Michael Bailey

Our brother-in-law Michael left us today, having suffered for some months with an agressive neoplastic disorder.  Our condolences to Martyn’s sister Sandra.

Long leisurely lunch

Nice to have six round the table again yesterday.  We’d booked Celia and Andy, and since Annie is visiting her brother not too far away we invited them too.  It being Sweet Olive season, we baked some baguettes and served bruschette as an appetiser.  Home made bread, home grown tomatoes and basil (but garlic from Sainsbury’s).  Main course similar to my birthday tea: filet mignon de porc en croûte.  Since the fillet was on the small side, we lined the pastry with sliced prosciutto (Spanish at one end, Italian at the other), a couple of mushrooms, some Speldhurst sausage meat and a big handful of herbs from the garden.  Martyn knocked up a pan of delicious roast veggies, and we had some Alexandra potatoes with a little butter and chopped herbs from the garden.  So, ingredients from far and near - and the egg for the pastry wash came from the farm down the road.  We hadn’t tried Alexandra spuds before: though they came from good old Fortnums, they tasted as good as, if not better than, freshly dug charlottes (and anyone who can tell us where to get Alexandra seed potatoes wins a bottle of Lidl Prosecco).  Simple pud: soft fruit with a drop of cranberry juice.  And Annie brought a delicious lemon cake.

The guests seemed to enjoy each other’s company, as we did theirs.  It’s not often that we meet Celia and Andy without plants changing hands.  We recently got a superb pot of French tarragon (forget the tasteless Russian variety!) from Andy, and enjoyed some a few days ago with baked chicken thighs.  Yesterday, Andy went away with a couple of rooted white potentilla cuttings - probably the fourth or fifth generation of the ones I nicked from outside the Tonbridge sorting office.  

A propos cuttings, two other potentilla colours seem to be rooting: a primrose one liberated as cuttings from the garden of an art group friend, and a yellow one nicked from the Magistrates’  Court car park in Sevenoaks.  Our Rosemary has got rather leggy, so I chopped out a couple of boughs the other day and took cuttings.  Several dozen of them.  If they thrive, we’ll plant them - or more likely, ask Ben to plant them - across the front to fill the gaps left by the box tree moth caterpillars.

Another year older…

A pleasant day at home yesterday, with lots of cards, Facebook messages, phone calls and a surprise visit from Imogen, a friend from Woodside Road days, going back almost 40 years.  One never knows how many more birthdays there may be, so I decided to open a 1950 bottle of Sercial, a bone dry white Madeira, that Imogen and Jonathan gave me for my 40th birthday.  Once the copious sediment had settled, it turned out to be remarkably palatable.

Martyn has given me the Panama hat I’ve hankered after for years: the perfect present.  It’s far too good to be a gardening hat, but that’s what I was about during its first outing.  Nothing too strenuous: the usual round of watering and dead-heading.  The old compost bin has gone: at least four people were interested in it, and I gave it to someone who, unlike me, seems to know what she’s doing when it comes to composting.

No cake, but we had our favourite pizza for lunch - crème fraîche, rocket and spinach from the garden on the (home made) base, then smoked and fresh salmon and big prawns.  Then mozzarella.  For supper we had a pork fillet wrapped in prosciutto, sautéed mushrooms and a few leaves of sage, then baked in puff pastry.  We’ve atoned a little today by having a caprese for lunch!

The birthday present I hoped for but didn’t get was a suitable result in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election, but the very slim majority sent a suitable message.  It was held by the Tories because the Labour mayor of London was blamed for the Tory policy of extending the London low emission zone throughout Greater London.  

I do sympathise with people who have to use old cars to get to work into and from the outer suburbs.  Although our diesel Ateca is sufficiently umweltfreundlich, the old Altea wouldn’t stand a chance.  It fires up (when it’s in the mood) with a big puff of black smoke.  Given the mileage we do, it’s not worth changing cars now, so long as we’re allowed to drive the ones we have.  Mine, seven years old, turned 24000 miles recently.  We used to pile on the miles with the drive to Lagrasse, but that’s no longer a factor.   Between them, the two cars barely cover 2000 miles between MoTs.  I suppose that, by taxing both of them, we are helping the government with its headless chicken schemes like barges, Rwanda and cruise ships they can’t find berths for.

Owt for nowt

We had an enjoyable outing this evening to the town theatre, where the BBC was recording for its series, The Kitchen Cabinet.  Given that the venue was Disgustedville, one good question was ‘what disgusts you when you’re offered it to eat?’ or words to that effect.  Various predictable pet yucks, like fried eggs with globs of uncooked egg white, lamb chops with fat that hasn’t been rendered to crisp.  The questioner was asked what disgusted him: ‘gooseberries!’.  One of the panellists responded: ‘When there’s tripe in the world, how can you say gooseberries?’  Tempted to agree: I loathe former and like latter.  Since we were there as unpaid extras to provide audience noises, tickets were free.  It goes on air on 26 August, but all you’ll hear from us is the applause.

We have had our fortnightly visit from Ben and Duncan, so the grass is impeccably edged (Duncan’s specialism) and the compost bin is emptied and the ground cleared (despite Ben’s protestations that we save up the nastiest jobs for him).  And we have at least three people willing to take the bin away and put it to better use than we have.  I’ve never quite mastered the art.

Anything but eventful

Not much point boring everyone with weeding and dead-heading statistics, though we haven’t been doing a lot else lately.  We’re still beset with the noisy machinery and uncouth shouting of the oiky builders two doors up, but their presence does seem to have limited the obscene screaming tantrums of their client.  Such a nice quiet neighbourhood we live in.

Crops are cropping, and though we’ve had precisely one runner bean so far, we’re already tiring of, and giving away, baby plum tomatoes.  

The rain and cooler weather seem to be benefiting the larger tomatoes, though I’m still throwing a lot of rotting ones away, and they aren’t ripening yet.  There is one tomato plant with big round fruit, and they are ripening.  The seed came in the San Marzano packet, but it certainly ain’t that variety.  The Bramley apple is fruiting like mad this year, so I hope we’ll get to the fruit before the beasties.  We even have a few blueberries on the little bush we were given several years ago.  

The flowering department isn’t bad either: Chrissie’s tagetes are blooming in profusion and a large variety of colours - which is surprising as they all came from the same seed pod.  We raised nicotiana and rudbeckia from Marshall’s plug plants this year, and they are doing very well.  I was prepared to be disappointed by the  ‘Toto’ rudbeckias, since the first ones to bloom were all the same colour.  But other colours are coming along now, and their habit is much more compact than the ‘Rustic dwarf’ mix we’ve used in earlier years: they were far from dwarf, and had to be staked.

So it’s Toto for us, I think.  It’ll be interesting to see if they over-winter.  The Rustics did so for a number of years, but last winter’s vicious frosts finished them off.  Meanwhile, the perennial rudbeckia - Goldsturm, I think, despite the ‘aubergine’ label - looks as vigorous as ever, though it hasn’t started flowering yet.  The heavy rain of the past few days (well, it is Wimbledon fortnight after all!) has rather hammered the roses, but at least we have plenty of stored rain water again.