Birds, beasts and Disgustedville Tories

Earlier this morning, Martyn spotted a pied wagtail outside, feeding (presumably) on silver birch seed.  It was still around when we got home after shopping.  Quite a treat: they are such pretty and entertaining little birds.  The other sighting was a fallow deer in the forest: it sprung out in front of us - fortunately at a safe distance - and disappeared in the woods on the other side.  That’s our first sighting of wild deer for quite some time: the last was when one leapt out immediately in front of us, followed by about five more.  We quite often see farmed deer when we’re on the way to the garden centre.  I’d like to find a supplier of local venison, but Martyn is a bit squeamish about eating the likes of bambis and bunnies!

I wonder if we’re seeing winds of change among that other local fauna, the West of Disgustedville Tory voter.  A couple of elections back, one of our local councillors, who happened also to be the leader of the Tories on the council, got utterly trounced.   The winner was the candidate of a local alliance formed to oppose said leader’s vanity project to build a fixed-seating theatre in place of the highly versatile Assembly Hall.  It would have meant borrowing several millions, intruding on town centre green space and eliminating some hundreds of revenue-generating car parking spaces.  Ironically, as readers may remember, it was in that same Assembly Hall that the count took place!  

Next-door neighbour Julian’s death created a vacancy, and the election was held on Thursday, the alliance having called it even before Julian (who, incidentally, opposed the theatre project) had been laid to rest.  The Tories fielded Julian’s daughter Rowena, expecting that she’d romp home.   She told us that she was meeting a lot of hostility on the doorsteps, and that normally reliable Tory voters were wobbling: to quote her, ‘Boris isn’t helping!’.  Her defeat was a lot closer than that of the former leader, but a defeat it was.  So the Tories, though the biggest group on the council, are now in a minority.  Interesting times, eh?

Modest gardening

I pursued the mower across the back grass the other day, as much to pick up and shred willow and oak leaves as anything else.  It’s the time of year when we get a lot of fungi popping up through the grass up at the top.  They look like pleurotes, but I’m not about to put that identification to the test!  

A lot of the annuals are now down, and the raised bed is now empty of runner beans.  Those on the fence at the other side are still in place, where there are a few big pods that I’ll leave to see if we can get seed from them for next year.  We’ve learned from this year that wigwams on slender poles are a Bad Thing, so will get stouter supports next year and lash them to the fence.  We shall not bother trying to grow carrots again: we got precisely three runty examples this year, and since the commercial growers do a good enough job, and they’re dirt-cheap, we won’t bother.  Might do leeks again, though, but not in quite such numbers!

We’ve had a few sharp frosts lately, so it was time to get some of the cuttings potted up and brought indoors.  I’ve had more success with the fuchsia magellanica alba this time - I lost last year’s batch, largely through neglect, I’m afraid.  The penstemon cuttings were a mixed result: some rooted enthusiastically, others not at all.  I only got two purple ones to root, but have put the rest back in the cold frame, since the foliage looked healthy.  The reds and rose pink did better, but the star performer is the nth generation of a pale pink subject from cuttings I scrounged from a neighbour at Smith Towers before we moved here.  One neighbour wants fuchsias, another wants penstemons.  I’ll try to bring them on (the cuttings, not the neighbours) in the sitooterie through the winter.

The gas man cameth once again today.  The boiler has taken to cutting out, or not starting first thing in the morning, forcing us to reset and relight.  With the weather as it is, a duff boiler is not to be encouraged.  Today’s rather piratical-looking West Countryman suspected the condensation drain was blocked, blew down it and left, asking me to video the behaviour of the warning light should the problem recur.  

The shower door is repaired, thanks to Martyn’s patience and perseverance, but the shower room vent fan is sounding stressed - no doubt because it’s fighting to get the air past disused wasp nests.  And the shower pump is getting temperamental.  The bathroom is now looking really shabby: the DIY job done by a previous administration has not stood the test of time.  We’ll review shower pumping arrangements when we get that job done.  Not cheap, this home ownership business.  But I did a modicum of DIY today, partially dismantling and cleaning the cloakroom vent fan.  Hardly a triumph, since it involved one Philipps screw, a bowl of soapy water and a damp sponge.

As for the political world, I’ll limit myself, in the interests of my blood pressure, to reporting the view that it’s time for a visit from the men in the grey suits.  If the breed still exists.  I’ve read views - not that I could personally express one  - that something needs to be done about the indecisive, incompetent, unprincipled, self-promoting, morally bankrupt occupant of the office of First Lord of the Treasury.  But such a commentator might also repeat the immortal words of Hilaire Belloc: always keep a-hold of Nurse/For fear of finding something worse!

Otorhinolaryngology etc

We’ve had to get used to having things shoved up our noses lately, what with lateral flow tests before having guests to our table, and a PCR test on Sunday.  That was interesting: I’d to drive into a tent down the hospital service road and drop the window, whereupon a nice young woman came and did the necessary.  This was the necessary precursor to today’s follow-up to last May’s ENT appointment (it should have happened in June, but modern times, eh?).  I’d been rather dreading having a camera stuck down my throat, even though I knew we weren’t talking Hasselblad proportions.  As it turned out, the fibre optic was maybe 5mm wide, and not in the least uncomfortable.  Nothing sinister found, thank goodness.  And if, dear reader, you ever need the same procedure, you have nothing to fear from it.  Specially if you have someone loving like Martyn to drive you there and back.

Nice surprise yesterday: neighbour Rowena rang the bell and handed me a bag containing some very exotic chocolates and a bottle of local wine.  Far too generous, given the modest catering we’d done for them: their apparent enjoyment thereof was reward enough.  But it’s so good to have such likeable neighbours.

It has been a fine, mild day here today, but given the afternoon’s agenda, I  couldn’t motivate myself to go gardening.  It is all looking rather bedraggled, but I’ve hauled down most of the runner beans, and will try to get the rest out.  We are drying some hydrangea and sedum heads for winter arrangements, and I might do a few more before the frost finishes them off.  Fortunately, most of next door’s oak leaves have landed in their garden.  This means that we have copped most of the willow leaves,  and no shortage of silver birch ditto from across the road.  The strong winds of a few days ago have pretty much stripped the leaves from the cornus, so we have some fine colours when the sun shines.  Much as I love the autumn colours, they just serve to remind me of what comes next.  

Catering, misc

Since our recently widowed neighbour is having her kitchen refitted, we’ve had her and her daughter in for a couple of lunches.  The lasagne was not brilliant, since it was the first time I’d used non-gluten pasta and flour.  I plainly need practice: the top pasta sheets curled up and went hard, and I found it really hard to get the the béchamel to the right consistency.  Still, it all went.  (Of course, it didn’t help that I’d made a batch of my usual béchamel before I remembered that I’d to use gluten-free flour….  Well, there’s some in the freezer for next time).  Yesterday I played safe with a good old chicken casserole, though thickening the sauce was a bit nerve-wracking.  It seems to have gone down OK.  Martyn’s g-f apple crumble went just fine - and the enormous cooking apples from Fortnums were excellent.

Today we’ve had our booster jabs: the organisation at the TA barracks was a shade less impressive than it was across the road at the Masonic Hall, but the administration of the needle was less uncomfortable than the first two.  We bought rather good fish and chips on the way home from a shop we hadn’t used before, since our local shop has been ‘temporarily closed’ for some weeks now.  Must find out what the story is.  But since the place we used today delivers, and takes cards, we may defect.

Sad times

The last few weeks have called for far too many condolence messages.   First was next-door neighbour Julian; then former colleague Paul’s wife Ann; next Michael, companion for some years to our old friend Joan, next Kerstin’s husband Julian, a fellow trustee at Historia, and today the mother of our friend Tony.  I suppose that, as we get older, such events become more depressingly frequent.

It hasn’t helped today that my physio was repeating his rant about how inappropriate the video regime I’d been given was for someone of my great age.  As if I needed reminding.  But then, one benefit of said great age is that we get to have our booster jabs (jags, for those of the Caledonian persuasion) next Tuesday.  

We worry about how seriously people are taking this pandemic: lots of shoppers not wearing masks, despite rising infection rates hereabouts, and far too many people in masks covering their mouths and not their noses.  Martyn’s sister and brother-in-law caught the lurgy at church a week or so ago, someone knowingly symptomatic having attended.  What is the matter with people?  The Rt Hon First lord of the Treasury seems to think we should rely on people to use their common sense.  But then, he is talking of an electorate that voted for Brexit, so expectations are modest.