Flowers in the Morning

The magnolia stellata in our front garden this morning, photographed a few minutes ago (note also the new shoots forming on the rose in front of it):


A clump of daffodils in the path in the back garden, also photographed a few minutes ago:


And just for contrast, a collection of tatty old refrigerator shelves, protecting newly planted out seedlings from being pecked to death by feral pigeons. This works!

"Why am I being assaulted by a tree in my own kitchen?"

-- queried The Wugster as she maneuvered around the folding bicycle propped against the oven. It was indeed a most apt question.

In all the years we've lived here, we've shampooed the carpets precisely once, when we hired a carpet cleaning machine for a weekend from a machinery hire shop in the High Road. But that closed down and went away years ago, and any carpet cleaning we've done since has been ad hoc responses to various spillages rather than a dedicated programme of care and upkeep. The result, inevitably, was rather grubbified carpets, spotted with evidence of past exudations of one kind or another. We had begun to talk of replacing the carpets, at least in the downstairs dining and living area, or laying down carpet tiles to conceal the worst bits.

But late last year, we began seeing adverts for Rug Doctor carpet cleaning machines which could be hired for a weekend, and thought we should give one a go. The Morrisons supermarket in Wood Green seemed the closest; then we saw that they could also be hired from B & Q in Tottenham Hale, a fifteen minute walk away. So we blocked out a suitable weekend, thoroughly vacuumed the downstairs carpet, moved quantities of clutter either upstairs or into the kitchen (mostly quantities of Wugster clutter, apart from the folding bicycles and my weeping fig tree), and set to on Saturday morning. Set to so thoroughly, in fact, that while I did the dining area of the downstairs, The Wugster had to return to B & Q to purchase more carpet detergent and stain remover.

Several passes later, the carpet no longer looked quite so grubby -- not back to its original oatmeal colour, but certainly not something to still feel embarrassed about whenever we have visitors. Not back to its original colour, that is, except for the more stubborn areas which had to be treated with the stain remover, the side-effect of which was to remove almost all the accumulated grunge and leave patches which are now lighter than the rest of the carpet, thus paradoxically drawing attention to themselves. Perhaps we should shampoo the whole thing in another weekend or so, and see what effect that has.

We had originally intended to do only the downstairs carpet, but ended up doing the whole house (apart from our respective studies, in which stuff was piled for the duration). Getting into the spring cleaning spirit, The Wugster also deployed some Mr Muscle spray on the oven -- meaning, with all these chemicals poisoning the air, we had to open the doors and windows wide to allow ventilating beezes to blow through on a weekend which turned wet and cold, with the daytime temperature falling back into single figures and The Wugster thus required to apply several layers of shirtage and woollies.

By Sunday evening, the carpets were more or less dried out, and stuff could start being returned to its usual places -- the bicycles to behind the chairs, the weeping fig tree to the front corner. At the time of writing, quantities of Wugster clutter still remain in her study, which should be a good oportunity to sort it out and throw lots of it away rather than simply stuffing it all back from whence it came. Or I'll keep sneaking in and seizing discreet handfuls of stuff to throw away if she doesn't....

Springing Forth

Bloody hell (as we say here), but it's been some time since I last checked in. To much to do, so little time (as Cecil Rhodes is reported to have said on his death-bed -- or was it Doctor No to 007 in the novel of the same name?). Anyway, we've been busy, as usual, but not too busy to have time for some preparatory work on the allotment for the coming growing season. On a couple of weekends in January, I used the long loppers to trim the trees along the southern boundary, to ensure that when they start coming back into leaf they won't cast any shade on our crops; and last weekend (although this doesn't strictly fit the "preparing for growing things" matrix) I cleared the blanket weed from the pond, "ready for the frogs to spawn" as I explained to The Wugster. She looked suitably dubious.

But when we went there this afternoon -- an unseasonably warm day, as though spring had arrived a month earlier than usual -- what did we find but the first blob of this year's frogspawn.

We also found -- or, rather saw -- several frogs: one pair clamped together in amplexus, one gravid female lurking on the bottom, and two skinny males waiting (presumably) for darkness to fall and with it the opportunity for the froggy equivalent of getting their rocks off. (This is the one time of the year when you can tell females from males, precisely because the former are so much fatter than the latter. Once the spawning season is over, they're indistinguishable.) Our afternoon tea break was enlivened by the gentle croaking of the males, who seemed not at all perturbed by our company. (Which is unusual -- the frogs in the allotment pond are much less habituated to human oversight than those in our garden pond, and usually stay well out of sight. Perhaps the drive to bonkety-bonk overrides all other considerations.)

Just to add to the unseasonality of the afternoon, on our return to the house as the sun was setting, we noticed that the magnolia stellata in the front garden had opened its first flower. We must clearly hope for No Frosts Whatever in March. In the meantime, photographs appropriate to this post follow!

Christmas 2011

A somewhat different Christmas holiday experience from the past few years -- having previously spent the holiday on our own, this time we're visiting sister Lynn and her husband Chris in Derbyshire (both having recently taken early retirement from their formal jobs, the lucky sods, but carrying on with various bits of part-time, fill-in, "consultancy" and other work); joined by Mutti who would otherwise have spent the holiday on her own in Lyme Regis; and (briefly -- they arrived on Christmas Eve and departed earlier today) sister Gail, her husband Franck and their daughter Chanel.

This has meant that instead of seeing how many jigsaws the Wugster and I can do in four days, we've been walking Lynn's and Chris's dog Wesley in a nearby bit of the National Forest, a twenty-year-old project to create new woodlands on what was formerly rather degraded arable land across the three Midlands counties of Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire. As can be seen from the photographs attached to this post, the planting is a wee bit regimented: I daresay the theory is that some of the young trees will die young (disease, damage by animals or the wind, nutrient-poor soils) thus leaving room for the surviving trees to grow into the newly opened spaces and form a more natural-seeming woodland cover. (Either that or some army of the unemployed will be engaged in feats of heroic uprooting and replanting, which seems most unlikely.) Anyway, the attached photographs show, in order, two panoramas of the walking party passing through (or by) National Forest planatations; a stretch of newly planted land, the seedlings encased in plastic tubes to prevent them from being nibbled to death by rabbits and deer; the walking party passing through a patch of conifers (apparently only one of these trees has ever been cut down for use as a Christmas ornament); and a hilltop copse of the kind which existed here when the land was still used for arable agriculture (farmers traditionally left the hilltop copses alone because they always had -- some superstitious Tudor-era or earlier prohibition on disturbing the fairies, doubtless).

Today's Potato Harvest

Today's potato harvest, posted purely for consistency with last week's photograph. The two varieties in question are Ratte (the small elongated ones) and Valor (a main crop). As far as can be determined, this photograph contains no naughtiness of any kind, posed or otherwise, and has therefore received the Frightfully Upstanding Certificate (King Indicative Number, General, High Express Long Lasting) stamp of approval.

Yesterday's Potato Harvest

Contains naughty vegetables. Not suitable for children under fourteen years of age.

There's Something Wrong with this Blackcurrant, Sarge....

We're in the second week of October, its leaves are turning brown and dropping off, but otherwise it thinks it's spring -- as this photograph shows, there are new buds forming!

A Quick Catch-Up

Lobbing in here after several weeks of busy-ness, but not having time right now to post much of a catch-up. Last time, I celebrated the abundance of our fruit and tomato crops; but while the fruit has continued to do very well (we've had so much of it that we've had to make at least one apple-and-pear pie a week in order to keep up -- when a fruit pie is something we usually make only once or twice a year), the summer weather (or lack-of-weather) has heavily impacted the tomatoes. The summer has been no damper than usual, but the cooler temperatures and lack of sunshine that we've experienced since the highs of May have magnified the impact of the damp, and much of what was on display in the photographs posted less than six weeks ago has succumbed to blight, and has had to be yanked out and thrown away. Judith will perhaps be able to provide a better estimate, but I reckon we've lost at least a third and possibly as much as a half of the crop. Bum donkey poo smells! (as we say here)

On the other hand, we have kept up the leisure travel and culture programme -- a weekend in Hastings with a side visit to Bodiam Castle on 13-14 August, followed by a few days in Weymouth on 8-11 September, with a walk around the Isle of Portland (partly in and sometimes above the low-level cloud blowing in from Lyme Bay to the west) and a walk along The Fleet from Abbotsbury to Weymouth, part of it in the rain. But at least we can say we've finally done it....

....and in a few days' time we're off to Eastern Crete with the holiday company Travel Editions, with whom we visited Western and Central Crete in 2007. Part of the reason for going back is (as it were) to "complete Crete", so that we can tick it off the list; another part of the reason is that our guide will be the same hugely knowledgeable and enthusiastic local we had in 2007, which was a real bonus. After which, winter will be closing in, and it will be time to concentrate on my promised (to myself) winter projects: albumising the physical photographs of our trips to Andalucia, Madrid and Catalonia in 1998, 1999 and 2005, and uploading to Facebook public photo albums of our visits to Sicily (2007), Provence and the Loire Valley (both 2009), Purbeck aka The Land of My Boyhood (2009 and 2010 -- and in due course 2012 as well) and of course Crete. In the meantime, here's a photograph from the window of our B&B in Weymouth, one of a terrace of tall Regency-era houses at the southern end of The Esplanade backing onto the harbour. Under its former name of Melcombe Regis, it was through this port that the Black Death entered England in 1348, resulting in the loss of a third of the population and -- as a consequence -- the end of the feudal system.

This Year's Crop

We planted fruit trees in our garden in the first couple of years we were here -- a cherry tree, a redcurrant bush, three apple trees, a pear tree and a plum. The plum died almost instantly; the redcurrant succumbed to woolly moth after a few years and had to be dug out and burned; one of the three apple trees took years to produce its first flowers and for years afterwards never gave us more than a couple of fruits, so was eventually dug out as well; the cherry produced lots of fruit every year but was generally stripped bare by the birds before we got anything, so that eventually went as well. That has left us with two apples and one pear tree, plus a blackcurrant bush purchased later and inserted into a likely-seeming gap, and a blackberry bramble which The Wugster introduced and which we have to keep severely under control lest it take over one whole side of the garden.

So that's round about fifteen years that we've been growing fruit in one form or another, and for most of those fifteen years we've never got very much -- the blackcurrant and the blackberry are fairly reliable, but the apple and pear trees generally crop poorly. They give us lots of blossom in the spring, but then seem to lose a good half of their buds in the "June drop" while those remaining are either nibbled by squirrels or invaded by coddling moths. Most of the time, the fruit is boiled for its pectin, used to help jam set; we seem to eat very little of the fruit as fruit.

Except this year. This year, for what must be the first time ever, we have a bumper crop of apples and pears -- fruit which looks as though it's staying on the trees to ripen, which is not being pecked or nibbled or attacked, which is starting to give me the lunch I take to work every day. Here's some photographs:




Our tomatoes are also doing rather well -- there's a lot of green fruit at the moment, because the weather's been rather cool and damp, but those in the greenhouse are starting to turn and soon those outside will follow. Ace!

Another Visit

This afternoon we went to Fulham Palace in west London, but saw rather less than we expected because parts of it (the Tudor Great Hall, the Gallery, the Chapel) had been taken over for a private function (a wedding, by the look of it) and therefore weren't open to the public. (Hire of venues such as this for private functions is one of the many things that small museums in local authority ownership have to do these days in order to support themselves. As the chair of the Friends group for our own local authority-owned museum, I understand this completely.) As the museum's helpful volunteer staff pointed out, the fact of the closure was posted on their website; we should have checked beforehand (and therefore only have ourselves to blame. Poot).

Oh well. It's only in west London, after all, so we can always go back in the autumn. In the meantime, here are some photographs of, in order, the Tudor west court (seen through the gate -- we were allowed to at least look at it); the Tudor chapel with its diagonals of darker brickwork (fired clay bricks were then a new and expensive building material, and those who could afford them wished to show them off); the 1814-1818 extension (creating another court to the east of the Tudor original) with its "gothick" windows allegedly inspired by Horace Walpole's gothick "castle" at Strawberry Hill; the restored interior of Bishop Sherlock's room in the 1814-1818 extension (much of the decorative plasterwork had to be recreated from scratch because decades of municipal use had damaged the original work beyond repair); and The Wugster seated in a chair carved from (and attached to the stump of) a huge elm tree in the grounds of the palace which was felled in the Great Storm of 1987. Zena will undoubtedly recognise the jacket as one she donated way back when.

Back at the Allotment Again

It was the first sunny day after a fortnight of overcast and rain, so we spent several hours at the allotment this afternoon. Afternoon and early evening, in fact -- we returned home only half-an-hour ago. (It's potatoes, salad leaves and the last of the broad beans for dinner tonight.) On our next visit -- hopefully next weekend, if the changed weather holds -- I shall have to do some serious grass-cutting and grass-strimming. In the meantime, here's a photograph of a frog on the edge of the pond. We don't often see frogs at the allotment pond because, unlike the frogs in the garden pond, they're not as habituated to our presence, so tend to hide in the pond vegetation when we're there. However, this one held still for long enough for me to take its picture before thrusting itself into the woodpile and out of sight.

Something for Daniel's History Exam

Probably a few months too late for Daniel's history exam, in fact, but if the Battle of Agincourt comes round again he might like to have a look at some recent research by Leeds University which suggests that the armour worn by the French knights was so heavy that by the time they closed with the English lines they would have been too exhausted to actually fight:

...people wearing armour expended up to 2.3 times as much energy while walking and 1.9 times as much energy while running compared with wearing no armour ... The doubling effect was greater than could be accounted for by the extra weight of the armour alone. The researchers worked out that if the knights had carried the total weight of the armour in a backpack, they would have experienced just 1.7 times their unloaded energy expenditure.

"Carrying a load of about 30kg spread around the body requires more energy than carrying the same load in a backpack ... because, in a suit of armour, the limbs are loaded with weight which means it takes more effort to swing them with each stride" ... In addition, the armour constricts breathing. "Being wrapped up in a tight shell of thick steel makes one feel invincible, but also unable to take a deep breath," said Federico Formenti of the University of Auckland, who was a co-author of the research. "You feel breathless as soon as you move around in medieval armour."

The news report (with video of a volunteer running on a treadmill in armour to measure his respiration rate) is here, with a link to the abstract of the scientific report here.

Back on the Tourist Trail

Following an enforced hiatus, our "leisure visit programme" (i.e., what we do when we're not gardening or working) resumed last weekend with a trip up to Oxford to visit the exhibition of Macedonian artefacts from the royal tombs at Aegae which is currently at the Ashmolean Museum, followed by a visit to the nearby Pitt Rivers Museum to marvel at its eclectic jumble of ethnographic materials, all still arranged in their nineteenth century cases (and thus in many ways a museum of itself). Today, we went across to Harrow in northeast London to visit the recently restored (and thus re-opened to the public) Headstone Manor House, the only surviving moated medieval house in the London area and the centrepiece of Harrow Museum's collections. Not that there's much to the collections beyond the buildings themselves -- the manor house, the two post-medieval barns, and the granary, but since it was the old buildings we were going to see that didn't matter too much.

Here are some photographs of the Headstone Manor estate (the remnants of what was once a large working farm) -- the Small Barn, the Tithe Barn (so-called -- it never was one during its working life, but the moniker seems to get attached to any barn of this size), the Granary, and two views of (respectively) the front and back of the manor house. Note that, in the second of the manor house views, the oldest part of the structure is the yellow lime-washed tower to the left; the half-timbered part to the right is actually later, added in the eighteenth century (and the small lean-to arrangement at the extreme right is later still: a Victorian laundry, added in the nineteenth century). The front view shows the Georgian brick facade added in the eighteenth century to smarten it up by concealing the timber-frame and lime-washed wattle-and-daub of which much of the house is actually made.

For further information about these buildings (and the two Oxford museums), follow the links embedded in the introductory paragraph.

The Final Flight (Photographic Evidence)

Two photographs by my brother Ian, showing the Sea King helicopter approaching The Cobb from the Charmouth direction and (on its second pass) emptying the urn containing Vati's ashes into the sea off Monmouth Beach. As the Boscombe Down people said, "This was a real pleasure, especially to mark the passing of someone so influential in our Air T[esting]&E[valuation] heritage".

I have some video of my own, which I hope to upload once I've edited it to remove the rough patches and similar. For now, enjoy the photographs.

The Final Flight

Vati's ashes were scattered in the sea adjacent to The Cobb in Lyme Regis yesterday afternoon, from a military Sea King helicopter on a "routine training flight" from Boscombe Down. It was in accord with his wishes, and the family gathered on the end of The Cobb to witness it, on a warm sunny day with a gentle onshore breeze.

We weren't the only people there, of course, but we were certainly the only people who knew to expect it. And at "1400 local" there it was, appearing through the Charmouth gap and skimming across the sea directly towards us. The crew had a flight plan, but of course had to wait for us to identify ourselves; we waved vigorously, and as the helicopter clattered overhead we made eye contact with the pilot, who nodded his acknowledgement of us.

The helicopter slowed, and made a wide circle to port off Monmouth Beach, to the west of The Cobb. As it circled back towards us, its speed slowing and its nose pitching up in forward hover mode, we could see that the starboard door had been slid back and that the winchman was in position, with the urn collected from my mother that morning. The helicopter came back abreast of us; and as we watched a couple of plumes of diffuse grey matter went streaming back from the doorway. Vati's remains, drifting down into the water.

The helicopter made another wide circle to port, coming back to present its starboard side to us again. We waved again at the crew; the crew waved back. Then the Sea King's door was closed, its nose lifted, its speed increased, and it set off back inland over the Undercliff to the west of The Cobb.

The other people on The Cobb who'd witnessed the event were looking at us with some curiosity. But although it was a public act, it had an entirely private meaning, and we felt under no obligation to explain anything to them. Instead, we walked back to The Royal Standard Inn, on the seafront, and had a few beers in Vati's memory.