This morning, miraculously, it was not raining. I'm sure that rain was forecast through most of the end of last week, possibly even heavy rain, but it didn't arrive on the day. In a fit of optimism I decided to start clearing the beds in the vegetable patch. I think it was after reading an article by Jay Rayner in the Guardian, about how difficult life was for UK farmers and how the price of food was going to go up, and I felt exasperated with myself, that I had all this land and ought to be able to grow some food on some of it. Or my inner earth mother might have been boosted by the success of my latest attempt at making wholemeal bread, which rose up convincingly and really did look and taste like something you might be served in quite a good gastropub, and not like a brick. Whatever the reason, I had a sudden vision of abundant leeks and broad beans.
Although I didn't even try to grow vegetables last year, the plot wasn't left entirely untouched, as I sprayed the beds with glyphosate a couple of times. I never said I was going to grow vegetables organically, and having let the vegetable patch go extremely fallow a few years ago, I knew how long properly established weeds took to dig out, and didn't want to have to do it again. Once the more rampant weed grasses take hold, and you have the deep roots of mature docks to contend with, winning back the soil is a painfully slow task. Most of the current crop of weeds are fairly young, and dig out without too much difficulty, using a small and very sharp ladies' border fork from a kneeling position, as if it were a trowel.
I was keen to clear the asparagus bed before the asparagus started to emerge. That was covered with Strulch, and had stayed fairly weed free, except that strawberry runners had found their way across the path from the bed that is supposed to have strawberries in it, and had done a pretty good job of turning the asparagus bed into a second strawberry patch. I didn't think that a permaculture mixture of asparagus and strawberries would work, though it felt rather wasteful pulling young strawberry plants up as if they were weeds. Which of course in this context they were. The asparagus bed was planted in two tranches, the first of which is well established by now, but I'm not sure that some young roots I dropped into the space at the end have survived. I think they were planted just before one of our more severe droughts, and I'm not sure they got watered enough to take. It sounds terribly wasteful, and is, buying asparagus roots and planting them and then not watering them properly, but with all the other replanting I had to do to replace winter losses, it was very difficult to keep up.
Two robins watched me, beady eyed and eager for worms and other freshly exposed trifles. Robins are sensible birds. They understand I am far too large and slow to catch them, and in any case mean them no harm, and come and avail themselves of the delicacies on offer when I weed. Blackbirds eat worms, and no blackbird in this garden has ever witnessed me do anything even remotely hostile to a blackbird, while they have seen me fill up the bird table loads of times, but they won't come gardening with me.
My first passes of the vegetable beds are fairly rough and ready. I'm digging out what perennial roots I can find, but will be ready with the glyphosate to hit the leaves that emerge from pieces that I've missed. Some of the beds need more compost, which will have to come off the weedy heap that is the remains of the great compost barrow. I want to get rid of the heap anyway, so tipping it on the vegetable beds will fulfil two aims in one operation. It means the veg patch may acquire some new and exotic weeds, but it has so many already, it won't really matter if it starts throwing up Verbena bonariensis as well as everything else.
At a quarter to three I had reluctantly to remove myself and start scrubbing the dirt out from under my fingernails, since it was the last concert of the present music society season at four. We had a Lithuanian string quartet. The programme said they had been playing for thirty years and done in excess of two thousand concerts, but I think that must have been thirty years in the grandfather's axe sense, unless the viola player was an exceptionally precocious infant. The programme notes said that the opening Grieg had distinct overtones of Norwegian folk music, and it certainly put me in mind of an album by Shetland fiddler Aly Bain duetting with Danish-Norwegian (living in Sweden) Ale Moller (it's called Fully Rigged and I recommend it highly).
This was followed by a piece by a famous Lithuanian composer, dedicated to the quartet's cellist, who is his brother, thus keeping to the convention of putting the difficult, twentieth century element of the programme immediately before the interval, so that people can cheer themselves up with refreshments afterwards. If you put it in the second half there's a risk they might make their escape during the break. It was quite nice not to spend the whole of the interval frantically pouring tea and washing cups. The second half brought Schubert's Rosamunde quartet, and the man sitting next to me told me cheerfully that he had put his hearing aid in for the Schubert. Some quartets don't do encores, but this one did, and we got a charming lullaby by a composer whose name nobody caught, though the chairman said she would find out.
I was pleased to see that the customers I was chatting to last Monday did come, and brought some of their family with them. I really do very little on the music society committee apart from help with the catering, but it is rather wonderful that people like the booking secretary and chairman go to as much trouble as they do to bring professional chamber musicians with international careers to perform in obscure corners of the English countryside. Dear reader, the next time that you see a poster for such an event, or a tiny mention in your local paper, do pause for a moment and think about whether you might like to go. If quality music is to happen beyond London's south bank and the august spaces of the Wigmore Hall and St John's Smith Square, it needs public support.
Sunday, 17 March 2013
Saturday, 16 March 2013
too much winter, too long
I think the weather is starting to drive me insane. The cold. The almost incessant wind. The rain. The drizzle. The snow. The everlasting greyness. I think I have seen the sun twice since Christmas. The house full of bored and irritated cats, getting under my feet or chewing each other's ears. The impossibility of getting even a quarter of the things done in the garden that I need to do. The cold.
I went into the spare bedroom last night, to hunt through the boxes of beekeeping books for two that somebody wanted to borrow. It felt icy, even wearing two heavy, long-sleeved cotton t-shirts underneath my extremely dense, pure wool, knitted in Iceland sweater. They understand cold in Iceland. This morning I went down to Clacton to hand over the books, since I'd promised to take them along to the committee meeting on Thursday and completely forgotten them. Walking along the sea front, watching the turbines on the Gunfleet rotate sulkily, the wind cut through me like a knife. Mine was the only car in the car park by the Martello tower at the west end of the parade, and the beach was deserted.
I met my fellow committee member at the bank, where he had an appointment to talk finance and I had some money from the beekeepers' raffle and refreshments to pay in. We huddled in a doorway waiting for the bank to open, like a pair of smokers save for the absence of cigarettes, and exchanged views on how the committee was going, and I gave him the plastic bag containing Microscopy on a Shoestring and Anatomy and Dissection of the Honey Bee. Afterwards I thought that maybe one needed to be a little careful furtively exchanging plastic bags in doorways in a place like Clacton. It could be liable to misinterpretation. Walking back along the front the wind brought tears to my eyes. Tendring council had done a brave job with the spring bedding, but even bright yellow polyanthus were not enough to make the gardens look cheerful on such a day. The only other people out were a few chilly-looking dog walkers.
I noticed that the council had put up waymarks along the railings, to encourage people to exercise. The full round trip of the Clacton Seafront and Garden Walk covers 1,870 metres and walking it should burn up to 360 calories (or more on a day like today), though the effect will be negated if you end your trip by treating yourself to breakfast at the Toby carvery. I didn't.
At the plant centre they must be tearing their hair out. It is the annual spring jamboree, but who wants to go on a guided garden tour and buy plants in weather like this? I am rather selfishly relieved it isn't my weekend to work, since the atmosphere at an event that should have been a big, important day but has been blighted by weather is always depressing. The forecast for next week is almost as bad, not as windy but with light rain expected every day, up to and including Wednesday. One of the people at the local garden centre where I buy the mushroom compost was muttering yesterday about emigrating, and one of the girls there told me that last Monday, when it snowed, the snow came in through the greenhouse vents, and by the time she got home, she was so cold she'd forgotten what her own name was. The news on the farming programme this morning was of fields sitting unsown because they were too wet for the farmers to get machinery on to them, and crops standing still instead of growing, because of the cold. Surely spring must come soon, before we are all mad, or bankrupt?
I went into the spare bedroom last night, to hunt through the boxes of beekeeping books for two that somebody wanted to borrow. It felt icy, even wearing two heavy, long-sleeved cotton t-shirts underneath my extremely dense, pure wool, knitted in Iceland sweater. They understand cold in Iceland. This morning I went down to Clacton to hand over the books, since I'd promised to take them along to the committee meeting on Thursday and completely forgotten them. Walking along the sea front, watching the turbines on the Gunfleet rotate sulkily, the wind cut through me like a knife. Mine was the only car in the car park by the Martello tower at the west end of the parade, and the beach was deserted.
I met my fellow committee member at the bank, where he had an appointment to talk finance and I had some money from the beekeepers' raffle and refreshments to pay in. We huddled in a doorway waiting for the bank to open, like a pair of smokers save for the absence of cigarettes, and exchanged views on how the committee was going, and I gave him the plastic bag containing Microscopy on a Shoestring and Anatomy and Dissection of the Honey Bee. Afterwards I thought that maybe one needed to be a little careful furtively exchanging plastic bags in doorways in a place like Clacton. It could be liable to misinterpretation. Walking back along the front the wind brought tears to my eyes. Tendring council had done a brave job with the spring bedding, but even bright yellow polyanthus were not enough to make the gardens look cheerful on such a day. The only other people out were a few chilly-looking dog walkers.
I noticed that the council had put up waymarks along the railings, to encourage people to exercise. The full round trip of the Clacton Seafront and Garden Walk covers 1,870 metres and walking it should burn up to 360 calories (or more on a day like today), though the effect will be negated if you end your trip by treating yourself to breakfast at the Toby carvery. I didn't.
At the plant centre they must be tearing their hair out. It is the annual spring jamboree, but who wants to go on a guided garden tour and buy plants in weather like this? I am rather selfishly relieved it isn't my weekend to work, since the atmosphere at an event that should have been a big, important day but has been blighted by weather is always depressing. The forecast for next week is almost as bad, not as windy but with light rain expected every day, up to and including Wednesday. One of the people at the local garden centre where I buy the mushroom compost was muttering yesterday about emigrating, and one of the girls there told me that last Monday, when it snowed, the snow came in through the greenhouse vents, and by the time she got home, she was so cold she'd forgotten what her own name was. The news on the farming programme this morning was of fields sitting unsown because they were too wet for the farmers to get machinery on to them, and crops standing still instead of growing, because of the cold. Surely spring must come soon, before we are all mad, or bankrupt?
Friday, 15 March 2013
the name game
David. George. Henry. Joyce. Gilbert. Franklin. Tracey. Cameron. Stella. Michael. John. Giles. Grace. Alexander. Allen. Dick. James. Norman. Morgan. Graham. Stanley. Spencer. Lawrence. Bruce. Oliver. Owen. Edgar. Terry. Joseph. Thomas. Russell. Simon. Howard. Paul. Charles. Stuart. Lee. Grant. Lewis. Rose. Fraser. Kenneth. Jackson. Raymond. Nicholas. Martin.
It must create confusion sometimes when you have to introduce yourself, or register for something. I used to deal with a stockbroker called David George, a long time ago. If he gave his name as George would that be understood as his surname, or would the person he was speaking to assume he was being informal and had gone straight to first name terms?
Most of the first-name, second-name examples I can think of are male, when used as forenames. I was pushing it including Stella. While Frank Stella is a famous American artist, there aren't any Stellas in the Colchester phone book. There again, there aren't many people of Italian descent in the Colchester phone book. Perhaps I'm struggling to find examples due to some sort of cognitive bias, but I don't think so. Sinister evidence of the patriarchy embedded in our language?
There is another raft of first names that become second names by the addition of a final S. Williams. Rogers. Stevens. Janes. Richards. Phillips. Edwards. Roberts. Matthews. I slipped Janes in there, but most of these names seem to be masculine as well, and Janes isn't exactly common. Anyway, first names that require extra letters to become second names don't count for this exercise.
Then there are the names that can be male or female. Evelyn Waugh married another Evelyn (unhappily, as it turns out,) and a whole detective story hinges on the fact that a child called Evelyn reappears in adulthood (bent on vengeance) as a woman called Evie. If you are meeting a Stacey or a Kelly for the first time you wouldn't know quite which to expect. A Robin might be a woman, especially in America. Man Ray's assistant, one-time lover and lifelong friend Lee Miller was a woman. Ruby Walsh is indubitably a man, though he is the only non-female Ruby I can think of. More common are the unisex abbreviations. Nicky. Stevie. Sam. Charlie. The diminutive final y or ie gives them a sort of metrosexual connotation when applied to men. I feel as though a man called Nicky would be much more likely to be a hairdresser than a steel fabricator. First names that sound the same but are spelt differently don't count, so you can't include Leslie and Lesley.
Intriguingly, Evelyn, Stacey, Kelly and Lee don't stop at being first names for both men and women, but will do as surnames as well. Imagine being called Stacey Kelly. The scope for confusion would be practically endless.
Got the link yet? Of course you have. They are all first names that function equally well as surnames, or vice versa. Henry James or James Henry? George Michael or Michael George? Paul Simon, Simon Paul? Either sounds equally normal, equally correct, though some orders scan better than their opposite. You could find lots of other examples if you wanted to (though after a while, trying to think of dual-purpose names seemed to clog up my linguistic faculties and I was reduced to skimming through the papers and scanning the spines on the bookshelves). They are still in the minority, though. Most of the surnames in the phone book would sound distinctly odd as first names. Cresswell. Eagle. Foley. Longman. They wouldn't sound right preceding something else. Cresswell Jones. Eagle Smith. No, though Eagle Smith sounds as though he might have been a great blues player.
It must create confusion sometimes when you have to introduce yourself, or register for something. I used to deal with a stockbroker called David George, a long time ago. If he gave his name as George would that be understood as his surname, or would the person he was speaking to assume he was being informal and had gone straight to first name terms?
Most of the first-name, second-name examples I can think of are male, when used as forenames. I was pushing it including Stella. While Frank Stella is a famous American artist, there aren't any Stellas in the Colchester phone book. There again, there aren't many people of Italian descent in the Colchester phone book. Perhaps I'm struggling to find examples due to some sort of cognitive bias, but I don't think so. Sinister evidence of the patriarchy embedded in our language?
There is another raft of first names that become second names by the addition of a final S. Williams. Rogers. Stevens. Janes. Richards. Phillips. Edwards. Roberts. Matthews. I slipped Janes in there, but most of these names seem to be masculine as well, and Janes isn't exactly common. Anyway, first names that require extra letters to become second names don't count for this exercise.
Then there are the names that can be male or female. Evelyn Waugh married another Evelyn (unhappily, as it turns out,) and a whole detective story hinges on the fact that a child called Evelyn reappears in adulthood (bent on vengeance) as a woman called Evie. If you are meeting a Stacey or a Kelly for the first time you wouldn't know quite which to expect. A Robin might be a woman, especially in America. Man Ray's assistant, one-time lover and lifelong friend Lee Miller was a woman. Ruby Walsh is indubitably a man, though he is the only non-female Ruby I can think of. More common are the unisex abbreviations. Nicky. Stevie. Sam. Charlie. The diminutive final y or ie gives them a sort of metrosexual connotation when applied to men. I feel as though a man called Nicky would be much more likely to be a hairdresser than a steel fabricator. First names that sound the same but are spelt differently don't count, so you can't include Leslie and Lesley.
Intriguingly, Evelyn, Stacey, Kelly and Lee don't stop at being first names for both men and women, but will do as surnames as well. Imagine being called Stacey Kelly. The scope for confusion would be practically endless.
Thursday, 14 March 2013
cats
When we last needed some kittens I rang the local branch of the Cats Protection League. On hearing that both I and my partner would be out at work all day, they said that we were not suitable people to keep kittens, and they would not let me have any. Kittens needed six tiny meals a day, on account of their small stomachs, which we would not be there to provide during the week. Instead I rang somebody who was advertising kittens on the noticeboard at the vet, 'One black and two taby'. Nearly fourteen years on, the black and the chosen taby are doing very nicely, thank you.
Kittens are tough little things, and a pair of them do fine during the day given each other's company, a warm bed and a plate of kitten food. The same cannot be said of elderly cats, and I heaved a mental sigh as I turned on the Today programme and discovered that this morning's lifestyle guilt-inducing feature from the BBC was the problem of Fat Pets. We have a problem with two fat pets (though when the Systems Administrator tells the fat indignant tabby to her face that she is fat, she punches the SA, and I've explained that you shouldn't say things like that to a girl). We simultaneously have a problem with two thin pets.
The radio feature blamed the Fat Pet issue largely on owners feeding their pets treats between meals. Our cats don't get left over takeaways, or even pet treats, except for the odd Thomas treat to remind them how nice Thomas treats are, for the next time we need to stick a pill to one. The trouble is that the concept of meals doesn't exist in the mind of an old cat. It might be that with a dog, you can put down a bowl containing half of its daily ration, watch it wolf it down, and then not feed it until the evening, when you repeat the process with the other half of whatever the correct amount of food per day is. I don't know, I've never had a dog. I do know that doesn't work with our cats.
You put down four bowls of food, a spoonful in each, and they eat some of it. Later on whichever is around at the time and is hungry or bored will finish the rest. The thin cats are the slowest and most desultory eaters. To get them to eat enough in twenty-four hours you really do need to serve six tiny meals a day, if not eight. Some of these can be served exclusively to the thin cats by dint of feeding them in the kitchen and locking the other two out of the room. Even then you end up with bowls of half-eaten cat food stashed away in cupboards, or else who ends up finishing that helping of cat food is anyone's guess. Policing the amount that any one cat eats when you have four of them is almost impossible. I know the Telegraph vet says in his column that this is an excuse made by all owners of fat cats, but that doesn't stop it being true.
Also, if you don't feed a cat as much as it wants to eat it will hunt. Maybe not all cats, but I once took Our Ginger into the garden with me, thinking that at least he would get some exercise walking back to the house. When I turned around a few minutes later he was crunching on a mouse.
We noticed on Saturday evening that the big tabby (thin) had been bitten at the base of his right ear. It wasn't sensitive to the touch, and we hoped it might get better by itself. I was at work on Monday, the SA was away, and the weather on Tuesday morning was not conducive to driving to the vet. Yesterday the big tabby let me touch his ear, and although I didn't quite like the look of it, it didn't seem to be causing him pain. Though it is difficult to tell when a cat is in pain. They are stoical animals. This morning it was more swollen and slightly shiny, and I could see a tell-tale smear of pus. Time for a trip to the vet.
The vet turned out to be a new one, or at least I hadn't met her before. She looked scarcely old enough to have done her A levels, and probably qualified a couple of years ago. The classic sign of advancing age is supposed to be when the policemen look young, but for me it was first Finance Directors, and then vets. She had a bandage and splint on two fingers where one of her patients bit her yesterday. The big tabby was pronounced to have a septic ear and taken away to be cleaned up, checked out and given a shot of antibiotic. Injectable antibiotics are a wonderful invention, since without the SA I don't think I could get pills down the big tabby, and given he has a sore head it wouldn't be easy with two. The good news was that the big tabby's temperature was normal and his insides felt fine when given one of those routine palpitations that vets always do. I was told to keep him indoors for twenty-four hours, since she didn't want him getting dirt in the wound in his ear, and to keep an eye on his appetite. Eating good, stopping eating bad. The site of the bite might ooze for the rest of the day, and I should mop up any pus.
We got home and I let him out of his basket. I don't know if he had a scratch at the ear, but minutes later it was not oozing but streaming, blood running down the side of his face. The big tabby responded in the same way that he behaves when dribble is running down his face, and gave his head a good shake. Blood spattered over the hall door, the floor, and the wall on the opposite side of the corridor. I don't like blood. I am really not very good with it. When I was about four I announced my intention to be a nurse, to which my mother's reply was Oh no, wouldn't you rather be a doctor, which was a fine piece of 1960s aspirational feminism, but overlooked some key points, including the fact that I don't like ill people, ill animals or blood. I shut the doors to the study and the sitting room so that the big tabby could not go and bleed on the dining chairs, tribal rugs and cushions, or shake blood over the spines of the books on the lowest shelves, and surveyed the situation.
I had a cat that was supposed to be kept in the house, that was bleeding freely. I had three other cats that needed to be kept somewhere. I didn't think they could all live in the kitchen and the hall all day and night, not without murder being done. The vet's advice to keep the big tabby indoors probably hadn't factored in the chances of his getting into another fight and sustaining a second injury, or biting one of the other cats. I mopped up the blood, found some cat litter and a plastic box, and gave the big tabby some posh food out of a pouch which he ate, blood from his ruff smearing over the edges of the dish.
After a while he stopped bleeding, washed himself, and began to look quite cheerful. I tidied various papers off the kitchen table and put my laptop out of harms way, and the other cats settled down to a day of having to ask to be let in or out. They sort of know the drill from previous illnesses. Luckily the house has a small outer hall, separated from the inner hall by a glass door and window. It means that any cat that comes in through the cat door can sit in the inner hall, and you can see it through the glass and let it into the rest of the house. The people who built the house didn't even have cats, and I have no idea of the original purpose of this idiosyncratic piece of domestic architecture, but it happens to be handy for us.
I wish the cat would learn to stop fighting. He is nearly fourteen. Of course, I don't know how he came to be bitten, and it may be that he is the blameless victim in all of this, but I wouldn't put money on it, the way he normally charges around the house annoying the other cats. The vet thought it was a cat bite and not a rat, and that he probably gave as good as he got, since the bite was on his head. Apparently they mainly see bites on the head and front paws, plus bites on the tail and base of the spine of cats that were running away, but very little in between. It is not nice for him being bitten, though, and it is a complete nuisance for me. It's like mending the beehives yesterday. The cat had a perfectly good ear until he went and got bitten, and it has cost me sixty quid in consultation fees and injectable antibiotics, and taken up half of the morning when I could have been gardening, before the next lot of rain and snow sets in.
I had an e-mail from my uncle the other day, asking whether in the very unlikely event of the simultaneous demise of both him and my aunt, I would be their cats' official guardian. They have three pedigree Korats, beautiful animals, and were prompted to make arrangements after a breeder they know died unexpectedly and his animals ended up in the custody of the RSPCA. Subsequent efforts by the breeders association to rehouse them were rebuffed, and my uncle did not wish for his own cats to end up in an animal rescue centre, subject to the rehousing criteria of the RSPCA. I was very touched to be asked, though I don't expect to ever have to do anything. People must be able to tell that I like cats. Nobody has ever asked me to be a godmother.
Kittens are tough little things, and a pair of them do fine during the day given each other's company, a warm bed and a plate of kitten food. The same cannot be said of elderly cats, and I heaved a mental sigh as I turned on the Today programme and discovered that this morning's lifestyle guilt-inducing feature from the BBC was the problem of Fat Pets. We have a problem with two fat pets (though when the Systems Administrator tells the fat indignant tabby to her face that she is fat, she punches the SA, and I've explained that you shouldn't say things like that to a girl). We simultaneously have a problem with two thin pets.
The radio feature blamed the Fat Pet issue largely on owners feeding their pets treats between meals. Our cats don't get left over takeaways, or even pet treats, except for the odd Thomas treat to remind them how nice Thomas treats are, for the next time we need to stick a pill to one. The trouble is that the concept of meals doesn't exist in the mind of an old cat. It might be that with a dog, you can put down a bowl containing half of its daily ration, watch it wolf it down, and then not feed it until the evening, when you repeat the process with the other half of whatever the correct amount of food per day is. I don't know, I've never had a dog. I do know that doesn't work with our cats.
You put down four bowls of food, a spoonful in each, and they eat some of it. Later on whichever is around at the time and is hungry or bored will finish the rest. The thin cats are the slowest and most desultory eaters. To get them to eat enough in twenty-four hours you really do need to serve six tiny meals a day, if not eight. Some of these can be served exclusively to the thin cats by dint of feeding them in the kitchen and locking the other two out of the room. Even then you end up with bowls of half-eaten cat food stashed away in cupboards, or else who ends up finishing that helping of cat food is anyone's guess. Policing the amount that any one cat eats when you have four of them is almost impossible. I know the Telegraph vet says in his column that this is an excuse made by all owners of fat cats, but that doesn't stop it being true.
Also, if you don't feed a cat as much as it wants to eat it will hunt. Maybe not all cats, but I once took Our Ginger into the garden with me, thinking that at least he would get some exercise walking back to the house. When I turned around a few minutes later he was crunching on a mouse.
We noticed on Saturday evening that the big tabby (thin) had been bitten at the base of his right ear. It wasn't sensitive to the touch, and we hoped it might get better by itself. I was at work on Monday, the SA was away, and the weather on Tuesday morning was not conducive to driving to the vet. Yesterday the big tabby let me touch his ear, and although I didn't quite like the look of it, it didn't seem to be causing him pain. Though it is difficult to tell when a cat is in pain. They are stoical animals. This morning it was more swollen and slightly shiny, and I could see a tell-tale smear of pus. Time for a trip to the vet.
The vet turned out to be a new one, or at least I hadn't met her before. She looked scarcely old enough to have done her A levels, and probably qualified a couple of years ago. The classic sign of advancing age is supposed to be when the policemen look young, but for me it was first Finance Directors, and then vets. She had a bandage and splint on two fingers where one of her patients bit her yesterday. The big tabby was pronounced to have a septic ear and taken away to be cleaned up, checked out and given a shot of antibiotic. Injectable antibiotics are a wonderful invention, since without the SA I don't think I could get pills down the big tabby, and given he has a sore head it wouldn't be easy with two. The good news was that the big tabby's temperature was normal and his insides felt fine when given one of those routine palpitations that vets always do. I was told to keep him indoors for twenty-four hours, since she didn't want him getting dirt in the wound in his ear, and to keep an eye on his appetite. Eating good, stopping eating bad. The site of the bite might ooze for the rest of the day, and I should mop up any pus.
We got home and I let him out of his basket. I don't know if he had a scratch at the ear, but minutes later it was not oozing but streaming, blood running down the side of his face. The big tabby responded in the same way that he behaves when dribble is running down his face, and gave his head a good shake. Blood spattered over the hall door, the floor, and the wall on the opposite side of the corridor. I don't like blood. I am really not very good with it. When I was about four I announced my intention to be a nurse, to which my mother's reply was Oh no, wouldn't you rather be a doctor, which was a fine piece of 1960s aspirational feminism, but overlooked some key points, including the fact that I don't like ill people, ill animals or blood. I shut the doors to the study and the sitting room so that the big tabby could not go and bleed on the dining chairs, tribal rugs and cushions, or shake blood over the spines of the books on the lowest shelves, and surveyed the situation.
I had a cat that was supposed to be kept in the house, that was bleeding freely. I had three other cats that needed to be kept somewhere. I didn't think they could all live in the kitchen and the hall all day and night, not without murder being done. The vet's advice to keep the big tabby indoors probably hadn't factored in the chances of his getting into another fight and sustaining a second injury, or biting one of the other cats. I mopped up the blood, found some cat litter and a plastic box, and gave the big tabby some posh food out of a pouch which he ate, blood from his ruff smearing over the edges of the dish.
After a while he stopped bleeding, washed himself, and began to look quite cheerful. I tidied various papers off the kitchen table and put my laptop out of harms way, and the other cats settled down to a day of having to ask to be let in or out. They sort of know the drill from previous illnesses. Luckily the house has a small outer hall, separated from the inner hall by a glass door and window. It means that any cat that comes in through the cat door can sit in the inner hall, and you can see it through the glass and let it into the rest of the house. The people who built the house didn't even have cats, and I have no idea of the original purpose of this idiosyncratic piece of domestic architecture, but it happens to be handy for us.
I wish the cat would learn to stop fighting. He is nearly fourteen. Of course, I don't know how he came to be bitten, and it may be that he is the blameless victim in all of this, but I wouldn't put money on it, the way he normally charges around the house annoying the other cats. The vet thought it was a cat bite and not a rat, and that he probably gave as good as he got, since the bite was on his head. Apparently they mainly see bites on the head and front paws, plus bites on the tail and base of the spine of cats that were running away, but very little in between. It is not nice for him being bitten, though, and it is a complete nuisance for me. It's like mending the beehives yesterday. The cat had a perfectly good ear until he went and got bitten, and it has cost me sixty quid in consultation fees and injectable antibiotics, and taken up half of the morning when I could have been gardening, before the next lot of rain and snow sets in.
I had an e-mail from my uncle the other day, asking whether in the very unlikely event of the simultaneous demise of both him and my aunt, I would be their cats' official guardian. They have three pedigree Korats, beautiful animals, and were prompted to make arrangements after a breeder they know died unexpectedly and his animals ended up in the custody of the RSPCA. Subsequent efforts by the breeders association to rehouse them were rebuffed, and my uncle did not wish for his own cats to end up in an animal rescue centre, subject to the rehousing criteria of the RSPCA. I was very touched to be asked, though I don't expect to ever have to do anything. People must be able to tell that I like cats. Nobody has ever asked me to be a godmother.
Wednesday, 13 March 2013
badgers ate my beehives
Something has been eating my beehives. Corners on two of them have been gnawed away from the floor to where the galvanised roof protects the top of the brood box, exposing the nails that hold the boxes together. I presume it was badgers. I can't think what else could chew through solid wood, and the damage seems too serious for it to have been muntjac with itchy horns having a little scratch. Certainly there are plenty of badgers in this part of the world, and they are getting more intrusive in the meadow, scraping up the grass and digging among the roots of shrubs.
I spent the first hour of the morning screwing L shaped steel section on each corner of every hive, after the Systems Administrator had kindly cut it to length for me and drilled holes in it. Jobs like that irritate me, since I had perfectly good beehives before the badgers took it into their heads to start chewing them, and now it has taken me nigh on forty pounds worth of materials and an hour of my life just to restore the status quo. I've had to buy a couple of extra brood boxes to move the bees into, as soon as the weather is warm enough to start moving frames around, so that the damaged boxes can be repaired properly. So little material remains in the damaged corners that I'm not sure if I could lift them in their current state without them disintegrating.
It must have been stressful for the bees, to hear something attacking the outside of their hive, and feel the vibrations. Bees tend not to like being vibrated. I had a very quick peek under the roof of each, not lifting the crown board that covers the frames, and could see live bees through the holes in the crown board, so at least I know they are alive, which is something. The vile weather is not helpful. They ought to be out, foraging on the crocus flowers and the daphne, instead of confined to barracks. Spring is a key time in the life of a colony, when the queen bee should be laying eggs full tilt, to build up bee numbers for the season.
Then I went and bought some bags of spent mushroom compost from the local garden centre that sells it on a bag-your-own basis at £1.50 for thirty litres. The SA has promised to take me up there in the truck sometime, for a big load, but I needed some to keep me going. I'd used all of it by just after lunchtime, mulching the entrance bed and planting a winter jasmine. I have tried Jasminum nudiflorum in the back garden without success, and am starting to think it wants better drainage, or more sun, or both, in order to be happy, since in the back it grows grudgingly but doesn't flower. I could probably have found a small piece in the back garden that had rooted where it touched the ground, and moved it to the front, if I'd been a patient and frugal gardener, but I am going to use it as ground cover and I want it to start covering the ground as quickly as possible, so starting with what was effectively a rooted cutting felt too slow.
A patch of lesser celandine has appeared in the entrance bed. This is a noxious weed, though a delightful wild flower in the right place. It grows in the wood and is fine there, but it is not something you want in a border. I am fairly sure it came in with a plant that was given to me from a garden that I know had it. The older I get, the more cautious I am about accepting gifts of home-propagated plants from anyone except people I judge to be skilled and hygienic gardeners. Yes, you can save some money on plants, but if you value your time at all then it isn't worth it to acquire the free weeds that come with the plant. I once destroyed a perennial sunflower given to me from a garden that suffered from ground elder, because while the donor said the ground elder in that area had been sprayed off with glyphosate and killed, examination of the helianthus roots revealed the presence of ground elder roots that didn't look sufficiently dead for my liking. This garden currently has horsetail, sheep's sorrel, and some dreadful forms of running grasses, but not ground elder.
Addendum I read on yesterday's Telegraph on-line that women constantly lie about life on Facebook to make their lives appear more exciting. I don't, because I'm not on Facebook, but I don't embellish on Cardunculus either. In fact, I tone down some of the more baroque episodes to avoid hurting people's feelings. Perhaps I should sex up the dossier a bit. After all, badgers ate my beehives, I bought some manure and spread it about, it started snowing again so I came inside and typed this. That's not a very exciting day, is it? I'm not going to impress anybody with that. But if I did claim to have been to a luxury spa, or had lunch with Liam Neeson, or hobnobbed with Zaha Hadid at the preview of the RA George Bellows exhibition while wearing my new Monolos, I don't think anybody would believe it for a minute.
I spent the first hour of the morning screwing L shaped steel section on each corner of every hive, after the Systems Administrator had kindly cut it to length for me and drilled holes in it. Jobs like that irritate me, since I had perfectly good beehives before the badgers took it into their heads to start chewing them, and now it has taken me nigh on forty pounds worth of materials and an hour of my life just to restore the status quo. I've had to buy a couple of extra brood boxes to move the bees into, as soon as the weather is warm enough to start moving frames around, so that the damaged boxes can be repaired properly. So little material remains in the damaged corners that I'm not sure if I could lift them in their current state without them disintegrating.
It must have been stressful for the bees, to hear something attacking the outside of their hive, and feel the vibrations. Bees tend not to like being vibrated. I had a very quick peek under the roof of each, not lifting the crown board that covers the frames, and could see live bees through the holes in the crown board, so at least I know they are alive, which is something. The vile weather is not helpful. They ought to be out, foraging on the crocus flowers and the daphne, instead of confined to barracks. Spring is a key time in the life of a colony, when the queen bee should be laying eggs full tilt, to build up bee numbers for the season.
Then I went and bought some bags of spent mushroom compost from the local garden centre that sells it on a bag-your-own basis at £1.50 for thirty litres. The SA has promised to take me up there in the truck sometime, for a big load, but I needed some to keep me going. I'd used all of it by just after lunchtime, mulching the entrance bed and planting a winter jasmine. I have tried Jasminum nudiflorum in the back garden without success, and am starting to think it wants better drainage, or more sun, or both, in order to be happy, since in the back it grows grudgingly but doesn't flower. I could probably have found a small piece in the back garden that had rooted where it touched the ground, and moved it to the front, if I'd been a patient and frugal gardener, but I am going to use it as ground cover and I want it to start covering the ground as quickly as possible, so starting with what was effectively a rooted cutting felt too slow.
A patch of lesser celandine has appeared in the entrance bed. This is a noxious weed, though a delightful wild flower in the right place. It grows in the wood and is fine there, but it is not something you want in a border. I am fairly sure it came in with a plant that was given to me from a garden that I know had it. The older I get, the more cautious I am about accepting gifts of home-propagated plants from anyone except people I judge to be skilled and hygienic gardeners. Yes, you can save some money on plants, but if you value your time at all then it isn't worth it to acquire the free weeds that come with the plant. I once destroyed a perennial sunflower given to me from a garden that suffered from ground elder, because while the donor said the ground elder in that area had been sprayed off with glyphosate and killed, examination of the helianthus roots revealed the presence of ground elder roots that didn't look sufficiently dead for my liking. This garden currently has horsetail, sheep's sorrel, and some dreadful forms of running grasses, but not ground elder.
Addendum I read on yesterday's Telegraph on-line that women constantly lie about life on Facebook to make their lives appear more exciting. I don't, because I'm not on Facebook, but I don't embellish on Cardunculus either. In fact, I tone down some of the more baroque episodes to avoid hurting people's feelings. Perhaps I should sex up the dossier a bit. After all, badgers ate my beehives, I bought some manure and spread it about, it started snowing again so I came inside and typed this. That's not a very exciting day, is it? I'm not going to impress anybody with that. But if I did claim to have been to a luxury spa, or had lunch with Liam Neeson, or hobnobbed with Zaha Hadid at the preview of the RA George Bellows exhibition while wearing my new Monolos, I don't think anybody would believe it for a minute.
Tuesday, 12 March 2013
members and friends
My new Tate membership card arrived, with an encouraging covering letter, a leaflet highlighting the cream of the forthcoming shows in 2013, and some stickers to put on my calender (which I won't use). I looked at the letter, and thought I might upgrade to Member Plus One for exhibitions. It would be nice to be able to take the Systems Administrator for coffee in the members' room at Tate Modern, after raving about it enough times, and I had a good feeling that I might find a couple of people this year who would like to come to see something with me. Tate membership is sixty pounds, if you pay by direct debit, or ninety pounds for the Plus One option. It's all very nicely graduated, as you can buy further add-ons giving you access to special viewings, but being able to swan into any exhibition on the day is enough for me.
The arithmetic of membership is straightforward. A full price ticket for a big show is generally a smidge under fifteen pounds, while small shows by relatively obscure artists come in a bit cheaper. You need to go to four to five exhibitions per annum to make it pay financially, and take a friend or rellie a couple of times a year to make the Plus One add up in purely monetary terms. But the no-book, no-queue aspect is extremely attractive, as is the view of St Paul's from the members' room at Bankside. Anyway, it's nice to be able to treat a friend, though again in purely monetary terms if I buy their ticket they will probably offer to buy me lunch.
Tate's management systems for keeping track of members are pretty sophisticated. The membership card has a bar code which the gallery attendant swipes when you go in (though the card readers don't always work) so they know where you've been. I often get home to find an e-mail from the curator waiting for me, though I don't think they wish to enter into dialogue about the merits of each exhibition. On the whole my required input seems to be to post enthusiastic reviews on the Tate's Facebook wall, which I haven't done, being a Zuckerberg refusenik.
The letter that comes with the new card gives the number to ring if you want to upgrade your membership. I rang it, and was slightly thrown off my stride to get a recorded message that told me the phone line was not open, and then a lot of other things I didn't need to know at that moment, but not when the phone line would be open. I tried again later, and after narrowing down my required option by pressing one repeatedly on my handset was invited to input my membership number. I could do that, because they'd just sent me a card. It was a let-down to get through to a human voice that asked for my membership number. I expressed my disappointment that it hadn't come up on a computer screen when I'd just put it into my phone, and the voice said Oh yes, it had just come up. I said I wanted to upgrade to Member Plus One and the voice said that would be fine, they would send me a new card. I had a vivid (though possibly unjustified) image of a young man (sure about that bit), possibly in his first job, and trying desperately hard to be hip while suffering from an amount of existential angst, and probably still living with his parents. Afterwards I thought it might have been a good idea if he'd checked what my name was, otherwise if I misdialled the number on my card I have accidentally upgraded somebody else's membership.
The Tate is an awful lot slicker than the Royal Academy. I was a Friend of that for two or three years. My mother originally bought me the subscription as a birthday present, at a point when it cost around sixty pounds, and I was shocked a couple of years later when I found out how rapidly they'd ramped the price up. It is now ninety pounds on direct debit, the same as the Tate, or one hundred by credit card payment. Admittedly the RA Friends deal always included the ability to take a guest in to exhibitions. On the other hand, the Tate has two galleries in London, and two more in the regions should you be on holiday in the area, so offers a lot more exhibitions in total through the year.
A year or two back the RA introduced a rule, driven by a change in the tax regulations concerning Gift Aid, that it had to be a 'family' guest. Trying to adjudicate such a rule sounds like a case that would divide the High Court, since what is 'family' in 2013? Your spouse, sibling or parent, obviously. Live-in partner with who you share a mortgage and cats without being married? Cousin? Sister-in-law? Second cousin? Step-sibling? Step-sibling's other biological parent who is not married to your parent? Ex-spouse with whom you have children? It is clearly ludicrous, and I was never challenged on the door to explain what my relationship was to whichever friend I was taking at the time, or indeed when I did go with either of my parents. Nonetheless the rule rankled. The RHS was affected by the same rule, and wrote to me asking whether as an existing member I would be prepared to limit myself to family guests so that they could claim Gift Aid and I replied that no, I would not, since I considered the ability to take my gardening friends into RHS gardens a valuable part of my membership. The RA simply imposed the new rule on everybody.
The deal-breaker for me was when the RA started requiring Friends to pre-book slots for the most popular exhibitions. They trilled that entry was still free to RA Friends, but that wasn't the point. It wasn't free because I (or rather my mother) had already paid them sixty pounds, rising to ninety, to get me into exhibitions. I don't want to have to commit to a particular time and day if I can avoid it. Suppose the chosen day arrives and the weather is perfect for gardening, or the trains are disrupted, or (like today) it has snowed overnight and I don't know if I would be able to get to the station, or how long it would take, or if the car park would be an ice rink? Being able to walk in off the street when you feel like it, or for half an hour to revisit your favourite pictures in an exhibition you have seen before, is a boon. Having to commit yourself to the one day in the week when it's a nice day to be out in the garden (like last week's Manet expedition) is a nuisance.
The RA does not issue cards with bar codes, or didn't at the point when I ceased being a Friend. Instead the member of staff at the door does a simple head-count of people going in on a Friend's ticket. They thus know nothing about how their supporters are using their tickets. Their lack of marketing nous was demonstrated most clearly when I agreed with my mother that she wouldn't renew the gift subscription. You would think a commercially astute organisation would have written to me at that point, hoping I had enjoyed my past subscription and inviting me to take one out on my own account, especially now they are beefing up the accommodation available to Friends (the old Friends' room was impossibly crowded if there was anything popular on. The service was very slow as well, but needed to be to give time for the existing patrons to leave so that you could get a seat). And the RA doesn't give you a gallery guide at the door when you produce your Friends card, even though you have paid them ninety pounds, whereas the Tate always does. The Tate has it, by several lengths.
Addendum I was supposed to be going into Colchester today for a haircut, but rang to cancel when I saw how much it had snowed in the night. By mid-morning the snow had melted a lot, at least where the sun shone on it, and I was afraid I had been over-cautious. I felt better at lunchtime when I checked the local papers on-line and saw the headline Snow gridlocks roads. Reading on I saw that, as I feared, Blizzards have caused chaos in Colchester. Drivers were faced with gridlock on Tuesday morning after snow fell overnight. I rather thought they would be.
The arithmetic of membership is straightforward. A full price ticket for a big show is generally a smidge under fifteen pounds, while small shows by relatively obscure artists come in a bit cheaper. You need to go to four to five exhibitions per annum to make it pay financially, and take a friend or rellie a couple of times a year to make the Plus One add up in purely monetary terms. But the no-book, no-queue aspect is extremely attractive, as is the view of St Paul's from the members' room at Bankside. Anyway, it's nice to be able to treat a friend, though again in purely monetary terms if I buy their ticket they will probably offer to buy me lunch.
Tate's management systems for keeping track of members are pretty sophisticated. The membership card has a bar code which the gallery attendant swipes when you go in (though the card readers don't always work) so they know where you've been. I often get home to find an e-mail from the curator waiting for me, though I don't think they wish to enter into dialogue about the merits of each exhibition. On the whole my required input seems to be to post enthusiastic reviews on the Tate's Facebook wall, which I haven't done, being a Zuckerberg refusenik.
The letter that comes with the new card gives the number to ring if you want to upgrade your membership. I rang it, and was slightly thrown off my stride to get a recorded message that told me the phone line was not open, and then a lot of other things I didn't need to know at that moment, but not when the phone line would be open. I tried again later, and after narrowing down my required option by pressing one repeatedly on my handset was invited to input my membership number. I could do that, because they'd just sent me a card. It was a let-down to get through to a human voice that asked for my membership number. I expressed my disappointment that it hadn't come up on a computer screen when I'd just put it into my phone, and the voice said Oh yes, it had just come up. I said I wanted to upgrade to Member Plus One and the voice said that would be fine, they would send me a new card. I had a vivid (though possibly unjustified) image of a young man (sure about that bit), possibly in his first job, and trying desperately hard to be hip while suffering from an amount of existential angst, and probably still living with his parents. Afterwards I thought it might have been a good idea if he'd checked what my name was, otherwise if I misdialled the number on my card I have accidentally upgraded somebody else's membership.
The Tate is an awful lot slicker than the Royal Academy. I was a Friend of that for two or three years. My mother originally bought me the subscription as a birthday present, at a point when it cost around sixty pounds, and I was shocked a couple of years later when I found out how rapidly they'd ramped the price up. It is now ninety pounds on direct debit, the same as the Tate, or one hundred by credit card payment. Admittedly the RA Friends deal always included the ability to take a guest in to exhibitions. On the other hand, the Tate has two galleries in London, and two more in the regions should you be on holiday in the area, so offers a lot more exhibitions in total through the year.
A year or two back the RA introduced a rule, driven by a change in the tax regulations concerning Gift Aid, that it had to be a 'family' guest. Trying to adjudicate such a rule sounds like a case that would divide the High Court, since what is 'family' in 2013? Your spouse, sibling or parent, obviously. Live-in partner with who you share a mortgage and cats without being married? Cousin? Sister-in-law? Second cousin? Step-sibling? Step-sibling's other biological parent who is not married to your parent? Ex-spouse with whom you have children? It is clearly ludicrous, and I was never challenged on the door to explain what my relationship was to whichever friend I was taking at the time, or indeed when I did go with either of my parents. Nonetheless the rule rankled. The RHS was affected by the same rule, and wrote to me asking whether as an existing member I would be prepared to limit myself to family guests so that they could claim Gift Aid and I replied that no, I would not, since I considered the ability to take my gardening friends into RHS gardens a valuable part of my membership. The RA simply imposed the new rule on everybody.
The deal-breaker for me was when the RA started requiring Friends to pre-book slots for the most popular exhibitions. They trilled that entry was still free to RA Friends, but that wasn't the point. It wasn't free because I (or rather my mother) had already paid them sixty pounds, rising to ninety, to get me into exhibitions. I don't want to have to commit to a particular time and day if I can avoid it. Suppose the chosen day arrives and the weather is perfect for gardening, or the trains are disrupted, or (like today) it has snowed overnight and I don't know if I would be able to get to the station, or how long it would take, or if the car park would be an ice rink? Being able to walk in off the street when you feel like it, or for half an hour to revisit your favourite pictures in an exhibition you have seen before, is a boon. Having to commit yourself to the one day in the week when it's a nice day to be out in the garden (like last week's Manet expedition) is a nuisance.
The RA does not issue cards with bar codes, or didn't at the point when I ceased being a Friend. Instead the member of staff at the door does a simple head-count of people going in on a Friend's ticket. They thus know nothing about how their supporters are using their tickets. Their lack of marketing nous was demonstrated most clearly when I agreed with my mother that she wouldn't renew the gift subscription. You would think a commercially astute organisation would have written to me at that point, hoping I had enjoyed my past subscription and inviting me to take one out on my own account, especially now they are beefing up the accommodation available to Friends (the old Friends' room was impossibly crowded if there was anything popular on. The service was very slow as well, but needed to be to give time for the existing patrons to leave so that you could get a seat). And the RA doesn't give you a gallery guide at the door when you produce your Friends card, even though you have paid them ninety pounds, whereas the Tate always does. The Tate has it, by several lengths.
Addendum I was supposed to be going into Colchester today for a haircut, but rang to cancel when I saw how much it had snowed in the night. By mid-morning the snow had melted a lot, at least where the sun shone on it, and I was afraid I had been over-cautious. I felt better at lunchtime when I checked the local papers on-line and saw the headline Snow gridlocks roads. Reading on I saw that, as I feared, Blizzards have caused chaos in Colchester. Drivers were faced with gridlock on Tuesday morning after snow fell overnight. I rather thought they would be.
Monday, 11 March 2013
auditor for the day
Yesterday felt cold, but today felt a lot colder, because the wind had got up. I was slightly late to work, since the car turned out to be more frozen than I thought it would be when I started it up, and after skating several metres down the lane near home I took things very steady. The manager was later, because he encountered four traffic accidents along his route to work. My young colleague was ill for the second day running and didn't make it at all, but there wasn't much for two people to do, let alone three.
Most of the fleece had stayed where we put it yesterday afternoon, but the double row of narrow fleece over the Cistus had lifted and twisted itself up in the wind. It shows we were right to have raided stock for more of the 1.5 metre wide stuff. The lavenders were looking miserable despite their protective covering, but if you are a lavender plant then lumps of frozen snow lying on your leaves are about equally bad whether or not there is an intervening coat of very thin man-made felt.
I asked nicely if I could have a look in the van that calls on Monday selling instantly appealing plants, as a reward for having worked so hard to put the roses out, and because there was nothing else to do. I love going in the van. All the plants look so inviting, and at this time of the year they have young clumps of rhubarb, all of which I covet. I already have three rhubarb plants, which is more than enough for two people, one of whom isn't even especially keen on rhubarb, but I keep feeling the urge to plant more, when I see such tempting pots of it. The manager and owner chose a few trays of primroses and daffodils in flower, to add instant colour for next weekend's spring event. Guided garden walk and propagating talk, tea, coffee and cake, all free and gratis. Let's hope the weather is better by then. The manager was very despondent as we looked at the shelves of aubretia and polyanthus. I told him that things could have been worse, since it was not actually snowing, but then it started to snow.
It snowed quite heavily at times, which with the snow blowing off the roof of the shop and the tops of the tunnels was enough to make it look like a blizzard, though it didn't settle. I stuck price labels on the plants out of the van. After that I was stuck for anything to do, when the owner appeared with a file and a large pile of redeemed gift vouchers. My job, it turned out, was to tick off the ones that had been used against the list of those issued.
We don't take part in the national garden gift voucher scheme, but we do issue our own vouchers. They are printed in the office on A5 sized heavy paper, with our logo at the top, a printed value, and spaces for the issuing member of staff to date and sign them, and assign them a number. Details of vouchers sold are recorded on a sheet that lives in a concertina file with the blank vouchers, and you put down how much the voucher was for, the date, and your initials. Voucher numbers are written on the sheet, so if the last voucher issued was 2045 then you issue number 2046, and so on. When the sheet of issued vouchers is full it goes up to the office to be filed, and you start a new sheet.
It is an accounting system hand-crafted out of tofu. Voucher number 2071 was written with a rather truncated 7, that could have been a 1, so the next voucher issued was 2012, not 2072. Voucher numbers that had been used once already were repeated all the way down to the bottom of the page, when the numbers jumped forward for some reason to 2055, then continued repeating back up to 2071. You could work out whether a given voucher was the original 2066 or the repeated one by looking at the value, the date of issue and the identity of the issuer, so from a strictly informational point of view it didn't really matter. It was messy, though. I wrote a note to the owner suggesting that if we had pre-numbered sheets that shouldn't happen.
It is a weakness in the system that vouchers are issued by hand, and not reconciled to voucher sales put through the till. It occurred to me that while in order to forge a voucher you would need to be able to copy one of our signatures, it was logically possible and easy for anyone who worked in our shop to create the odd voucher and give it to their friends or relatives to be spent in a couple of months time. The check that I was doing proved that the voucher had been issued by a member of staff, but it didn't prove it had been paid for. As it happens, I don't think that any of us are stealing from our employers by dint of creating illicit vouchers, but a well-run company has good systems in place to protect it from human error, while we rely on good humans to protect us from systems errors. I explained to the manager how easy this particular staff scam would be, and he was shocked, so I added it to my note to the owner.
Sometimes our customers don't want to spend the whole value of their voucher at once. Because we are kind people, and want our customers to like shopping with us and be happy and come back another time, we don't insist on cancelling the unused portion like some big chains and national schemes. Instead we write on the voucher that they have used £7.02 of their voucher and have £22.98 left on it, and give the voucher back to them, and write a note to the owner saying that there was a £7.02 voucher sale. The little notes are sent up to the office at the end of the day, and put in the big pile of redeemed vouchers, to be dealt with at a later date. There is no standard proforma for the little notes, which are of variable quality. Some repeat the information on the original voucher, its number and value, and they are easy to match up with the voucher when the rest of the money is spent and it's finally handed in. Some just say there was a voucher sale for £29.46, and a date if you're lucky. These are not so easy to match up. In fact, you can be reduced to using clues like what pen was used, and whose handwriting the note and the annotations on the voucher are in.
Unless you match up the slips and the vouchers, preferably on a regular basis, you can't tell whether the claim that there was a part-voucher sale of £29.46 is grounded in reality. If I wished to defraud my employers, which as it happens I don't, it would be entirely possible for me to put a £30.00 cash sale through as a voucher sale. The customer would never notice, and I would give them their change as normal. Later on I could take the £29.46 from the till, and replace it with a note saying that a voucher had been partially used. I explained this potential scam to the manager, who was shocked, and added it to my note to the owner, with the suggestion that it would be helpful to have forms to fill in to prompt my colleagues to record the voucher number and amount, or else take the original voucher back and issue a part-redeemed replacement voucher. Given the impossibility of persuading most of my co-workers to fill in any kind of form, the latter would be preferable.
By the end of the afternoon I was down to the hard core of problem vouchers, the ones with no number, plus the ones redeemed in stages that didn't tie up with any of the little notes. I tied the ones I'd ticked off into neat bundles with sleeves saying they were checked, and folded the odds and sods into another bundle for the owner to have a go at them. In the end, as a small business employer you have to decide whether you trust your staff, and draconian systems that make everyone feel they are under suspicion can be counter-productive. There have been times in the past when we've had runs of till shortfalls, and everyone has fallen under suspicion. They are very disheartening, and make going into work a depressing experience, and I have always thought how misplaced they were. Apart from the fact that I didn't think any of us would do that, there were so many easier ways of stealing from our employers if we'd wanted to, that they would never have detected.
Most of the fleece had stayed where we put it yesterday afternoon, but the double row of narrow fleece over the Cistus had lifted and twisted itself up in the wind. It shows we were right to have raided stock for more of the 1.5 metre wide stuff. The lavenders were looking miserable despite their protective covering, but if you are a lavender plant then lumps of frozen snow lying on your leaves are about equally bad whether or not there is an intervening coat of very thin man-made felt.
I asked nicely if I could have a look in the van that calls on Monday selling instantly appealing plants, as a reward for having worked so hard to put the roses out, and because there was nothing else to do. I love going in the van. All the plants look so inviting, and at this time of the year they have young clumps of rhubarb, all of which I covet. I already have three rhubarb plants, which is more than enough for two people, one of whom isn't even especially keen on rhubarb, but I keep feeling the urge to plant more, when I see such tempting pots of it. The manager and owner chose a few trays of primroses and daffodils in flower, to add instant colour for next weekend's spring event. Guided garden walk and propagating talk, tea, coffee and cake, all free and gratis. Let's hope the weather is better by then. The manager was very despondent as we looked at the shelves of aubretia and polyanthus. I told him that things could have been worse, since it was not actually snowing, but then it started to snow.
It snowed quite heavily at times, which with the snow blowing off the roof of the shop and the tops of the tunnels was enough to make it look like a blizzard, though it didn't settle. I stuck price labels on the plants out of the van. After that I was stuck for anything to do, when the owner appeared with a file and a large pile of redeemed gift vouchers. My job, it turned out, was to tick off the ones that had been used against the list of those issued.
We don't take part in the national garden gift voucher scheme, but we do issue our own vouchers. They are printed in the office on A5 sized heavy paper, with our logo at the top, a printed value, and spaces for the issuing member of staff to date and sign them, and assign them a number. Details of vouchers sold are recorded on a sheet that lives in a concertina file with the blank vouchers, and you put down how much the voucher was for, the date, and your initials. Voucher numbers are written on the sheet, so if the last voucher issued was 2045 then you issue number 2046, and so on. When the sheet of issued vouchers is full it goes up to the office to be filed, and you start a new sheet.
It is an accounting system hand-crafted out of tofu. Voucher number 2071 was written with a rather truncated 7, that could have been a 1, so the next voucher issued was 2012, not 2072. Voucher numbers that had been used once already were repeated all the way down to the bottom of the page, when the numbers jumped forward for some reason to 2055, then continued repeating back up to 2071. You could work out whether a given voucher was the original 2066 or the repeated one by looking at the value, the date of issue and the identity of the issuer, so from a strictly informational point of view it didn't really matter. It was messy, though. I wrote a note to the owner suggesting that if we had pre-numbered sheets that shouldn't happen.
It is a weakness in the system that vouchers are issued by hand, and not reconciled to voucher sales put through the till. It occurred to me that while in order to forge a voucher you would need to be able to copy one of our signatures, it was logically possible and easy for anyone who worked in our shop to create the odd voucher and give it to their friends or relatives to be spent in a couple of months time. The check that I was doing proved that the voucher had been issued by a member of staff, but it didn't prove it had been paid for. As it happens, I don't think that any of us are stealing from our employers by dint of creating illicit vouchers, but a well-run company has good systems in place to protect it from human error, while we rely on good humans to protect us from systems errors. I explained to the manager how easy this particular staff scam would be, and he was shocked, so I added it to my note to the owner.
Sometimes our customers don't want to spend the whole value of their voucher at once. Because we are kind people, and want our customers to like shopping with us and be happy and come back another time, we don't insist on cancelling the unused portion like some big chains and national schemes. Instead we write on the voucher that they have used £7.02 of their voucher and have £22.98 left on it, and give the voucher back to them, and write a note to the owner saying that there was a £7.02 voucher sale. The little notes are sent up to the office at the end of the day, and put in the big pile of redeemed vouchers, to be dealt with at a later date. There is no standard proforma for the little notes, which are of variable quality. Some repeat the information on the original voucher, its number and value, and they are easy to match up with the voucher when the rest of the money is spent and it's finally handed in. Some just say there was a voucher sale for £29.46, and a date if you're lucky. These are not so easy to match up. In fact, you can be reduced to using clues like what pen was used, and whose handwriting the note and the annotations on the voucher are in.
Unless you match up the slips and the vouchers, preferably on a regular basis, you can't tell whether the claim that there was a part-voucher sale of £29.46 is grounded in reality. If I wished to defraud my employers, which as it happens I don't, it would be entirely possible for me to put a £30.00 cash sale through as a voucher sale. The customer would never notice, and I would give them their change as normal. Later on I could take the £29.46 from the till, and replace it with a note saying that a voucher had been partially used. I explained this potential scam to the manager, who was shocked, and added it to my note to the owner, with the suggestion that it would be helpful to have forms to fill in to prompt my colleagues to record the voucher number and amount, or else take the original voucher back and issue a part-redeemed replacement voucher. Given the impossibility of persuading most of my co-workers to fill in any kind of form, the latter would be preferable.
By the end of the afternoon I was down to the hard core of problem vouchers, the ones with no number, plus the ones redeemed in stages that didn't tie up with any of the little notes. I tied the ones I'd ticked off into neat bundles with sleeves saying they were checked, and folded the odds and sods into another bundle for the owner to have a go at them. In the end, as a small business employer you have to decide whether you trust your staff, and draconian systems that make everyone feel they are under suspicion can be counter-productive. There have been times in the past when we've had runs of till shortfalls, and everyone has fallen under suspicion. They are very disheartening, and make going into work a depressing experience, and I have always thought how misplaced they were. Apart from the fact that I didn't think any of us would do that, there were so many easier ways of stealing from our employers if we'd wanted to, that they would never have detected.
Sunday, 10 March 2013
it snowed on Mother's Day
It's a pity it snowed on Mother's Day. Not many people want to spend Sunday walking around a plant centre while wet snow, verging on sleet, falls on them, Mothering Sunday or no. The owner had stocked up specially with scones and cream for the occasion, but most of them were surplus to requirements.
I finished putting the rose delivery out for sale, spotted where my backwards working through the alphabet had got 'Charles de Mills' and 'Charlotte' the wrong way round, and then finished removing the old coloured bed labels and putting them up again in the right place now that all the roses had moved, except for 'Alberic Barbier'. Some new labels had come with the delivery, but to re-use the old ones I had to prise the old staples out with a pair of scissors. Walking around in the sleet, trying to unstick a pile of plastic coated labels from each other with gloved hands that were getting wetter by the minute, and fixing them to wooden boards with an industrial-grade staple gun, was a vaguely depressing exercise, especially at half past eight on a Sunday morning.
After that it was time to ring people whose plants had arrived. Calling somebody who was asking for so-and-so in February 2013 is OK, and you feel rather efficient doing it. It isn't too embarrassing to call about requests dating from before Christmas, say in October or November. Especially if the plant concerned is a bit tender, it isn't unreasonable to be getting new stock the following spring. Calls about queries dating from last summer are slightly cringe-making, particularly if it's a fairly bread-and-butter, ordinary sort of plant the customer was after. If the request was placed in 2011 or earlier you really have to draw a deep breath before picking up the phone and dialling.
Some people are thrilled their plant has arrived. One seeker after a Eucryphia lucida 'Pink Cloud' sounded so happy that it had finally arrived, you'd have thought I was calling to say she'd had a small lottery win. However, one woman sounded ferociously hostile until I'd managed to make her understand I was ringing up about a rhododendron, at which point she became charm and happiness personified, and apologised that she had been so guarded before, but she thought I was ringing from a charity soliciting money. My colleague braved the man who had been waiting for Picea breweriana since 2011, but he'd already found one elsewhere. He must have placed an order with every nursery in East Anglia to be on the safe side, since she had great difficulty in making him understand which firm she was ringing from. Mostly we got answerphones, which saves our blushes in the case of a very old enquiry, but means we risk reserving plants for weeks before the final realisation that the customer no longer wants that plant, and is not coming.
The forecast for tonight was for temperatures down to minus 2 degrees, which was our trigger in the list of instructions from the manager to cover various vulnerable species with fleece. We began at four, tucking fleece over the rows of pots, or lifting them into trolleys and wheeling them under cover, and it took over an hour. We ran out of fleece in sensible widths, since you really can't make a decent job of covering a bloc of pots with fleece that's narrower than the area you're trying to cover. and our remaining pieces were only a metre wide. In the end we broke open new packets from the shop. The boss discovered us doing this, and was rather grudging in giving his permission that if there really wasn't any more old fleece in the pot store then we could raid supplies. I felt no compunction at all. We were told to fleece the lupins, Digitalis, Ceanothus, lavenders, Nandina, alliums, gladioli, Cistus, Astelia, Phygelius, and Brachyglottis. That's a lot of pots, and we had to cover them with something. No bricks without clay.
Tomorrow my colleague is due to fly out to Cyprus on holiday. The temperature out there is forecast to be 25 degrees. Nice.
I finished putting the rose delivery out for sale, spotted where my backwards working through the alphabet had got 'Charles de Mills' and 'Charlotte' the wrong way round, and then finished removing the old coloured bed labels and putting them up again in the right place now that all the roses had moved, except for 'Alberic Barbier'. Some new labels had come with the delivery, but to re-use the old ones I had to prise the old staples out with a pair of scissors. Walking around in the sleet, trying to unstick a pile of plastic coated labels from each other with gloved hands that were getting wetter by the minute, and fixing them to wooden boards with an industrial-grade staple gun, was a vaguely depressing exercise, especially at half past eight on a Sunday morning.
After that it was time to ring people whose plants had arrived. Calling somebody who was asking for so-and-so in February 2013 is OK, and you feel rather efficient doing it. It isn't too embarrassing to call about requests dating from before Christmas, say in October or November. Especially if the plant concerned is a bit tender, it isn't unreasonable to be getting new stock the following spring. Calls about queries dating from last summer are slightly cringe-making, particularly if it's a fairly bread-and-butter, ordinary sort of plant the customer was after. If the request was placed in 2011 or earlier you really have to draw a deep breath before picking up the phone and dialling.
Some people are thrilled their plant has arrived. One seeker after a Eucryphia lucida 'Pink Cloud' sounded so happy that it had finally arrived, you'd have thought I was calling to say she'd had a small lottery win. However, one woman sounded ferociously hostile until I'd managed to make her understand I was ringing up about a rhododendron, at which point she became charm and happiness personified, and apologised that she had been so guarded before, but she thought I was ringing from a charity soliciting money. My colleague braved the man who had been waiting for Picea breweriana since 2011, but he'd already found one elsewhere. He must have placed an order with every nursery in East Anglia to be on the safe side, since she had great difficulty in making him understand which firm she was ringing from. Mostly we got answerphones, which saves our blushes in the case of a very old enquiry, but means we risk reserving plants for weeks before the final realisation that the customer no longer wants that plant, and is not coming.
The forecast for tonight was for temperatures down to minus 2 degrees, which was our trigger in the list of instructions from the manager to cover various vulnerable species with fleece. We began at four, tucking fleece over the rows of pots, or lifting them into trolleys and wheeling them under cover, and it took over an hour. We ran out of fleece in sensible widths, since you really can't make a decent job of covering a bloc of pots with fleece that's narrower than the area you're trying to cover. and our remaining pieces were only a metre wide. In the end we broke open new packets from the shop. The boss discovered us doing this, and was rather grudging in giving his permission that if there really wasn't any more old fleece in the pot store then we could raid supplies. I felt no compunction at all. We were told to fleece the lupins, Digitalis, Ceanothus, lavenders, Nandina, alliums, gladioli, Cistus, Astelia, Phygelius, and Brachyglottis. That's a lot of pots, and we had to cover them with something. No bricks without clay.
Tomorrow my colleague is due to fly out to Cyprus on holiday. The temperature out there is forecast to be 25 degrees. Nice.
Saturday, 9 March 2013
roses
I moved a lot of pots of roses today. Really, that sums up my day in a nutshell, and since we have friends coming around for supper presently, if today's post breaks off in mid-flow for lack of time you won't have missed anything else of substance.
The roses were delivered at some point since I was last at work, and stood in rows at the back of the plant centre, one group of climbing and rambling roses, and another of old-fashioned, shrub, and David Austin varieties. I didn't count the pots, and the manager didn't leave me a copy of the delivery note, so I don't know how many there were, but there were a lot. They were in 4L deep pots, and it's a shame it rained for most of yesterday, because the compost was saturated, making the pots significantly heavier than they would have been otherwise. I don't know how much four litres of wet compost weighs. I ought to weigh one sometime, in the interests of precise blogging.
The delivery of new roses had to be merged with the existing stock of roses, while leaving spaces for a further delivery which is due shortly. Over the winter the rose stock we had left was bunched up on the beds so that it didn't look too sparse and meagre, and to make space for other things. The other things have now been moved to a new home, so as I put the delivery out for sale I had to move of all the existing roses along to make room for the extra ones and occupy the whole length of the bed. I was thus merging the existing roses, the new roses and leaving gaps for the other new roses, while working backwards down the alphabet, since the empty space was at Z for 'Zephirine Drouhin' and not A for 'Alberic Barbier'.
Shelf stacking in supermarkets is held up as a low skill, derided job. Graduates take out legal actions arguing that it teaches them nothing. I have never stacked supermarket shelves myself, but I think that a computer gives you a precise shelf location for every item. In the plant centre you start with a blank bed, and your own ability to remember the alphabet (backwards) and idea of roughly where each letter of the alphabet came last year. The latter is helpful because otherwise you will get back to the As and Bs and find you still have four dozen pots to fit in and space for about six. Then you will spend a very long time budging up all the pots you have just lifted once already.
I didn't quite finish. By five to five I'd done the climbers and ramblers, but still had shrub rose 'Buttercup' and all the other Bs and As to go. I am not a completist by nature, and was not going to put in any unpaid overtime for the satisfaction of getting the job finished in one day. Tomorrow will suffice. Besides, we have friends coming to supper.
The roses were delivered at some point since I was last at work, and stood in rows at the back of the plant centre, one group of climbing and rambling roses, and another of old-fashioned, shrub, and David Austin varieties. I didn't count the pots, and the manager didn't leave me a copy of the delivery note, so I don't know how many there were, but there were a lot. They were in 4L deep pots, and it's a shame it rained for most of yesterday, because the compost was saturated, making the pots significantly heavier than they would have been otherwise. I don't know how much four litres of wet compost weighs. I ought to weigh one sometime, in the interests of precise blogging.
The delivery of new roses had to be merged with the existing stock of roses, while leaving spaces for a further delivery which is due shortly. Over the winter the rose stock we had left was bunched up on the beds so that it didn't look too sparse and meagre, and to make space for other things. The other things have now been moved to a new home, so as I put the delivery out for sale I had to move of all the existing roses along to make room for the extra ones and occupy the whole length of the bed. I was thus merging the existing roses, the new roses and leaving gaps for the other new roses, while working backwards down the alphabet, since the empty space was at Z for 'Zephirine Drouhin' and not A for 'Alberic Barbier'.
Shelf stacking in supermarkets is held up as a low skill, derided job. Graduates take out legal actions arguing that it teaches them nothing. I have never stacked supermarket shelves myself, but I think that a computer gives you a precise shelf location for every item. In the plant centre you start with a blank bed, and your own ability to remember the alphabet (backwards) and idea of roughly where each letter of the alphabet came last year. The latter is helpful because otherwise you will get back to the As and Bs and find you still have four dozen pots to fit in and space for about six. Then you will spend a very long time budging up all the pots you have just lifted once already.
I didn't quite finish. By five to five I'd done the climbers and ramblers, but still had shrub rose 'Buttercup' and all the other Bs and As to go. I am not a completist by nature, and was not going to put in any unpaid overtime for the satisfaction of getting the job finished in one day. Tomorrow will suffice. Besides, we have friends coming to supper.
Friday, 8 March 2013
a night out in Brightlingsea
We went for our night out in Brightlingsea, and had a nice time, though we seemed to be in the minority. I'd vaguely thought that other people went out on Thursdays, and we were peculiarly rural, isolated and anti-social, but apparently not.
The initial impression given by the Railway Tavern was not promising. The door from the street opened into a long, dark corridor that smelt definitely of something, and not in a good way. Either stale beer or stale pee. The door to the bar couldn't quite keep the smell out of there, either. I needn't have worried about everybody falling silent at our entrance, since there were only three people in the room and a damp black and white cat. One of the three was a youth with a dramatic floppy hairstyle and very low-slung trousers, who scarcely looked old enough to be in a pub, but turned out to be the barman. The other two, an oldish man in a hat, and a young man, had secured the spot in front of the fire, and were discussing cross channel ferry routes in a leisurely fashion, the young man eventually resorting to looking up prices and sailing times on his mobile phone.
Once they'd gone, that left us and the barman, who resumed his seat by the fireplace, and stated with a polite note of question that we were not local. We told him which village we lived in, but he seemed non-committal about whether living four miles away counted as local or not. He told us that Thursday was always quiet at The Railway, and that Tuesday and Wednesday were busier. People, he added, moved in packs.
The whole bar was incredibly shabby, with ancient paintwork and an assortment of railway posters. The notice board included the reading list for the book club, some of which was quite heavyweight, and vaguely masculine, including The Junior Officer's Reading Club. We noticed a couple of bodrhans stashed away in one corner. Once we were seated on the opposite side of the bar to the door into the corridor, the unfortunate smell was no longer detectable. Two more customers arrived before we left, a tall thin man, and a short stout one with long silver hair, an orange beret and a luminously stripey jumper. The cat left when they came in.
The beer was well kept, so whatever the smell was it wasn't the beer pipes. I don't think I'd risk eating anything in the Railway Tavern, on the other hand, I don't think they do anything to eat, but the beer seems fine. Beer was after all used in the Middle Ages and beyond as a method of making unsafe water drinkable. Some other passing visitors seem to have found their foray into the Railway Tavern more traumatic. It's worth looking at the on-line reviews. There are some cracking ones.
As we walked past one of the other pubs to the Indian restaurant we saw there were only about four people in there, so wherever the folk of Brightlingsea moved in packs on a Thursday it wasn't to The Yachtsman's Arms. However, the pub was beating Kovalam, which had no customers at all. We were shown to a table, and I noticed that they still hadn't had the cracked wall mirror replaced that has been broken for as long as we've been going. Two more eat-in customers arrived, and were rather obscurely shown to a table under the stairs that didn't have full standing headroom above two of the four seats. They were joined by two more, and the six of us were the only diners.
The food was very good. One Tripadvisor reviewer grumbles about stale poppadums, but they must have opened a new box last night. We skipped starters, having not done much all day to work up a huge appetite, so it did feel like quite a long wait until the main courses arrived, but that's partly the point of starters, to distract you while they get the next bit ready. I had an aubergine stew with ginger, which tasted clean and fresh and certainly had strips of proper ginger root in it. The Systems Administrator had a lamb speciality of the house which was pronounced fine. My favourite thing at Kovalam is the bread, because they serve a wonderful wheat based pancake made out of a spiral of batter, which is light, delicious, and unobtainable in other local Indian restaurants. I once saw something similar being made on a Claudia Roden TV programme, years and years ago, and can't remember what country she was visiting at the time. I wish I could do a week's work experience in Kovalam, to learn how they make the bread, and what goes in the aubergine stew. The answer might be a jar of curry sauce from a trading estate in Leicester, but I don't think so.
Driving home we passed The Cherry Tree, which had candles burning in bottles on every table, but no customers that we could see. The moving pack evidently wasn't there either.
Thursday, 7 March 2013
weeding, pruning and accounting
It was drizzling faintly when I woke up. By the time I'd had breakfast it had stopped, so I hot-footed it into the garden to get at least something done before it could start again. I pulled out a lot of small goosegrass seedlings and tufts of annual grass that had sprung up in the sloping bed that runs along our boundary, and made a mental note that I must buy some more Strulch very soon. I cut unsightly old leaves off the hellebores, a job I should have done before, and trimmed the odd stalks of Japanese anemone that escaped the main tidying up session I did sometime before Christmas.
The expensive named varieties of Helleborus x hybridus that I bought from Ashwood Nurseries are looking exceptionally lux. I hope that this season they will present me with exciting seedlings that I can spread around the garden. Further up the slope, not at all lux but very cheerful, the mixed collection of primula built up over the years are starting to open. Some I bought, some I raised from seed, some were presents. There is no colour scheme, and they would not pass muster with a really tasteful gardener, but I like them. They remind me of my childhood, and at this time of the year a patch of bright colour is welcome. The borders around the bottom lawn are all given over to plants that are true species, or hybrids in refined, pale colours, but up the hill the mixed polyanthus are free to be vulgar. I added a dark purple one with nice long stems, for luck.
I pick-axed out the remains of the Hydrangea quercifolia that suddenly died last year. I have a replacement ready to plant, but for that I need more mushroom compost. I am slightly in a dither where to put the new one, since I also need to find room for a poor shrubby peony that is living on much too dry soil at the top of the garden, and needs to move, and the sloping bed is really getting rather full. I am not sure that moving shrub peonies is recommended, but I met a customer once who said he had done it successfully, and as the plant is doing no good where it is I have nothing to lose by trying.
As I was working in that part of the bed I checked in the pruning book, took a deep breath and lopped the whole top off a badly shaped Hydrangea paniculata. The book advises that they make much better specimens with regular pruning. This one had never been pruned, and had sent up one great shoot which formed a tuft of branches on top. It was not quite a standard, and in any case I do not want a standard Hydrangea paniculata. The books says they normally respond well to hard renewal pruning, done before they start into active growth, and I removed the entire bushy top to leave one bald upright stem about sixty centimetres tall, and a single side shoot, which I reduced as well since it looked silly.
Then I pruned the hybrid tea roses, a job that should have been done a couple of weeks ago, since their buds were just starting to break, but I reckon they'll be all right, though I must feed them. The Systems Administrator had a great desire for some modern roses, so I found space for a square bed and edged it with box hedging. The roses have been a mixed success, since the soil there is really too light for them, and the catalogue that said they all grew to the same height was wrong. Some have proved much stronger growers than others, and sod's law dictated that the tallest ones were at the front. The box hedging has grown vast and fat, and I need to reduce it. I am not disciplined about pruning.
After that it really was raining too much, and I did all my ironing, and then made a start on the beekeepers accounts. I have been keeping them so far in 2012 by carefully putting all related paperwork in a large cardboard box, and checking that there is nothing untoward on the bank statement, but that approach will only get you so far. It's not as though I can give the contents of the box to my accountant at the end of the year, since I am the accountant. Having now had the experience of writing up the 2012 accounts and submitting them to the County Treasurer and our own AGM I now have a much better idea of what information I'm going to need later in the year, and am trying to set up all the spreadsheets in such a way that come the first week of January 2014 the desired totals and subtotals will simply drop out of them. The 2012 accounts took an entire day to complete, and the atmosphere was so tense that the SA was afraid to come into the room.
This evening we are going for an evening out in Brightlingsea. There is a very good curry house which serves food from southern India, rather out of the ordinary, and according to the CAMRA guide there is a good pub. We haven't visited the pub before, and I don't know if it's the sort of pub where the whole room falls silent in the presence of people who are not from Brightlingsea, when a non-local walks in.
The expensive named varieties of Helleborus x hybridus that I bought from Ashwood Nurseries are looking exceptionally lux. I hope that this season they will present me with exciting seedlings that I can spread around the garden. Further up the slope, not at all lux but very cheerful, the mixed collection of primula built up over the years are starting to open. Some I bought, some I raised from seed, some were presents. There is no colour scheme, and they would not pass muster with a really tasteful gardener, but I like them. They remind me of my childhood, and at this time of the year a patch of bright colour is welcome. The borders around the bottom lawn are all given over to plants that are true species, or hybrids in refined, pale colours, but up the hill the mixed polyanthus are free to be vulgar. I added a dark purple one with nice long stems, for luck.
I pick-axed out the remains of the Hydrangea quercifolia that suddenly died last year. I have a replacement ready to plant, but for that I need more mushroom compost. I am slightly in a dither where to put the new one, since I also need to find room for a poor shrubby peony that is living on much too dry soil at the top of the garden, and needs to move, and the sloping bed is really getting rather full. I am not sure that moving shrub peonies is recommended, but I met a customer once who said he had done it successfully, and as the plant is doing no good where it is I have nothing to lose by trying.
As I was working in that part of the bed I checked in the pruning book, took a deep breath and lopped the whole top off a badly shaped Hydrangea paniculata. The book advises that they make much better specimens with regular pruning. This one had never been pruned, and had sent up one great shoot which formed a tuft of branches on top. It was not quite a standard, and in any case I do not want a standard Hydrangea paniculata. The books says they normally respond well to hard renewal pruning, done before they start into active growth, and I removed the entire bushy top to leave one bald upright stem about sixty centimetres tall, and a single side shoot, which I reduced as well since it looked silly.
Then I pruned the hybrid tea roses, a job that should have been done a couple of weeks ago, since their buds were just starting to break, but I reckon they'll be all right, though I must feed them. The Systems Administrator had a great desire for some modern roses, so I found space for a square bed and edged it with box hedging. The roses have been a mixed success, since the soil there is really too light for them, and the catalogue that said they all grew to the same height was wrong. Some have proved much stronger growers than others, and sod's law dictated that the tallest ones were at the front. The box hedging has grown vast and fat, and I need to reduce it. I am not disciplined about pruning.
After that it really was raining too much, and I did all my ironing, and then made a start on the beekeepers accounts. I have been keeping them so far in 2012 by carefully putting all related paperwork in a large cardboard box, and checking that there is nothing untoward on the bank statement, but that approach will only get you so far. It's not as though I can give the contents of the box to my accountant at the end of the year, since I am the accountant. Having now had the experience of writing up the 2012 accounts and submitting them to the County Treasurer and our own AGM I now have a much better idea of what information I'm going to need later in the year, and am trying to set up all the spreadsheets in such a way that come the first week of January 2014 the desired totals and subtotals will simply drop out of them. The 2012 accounts took an entire day to complete, and the atmosphere was so tense that the SA was afraid to come into the room.
This evening we are going for an evening out in Brightlingsea. There is a very good curry house which serves food from southern India, rather out of the ordinary, and according to the CAMRA guide there is a good pub. We haven't visited the pub before, and I don't know if it's the sort of pub where the whole room falls silent in the presence of people who are not from Brightlingsea, when a non-local walks in.
Wednesday, 6 March 2013
life on the lettuce farm
Spring has brought the lettuce farm leaping into action. Actually, that must be an illusion. I'm sure that our neighbouring farmer didn't wake up and think that it was a lovely day and he would plant some lettuces. He has presumably got delivery dates in mind by which he needs to have lettuce ready to harvest for the supermarkets, and has worked backwards from those and calculated that the lettuces need to go in towards the end of the first week of March.
The field next to us was ploughed a few weeks ago, then harrowed to a fairly smooth state, and it was top-dressed with what I took to be fertiliser, though it could have been a herbicide. At the start of the week young men in fleece hats were scrambling around re-installing the irrigation pipes along the edge. At some point when I wasn't here they must have formed the earth into the wide beds they use, and yesterday and today they were out planting lettuces.
A commercial producer like our neighbour doesn't sow seed, but plants out young plug plants that arrive by the crate. I suppose he might raise these himself somewhere else on the lettuce empire, but he probably buys them in from a specialist grower. A lettuce planting machine goes over each bed, mechanically dibbling holes and dropping a plug into each, followed by a couple of young people (they will be Lithuanians or Latvians) whose job is to plant any odd lettuces that have missed their holes or aren't firmed in properly. You couldn't plant up a whole field by hand, or at least if you did each lettuce would cost about as much as a free range chicken. It looks back-breaking work, following the lettuce planting machine, definitely a job for youngsters. Half a day of it would cripple me.
Behind the lettuce planting gang come the fleecers. A tractor with a huge roll of horticultural fleece trundles down each row, the fleece unwinding behind it, so that the lettuces will be protected on cold nights. I rather think that there is even a tiny mini-tractor that turns one row of earth over the edges of the fleece to hold it down, so that all the farm workers have to do is fill any gaps the tractor has missed. Every row of lettuce that's planted during the day is covered over before dusk.
The fleece will also serve to keep the pigeons off. One of the ladies at last week's woodland talk was a farmer, and she was telling me how pigeon damage has got so bad around here that some sowings of oilseed rape have been wrecked, and there has been nothing else to do but plough them back in. Certainly I have noticed an increasing number of bird-scarers of one sort and another in the fields around here, kites and mock hawks fluttering from tall carbon-fibre poles. In past years the lettuce farm haven't bothered fleecing later in the season, but maybe that will change.
You could say that the fleece looks very industrial and unattractive. I suppose it does, though once our hedges leaf up we don't really see it from the garden, and in the right light with wind rippling its surface it can look quite like water. Indeed, we once saw a couple of peeved swans that had apparently crash-landed on it in error, mistaking it for a reservoir. Part of the reality of living next door to a farm is that you have to accept modern commercial farming practices. Fleece is not intrinsically too upsetting, and it is only there for certain times during the year. It's when you move to the country expecting it to be like living in an episode of The Darling Buds of May that you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
The field next to us was ploughed a few weeks ago, then harrowed to a fairly smooth state, and it was top-dressed with what I took to be fertiliser, though it could have been a herbicide. At the start of the week young men in fleece hats were scrambling around re-installing the irrigation pipes along the edge. At some point when I wasn't here they must have formed the earth into the wide beds they use, and yesterday and today they were out planting lettuces.
A commercial producer like our neighbour doesn't sow seed, but plants out young plug plants that arrive by the crate. I suppose he might raise these himself somewhere else on the lettuce empire, but he probably buys them in from a specialist grower. A lettuce planting machine goes over each bed, mechanically dibbling holes and dropping a plug into each, followed by a couple of young people (they will be Lithuanians or Latvians) whose job is to plant any odd lettuces that have missed their holes or aren't firmed in properly. You couldn't plant up a whole field by hand, or at least if you did each lettuce would cost about as much as a free range chicken. It looks back-breaking work, following the lettuce planting machine, definitely a job for youngsters. Half a day of it would cripple me.
Behind the lettuce planting gang come the fleecers. A tractor with a huge roll of horticultural fleece trundles down each row, the fleece unwinding behind it, so that the lettuces will be protected on cold nights. I rather think that there is even a tiny mini-tractor that turns one row of earth over the edges of the fleece to hold it down, so that all the farm workers have to do is fill any gaps the tractor has missed. Every row of lettuce that's planted during the day is covered over before dusk.
The fleece will also serve to keep the pigeons off. One of the ladies at last week's woodland talk was a farmer, and she was telling me how pigeon damage has got so bad around here that some sowings of oilseed rape have been wrecked, and there has been nothing else to do but plough them back in. Certainly I have noticed an increasing number of bird-scarers of one sort and another in the fields around here, kites and mock hawks fluttering from tall carbon-fibre poles. In past years the lettuce farm haven't bothered fleecing later in the season, but maybe that will change.
You could say that the fleece looks very industrial and unattractive. I suppose it does, though once our hedges leaf up we don't really see it from the garden, and in the right light with wind rippling its surface it can look quite like water. Indeed, we once saw a couple of peeved swans that had apparently crash-landed on it in error, mistaking it for a reservoir. Part of the reality of living next door to a farm is that you have to accept modern commercial farming practices. Fleece is not intrinsically too upsetting, and it is only there for certain times during the year. It's when you move to the country expecting it to be like living in an episode of The Darling Buds of May that you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
Tuesday, 5 March 2013
three exhibitions
Today I went to the Royal Academy. I booked myself a ticket for Manet's portraits some time ago, since the show was reviewing well and I wanted to be sure of getting one. As the weather forecast for this week firmed up, and Tuesday looked like being the brightest day of the week, I felt a certain regret that I was committed to going to London, but there it was. And as a friend pointed out, walking around London is nicer when other people are not skewering you with their umbrellas.
My ticket was for 2.00 pm entry, chosen to avoid panic in the case of the trains being delayed, and to allow time to look at something else first assuming they weren't. Everything ran to time, so I set my sights on the National Gallery and hopped on board a number 23 bus, where I bagged one of the upstairs seats at the front. Even the London traffic was running freely, and the City looked beautiful in the pale sunshine, St Paul's having finally emerged from its shrouds of scaffolding. There is now a great hole in the ground opposite my former office, and for the life of me I can't remember what used to be there. Presumably something immediately post-war and utterly unmemorable.
Barocci: Brilliance and Grace at the National Gallery is a delight. He was an Italian painter from Urbino who worked at the cusp between the Renaissance and the Baroque. He went to Rome once, somebody tried to poison him, he came home to Urbino, and stayed there for the rest of his life, largely working on altar pieces and devotional subjects. Some of these are too large and fragile to travel to London, but the National Gallery has assembled enough to give you a fair idea, plus a good number of sketches and preparatory works. The paintings are very soft and warm, and the accompanying drawings and sketches give a fascinating view of how Barocci developed and worked up his compositions.
It is tantalising, though, to view Barocci's work as a northern European from a post-Protestant culture. The captions to the pictures describe how some of his original patrons spent hours in religious contemplation before them, and I was rather aware as I walked around that while I could admire the skill of his draughtsmanship and the sheer prettiness of his palette, I wasn't able to see the paintings in the same way as a devout Catholic of the late fifteen hundreds would have perceived them. Even though I knew most of the biblical stories in a narrative sense, I didn't share their convictions.
Another friend commented to me that Manet: Portraying Life was rather an odd exhibition, and now I've been to it I see what they meant. It has garnered some rave reviews in the broadsheets, and much has been said about how many of the portraits straddle the line between genre painting and straight portraiture, and how good Manet was at painting black. They do, he was. Now I've been to the exhibition I still I have no idea why his family group at luncheon includes a military helmet perched on a chair in the foreground, or why a woman and child in expensive clothes are apparently sitting on a wall next to a railway track, where their outfits will get covered in smuts.
It is a big exhibition, though not quite big enough to fill the whole main suite of rooms at the Royal Academy, so one crowd scene gets an entire room to itself, and another room is taken up with displays of a time-line and reproductions of Manet's photo albums. Some of the paintings are very, very good. I stared for a long time at his portrait of Berthe Morisot, and went back to it again when I finally reached the end, and was rather disconcerted to see it afterwards reproduced on a tote bag in the inevitable exit-through-the -shop. Berthe Morisot's face breathes a wary energy, strong sideways light strikes her nose dramatically, her black hat is a marvel. I loved that portrait. I should like to steal it and look at it every day. Some of the other pictures were rather suspect, with one particularly dodgy horse, and in the middle section I did begin to get slightly bored of men with serious expressions, big beards and top hats.
It seems terribly frivolous to judge an artist by how much you like their palette, since that is to reduce their work to the status of interior decoration, but Manet's can be on the muddy side, which gets somewhat depressing after rooms and rooms of it. My overall conclusion would be that the show is good, it's interesting, it's worth going, I'm glad I went (even on a sunny day), but I didn't find it uplifting in the way that I would spending an hour and a half looking at Van Gogh, or Rothko, or Rembrandt.
After all the Manet I wondered whether my brain was full, but it seemed a waste to go home at only four o'clock, what with the price of railway tickets and given that I'd taken a day off from the garden, so I had a cup of tea to restore myself and then went to see the Man Ray Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. I knew virtually nothing about Man Ray, other than the fact that I'd heard of him, but I like photographic portraits and the portrait gallery is always good. Indeed, I can't think when I've been to a duff exhibition there, and this one has reviewed well. It turned out that Man Ray spent much of the 1920s in Paris with the Surrealists, where he photographed artists of the day. Braque, who painted the small view of the white ship in Antwerp docks currently on loan to the Courtauld which is one of my favourite pictures in London, turned out to be a burly man in braces and a collarless shirt. Jean Cocteau was quite ravishingly good-looking, while Stravinsky was a tiny, fey man, his receding chin and head flung back giving him the look of a startled hare. Matisse looked just like a respectable country doctor in good tweed, with a neat beard and wire-rimmed spectacles. Satie had beaming eyes under dark brows and a great domed forehead, and a warm if knowing smile. James Joyce looked as though he had a headache.
Then Man Ray went back to the States, and I hadn't heard of most of his subjects, but they were very photogenic people, or it was Man Ray's talent to make them appear so. I know nothing of photographic techniques, and I expect anyone who did would see much more in this exhibition than I was equipped to, but I enjoyed it thoroughly anyway.
They are all on for weeks yet, since for once I haven't left it until the closing days to go in a panic. All are worth seeing and quite different to each other, though if you try to cram all three into one day your brain will be suffering from overload afterwards.
Monday, 4 March 2013
changing times
Now that it's March we start work at 8.00 am instead of a quarter past. The shift is gently disorienting, since all my guideline timings to get out of the house in the morning are thrown into confusion. The time by which I need to have finished doing odd bits of clearing up in the kitchen and start making my packed lunch, the point at which I need to be sitting down eating breakfast if I want time for enough cups of tea, the moment at which I need to be cleaning my teeth, putting on my uniform shirt over my layers of t-shirts, when I need to stir myself to go outside to let the chickens into their run and top up their food and water, all of these are closely calibrated against the kitchen clock, and when our start time moves they all have to be reworked. Knowing that by ten to seven I need to have begun making my lunch is not the same as having to calculate that at whatever time it is at fifteen minutes before ten to seven I should be digging around in the cupboard for the tupperware and assembling sandwiches.
The week got off to a slightly ropey start since the owner did not mention receiving my e-mail over the weekend with a draft poster attached for our next talk at the plant centre, and when I asked her if it had arrived she was cross I'd sent it to her in the first place, grumbling that the point of outsourcing publicity for events was so that she wouldn't have to think about it, and I should have sent it straight to the woman who works in the office. I explained that I'd done that with the last poster, which had ended up stuck on her desk for nearly two weeks awaiting approval, so I'd thought she wanted to see it first. We agreed that future posters could be sent direct to the woman who works in the office, and I found out her direct e-mail address, so that the boss couldn't intercept the next one and sit on it like he did last time.
It was not a very sophisticated poster. I have no training in and no natural talent for graphic design, and no software packages to allow me to attempt anything fancy, even if I could think of something attention-grabbing I wanted to do, so it was only a home-made poster done in Word. The woman who works in the office dropped in our logo, which I have not been entrusted with on my own machine, and I copied a photo from Google images so that it least it had a colour illustration at the bottom. It included all the necessary information on the event, what it was about, where and when it was happening, how much tickets were and where to buy them, so people who like that sort of thing and are free on the day can buy tickets if they want to. It probably wasn't a poster to bring people in who didn't have any previous interest in the topic. The owner did admit it was OK, once she had calmed down and understood that she wasn't being asked to add the logo or find an image.
Deliveries of perennial plants have started to arrive, and I spent much of the day pricing a couple of recent consignments and putting them out for sale, and removing the ones put out for sale over the weekend from their plastic trays, which my colleagues had failed to do. The manager wanted them de-trayed because otherwise in wet weather they can suffer from the lack of drainage, even when the trays have holes in the bottom, but of course it is easier and faster to put them out for sale if you don't have to handle each individual pot. It's always interesting to see what's come in, and I bought myself a couple of violets, one with white and one with pink flowers, to slot into whatever gaps I can find in the bed by the ditch. There are bound to be a few bare patches, and my ideal is for a continuous, interweaving mat of woodland flowers.
The younger dog has started chasing and killing the owners' chickens. She could do with some sessions at a puppy obedience class. At least her mother restricts herself to rabbits and rats.
The week got off to a slightly ropey start since the owner did not mention receiving my e-mail over the weekend with a draft poster attached for our next talk at the plant centre, and when I asked her if it had arrived she was cross I'd sent it to her in the first place, grumbling that the point of outsourcing publicity for events was so that she wouldn't have to think about it, and I should have sent it straight to the woman who works in the office. I explained that I'd done that with the last poster, which had ended up stuck on her desk for nearly two weeks awaiting approval, so I'd thought she wanted to see it first. We agreed that future posters could be sent direct to the woman who works in the office, and I found out her direct e-mail address, so that the boss couldn't intercept the next one and sit on it like he did last time.
It was not a very sophisticated poster. I have no training in and no natural talent for graphic design, and no software packages to allow me to attempt anything fancy, even if I could think of something attention-grabbing I wanted to do, so it was only a home-made poster done in Word. The woman who works in the office dropped in our logo, which I have not been entrusted with on my own machine, and I copied a photo from Google images so that it least it had a colour illustration at the bottom. It included all the necessary information on the event, what it was about, where and when it was happening, how much tickets were and where to buy them, so people who like that sort of thing and are free on the day can buy tickets if they want to. It probably wasn't a poster to bring people in who didn't have any previous interest in the topic. The owner did admit it was OK, once she had calmed down and understood that she wasn't being asked to add the logo or find an image.
Deliveries of perennial plants have started to arrive, and I spent much of the day pricing a couple of recent consignments and putting them out for sale, and removing the ones put out for sale over the weekend from their plastic trays, which my colleagues had failed to do. The manager wanted them de-trayed because otherwise in wet weather they can suffer from the lack of drainage, even when the trays have holes in the bottom, but of course it is easier and faster to put them out for sale if you don't have to handle each individual pot. It's always interesting to see what's come in, and I bought myself a couple of violets, one with white and one with pink flowers, to slot into whatever gaps I can find in the bed by the ditch. There are bound to be a few bare patches, and my ideal is for a continuous, interweaving mat of woodland flowers.
The younger dog has started chasing and killing the owners' chickens. She could do with some sessions at a puppy obedience class. At least her mother restricts herself to rabbits and rats.
Sunday, 3 March 2013
weeding
Spring is back in the air. It suddenly feels warmer, making time spent outdoors a pleasure instead of a penance. We were supposed to be meeting friends for lunch in a pub near Chelmsford, a get-together deferred from weeks ago, when it was snowing, but they rang yesterday to cry off, because they all had various sorts of sore throats and upset stomachs. To say they had colds would be to trivialise their sufferings, but to call it flu might be to over-dramatise the situation. Anyway, something nasty enough that they weren't up to schlepping out to mid Essex for a pub lunch.
I was sorry they were ill, and sorry not to see them, but at the same time having the day unexpectedly free to get on with things outside felt like an illicit treat, especially since the recent icy blast had given way to something altogether softer and more welcoming. Spring brings many delights, daffodils, primroses and birdsong. It also brings weeds, and the rush is on to get as much ground finally weeded, planted up and covered in mulch as I can, before the weeds race away from me, or there's a dry spell and the soil sets like concrete, bringing weeding to a halt, or the existing plants have made so much growth that I can't work among them without damaging them.
I spent the morning weeding around the compost heaps and by the fruit cage. It isn't an area you can see from the house, but I wanted to use the bags of home made wood chippings, partly to free up the bags so that I can use them next week to collect mushroom compost, and partly to encourage the Systems Administrator to do some more shredding. Creating chippings that are laid down at once on a path is more rewarding than spending time filling bags with shredded wood that then sit around not being used for anything for the next twelve months.
After lunch I switched back to weeding the entrance bed, the one which has been through multiple incarnations, none wholly successful. My current plan is to fill it largely with weed-suppressing (or at least concealing) evergreens. It isn't a place anyone lingers to appreciate a complicated mixed planting, and the thin soil, windswept aspect and competition from the boundary hedge conspire against growing anything except the toughest and most durable species. I've got a pine tree sitting in a pot that's destined for the entrance bed, and some subtly variegated box. Our existing pines have done very well in similar conditions, and box is pretty tough, and certainly drought resistant.
The SA cut up the wood harvested from trimming the boundary hedge, and the reason for stacking it on the back of the truck became apparent. The SA parked the trailer next to the truck, so that each piece of trunk out of the hedge could be picked up without stooping down, and sawed them up using an old bench saw mounted across the trailer, so that each log fell straight into the trailer and didn't have to be picked up off the ground. When the trailer was full it could be towed straight to the log shed. It goes to show how other people generally have a reason for doing things, so even if you can't immediately see the point of what they're doing (such as stacking all the heavy hedge trimmings on the back of the truck), it can be better to keep quiet until you discover what the reason is, rather than letting forth with cries of What on earth are you doing that for? Of course, if you believe that your nearest and dearest really are complete numpties then you might as well challenge them immediately, but unjustified accusations of numptyhood are liable to cause offence.
I was pleased to see the truck emerging from under the wood pile, since it means we can go and collect a big load of spent mushroom compost next week.
I was sorry they were ill, and sorry not to see them, but at the same time having the day unexpectedly free to get on with things outside felt like an illicit treat, especially since the recent icy blast had given way to something altogether softer and more welcoming. Spring brings many delights, daffodils, primroses and birdsong. It also brings weeds, and the rush is on to get as much ground finally weeded, planted up and covered in mulch as I can, before the weeds race away from me, or there's a dry spell and the soil sets like concrete, bringing weeding to a halt, or the existing plants have made so much growth that I can't work among them without damaging them.
I spent the morning weeding around the compost heaps and by the fruit cage. It isn't an area you can see from the house, but I wanted to use the bags of home made wood chippings, partly to free up the bags so that I can use them next week to collect mushroom compost, and partly to encourage the Systems Administrator to do some more shredding. Creating chippings that are laid down at once on a path is more rewarding than spending time filling bags with shredded wood that then sit around not being used for anything for the next twelve months.
After lunch I switched back to weeding the entrance bed, the one which has been through multiple incarnations, none wholly successful. My current plan is to fill it largely with weed-suppressing (or at least concealing) evergreens. It isn't a place anyone lingers to appreciate a complicated mixed planting, and the thin soil, windswept aspect and competition from the boundary hedge conspire against growing anything except the toughest and most durable species. I've got a pine tree sitting in a pot that's destined for the entrance bed, and some subtly variegated box. Our existing pines have done very well in similar conditions, and box is pretty tough, and certainly drought resistant.
The SA cut up the wood harvested from trimming the boundary hedge, and the reason for stacking it on the back of the truck became apparent. The SA parked the trailer next to the truck, so that each piece of trunk out of the hedge could be picked up without stooping down, and sawed them up using an old bench saw mounted across the trailer, so that each log fell straight into the trailer and didn't have to be picked up off the ground. When the trailer was full it could be towed straight to the log shed. It goes to show how other people generally have a reason for doing things, so even if you can't immediately see the point of what they're doing (such as stacking all the heavy hedge trimmings on the back of the truck), it can be better to keep quiet until you discover what the reason is, rather than letting forth with cries of What on earth are you doing that for? Of course, if you believe that your nearest and dearest really are complete numpties then you might as well challenge them immediately, but unjustified accusations of numptyhood are liable to cause offence.
I was pleased to see the truck emerging from under the wood pile, since it means we can go and collect a big load of spent mushroom compost next week.
Saturday, 2 March 2013
catering for the masses
I have made two vast vats of chicken stew for the music society's fund-raising supper concert, following the recipe given to me by the society's secretary. The classic advice is never to try out a new recipe for the first time on guests, but I have leaped in at the deep end, making enough to feed two dozen people as instructed.
I hope it is all right. It should be. While I have not done this exact recipe before, I have cooked chicken stew often enough. As long as you are scrupulous about keeping raw and cooked meat apart, don't use the same utensils for both, wash your hands frequently, and make sure the chicken pieces are cooked all the way through, in theory there isn't much to go wrong. Nonetheless I am nervous of a recipe for four that has been scaled up to twenty-four. Suppose I have put too much garlic in? I wouldn't choose a casserole containing garlic at all for mass catering, since too many people don't like it, but the recipe I've been given says garlic. Also three red onions for twelve people, implying six for the quantity I'm doing, but how big is an onion? The ones in the bag I bought were rather small, and I put them all in.
Apparently it is the same stew we did last year, except that last year I managed to get out of doing a main course and just made apple crumbles, which felt much safer. I would really have to try very hard to poison anybody with a fruit crumble, whereas chicken can be tricky stuff. The recipe contains anchovies, which are supposed to thicken the sauce and make it more flavoursome. I never use them at home, because of the Systems Administrator's fish allergy (though one weekend when we're not doing anything I should try smuggling some in, and find out whether the SA is allergic to anchovies, or just dislikes the idea of them by association with other fish).
The recipe also contains capers, which again I never use at home, though given the SA eats tartar sauce quite happily I probably should. I bought a jar of capers while I was shopping, and then lost my nerve when I got home, re-reading the footnote that said that last year not everybody liked capers and perhaps we should use olives instead, as being easier for olive and caper-haters to pick out. I substituted some olives that were already in the larder, and now have a jar of capers going spare. I'd better start making my own pizza, anchovies and capers at my end, and pepperoni on the SA's half. I once made a vegetarian pizza, but the SA's end of it turned into vegetarian pizza with salami.
There is quite a lot of juice. Juice is always considered a good thing in our house. The SA likes juice, and gravy, and soup made from left-over, excess juice. I'm not sure there is supposed to be so much liquid, or if it means I used the wrong sort of tomatoes. I used Napolina chopped tomatoes in rich tomato juice, which were on special offer in Tesco, but it was a choice between them and Tesco own-brand. I am slightly doubtful about how I am going to transport the juice eleven miles cross country without spilling it in the back of my car. It wouldn't hurt the car, which has got a boot liner and has had worse in it, but could be disappointing for the music society's supporters, to find there is no sauce to go with their chicken portions. I'm not entirely sure the Chairman and Secretary have taken into account the fact that several of their committee members now live some way from the village. Driving at ten miles an hour up the high street to avoid spilling a casserole is one thing, but doing it all the way up the main road across the county border is another.
I had to compromise my principles and buy intensively reared chicken, since I didn't think the society's funds would run to free range. I managed to get a couple of packets of barn raised chicken thighs, that at least were guaranteed to have had natural daylight and straw bales to perch on, but there weren't enough in stock, and I had to make up the quantity with Everyday Value. I expect I eat Everyday Value chicken when I go to other events. I probably ate it on Thursday at the ladies' lunch club after my talk. Still, I feel rather depressed at buying it. The domestic rule is that if we can't find or afford a free range bird, we don't have chicken. The recipe said skinless thighs, and the only thighs I could find in Tesco had skins on, and even then I had to include some drumsticks. It took half an hour to pull all the skins off, at the end of which I was closer to becoming a vegetarian than usual.
I'm sure it's a valuable social skill to be able to cook hot foot for two dozen people. The most I have catered for so far is around twelve, so it represents a step forwards. I shall be relieved when I've unpacked it at the other end without finding a boot full of spilt tomato and wine sauce, and more relieved on Tuesday when I still haven't heard reports of a food poisoning outbreak among the music lovers of the Essex and Suffolk border.
I hope it is all right. It should be. While I have not done this exact recipe before, I have cooked chicken stew often enough. As long as you are scrupulous about keeping raw and cooked meat apart, don't use the same utensils for both, wash your hands frequently, and make sure the chicken pieces are cooked all the way through, in theory there isn't much to go wrong. Nonetheless I am nervous of a recipe for four that has been scaled up to twenty-four. Suppose I have put too much garlic in? I wouldn't choose a casserole containing garlic at all for mass catering, since too many people don't like it, but the recipe I've been given says garlic. Also three red onions for twelve people, implying six for the quantity I'm doing, but how big is an onion? The ones in the bag I bought were rather small, and I put them all in.
Apparently it is the same stew we did last year, except that last year I managed to get out of doing a main course and just made apple crumbles, which felt much safer. I would really have to try very hard to poison anybody with a fruit crumble, whereas chicken can be tricky stuff. The recipe contains anchovies, which are supposed to thicken the sauce and make it more flavoursome. I never use them at home, because of the Systems Administrator's fish allergy (though one weekend when we're not doing anything I should try smuggling some in, and find out whether the SA is allergic to anchovies, or just dislikes the idea of them by association with other fish).
The recipe also contains capers, which again I never use at home, though given the SA eats tartar sauce quite happily I probably should. I bought a jar of capers while I was shopping, and then lost my nerve when I got home, re-reading the footnote that said that last year not everybody liked capers and perhaps we should use olives instead, as being easier for olive and caper-haters to pick out. I substituted some olives that were already in the larder, and now have a jar of capers going spare. I'd better start making my own pizza, anchovies and capers at my end, and pepperoni on the SA's half. I once made a vegetarian pizza, but the SA's end of it turned into vegetarian pizza with salami.
There is quite a lot of juice. Juice is always considered a good thing in our house. The SA likes juice, and gravy, and soup made from left-over, excess juice. I'm not sure there is supposed to be so much liquid, or if it means I used the wrong sort of tomatoes. I used Napolina chopped tomatoes in rich tomato juice, which were on special offer in Tesco, but it was a choice between them and Tesco own-brand. I am slightly doubtful about how I am going to transport the juice eleven miles cross country without spilling it in the back of my car. It wouldn't hurt the car, which has got a boot liner and has had worse in it, but could be disappointing for the music society's supporters, to find there is no sauce to go with their chicken portions. I'm not entirely sure the Chairman and Secretary have taken into account the fact that several of their committee members now live some way from the village. Driving at ten miles an hour up the high street to avoid spilling a casserole is one thing, but doing it all the way up the main road across the county border is another.
I had to compromise my principles and buy intensively reared chicken, since I didn't think the society's funds would run to free range. I managed to get a couple of packets of barn raised chicken thighs, that at least were guaranteed to have had natural daylight and straw bales to perch on, but there weren't enough in stock, and I had to make up the quantity with Everyday Value. I expect I eat Everyday Value chicken when I go to other events. I probably ate it on Thursday at the ladies' lunch club after my talk. Still, I feel rather depressed at buying it. The domestic rule is that if we can't find or afford a free range bird, we don't have chicken. The recipe said skinless thighs, and the only thighs I could find in Tesco had skins on, and even then I had to include some drumsticks. It took half an hour to pull all the skins off, at the end of which I was closer to becoming a vegetarian than usual.
I'm sure it's a valuable social skill to be able to cook hot foot for two dozen people. The most I have catered for so far is around twelve, so it represents a step forwards. I shall be relieved when I've unpacked it at the other end without finding a boot full of spilt tomato and wine sauce, and more relieved on Tuesday when I still haven't heard reports of a food poisoning outbreak among the music lovers of the Essex and Suffolk border.
Friday, 1 March 2013
car
My car passed its MoT. I was not expecting it to fail, given that it is not all that old, and quite low mileage, but it was still a gentle relief, as it was when we got to lunchtime, having dropped it off at the garage at nine, and still hadn't had a phone call to discuss an unexpected problem with the brake discs, or signs of excessive wear or failure in some other vital part.
I really like my garage. This is probably a minority view, since consumer rights groups seem to be forever releasing reports on how their undercover investigators took assorted cars to a selection of garages, who then did unnecessary work, or charged for the work without doing it, or failed to spot actual life-threatening defects in the vehicles. In six years of Skoda ownership my garage has charged me for a minimal amount of work beyond the routine services. Three faults have emerged, a broken gasket (or was it a gaiter?) that was covered under the warranty, a wiring fault that meant that the brake lights stayed on all the time, even when the key wasn't in the ignition, and a burst console brush (or bush).
The first cost me nothing to put right beyond the nuisance of taking the car to the garage, while the second was certainly a genuine fault since I saw the lights stuck on with my own eyes. Apparently it is a known Skoda Fabia failing. Fortunately the Systems Administrator knew how to remove the fuse from the brake light circuit overnight, so that it couldn't flatten the battery before I got the car to the garage. The console brush (or bush) I have had to take their word for. It was flagged up as an advisory at last year's service and MoT, when the garage said it was not a crisis but I should get it done within the next two or three months. I didn't, partly because the garage went bust shortly afterwards, and I was still sulking about the loss of my useful local Skoda dealer when they reopened, but then I never got round to it, though it played on my conscience occasionally. It is done now, and cost me a hundred and thirteen pounds in labour, and the woman who runs the service department did warn me that excessive play in the front wheels might have contributed to wear on the front tyres. That will teach me.
We could never work out how a Skoda dealer in Little Clacton could go bust, even in an economic downturn. Frinton-on-Sea is just up the road, natural Skoda owner territory, full of responsible people over the age of fifty who are going to want to keep their investment properly serviced and maintained. The garage did not go out of business under its own auspices, but as part of a larger group which had bought it from the original founder. He was able to buy it back and re-open it with the same staff, which is handy for them and for us, though I suppose not so good for any suppliers who were owed money by the previous owners.
The woman who runs the service department sounds as though she knows quite a lot about cars. I have waited while she took down copious details from a young man whose car was playing up, as she questioned him minutely about exactly what his car had and had not been doing. She wrote so much she ran out of space in the field on her computer, telling him that the more the mechanics knew before they started, the faster and more cheaply they could do the job. It sounded like one of those cars that you wouldn't necessarily want to spend much money on, so you needed to know what was wrong with it and how expensive it would be to fix before you started. As well as knowing quite a lot about cars she knows how to pronounce our name correctly, which is a rarity.
She wears a small cross around her neck. As someone whose faith was never fully formed enough in the first place to merit the term lapsed Anglican, I don't share her persuasion, but I don't mind at all if she wants to wear a crucifix where I can see it, rather than under her sweater as a private mark of faith. Goodness knows who the customers are who are supposed to be offended if the staff they deal with wear visible religious symbols. I'm more offended by the assumption of the management of the likes of British Airways that I'm so intolerant, or insecure in my own agnosticism, that I'd be upset by seeing a small cross. Am I meant to be afraid that my garage, sensing a member of the ungodly approaching, will put a pinch of sugar in my petrol tank or give my brake pipes a quick rub with a hacksaw?
The car was all ready, serviced and MoTd, by mid-afternoon. The only advisories this year were the somewhat worn front tyre, and slight smearing from one windscreen wiper. I'd already noticed that, and it wasn't bad enough to be an MoT failure. If it gets worse then even I can buy a wiper in Halfords and change it. I like my garage, and very much hope I don't have to go back there for another year.
I really like my garage. This is probably a minority view, since consumer rights groups seem to be forever releasing reports on how their undercover investigators took assorted cars to a selection of garages, who then did unnecessary work, or charged for the work without doing it, or failed to spot actual life-threatening defects in the vehicles. In six years of Skoda ownership my garage has charged me for a minimal amount of work beyond the routine services. Three faults have emerged, a broken gasket (or was it a gaiter?) that was covered under the warranty, a wiring fault that meant that the brake lights stayed on all the time, even when the key wasn't in the ignition, and a burst console brush (or bush).
The first cost me nothing to put right beyond the nuisance of taking the car to the garage, while the second was certainly a genuine fault since I saw the lights stuck on with my own eyes. Apparently it is a known Skoda Fabia failing. Fortunately the Systems Administrator knew how to remove the fuse from the brake light circuit overnight, so that it couldn't flatten the battery before I got the car to the garage. The console brush (or bush) I have had to take their word for. It was flagged up as an advisory at last year's service and MoT, when the garage said it was not a crisis but I should get it done within the next two or three months. I didn't, partly because the garage went bust shortly afterwards, and I was still sulking about the loss of my useful local Skoda dealer when they reopened, but then I never got round to it, though it played on my conscience occasionally. It is done now, and cost me a hundred and thirteen pounds in labour, and the woman who runs the service department did warn me that excessive play in the front wheels might have contributed to wear on the front tyres. That will teach me.
We could never work out how a Skoda dealer in Little Clacton could go bust, even in an economic downturn. Frinton-on-Sea is just up the road, natural Skoda owner territory, full of responsible people over the age of fifty who are going to want to keep their investment properly serviced and maintained. The garage did not go out of business under its own auspices, but as part of a larger group which had bought it from the original founder. He was able to buy it back and re-open it with the same staff, which is handy for them and for us, though I suppose not so good for any suppliers who were owed money by the previous owners.
The woman who runs the service department sounds as though she knows quite a lot about cars. I have waited while she took down copious details from a young man whose car was playing up, as she questioned him minutely about exactly what his car had and had not been doing. She wrote so much she ran out of space in the field on her computer, telling him that the more the mechanics knew before they started, the faster and more cheaply they could do the job. It sounded like one of those cars that you wouldn't necessarily want to spend much money on, so you needed to know what was wrong with it and how expensive it would be to fix before you started. As well as knowing quite a lot about cars she knows how to pronounce our name correctly, which is a rarity.
She wears a small cross around her neck. As someone whose faith was never fully formed enough in the first place to merit the term lapsed Anglican, I don't share her persuasion, but I don't mind at all if she wants to wear a crucifix where I can see it, rather than under her sweater as a private mark of faith. Goodness knows who the customers are who are supposed to be offended if the staff they deal with wear visible religious symbols. I'm more offended by the assumption of the management of the likes of British Airways that I'm so intolerant, or insecure in my own agnosticism, that I'd be upset by seeing a small cross. Am I meant to be afraid that my garage, sensing a member of the ungodly approaching, will put a pinch of sugar in my petrol tank or give my brake pipes a quick rub with a hacksaw?
The car was all ready, serviced and MoTd, by mid-afternoon. The only advisories this year were the somewhat worn front tyre, and slight smearing from one windscreen wiper. I'd already noticed that, and it wasn't bad enough to be an MoT failure. If it gets worse then even I can buy a wiper in Halfords and change it. I like my garage, and very much hope I don't have to go back there for another year.
Thursday, 28 February 2013
a talk
Today's woodland talk was slightly different to the usual events I go to, since it was held in somebody's house instead of a village hall. I'd suggested to the organisers that I'd better arrive before the pre-talk refreshments, to set up the projector and screen and bring my things in, and in fact I was earlier than I needed to be, having allowed time for getting lost or not being able to find the house, and then finding that the house was exactly where Google maps said it would be. When I saw how many chairs were fitted into the sitting room I was very grateful to be putting up my screen and crawling around plugging in the extension cable before the room filled up with ladies holding cups of coffee. Apart from anything else, it was one of those rooms containing tables of family photographs and antique china, that we don't even attempt to have, since the cats would only destroy them (and anyway we would never dust them).
I had a strategic advantage over my hostess, in that I knew who she was. She comes to the music society concerts, and shops in the plant centre, and once when she was ordering a shrub I took down her name, which seemed oddly familiar, until later the penny dropped that she is a local councillor. On the other hand, she had no reason to know my name, so I thought it might be a surprise to her when I popped up on her doorstep. It was, but she bore it with equanimity.
She was ailing with a cold or flu that had struck that morning, but insisted to her friends that she was fit to carry on. Her husband already had it, and had retreated upstairs with the dog. The friend who had got me the booking arrived, and disappeared again after a few minutes on the grounds that due to family commitments she absolutely could not afford to risk catching the cold and/or flu, and that she had heard my talk before anyway. There were cries of sympathy, cries that our hostess should have cancelled, and instructions to go and lie down for half an hour, which were ignored.
I waited for them to be ready to start, while inspecting the titles in my hosts' bookcases and the tottering stacks of books piled next to the bookcases, which won my full approval. Colin Thubron, William Dalrymple, Lynn MacDonald, Beth Chatto. Travel in Asia, military history, gardening, fine art, natural history. All good stuff. I love looking at other people's bookcases. It would be rude to touch, but I read the spines.
The talk was fine, though I had to include ash dieback, which was depressing. I decided to cover it near the beginning, since it is so topical and otherwise would have been hanging over the rest of the talk in a great unspoken cloud, which meant I needed an extra image between slides 5 and 6, and the existing slides 6 to 32 inclusive all had to be renumbered. The Systems Administrator kindly fixed that for me earlier in the week. The only way of doing it I could think of would have been laboriously slow and error-prone.
After the talk came lunch, which I'd been invited to stay for and so did. Chicken casserole, salad, French bread. I am beginning to grasp that these are staples of middle class mass catering, since that's exactly what we're doing for the music society supper concert, albeit with a different chicken recipe. And a choice of puddings. People were friendly, and I was given two primroses for my garden and a generous donation for the charity. As gigs go it was definitely at the genteel end of the charity talks circuit, and beat flogging back up the A12 from south Essex in the middle of winter at ten at night, fortified with nothing but a cup of tea and a custard cream.
I had a strategic advantage over my hostess, in that I knew who she was. She comes to the music society concerts, and shops in the plant centre, and once when she was ordering a shrub I took down her name, which seemed oddly familiar, until later the penny dropped that she is a local councillor. On the other hand, she had no reason to know my name, so I thought it might be a surprise to her when I popped up on her doorstep. It was, but she bore it with equanimity.
She was ailing with a cold or flu that had struck that morning, but insisted to her friends that she was fit to carry on. Her husband already had it, and had retreated upstairs with the dog. The friend who had got me the booking arrived, and disappeared again after a few minutes on the grounds that due to family commitments she absolutely could not afford to risk catching the cold and/or flu, and that she had heard my talk before anyway. There were cries of sympathy, cries that our hostess should have cancelled, and instructions to go and lie down for half an hour, which were ignored.
I waited for them to be ready to start, while inspecting the titles in my hosts' bookcases and the tottering stacks of books piled next to the bookcases, which won my full approval. Colin Thubron, William Dalrymple, Lynn MacDonald, Beth Chatto. Travel in Asia, military history, gardening, fine art, natural history. All good stuff. I love looking at other people's bookcases. It would be rude to touch, but I read the spines.
The talk was fine, though I had to include ash dieback, which was depressing. I decided to cover it near the beginning, since it is so topical and otherwise would have been hanging over the rest of the talk in a great unspoken cloud, which meant I needed an extra image between slides 5 and 6, and the existing slides 6 to 32 inclusive all had to be renumbered. The Systems Administrator kindly fixed that for me earlier in the week. The only way of doing it I could think of would have been laboriously slow and error-prone.
After the talk came lunch, which I'd been invited to stay for and so did. Chicken casserole, salad, French bread. I am beginning to grasp that these are staples of middle class mass catering, since that's exactly what we're doing for the music society supper concert, albeit with a different chicken recipe. And a choice of puddings. People were friendly, and I was given two primroses for my garden and a generous donation for the charity. As gigs go it was definitely at the genteel end of the charity talks circuit, and beat flogging back up the A12 from south Essex in the middle of winter at ten at night, fortified with nothing but a cup of tea and a custard cream.
Wednesday, 27 February 2013
charmed by finches
Getting into the car to go out to lunch this morning, I noticed a large flock of small birds in the hedge. They were making a lively chattering noise, and I couldn't see what they were. Later on the Systems Administrator, on returning from a different lunch, said that there was a big flock of some sort of small birds outside. The SA couldn't see what they were, but thought they might be finches.
Looking out of the bedroom window at around a quarter to five, there they were in the big holly at the end of the wood, a great number of little birds flitting energetically through the branches of the tree and twittering to each other, and I saw that they were goldfinches. Bright creatures, with a yellow flash along their wings and distinctive red patches on their faces. A flock of goldfinches. A charm of goldfinches, indeed, though I think that is becoming pretty archaic. I can't think when I last heard anyone, wishing to refer to a quantity of finches, referred to them a charm. It is probably still a valid term for purposes of crossword setting and pub quizzes, but in normal conversation it is edging into the territory occupied by people who peruse menus instead of reading them.
I wondered what they were doing in the holly. They are seed eaters, and I have seen them on the teasel heads and the old stems of the evening primroses in the gravel, but they wouldn't find any seeds in the holly. They feed insects to their young, so maybe they eat insects themselves as well, but would they find any insects in late February? They must know their own business, so I'm sure they had a reason to be there.
One of the pictures of the infant Christ in the Courtauld gallery showed him holding a goldfinch, and a passing visitor explained to me that in Christian symbolism the goldfinch is associated with the Passion and the crown of thorns because of the thistle seeds it eats. Since then I've read somewhere the idea that the red splash on the goldfinch's face is because a drop of blood fell on it at the crucifixion. It's strange how animals and plants get attached to that story. In a few weeks the Crown Imperial fritillaries will be up, and if you tip one of the strange, foxy smelling flowers up to you and look into it you will see a permanent bead of nectar glistening at the base of each petal. These are said to be the fritillary's tears of shame at its failure to bow its head at the crucifixion, and is why the flowers now nod downwards in penitence.
From these elevating thoughts I went to my music society committee meeting. By the end of it I had agreed to spend a hunk of Saturday cooking four dozen chicken thighs for the fundraising supper concert. I realised on the way home that I had no idea how large a stew for twenty four people was, but if it won't all fit in our two casseroles there is always the stock pot, and in an emergency the jam saucepan.
Looking out of the bedroom window at around a quarter to five, there they were in the big holly at the end of the wood, a great number of little birds flitting energetically through the branches of the tree and twittering to each other, and I saw that they were goldfinches. Bright creatures, with a yellow flash along their wings and distinctive red patches on their faces. A flock of goldfinches. A charm of goldfinches, indeed, though I think that is becoming pretty archaic. I can't think when I last heard anyone, wishing to refer to a quantity of finches, referred to them a charm. It is probably still a valid term for purposes of crossword setting and pub quizzes, but in normal conversation it is edging into the territory occupied by people who peruse menus instead of reading them.
I wondered what they were doing in the holly. They are seed eaters, and I have seen them on the teasel heads and the old stems of the evening primroses in the gravel, but they wouldn't find any seeds in the holly. They feed insects to their young, so maybe they eat insects themselves as well, but would they find any insects in late February? They must know their own business, so I'm sure they had a reason to be there.
One of the pictures of the infant Christ in the Courtauld gallery showed him holding a goldfinch, and a passing visitor explained to me that in Christian symbolism the goldfinch is associated with the Passion and the crown of thorns because of the thistle seeds it eats. Since then I've read somewhere the idea that the red splash on the goldfinch's face is because a drop of blood fell on it at the crucifixion. It's strange how animals and plants get attached to that story. In a few weeks the Crown Imperial fritillaries will be up, and if you tip one of the strange, foxy smelling flowers up to you and look into it you will see a permanent bead of nectar glistening at the base of each petal. These are said to be the fritillary's tears of shame at its failure to bow its head at the crucifixion, and is why the flowers now nod downwards in penitence.
From these elevating thoughts I went to my music society committee meeting. By the end of it I had agreed to spend a hunk of Saturday cooking four dozen chicken thighs for the fundraising supper concert. I realised on the way home that I had no idea how large a stew for twenty four people was, but if it won't all fit in our two casseroles there is always the stock pot, and in an emergency the jam saucepan.
Tuesday, 26 February 2013
cooped up
My three days charging around in the fresh air at the plant centre must have exhausted me, because when I woke up this morning it was twenty to nine, and I didn't have a riotous evening last night to celebrate the end of my working week (scrambled egg on toast, teetotal, in bed by eleven). The trouble with waking up at gone half past eight when you keep chickens is that after realising what the time is your first thought is that your chickens are still locked in a box. The cats were keen for their breakfast as well.
It was too cold to do anything outside. It is a testament to my strong Protestant work ethic that I managed to do so much over the weekend. Wishing to keep my job, and feeling that if I was being paid to work I should do some, I stuck it out. Today, left to my own devices, being outside simply seemed too horrid. I spent half an hour watering the pots in the greenhouse and conservatory, and at the end of that my hands were so cold I couldn't type properly.
The Systems Administrator had to venture out after lunch to cut some more firewood, since we are chewing though our supplies at an alarming rate, and came back indoors after an hour with chattering teeth saying it was no good, it was too cold. And last night my mother rang about a proposed trip this week to look at the hellebores at Beth Chatto, saying it was too cold for garden visiting, and could we just have lunch instead.
I don't understand why it feels so cold. According to our weather station it was four degrees outside when I got up, which is not that cold. The SA said it was because the humidity was so high at ninety per cent, though when I asked why that should make it feel colder neither of us really knew. We agreed it must be that damp air was a better conductor of heat away from the human body than dry air, or else that tiny beads of moisture condensed from the atmosphere on our skins and then cooled us by evaporation, or both. Whatever the reason, it felt cold. Always work from the evidence. My least favourite rationalists are those who, failing to know the reason behind an observed phenomenon, or observing a phenomenon that does not accord with their accepted theory, argue that the observed phenomenon cannot in fact be the case.
We listened to The World at One with our lunch (more eggs. We forgot to heat the baked beans up) and grumbled about why the producers thought the Italian election results ranked beneath a long interview with a woman involved in the Liberal Democrat sex scandal, and another interview with a woman who had been involved in a previous Egyptian balloon accident. Having your leg touched in a hotel bar in Peterborough while surrounded by other people also known to you sounds thoroughly unpleasant on many levels, as does being injured though not killed some time ago in a balloon accident, but we couldn't see why they merited fifteen minutes on what is supposed to be a flagship news and current affairs programme, ahead of the outlook for the Italian economy, the Euro, and the European banking system.
The cats are all bored with the winter as well, the big tabby alternating between following us around aimlessly, niggling for food he then doesn't eat, and needling Our Ginger. Roll on the spring. We all need to get out more.
It was too cold to do anything outside. It is a testament to my strong Protestant work ethic that I managed to do so much over the weekend. Wishing to keep my job, and feeling that if I was being paid to work I should do some, I stuck it out. Today, left to my own devices, being outside simply seemed too horrid. I spent half an hour watering the pots in the greenhouse and conservatory, and at the end of that my hands were so cold I couldn't type properly.
The Systems Administrator had to venture out after lunch to cut some more firewood, since we are chewing though our supplies at an alarming rate, and came back indoors after an hour with chattering teeth saying it was no good, it was too cold. And last night my mother rang about a proposed trip this week to look at the hellebores at Beth Chatto, saying it was too cold for garden visiting, and could we just have lunch instead.
I don't understand why it feels so cold. According to our weather station it was four degrees outside when I got up, which is not that cold. The SA said it was because the humidity was so high at ninety per cent, though when I asked why that should make it feel colder neither of us really knew. We agreed it must be that damp air was a better conductor of heat away from the human body than dry air, or else that tiny beads of moisture condensed from the atmosphere on our skins and then cooled us by evaporation, or both. Whatever the reason, it felt cold. Always work from the evidence. My least favourite rationalists are those who, failing to know the reason behind an observed phenomenon, or observing a phenomenon that does not accord with their accepted theory, argue that the observed phenomenon cannot in fact be the case.
We listened to The World at One with our lunch (more eggs. We forgot to heat the baked beans up) and grumbled about why the producers thought the Italian election results ranked beneath a long interview with a woman involved in the Liberal Democrat sex scandal, and another interview with a woman who had been involved in a previous Egyptian balloon accident. Having your leg touched in a hotel bar in Peterborough while surrounded by other people also known to you sounds thoroughly unpleasant on many levels, as does being injured though not killed some time ago in a balloon accident, but we couldn't see why they merited fifteen minutes on what is supposed to be a flagship news and current affairs programme, ahead of the outlook for the Italian economy, the Euro, and the European banking system.
The cats are all bored with the winter as well, the big tabby alternating between following us around aimlessly, niggling for food he then doesn't eat, and needling Our Ginger. Roll on the spring. We all need to get out more.
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