First day of partial lockdown

It was good to see a well-spaced group of walkers out the front this morning: I’m sure the Amblers enjoyed today’s spring weather.  We meanwhile have not been so enterprising: a couple of loads of washing out, dry and in, thanks to solar and wind energy, and neither of them bought from the French state-owned utility that fleeces us for gas and electricity (apart from running the washing machine, of course: you can’t fight the monopolies).

We have gardened.  We returned from our local nursery this morning with a few more plants, some bean poles and what felt like half a ton of grit for the extended rockery.  Bought plants are in and watered, as are a number of transplanted subjects, and a few that we have raised from cuttings.  More tomorrow: a few drifts of penstemon, I think, and a spot of architectural box.

Two days hence, I shall have been retired (from salaried employment) for twenty years.  My ambition, as was my grandfather’s, is to get more in pension than I did in salary, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d achieved my target already. I’m just too lazy to do the calculations.  This does not take inflation into account, of course.  But I’m achingly conscious of how well off my generation is with its final salary pensions. 

The car was unenthusiastic about starting this morning, as it has the last few times I’ve fired it up.  It helpfully told me that the battery charge was very low, and advised me (duh!) to drive it to recharge it.  Well, the trip out was complicated by idling at a couple of lots of roadworks within half a mile of home, a detour to let the police get on with dealing with a crash, and still more roadworks on the way home (by a different route).  Par conséquent, the battery was in better shape when we got home, and the coolant and sump oil had got up to decent temperatures.  With advancing years, I have become a rather more anxious driver, and driving today on our narrow country roads didn’t help.  Oh well: we realised when we got home that we had a lot more on the nursery shopping list than we actually bought, so maybe I’ll have another go tomorrow - once the next lot of washing’s out.

It’s spring!

It’s that welcome time of year that seems to take for ever to arrive.  There’s light in the sky well before 6.00am, and the garden is coming back to life at last.  In the front garden, the magnolia stellata and camellia are coming into flower (photographs can wait until there are a few more blooms), and at the back all sorts of things are delighting us.  The polyanthus are starting to give us a good display, and the beautiful hoop petticoat narcissi are in flower.  Tulips are budding in various containers, and there are good shoots on the roses.  We went plant buying on Monday, spending the Christmas present vouchers.

Today I’ve got into my wellies for the first time in years and planted up the  new bed at the top of the garden.  A pink camellia, two climbing roses, two clematiseseses, a fuji cherry and a perennial rudbeckia (it came to us last year labelled ‘aubergine’... ) are now all planted out.  We have rooted  cuttings of two varieties of cistus and a hebe to add to the border when I can summon the energy.  But even then there’s still going to be a lot of bare earth.  Might split the primroses when they go over, and slap in a few bits of lungwort.  There’s also some woodland geranium that can split to add ground cover.

Meanwhile, in the sitooterie, seeds are germinating like mad.  The latest to germinate are tagetes, rosemary and tarragon.  The fuchsia cuttings seem OK for the moment, but I’m not counting my fuchsias before they’re rooted.  Thinking we might put some of them with trailing geraniums in the basket at the front door this year, to make a change from the ivy and lobelia we’ve had of late.

My esteemed ex-employer is making its presence felt.  We’ve had the usual two vans outside twice in the past week.  No idea what they’re doing, but as usual it’s one man working and two watching for much of the time.  It’s the sub-contractors today, speaking a language I don’t recognise.  We have finally weakened and bought the adaptors that will allow us to use the BT TV box.  And of course we’re having to pay an extra £12 a month to get any useful content.  Still, it seems to be working, despite - or, let’s be generous, perhaps because of - the fiddling around down the holes in the street.

Kitchen, garden and stuff

The soup ingredients have been nagging me for a week or so from the bottom drawer of the fridge, so I finally had at it this morning.  Squash and bacon soup served with grated Gruyères.  The recipe we use also calls for onions, garlic, spuds, cumin and coriander, and we had lots of stock from last weeks chicken.  Last time I made it, I annotated the recipe book with ‘a bit labour-intensive’, and have not changed my mind.  Chopping the veg with a big knife helps reduce the wear and tear on the creaky hands, however.  Anyway, it tasted OK, and we have three more lunches’ worth ready to go in the freezer.  This afternoon, I did a beef casserole, and some sauce remains to add to the next one.  Is it any wonder that our shadows do not diminish?  

Martyn has been working on his next model railway layout, though it may not be complete until the garage conversion has been done, freeing up his study for ferromodélisme. The planning application is in, and we await the supplementary questions.  I’ve been doing some clearing out of my study: a lot of files that are no longer active are now up in the attic in labelled boxes, and the stamp albums from UPU congresses will soon follow.  I can’t quite bring myself to throw them out.  Countless framed prints and canvases have also moved up aloft (a few will come back down to decorate the new study).  We think the sofa bed will also go down to the new study, creating space for a proper third bedroom: we assume that we may one day be able to offer modest hospitality.

Downstairs in the sitooterie I’ve sowed various tomato and rosemary seeds, and am watching the leeks as they germinate.  Outside in the garden, Ben put down some decent topsoil next to the new path, so I’ve sown and trodden in most of the grass seed we had in stock.  It’s just about early enough in the year for a second sowing if the old stock proves not to be viable.

Nothing spectacular by way of creativity, but one’s Weltanschauung is slightly more positive than of late.

Another one bites the dust

We learn today, neither to our surprise nor with great disappointment, that our July cruise to the fjords has been pulled.  We aren’t far enough through the pandemic to feel comfortable about being confined with best part of three thousand other people.  In less dramatic times we have returned from cruises with infections of one sort and another, so we’re quite relieved by the news.  How soon we can get our two cruises’ worth of money back is another story, of course, but when we do it’ll come in handy to contribute to home projects.  The garden job is paid for and largely complete, the application is in for the garage conversion and a builder is commissioned.  Another builder whom we interviewed and liked also does bathrooms, and our rather shabby bathroom wants sorting once we’re ready to have tradesmen in the house again.

So it looks like we shall be here in July to look after the crops.  The leeks have germinated well, and we’ll be sowing other stuff outside once the next cold snap is past.  It’ll be a week or three before we see any rosemary seedlings, but they are sown in the hot bot propagator next to the rudbeckias, the enthusiasm of which we hope is infectious.  Not sure what other flowering subjects we’ll sow this year.  I might throw some antirrhinum seed around, but shall not waste my time on nurturing seedlings, since the last couple of years’ sowings have languished.  A pot of Display fuchsias, meanwhile, is shedding leaves like mad on the sitooterie floor, but is putting up lots of good shoots that I’ll cut and pot up.

I have yet to master the art of setting up a Zoom meeting, though I’ve taken part in quite a few now.  The local U3A is making extensive use of it: our twice monthly German conversation group is using it (with varying degrees of success), and there’s now a monthly ‘coffee morning’.  Today there’s a virtual craft show: one of the U3A movers and shakers suggested that people send in pictures of their craft activities during lockdown.  I’ve sent in a few pictures of my Brusho abstract greeting cards, which have been quite fun to do.  I gather that the organiser has received pictures of a wide variety of crafts, so it ought to be a fun show.

In spring, an old man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of....

.... gardening.  The leeks have started to germinate, as have seed harvested from last year’s rudbeckias.  The potatoes are slowly chitting in an egg tray in the garage, and we’re enjoying an increasing display of spring flowers.  Martyn has moved some rocks around to fill space created by landscapers Ben and Duncan, so we shall be looking to improve the soil a bit and transplant some alpines.  My next job is to chop down the cornus.  They have provided welcome winter colour, but now that they’re shooting vigorously it’s time to hack them down.  I’ve already given the hydrangea its annual haircut, and shall get the penstemon chopped down next month.  Once the soil is warmer, we can start to think about planting up all the new garden we’ve gained.  I moved some roses up to the raised bed the other day, but am not optimistic.  The soil is awful.

The moving of the rocks proved to be the last straw for our old wheelbarrow.  It has had an interesting career: the original mild steel pan rusted out after a few years, and I replaced it with a plastic one.  In that, we transported a ton of rockery rocks from the front apron to the back garden, and then again up to the rockery.  It has also schlepped countless heavy bags of compost, grit and muck from the car boot to the back garden, so it has served us well.  We found pan N°3 on line, and I have fitted it to the frame today.  The frame is looking rather tired now too, so I’ll maybe take a wire brush to the rust and see if we can get another few years out of it.  The pan comes with replacement bolts, but you have to drill the holes to meet the holes on the frame - six of them.  It took me until hole six to realise that the drill was still set on ‘unscrew’ for the marathon model railway dismantling up aloft.  I wondered why it was making such heavy weather of the job!  Well, all’s well that ends well, to quote another poet, so we have a serviceable brouette once again.

.... and to planning bureaucracy.  I’d mentioned that we were aiming to cut the fleet to one vehicle and convert the smaller garage into a study/bedroom.  Although the latest planning regulations appear to allow such conversions under the Permitted Development rules, the toon cooncil is insisting that we submit a planning application, having already taken a fee for the preliminary opinion, which it delivered after double the stated period for a reply.  Martyn has spent days assembling the dossier, and we spent a while this afternoon filling in the form, which asks the same questions whether you’re replacing a garage door with a window or building a bloody great housing estate.  Some hundreds of pounds later, we have filed the application, and await the supplementary questions.  Deep Sigh.

Sad news

I learned yesterday that my old friend Claire Smith has died, just over a month before her 99th birthday. She had been in poor health for some time.  An intensely social person, reduced mobility and the lockdown were terrible for her to endure.

She was a tough one though: widowed quite young, she coped with that, a house fire, two knee replacements and heart by-pass surgery.  She was driving well into her 90s, no doubt to the terror of her fellow Floridians.  She worked for some decades for the US Postal Service, part of her duties being translation from French to English.  This made her a good choice as a temporary translator at the five-yearly Universal Postal Union congresses, and it was at the Lausanne congress in 1974 that I first met her. We met again at the Rio de Janeiro Congress in 1979.  

Between then and my last visit to the USA in 2001 we visited each other at intervals, and I helped her with her move from Maryland to Florida in the late 1990s.  An enthusiastic traveller, she visited me at my little house in Tonbridge, my holiday home in the Corbières and at my expat postings to Paris, Brussels and Zürich.  It was in Zürich that I collected my only speeding ticket to date.  I had run out of vermouth for her favourite tipple, a dryish martini, and it being a Sunday, the only shops open were those on Federal land, such as railway stations.  We went along to Oerlikon station (where, ironically, there wasn’t a drop of the stuff to be had), and on the way home to Dübi I went to overtake a very slow-moving car.  The car was quite new to me and rather more powerful than my previous one, and I managed to kick down two gears rather than one, which brought me into the welcoming beams of a radar camera at, if I remember right, 58 kph on a 50-restricted road.  All Claire's fault, of course.

March at last

OK: February is the shortest month, but it sometimes feels like the longest.  This year it has brought prolonged rain, snow and the usual few fine, mild days.  We’ve had a few of the latter just lately, so the grass has had its first cut, and yesterday the washing dried on the line for the first time this year.  The mower (which, alas, is now rusting away) started on the second tug of the cord (and for once I had first checked the oil level). 

We are in the process of auditioning builders.  Since we no longer need two cars, the smaller garage is going to be converted into a shared study/bedroom, as so many of our neighbours have done.  In fact, when we bought the house, it had permission for the conversion.  Long since timed out, of course, and we’re fairly certain that the planning rules have changed  meanwhile, requiring no planning consent for jobs of this kind.  Third audition tomorrow afternoon.  Putting cars in garages seems to have become pretty unfashionable hereabouts - and in any case, cars have grown in girth since 1980, when the house was built - so we think the project will add to our estates by adding a useable room rather than a dumping space.  I should add that the toon cooncil is not covering itself in glory.  We were charged £75 for an initial assessment of our plans, and await a reply twice later than their target.  We may be looking for a refund.

Martyn’s study will become his railway room, and mine may become a proper third bedroom/snoring refuge.  We find that we rarely use desktop computers these days, so need less infrastructure for such hardware.  Isn’t it frightening how quickly computing kit becomes as relevant as Auntie’s good gramophone?