a reading day

Today was forecast to be warmer than yesterday, and I had thought I might finally get outside, but when I stuck my nose out first thing to do the chickens it felt as cold and raw as ever.  Worse than yesterday, if anything, because it was very lightly drizzling.  Looking again at the weather forecast I realised that while I'd checked whether rain was likely and how warm it was expected to be, I had ignored the forecast relative humidity, which was set to stay between 99% and 97% for the entire day.  The resulting weather was like being stuck inside a cloud, cold, damp, and incredibly raw.

It's lucky I was given mostly books for Christmas.  I have been reading PLANT published by Phaidon, a beautifully produced collection of botanical art covering the past fifteen hundred years (with a few prehistoric examples), and spanning both Western and Asian traditions.  It includes a vast variety of techniques, including wood block prints, water colours, lithographs, the results of electron microscopy hand tinted in bright colours, dried and pressed flowers, weird and marvellous prints made using the actual leaf as the printing block, the effect of laying samples on light sensitive paper, and techniques I hadn't even heard or thought of.  The pictures facing each other in each pair of pages have been chosen to complement each other in some way, perhaps two different treatments of the same subject made hundreds of years apart, or related subjects such as two different fruits, or similar visual approaches to different subjects, or pictures made for the same purpose.  It is printed on lovely, thick, glossy paper and is a reminder of why for some subjects a physical book is infinitely nicer than reading or seeing the image on a screen.  So far I have managed to guard it against Mr Fidget taking a bite out of the dust jacket or Mr Fluffy planting a large, hairy footprint on any of its pages.

It is impossible to absorb over two hundred pages of botanical images in one go and so I have been alternating with Rachel Roddy's Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome.  I put in a request for it after following her column online in the Guardian, since she writes the sort of edible sounding recipes involving half a dozen ingredients rather than fifteen or twenty including several I would have to buy specially, assuming I could find them in Colchester, and would probably never use up before they dried up, lost their flavour or went off.  You can tell I am not a natural fan of Yotam Ottolenghi.  But I have cooked one of Rachel Roddy's vegetable recipes out of the Guardian and it worked.  She says that the ethos of Roman cooking is very close to that of her northern English grandmothers, and cites Jane Grigson's vegetable book as one of her seminal influences, which reinforces my instinct that I am going to enjoy cooking her kind of food.

Meanwhile, after stretching the lamb curry Systems Administrator made on Wednesday to two evenings, and discovering a pair of pizzas in the freezer that needed eating up, it really is my turn to cook.  I have a pair of pork chops that have been sitting in the fridge looking at me each time I opened the door since I bought them on the morning of New Year's Day.  I was supposed to do them earlier in the week and cried off, pleading lack of energy, but they are only good until today.  I don't suppose they will actually go off at the stroke of midnight, but still it's time to rouse myself and do something with them.  Probably simmer them with onions and a couple of sage leaves, and serve them with some of the forbidding parsnip mountain that's still lurking in the fridge.

twelfth night

It was another day for not going outside more than you had to.  There was no frost on the grass when I woke, but the air was savagely cold on my face and in my lungs when I went to open the hen house. The flu has left me with a hacking cough, which according to the NHS website is not uncommon, and the cure is rest, warmth, plenty of fluids, and time.  The GP cannot do anything to hasten recovery and does not want to see me, not unless I start running a fever or go blue.  Neither of these things have happened so I am stuck indoors, drinking tea.  It's a waste when there is so much to be done in the garden, but there it is.

I took the Christmas cards down, sorting them out between out the ones with glitter that can't go in the paper recycling and the rest that can.  I still couldn't work out who one of them was from.  I would have hazarded a guess, and the card was sold in aid of the RSPB when I know the person I might have guessed at is a keen bird watcher, if it were not that she had sent me another card, clearly legible and with her news taking up the left hand half of the inside.  And the mystery card was addressed to both of us with the Systems Administrator's name first, while she generally addresses her card to me and had done so again this year.  Somebody wishes us well, but I really don't know who.

Somebody else had sent us two cards, presumably having had to write them in more than one batch and having not kept a list, but that doesn't matter, not like the story in the Guardian by the pseudonymous Widower of the Parish who received a card addressed to Adam and Helen wishing them the best Christmas and New Year ever! from somebody who had actually been present at his wife's funeral earlier in the year.  Things can feel rushed at Christmas, but that is a fairly basic failure of mindfulness.  I suppose they will now be smothered in remorse, if they read his column.

Only one of the neighbours bothered with a card (not the Airedale owners).  Maybe cards are ceasing to be a thing.  I have heard that it is so among the younger generation.  We don't even have postal addresses for some of our nieces and nephews.  It came as a surprise to me that one of them had a baby this summer, though not so to the Systems Administrator who looked unsurprised when I read the announcement included in her parents' card and said Ah, yes, I think I knew that.  The SA is less inclined to talk about people behind their backs than almost anybody else I have ever met, which is in many ways an admirable and endearing trait given that about ninety per cent of anything said behind people's backs is bitchy at one level or another, but it can make it difficult for me to keep up sometimes.

Meanwhile I am half way through writing a letter to an old friend whose card indicated that all had not been plain sailing in past couple of years.  It must have been three or four years since we've seen each other, but she was happy with my suggestion that we should try and meet sometime in 2017.  On the basis that she probably gets several hundred work related emails a day I thought an actual hand written letter in a paper envelope might be likelier to get noticed.

Addendum  In the afternoon I made a Victoria sandwich.  That came out quite well, but the ricotta with honey I had for breakfast was really vaguely horrid, dry and not a patch on Greek style yogurt. After putting the tail end of two white sliced loaves and the desiccated fourth quarter of the chocolate sponge in the food recycling bin I think we have finally pretty much cleared out the last of the Christmas food.  If you are both going to be ill try not to do it with a stuffed fridge.

poultry care and a cheese conundrum

As I went out this morning to let the hens into their run, I saw the two straw bales next to it that the Systems Administrator moved last night and remembered I'd said I'd put them inside first thing while the hens were still in their house.  I don't like strawing down when the hens are out, partly because I worry about them making a break for freedom through the open door, and partly because I worry about Mr Cool or Mr Fidget nipping inside to further their acquaintance with the hens.  Now we're in government ordained poultry lockdown because of bird flu I don't have to worry about whether or not I should let the hens out for another tour round the garden.  They do enjoy eating grass and scratching up my flowerbeds, but I do not trust Mr Cool's and Mr Fidget's intentions towards them.

The straw goes some way towards cheering them up, since they can poke about in it looking for insects.  Plus, it helps keep their feet clean which is better for their health and in turn helps keep the eggs clean.  Finding a source of small bales is always a problem, and I might start saving thin woody prunings to go on the floor of the run to help stop it being churned to mud, but at the moment we do have some straw.  One of the bales had burst in transit, and the door of the hen run doesn't open fully due to general age, decrepitude and possibly a basic design flaw (it opens with about as much ground clearance as your average domestic door in a house, only your average house floor is not covered in grass that keeps growing).  I got most of the straw in, but quite a lot stayed strewn around the grass outside or stuck to my front.  The hens liked it anyway.

After lunch I roused myself to clean their droppings board and put down fresh sawdust.  They should appreciate that as well, once they go to bed and notice what I've done.  I was pleased to see an article in the Times extolling the intelligence of hens.  I have long thought they were quite bright animals.

Apart from that, although the sun was shining, it was too cold to do anything outside.  I stuck my nose out a couple of times, drawn by the blue sky and sunshine and lurking suspicion that it was not healthy to go on doing nothing indoors for ever.  After all, look where that got Colin in The Secret Garden.  But the cold air hurt my chest, my muscles ached, and I had to admit that gardening was going to have to wait to another day.  Yesterday it was not so cold, and in the middle of the day I managed to finish wiring up the base of the compost bins, and refill our brown bin with nettle roots so that it should be all ready for when collections finally resume.  And I deadheaded the little pots of cyclamen and pansies by the front door, and cut down the dead stems in half of the dahlia bed. But yesterday it didn't feel this cold.

Instead I had a look online for ideas to use up ricotta, but didn't get very far.  Approximately half of all recipes for ricotta also include spinach.  The Systems Administrator is allergic to spinach.  Quite a lot are for cheesecake, but I wasn't sure whether we'd manage to eat a whole cheesecake, even supposing I'd felt like cooking one.  Quite a lot more were for lasagne, which was the original plan, but I didn't really feel like messing about with layers of sauce or stuffing pasta tubes, though I suppose the unlikely sounding Brussels Sprouts Lasagne offered by the Huffington Post might have killed two birds with one stone, if the Christmas sprouts are still edible.  I certainly wasn't going to start deep frying doughnuts, which was one popular suggestion from the Italian repertoire.  Quite a few recipes demanded fresh strawberries: not in this house in January.  The possibilities widened after the SA suggested he might go shopping tomorrow, in which case I would not be limited to the ingredients in the fridge, on the other hand buying lots of extra food so that I could use up a pot of cheese that in my heart of hearts I didn't want to cook with felt perverse.  Baking it with an egg and some sugar and vanilla and quietly eating it myself for breakfast with some honey (ignoring the serving suggestion of dishing it up with figs) might be easiest.  Or maybe just eat it with honey, and ignore the baking bit.

eat it up

We are still eating our way through the great pile of Christmas food.  It just goes to show what a gargantuan amount we must normally manage to tuck away between Christmas Eve and the first couple of days of the New Year, since we were both starting to ail by the time we shopped this Christmas, and only got what felt like the bare minimum so that if we rallied enough to celebrate we wouldn't find we were lacking the basics.  Imagine the conversation: Do you remember where in the fridge you put the chipolatas?  I can't see them.  Oh, I didn't bother to get any, didn't think we'd want them.

At lunchtime the Systems Administrator ate the last of the large expensive piece of dead pink pig.  I was all hammed out by then.  We had sliced ham with fresh French stick for lunch on Monday, toasted French stick with ham and cheese for lunch on Tuesday, and more cold ham for supper yesterday evening.  I like ham in moderation, but by that stage I didn't see it as food so much as an invitation to bowel cancer by nitrate.  I'd been all set to slice the last bit thinly and freeze it for future use in pancakes or flans, but the SA likes preserved pig.  A lot.

The ham was best before 4 January, so we dealt with it in the nick of time.  Yesterday we had mozzarella for lunch, originally bought some time in the third week of December with the intention of making lasagne.  That's making everything, including the pasta.  In the event I didn't have the energy and we ate some frozen pasta sauce instead with dried penne.  The mozzarella was best before 3 January, and I had uneasily remembered its presence some time on Monday.  Served with tomatoes roasted in olive oil it made a respectable lunch, only we had to pretend that the toasted white sliced bread was sourdough or ciabatta.

There is still a pot of ricotta also originally intended for the lasagne, best before 7 January so I have three days to work out what to do with it.  So far my mind is a blank.  I read a recipe in the Rachel Roddy book of Roman cooking I was given for Christmas for turning it into pasta sauce, which I thought sounded nice, but the Systems Administrator looked very dubious when I mentioned it.  That was bad psychology.  If you are cooking never give the rest of the family the chance to object to a new idea in advance.  Just dish it up, preferably when they are hungry, and anyway if they are nice and polite people they won't feel able to grumble unduly.

Instead of more dead pig for lunch I began on the Christmas brie, best before 7 January and actually just about right now, whereas it felt very hard the last time I found it in the fridge.  We should manage to finish it tomorrow, but I think the left over quarter of chocolate sponge is a goner, and I'm not optimistic about the last of the sprouts, while there's a bag of parsnips looking distinctly sweaty, and a green pepper somewhere I haven't had the heart to exhume.  Food waste is another casualty of illness.  You aren't as hungry as you normally would be, you don't feel like cooking, and your careful plans about how you are going to use up the ends of everything (especially when there are only two of you) unravel.

checking the bees

After lunch I steeled myself to go and check the bees.  I did not really feel like fiddling about with beehives.  It was cold, and it would have been much better not to disturb them.  And I'd rather not have gone out in the cold myself.  But just as I went down with flu I had realised that I'd left their food stores set up wrong, and then a few days ago an email arrived from the government national bee unit warning of the risks of starvation.  Apparently the unseasonably mild weather before Christmas might have led them to use more energy than they normally would have, and starving colonies had been reported.

I was really pleased with myself in the autumn that I remembered to fit the mouse guards to the hives in good time, and after all these years keeping bees you'd think I'd know how to set up their winter stores.  The problem came because this year I decided to allow most of the hives to keep some of their own honey for winter.  I'd already harvested as much as I was likely to use, give away, or sell, and last year when I took the last almost full super of honey off each hive at the end of the season and extracted it, the honey fermented in storage.  That seemed a waste, so this year I left the supers on longer for the bees to make sure the honey was absolutely ripe and finished, and then I realised that the bees had already been on the ivy.  Ivy honey tastes absolutely disgusting, at least to humans, so in the end I decided it was better to leave it with them than take it off and then laboriously feed them sugar syrup instead.  Their own honey is probably more nutritious anyway.

What I failed to do was think through how they were going to get to it.  In the summer beehive the queen bee lives in the big brood box at the bottom of the hive, laying eggs, and the worker bees store any surplus honey in the supers above.  The queen is prevented from going up into the supers to lay eggs by a metal frame cunningly designed so that the smaller worker bees can crawl through it but the larger queen can't.  In the depths of winter the bees clump together for warmth, and the whole clump gradually moves over the frames inside the hive, eating the honey (or sugar) stored there.  If the only food left is above the metal frame the cluster of bees will go to it, and the queen will be left behind down in the brood box, where she will starve if she doesn't freeze first.  I should have taken the metal frames out.

This gently preyed on my mind once I didn't feel so ill that I didn't care.  Then the bee unit email niggled away, until I thought that now I was not so ill I had better go and take a very quick look, remove the queen excluders, and feed any colonies that were light on stores.  The prospect did not fill me with delight, nor having to unscramble the results in a couple of months time if the queen had moved upstairs and started laying.  But I had weeks to work out how I was going to do that, whereas the bees could be dying of cold or starvation by tomorrow morning, so wearing a thermal hat under the hood of my bee suit I set off, armed with hive tool, ekes, bags of fondant and a pair of scissors.  I didn't bother with a smoker.  I didn't think the bees would be that keen to come out, and I wasn't planning on keeping the hives open for longer than about three seconds.

The good news was that all the hives had live bees in, and every cluster was still down in the brood box.  Of course I can't be sure that they've been down there all the time, and I won't know if I still have a live queen in every colony until the spring, but my hunch is that they have been living on the stores in the brood boxes and have not abandoned their queens.  One cluster was right at the top of the frames and began to come out to see what was happening as I disturbed the hive, which was a nuisance.  I didn't want them catching cold, and they were in the way as I tried to clear lumps of brace comb so that the super would sit directly on top of the brood box without leaving a draughty crack between the two.  Still, perhaps they were poised to move upstairs and perhaps my tardy intervention has saved their queen.  Who knows?  Perhaps I have squashed her.

Every hive felt heavy enough.  I didn't feel I should ignore the government advice, but I wonder whether bees really waste their stores moving around to no good purpose in mild winter spells. Bees have been perfecting the art of how to be bees for tens of millions of years.  Their foraging behaviour in the field is so efficient that it has been used as the basis for modelling the optimal routes for delivery vans.  Does such a marvellously efficient creature use extra energy to no good purpose fiddling around just because it is a nice day, or do they work out there's precious little forage to be had and that it's still dark most of the time and stay put in their clusters?

winter watering

I roused myself today to check the pots in the greenhouse and the conservatory.  I hadn't done any watering since before Christmas, and while I thought that most things would still be OK, I was beginning to think that it would be a shame to find too many desiccated remains when I finally returned to the garden.  The greenhouse is practically impassable because I hurriedly shoved a lot of pots and trays in there some time in mid December when particularly wet and cold weather was imminent, thinking I'd sort them out later, and later hasn't come yet.

Winter watering is tricky.  The manager at the plant centre used to drain down the irrigation system for winter, and only fire it up occasionally on days when he was there.  The stated reason was to prevent the pipes splitting in the frost, and I'm sure that was one motivation for draining it, but I'm equally certain the other was to prevent over-keen members of staff from over-watering the pots in the tunnels.  Watering can feel like a satisfying way of spending a couple of hours at work, especially if the alternative is standing outside when it's only a few degrees above freezing and trying to scrape weeds off frozen pots.  But most plants in containers use water very slowly at this time of year.  Drench them now when they don't need it and their roots may rot away before they ever manage to dry out.

Of course the flip side is the root ball allowed to sit too dry over winter so that the plant quietly dies before spring ever arrives.  I have managed to kill plants, mostly my own, by both methods though I am probably more of an under-waterer than an over-waterer.  Anyway, today I decided it was time to go and make an inspection.  Most things didn't look too bad.  I gave a stingy amount to some of the pelargoniums up on the greenhouse staging, and a couple of evergreen shrubs in the conservatory that looked dry, but most pots didn't need watering.

The light was flashing on the electric rat zapper in the greenhouse, and when I looked inside there was a dead mouse.  Goodness knows how long that had been there.  It had chewed the emerging leaves of some hyacinths under the staging, or one of its friends or relations had, but there was no further damage to the tray of Clivia seedlings that was the mouse's target last time, and was why I moved the zapper from the top of the sealed cases of small bulbs to the other end of the bench.  It looked as though nothing had managed to get into the propagating cases, but I wasn't breaking the gaffer tape seals to find out.  I threw away the mouse and reset the trap, but it began to buzz faintly and I had to swap it with the one that's been drying in the laundry room over Christmas.  The price of electric rat zappers has gone up in recent months, perhaps a casualty of Brexit, and it is annoying to have to adopt a one on, one off system with them.  I should prefer to deploy all three at all times.  As it is there is one on permanent duty by the chicken food bin in the garage, meaning I don't have a spare to put down in the conservatory.  (Anybody who does not understand my hatred of mechanical traps still has twenty days to catch David Sedaris's essay on the subject on Radio 3).

I discovered to my annoyance that the potted Christmas tree that never was had lost its pot.  I moved it into the greenhouse before Christmas so that it should not blow over and break any of its branches, standing it in a seed tray balanced across the edges of three dahlia pots because I was so short of space, and its pot must have dropped off the root ball as I lifted it, and I must have not noticed in my declining state.  The root ball didn't feel too dry, and the needles hadn't assumed that dull tone that tells you that something is going badly wrong with a conifer, but it can't have done it any good to sit without a pot for over a fortnight.  Heigh ho.

happy new year

We dined on New Year's Eve on corned beef hash, while watching the last episode of Simon Sebag Montefiore's three-parter on the history of Vienna, and at half past ten I went to bed and read a couple of pages of the RHS history and use of fifty garden tools before going to sleep long before midnight.  I should have sent a photo of the hash to the Guardian for their selection of underwhelming New Year's Eve photos.  We'd have been in good company: I saw this morning that quite a few of the photos that were included featured cats.  Actually, I have never been a great fan of New Year celebrations even when not convalescing from flu, and I like corned beef hash.

The Systems Administrator pointed out yesterday that the large and expensive lump of pink pig meat I bought what seems like weeks ago to eat as part of the Christmas lunch we never cooked was not gammon but ham.  I am not sure I had really grasped there was a difference, but by the time I bought it I was beginning to sink.  Apparently there is, the ham being already cooked.  The SA said never mind, we could eat it for lunch with some nice bread, except that as in the Irish joke about eggs and bacon we did not have any bread, except for half a week old white sliced loaf.

According to a useful list on the local paper's website of supermarket opening hours over the festive season the Highwoods branch of Tesco was due to open on New Year's Day, and so I set off.  Twenty minutes after opening the store was very quiet, the aisles mostly filled by people looking as though, like me, for one reason or another they hadn't bothered with any celebrations the night before.  By the time I finished my shopping the store was considerably busier and the customers on average looked more fragile, and it had started to drizzle.  Still, well done Tesco, for not merely being open but for maintaining normal stocks of milk and firelighters.  You would never have guessed that the annual ritual of panic buying had just been and gone, if it weren't for the sad, left-over, penguin-shaped novelty boxes of biscuits, their currency quite devalued now it is 1 January and not 23 December.

Then I spent the rest of the day looking at the Chiltern Seeds 2017 catalogue and dreaming of all the wonderful plants I could grow, while trying to temper the dream with the reality of how little space there is in the greenhouse, and the fact that I have already ordered some seeds from Derry Watkins' Special Plants nursery and some more from Mr Fothergill because a friend invited me to join in with her garden club bulk discount order.  The internet provided another useful reality check.  The delightful prospect of lots of lovely little plants of Dodecatheon meadia faded once I read on the Missouri Botanic Garden website that propagation from seed was slow and difficult. And I have thrown away enough ungerminated pots of daphne and clematis seed to have put me off spending £2.95 a packet on them.

looking ahead

As my thoughts drifted ahead to 2017, and by way of amusing myself because it was too cold and damp to think about going outside (or rather I was still too busy getting over the flu for the degree of cold and damp that there was), I spent the afternoon thinking about where we might go on next year's holiday.  Now choosing a place is a difficult matter, it isn't just one of your holiday games. Going anywhere is a major undertaking, with the cats to be fed, the hens to be shut in and let out, the thousand and one things in pots to be watered, and the bees poised to swarm between April and August.  And since packing in the City careers early, a week in Dorset is a more realistic prospect than three weeks in Latin America.  In fact, a week somewhere in the UK each year is as much as we run to nowadays.

So choosing where and when to spend the week is a big decision, and doing the research is part of the fun.  We want somewhere with enough gardens, industrial museums, ruins, art galleries, steam engines and architecture to keep us busy for a week without too much driving about.  And a holiday let sleeping two with dedicated parking.  And preferably some scenery.  That leaves most of the UK as a potential destination, since our island is positively bulging with heritage and scenery, though as we discovered last year holiday lets can be thin on the ground in parts of southern England where house prices have gone particularly bonkers.

My method, honed by years of practice, is to pick on an area where I feel there should be plenty to do, and list everything I can find on a spreadsheet, grouped around a nominal centre.  It left me thoroughly confused the year we went to Dorset when I had categorised the attractions according to their location relative to Dorchester and we didn't stay in Dorchester but outside Blandford Forum, so all my carefully noted approximate distances and directions were wrong.  Only when I am sure I have found enough gardens and museums and notable views to provide at least a week's worth of entertainment do I pitch the idea to the Systems Administrator, so that the SA cannot declare that there would not be enough to do and take against the area.  It took me a couple of years to reintroduce the concept of Dorset, after mentioning it without sufficient preparation causing the Systems Administrator to recoil from the prospect of driving for hours at a stretch  along tiny roads as we progressed from one distant garden to the next.

Once we have an agreement in principle then if we manage to find a cottage (which we never did in Sussex) I refine the spreadsheet, adding details of which days of the week things are open and their opening times, and then it becomes a juggling act to visit all the nearby attractions on the same day and in the right order so that you don't pitch up first at the one that doesn't open until eleven.  We have got pretty good at it.

At this stage I'm still working from the road atlas, the 2016 National Trust guide, the 2017 Art Fund Guide, and Google.  Google Maps are good for finding where places are when you absolutely can't spot Little Sniddly but useless for journey planning because the main roads are too indistinct by the time you've zoomed any distance out.  Understanding main roads is imperative, since a separation of thirty miles can be a quick half hour along a dual carriageway, or a grinding hour and a quarter down a minor A road studded with villages all campaigning unsuccessfully for a bypass.

Our road atlas is quite old, which doesn't matter greatly from the point of view of where places are, given the modest pace of road building in Britain, but does bring home the pace of change when it comes to tourist attractions.  I don't know what a hopeful sounding railway was doing to get itself a symbol on the 2004 Great Britain A to Z road atlas, but it certainly isn't open to the public now.  Actually, I hadn't realised the atlas was quite that old.  Maybe I should get a new one.

I'm not impressed by the number of tourist websites which tell so little about the place they are supposed to represent that it is easier and quicker to look on Wikipedia.  The National Trust, I'm afraid, is a repeat offender.  The pages for each individual property manage to include remarkably little information, and for hard facts about when it was built, in what style, if it is still there or burned down some time in the 1920s, whether there is a park and so on you get loads more on Wikipedia.  I don't count the Trust's exhortations to visit the Courtyard Cafe or ideas for activities to amuse the kids.  One thing the English countryside is not short of nowadays is cafes, and we aren't proposing to take any kids on holiday.  The visitBath website is unhelpful along the same lines.  Top ten Must Dos (ranging from visit the Roman baths to eat in an independent restaurant), top ten Must Sees (including visiting Stonehenge).  Bath is a UNESCO world heritage site (though its future is under review following some block-headed redevelopment) and a straightforward list of the main buildings, streets and museums would be a good starting point.

Little preserved railway websites that tell you all about the Santa Special but don't seem to include a map anywhere so that you can see how much actual track there is are another thing.  Generally the answer is that the track is rather short, otherwise they would make more of a feature of it, but there's also an element of enthusiasts so bound up in their interest that they haven't managed to take a step back and think what they need to tell other people about it, who currently know absolutely nothing.  Fortunately for an overview there's Wikipedia again.

fog

I am beginning to feel the first twinges of boredom.  I'm sure that has to be a good sign.  Boredom, or the inchoate desire to be doing something different to what you are doing, is supposed to be a stimulus to creativity in children.  More to the point, it implies desire.  One of the signs of being properly poorly is having no desire to do anything, or nothing beyond lying down in a dark quiet room, or staring out of the window.

There wasn't much to stare at today, because the fog never lifted.  I could see as far as the irregular outlines of the trees at the bottom of the garden, which looked quite atmospheric and mysterious in an Atkinson Grimshaw sort of way, but that was it.  I certainly couldn't see as far as the wind turbine, not that I especially wanted to see it.  The effect of Gothic suspense was slightly undermined by the fact that noise carries very well in damp air and so the sounds of the farm and whichever main road happened to be downwind of us today were clearly audible, but the Systems Administrator reported after going out to collect some firewood that the mist was swirling through the trees in the wood in a very atmospheric fashion.

The poor old postman called mid morning, and I sympathised about the fog, and he said that it was getting worse and scrunched off into the murk.  It was getting worse, definitely a day to spend convalescing with some Christmas books.  I have now very diligently read about the gardens of London, and the history of the park, and using self seeding plants, and they were all very good, but I can't keep up the pace all weekend.

Our Ginger was not going out, not in this weather, and spent the morning lying in the kitchen wearing his bitchy resting face.  Mr Fidget insisted on walking out to the middle of the frozen pond after breakfast, until I smashed the ice, which was a rerun of what he insisted on doing yesterday. I'd like to think that he had an instinctive understanding about the dangers of thin ice, but I have my doubts.  Mr Fluffy spent most of the day sleeping in a box, while Mr Cool sat on the bird table for the second day running.  He waited very patiently for a long time, but no birds came, and he had to eat some of the bird food as a consolation prize.

The Systems Administrator watched the first hour of the two hour DVD on modern freight trains that I gave him for Christmas.  Various of my friends had asked me what I was getting the SA for Christmas, and most seemed unconvinced by the merits of Big Freight, but just because their husbands wouldn't want it doesn't mean the SA didn't.  The SA said it was very good, only two solid hours of freight would be a bit much in one sitting.  The trouble with having bought it is that I am now on Videoscene's mailing list, and set to be hearing about the latest thing in rail DVDs weekly for the rest of the year.

trespassers

I switched on Radio 4 when I woke up, and discovered that Debbie Reynolds had died.  Or at least, people were saying nice things about her in the past tense, which came to the same thing.  That was very poignant.  At least she was old enough to have qualified for her pension and her free bus pass for some time, if she had been one of us and not Hollywood royalty, but it was still sad.  And I really liked Singin' in the Rain.

It was another beautiful day, with bright wintry sunshine, though the frost never quite burned off the grass.  Yesterday was lovely too, once the fog lifted which took some time, while on Christmas Day it was so warm in the sunshine that the bees were out in force foraging on the mahonia by the oil tank.  I decided that it was sunny and still enough and I was strong enough to risk walking to the post box.  That was the first time I'd ventured off the premises since Tuesday of last week.  I told the Systems Administrator where I was going, asking the SA to come and look for me if I hadn't returned inside half an hour, in case my legs had given up and I was sitting on the verge crying. Just to be on the safe side I wore my walking coat that I actually could have sat on a verge in without spoiling it, but my legs held up quite nicely, and I felt an almost smug glow that a tiny bit of fresh air and exercise might have done me good.

As we sat in the study before lunch, the SA with a headache and me feeling that that was enough exercise for one day, we heard a dim barking sound.  Muntjac?  It was an odd sort of time for them to be making a noise and the SA suggested that perhaps it was a dog.  I looked out into the front garden, to see both of the neighbours' Airedales pushing up against the chicken run, and the anxious faces of the chickens in the window of the hen house as they attempted to take shelter.  Feeling deeply exasperated, because it was not the first time the dogs had been into the garden annoying our animals, I advanced on them, telling them in the brightest and most encouraging voice I could manage to come on doggies, we were going home now.  I don't like the Airedales, but yelling at them wasn't going to do any good.

I took what seemed to be the ringleader's collar and we set off down the lane, the other Airedale following along behind us.  They seemed quite friendly, and I kept up the affable good-doggies patter while thinking that I did not feel especially comfortable with my exposed wrist on the collar of a large dog I barely knew and whose owners were nowhere in sight.  I love the company of my friends' dogs, but I only meet those dogs when they are under the supervision of people I trust.  I don't at all like having to try and control large dogs who are roaming about the countryside at random.

Two thirds of the way down the lane my captive slipped his collar, which was a stupid elasticated one, presumably in case he should wander off and strangle himself.  Fortunately both dogs followed me to the neighbour's house.  I rapped on their door.  Nobody appeared, but the ringleader of the Airedales began to bark.  Great, now he was going to think I was trying to break into his house.  I knocked again, but there was no reply.  I hung the useless collar on the door knob and set off home, both dogs happily coming with me.  I hoped the SA would have had the wit to get Our Ginger safely into the house before  we all arrived.

Then I saw the neighbours walking across their field, one holding a lead.  Wretched people not to know where their dogs were.  I veered across the field to meet them, and told them that I had just found both Airedales poking around my hen run and taken them home, but that one had slipped its collar and they would find the collar by their front door.  The male neighbour said he was sorry.  It was not the first time, I said.  While we were on holiday one of the dogs had come into our house, according to the people looking after the house who had been watching television and looked round to find a big brown dog looking at them.  The male neighbour said again that he was sorry and that they did try to control the dogs.  And they knew the dogs had chased our kittens and the old cat in our garden, I continued, because they had heard me screaming.  Our ginger cat was twelve and too old to be mobbed by dogs on his own doorstep.  If you had a dog you were supposed to be in control of it when it was outside, not let it roam around the neighbouring gardens.

The female neighbour tried to object, saying that I knew how long I had lived next door to their dog.  That made me really cross, probably crosser than the circumstances warranted, but I was not in the mood to cope with Airedales, and besides, when you are in the wrong (as they were about their roaming dogs) the graceful thing to do is apologise, not start trying to justify it.  It is true that in my time I have unleashed the odd swarm of bees on the neighbourhood, and let he or she who is without sin cast the first stone, but I was feeling tired, ill and incredibly pissed off. Announcing that I had had flu, had had no Christmas at all, and that I really could not cope with Airedales and would they please keep them away from us, I stomped off.

It is a pity.  It is better to get on with your neighbours than not, and especially in the countryside when you don't have many.  But I fairly loathe those Airedales, and it isn't as though the neighbours popped round after the time they heard me screaming at their dog to check that no damage had been done.  The Systems Administrator had just refilled the chickens' water when I got back, which they had kicked over in the panic, so if we had been out all day and the dogs had been left by their clueless owners to go on scaring the hens until they got bored and went home of their own accord, then the hens would have been left without anything to drink until we got home.  The Airedales are lucky they don't live in sheep country, or somebody would have shot them by now.

the reluctant invalid

The Systems Administrator had rallied enough by the middle of yesterday to go and buy fresh supplies of milk, firelighters, biscuits and cat food.  I sat in front of the wood burning stove, and saw in the Guardian that Carrie Fisher had died.  I have tried to remain positive towards 2016 in the face of Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the general death-of-the-stars tide of doom that has been dragging down the prevailing mood, or at least the mood among my friends who on the whole do not seem in favour of Brexit or Trump or the sad early demise of Alan Rickman and David Bowie and Victoria Wood.  But it is beginning to feel like hard work.

Fortunately I do not have anything in my diary until 17 January, and that's an AGM which while I ought to attend it if I can, I am not on the committee and it won't cost me anything if I can't. Otherwise, no concert tickets, no exhibition slots booked, no arrangements to meet anybody.  This is partly by design because as I was feeling under the weather in December I held off making any more arrangements on the basis that when you're in a hole, stop digging.  It is also down to sheer good luck that the things we wanted to see at the Mercury theatre and the Arts Centre weren't on until February.

I had hoped to get to Dulwich before the current exhibition of a Dutch Golden Age landscape painter ends on 15 January, but once I didn't manage to go before Christmas I had a dark suspicion I might not make it at all.  At least I don't have to decide whether come next week I am fit to drag myself into the Plant Centre.  Or the City.  It could be much worse.  As it is all I have to do is sit in front of the stove and try not to think about the garden.  I haven't done any work in the garden since 7 December.

The NHS website is infuriatingly vague about the recovery time for flu, saying that most people feel much better within a week but full recovery can take significantly longer.  Well, I do feel much better than I did in the middle of last week, I don't have a temperature and a screaming headache, but how long is significantly long?  A week?  Two weeks?  Longer than until 15 January, which in practice means 13 January because we have no trains at weekends?

The SA always tells me that he can tell I am starting to get better when I begin to grumble.  It is when I am really meek and quiet that he worries.  On that basis I am starting to get better.  But ye gods, this is such a waste of time.  Look at Alan Rickman and Victoria Wood.  Who can say how much of that we all have left?

on the feast of Stephen

It took me decades to discover that St Stephen's Day and Boxing Day were the same day.  The Feast of Stephen had to be some time in winter, because the snow lay deep and crisp and even when good King Wenceslas looked out, and it was presumably sometime around late December as his story had got appended to the mass of English carols, but it was only when we got a copy of Thea Gilmore's Strange Communion, a Christmas album like no other, that I learned the two days were the same and one, from the track The St Stephen's Day Murders, a rousing ditty about turning on your appalling relatives and slaughtering them all, and featuring a vocal contribution by Mark Ratcliffe sounding as though he had been gargling with gravel.

I switched on Radio 4 when I woke up and it was playing pop music.  That's always a bad sign, but since I didn't recognise the song I had to wait until it finished to find out who was dead.  Poor George Michael.  I was not a Wham! fan, but he was good at what he did.  And he was younger than me.  The Systems Administrator was surprised as the day went on that his death got quite so much coverage, having not thought that George Michael was that big, but he was.  It was just that our tastes ran more to rock and indie.  If you were to play me Wham!'s greatest hits I'm sure they would make me quite nostalgic for the pubs and parties of yesteryear, while I still wouldn't have been able to name a single song or tell you it was by Wham!.  They were part of the background noise of my youth.

In the middle of the morning we rallied ourselves, and the Systems Administrator cut some more logs while I cooked the chicken with just plain mashed potato and carrots and sprouts.  There were no trimmings, partly because I couldn't be bothered and wasn't that hungry, and partly to make it clear that it was not pretend delayed Christmas lunch.  I thought some hot food and plain digestible proten might be good for us.

By late afternoon we were fading badly, and I distracted myself by looking through Presto Classical's top 100 albums of 2016, imagining which of them I might buy while they had thirty per cent off.  2016 appears to have been a good year for Brahms recordings, which is fine.  I like Brahms.  Occasionally I looked things up on Google.  Sonata form denotes a piece of music in three sections, exposition, development, and recapitulation, in which two themes or subjects are explored according to set key relationships.  Rubato is the temporary disregard of tempo to allow for expressive quickening or slackening, usually without altering the overall pace.  That will be what Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill do playing Irish reels, and why it is so annoying when people try to clap along with them.  Rutabaga is the American name for a Swede.  I had to get to that answer backwards, since Wikipedia told me that rutabaga was the Engish swede or turnip, and since turnips or swedes are two different vegetables that didn't help, so I Googled swede and confirmed that Americans call it rutabaga.

By eight we we both exhausted and went to our separate rooms, where I slept badly and had to get up at half past four to let Our Ginger in because he was howling outside the door.  He was not a cooperative visitor and spent quite a long time clawing at my scalp and trying to lie on my head or work his way under the duvet.  When I woke properly it was ten past eight.  I switched on Radio 4 and it was a discussion about dementia.  Good old BBC, there to cheer you up when you need them. I thought I had better get up to feed the cats and let the hens out of their house, and then realised I could not see Our Ginger.  I looked under the bedclothes and under the bed, and began to wonder if I had imagined letting a large ginger cat into the room in the small hours, and then the SA stuck his head round the door, looking like Death would look if he were wearing navy blue trousers and a pullover from Marks and Spencer, and said he had done the chickens and the cats and broken the ice on the pond and might go back to bed now, and it was he who had let Our Ginger out, when he looked in twenty minutes earlier and I was asleep.

on Christmas Day

We shared a tin of tomato soup for Christmas lunch., with a slice of toast made from white sliced bread (medium thickness) and followed by one little orange each.  It was a good impulse of the Systems Administrator's to grab the white sliced loaf in the trolley dash around Waitrose on Friday. Then the SA went back to bed, leaving me to listen to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols which I missed on Christmas Eve.  It did not sound as good on my gardening radio as it would have through the big stereo speakers in the sitting room, but we hadn't heated the sitting room up and I couldn't face working out how to get Radio 3 on the telly.

By late afternoon I'd made it through the day's Difficult Sudoku in average time, which was an improvement on my efforts first thing when it took me four attempts to get to the end of the Mild one without making a mistake.  The SA reappeared saying that his headache was a lot quieter after another couple of hours' sleep, and we rallied enough to eat some more of the emergency shortbread and open our presents.  Then we ate what had originally meant to be Friday night's pizza and watched Hail Caesar, and at nine the SA went back to bed.

I loved Hail Caesar, and am puzzled by the mixed reviews and even more puzzled by the slightly ho-hum response of the wider public.  It is a Coen brothers skit on the tail end of the Hollywood studio system during the 1950s, a films within a film comedy caper about a day in the life of a Hollywood fixer based on a real person.  And yes, it sanitises the studio system and the behaviour of the real person.  I know that in real life the studios would use tactics ranging from the coercive to the downright criminal to control the public image of their stars, but we all know that in real life Hitler wasn't very nice.  That doesn't mean Mel Brookes was wrong to make The Producers.  Hail Caesar is a satire, not a biopic.

In the film part of it George Clooney plays an amiable, slightly aging star whose private life doesn't exactly match up to the studio image.  He is starring in an incredibly clunky picture about the life of Christ, and remains dressed throughout in a monumentally unflattering Roman centurion's costume complete with sword which he has no idea how to wear without crashing into things.  I adore George Clooney when he is doing comedy with the Coens.  He is kidnapped from the set, and much of the rest of the film part of the film deals with the fixer's attempts to get him back.

Every one of the films within a film is a gem.  Besides the Roman epic there is a synchronised swimming film (the snag being that the star has just announced that she is pregnant. She is twice divorced, not currently married, and this is 1950s Hollywood), tap dancing sailors, and a screen adaptation of a Broadway drawing room piece with an English director and a freshly cast male lead whose reputation to date has been built on cowboy films (the studio is changing his image).  We see a scene from every one being shot, and they are all quite wickedly funny and packed with so much detail it would probably be worth watching several times (if only one had the time).  Look out for one of the synchronised swimmers quickly flipping over because she is showing the red side of her costume when everybody else is yellow (or vice versa.  I loved Screen Test when I was a child, but I was very bad at it).  The vague sense that there is a gay subtext to the singing and tap dancing sailors becomes a honking certainty as the routine goes on, while reminding me how much I adored Gene Kelly.  The most trailed vignette of the entire film must be the English director's attempts to coach the cowboy actor in the lines 'Would that it were so simple', but the scene of that film within a film's director viewing the first cut outdoes it for comedic brilliance.

Back in the film, communists appear.  I suppose it would be a plot spoiler to say who they are, though once you have heard their rationale you realise you should have worked that out.  And there is an acting dog.  Called Engels, which is a clue.

I absolutely loved it.  Not just for the satire, or the brilliant cast (which sadly is no guarantee of greatness, as the painful disappointment of the Dads' Army film demonstrated), but because it is such a good natured film.  Some reviewers have referred to the character of the cowboy actor as stupid, but as the film progresses he actually comes out as quite smart, honest, unpretentious and brave.  His acting in a drawing room drama is clunky (to brilliant comedic effect) because he has never done it before in his life before being thrust on to the set (the reveal of how the director gets round 'Would that it were so simple' is brilliant).

I loved it so much, I might even buy it, then I can watch it on my laptop if I need cheering up.  Last night the Systems Administrator had downloaded it, but I don't think that lasts forever.  It is full of film references, so if you were more of a film buff than I am you would get even more out of it, but like all good parodies it works even if you don't know the original.

The SA professed to be delighted by his Christmas copy of Battleship Potemkin, but we are saving that until we feel a trifle stronger.

the lost days of Christmas

So here I am, back in the land of the living, as in showered, fully dressed including earrings, and having eaten food that looked like normal breakfast at breakfast time.  It is 10.22 am on Christmas Day.  The Systems Administrator is still in bed with a temperature.

On Tuesday when I last posted I did not feel awfully well, hot and cold and shivery and snuffly, and as I went to bed that night I felt the beginnings of a headache.  By Wednesday morning the headache was firmly in place, maybe a 3 or 4 on a scale of one to ten (though I have never felt very accurate about putting pain on scales.  Is it a logarithmic scale or a linear one?  Somebody should write a short description of symptoms for each grade of headache, like the Beaufort scale.) I had promised to drive the Systems Administrator to the railway station for the first of two back-to-back reunion lunches, and so I did.  Then I wrapped up the SA's presents with the SA safely off the premises, and fiddled around in the kitchen for a bit, but gave up.  We had beans on toast for supper since the SA was full of reunion lunch and I wasn't terribly hungry.

In the night I felt hot and ill, and announced when morning came that I had a temperature and was staying in bed.  The Systems Administrator peered at me with furrowed brow and asked if I was fit to be left, and I grumpily testified that I was.  Well, it's important to go to these sorts of things when you can, or you slip out of touch with people, and whatever bug I had was developing with such a slow onset that I didn't feel I was about to lapse into delirium in the next few hours.  I did not have the energy to root around in the bathroom cupboards looking for the thermometer, but working on the basis that there are four levels of human temperature which are normal, hot, scarily hot, and no longer making sense, I was only in the hot zone.  I mean, I could get myself to the bathroom to use the loo or get a glass of water without my legs feeling weak.  I felt very tired, though, and the headache was screaming up into the eight territory.  In a situation like that there is little somebody else can do.  I didn't want anything to eat.  I didn't want to chat, and I certainly didn't want anybody dabbing at me with a wet flannel.  I didn't even want anybody coming into the room to ask if I wanted anything when I had just managed to go to sleep.

The SA went off the the jolly, having done something to the central heating controls so that the room would stay warm, and I lay in bed with the electric blanket on.  Sometimes I slept, and the rest of the time I shuffled about.  The radio was no use because it made a noise, and I couldn't read.  Through the floor I could hear the phone ring, and then ring again, so eventually I crept downstairs to see if had been two people or the same person ringing twice in which case it might be urgent, and check my emails.  I saw from the phone handset that the callers had been two different numbers, one of them my mother's, who had also emailed asking if I was All Right.  The answerphone was bleeping loudly to alert me to the fact that one of the callers had left a message, but when I pressed Play it just kept on beeping.  I emailed back to say that I was All Right but had the flu and please not to keep ringing because of the noise, then I unplugged the phone at the wall to stop the beeping and tottered back to bed.

I had to get up at noon to feed the cats, and again at teatime to give them their tea, and then at dusk to shut the hens, when I noticed with some irritation that their water had run out.  And I did not know whether the SA had a front door key, since the door had been unlocked when I came down to check the phone, so I sat grimly at the kitchen table until the SA returned, and unlocked the door with shaky fingers while the SA stood on the other side of the glass feeling around all his pockets for a key.  The SA asked how I was, and I said that I was Very Ill and was now going back to bed, and that the hens' water had run out.  The SA followed on to check quite how ill that might be, and we established that I was not sick and did not have a rash or chest pains, just a temperature and a screaming headache.  The SA had suddenly grown rather nervous about such things since that day's reunion lunch had mainly brought news of major health scares and cancer diagnoses for the spouses of practically everybody else at it.  The SA decamped to the spare room for the night to give us both some breathing space, leaving me with the better of the bargain since I got to keep the electric blanket, and I settled to a night of strange dreams and muffled Radio 3.

On Friday morning I stayed in bed, but remembered about the hens' water, while the Systems Administrator made an emergency dash to Waitrose to do the shopping I would have done if I hadn't been ill.  I rather doubted that we were going to need it, but I wasn't going to argue.  Apparently the SA was there at the head of the queue as the doors opened, and being swept into the store by the tidal wave of trolleys was like riding at the head of the peloton.  The SA did a swift, efficient grab of the basic elements of a Christmas lunch, plus the traditional Christmas Eve steaks and some already reduced Christmas shortbread because I'd warned I didn't think I'd be making any mince pies or stollen on Christmas Eve.  By the time the SA left the car park was full and the queue was stretching all the way down the inner bypass to the roundabout, and by the time the SA got home he was beginning to look a bit grey and fluey himself.  I never got up all day, though by late afternoon I felt well enough to eat one slice of bread and butter which the SA kindly brought up for me, looking fairly ill.  It's bad luck being ill when your other half is iller.  You get lumbered with the fetching and carrying when you'd rather sit down yourself.  The SA says he gave up and went to bed at eight on Friday night.

Saturday was Christmas Eve.  I should have been making stollen and the Systems Administrator would traditionally have been bringing in ivy to decorate the mantelpiece, which he does beautifully, except that by then the SA was in bed as well.  I tottered out to open the hen house, refilled their water which had run out again, and fed the cats, and went back to bed.  The headache was down to only a five or so,  I fed the cats at noon, and at two I tottered downstairs to give them their tea under the impression that it was four o'clock.  As soon as I got down to the kitchen I realised I'd misread the alarm clock in the darkness of the bedroom and without my spectacles, since although the evenings have started getting lighter they certainly hadn't got that much lighter, but then I thought that now I was up I might have something to eat, and made a slice of toast which went down so well that I had a second one, and a fruit flavoured yogurt and a small orange.  The headache had dropped to a three.

At teatime the SA appeared, feeling slightly less grim, and we opened the box of Waitrose Christmas shortbread and lit a fire, and discussed what to do with all the food, since we clearly weren't going to be up to cooking a full roast chicken with all the trimmings, or eating it, let alone coping with the tide of leftovers.  Some of them like the ham and bacon were so long dated they could be absorbed into normal supplies, and even the chicken was good until the 27th, so we agreed the best thing was to keep an eye on them and freeze anything that was about to date expire if we didn't want to cook it that day.  By evening my headache had gone, except that my head felt very fragile the way heads do when you have had a continuous headache for the best part of 72 hours. The SA's head was still pounding and he went to bed early.  I went to bed a bit later and lay there trying to work out if I could in any way identify with the five year old me who used to be so excited on Christmas Eve waiting to open my stocking, but I couldn't.

This morning the headache was creeping back, but I put that down to having subsisted on three slices of white bread, two glasses of milk, two glasses of apple and elderflower, two small bits of shortbread and a handful of peanuts over three days.  I found that I could contemplate the idea of putting water on my head and had a shower, which improved things greatly, and went downstairs and fed the cats and opened the hen house door.  There was no sign of movement from the spare bedroom.  At half past nine I looked in just to check that the SA was still alive and no more than hot on the human temperature scale.  The SA was alive but claimed to feel terrible, so I came back downstairs and listened to Harry Christopher and the Sixteen's Early English Christmas, and started this blog post.  A while later the SA appeared, dressed and not feeling quite so terrible after some more sleep.  The SA ate two shortbread biscuits and went for a shower.

And that has been our Christmas so far.  It isn't what I'd planned.  After all the effort, the finding the potted tree and researching presents on the internet, the making of lists and sending cards and planning how to cat-proof the decorations, it would have been nice to bring the tree into the house instead of it still being tucked away in the greenhouse.  And nice to hang up the fairy lights and my new die cut string of reproduction Victorian Christmas cats in the study, and listen to the Watersons on Christmas Eve in front of the fire like we do every year, and make stollen, and be looking forward to an enormous lunch of roast chicken with all the trimmings and traditional pudding made in the Lake District by barn owls.  And it would have been nice not to be ill.  Mainly it would have been nice not to be ill.  Up to last weekend I was reading Thomas Mann's fantastical novel about a Swiss sanatorium, and the young hero is taken to task when he sympathises too much with the feelings of the more seriously ill inmates.  It is an error, his interlocutor tells him, to imagine that they feel about their situation as you would feel now when you are not that ill.  And Thomas Mann was dead right.  While lying in bed feeling really, grottily ill you don't wish you were downstairs hanging coloured decorations on a small potted Nordmann fir.  You are much more bothered about your headache than the fact that you are missing Christmas.

Of course most of it will not be wasted, strictly speaking.  Most of the food will be eaten, though if the SA remembered to get any mushrooms to go with what should have been last night's steak they may be past it before either of us feel like mushrooms.  We will still have the presents people have bought for us, and in three months time we will like them exactly as much as we would have if we'd opened them by eleven this morning so that the SA could go and start cooking the lunch.  I sent our cards with our genuine goodwill, and those we received were read and appreciated and in some cases brought welcome news.  It will be a horticultural challenge to try and bring the potted tree through to Christmas 2017 in good shape and preferably larger, and I'd have done that anyway. It is just the occasion that's gone for this year, the ritual.  We agreed yesterday afternoon that the one thing we would definitely not be doing would be cooking the chicken and ham and all the trimmings two or three days after the event, and pretending that we were having Christmas late. No kidding.  We missed it and that's that.

still got a cold

Men curse germs, but a germ thinks of a man only as a swamp in which he has to live.  Thank you, Don Marquis.  I am that swamp.

time for a rest

My cold is still hanging about.  In fact, it has started to relapse.  But at least I can now stop.  In the past week I have spent the morning at the hospital with my parents, met one friend for coffee, another for lunch in London, gone over to Cambridge with a third, been out to what might almost have been a dinner party in that there were three courses or four counting the cheese and we didn't know the other guests awfully well, except that it was billed as supper and was not stuffy enough to count as a dinner party, and had my parents to lunch.  That is a lot more than I would normally aim to do in a week, but that's just how the dates worked out.  The timing of hospital appointments you can't do anything about, and there's nothing like Christmas for making friends who have been too busy working or coping with their own parent's hospital appointments to see you decide they would like to squeeze the time to catch up into their diaries.  Which is sort of bonkers in that they are also frantically trying to fit in their Christmas shopping, but that's the way it goes.

Now there is nothing in my diary until some time in about the third week of January.  Literally nothing.  Zip.  Zilch.  The Systems Administrator is due to catch up with one lot of old work friends on Wednesday and a second on Thursday, but my life is a total blank.  That's mainly down to how the dates worked out given how my friends were placed, and my would-be work reunion ended up getting pushed back to January because somebody was away for most of December.  It is also by now deliberate, in that once I realised the cold was settling in I tried not to commit to any more plans.  So I can have a rest.  I am due to do the shop for our very low key Christmas lunch on Thursday, so that we don't have to go anywhere near a supermarket on Friday, and beyond that I am free to sit in front of the fire reading easy books and drinking a great deal of tea until I start feeling better.  It's a shame about the garden, but there you go.  The last compost bin will remain unpainted and the tulip bulbs in the garage unplanted until I don't have a sore throat.  The SA will cook the festive chicken with all the trimmings.  Beyond hanging some unbreakable decorations on this year's small potted tree I don't have to do anything.

It is such a relief.  I have addressed full boards of pension fund trustees feeling worse than this in the old days, and dragged myself out to do woodland charity talks, but I am so glad I don't have to. I feel for my lunch companion whose elderly parents live in Germany and who has got to get herself there for Christmas amid the threat of strikes and fog.  But I don't.  I need to post some things and I might buy some throat sweets while I'm out, but I don't have to go anywhere (except Waitrose), do anything, dress up, be amusing or impressive or anything.  Like Claudius, a bump on a log.  Bliss.

house work, house plants and a propagation update

It is another foggy day.  I am going to go to Waitrose, and then cook tomorrow's lunch and tonight's supper and finish cleaning all the things I didn't get round to cleaning yesterday, or at least that subset of things that I'm going to clean at all.  I'm not sure it's worth washing the glass partition in the hall at this time of year.  You can only really see the difference when the sun shines through it. Anyway, by the time I've done all that I'll probably fancy a nice sit down with a Sudoku, and Waitrose doesn't open until half past ten.

The trouble with cleaning is not just the cleaning, it's the tidying up first.  Things would be different if we were tidy people, but neither of us are.  Tidying the kitchen took ages, what with clearing up the pile of old newspapers, catalogues, gallery guides from art exhibitions I'm not going to revisit, bank statements, charity appeals, my calculator, a plastic ruler, several pencils, various magazines, and assorted till receipts.  They all have to be sorted out carefully otherwise your credit card statement ends up in the paper recycling.  Then there was the wildlife camera next to the toaster (which I put on my desk where it doesn't count as mess because I haven't tidied my desk yet).  Even now there is a multipack of tins of cat food next to the kettle, which I can't put in the cupboard where the cat food is supposed to live because that is taken up by boxes of cat biscuits, which have to be kept in a cupboard because otherwise Mr Fluffy will chew through the box.  The kittens have not yet worked out how to open tins, but they did bite holes in a bag of no-mess bird food which is now in a tupperware container meaning it won't fit in the crock in the hall where it supposed to live, so has ended up on the kitchen worktop next to the ice cream machine.

As part of the great kitchen tidy I took stock of the experimental cuttings on the window sill.  One took and one didn't.  Impatiens auricoma x bicaudata rooted with ease.  This is the orange flowered impatiens that will grow a yard tall and across once it gets going, and was happy in semi shade at the back of the conservatory until vine weevils ate the roots.  The piece I experimentally stuck in compost was from fairly near the base of the plant and had two branches about as fat as my little finger, so broader than a pencil, and about eight inches long, plus a third, short, fatter stem.  It always used to drop its leaves for winter in the conservatory and had done so this year before the final collapse from vine weevil.  I used normal multi-purpose compost because that was what I had, and didn't put the cutting in a plastic bag because I was afraid the fleshy stems would rot and anyway it didn't have any leaves to lose moisture.

I thought it was beginning to root fairly early on, as I could see one wavering white thread through a drainage hole, and when I very carefully upended it over the sink (while the Systems Administrator was out) there were roots, just the two.  It is better really not to disturb your cuttings until they have had more of a chance to establish, but it was an experiment and I was curious.  New leaves began to grow at the same time, the kitchen of course being much warmer than the conservatory in winter.  The short third stem began to wither early on, and I wonder if it was supplying moisture to the rest of the plant.  Now I can see more roots through the holes in the bottom of the pot, and it has begun to throw out some rather weedy side shoots, so I think we can say it has taken.  The only potential problem is black dieback in the stem ends at the top, and I have just cut half an inch off one of them, sacrificing a shoot, to take it back to clean and undamaged tissue.  I haven't checked how the two smaller cuttings I left in the greenhouse are getting on, but the principle is established.  If you have an Impatiens auricoma x bicaudata you can propagate it from cutting without any fuss.  I am curious now to try my luck with another exotic balsam.  I think Dibley list one with pink flowers.

Against that, Fuchsia boliviana resolutely refused to root.  First one and then the other cutting died, leaves dropping one by one until the tip drooped and told me it was game over.  Upon exhumation neither had the least suspicion of roots.  Alas.  Perhaps Other Fellow Fuchsias will have more in the spring, and if I can track one down I will know to keep it almost pot bound to make over watering more difficult.

Looking on the bright side, my orchid is throwing up a new flowering spike and sending out two side shoots off the remains of the old one.  But the older leaves on the Mandevilla hybrid in the hall are yellowing and dropping.  The nursery woman I bought it from told me to keep it on the dry side over winter and not to move it into a larger pot until spring.  Perhaps the air in the hall is too dry for it.  The striped green, peppermint and bronze Tradescantia is very happy, sending out long new arms that are feeling their way hopefully up the bread crock with bird food in it and through the Mandevilla.  I am keeping that very dry indeed, after the losses of previous years.  It was rooted from a piece that I accidentally broke off the plant in the conservatory and took very easily.  It makes a good companion for the Mandevilla in that the leaves are a similar size and shape and the green centre of the Tradescantia leaf picks out the solid green of its neighbour.  Aphid has been a problem on everything except the orchid.  Yesterday I sprayed the Impatiens and stood it out in the porch to dry, luckily remembering to bring it in again in the evening, and now I see I need to do the same for the Tradescantia.

a domestic day

The fog never lifted all day, and I was reminded why every year I think it would be lovely to go to the carol service in Long Melford's splendid wool church, and then don't buy tickets.  Really my friend and I were very lucky over our trip to Cambridge.  We certainly wouldn't have wanted to drive to Cambridge today.

Fortunately today neither of us had to go anywhere, and the fog didn't make any difference to my plans since the day was already earmarked for housework.  Things had got rather grubby and dishevelled while we both had colds, but I was not starting from a zero base of grubbiness because the Systems Administrator made a start on Wednesday while I was out.  I never gave public credit where credit was due at the time because I was so taken up with my outing, but I got home to find that the SA had vacuumed the house, including the bedroom where for days I'd been carefully walking around the little pile of earth that fell out of my gardening trousers so as not to tread it into the carpet.  I hate vacuuming.  And the SA had put out the paper for recycling and the rubbish, including the plastic off the cat food multipacks and magazine wrappers from the waste paper basket in the study and not just the kitchen bin.  And worked out correctly that it was best to empty the vegetable peelings bin into the plastic sack of old poultry litter waiting to be mixed into the next compost bin as I filled it, and not just sprinkled on top of any of the full bins.  I was so happy when I stepped through the front door and saw that the detritus of gravel and dust off our shoes and the cats had gone and that the cats' food dishes were resting on clean newspaper.

The kittens have done their best to undermine the good work since then by shredding a toilet roll on the landing, and some leaves and Strulch have come in stuck to Mr Fluffy,  But the house is still a lot cleaner than it was before the SA's efforts.  I wiped the kitchen units and the Aga, and shook the accumulated crumbs out of the toaster.  It has a removable floor for cleaning so you don't actually have to upend it over the sink, I have discovered.  Who knew?  We have had the toaster for about a decade.  It belonged to the Systems Administrator's late mother.

As a break from cleaning the kitchen I caught up with the ironing, and felt a glow of accomplishment as I cleared the last rumpled garment off the spare bed.  The secret with ironing is not to let the pile grow so huge it becomes terrifying.  One of the listeners' one sentence weeks on Radio 4's iPM programme this evening was from somebody who had got to the bottom of their ironing basket for the first time in seven years.  Our spare bed has been more manageable since the SA finally admitted that post City there was really no need to keep the SA's entire stock of about two dozen Thomas Pink white double cuffed office shirts on the bed pending ironing, and consigned most of them to the textile recycling skip.

the postman rings

Since I am fast enough to grumble when the postman makes a mistake I feel praise should be given where it is due.  This morning as we were sitting in the study drinking coffee the doorbell rang with multiple peals (this doorbell is a recent acquisition, to save delivery drivers having to open the back door (which is at the front) and shout Hello while trying not to look like a burglar.  I don't know what it is about doorbells that they always break down, but we currently have one.  I fancied a huge and thunderous brass door knocker, but the doorbell was easier and cheaper.  I expect the Systems Administrator got it on Amazon).

It was the postman, who had noticed that the names and addresses on some of the mail looked anomalous, and instead of stuffing it at random through somebody's door had taken the time to ask. First up was an envelope with the name of our neighbour on it, who sold us this house in 1993 and now lives in the original family farmhouse down the lane.  We have received spasmodic mail for him ever since, and at Christmas I take it round unless it is addressed to his dead wife as well, in which case I feel he doesn't need to have it.  I stopped the year she died since friends and relatives who were in touch must have known of her death, and I was afraid that cards addressed to them both would simply upset him, while anyone who didn't know after nearly twenty years that he had moved house couldn't be a close friend.  As that was about five years ago perhaps I should start again, in case it is a long lost friend trying to get back in touch.  I thought it was very sensible of the postman to try and clear this one up, since he must know from all our other mail that our neighbour lives down the road and we live here.  And he can take the responsibility for the deceased wife's mail in future.

Second up was a fat, disintegrating envelope addressed in writing I recognised as my father's cousin's.  To clinch matters it had a little sticker with his name and address on the back.  The reason why the postman was confused was that the names on the envelope were not ostensibly anything to do with us.  In fact they were my brother and his wife, but as I was traditionalist enough to adopt my husband's name on marriage there was no obvious way for the postman to guess.  The Systems Administrator explained about that as well and we promised to give the envelope to my brother the next time we saw him.  I am afraid that my father's cousin has got his address book muddled up.  I really ought to go and visit him next year, though the thought of getting myself to Lytham St Annes fills me with despondency, and if we both go then we have to find somebody to look after the zoo and it becomes a major expedition.

Meanwhile I finished my Christmas shopping, and after lunch I delivered the Christmas cards to our neighbours and put the last tricky one in the post.  We are not trying to do anything very elaborate for Christmas, lunch for my parents next week and a roast chicken with all the trimmings for us on Christmas Day.  It might even be all under control.

RI and RA

I went this afternoon to the Royal Academy to see the Ensor exhibition.  I wouldn't necessarily have gone so hot on the heels of the Cambridge visit, especially when it is on until the end of January, but I was seeing an old university friend for lunch first and that's the way the dates ended up working for everybody.

I was pleased to see my friend, since we hadn't managed to catch up with each other since May. She runs a one woman consultancy advising small and techie companies on fund raising, EU grant applications and investor relations, as far as I can follow, having started off as a stockbrokers analyst covering the automotive sector.  This year has been busy, which pays the bills, besides which she likes industry.  She finds my ability to amuse myself for hours fiddling around with mud faintly baffling, but we are fond of each other and have known each other for a very long time.

We had lunch at what seems to be one of the most useful and best kept secrets in the West End, the cafe of the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street.  I have been to a couple of lectures there, but the last time we tried to meet at the cafe it was shut that day due to a private function.  We ended up in Fenwick instead and I made a mental note to avoid arranging to meet anybody at the RI cafe in future, since somewhere that can't be relied upon to be open is no use at all.  But my friend seemed to think it would be OK, and I thought that since Fenwick was still round the corner we'd be fine one way or another.

The food at the RI cafe is not very exciting though perfectly edible and the decor is utterly unremarkable.  BUT the tables are generously spaced apart, and only about three of them were occupied apart from ours, with the result that the room was astonishingly quiet.  My friend is fairly deaf and I am naturally soft spoken unless in performance mode for a lecture, so to go somewhere that we didn't have to repeat ourselves endlessly or sit smiling and nodding when we'd given up trying to work out what the other one was actually saying was a huge plus.  The till was broken so that they could not print itemised bills, but if there is anywhere else within a stone's throw of Piccadilly where you can get a pulled pork brioche bun with chips, a perfectly adequate chocolate brownie and three goes of tea and occupy a table in a quiet and practically empty room for an hour and a half for fifteen quid I'd like to know where it is.

Intrigue: James Ensor by Luc Tuymans was not as empty as the RI cafe but was not heaving.  I have been aware of Ensor for about twenty years since calling at Ostend on a sailing holiday and finding every lamp post on the sea front had a banner for an Ensor exhibition fluttering from it in the stiff breeze there always seems to be at Ostend.  Ensor was a native of the city, indeed he rarely left. We did not go to the exhibition, and I was curious two decades on to find out what we'd missed, and add to my collection of Famous Belgians (Tintin does not count.  He was a fictional character, but you may have Georges Simenon who was not French despite Maigret being a commissaire of the Paris Brigade Criminelle).

Ensor was of his time, Impressionistic interiors painted in thick oils, Surrealistic masks and skulls, a fascination with death and grotesquerie.  He had his own voice and did not paint exactly like anybody else that I can think of.  The exhibition has quite a lot of drawings and lithographs as well as paintings and I must admit I glossed over some of the smaller and darker ones because after the illuminated manuscripts yesterday I was tired of trying to look at small, dark things that I could barely see.  One of the larger drawings, a tongue in cheek scene of a beach and sea crowded with bathers did remind me of print of holiday makers on a busy pier Anthony Gross made for the Lyons Corner Houses a generation later (which I coveted unutterably when we saw it at Eastbourne during another sailing holiday) and looking up Gross's biography just now on Wikipedia I see that there was a Continental influence in that he studied in Paris and worked with Jean Cocteau.  Ensor's self portrait in a ladies' hat complete with dangling feather has to be a tongue in cheek homage to Rembrandt and the Dutch school.  On the whole I rather liked Ensor.  If you lived with his stuff it would grow on you, I think.  If you want to see for yourself it is on until 29 January.