I gave up history and did geography for O level.
When I met the Systems Administrator the SA was astounded that anybody could know so little history, let alone someone who had been to an academically selective private school, and Christmases and birthdays for the past thirty years have been taken as opportunities to try and remedy the deficiency. After three decades my realms of historical ignorance are still practically boundless, and so it didn't have to be the Prussians this time round. I've still got most of the history of north and south America to tackle from Columbus onwards (and I'm pretty shaky on Columbus). I'm extremely vague about most places east of Europe, and indeed most of Europe, and my knowledge of England in the eighteenth century is a blur of Lunar Men, Queen Caroline, and Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, with a tiny bit of architecture thrown in. However, I became curious about Prussia.
My first German enthusiasm was for the Hanseatic League, after being sent on an educational trip around the Baltic aged fifteen. Since I have still not managed to track down a good book on the subject it remains a hazy area of interest. A couple of years ago I surprised myself by reading and enjoying Buddenbrooks, saga of a merchant family in the former Hanseatic city of Lubeck, which further piqued my interest in the Baltic fringe, and the religious and cultural gulf between north and south Germany. Then I discovered the semi-autobiographical writings of Sybille Bedford, born Freiin Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck on an impoverished noble estate outside Berlin. An uncle rejected military service, with catastrophic and brutal results. Gunter Grass's Peeling the Onion had me scratching my head over the relationship between Danzig, city of his birth, and the surrounding countryside, which seemed neither wholly German nor Polish.
Curiosity whipped up by novels and memoirs will only get you so far, and last year I bought Max Egremont's Forgotten Land: Journeys among the ghosts of East Prussia. It was interesting and I'd recommend it to anyone who has a thing about Prussia, but it is not a history as such. Instead it is a series of encounters, interwoven with stories of figures from history and fragments of myth. It gives you a vivid flavour, but nothing approaching a coherent narrative. Cue the SA to step forward (it may have been last birthday rather than Christmas) with a proper history.
Iron Kingdom told me quite a few of the things I wanted to know. There are a lot of facts and dates packed into the 688 pages. You start off with a small kingdom in north east Europe, not blessed with great natural resources and hemmed in on both sides by powerful neighbours, and follow how, with a combination of judicious alliances, military action and frantic fence-sitting, it manages to annexe more and more of the surrounding teritories until it is a European power. This is slightly difficult to keep track of at times, partly because Christopher Clark doesn't always follow a strictly linear narrative and tends to loop around in time, and because it really does make it more confusing that almost every King is called Frederick. You get a lot about constitutional developments, which are not easy to grasp from a starting point of knowing practically nothing about the Holy Roman Empire. You get very little economic history, presumably because at 688 pages it is already long enough and there wasn't room. I would have liked a little more myself. Starting from a position of thin infertile soil and no mineral wealth, how exactly did Prussia manage to become so powerful? Surely military organisation will only get you so far?
It gets a 4 star review on Amazon. I deliberately avoided reading any reviews until I'd typed the last paragraph. Some readers loved it and gave it five stars, but there is a long tail of those who didn't. A common criticism is that military actions are glossed over. As a non military historian I was quite happy not to get detailed battle descriptions, but even so I was surprised that the Seven Years War was dealt with in a couple of pages. Some think the build-up to the First World War is skipped over too quickly, and they are probably right. By that stage of the 688 pages I was beginning to flag. Overall it is worth the effort, but only if you have a definite bee in your bonnet about the history of Germany.
Addendum There is a strange postscript. Kaiser William at the end of the war fled to the Netherlands, where he lived out his days on a small country estate outside Utrecht, called Doorn. When I read that it rang bells, and I recalled that a month or two previously I'd heard a mention of Doorn on the radio. After the Kaiser's death the Huis Doorn passed to the Netherlands government, and was run as a museum, a preserved slice of Prussian life in exile. At the end of last year the Dutch government voted to half the funding given to Doorn, as part of their austerity measures, on the grounds that it was not Dutch enough. There is no proposal yet to sell the house or disperse its contents, but historians are afraid that once it is no longer open to the public, that will be the next step. Information on the topic is hard to find if you don't read Dutch or German, since the Huis Doorn's English language website is sketchy, and none of the UK broadsheets seem to have picked up on the story so I haven't found a nice archived page from the Telegraph. Instead my knowledge of the future facing the Huis Doorn is pieced together from chat rooms of unknown reliability. I can see that historic relicts of the Kaiser are unlikely to attract much popular support from most quarters, but it seems mad if as Europeans we can't find the extra £200,000 per annum to keep the museum together and open, the year before the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War.
History was dreadfully badly taught at all the schools I attended, when it was taught at all. At infants school we did the hypocaust. Underfloor central heating, Roman style. I don't remember any history being taught at the convent school. Aged eleven to thirteen, history lessons consisted of being read facts and dates about the voyages of Columbus, and Acts of Parliament pertaining to women's property rights and the female franchise, which we were required to write down in notebooks using a system of abbreviations of our own devising. The notebooks were then marked for neatness and comprehensibility. I gave up history and did geography for O level.
When I met the Systems Administrator the SA was astounded that anybody could know so little history, let alone someone who had been to an academically selective private school, and Christmases and birthdays for the past thirty years have been taken as opportunities to try and remedy the deficiency. After three decades my realms of historical ignorance are still practically boundless, and so it didn't have to be the Prussians this time round. I've still got most of the history of north and south America to tackle from Columbus onwards (and I'm pretty shaky on Columbus). I'm extremely vague about most places east of Europe, and indeed most of Europe, and my knowledge of England in the eighteenth century is a blur of Lunar Men, Queen Caroline, and Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, with a tiny bit of architecture thrown in. However, I became curious about Prussia.
My first German enthusiasm was for the Hanseatic League, after being sent on an educational trip around the Baltic aged fifteen. Since I have still not managed to track down a good book on the subject it remains a hazy area of interest. A couple of years ago I surprised myself by reading and enjoying Buddenbrooks, saga of a merchant family in the former Hanseatic city of Lubeck, which further piqued my interest in the Baltic fringe, and the religious and cultural gulf between north and south Germany. Then I discovered the semi-autobiographical writings of Sybille Bedford, born Freiin Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck on an impoverished noble estate outside Berlin. An uncle rejected military service, with catastrophic and brutal results. Gunter Grass's Peeling the Onion had me scratching my head over the relationship between Danzig, city of his birth, and the surrounding countryside, which seemed neither wholly German nor Polish.
Curiosity whipped up by novels and memoirs will only get you so far, and last year I bought Max Egremont's Forgotten Land: Journeys among the ghosts of East Prussia. It was interesting and I'd recommend it to anyone who has a thing about Prussia, but it is not a history as such. Instead it is a series of encounters, interwoven with stories of figures from history and fragments of myth. It gives you a vivid flavour, but nothing approaching a coherent narrative. Cue the SA to step forward (it may have been last birthday rather than Christmas) with a proper history.
Iron Kingdom told me quite a few of the things I wanted to know. There are a lot of facts and dates packed into the 688 pages. You start off with a small kingdom in north east Europe, not blessed with great natural resources and hemmed in on both sides by powerful neighbours, and follow how, with a combination of judicious alliances, military action and frantic fence-sitting, it manages to annexe more and more of the surrounding teritories until it is a European power. This is slightly difficult to keep track of at times, partly because Christopher Clark doesn't always follow a strictly linear narrative and tends to loop around in time, and because it really does make it more confusing that almost every King is called Frederick. You get a lot about constitutional developments, which are not easy to grasp from a starting point of knowing practically nothing about the Holy Roman Empire. You get very little economic history, presumably because at 688 pages it is already long enough and there wasn't room. I would have liked a little more myself. Starting from a position of thin infertile soil and no mineral wealth, how exactly did Prussia manage to become so powerful? Surely military organisation will only get you so far?
It gets a 4 star review on Amazon. I deliberately avoided reading any reviews until I'd typed the last paragraph. Some readers loved it and gave it five stars, but there is a long tail of those who didn't. A common criticism is that military actions are glossed over. As a non military historian I was quite happy not to get detailed battle descriptions, but even so I was surprised that the Seven Years War was dealt with in a couple of pages. Some think the build-up to the First World War is skipped over too quickly, and they are probably right. By that stage of the 688 pages I was beginning to flag. Overall it is worth the effort, but only if you have a definite bee in your bonnet about the history of Germany.
Addendum There is a strange postscript. Kaiser William at the end of the war fled to the Netherlands, where he lived out his days on a small country estate outside Utrecht, called Doorn. When I read that it rang bells, and I recalled that a month or two previously I'd heard a mention of Doorn on the radio. After the Kaiser's death the Huis Doorn passed to the Netherlands government, and was run as a museum, a preserved slice of Prussian life in exile. At the end of last year the Dutch government voted to half the funding given to Doorn, as part of their austerity measures, on the grounds that it was not Dutch enough. There is no proposal yet to sell the house or disperse its contents, but historians are afraid that once it is no longer open to the public, that will be the next step. Information on the topic is hard to find if you don't read Dutch or German, since the Huis Doorn's English language website is sketchy, and none of the UK broadsheets seem to have picked up on the story so I haven't found a nice archived page from the Telegraph. Instead my knowledge of the future facing the Huis Doorn is pieced together from chat rooms of unknown reliability. I can see that historic relicts of the Kaiser are unlikely to attract much popular support from most quarters, but it seems mad if as Europeans we can't find the extra £200,000 per annum to keep the museum together and open, the year before the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War.
Monday, 21 January 2013
skiving
I didn't try to go to work. I thought yesterday afternoon that I probably wouldn't, as the snow came down, and set my alarm for an hour later than usual, so that if in the light of morning I decided it really wasn't that bad I could still be there before opening time, while if I wasn't going I hadn't dragged myself out of bed at six to no good purpose. I rang in at twenty past eight, five minutes after the official January starting time, and got the answering machine, so clearly my employers were not standing in the office snapping their fingers and waiting for the staff to turn up.
In truth the snow wasn't that deep. If I'd had to get out, if I'd had a crucial appointment or interview or had run out of essential medication, I'd have ventured on to the roads. The postman made it at much his usual time, proving the lanes were not impassable. But it would have been a miserably unpleasant drive to work, and there would have been practically nothing for me to do when I got there. I don't suppose there were many customers today (if any), while the pots of herbaceous plants that still need weeding would have been covered in snow and frozen solid. And I don't know how much snow they had on the Suffolk side of the border, but suspect it may have been more than we had here, thanks to the Clacton coastal strip effect. My memories of driving to work the last time it snowed are still nerve racking enough that I've no desire to repeat the experience.
The Systems Administrator and I retreated back to the study, after breaking through to the sitting room for the weekend. You can burn coal in the grate upstairs, and the SA had bought several bags and was getting paranoid about the rate at which we were chewing through logs. We even put the radiators on, telling each other that we needed to get some heat into that end of the house, and in celebration of the fact that we had a full tank of heating oil. The oil, however, has to last us a minimum of twelve months, so today it was back to burning poplar. By lunchtime the temperature in the study had climbed laboriously from thirteen degrees to eighteen.
The snow was not deep and crisp and even, but already starting to melt slowly in splodgy lumps by the time I got up. I detest melting snow, cold and wet being one of my least favourite combinations. In this I am at one with the cats. The fat indignant tabby spent the day on the chair by my desk. This is where she spends most of her days, whether we are in the study and the stove is lit or not. It is inconvenient, since I don't have the heart to move her when I need to print odd things, and have to work standing, leaning awkwardly forward over the desk. The black cat began his day in the sitting room, becoming increasingly pathetic as he realised that the fire was not going to be lit and the radiator had been turned off, before coming and trying his luck in the study with the rest of us. The big tabby and Our Ginger alternated between sleep and prowling around in circles, intimidating each other off the hearth rug, the footstool, the back of my chair and my lap, in a slow ceaseless swirl of bored cat.
I started off reading in the kitchen since the SA had Radio 2 on, but decided that the kitchen chair was doing my back no favours and that I'd have to ask the SA to listen through headphones so that I could join the party in the study. Our normal routine is that we don't meet much in the mornings. I generally get up first, and am often out in the garden before the SA surfaces, so that our first sustained conversation of the day is at lunchtime. We happily pass twenty-four hours a day in each other's company when we're on holiday, but holidays are different. You spend them charging about looking at things and doing things which in turn gives you lots to talk about. You aren't sitting in one room surrounded by slightly irritable cats, one of you clamped into headphones watching a war film on a laptop, while the other checks all eleven pages of their Amazon wishlist in case anything has got cheap. Devoted couple that we are, we will still be glad when it warms up enough for each to have some more personal space.
After lunch I started making a loaf of bread using Elizabeth David's basic bread recipe. So far it hasn't risen as much as it is supposed to. There is some good news, though. The SA identified that my iPod battery was practically flat despite it living on the docking station which is supposed to charge it, charged it fully, and synched it with my laptop, and it has stopped stuttering.
In truth the snow wasn't that deep. If I'd had to get out, if I'd had a crucial appointment or interview or had run out of essential medication, I'd have ventured on to the roads. The postman made it at much his usual time, proving the lanes were not impassable. But it would have been a miserably unpleasant drive to work, and there would have been practically nothing for me to do when I got there. I don't suppose there were many customers today (if any), while the pots of herbaceous plants that still need weeding would have been covered in snow and frozen solid. And I don't know how much snow they had on the Suffolk side of the border, but suspect it may have been more than we had here, thanks to the Clacton coastal strip effect. My memories of driving to work the last time it snowed are still nerve racking enough that I've no desire to repeat the experience.
The Systems Administrator and I retreated back to the study, after breaking through to the sitting room for the weekend. You can burn coal in the grate upstairs, and the SA had bought several bags and was getting paranoid about the rate at which we were chewing through logs. We even put the radiators on, telling each other that we needed to get some heat into that end of the house, and in celebration of the fact that we had a full tank of heating oil. The oil, however, has to last us a minimum of twelve months, so today it was back to burning poplar. By lunchtime the temperature in the study had climbed laboriously from thirteen degrees to eighteen.
The snow was not deep and crisp and even, but already starting to melt slowly in splodgy lumps by the time I got up. I detest melting snow, cold and wet being one of my least favourite combinations. In this I am at one with the cats. The fat indignant tabby spent the day on the chair by my desk. This is where she spends most of her days, whether we are in the study and the stove is lit or not. It is inconvenient, since I don't have the heart to move her when I need to print odd things, and have to work standing, leaning awkwardly forward over the desk. The black cat began his day in the sitting room, becoming increasingly pathetic as he realised that the fire was not going to be lit and the radiator had been turned off, before coming and trying his luck in the study with the rest of us. The big tabby and Our Ginger alternated between sleep and prowling around in circles, intimidating each other off the hearth rug, the footstool, the back of my chair and my lap, in a slow ceaseless swirl of bored cat.
I started off reading in the kitchen since the SA had Radio 2 on, but decided that the kitchen chair was doing my back no favours and that I'd have to ask the SA to listen through headphones so that I could join the party in the study. Our normal routine is that we don't meet much in the mornings. I generally get up first, and am often out in the garden before the SA surfaces, so that our first sustained conversation of the day is at lunchtime. We happily pass twenty-four hours a day in each other's company when we're on holiday, but holidays are different. You spend them charging about looking at things and doing things which in turn gives you lots to talk about. You aren't sitting in one room surrounded by slightly irritable cats, one of you clamped into headphones watching a war film on a laptop, while the other checks all eleven pages of their Amazon wishlist in case anything has got cheap. Devoted couple that we are, we will still be glad when it warms up enough for each to have some more personal space.
After lunch I started making a loaf of bread using Elizabeth David's basic bread recipe. So far it hasn't risen as much as it is supposed to. There is some good news, though. The SA identified that my iPod battery was practically flat despite it living on the docking station which is supposed to charge it, charged it fully, and synched it with my laptop, and it has stopped stuttering.
Sunday, 20 January 2013
cabin fever
It didn't snow in the night. Again. In the morning the weather radar showed heavy snow out over the North Sea, which dissipated as it came ashore. The wind had dropped, which was a relief, since it makes the house even more difficult to heat. I sat at the kitchen table near the Aga until the Systems Administrator had got the fire going. By lunchtime it was snowing gently, and the BBC website was talking about heavy snow at Chelmsford and difficult driving conditions and a crash on the A12, which made me feel better about cancelling lunch in the pub (on reflection a very selfish reaction, since I should have been thinking about the crash victims).
It's been such a wasted week, I feel I should have accomplished something in the time. At least polished off the history of Prussia I've been working my way through since Christmas. Really with a whole week at my disposal I should have mastered the basics of a foreign language, or bashed out the first two and a half chapters of what might have turned out to be the next Harry Potter or Fifty Shades of Grey. I haven't. There is something about the insidious creeping cold, and the awareness of being stuck indoors by circumstances and not choice, that is deeply inimical to creativity.
Instead I have spent a great deal of time surfing the newspaper websites, and reading the first half of Katie Caldesi's Italian Cookery Course, picked up in hardback (new) for a mere six pounds (plus delivery) from an Amazon vendor. It is still available at that price on the Amazon website, and I recommend it highly. True, I haven't actually cooked anything from it yet, but the recipes sound as though they ought to work, and there is a lot of technical advice about things like making pasta. Twenty-nine out of thirty-one Amazon reviewers give it five stars, and the other two give it three. I would only give it six out of ten for design, since there are too many different fonts and random coloured pages for my taste, but at that price for over four hundred recipes from someone who does actually run an Italian cookery school and two restaurants, I'm not grumbling.
I made some soup, not out of a book but invented from first principles of country soup. Leeks and onions sliced very fine, potatoes diced very small, softened in butter for about quarter of an hour and then simmered in chicken stock with the last bits of a gammon joint, shredded finely. The soup was good. The milk rolls were OK, but the dough took an age to double in size during the first proving, and formed a skin on top in the process. I was experimenting with clingfilm, but am going back to my damp tea towel, even though the bread book tells me not to use it because it will chill the dough. Then the tops of the rolls caught slightly, even though I don't think the Aga was as hot as the temperature suggested in the book. It is a very non-linear art, converting conventional oven settings to positions in an Aga. They tasted quite good. At lunch today I ate one of mine, reheated, followed by a supermarket soft white roll, and the home made one tasted more of bread, or indeed of anything.
I booked a ticket on-line for Manet, after reading an article about how well advance ticket sales were going. I opted for a Tuesday in March, after the initial rush and before the closing panic, though I dare say it will be busy anyway. I was going for a date in February, then decided there was no point in choosing a week when we might still have wintry weather, since the trains would probably be shot. There were disruptions on three days out of five last week according to the papers, with snow, failed trains, failed signals, and a general failure of will to live.
I thought about buying a smart phone, without reaching the point where I clicked on a Buy Now button. Which phone? Which network provider? I read an article about research conducted into people's jam buying habits, which found that customers given more choice ended up buying less jam than those faced with a simpler decision. That's how I feel about internet-enabled telephones. Will I regret the compromise if I opt for the reduced pixel budget Samsung instead of the SII (by now SIII) recommended to me by someone much more tech savvy than me, who had done extensive research? How many megabites do I need? Can anybody explain 3 Mobile's pay-as-you-go pricing packages, which are about as intuitively clear as mud or the concept of an ethical foreign policy? Do I even need a new phone? Exactly the same number of people will try to contact me, with the same frequency and about the same things, whether I have a smart phone or not. It's not as though in upgrading my phone I upgrade my lifestyle, suddenly acquiring a whole new Contacts list pressing me with first night invitations and Wildean bon mots.
The Systems Administrator had a good idea for an app for chicken minding, if we could fit a miniature transponder to the leg of each chicken. Then we could track their whereabouts in the garden on-screen. It is a drawback that miniature transponders are still rather expensive, and the SA thought the GPS signal would only allow us to locate each chicken to around thirty feet, which is a large margin of error when you are looking for something the size of a chicken. I thought the US military had stopped degrading the signal. We argued about this for some time, inconclusively.
It will be a relief when the cold snap ends, and I can get out more.
It's been such a wasted week, I feel I should have accomplished something in the time. At least polished off the history of Prussia I've been working my way through since Christmas. Really with a whole week at my disposal I should have mastered the basics of a foreign language, or bashed out the first two and a half chapters of what might have turned out to be the next Harry Potter or Fifty Shades of Grey. I haven't. There is something about the insidious creeping cold, and the awareness of being stuck indoors by circumstances and not choice, that is deeply inimical to creativity.
Instead I have spent a great deal of time surfing the newspaper websites, and reading the first half of Katie Caldesi's Italian Cookery Course, picked up in hardback (new) for a mere six pounds (plus delivery) from an Amazon vendor. It is still available at that price on the Amazon website, and I recommend it highly. True, I haven't actually cooked anything from it yet, but the recipes sound as though they ought to work, and there is a lot of technical advice about things like making pasta. Twenty-nine out of thirty-one Amazon reviewers give it five stars, and the other two give it three. I would only give it six out of ten for design, since there are too many different fonts and random coloured pages for my taste, but at that price for over four hundred recipes from someone who does actually run an Italian cookery school and two restaurants, I'm not grumbling.
I made some soup, not out of a book but invented from first principles of country soup. Leeks and onions sliced very fine, potatoes diced very small, softened in butter for about quarter of an hour and then simmered in chicken stock with the last bits of a gammon joint, shredded finely. The soup was good. The milk rolls were OK, but the dough took an age to double in size during the first proving, and formed a skin on top in the process. I was experimenting with clingfilm, but am going back to my damp tea towel, even though the bread book tells me not to use it because it will chill the dough. Then the tops of the rolls caught slightly, even though I don't think the Aga was as hot as the temperature suggested in the book. It is a very non-linear art, converting conventional oven settings to positions in an Aga. They tasted quite good. At lunch today I ate one of mine, reheated, followed by a supermarket soft white roll, and the home made one tasted more of bread, or indeed of anything.
I booked a ticket on-line for Manet, after reading an article about how well advance ticket sales were going. I opted for a Tuesday in March, after the initial rush and before the closing panic, though I dare say it will be busy anyway. I was going for a date in February, then decided there was no point in choosing a week when we might still have wintry weather, since the trains would probably be shot. There were disruptions on three days out of five last week according to the papers, with snow, failed trains, failed signals, and a general failure of will to live.
I thought about buying a smart phone, without reaching the point where I clicked on a Buy Now button. Which phone? Which network provider? I read an article about research conducted into people's jam buying habits, which found that customers given more choice ended up buying less jam than those faced with a simpler decision. That's how I feel about internet-enabled telephones. Will I regret the compromise if I opt for the reduced pixel budget Samsung instead of the SII (by now SIII) recommended to me by someone much more tech savvy than me, who had done extensive research? How many megabites do I need? Can anybody explain 3 Mobile's pay-as-you-go pricing packages, which are about as intuitively clear as mud or the concept of an ethical foreign policy? Do I even need a new phone? Exactly the same number of people will try to contact me, with the same frequency and about the same things, whether I have a smart phone or not. It's not as though in upgrading my phone I upgrade my lifestyle, suddenly acquiring a whole new Contacts list pressing me with first night invitations and Wildean bon mots.
The Systems Administrator had a good idea for an app for chicken minding, if we could fit a miniature transponder to the leg of each chicken. Then we could track their whereabouts in the garden on-screen. It is a drawback that miniature transponders are still rather expensive, and the SA thought the GPS signal would only allow us to locate each chicken to around thirty feet, which is a large margin of error when you are looking for something the size of a chicken. I thought the US military had stopped degrading the signal. We argued about this for some time, inconclusively.
It will be a relief when the cold snap ends, and I can get out more.
Saturday, 19 January 2013
no snow
The promised heavy snow didn't materialise overnight. We had a light dusting, but no more. The authorities are still predicting the worst, with stern warnings on the BBC Essex website from the police to motorists to Be Prepared. There is heavy snow shown throughout Sunday on the Met Office five day forecast for Colchester, and regional warnings for snow and ice stretching out until Tuesday, when, rather prosaically, it is going to rain. It's going to be rather a let-down if, after all this anticipation of ferocious weather and precautionary cancellation of tomorrow's lunch, nothing much happens in Essex after all.
I needn't have insisted on taking my beekeepers accounts over yesterday evening to our examiner in Clacton if I'd known it wasn't going to snow heavily in the night. I thought that if and when it did snow hard I'd never get there at all, and the AGM is on Thursday. Clacton seafront is a pretty desolate spot in January after dark, even when it's not snowing. The red warning lights on the wind turbines out on the Gunfleet have an air of eerie desolation, and light up the sea just enough to show you how unpleasant it is. On a windy night like yesterday the cold cuts through to your bones.
The examiner rang mid morning, to ask about the subscriptions included in expenses. I explained that these were repayments of subs overpaid in error, plus the bank reversing out a cheque which bounced. He didn't ring again, and as the morning wore on I thought this was a good omen. After lunch he e-mailed to say he approved the accounts, which was a relief. They are rather untidy accounts, income being a hybrid of gross income, and surpluses on events banked by the organisers after deducting costs. I was afraid that a proper accountant might object to them, though I had done my best with the information presented to me by my fellow club members. Fortunately it turns out that most small club accounts look like that.
The Systems Administrator's great friend in Hitchin is Treasurer of the local cricket club, whose income includes match fees. I never thought about how you would structure the membership fees of a village cricket club, but apparently it is very cheap to join, then you pay per match if you play, to cover direct costs of the match including balls and your tea, as well as a contribution to the club's running costs. It's something like a tenner a game, which sounded quite a lot to me, but I suppose you should view it as similar to a gym membership. In theory the captain collects the match fees from his players on the day. In theory. In practice members run up tabs then pay for several matches at once, so that it's quite complicated from the Treasurer's point of view keeping track of who is fully paid up, versus who still owes. Remind me not to offer to help with the finances of any village cricket clubs.
After lunch I started off the dough for some milk rolls, going back to my ancient Good Housekeepers cookery book. The bread book I used for the wholemeal recipe and the stollen, which both worked, is rather sniffy when it comes to rolls, talking about how the flavour is improved by two stage fermentation processes. That would be fine if I'd started off stage one yesterday, but I didn't. I just want some rolls to go with the soup for supper.
Settling down to cook brought the unwelcome discovery that my iPod was malfunctioning. It normally lives on a docking station in the kitchen, whose two small speakers produce remarkably decent sound quality, and it was working beautifully before Christmas, but is now jumping slightly within tracks, like the stylus on a turntable if the floor is vibrating. The SA tried wriggling the iPod on its connector in case the connection was faulty, but that didn't improve matters, then tested the iPod quickly with headphones, since my hands were covered in dough and I don't have any headphones. It still jumped. That means it is the iPod and not the docking station. Blast. It is a fairly old iPod, but not that heavily used. I'm not impressed. Look at our Marantz stereo system, still going strong and only needing a new amp after nearly twenty years.
If we don't get heavy snow tomorrow, or any snow at all, then there will have been no need to cancel our pub lunch. I wish the forecasters would get it right. Over-forecasting everything just to be on the safe side might make the Met Office and authorities feel better, but it doesn't help the rest of us.
I needn't have insisted on taking my beekeepers accounts over yesterday evening to our examiner in Clacton if I'd known it wasn't going to snow heavily in the night. I thought that if and when it did snow hard I'd never get there at all, and the AGM is on Thursday. Clacton seafront is a pretty desolate spot in January after dark, even when it's not snowing. The red warning lights on the wind turbines out on the Gunfleet have an air of eerie desolation, and light up the sea just enough to show you how unpleasant it is. On a windy night like yesterday the cold cuts through to your bones.
The examiner rang mid morning, to ask about the subscriptions included in expenses. I explained that these were repayments of subs overpaid in error, plus the bank reversing out a cheque which bounced. He didn't ring again, and as the morning wore on I thought this was a good omen. After lunch he e-mailed to say he approved the accounts, which was a relief. They are rather untidy accounts, income being a hybrid of gross income, and surpluses on events banked by the organisers after deducting costs. I was afraid that a proper accountant might object to them, though I had done my best with the information presented to me by my fellow club members. Fortunately it turns out that most small club accounts look like that.
The Systems Administrator's great friend in Hitchin is Treasurer of the local cricket club, whose income includes match fees. I never thought about how you would structure the membership fees of a village cricket club, but apparently it is very cheap to join, then you pay per match if you play, to cover direct costs of the match including balls and your tea, as well as a contribution to the club's running costs. It's something like a tenner a game, which sounded quite a lot to me, but I suppose you should view it as similar to a gym membership. In theory the captain collects the match fees from his players on the day. In theory. In practice members run up tabs then pay for several matches at once, so that it's quite complicated from the Treasurer's point of view keeping track of who is fully paid up, versus who still owes. Remind me not to offer to help with the finances of any village cricket clubs.
After lunch I started off the dough for some milk rolls, going back to my ancient Good Housekeepers cookery book. The bread book I used for the wholemeal recipe and the stollen, which both worked, is rather sniffy when it comes to rolls, talking about how the flavour is improved by two stage fermentation processes. That would be fine if I'd started off stage one yesterday, but I didn't. I just want some rolls to go with the soup for supper.
Settling down to cook brought the unwelcome discovery that my iPod was malfunctioning. It normally lives on a docking station in the kitchen, whose two small speakers produce remarkably decent sound quality, and it was working beautifully before Christmas, but is now jumping slightly within tracks, like the stylus on a turntable if the floor is vibrating. The SA tried wriggling the iPod on its connector in case the connection was faulty, but that didn't improve matters, then tested the iPod quickly with headphones, since my hands were covered in dough and I don't have any headphones. It still jumped. That means it is the iPod and not the docking station. Blast. It is a fairly old iPod, but not that heavily used. I'm not impressed. Look at our Marantz stereo system, still going strong and only needing a new amp after nearly twenty years.
If we don't get heavy snow tomorrow, or any snow at all, then there will have been no need to cancel our pub lunch. I wish the forecasters would get it right. Over-forecasting everything just to be on the safe side might make the Met Office and authorities feel better, but it doesn't help the rest of us.
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