Steaming Away (The Motionless Picture)

Addendum to the previous post: I tried posting a video clip of the beam engine in operation, but after an hour the upload was still churning away, with no end in sight. It has therefore been abandoned. Instead, have this picture of the engineer's desk, with its giant spanners.

Steaming Away

Today it rained a lot; but we didn't mind, because we had planned to visit the Markfield Beam Engine in Markfield Park, a Grade II listed (i.e. historically protected) steam pumping engine from the great days of Victorian sewage engineering. (The website has, under the "History of the Site" tab, a detailed exposition of not just the engine's history but also the history of the struggle to bring adequate sanitation to late nineteenth and early twentieth century London. Who'd have thought that poo -- the stuff that comes out of botties -- could have such heritage value, eh?) The engine is not now connected to the sewage system, having been decommissioned in 1964, but was recently restored to working order with money from the Heritage Lottery Fund (which also built the cafe alongside and installed modern toilets) and now steams a couple of times a month -- the beam rocking back and forth, the pressure cylinders being pumped up and down, the flywheel spinning. It all looks suitably majestic, and here are some photographs to prove it -- a general view of the beam engine house, with (in the foreground) the gardens where the sewage filter beds used to be; a view of one end of the beam support structure, with the flywheel to the right; the flywheel itself, with added Judith for scale; the pressure cylinders in operation; and a view of the other end of the beam support structure, showing the stairs to the upper deck and (descending) one end of the beam itself. (The beam can be seen from above on the website, under "The Engine" tab -- a view denied to ordinary visitors.)

In a separate post, I shall upload some video I took of the engine in operation.

Another Victory

Today has been cool, overcast and occasionally drizzly; but that has not deterred me from attempting and almost completing the relaying of the back garden path. It was visible in Friday's photographs of the arch before and after restaining; what was not visible was its decayed and untidy state, where what had once been clean gravel had been pressed down into the soil and soil brought up to the surface in patches (very often by feral pigeons pecking in the gravel for seed dropped from the bird feedery by the sparrows and other birds). I had been putting off attending to it because of the volume of gravel which would have had to be sieved (and the length of time this would have taken); in the event, however, I made the decision to just rake off the top layer, leave the rest embedded in the soil, and lay down the new path over the top. This did require some digging out, in order to remove what had built up over time and lower the level back to the original; stony soil was accordingly redistributed to selected parts of the growing beds. I then laid a weedproof membrane to ensure there would be no future mixing of gravel and soil, washed and replaced the brick stepping stones, and applied the reclaimed gravel to the membrane. Except that the quantity of gravel reclaimed, plus another bag of gravel already in stock, wasn't nearly enough to completely cover the membrane; we shall need to acquire at least two more from B & Q at Tottenham Hale. (And a third bag to apply to the slope on the front face of the pond. Is there no end to the gravel requirements of 15 Jansons Road?)

Below are some photographs of the path relaying in progress -- the two-trug system used to reclaim the gravel (shovel it into one, add water and stir vigorously to separate it from the soil and weed plants, then sieve the washed gravel into the second), with Wugster feetyoids visible for scale; a view of the path being dug up; the membrane as laid; the replaced brick stepping stones; and the regravelling in progress (reclaimed gravel at the garden end, new gravel at the house end). Lashing rain is promised for tommorow, so the regravelling may not be completed until next weekend.

Achieving Great Victories

It's clouded over now -- and in fact clouded over a couple of hours ago -- but in the hours of sunshine available I completed two of the garden jobs I'd diarised for this holiday weekend: applying a new coat of wood stain to the arch which holds the bird feedery; and giving the grass its first cut of the year. Below are two photographs of the arch, before and after its re-painting; if it looks as though the uprights aren't vertical, and that the whole thing has a twist to it, that's not an optical illusion -- it really is crappily constructed, by yours truly.





While the sun shone, the Wugster also got some gardening done, mostly in the front while I was busy in the back -- so no photographs of what she was about, except for this one, of her doing some potting up for tomorrow's plant sale on behalf of the Wards Corner Community Coalition. As the Wugster, she is of course thoroughly rugged up against the cold, while I was happily legging about in a pair of shorts and nothing else. (Well, it meant that I didn't get any splashes of wood stain on my clothes, what what?)



Tomorrow, if it doesn't rain, I shall attempt another of the diarised tasks: relaying the brick and gravel path. A whole day's work, to be sure....

Easter Approaches

I was looking forward to Easter, and last weekend even drew up a list of things to be done in the garden and on the allotment -- give the grass its first cut of the year, remove the bubble plastic from the greenhouse, rehang the insect home on the fence, apply a new coat of wood stain to the arch which holds the bird feedery, repair bed edging and lay down some new carpetting, install guttering and a downpipe on the allotment shed....but the weather forecast looks grim, and it seems that little if any of that will now be possible (chiz chiz, as N Molesworth would sa). Not that there aren't things I can get on with indoors (sorting the photographs of Paris I took a couple of weekends ago into the existing Paris photograph album -- restoring some slipped fragments in the stained glass of the front foor -- various computery things -- reading some books), but postponing any garden work at this time of the year, when one is essentially setting things up for the summer and autumn, simply creates a traffic jam of Things To Do later on in the month, which is most non-robust (chiz chiz agane).

Still, the Markfield Beam Engine will be steaming on the Monday, and we are planning to go to that whatever happens. I don't have any existing photographs of the engine and its house, so will probably take a few and post them here -- a positive outcome!

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.