Nice surprise

 For the annual ramblings, go to the 6 December post

Our bank’s on-line cheque deposit facility being unavailable, I legged it down to the village yesterday afternoon to deposit the cheque for our modest winnings in the local Hospice lottery.  The dedicated Post Office is no more, so the One Stop staff have to multi-skill - and they’re taking a while to get the hang of it all.  It eventually took three staff to sort it out - I hope.  Hardly surprising.

What was a surprise, and a delightful one, was in the queue at the chemists.  Two people ahead of me had met before, and the man said to the woman, ‘the last time we met here you were singing the Marseillaise!’.  Whereupon she launched into the first line, so I picked it up and ran with it, the two of us rendering the full thing with gusto, much to the amusement of the queue and the pharmacy staff.

Preparations for the festive hostilities advance slowly.  Pigs in blankets are in the freezer, joined today by a batch of palmiers.  Since we shall have veggie and gluten intolerant guests, I’ve done a batch of Madhur Jaffray chick peas today: they freeze well.  Martyn is visiting family and friends in Medway today, so won’t have to endure the exotic cooking aromas!

Annual ramblings, 2024

Altogether a less dramatic year, though we’re constantly reminded by our bodies that we are no spring chickens: Martyn turned 70 this year, and I’ve progressed into my 75th.  I’ve passed my year one check-ups following last year’s treatment and surgery, so am feeling positive.  

On the basis that the rainy day we’ve been saving for has already been and gone, we’ve been spending a bit on the house and the mews.  We now have an array of solar panels on the roof, and enjoy watching how they perform, even on dull days.

It has been a pleasure to be able to travel again, even though we find it a bit strenuous these days.  The garden keeps us busy (or feeling guilty about not getting busy out there), and has given us modest crops of fruit and veg.

As for matters political, I keep wondering each year at this time how the coming year will turn out, and how looming disaster can be avoided.  At least we are rid of an - at best - incompetent, rudderless government, though the new lot aren’t exactly covering themselves in glory.  Our relatively decent Tory MP decided not to stand for re-election, and now both the MP and the Local Council are LibDem.  Our solidly bourgeois ward has two Labour and one TW Alliance councillors.  Who’d ha’ thunk it?

Garden

We grew some of our favourite charlotte potatoes this year, but in the raised bed rather than in bags.  No significant difference in crop yield, so we’ll do that again.  We’d been impressed by the alexandra variety of salad potatoes supplied by good old Fortnums (as we nickname Lidl), so I tried - and failed - to find seed potatoes thereof.  Nothing ventured, I chitted a bag of supermarket alexandras and planted them out.  We won’t try that again: the yield was poor, and after all, newly dug charlottes are delicious anyway.  The Bramley apple tree yielded well this year following a bit of judicious thinning, and we still have some puree in the freezer.  We even had a couple of handfuls of blueberries and strawberries.

The moth having devastated our box hedging again last year, we took dozens of cuttings from the rather overgrown rosemary bush, and brought them on over the winter in a raised bed.  We’ve planted them out where the box used to be, and so far they’ve mostly survived and grown quite a bit.  There are a few gaps, but we have more cuttings coming on.

In the flower garden, we’re relying less on annual bedding and planting perennials where we can.  We grew some rudbeckias from saved seed, but they were a bit uninspiring compared with previous years.  Fuchsias and lobelias bought as plug plants did well in the containers together with some of last year’s geraniums.

Recent storms have brought down a stretch of fencing (again) and led to an alarming list on the one we had put up mere months ago.  Oh well, it’s only money.  The usual contractors are coming to estimate before Christmas, but I guess we’ll be wide open well into the New Year.  The grass has had its last cut of the year - I hope.  A soggy business at this time of year, not helped by hundreds of worm casts and lots of twigs blown down from the willow trees.

  

Arrivals

We had an enjoyable visit from Annie at New Year, but otherwise have offered little hospitality other than a few lunches.  In September we held a Macmillan Coffee Morning for around 30 neighbours and friends, and raised over three times as much as we did last time, five years ago.  That coincided with a visit from Martyn and Sandra’s cousin Susan who was visiting from the USA.  We’ve also had a pleasant gathering with Chez and Lorraine, whom we met on a cruise some years ago, and who were visiting relatives in town.  

Departures

A bit more to report this year.  We attempted a few years ago to take a cruise to Norway, something I’ve long wanted to do, but it was cancelled owing to the pandemic.  Probably no bad thing: we’d booked for April, and it would have been pretty cold above the arctic circle.  This time we booked a shorter trip at midsummer, visiting Bergen, Flåm and Olden, and enjoyed it very much.  Fabulous scenery, exceptionally good weather - even in the notoriously wet Bergen.  Towards the end of the cruise we were due to visit Haugesund, but could not owing to strong winds.  We weren’t too disappointed, since it seems to make most of its living by selling stuff to tourists.  Instead we were treated to the most delightful cruise up the Handangerfjord, with views of waterfalls and a glacier.

The cruise was on Cunard’s new Queen Anne, which is a fair bit larger than the Elizabeth and the Victoria, and we found it a bit crowded.  One evening up on deck, Martyn spotted someone luxuriating in the hot tub whom he recognised: Luke, one of a couple who publish on YouTube as the Cruise Monkeys.  His other half Gavin was nearby, and we had a pleasant chat with them.  (They agreed with us that the main advantage of the QA over its little sisters was the glazed door to the shower.)

Our next jolly jaunt was to Switzerland, where we rented a flat not far from Pam’s for a week, and toured as usual on trams, buses, trains and ships.  We flew from London City to Zürich and back, and took Swiss travel passes which covered us from arrival to departure, and as usual we used them to the full.  

We saw both old friends and familiar places, and new ones.  I’d corresponded with another YouTuber, Matthias Hänni, so arranged to meet him one Sunday morning at Bern airport.  Nice chap: his YouTube persona is Matt’s Aviation Channel.  We had a sandwich together and watched various flights come and go, then he kindly drove us to Münsingen, where we picked up our next train of the day.  Intending to return from Brig by the base tunnel, I suggested we go round by Lausanne instead, so we had quite an orgy of scenery.

As you see, we tended to build our itineraries as we went along, which is much easier now you can look up timetables on the smartphone.  We rarely did the exact trips we’d planned, but the public transport is so extensive and reliable that it’s easy to build a mystery tour ad hoc.

On our last full day in Switzerland we went to visit the Kaeserberg model railway near Fribourg, not helped by the fact that I put us on the right bus, but in the wrong direction).   Martyn picked up some ideas from this rather impressive layout, and we’ll see soon how he’s using them up in the railway room.  Later, we had a guided tour of Fribourg with an old colleague, Josy Pitteloud, whom I hadn’t seen this century.  We couldn’t accept his dinner invitation since we’d arranged to take Pam out later, but we had a pleasant aperitif with him on the terrace of a café overlooking the old town and the valley of the Sarine before returning to Bern.

Food and drink

We have shifted our fish and chips allegiance to a shop the other side of town, where they do a rather better job than our Turkish friends in the village.  The distance is a disincentive to indulging too often!  We had a nice lunch on our wedding anniversary at Sankey’s.  Not cheap, but good quality and a nice pub environment.  I’ve been experimenting with things like home-made tapenade and houmous, and inspired by a lunch at the National Trust property at Standen, Coronation chick peas!  We make a lot of use of the air fryer: it’s just so easy, for example, to do spice-coated chicken thighs on or off the bone.  I haven’t succeeded with bread yet, and in any case, I seem to be losing my touch.  If I get the bread to rise enough, it tends to be full of holes, and otherwise finishes up as rather small loaves.  (We also get rather good sourdough bloomers at Fortnums’…).  

I’m gradually discovering what I can and can’t safely eat given my abbreviated plumbing.  Big salads are off the agenda - well, big anything, really.

Wheels

Since Martyn’s Altea was getting on for sixteen years old, and hence Green Flag wouldn’t provide roadside assistance any longer, we started researching electric cars.  On test driving a Fiat 600e, we were so impressed that we placed an order there and then.  It is not the roomiest of cars, but is quiet, very responsive and nippy around town.  Driving it for a month or so persuaded me that my Ateca felt a bit coarse and sluggish by comparison.  So both our diesels are off to new homes, and for my new car I’ve gone back to Renault after a gap of 27 years: a Scenic E-tech.  Roomy and refined, and quite brisk enough for an old geezer like me.  Charging can be frustrating: getting the charger to work in the first place took several visits from the fitters (one of whom put his foot through the garage ceiling).  I think I’ve got the hang of it now.

Arts

Another meagre year.  I was quite attracted by an exhibition of paintings by a former neighbour who has gone on to wealth and fame, but was disappointed by the work - and shocked by the prices.  On our cruise, Cunard routed us to the dining room via an art sales shop as usual.  Some nice stuff in there, but nothing within our budget.  In any case, we have an attic full of paintings and prints, and very little remaining wall space.  

I joined a u3a art group for a few sessions, but it didn’t suit me: I need lots of space, and it just wasn’t available where we met.  It was well suited to disciplined watercolour painters, and I’m neither of the above.  I’ve banged out a pot-boiler in acrylics for the Christmas card, but little else.  

2025

As I mentioned at the top, HMG has got off to a disappointingly clumsy start.  Clearly, it was handed a poisoned chalice, but it didn’t help that, for electoral reasons, it had ruled out particular varieties of tax increase.  At least the batshit crazy Rwanda scheme was promptly dropped and the grisly Bibby Stockholm cleared out, but there are few signs of an approach that goes to the many roots of the small boat immigration problem and the hopeless asylum application ‘system’.  Given the success of the vast majority of asylum applications, it is scandalous that so many cases are outstanding, and that we can’t get this vast pool of labour and talent into productive work and decent homes.  

As for the Land of the Free, it was hardly surprising that the Orange One was re-elected, given that Biden was dissuaded from standing at far too late a stage.  Well, there’s nothing we lesser mortals can do about it, so we’ll just have to wait and see.  We hope that 2025 will be as kind to you as the political surroundings will allow.

Martyn & David

Mr Smith vs The Post Office

The other day I summoned up the courage to watch the ITV dramatisation of the Post Office Horizon scandal.  In the eleven months since its first screening I haven’t heard any suggestion that the drama was significantly inaccurate - I guess ITV’s lawyers will have done their due diligence.  

On one level, it was a superb piece of writing and direction, brilliantly acted: I won’t single out individual actors because they were all brilliant.  It’s a damn’ shame that despite Private Eye’s efforts over the years, it took a TV drama to lift the lid of this egregious can of worms, however, and Post Office management and HMG have blood on their hands such as would the multitudinous seas incarnadine.  The quotation invites comparison of Lady Macbeth and Paula Vennells, and I’ll leave it to others to draw the exact parallels, of which I suspect there are many.  I’ll allow myself one, though: at the most charitable interpretation, Vennells sleepwalked her way to the ruin of hundreds of lives and, oh, by the way, her reputation and that of the Post Office.

I’m struggling to get the story out of my mind.  Perhaps I shouldn’t.  At the time of the action, I was no longer an employee of the Post Office, but I remember the institutional hubris that pervades the script.  A frequently articulated mantra was that ‘the Post Office is a good employer’.  Then as during the scandal, there seemed to be no sense among senior management that the Post Office could do any wrong, but rather that the public should be grateful for its mediocre service.  The portrayal of the investigators and auditors seemed pretty accurate to me.  Some might say that the ID (Investigation Department) were always a bunch of thugs, and I’ve heard it said that it had a spectacular library of confiscated pornography.

By way of therapy, I did a spot of gardening yesterday, doing a pre-winter trim of some of the roses, and planting up some of the tubs out on the steps.  The hanging baskets are down now, and I have a few geranium and fuchsia cuttings in the sitooterie.  The cuttings I took of the New Guinea busy lizzies are starting to root well in water on the kitchen window ledge, so I’ll get them potted up in a week or so.  Storm Bert brought down a couple of sections of the fence and gave another few a distinct list to port, so we have our old friends from the fencing company coming round in a fortnight’s time to estimate.  Forget Christmas presents.

Winter - updated

Though we haven’t yet had the heavy snow that is affecting much of the country, it’s perishing cold.  We’re neither of us starting the winter in the best of shape: Martyn has been fighting a chest infection for a while now, and is on a second course of antibiotics.  It’s probably they that are making him feel so rotten: after a poor night, he went back to bed after breakfast.  I just have a heavy cold, so am merely wallowing in self-pity, as is only right and proper for a bloke with a cold.

On the positive side, having yesterday had to do some shopping, I succeeded in ‘preconditioning’ the car, which was covered in frost first thing, so it was defrosted and warm when I went out.  The process, launched from my iPhone without the need to brave the cold outdoors, takes a quarter of an hour, and uses about ten miles’ worth of range.  Of course, none of the fumes and noise that the same job generates in a combustion car.  It’ll take me years to learn all the car’s tricks, so I’m glad I’ve discovered this one early.

Thinking of the seasons, I recall a German verse, from a souvenir plate, I think:

Nutz die Frühling deines Lebens; Leb’ den Sommer nichts vergebens; Denn gar bald stehst du im Herbste, Und wann der Winter kommt, dann stirbst du.

Loosely translated: enjoy spring, make the most of summer: it won’t be long till autumn, and when winter comes, you die.  It occurred to me, while I was cooking just now, that I spent an enjoyable evening once in Brussels with my old friend Kjell Johnsen, preparing a ratatouille together.  Well, on looking at Facebook, I see that Kjell is no longer with us. Sad: he was a kind, undemanding friend.

Carpe idem, innit?

What passes for excitement hereabouts

We had a pleasant Sunday lunch and afternoon with Sandra: Martyn had found a lamb casserole recipe which looked worth a try, so we got some local neck fillet from our usual butcher.  It’s nice in these days of plastic-wrapped everything to see the butcher return from the back shop with part of a carcass and carve out a neck fillet.  Lamb from Penshurst, less than five miles from here.  Three fillets came to just over a kilo.  Trimmed and browned, then veggies sweated, spices and home made passata added and a long slow cook - and we had a good meal for two left over after we’d served three decent portions.  Pudding used up a lot of this year’s apple crop, so two ingredients from the garden, which is always a comfort.  (I’ll pass rapidly over the fact that the blackberries in the crumble came from Guatemala.)  We had some houmous and tapenade for starters, and although we didn’t grow the chickpeas and olives ourselves, we can at least take the credit for their transformation.

As we sat and digested with a cup of tea, we could hear pneumatic drills going nearby.  Martyn had noticed some neighbours stopping outside Mary and Charles’s, then going and ringing the bell.  They had presumably spotted a water leak, so as it turned out the water company’s contractors beavered away for hours into the night, the water pressure dwindling away meanwhile.  I’d calls during the evening from two elderly neighbours seeking reassurance that it wasn’t just they whose water supply had dried up, so I was able to reassure them on that point, and advise them to fill their kettles from the tap in the cloakroom rather than the mains tap in the kitchen.  Before bedtime the water came on again, and it didn’t take long before it was running clear again.

This morning Charles and a friend were standing contemplating the huge hole outside N°4, so I accused the former of getting bored and deciding to drill for oil.  Remains to be seen what happens next: I guess they’ll have done a lash-up pending a definitive repair.

Modest amounts of gardening: we’ve taken down the hanging baskets, since they were starting to look tired.  They’re in the mini greenhouse pro tem while I summon the energy to replant them.  There’s still a bit of colour in the garden, though I have started to haul out the verbena bonariensis in the hope that it hasn’t seeded too much already.  The little beech is turning into that wonderful palette of colours that comes each autumn, and the cornus are showing the coloured stems that will bring much of our winter colours.  When I was planting one of the Midwinter Fire cornus last week, I could see plenty of bulbs coming back to life.  We just have to get through the dark months now.

First service

A year or so after surgery I’m now on a five-year surveillance programme.  I had a CT scan a few weeks ago, and a blood test to look for tumour markers.  Yesterday I had a colonoscopy, which was altogether less uncomfortable than previous essays in the medium: of course, I could lie on my back for this one, and the man with the long eye had less far to go.  None of the above revealed signs of recurrence, but I’m still on probation for another four years.  Cautious optimism in order.

We’ve hardly seen the sun this month: the anticyclonic gloom has set in good and proper: dreich, damp and chilly.  Still, there’s the odd bit of colour left in the garden, and Ben has (a) cleared out the bed under the garnet acer and red cornus, and (b) brought us a couple of midwinter fire cornus plants: we just need to find room for them.  I just hope the hellebores survive his radical treatment!  Pale pink penstemon cuttings rooted well, so we have passed on a few to Mary down the road: she admired the parent plant when we had our Macmillan coffee morning back in September.  [Proceeds now stand at £1422, by the way!] 

As for politics, we’re both pretty depressed.  It wouldn’t worry us too much if the mayhem could be confined to the Land of the Free, but if the orange one (a) hangs Ukraine out to dry and (b) emasculates NATO, the soi-disant successor to Peter the Great will be emboldened to chance his arm in the Baltic States, Poland, Moldova and goodness knows where else.  Once again, one is grateful to be ancient and childless.

Eighteen years on

Having had to dip out of Martyn’s birthday meal, we rebooked for today’s wedding anniversary at the same venue, which we know by reputation only.  Well, our first visit was a success.  Excellent food, friendly service and a pleasant environment with muzak that didn’t impinge on conversation.  Sankey’s Seafood Kitchen and Bar.  Two firsts for me: Korean crisp cauliflower starter, and John Dory main course.  Martyn had a classic prawn cocktail followed by halibut.  The John Dory was delicious, but a shade labour-intensive. I’ll have a better idea of how to tackle the bones next time.

Young Mr Sankey was visible in the restaurant, which is always a good sign.  I was tempted to collar him, since he’s a one of our three councillors, and I have a bone to pick with said body.  But since I hadn’t taxed Alex, the other local councillor who served me when I collected my happy pills from the pharmacy earlier, I thought it would be unfair to tackle him - in any case, today’s agenda is a happy one, so no need to sour the atmosphere.  

Eighteen years since the very wet day when we registered our civil partnership.  Since we’d been an item for over five years by then, we tend to remember 28 April 2001, the day we met.  But a good excuse for a celebratory meal nevertheless.