Modern Times

Last time I needed a knee X-ray, the doctor gave me a form and told me just to turn up at Disgustedville hospital, where I was seen at once at a time of my choosing.  This time I have an appointment a month tomorrow.  Some ultrasounding I need has been referred to a limited company in Oswestry that doesn’t answer its phone.  Well, I finally have an appointment month after next at an insalubrious address 45 minutes’ drive away.  One could be forgiven for thinking that this is all part of the plot to send those who can afford it to the private sector, and to mete out an appalling service to those who can’t.  Mr Attlee, Mr Bevan: you should be living at this time.

The good news on the health front is that after some years of six-monthly and later annual sight and eye examinations, the backs of my eyes seem healthy, intra-ocular pressure is ‘fine’, and I’m going back to normal Joe-Public two-yearly examinations.  I’m getting less short-sighted - one of the few benefits of ageing - though of course worsening presbyopia is the other side of the coin.  Given that I only wear my varifocals for driving these days (and my half-moons when I clip my finger nails!) I shall not be breaking the bank on new specs yet awhile, and recognise that I have much to be grateful for.

We were expecting the gas man on Wednesday, and on Tuesday we had a call to say that he wasn’t coming, with the next available date over a month away.  Once again we took to social media, and when Br1ti5h G4s picked it up, we said ‘reinstate appointment or lose contract’.  Well, he turned up on Wednesday.  Not clear whether he fixed the intermittent fault, and his ‘if you still have problems, just give us a call’ remark provoked hollow laughter.  So far, so good.

We took a drive out yesterday to look for some marginal plants to stick in at the side of the pond, and found some at our second port of call.  Our journey took about double the normal distance thanks to all the roadworks, but we have our irises, and stakes for the tomatoes.  Lynn’s surplus hanging basket pots, in which she brought the acanthus last week, are now planted up with bush and trailing fuchsias and parked in the sitooterie to grow on.  The next sowing of beans has germinated well, and I’ve rigged up the last of the willow poles against the side fence ready for them once they’ve hardened off.  Martyn has done a fine job of tidying up the edge of the pond and the encroaching grass, and planted the irises.  We seem to have grass where we don’t want it, and bare patches where we do.  (Kindly resist analogies with my hair.)  The worst of the bare patches are now roughed up, filled and seeded, so maybe we’ll have something approaching a lawn by autumn.  Recent heavy rain and now warmer temperatures have helped, but of course that also means more mowing.  I think we can coax the mower through this season...

Air traffic seems to be building up a little: the only good thing about lockdown was the relative freedom from aircraft noise.  It’s nothing like back to normal, fortunately, but it means that I do tend to notice what is coming over, with help of Flightradar24.  There was a mighty racket a couple of days ago, created by two USAF fighters and a tanker.  The Airbus A400s from Brize Norton, also rowdy brutes, are much in evidence: we can hear them at cruise altitude from 20 miles away.  We hear a lot of small charter and business turboprops, such as the Pilatus PC-12 and the venerable King Air, so outfits like Jetfly are obviously making money out of people who would normally fly business class.  And with the highest possible pollution per seat mile.

And yet another.

The other day, neighbour Lynn brought us a couple of dollops of her acanthus, which will add some architecture to the top bed: she went away with a dozen or so tagetes.  As I so often say, one of the joys of gardening is the sharing of seedlings, cuttings and divisions.  The remaining tagetes are planted out in a rather weed-infested bed next to the cold frame.  It won’t be long before the honeysuckle, ivy and cotoneaster reassert themselves, I suppose, but we might get a splash of colour as well.  Talking of weeds, yesterday I took two garden buckets of weeds (mostly hairy bittercress) out of the bed under the surviving leylandii, and am wondering what to cover the ground with.  Lungwort, maybe.  Or that thug of a woodland geranium. 

The pots previously occupied by the tagetes are already re-used: a consignment of fuchsias arrived from Parkers this morning: they are now potted up and in the top of the greenhouse to harden off and grow on.

In the herbs department, the new raised bed is now full: I’ve added a row each of sage and tarragon.  That left a whole lot more seedlings to pot up, so I fancy we may have a plant sale later this year.  I've found homes for about four dozen rudbeckias, including the ones I hadn’t got round to potting up, but there are dozens more to plant out!  We still have a lot still in the ground from previous years, undeterred by April’s cold snap.

Grateful that the gales of the last couple of days have subsided.  Although I heard a clap of thunder this morning, we haven’t had thundery rain or hail showers today (as I write, having thus tempted fate, I see a very dark sky moving in from the west...).  I won’t need to water today’s plantings out.  The seasons really are all to cock this year, aren’t they?

The builder was back the other day with a fellow to measure up for the window of the future downstairs study.  The fact that he’s coming back on Monday with another window man suggests that he didn’t like the estimate.  Mr Disgustedville Buildings Regs has served Martyn with a list of stages that he’ll want to inspect.  That might start to justify his exorbitant fee.  Incidentally, a neighbour stopped a couple of weeks ago to ask Martyn about the planning consent notice that the council had posted in our front garden.  She and her husband had a garage conversion done under the assumption that such work didn’t need planning permission.  We see no evidence of a planning application by our nearby screaming banshee, who has also had a garage converted.  It is, of course, an aberration that Disgustedville Council requires consent for such work, which elsewhere comes under the Permitted Development rules, but we wonder how many other neighbours are expecting contravention notices!  I’ll be glad when the job’s done and dusted.  Currently estimated for the end of July.  Watch this space.  

Another boring gardening blog post

This time in years past, as Facebook smugly reminds me most days, I was posting photos of the garden in flower: yesterday’s reminder was of last year’s first rose.  And a few weeks earlier in past years, it was photos of the viburnum, which this year has only just come into flower.  After a cold, dry April, mid-May has brought day after day of torrential showers - even thundery hailstorms - which we can normally expect to have come and gone by the end of April.  Consequently, gardening is limited to what can be achieved between downpours, though these relieve one of watering duties for the most part.  The big garden success story, of course, is that of the weeds.  Still, the grass seed alongside the new path is germinating well at last, and I’m hoping for similar results in newly seeded bald patches. 

I have now planted dozens of leeks, so confidently expect to be heartily sick of them in due course.  Dill, rocket and spinach beet are coming along, and following some stern advice, the climbing beans are climbing.  The potatoes are coming through pretty well, so they’ve had their first earthing up.  We even appear to have some carrot seedlings, but are not abandoning the Sainsbury order just yet awhile.  Next job is to improve a pretty poor bed for bedding plants and maybe some fence-covering subjects. 

Age is taking its toll, not only on the joints, but also on the memory.  I was puzzled about how few runner bean plants we appeared to have, and more so when I went out to plant out rudbeckias.  After catching myself saying out loud ‘where the #@%¥ are the #@%¥ing rudbeckias?’, I was coming to the probably correct conclusion that I’m losing my marbles.  I eventually spotted them in the summerhouse, together with the missing runner bean seedlings.  I can’t remember when (or indeed why) I put them there, but fortunately most are alive and well and responding to a good soaking or three.  Before I found them, however, we’d gone out and bought more runner bean seeds and sown them.  The abandoned beans are now rescued and planted, as are a dozen or so rooted penstemon cuttings from last year, and another batch of tagetes.  And after I’d planted out a dozen or so of the last-mentioned from the greenhouse, I was puzzling why there were so few.  Yes: I’d already got a couple dozen out to harden off, and they were (and remain) standing on the soil in their pots maybe half a yard from where I’d planted the rest.  We’ve identified a site for the next batch of runner beans, so I’ve an idea the autumn blog will be full of even more boring stories of cropping, blanching and freezing.

Next job is to get the tomatoes out in growing bags on the terrace.  We’ve grown them in big pots in years past, with generally good results.  On Annie’s advice, we’ve bought some tomato rings, which should make watering much easier.

Despite (or perhaps because of) all the gardening, my knees are behaving slightly better than of late.  I’m not planning any major hikes, but feel modestly optimistic.  But I’m not going to compound the boring blog felony with tales of hospital visits!

The gas man cometh

The boiler has taken to refusing to spark up, and to showing a flashing light from time to time.  The manual says this could mean overheating or a blocked flue.  When I tried by phone to get Br1t15h G@s to attend (we have a £200+ maintenance contract with them) the best their automatic dame could offer was over five weeks away.  I gave up in frustration at that point, thinking it can’t be too long till the annual maintenance visit.  On checking, I found that it’s not actually due for another four months.  

Coincidentally, my old friend Dave Mann posted a Facebook grizzle about said utility this morning, and got a lightning response from them: they plainly have people monitoring social media for mentions of the company name, hence my scrambling of the company’s name above.  I replied to Dave, saying that we were having a similar experience, and also got a similarly rapid response from them.

Said utility’s telephone and web site services are so awful that I practically blew a gasket this morning.  Moral: embarrass the big beasts on social media and you get some action.  We got an appointment for the non-existent Wednesday 25 May, which I guess is progress of a sort.  (Now corrected.)

Martyn too is in gasket-blowing mode.  Having paid a couple of weeks’ state pension for (the statutorily unnecessary) planning consent for the garage conversion, we’re now being stung for close on twice that for Buildings Regulations inspection.  As for refuse collection, the ‘service’ is most charitably described as unreliable.  One begins to wonder wtf we’re getting for our ever-inflating Council Tax.

Add the fact that it takes over three weeks to get a telephone appointment with the doctor and you begin to entertain thoughts like ‘the country’s going to the dogs’. But, hey, we’re both outside two doses of vaccine, the garden is starting to be rewarding again and the sun shines from time to time.  And Lidl is doing quite a nice Costières de Nîmes Rosé at a decent price.

Back to the garden

The frustrations of dealing with the building trade make one glad to have a garden to play with, and grateful for weather good enough to garden in.  And, my word, now that the old knees are so troublesome, what a pleasure it is to plant stuff in raised beds!  A couple of dozen leeks went in yesterday, and similar numbers of tagetes today.  In a day or two I’ll plant out the sage and tarragon that have been hardening off in the greenhouse, and that will largely fill the raised veggie bed for this year.  In a day or two the rudbeckias ought to have hardened off enough to plant out.  The heavy rain we expect tomorrow will either wash everything out or help to bed it in.  A further attempt at sowing grass seed beside the new path is certainly pleasing the wood pigeons.  We’ll need to do a bit more work on the grass, which has a lot of dips and bare patches.

I’m not sure what to make of yesterday’s election results.  It seems to me that the success of the vaccine rollout owes a lot more to the wisdom of the CMO and to the resourcefulness of the NHS than to anything owed to Westminster, yet the lying, adulterous, questionably financed blond buffoon, malgré tout, seems to be reaping the dividends.  The Rt Hon Leader of HM Opposition, despite optimism on his appointment, is not covering himself in glory: he appeals more to the intellectual fringe than to the trade unions or to the electorate at large.  Well, I won’t have to vote in many more elections, not that my vote maks muckle odds.  Paciência.

MyBuilder.com. UPDATE

Well, so much for that idea. The fellow (name on application) we’d selected for our garage conversion has just told us he has taken another job for the date we’d agreed on, and has not offered an alternative.  Another bidder told us we didn’t need planning consent, which turned out to be wrong,  The third, who needed to be told to put a mask on (and didn’t do it properly) didn’t bother to send us a quote.  We’ll reflect on whether we actually need the work done in the short term, and take a decision once we’ve calmed down.  Snarl.  The planning consent should come through in a few days’ time, and will be good for three years.  

Friday 7th.  Yesterday morning we had a builder, but no planning consent.  This morning we had a planning consent, and a builder who couldn’t offer a date this year!  So we hop back on the merry go round again tomorrow.