glorious mud

Spring still doesn't feel fully sprung.  At least it is not raining, which is better than the forecast. Over the weekend the Met Office were predicting heavy rain all day on Tuesday for Colchester, and as recently as this morning they were still saying showers.  There was a light sprinkling of rain around ten this morning, and that was it, but the air feels slightly raw, without that balmy softness that would encourage plants to grow.

I'm still weeding and mulching the big sloping border in the back garden, though by way of a change and to celebrate having new wellington boots that don't leak I weeded the bog bed while I was at it. The Primula bulleyana that I planted last year have begun to make some leaves.  They are still only at the small rosette stage, but at least I can see that several of them are alive and doing something.  The Primula florindae are still invisible under the mud.  They might have made it through the winter, and merely be biding their time, which is possible as they flower later than most candelabra primula, or perhaps they have quietly rotted and died.  Time will tell.

There are small, wispy,  mauvish-green fronds that tell me that the Filipendula live on, but they have not started to grow yet.  The skunk cabbage has produced a tiny funnel of green leaves, that you would not see unless you were looking very closely.  Fortunately I saw it before I stepped on it. The Rheum by the deck has made some big, fat red buds, but has decided to leave it at that for now.  I have not waded through the mud to see what, if anything, the gunnera is up to.  The area where it was planted ended up wetter than I was expecting, as the water table continued to rise inexorably, and it may be that the crown has rotted.  Or it may be about to leap into glorious life.

Customers at work ask me for evergreens that will live in constantly wet situations, or even places that are intermittently very wet, and I struggle to think of anything.  For the past five or six months our bog bed has consisted of a small sea of mud, over which a layer of bright green slime gradually developed, the only vegetative interest provided by some tufts of weed grass that is apparently adapted to swamp conditions, some hopeful patches of lawn buttercup, some aquatic nettles (which don't look very well.  I don't think they've quite got bog life sussed yet) and rosettes of willowherb.

The yellow berried Viburnum opulus that I planted in the mud, while wondering whether the boss's label saying it would tolerate boggy soil could really be true, has got fat, round, pale pistachio green leaf buds on it, so that's alive and fairly well.  The next unknown is whether it will berry for me, or if it is too shady at the back of the bog bed.  Viburnum opulus berries are beautiful, almost translucent.  The surprise survivor among the shrubs that were there before the water table rose so dramatically to the surface is Itea viginica 'Henry's Garnet'.  The species hails from North America, and makes a lowish, suckering bush whose leaves colour to a good shade of red in the autumn, and hang on for a long time.  It is helping itself by partly perching on the root plate of a self-seeded pussy willow, but the parts that are growing in the bog seem to be doing quite well.  I have been impressed enough by it to start recommending it to customers who want a shrub for a damp and intermittently wet spot, but I don't think I've clinched a sale so far.

We had the night camera set up to try and catch whatever is eating plants, and in particular flowers, in the back garden.  I'm convinced it's muntjac, and want to know where they are coming in and how often, but all the camera caught this time round was some pheasants, and black and white Alsatian killer cat.  The SA thinks the batteries ran down.  The camera belongs to the Systems Administrator, who seems to need frequent reinforcement in the form of interesting night photos of something to retain enthusiasm for the night shot project.  I want to know what is eating my plants and how it gets in, so nights where we draw a blank and nothing comes into the garden still yield valuable information from my point of view.  However, a nil score tells me nothing if the reason for it is that the camera battery was flat.

A buzzard flew low out of the wood yesterday, straight towards the house.  We know that without the aid of a wildlife camera, because the SA saw it out of the bedroom window.

cracking up

The older gardener had a bad cold, which kept him off work last Friday with coughing.  The manager had a thick cold that has lasted five days so far without abating, and was booked to do a talk to a garden club tonight, and another at work tomorrow.  The wind had developed an evil chill, despite the wan sunshine.

The day was slow to develop momentum, then built up until it was quite busy.  I stuck labels on pots, put plants out for sale, answered the phone (a lot) and did my stint on the till.  Customers ranged from the delightful to the frankly annoying.  Top marks for charm go the local resident who correctly identified me by voice on the phone, and as well as chatting pleasantly about some plants she wanted, remembered to tell me that in her capacity as webmaster of one the local U3As she had put a link to the music society on their website, something I'd asked if she might be able to arrange when I discovered at the fundraising supper concert that she was the webmaster.

In pole position for sheer annoyance factor was the man who moved his things around in his trolley while I was trying to put them through the till, asked me questions about how a hose spray attachment worked while I was still operating the till, and insisted on counting his plants for me, announcing portentously that there were three of those as my hand hovered above one of three large Fritillaria imperialis.  Thank you, they are in your trolley right in front of my face where I can see them clearly, and although I work in a shop I can count to three.  Flavia, quamquam est femina. Flavia, although she was a woman (and a shop assistant) was not an idiot.

The young gardener had been on a visit over the weekend with the professional gardeners' guild to Wakehurst Place, where he enjoyed a tour of the Millennium Seedbank and a two hour trip round only one third of the garden.  He said that they could have done with six hours just to look at the garden.  You can tell that gardening is a vocation in that almost everybody who works with plants spends their spare time gardening or garden visiting.  I'm not sure how many actuaries play with life insurance tables at weekends.

The garden designer I reserved ten Iris 'Black Swan' for yesterday came to collect them, and bought a lot of other things as well, spending over three hundred and sixty pounds in total.  I was slightly relieved once she'd taken the iris without any repercussions, plus another five that the manager found for her, since that left us with only five, and after I'd told her she could have the the original ten I began to have horrible doubts in case they were already earmarked for another customer.  In principle we ought to try and boost sales by looking to see what else is stashed away behind the scenes, to make up the numbers for customers who need to source plants in quantity.  However, there's always the slight risk taking anything from the herbaceous tunnel, even if it has a price label on it, that perhaps it was intended for an existing order, or the manager was planning to split it.

Working on the till mid-afternoon I felt a sharp stab of pain in my left forefinger, and looking down saw a smear of blood.  I wondered whether I'd pricked myself on a loose staple, and managed to finish the transaction using the other hand, while keeping the bloody finger discreetly out of view. Investigating it afterwards I found it had split along the crease of the first joint.  I rub copious amounts of hand cream into my hands, morning and night, but they are terribly dry after this everlasting winter.  The second joint looks a bit fragile too.  The manager asked whether I was all right, and I waved my cracked and filthy hand at him and hissed that we really did need to get somebody to work the cafe.  Food service and nursery work do not mix.

Addendum  The only news on the radio on the way home was the death of Margaret Thatcher.  I was a fan.  When I went to university it was only the second year that my college had admitted women, and the recently elected Mrs Thatcher was our first female Prime Minister.  As a young woman embarking into the world I found it very encouraging.  The miners and workers in some traditional manufacturing industries did have a very thin time of it.  I profoundly disagree with her attitude to General Pinochet and several other things.  But I grew up against the background of the British disease.  We had scheduled power cuts because we couldn't organise ourselves to produce enough electricity, for goodness sake.  The Systems Administrator and I did well out of Big Bang, so it would be hypocritical not to be a fan, but I look at the choice of providers I had last month when I bought my new phone, and I wouldn't go back to the era of the three day week.  And Margaret Thatcher was by all accounts always considerate and polite to the junior people that worked around her.  I heard an interview on Radio 4 quite recently with one of her former protection officers, who was not a fan at the point when he was posted to Number Ten.  He had to work on Christmas day, and in the little room allocated to him to sit in while he waited to do any protecting needed, he found tinsel, a miniature bottle of spirits, and a card from Mrs T thanking him for his work and apologising that he was called away from his family on such a day.  He said in the interview that from that point onwards he would have taken a bullet for her.

a trying day

When I started the car this morning the display on the dashboard read minus 2.5 degrees.  That was colder than I'd expected last night, and caused us problems when we tried to start work.  The first thing we needed to do was the watering, and the hoses were blocked by ice.  Two of us spent over an hour and a half dragging them into the sun to try and defrost them, then periodically testing them with the lances, and without the lances in case it was just the heads that were blocked, switching the taps on and off in the hope that the pressure might dislodge the blockages, but without success.  There were hard lumps of ice inside the hoses themselves, and as the sun went in again and a thin sea mist slid over the plant centre, we realised that they were not going to have defrosted in time for us to do any watering before we opened at ten.

A couple wandered into the plant centre at only ten past nine, and I had to warn them to be careful of the hoses, while apologising for pointing out the blindingly obvious, since they are bright yellow and you can scarcely miss them.  They promised they would be careful, but I thought the man was unwise in the nonchalance with which he strolled past the open ends of hose pipes we were struggling to persuade to run.  If the ice blocking  them had suddenly shifted a considerable amount of water would have shot out, and while we tried to make sure they were turned off when he was nearby, frankly he was in the way.

After the bad start with the watering the day never really got on to an even keel.  The boss eventually ran off the labels for some of a delivery of herbaceous plants that were sitting behind the scenes.  To attach the labels to the pots we needed to staple them, since none of the plants had more than a few centimetres of growth, and certainly no leaves or branches you could tie a label to. One of the staplers in the shop contained approximately six staples, while the others were all completely empty.  I looked in the stationery cupboard by the owner's desk but could only see staples for the staple gun, which is a different and altogether heavier beast.  In the end I went and robbed what looked like the last supplies on the potting bench over in the herbaceous tunnel on the far side of the car park.

The last time I noticed we were running out of staples I left a note for the owner asking if we could have a box for the shop, but all that happened was that she scrawled on the note in spiky handwriting that she had just given a box to the manager and left the annotated note for me to find the next day.  She may well have already given the manager some staples, but I didn't know that, and he hadn't left them in the shop.  In fact, it turned out he had taken them over to the herbaceous tunnel.  In the light of how it turned out last time I did not leave another note about the shortage of staples.

There were three of us on duty, and one was fairly fully occupied with the tea room from mid-morning onwards.  Two people are not really enough to operate the till, help customers find plants, advise on their gardening questions and answer the phones.  The boss picked up a couple of calls, including one that he only left to ring twice before taking it.  It can take longer than two rings to get your gloves off and extract the phone from your pocket, added to which the phone starts making a noise in the office before the roaming handsets outside start ringing, so he had a head start on us.  The boss asked irritably over the radio whether the phones were working out there, which is boss speak for Why aren't you answering the phones as included in your job description? The roaming handsets don't always roam as far as the herbaceous tunnel on The Other Side, and in fact for one of the missed calls my phone hadn't rung.

Bookings for the talk on herbs are not good.  There is a received wisdom, or at least if not received it gets trotted out in the broadsheet newspapers and on Radio 4, that one of the ways that retail businesses are supposed to beat the downturn is by offering more than just products.  We are supposed to offer Events and Experiences.  Hence bookshops are supposed to host book clubs, invite authors to do evening talks, create coffee areas and all the rest of it.  Merely selling books will not cut the mustard in the days of Amazon.  We are trying to offer Events and Experiences, but they aren't bringing people thronging in through the doors.  The owner discovered that the number of people coming to the herb day, and in particular the number of people requiring lunch, had been overstated.  She had consequently ordered too much food and was cross.  The names and phone numbers of the people booked on the course are clearly written down in a file, so goodness knows how anybody managed to overstate them.

By the afternoon the hoses had defrosted, and at four I started watering in the tunnels, as most customers had left by then.  Then I watered outside, which entailed dragging another hose out of storage and persuading a different tap to work.  That arm of the irrigation system had collected a small amount of mud and pebbles, which blocked the lance twice, meaning that each time I had to turn off the hose, go back to the tap and turn it off, turn the hose on again to release the pressure, and hold the lance as far from my body as I could while disconnecting it from the hose, following which it spat brown water over my fleece and my glasses.  By quarter to six my hands were getting jolly cold.

spring is slightly sprung

The car was frosted this morning, as was the chickens' water container.  The latter was frozen together more solidly than I expected, and I had to boil a kettle of water to melt the ice in the base before I could remove the top half and refill it.  This led to my setting off for work slightly later than I would have liked, but fortunately it was a morning with practically no traffic.  Arriving at work I met the dogs standing by the front entrance looking speculatively out into the road.  I thought they really shouldn't be there, since cars come hammering along that road at well over the speed limit, so I parked and went back to call them in.  To my great relief they came, and consented to follow me up to the house, where I was able to shut them in.

The sun shone.  It shone out of a rather hazy sky, and as the day went on the wind got up, though not as bad as yesterday (which was a day when empty compost bags blew across the garden unless weighted down).  It was not exactly a gentle and balmy spring day, but it was sunny (at home the thermometer reached a whole nine degrees in the middle of the day.  That's still a couple of degrees colder than the average maximum daytime temperature for April in this part of the world, but still a big improvement on last Thursday, when at lunchtime my car thermometer was reading half a degree).

Our first instruction for the day on the manager's list of tasks was to check the watering.  Some of the evergreen shrubs in the shade tunnel were dry, and I pulled out the hose ready to start my fireman Sam act.  I enjoy watering, though it can get physically hard work in hot weather when we're doing four hours of it every day.  I have seen a Freudian interpretation of female satisfaction at spraying water around with a big hose, though I don't look at it that way myself.  This morning's pleasure was short-lived, as after an initial spurt of water the hose stopped working.  That normally means there is a kink in the hosepipe, but if  there isn't, it usually means the nozzle is blocked. There was no kink, but when I managed with some difficulty to uncouple the lance from the hose, it was blocked with ice.

I went and defrosted the ice in hot water in the cafe sink, and for good measure warmed the spray head end as well, but it didn't improve matters, and when I tried the hose without the lance (standing at a safe distance), no water came out.  I tested the tap at the wall (keeping well clear) and that had a normal water supply under pressure, so I decided that the problem was that the hose was frozen.  I left the watering for an hour, until the day had begun to warm up, and when I tried the hose again a gout of slush burst out of it, discoloured with earth where the irrigation system has leaked slightly in the winter.  Sometimes the lance heads get blocked because a piece of gravel has got into the hose, and once, when a garden hose stopped working at home and I investigated the spray head, I found the squashed remains of an enormous slug.

Customers were a little slow to arrive, and by mid-morning my young colleague was faintly restive and anxious.  I thought they'd be along later.  People tend not to dash out to buy plants first thing on a Saturday, but seem to take their time to get going.  Lie-in, breakfast, grocery shopping, I don't know how they occupy themselves in the first part of their day, but plants generally fit in later on.  I was right, and in the end we were busy.  Total takings through the tills were helped by the couple who spent over eight hundred pounds on pots and trees.  My young colleague served them, but overhearing parts of the conversation I gathered that they were slightly anxious to be buying things without their gardeners' permission.  Their gardeners were apparently lovely people, but the owners weren't always allowed to have their own way.

The turkeys have found their way into the car park.  The cock turkey is an enormous creature, and he is feeling the joys of spring.  He was displaying to Mrs Turkey, fanning his tail, dropping his outspread wings to the ground, and shuffling along with rapid steps while making the most extraordinary gobbling noise.  She seemed utterly indifferent.  My young colleague managed to herd them out of the car park, as he was concerned that they were so large they could be intimidating. In fact, he said, they intimidated him.  I don't mind them myself, but I think I would if Mr Turkey showed signs of going for me.  He is a big bird.

two histories

When I came to carve the nameless joint of frozen half pig, I was disappointed that underneath the skin there seemed to be almost nothing except an enormous bone.  I needn't have been, since the small amount of meat there was tasted inedible, as did the sauce.  Sometimes you speculate to accumulate, and sometimes you waste a tin of tomatoes and three small red onions.

This morning's loaf of bread was back to one hundred per cent wholemeal, without any old dough.  It rose faster than all my previous efforts, for reasons unknown to me, as I didn't consciously deviate from the exact same method I followed before.  The wind is not quite so cold as it was, so perhaps the house is fractionally warmer.  When I got it out of the oven the top was not quite rounded and taut, but had fallen in very slightly at one end.  It tasted perfectly nice when we had some for lunch, and the crumb was acceptably open, so it hadn't collapsed to a degree that you'd notice while eating it.  I still want to know what happened, though, in the interests of learning by doing.

Aside from the experimental cookery I have been occupying myself in this interminable winter by reading.  I recently finished Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum.  You would expect any book subtitled The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944 to 1956 to make sombre reading, and so it does, but still gripping.  I don't know why I'd expected it to be organised on a country-by-country basis, with a chapter on East Germany, one on Hungary, and so on, but I did.  It isn't.  Instead each chapter covers a theme, Policemen, Youth, Ethnic Cleansing or Radio.  I had not realised how gradually the Soviet fist tightened around its Eastern bloc satellites after the end of the war, vaguely assuming that Communist power was total from 1945 onwards.  The mechanics of how Soviet influence established itself turned out to be more complex, and grimly fascinating.  You hold elections.  You are hurt and surprised when the people do not vote for Communist power.  You falsify the results of the elections, or take power anyway.

Practically nothing I do would have been allowed.  Never mind being a bourgeois capitalist and property owner, or being educated at an elite university.  The music society and the beekeepers association would not have been allowed, because forms of social organisation that existed independently of the Communist party were forbidden, in the end if not at the start.  Most of my tastes in music, art and literature would not have been tolerated.  In fact, I wouldn't rate my chances of survival at all highly.

Oh, and the command economies of Eastern Europe didn't work.  In 1950, Poland and Spain had similar sized economies.  By 1988, Poland's had increased by two and a half times, Spain's by thirteen.  Something to remember, the next time you hear any politician claiming that under their party's policies economic growth will suddenly resume.

After Anne Applebaum I moved on to the monarch unkindly referred to The Dead Queen Anne in 1066 and All That.  Anne Somerset has gone for the more neutral Queen Anne.  The publishers have hopefully added the subtitle The politics of passion, but that's misleading.  It's a very readable account of the events leading up to James II's departure from the throne, which is about where my knowledge of English political history takes a break for the next century and a bit, then covers the reign of William and Mary, and Anne's own reign following William's death in 1702.  Poor Queen Anne, she gave birth to 17 children, only three of which survived at all and they died in infancy.  The current medical theory is that she suffered from a form of lupus.  Her consort, the Danish prince George, emerges as one of English history's unsung noble figures, and Sarah Churchill, later Duchess of Marlborough, as a most spectacularly unpleasant woman.  Anne adored her, or still does so far, since I'm only up to about 1708.  I'll let you know how it ends.

cabined, cribbed, confined

The weather forecasters have been promising us warmer weather by the weekend, so I was sceptical yesterday when the Systems Administrator warned me that today, Thursday, it was forecast to snow.  Today is 4th April.  The tax year ends tomorrow and the vernal equinox was two weeks ago.  How can it snow?  It snowed.

I went to Tesco, since the Systems Administrator had volunteered me to do this evening's supper. On that basis we are having part of a half pig that has been in the freezer for rather a long time. We bought it from a friend who was living with a farmer at the time, who had gone into small scale pig production.  Our pig was from the first batch, and he had not realised how far in advance he would need to book the abattoir, so the pig went on fattening for a fortnight longer than it was intended to.  The half pig was consequently heavier and more expensive than anticipated, the excess weight unfortunately being almost entirely fat.  It arrived jointed in unlabelled plastic bags, so that matching cuts to any of the recipes in our books was hit and miss, especially once the bags iced up.  The Systems Administrator became bored of the pig, and started buying pork even though we still had several nameless pieces in the freezer.  One of my missions for 2013 is to eat or throw away as uneatable everything in the freezer.  I am sure the half pig is not poisonous, but it may be that the fat has oxidized and it is not very nice.  I have promised the SA that if supper is disgusting I will go and get us a Chinese takeaway instead.

On the basis of experience I should say that buying half of any animal larger than a rabbit for your deep freeze was not a good idea for two people.  I know it is a lovely idea to have seen the corner of the field where the animal lived, and feel a personal connection with the farmer who sold it to you, but they sell very nice, locally produced pork in the farm shop, in manageable quantities and identifiable cuts.

The farm shop also sells locally produced flour.  A 1.5 kilo bag of organic stoneground strong wholemeal flour milled in Chelmsford will set you back £2.15.  The same quantity of non-organic stoneground strong wholemeal costs £1.39 in Tesco, and they are currently doing a 3 for 2 on baking ingredients, so you could bring that down to 93 pence per bag if you bake regularly.  Do you want to support a local shop selling local food, or shop organically, so much that you want to pay over twice as much?

I got a small bag of rye flour in Tesco, to make a sourdough starter.  I've a feeling I've read that rye starters are relatively easy to manage.  You mix some flour and some warm water, and keep the mixture warm, and carry on adding flour and water each day for another three days.  On day 5 you should have a usable starter, powered entirely by the natural yeasts on the flour.  No organic grapes, no potato peelings.  That is what Andrew Whitley says, and he adds that if your starter develops a layer of greyish liquid on top, don't worry about it but just stir it in.  He is very strict that the initial water should be at 40 degrees C, and the starter kept at 30 degrees, but I just used warm water, and the starter will be at whatever temperature it is on top of the Aga.  If after five days nothing seems to have happened there is further advice on page 181.  It all sounds potentially fraught, though not as bad as Jane Grigson's advice on salting your own beef (if green scum appears on the surface of the beef just wipe it off.  I haven't tried that one yet).

Then I took all the ingredients out of the store cupboard, which was in a muddle.  I take a fairly relaxed attitude to expiry dates for dry goods, but I was afraid that semolina that was best before November 2011 had probably gone off, and I didn't think the SA should be eating peanut butter that theoretically expired three years ago.  I don't understand why we have three jars of Frank Cooper's Oxford Marmalade, each one almost untouched.  I wonder if the SA buys a new one each year for Cheltenham week, and then doesn't eat marmalade for the rest of the year.  I know I have a recipe somewhere for cake that includes marmalade as an ingredient, so might make one sometime for the staff room at work.

I knocked the eyes off some potatoes that the SA had rejected because they were sprouting, and boiled them in their skins for the chickens.  They really like cooked potato.  They are pretty keen on cooked pasta as well, so the odd remains of three bags of conchiglie and macaroni could go the same way.

a small attack

I was going to go to London today with my mother, to take my artistic nephew to the National Gallery.  We didn't go, because yesterday evening I got a phone call from my mother saying that my father had had a suspected small stroke, and was being kept in Colchester General stroke unit overnight for observation and tests.  By three this afternoon they'd finished the tests, and confirmed that he'd suffered a transient ischaemic attack.  Beyond adding aspirin to the panoply of drugs he takes daily and telling him to take it very easy for a few weeks, there wasn't a lot they could do about that, and my mother was told he was ready to come home.

Ready to come home in the sense used by hospitals means medically fit to be discharged, not booted, suited, signed off and ready to go, and we sat for half an hour in a side ward until a very cheerful male nurse came and gave my father his discharge letter and bag of pills.  He addressed my father as 'Sir' and spoke to him rather than talking to my mother, which more or less made up for the NHS's cavalier attitude to everyone else's time.

However, it is a mystery to me why Colchester General is laid out without any short stay parking bays near the hospital doors for people collecting frail or elderly patients.  I was parked in the furthest part of the main car park, a long walk from the stroke unit for an eighty-two year old who is supposed to be taking it easy.  The wind was bitingly cold, which apart from the discomfort makes the platelets in your blood stick together, the last thing you want when you've just had a very small stroke already.  We found a side door which visitors collecting patients were permitted to hover by, though not right by the door in case an ambulance needed access, and my parents managed to find me before anyone came and told me to move on.  We had the same problem the night I collected them from A&E, but with the prospect of ambulances looming even larger.  I grumbled about the lack of pick-up facilities to the Systems Administrator when I got home, who said unkindly that it was Colchester General, so they weren't expecting anyone to leave except in a box.

Meanwhile, the rooster died.  He'd been poorly for several weeks, and we were hoping that if some warmer weather came he might pull round.  Yesterday he found a little patch of sun to stand in, out of the wind, but by lunchtime today he had quietly died in his chicken house.  Poor creature, he was an ineffectual rooster, but he had a kindly nature.  We don't know what did for him.  The hens have all been in bouncing good health throughout, so it was presumably not any virulent avian infection. We tend to keep very quiet if a chicken is ill, since people are generally not so sympathetic as they would be if were a cat or a dog, but make unfunny jokes about bird flu while inwardly panicking.

bread and circuses

My experiments in bread making are coming on by leaps and bounds.  Or at least, I have made several edible loaves in a row, and no inedible ones, or even lumps of bread that you could could eat at a pinch but would really be more use as ballast.  This morning's loaf was bread made with old dough, which does what it says on the tin, really.  You keep a bit of dough back when you make a loaf, store it in the fridge, and add it to the next lot of dough when you make bread again.  The idea is that the acids and yeasts in the old dough add flavour to the new, and help it develop a good structure.  The recipe comes from Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley, and for those of you who want to try it at home, you make a dough with 330 grammes of water and 500 grammes of flour, and after kneading it for five minutes add 160 grammes of old dough.  It isn't a true sourdough, because you still use yeast in the new dough.  Today's loaf was made with a roughly fifty-fifty mix of wholemeal and white flour, just because I ran out of wholemeal, and the old dough was one hundred per cent stoneground wholemeal.

It made a very nice loaf, though I say so myself.  I think that when I started off I was overly cautious due to the dire warnings in the books about the ill effects of using too much heat.  Water that was too hot would kill the yeast or inhibit its action, the books said, and proving at too warm a temperature would produce crumbly, funny tasting bread that didn't keep.  Heeding their advice, I was trying to make bread at temperatures that would have needed about twenty-four hours to produce a fully risen loaf.  Cranking up the heat a few degrees seems to have got things moving at a pace that fits in better with a desire to make bread, but not spend the entire day keeping an eye on the wretched stuff to see if it is finally ready to move on to the next stage.

Picking up the concertina after a gap of so many years is proving an education in learning and memory as well as music.  I'm sure I've read that athletes in training can continue to improve on days when they don't actually do any running around or physical activity at all, as their brains process the movements they were making the previous day.  Admittedly I read this thirty years ago, and I may have muddled the details in the interim, or science may now have proved the opposite. It is certainly the case that a tune I was struggling to learn, finding each time I listened to it and tried to play it through that I was missing a beat somewhere in the middle, suddenly popped into my head fully formed the next day.  The missing bar wasn't very interesting, the musical equivalent of hopping on one foot and going la-la for the duration, but it filled in the shape.

On the other hand, recalling tunes is horribly difficult.  I have worked out the fingerings for Walsh's Hornpipe, and once I've heard the first three notes of it I could play the rest of it.  At this stage 'play' means stumble through in a rather horrible and halting fashion, but I know the tune.  And yet I have whole hours when I try to remember how Walsh's Hornpipe starts, and nothing comes into my head, not one note, phrase or scintilla.  Suddenly it will bob up in odd moments and I'll run through it in my head several times.  An hour later it's gone again.  Clearly I have to practice not just playing tunes, but remembering them when I want them.  I've never had that problem with songs, and it is most peculiar.

I suppose that with songs you have the words to act as a cue.  The words also help me remember the title, something I have always struggled with when it comes to tunes.  Song titles tend to be self-explanatory.  A song about a girl cruelly betrayed by a blacksmith who marries someone else is called A Blacksmith Courted Me or The Blacksmith.  But Walsh's Hornpipe could be anything. It is a hornpipe, obviously, but it could just as well be called Robson's Fancy, or Buckets and Brooms (traditional songs often have names like that), or The Honiton Bypass because somebody wrote it while stuck in a traffic jam on the Honiton bypass.

If you went to the sort of school where morning assembly was daily and compulsory, complete with dirge-like hymn to piano accompaniment, then you almost certainly know some British folk tunes, even if you don't think you do.  Many share the same basic construction, starting with a phrase of eight bars, which is repeated with variations, then the whole sixteen bar phrase is repeated again. When I was young that was generally referred to as the 'a music', if it was called anything, though I don't know if the term is used nowadays.  Then came a second eight bar phrase, generally developing the first phrase in some way and often higher pitched, followed by a second eight bar phrase that was generally a reprise of the 'a music'.  This second sixteen bar construction was also repeated, and that was the 'b music'.  The hymn I heard the voice of Jesus say follows this pattern. When it is not doing duty as a hymn tune it serves for the traditional song Dives and Lazarus, and as a traditional tune when it is often called the Star of the County Down.

You will see that a traditional tune isn't very long, so to spin the proceedings out to a decent length and make them more interesting it's customary to string two or three tunes together into a set, which is played through with no pauses between movements (if you are a player of pure genius, such as Martin Hayes, you will go off into sets of multiple tunes lasting a full half hour, while your trusted accompanist begins to look a trifle anxious as to how you are both going to get out of this or when you are ever going to stop).  To form a set you pick tunes that sound right together, which creates another challenge for the novice musician, to avoid following the first half of one tune with the second half of a different one.  At one level I suppose that wouldn't matter, but it would irritate anyone in the audience who knew them.

I am sure that the mental effort in grappling with this at my age will be extremely good for me, probably helping ward off dementia and all sorts of things.  In the meantime, at this particular moment, I still can't think how Walsh's Hornpipe starts.

tiny signs of life

The trouble with working on Easter Monday when the clocks have just changed is that you have to get up at what your body is telling you is five o'clock in the morning.  I had remembered to reset the time on my bedside clock yesterday, and the kitchen clock switches to the new time automatically, so I knew what the time now theoretically was, it just didn't feel like that.

I was expecting another depressingly quiet day at work, since it was still cold, but as the sun came out so did the customers.  They were wearing scarves, woolly hats and thermal gloves, and some vowed to return to buy more plants when it was warmer, but they did come, and they bought things. We had some big trolleys go through, and it was nice to see some familiar faces of regular customers, returning like swallows.

I thought on Tuesday that I saw one of them at the RHS show in Vincent Square, so as he was paying for his plants I ventured to ask whether he had a doppelganger or whether I had indeed seen him at the show.  It turned out that I had.  He divided his time between London and Suffolk and often went to the shows, though the RHS didn't run so many as they used to.  I said that I didn't often get to them, but it had so happened that I'd had a ticket for a lunchtime concert on Tuesday and went to see the flowers afterwards.  He turned out to be familiar with the London lunchtime concert scene as well as the flower show scene, and remarked that next time we should go for a drink.  This week was the first time in a decade I've seen him without his regular male companion, so we are on very safe ground with a shared enthusiasm for plants and classical music.

It was a pity that the electric bar heater in the staff room broke.  The manager came to tell me not to switch it on any more, since a shower of sparks had suddenly poured out of it while he was sitting drinking his mid-morning mug of tea.  You will be able to form an impression of the approximate age of the heater when I tell you that it has a fabric covered flex.  I hope the owners will get us a new one, hard times and terrible cash flow notwithstanding.  Otherwise we will have to do what we usually do, and fall back on whatever domestic appliance a member of staff is turfing out of their house to make room for something newer and shinier.  We have kept ourselves in kettles for years by that method.

Now that it is April our official working hours are eight until six, but at half past five the manager suggested that as it was so quiet we could all bunk off early, and while we were tilling up the owner came over the radio telling us not to hang around if there were no more customers, as it was so cold.  The last feature on the R4 PM programme before the weather forecast was about the travails of the garden centre industry and their suppliers.  I'm glad somebody's noticed.

snow at Easter

I am beginning to get an inkling of how it must feel to be on an unsuccessful Polar expedition, beaten back repeatedly by the weather.  This morning really didn't look too bad.  The sun was almost shining, and I saw a bee on a flower in the front garden.  Just the one.  Swaddled in thermal leggings, thermal long sleeved vest, long-sleeved t-shirt, old office cotton shirt, thermal hat and neck fleece, heavy fleece jacket and jeans, I strode forth to garden.  The Systems Administrator looked at me dubiously, and I said encouragingly that it was really not too bad out there.

If it had not been such dreadful weather I would have been to the dump at Clacton, and if I had been to the dump I would have come home via the Clacton Garden Centre and bought a large tub of fish, blood and bone.  And if it had not been so very cold and windy the SA and I would have taken the truck to collect a big load of mushroom compost.  If it had been marginally nicer out then at least I would have taken the Skoda and collected a boot-load of compost to be going on with.  Because I had not done any of these things I had run out of mushroom compost, and soon ran out of fish, blood and bone, which put paid to further applications of Strulch.

I did plant out the remaining tray of seed raised oriental poppies from the greenhouse.  Since the plants come into leaf and flower in the spring and are pretty dormant over the summer, I'm experimentally combining them with a patch of perennial sweet pea and Geranium 'Ann Folkard', which die down completely in autumn and take their time to get going the following season.  My hope is that the poppies will have time to do their bit before they disappear under a tidal wave of pea foliage.  The seed came free with a magazine, and I can't think where else to plant them, so it is a low-cost experiment.  I'll let you know how it goes.  I planted some of the poppies last autumn, and it's interesting to see how much bigger and stronger the plants in the ground have grown compared to the ones that overwintered in their pots.

Half way through planting the poppies it began to snow.  It's Easter Sunday, after all.  Why wouldn't it snow?  I was about to give up when it stopped snowing.  I planted out five pots of Muscari 'Dark Eyes' at the front of the border, wondering why I had bought so few bulbs.  I love grape hyacinths. Some tidy-minded people grumble about their self-seeding habits, but I don't.  Extra flowers are always welcome, and I like the semi-natural, interweaving look that you get in gardens where self-seeding is allowed.  I don't even mind the spreading patch of Allium triquetum, which some look on as a fearsome weed.  Mind you, if it escapes into the wild then it is a fearsome weed.

I planted a pot of a miniature Narcissus called 'Baby Moon', then began to wonder if I had put it in a sensible place, or if the perennial pea would smother its little leaves before it had finished growing for the year.  I scooped up 'Baby Moon' and put it back in its pot, deciding it was too cold to think and I would weed the island bed and cut down the last of the old herbaceous stems.  It began to snow again.  I gave up.

dusting down the squeezebox

We were going to go to the point-to-point at Higham.  Neither of us have ever been to a point-to-point, and I thought it might be rather charming, smaller even than Fakenham races, being to Cheltenham what a novelty dog show is to Crufts.  That is probably unfair to point-to-points, since the Systems Administrator says you get some quite good horses at them.  By the middle of the week, as the weather continued so cold and the forecast barely any better, I began to think that it would be unbearably chilly.  I froze at Fakenham, although I enjoyed myself, and that was with the benefit going to lurk periodically in the members stand, where we could look at the course through a big plate glass window while drinking hot chocolate.  You don't get anything like that at a point-to-point.  You are basically standing in a big field while horses run about.  If it had been a lovely spring day, with happy members of the hunting, shooting and fishes classes and jovial dogs all brisking around, it would have been fun.  Not in the icy blast from Siberia.

When I got up and looked out of the bathroom window I discovered it was snowing.  I had to rush downstairs and put the camellia and Corylopsis I borrowed for Thursday night's talk under cover so that the flowers didn't spoil, since I'd left them standing by the front door until I return them on Monday, but I hadn't been expecting it to snow.  We were definitely not going to the point-to-point (though according to the Racing Post all point-to-points were going ahead today, and a miserable time I'm afraid they'll have of it).

My bread-making skills are coming on by leaps and bounds, with all this dire weather, so I couldn't amuse myself making bread because I did that yesterday.  We ate some of it for yesterday's lunch, but there is still enough left that we don't need any more yet.  The SA's confidence in the bread has risen to the point of not buying any yesterday morning when going shopping, so if the bread hadn't worked we'd have had to eat oat cakes, or crisps.  I was touched, though, since it would be rather demoralising to pull a freshly baked loaf out of the Aga only for one's partner to announce that they had bought some anyway, in case your's was inedible.

Instead I dug my concertina out of the cupboard.  I haven't touched it for years, and recently I've been thinking that maybe I should.  It is a Wheatstone English concertina, and was my father's before me.  He bought it in a junk shop in Glasgow, whose name, Dunlop's, 31 Candleriggs, is still on a plate inside the lid of the case.  He was a junior fellow at an Oxford college at the time, and looked so shabby that the shop owner was initially reluctant to let him touch the instrument.

The English concertina is small with hexagonal ends.  Standing flat on the kitchen table beside me it measures 15 centimetres tall.  The ends are covered with polished steel, cut into a flowing leaf curlicue pattern, and the bellows are of black leather.  There are two screw holes on the upper side of the body at each end, relicts of a time when it must have had a strap fitted.  Towards the bottom of each steel plate is a small steel shelf with curved end, that rests on your little fingers while you play, and towards the top of each plate is an adjustable black leather loop through which you put your thumbs.  Although it is a small instrument, it feels remarkably heavy after a few minutes, taking its entire weight on your pinkies and your thumbs, and I tend to play sitting down so that I can rest one end on my knee, but professionals like John Spiers just stand there and play.

The keys are metal, as are the reeds, though I haven't touched those since my father had it refurbished for my benefit around 1980, by a chap who lived in Lacock who cured a couple of stuck notes and a leak in the bellows, and re-tuned it.  It probably needs tuning again, but not so badly as to upset an amateur ear like mine.  It has two volumes, off and loud.  The buttons are arranged in four rows at each end, the white notes in the inner rows and the incidentals in the outer rows. Successive notes in a scale are at opposite ends of the instrument, so to play a scale you hit a key at one end, then a key at the other end, then the next key diagonally up the instrument at the first end (going to the outside row of buttons for a black note, staying on the inside row for a white note) and so on.  Since you can't look at both ends of the instrument at once while you play you have to learn to find the notes without looking at all.  It makes the same noise whether you push or pull.

I don't know what any of the notes are.  I could find middle C on a piano, but I don't know which it is on the concertina, though I suppose if I can play a scale without using any notes in the outside rows I must have started on C.  Since I can't read music it doesn't make any difference not knowing. When I played (a little, and very badly) at Oxford I was teased for always arranging tunes in C, so I learned to choose a key with at least one outside row button in it, just to make sure that whatever key I was playing in it wasn't C.

I stumbled my way through a few half remembered Irish tunes, then dug out a reasonably familiar CD by Kathryn Tickell and loaded it on to my i-Pod to give me something to learn, and practice upon.  The i-Pod is brilliant for this purpose, compared to the old days of having to drop the stylus down on a vinyl LP again and again.  Learning tunes isn't so hard, if you were brought up as a folkie and have never been able to read music.  You listen a few times, hum along with the source, hum it some more, and start trying to play it, and it sticks.  I was never at all good at the concertina, and after a lapse of years am still at the stage of searching around for the notes on the instrument. They are easier to find when they are close together, so I get half a dozen right, the tune coming haltingly, then a bigger interval flummoxes me and I am left trying keys experimentally, looking for the note.  Add to that the fact that sometimes I know where the button is but hit the one next to it by mistake, and it must be agony to listen to.  Fortunately the SA doesn't mind watching telly through headphones, and we don't live in a studio flat.

My father was of the stern belief that you must keep the rhythm going, so if you hit a bum note don't stop to correct it, but keep the shape of the tune and keep going.  That's good advice, but only once you have got to the stage of knowing where all the notes are and being able to hit the right one reliably.  Once I can do that I can focus on the shape of the tune, and start putting in chords and twiddles and triples, and little percussive shakes of the bellows.  If I ever get there.  If the weather would only brighten up I'd be outside like a shot.  I very much doubt that my playing will ever progress to the stage where I would wish to inflict it upon other people.  I am not musically gifted, but just musical enough to be able to hear the difference between inspired genius and the dull plodders.

winter feeding

It felt marginally less cold today when I went out to let the chickens into their run, and the weather station was reading 4.8 degrees C on the roof.  The ceaseless cutting wind of the past week had dropped back, and the sun was shining.  It was rather thin, unconvincing sunlight, and after five minutes of sitting on the doorstep the black cat retreated to the upstairs sitting room to sunbathe through the double glazing, but it was sun.  This meant that it was time to go and feed the bees.

I received an e-mail from the British Beekeepers Association a week ago warning me of the danger of starvation.  Even without the reminder I was thinking about what stores they must have left, given that they have been able to get and out forage for no more than two or three days all month. However, I didn't go and look at them as soon as I got the BBKA message, because it was so cold, and then so snowy, and windy, that I really couldn't face it, and didn't think it would do the bees any good at all to disturb them.  If they had been starving then refraining from disturbing them and leaving them to die of starvation would have been a pointless courtesy, but I didn't really think they were starving.  When I checked the weight of the hives in February they felt good and heavy, and I fed them then anyway, so I thought they probably had enough to last a little longer.

One of the dangers the BBKA warns against, which I was taught in my beekeeping classes, is that in very cold weather the bees will stay in a tight cluster in the hive and won't move, so if the bees are at one end of the box and the remaining supplies of food are at the other, the bees can die even though they have food a matter of centimetres away.  The BBKA therefore wanted me to go and check, not just whether the hives were heavy enough, but whether the food was where the bees could reach it.  But to do that you have to remove the crown board and start investigating individual frames.  You are going to disturb the bees a lot, and let heat out of the hive, and I really didn't fancy doing that in this weather.  Perhaps my attitude is rather harsh, that any strain of bees so inept that they can't find their own food inside a beehive might as well be weeded out by natural selection.

When I lifted the roof off the first colony I couldn't see any bees through either of the holes in the crown board, and for a moment I thought that maybe I had been over-confident, and they had died, but when I lifted the crown board there they were, in a tight group.  I smeared the contents of a very old jar of honey over the tops of the frames around them, left over from a bumper crop that arrived at a time when I had no outlet lined up to sell it, and just before a period in my life when I was rather ill and couldn't cope with what to do with a large amount of honey.  I was taught in classes that I should never feed honey to bees, for fear of spreading disease, but this was from my own apiary and I had no reason to think the colony from which I harvested the honey was diseased. I never saw any signs of illness, and it was a very strong colony to have produced such a large crop.

The other three hives also contained live bees, in a slightly more active state.  I gave each of them a jar of honey as well, spreading it on top of the crown board since they were already moving about and were going to find it.  I began to worry in case the honey in the first hive ran down over the cluster of bees and squashed them, but told myself that they were bees and could cope with honey. It had granulated and was no longer at all runny, though not rock hard.  Since honey is their natural food, I thought they ought to find it easier to eat than sugar.

It is rather desperate to be going into April with the bees still not able to fly, or build up numbers or do anything except survive, but at least they have survived so far.  I may yet discover that one or more colony is queenless, but four out of four colonies are still alive.  In beekeeping terms there is still all to play for.

Bees tended to, I went to plant the rest of the snowdrops, that have been sitting in their plastic bags for the past week since the snow came.  They didn't look too bad at all, given that in an ideal world they'd have planted ten days ago.  I was peacefully crawling around in the wood listening the Radio 3 when from the direction of the garden I heard a terrible animal shriek, as if some creature were in great pain or danger.  I put the trowel down, and went to see what the noise was, accompanied by Our Ginger, who is incurably nosy and perhaps did not wish to be left alone in the wood.

Rising up horribly from one of the chairs in the conservatory, smeared in pollen or algae, I beheld the face of Black and White Alsatian Killer Cat, gaunt and ghastly as Martin Sheen arising out of the swampy waters of the Nung river.  The horror, the horror.  I had shut Alsatian Killer in the conservatory, the last time I closed the door.  I couldn't think exactly when that was or quite when I had last watered it, but days ago, perhaps getting on for a week.  The plants don't need much watering when it's this cold, and I didn't feel like clambering up and down the steps with cans when the snow was lying.  He could have drunk out of the fountain, so he wouldn't have been thirsty, though he might got have lead poisoning, but the heating wasn't on so he would have been barely above freezing, and with nothing to eat.  I opened the door and he slunk out, looking very seedy.

I went to fetch a small plate of food, not too big since I didn't think he should eat too much at once on an empty stomach.  He had vanished when I returned, and the Systems Administrator suggested that he might have gone home, but when I called his name he appeared out of the wood.  He ate the food with the speed of a cat that hasn't been fed for a week, then howled at us, and seemed to want to come with us.  I didn't want Alsatian Killer in the house.  I felt very sorry for him, at being shut in, and at being such a hopeless pet that the neighbours hadn't been round asking if we could check our sheds.  I put a pair of wellington boots in front of the cat flap, backed up by the latest Naked Wines delivery, and Alsatian Killer sat outside and screamed at us while our cats sat inside the glass and bristled back.

After half an hour he was still there, and I put on a coat and leather gardening gauntlets and went out to give him another small meal.  I have no desire to be bitten again by Alsatian Killer.  The last time he got my hand I was on antibiotics for a week, and it took more like six weeks to regain normal sensation in one finger.  After he'd eaten the second meal he had a wash, and began to look slightly less awful, though since most of one ear is missing and his expression is invariably malevolent he looks fairly sinister at the best of times.  We had to let our cats out, since the plump tabby was starting to cross her legs, and there was a great deal of posturing and hissing.  After another half hour I gave him a third small helping of cat food, and told him that that was it, and he should go home now.

He hung around the garden for the rest of the afternoon, occasionally screaming with rage or some strong emotion.  Anger at having been locked in?  Futile desire to be allowed to come and live in our house with the rest of the cats?  Stomach ache?  I don't even understand why he didn't make a noise to be let out before.  The bird table is right by the steps down to the conservatory, and he must surely have heard the SA coming out to restock the table.  I feel remorseful that I managed to shut him in like that.  In cold weather when I'm not watering every day or even every other day I shall have to keep an eye out, in case he lurks in there again.

the road to Harwich

We went last night for the Systems Administrator's delayed birthday night out in Harwich.  I like the old town in Harwich, and if it were not a slightly over-long and tedious drive we'd probably go there more often, if we went out.  To get to Harwich you have to use the A120, which you share with rather a lot of lorries heading for the port, while the multi-lingual signs on the way home reminding you to drive on the left serve to emphasise that some of your fellow road users are likely to be very tired, and not guaranteed to remember which side of of the road they are supposed to be on.

The last stretch as you approach Harwich is not dual carriage way.  If the Bathside Bay port development had gone ahead then paying to dual the remainder of the A120 would have been one of the planning conditions.  The proposal to extend the port has been rumbling around for at least four decades, according to a friend who has lived in the area for that long, but has been kicked back into the long grass yet again due to a combination of planning concerns, economic concerns, and the fact that in the meantime a large new container port has opened much further up the Thames estuary.  If Bathside Bay had gone ahead we would probably have had a quarry next to our house, so on balance we are happy to live with the non-dualled stretch of A120.  It is a dismal road, though, prone to banks of fog, and the same friend who knows about the port's planning history says it feels haunted.

The worst bit of the A120 is actually the stretch of dual carriage way nearer home.  I have grumbled in the past about how much I dislike turning right on to that road, or turning right off it.  In fact, nowadays I refuse to use the junction at all, except to turn left off the main road, and last night we took the back route through Tendring and picked up the A120 at the Weeley roundabout, at the point where it reverts to single carriageway.  People have been killed on that stretch of road, and in January the authorities spent spent several hundred thousand pounds painting new white lines and rearranging the cats' eyes to reduce it to single carriageway in both directions.  The idea was that it would cut the speed of traffic and accidents.  It didn't work, and there have been more crashes. Indeed, last night as we drove home from Harwich we saw a car in the verge where it had run straight off the road instead of turning left.  It was still there this morning when I went out for something else.

The latest proposal is to close the gaps in the central barrier so that people can't turn right at all, off or on to the main road.  This idea has been met with dismay by all those living on the lanes and in the villages that will suffer from the resulting increase in traffic.  The trouble is, the A120 cuts in a great swathe across the Tendring peninsular, and there aren't enough places to cross it if you want to travel from north to south, as I do each time I go to work, or for local traffic to join or leave the main road safely.  What we need is a roundabout on the site of the current dangerous junction, but of course roundabouts cost money.  Locals are asking why speed cameras can't be installed and a 40 mph speed limit on that stretch of road rigorously enforced, instead of making them take a long detour down single track lanes each time they want to return home from Colchester, let alone London.  Perhaps the Highways Agency and police don't believe people will stick to the speed limit, and fear there will be more accidents, or maybe they don't want to pay for the speed cameras, or perhaps port traffic mustn't be disrupted and the locals will just have to suffer the inconvenience.  I am waiting to see whether my normal route to work remains tenable, since it includes a longish single track section with only limited passing places.

I digress.  We went to Harwich, and went for a pint (or in my case half a pint) in The Alma.  The Alma is a lovely pub, so if you've just clicked on the link back there don't worry about their slightly lack-lustre website.  The decor is stripped wood and bare floor boards, but in a salubrious way. They have a decent range of draught beers, and the food is said to be good but not cheap (that's often the way).  There is no music and no TV.  We once called in when the landlord was running an esoteric quiz on spices that would have stumped most of R4's Kitchen Cabinet.  I didn't know the answers, and I fancy myself as a bit of a foodie, or at least well-read.  There was a large group of people in the bar, who were slightly but not excessively dressed up, and appeared to know each other, so we reckoned that was a works do, or a birthday, or something.  It came as a real shock to walk into a pub and find it full of people and buzzing with conversation, especially on a Wednesday. Normally it's just us and two or three blokes, and we wonder how the pub can keep going, and then leave.

For those of you who like pub quizzes, the battle of Alma was the first battle of the Crimean War, in 1854.  There was a broadside ballad written about it, and later it was recorded by Donovan.

After The Alma we had supper at Thai up at the Quay.  This gets almost uniformly rave reviews, and is very good.  I had let slip when making the booking that it was someone's birthday, and even though we ended up going not on their birthday we still got Happy Birthday glitter sprinkled on the tablecloth, and a complimentary pudding, which turned out to be a scoop of icecream and two slices of a Thai bread pudding with a little start shaped candle on a stick.  I didn't know the Thais went in for bread pudding, but this one was rather nice.  It tasted more of Christmas pudding than anything, and the owner told us it was made with coconut milk.  The vegetables in tempura batter (really just an excuse to eat batter), chicken satay, beef curry (hot enough to give the SA hiccups) and vegetable Phad Thai were all very good.  When I ordered vegetarian options the owner checked whether I was a strict vegetarian or if fish sauce would be acceptable.  As it happens I'm not a vegetarian at all, but I was impressed that he asked.  It seems unnecessarily hostile to tell restaurateurs that I'm concerned their chicken, pork and fish may not be ethically sourced, so if asked I just say I like vegetables.

late arrivals for the twenty-first century ball

I'm feeling my way with the new phone.  The first time it rang I failed to answer it, because I had not read or else forgotten the section of the manual that said that I had to not just touch the green icon of a phone on the screen, or tap it, but drag it sideways.  The whole routine of dragging my finger across the screen to confirm that I want it to wake up again, every time it goes into energy saving mode, has caused me some difficulties, and I think I have made one or two silent calls to contacts by mistake, through hitting dial on the contacts screen without meaning to.  That would explain why I got a call this morning from a friend who doesn't normally ring me for a chat.  They kept their end of the conversation up with aplomb, but afterwards I began to suspect that the reason they'd rung had been to find out the source of an incoming call from an unknown number.

Mind you, I think making false calls must be easily done with a touch screen.  I found I had a voicemail, that turned out to be four minutes and thirty-three seconds not of silence but of rustling, with the odd clonking noise as if a mug were being put down on a desk.  The on-line instruction book had very little to say about voicemails, since they are provided by O2 and not Samsung, and it took some time to discover by trial and error that in order to delete the voicemail I apparently had to listen to the end, before it would give me the option to Press 3 to delete.

I don't understand why a couple of outgoing texts seem to have stuck in draft instead of sending. The first time I sent a second, with apologies in case the first had already arrived.  The second one formed the tail end of an exchange of courtesies about tickets for a friend's upcoming concert, and I left it.  It will be interesting to see whether the entry in the messages summary next to that name suddenly stops saying Draft in red, and puts in the first few words of the message like the ones I know did send.

I managed to work out how to turn the phone to silent mode very early on.  The former colleague I saw yesterday was mildly impressed that I'd already cracked that one.  Before getting the phone I had vague ideas of downloading ringtones, and was considering the relative merits of the Pink Panther theme and the one from the 1970s TV version of Lord Peter Wimsey with Ian Carmichael, but the reality is that I don't want it to make a noise at all.  I have got it on vibrate, so that I know when it does something, and left on a surface like the hall table to act as a soundboard it makes a subdued but powerful buzzing noise.

Unfortunately I haven't yet found a setting that will let me silence it entirely for e-mails, and only buzz for texts, or incoming calls (not that I expect to get many of those).  It is rather disappointing to hear it buzz, and find not a text from a friend, but an automatic e-mail from Blogspot warning that another irritating marketing message has been appended under the guise of a comment.  That or Fidelity suggesting that now is the time to think about getting back into equities (because they want to flog ISAs at the end of the tax year, after the market has gone up a thousand points. Telling me to get into equities when the index was at 5,300 would have been much more useful). Indeed, it is still rather peculiar to have access to e-mails on the move, and part of me feels it spoils the surprise of getting home and seeing what has arrived in the course of the day, like looking through the morning's post.  I said as much to my friend yesterday, who laughed, and welcomed me to the twenty-first century.

I tried the map twice yesterday.  The first time I was using some free Wi-Fi (I think) in a branch of Costa Coffee, and the map didn't quite seem to work, since it opened centred on my house and not the City, and failed to add more detail as I tried to zoom in, instead expanding the overview map of London which simply became blurrier without adding any street names.  The second time at Liverpool Street using my tiny data allowance (I think) it opened beautifully, pin-pointing me at once to Bishopsgate, and adding information as I closed in until it showed every individual platform.

I still haven't cracked the camera, so haven't tried to read one of those QR codes.  The first time I ever saw one was by the jade vine in the Cambridge Botanic Gardens, and I thought then what a brilliant idea it was, except that I didn't have a device capable of reading it.  Nowadays they put them on cereal packets.  As an inveterate cereal packet reader I suppose that could give breakfast an extra high tech frisson.

All in all it's just as well I got the new phone when I did.  If I'd left it much longer, until I was even older and phones yet more complicated, I doubt I'd ever have got it to work at all.

a concert, an exhibition and a flower show

I went to London today, and made sure I crammed as much in as possible, starting with a lunchtime concert at the excellent LSO St Lukes.  It is their tenth anniversary, and today's performance was by the Wihan Quartet (and was broadcast as the Radio 3 lunchtime concert, so you have seven days left to listen again).  The Wihan quartet played at the first LSO St Lukes lunchtime concert in October 2003, with the same line-up of performers, when they performed the second of the pieces they played again today, Dvorak's string quartet in F major.  The Dvorak was the major draw that led me to pick today's concert rather than another day, and I was grateful to the Radio 3 presenter I'd heard introduce them as 'Veehan' and not 'Why-han', so I did not embarrass myself in front of the old friend I dragged along with me to the concert.  LSO St Lukes was a new experience for this friend, despite the fact that he is a cultured sort of chap, and proved a hit, including the basement cafe which I was afraid might lack finesse in his eyes.  Not that I am into one-upmanship with my friends, or no more so than is healthy if we are to discover interesting new things and not stick in a rut, but it is gratifying to have introduced a native Londoner to a London landmark they didn't already know.

As I strolled up to Old Street from Liverpool Street I was treated to a small Proustian moment of remembrance, seeing a taxi parked outside an office in Chiswell Street with the name of the person it was reserved for written on a piece of cardboard in the window.  It was a name I knew of old, a former colleague of the Systems Administrator.  He was once a close enough friend that we flew all the way to Italy for his wedding.  Soon after that he and his new Italian wife went out to try their luck in Hong Kong, and the next thing I knew he was agonising about whether or not they could ask their maid to wear uniform when friends came to dinner.  He rose up and out of our ambit, and I haven't seen him since.  I didn't hang around to ambush him as he got into his taxi, but went and had a nose around Bunhill Fields.  The massed ranks of tombstones behind their iron railings needed only a weeping Dickensian heroine to complete the effect, but instead I got an incongruous sprinkling of daffodils.

After the concert I yomped down to the Strand to see Becoming Picasso at The Courtauld Gallery. Originally I was going to get the tube, and even recharged my Oyster card when I arrived at Liverpool Street (memo to Transport for London: the reason why next time I don't top up on line, as they suggest, is that in order to activate your top up you have to swipe the card at a nominated station, and I prefer to decide on the day of travel whether to get the tube, or the bus, or walk, or not go to London at all).  However, the more I looked at the tube map the less I could see any sensible tube route between Old Street and the Aldwych, whereas it was a fairly short walk.  Even my native-Londoner friend admitted that it was a soddy journey by tube.  There's probably a bus, but I don't know the number.  The short walk would have been more pleasant if it hadn't been for the trail of large blood spots on the pavement every few paces along part of the Strand.

The Picasso exhibition is popular, and the Courtauld were operating timed tickets, though when I was there they were timed to go straight in.  This show consists of work he did in 1901, so he was no more than twenty years old at the time.  I hadn't realised his child with dove, familiar from a thousand postcards, was painted so early in his career.  It's a very good little exhibition, and well worth catching, on until late May so you have plenty of time.  While I was there I went and communed with my favourite Braque, and was happy to discover that an extremely weird Elizabethan portrait of a naked, bearded man up to his waist in water, with a ship and allegorical scenes behind, had reappeared from storage.  I think the background scenes are allegorical in the sense that art historians can't agree what the hell the painting is about, but it always reminds me of the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens.

After the Courtauld it was a toss-up whether to proceed on to the RHS show in Vincent Square or turn round and head for Liverpool Street, since it was already four o'clock and Vincent Square was another four tube stops in the wrong direction.  The flower show won by a neck, since with this weather I have spent a lot of time sitting in my house recently, and will be spending more.  The show was spread over both RHS halls, competitive daffodils, alpines and flower photographs in one, along with cutesy barrows of flowers, old-fashioned street lamps and bunting in one, and growers' stands in the other.  The daffodils and alpines were lovely.  I used to think that when I got too old and feeble to manage a large garden, I would retire to a small one and grow impossibly neat and perfect alpines, sheltering out of the rain in my alpine house.  I have rather given up on that plan, realising that I am not a neat person, and that a small messy courtyard garden stuffed with pots and objets d'art would be more my style, but I enjoy looking at other people's incredibly perfect, tiny plants.

It's a pity that the RHS decided to add to the intended Victorian street-scene ambience by turning down the main lights while I was there, so that I could no longer see the plants very well.  I heard a fellow show-goer giving the woman on the RHS information desk a very hard time about it, rather unfairly so in that her badge said clearly that she was a volunteer.  He should really have directed his ire at the management, though he was absolutely right about the lighting.

The trade stands were fun too, and I bought a plant, a young Parehebe perfoliata, which I've been after for about four years since admiring one at the Wrabness Open Gardens.  They like sunshine and free drainage, and it should be very happy in our front garden.  It appeared to be the only one on the stand, since I was given the display plant instead of another being produced from under the bench, and its little handwritten sale sign said that they were not often seen nowadays, which is true.

The boss was judging at today's show, but I think he'd gone long before I arrived.

last orders

I took the long way to work, to avoid the back lanes which certainly won't have been gritted.  As I approached the Ardleigh level crossing, which is the main reason why I normally use the lanes as a rat-run, the gates were up.  Just as I thanked fate that I hadn't been caught, the amber light came on with fifteen metres to go.  I don't believe in jumping lights at railway crossings, and resigned myself to spending the next quarter of an hour stuck the wrong side of the railway line, so it was a nice surprise when just one train went through, and I was only held up for three minutes.

Although I was early to work, a white van had beaten me to it and was already sat in the car park. This turned out to be a delivery from a supplier based down in the West Country, a one-man band who propagates some rare and unusual plants.  His van, a very old Transit with home made wooden shelves along both sides, was absolutely stuffed with pots, some of which were for us and some which weren't.  He handed these out to us one at a time, picking his way through his crates of plants and murmuring that this one for us, that one wasn't, there had to be another of these somewhere.  Occasionally he managed to offload a whole crate at once.  He obviously didn't believe in wasting money on labels, so some pots were individually labelled, some varieties just had one small stick-in label between all seven pots, and some weren't labelled at all.  The manager seemed happy that between them they added up to his list of what he'd ordered, so I expect he'll manage to work out which pots of dormant twigs are which.

They were nice plants, well grown, which is to say that they didn't look too much like the things grown for instant appeal pumped up on the plant equivalent of steroids, and aimed at the garden centre trade.  We sell those too.  These plants were quite young, still fairly skinny, and not cosseted with too much heat or nitrogen.  Moved into the ground as soon as the soil warms up they would grow away like crazy.  Proper nurseryman's plants, not nearly as lush and opulent as the ones that arrive on Dutch trolleys from bigger suppliers, but garden-ready.  Dutch trolleys are those multi-tiered metal racks with wheels that you have seen around the place in garden centres and farm shops.  We try to keep them tidied away behind the scenes, if the suppliers even leave them with us, and never put stock out for sale still on them.  They are having an insidious effect on plant breeding, since if you can fit more shelves into a trolley you reduce transport and delivery costs, and this is creating a commercial pressure to breed shorter plants.  Truly.

Our supplier from Devon just scraped in under the wire, since the boss and the manager agreed this morning not to order any more plants until the weather warms up.  I knew they were bound to do that.  The van with colour came, as it always does on a Monday morning, and apart from taking some trays of things we'd ordered, half of which were for a particular customer anyway, we didn't have any plants.  No pansies, no daffodils, no Pulmonaria.  I'm afraid much of their current stock is destined to bloom unseen, not on the desert air but in the back of a van driving around the Eastern counties.  What they do with it when the flowers fade I do not know.  Perhaps there will be bargains to be had in Norwich market, for gardeners who are prepared to be patient and wait for their Pulmonaria to bloom again next year.

It was desperately quiet, and cold.  I put together a good-sized mail order collection for somebody who telephoned from Wales.  I thought Wales was buried under snow, but obviously not his part of it.  Another customer rang to defer delivery of their order, because the last half mile of track to their house was impassable.  Two elderly ladies bought an extremely nice hellebore as a present for someone, and I made it look as smart as I could with green florist's paper.  The young gardener managed to find himself a warm job in the morning, printing off more labels for the plants in the garden, but then in the afternoon had to go and tie the labels on, and reappeared at five o'clock with numb fingers.  I played hunt-the-pot in the tunnel on the other side of the car park, to stick prices on various herbaceous plants in 11 centimetre pots.  The older gardener drew the short straw, and had to muck out the chicken house.  We all tried hard to make ourselves useful, but what we need is customers.  Customers and not snow.

The dogs have been chasing the turkeys, and drove one of them into the pond, where it was fortunately discovered in time and rescued by the owners' daughter.  The owners are trying to teach to turkeys to go into the chicken house at night, instead of sitting on the lawn in the snow.  Last night both eventually went in through the pop-hole, which represents progress, though they did have to be herded with sticks, and the cock is so large he can scarcely squeeze through the door.  We debated whether they needed poles to roost on, though as the gardener said, in a commercial operation the turkeys manage in their sheds without poles.  Whether or not they get poles may depend on how long the weather remains unsuitable for gardening.

In the plant centre we were reduced to de-icing the path from the shop with dishwasher salt.

tough times

I was sorely tempted to call work and suggest I didn't bother going in, faced with the prospect of another cold day, melting snow soaking my gloves, few customers, and not enough to do.  Taking a purely short-term view of it, the owner would probably have been happy enough to save a little on the wages bill.  I didn't make the call.  Taking the longer-term view, once you start deciding to not turn up to work on days when you don't really feel like it, or your employer decides to start standing you down at short notice to cut costs, you are both on a slippery slope.  Another time, I might decide I'd got other things I'd rather be doing on a day when my services were badly needed.  Small teams need everyone to be utterly reliable.  In the past decade I've missed a handful of days at short notice, through illness, and once when a tree collapsed over the front garden and it wasn't reasonable to leave the Systems Administrator working alone with a chain saw.

It wasn't very nice, though.  I finished putting the plants from the red trolley out for sale, except for one tray of Polemonium.  To make a space for them required me to move all the rest of the Jacob's ladders, and they were so covered in snow that I really couldn't see which was which or what I was doing.  Once the snow melts it will be the work of two minutes to sort them into the right order.  I removed the shrink wrapping from a delivery of plastic-coated obelisks, being careful not to damage the plastic, or lose the screws and wing nuts from the larger designs that come in two parts.  One finial was badly scuffed in transit, a great flap of plastic coating scraped away from the underlying metal, and will have to go back to the supplier.  I assembled the two-part obelisks, and stuck prices on packs of flexible plastic plant ties.  I searched through the list of plants people are waiting for and made phone calls, shamelessly ringing about enquiries dating back a full year, which drummed up a couple of prospective sales.  I was as nice and helpful and enthusiastic as I could be to two couples who were both making their first visit to the plant centre.  It snowed all morning and half of the afternoon, while the wind whipped the lying snow around.  It wasn't fun.  It wasn't what people dream of, when they imagine a fulfilling job working with plants and people who are interested in plants.

It is even less fun for the owners.  We have stocked up for spring, and need to start converting that stock back into cash.  There are suppliers to be paid, not the mention pay-day for the staff at the end of the month.  The growers we get the plants from must be pretty anxious too, since if retailers aren't shifting the stock they've already got, they won't be re-ordering.  The growers started propagating and potting months ago, and are now sitting on peak stocks themselves.  They equally need to start converting that stock back into cash, besides which plants will only keep for so long in pots before they start to deteriorate.  It isn't a business anyone would be in unless they really liked plants.  Or at least, they shouldn't be.  Digging out my ancient and moth-eaten investor's hat, it's an industry I would only put on a very low PE ratio.

It has its compensations, though, as a way of life.  Last week a friend from our City days parted company with his investment firm rather suddenly, and the SA suddenly realised that the only e-mail address he had for someone we've known for nearly thirty years was the office one, which had already been stopped.  And last night we watched Margin Call, a financial thriller released with little fanfare in 2011, that opens with a mass-sacking, immediately before the firm discovers that its holdings of complex financial instruments may have pushed it into insolvency.  The head of risk management was one of the staff to be fired.  His former bosses cannot call him to ask for help because when they fired him they cut off his telephone.

One of the things I decided when I left the City was that I was going to own my own life.  No corporate phone, no corporate e-mail, no corporate hospitality, no corporate lunches.  My social capital would be my own, my address book would be wholly mine, no employer would be able to cut me off from anyone I knew, and anybody who chose to spend time with me would do so because they wanted to, not because they were after my firm's business.  It is a decision I have never regretted, even on days like today when it left me trudging about lining up rows of geraniums in a snow storm.

rumbled

The alarm went off at six, and I dragged myself out of bed and took a sneak preview out of the window that faces on to the wood, to see if it had snowed in the night, and whether I would have to go to work.  There was a very light dusting on the leaves of the camellias opposite the dustbins, and that was it.  Work beckoned.  Oh goodie.  Not that I don't like my work, on the contrary, I generally do, but it's more fun when it's busy with customers than on deadly quiet days at a time of year when it should be buzzing.  And while I am a reasonably hardy creature, spending eight hours mostly outside while the thermometer hovers around freezing is quite tough.

The boss announced that he had a bone to pick with me, which was worrying and also faintly confusing as I hadn't been there since the start of last week.  I enquired what I'd done, but it transpired that the boss had been reading the blog and liked it.  Liked it so much that he presented me with a bottle of wine.  That was very kind, and totally unexpected, and certainly preferable to the alternative, which is that when your boss discovers your blog he sacks you.  He said he knew all about it, though he hadn't bothered reading it for the past eighteen months, but having returned to it he had enjoyed recent posts, and that for my information turkeys did not roost in trees, or catch colds.  Mind you, his turkeys tried to spend the night sitting on the lawn and he had to herd them into the chicken house, to try and teach them to go there at night.  If they don't learn about foxes they won't last until Christmas.

My first job of the day was to set out for sale the last of a delivery of herbaceous plants, that were still sitting in the trays they were delivered in.  We don't like them to remain in boxes, though some garden centres put them out for sale that way.  The trays look messy, especially once they are half empty, and we need everything to be in strict alphabetical order, in one or at the most two rows. The tables are getting fuller, to the point where sometimes existing rows have to be shuffled along to make room for new stock.  Today's setting out was made more difficult by the fact that most of the labels were coated in snow, and the plants were snow-covered lumps that could have been all sorts of things.

There were a couple of red trolleys of stock from The Other Side to be put out for sale as well, and I trudged around the plant centre lining up neat rows of Hydrangea, Cornus, Narcissus, Stokesia, and Origanum, gloves getting steadier soggier as I lifted snow covered pots and brushed slush off labels.  It snowed all morning, sometimes in flurries of heavy, wet flakes, and sometimes in a mini-blizzard of fine particles.  My feet began to feel rather cold, and I reflected that I must buy some better boots.  My right wellington has split over the big toe anyway, and would not be waterproof if I were to stand in more than a centimetre of water.

A few customers called in.  One bought a single bundle of bare root hawthorn hedging.  In some years you'd be pushing your luck towards the end of March with bare root hedging, but not this year. The buds are barely swelling.  Somebody rang to buy a gift voucher, someone else called to collect five trees, but his wife had already paid for them.  I did my best to drum up custom by calling people who were down on our list as wanting particular plants, if I knew the plants had arrived.  One woman who had been waiting for a year for Philadelphus delavayi professed herself absolutely delighted that we finally had some, declaring that she had been looking for it for years, since smelling one in Michael Heseltine's garden, and that I had made her day.  It is a nice feeling to have made somebody that happy, and helps compensate for the times when I steel myself to call someone when a long-awaited plant finally turns up and meet with scornful rejection.  They found one elsewhere, or planted something else, or moved house in the meantime, or can't remember why they wanted it in the first place.

The owner called me over the radio in the early afternoon, to say that it was entirely up to me, but that the snow was starting to settle on the roads and I might want to think about going home early. I sent one final e-mail, to somebody who was looking for a particular rhododendron and one Dianthus 'Desmond' (an unlikely combination), and my fingers stumbled on the keyboard.  I went home.

The Systems Administrator and I were going to visit the excellent Thai restaurant in Harwich tonight, but yesterday when I saw the weekend weather forecast I rang them and moved the booking to Wednesday.  The beekeepers' candle making session that should have been held today had to be cancelled, since it really wasn't a day for standing in somebody's double garage with the doors open, dipping wicks into vats of melted wax.  Surely spring must come soon?  Still, I'm glad the boss likes the blog.  All we need now is for it to go viral, and bring a flood of customers in search of the brilliant, bonkers corner of rural England that is the plant centre.  Chance would be a fine thing.

one of those days

Oh, dear me, the weather.  If you should be reading this blog in Arizona or Marseilles, and think that the English are always grumbling about the weather, take it from me that this is exceptional. It is not meant to be like this in late March.  It is technically spring, but it is blowing a freezing gale, with snow blanketing swathes of the north, and forecast for Colchester tomorrow.

The Systems Administrator was all lined up yesterday to help replace the broken poles in the fruit cage roof. They are hollow aluminium, like tent poles, and were bent out of shape by the weight of snow so badly the winter before last that it was impossible to straighten them by hand.  A couple actually broke.  It was my own fault for leaving the netting on the roof over winter, but I used to believe that it didn't snow that much in southern England.  I bought replacements for the worst damaged ones, then summer last year was so unremittingly dull, wet and foul that I gave up with ideas of fruit, and never fitted them.  The SA said that we could replace the poles without removing the netting from the roof, which would save us quite a lot of work, and I was about to go along with this when it struck me that it might not be a very sensible idea, not if it is going to snow on Saturday.  To mend your fruit cage on 21st March and have it damaged again by snow two days later on the 23rd would just be perverse.

This morning the SA was all lined up to take me to the local garden centre in the truck, so that I could buy a bulk load of bags of mushroom compost, and not just as much as I could fit into the boot of the Skoda.  As I lay in bed this morning listening to the wind howling, and trying to summon the energy to go and have a shower, it didn't sound like a very good day to go and load compost. Going outside to let the chickens into their run I found the wind had swung round to the north, and cut to the skin.  We agreed to leave fetching compost to another day.

I thought that maybe the back garden would be sheltered from the worst of the gale by the wood, the house, and the lie of the land, and set out to plant more of the bulbs I've been growing on, and spread a layer of Strulch over the bed, but as I looked at a tray of rather nice Allium rosenbachianum it struck me that they probably wouldn't like being covered in snow, fresh out of the greenhouse.  My plan was to plant before mulching, so as not to disturb the Strulch once it was down, so if I couldn't plant, I couldn't mulch.  The cold was making my eyes water so badly I couldn't even see very well, and I gave up with gardening for the day before I trampled too many plants to death.

That left me with the rest of the morning to play with the new phone.  As of yesterday evening it would receive e-mails but not let me send them.  Apparently this is a well-know glitch of some Samsung Android products, though not one that any of the phone companies mention in the glowing product descriptions on their websites.  Instead you can read about it in lots of chat-rooms where disgruntled owners compare solutions, most of which sound horribly complicated.  The SA knew of a simple answer, which was to download an app that accesses e-mail via Yahoo instead of the e-mail icon that came ready loaded on the phone, and that solved the problem, but it seems ridiculous.  Why can't Samsung and O2 just sell me a phone with an e-mail function that works?

I managed to text my own old phone, which was a start.  I have not tried to transfer my old number to the new phone.  Only about six people have my number so it's easier just to tell them the new one, and I can barely make the phone work as it is, without the added complication of trying to transfer numbers.  Anyway, I needed the old number to practice on.  My dismal failure to text the first friend I tried to contact turned out to be because I had typed her telephone number into my new Contacts list incorrectly, but I can't blame Samsung for that.

By lunchtime I had managed to download one free app, and was equipped to find any Art Fund supported venue within a specified radius.  The SA, more prosaically, suggested I add one that would tell me the times of London buses and service status on the underground, and sneaked in the national rail enquiry service when I wasn't looking.  It was the first time I ever looked in an app store, and it is not the most clearly signposted environment, but I suppose it is aimed at young people who grew up with digital technology and not fifty year old late adopters.  It is tricky exploring a new touch screen device when every time you touch anything trying to find out what it is and what it does, something happens, and you find you are either apparently downloading something you don't want, or have rung somebody up you didn't mean to call.

In the afternoon I made the dough for another loaf of bread, but after the success of my last two attempts, this one is very slow to rise.  It is that sort of a day.