Losing it…

 for the annual ramblings, please scroll down to the 1 December entry

When I logged on yesterday to amend the order for today’s grocery delivery, I noticed - fortunately - that I’d booked it for next Thursday rather than today.  Far too late by then to bring the delivery forward, so there was nothing for it but ordeal by Sainsbury’s in person: a delightful prospect two days before Christmas.  Having awoken around 05:00, I hauled on some clothes and consciousness and was at the shop door - along with scores of others - when it opened at 06:00.  It has been a while since I pushed a trolley round the shop, and in the meantime they have moved stuff around, so this added to the fun of the occasion.  My phone tells me I have hobbled 0.64 of a km.  Learning?  I hate the chore of navigating Sainsbury’s ponderous on-line shopping site, but must take more care when booking slots, since I hate shopping in person even more.

So what achievements this week?  I’ve succeeded in unblocking the sink drain gully - a lovely job involving rubber gloves and a bin bag up to the shoulder.  Anyone else done anything quite so joyful and romantic this Christmas week?  

On a more positive note, we have improved the view from the dining room door a little by planting some pansies and cyclamens in the pots on the steps, supplementing the stalwart but slightly tired polyanthus.  Feeding the robin adds interest to the outlook as well.  Just as well, given the amount of time I sit by the window reading, surfing, word-gaming and otherwise prodding the iPad.  

The garden has had a bit of attention this week: the last of the rudbeckias are chopped down, and the bolted leeks are in the bin.  There are still more to come, and we have started sharing them with selected neighbours.  The herbs in the raised bed need a bit of tidying up, notably the dead tarragon.  

Trip to the butcher’s yesterday: a nice plump chicken for Christmas dinner, some lamb neck fillet to which  to add lots of spices, apricots and chick peas for a tagine that will do three meals.  While that was chuntering away to itself in the top oven, Martyn’s Christmas cake was cooking in the lower one, and I was fiddling around with sausage meat, breadcrumbs and some sage from the garden to make stuffing balls to go with the bird.  Quite the hive of industry sometimes, our kitchen.

Grey days

for the annual ramblings, please scroll down to the 1 December entry

Dreich, for sure, but when it has been mild I’ve got out and done a spot of gardening and garden-related labour.  We still have no garden waste collection because of the shortage of lorry drivers, so I have been filling black bags and booking the occasional slot at the tip.  Killing two birds with one stone, I filled four bags last week and dumped them in the steaming municipal compost heap.  The other half of the journey was to collect Martyn from where he had left the Egg for a service and MoT, conveniently close to the tip.

Said Egg (a glance at the shape of the Seat Altea explains the sobriquet) sailed through its eleventh MoT with flying colours yet again.  It had perhaps burned a tank and a quarter of diesel since its last visit.

Back in the garden, I’ve got most of the dead-heading and hacking down of annuals finished.  I’ll need to get up on the new bed across the back to haul out more grass and buttercups: the muck Ben organised last January when he built the bed was nothing like well-enough rotted, and the horses responsible for it had certainly not fully digested the grass seeds!  A side effect of the richness of the soil is that a lot of our leeks have bolted, so are candidates for the next set of black bags.  But we have plenty of good leeks left, and shall work our way through them over the winter.

It’s that nice time of year when the Christmas cards start coming in.  Since we’ve hardly seen any of our friends for the best part of two years, it’s a comfort to know they’re around and thinking of us.  Martyn has set up and decorated the Christmas tree, so the place is looking quite cheerful.  Since we now have another downstairs window, both the electric candlesticks are in place.  

We got our cards printed, written and on their way last week.  One of the problems of age is that one can remember the brown tuppeny stamp that used to go on the Christmas cards. Today’s 66p stamp is eighty times that sum.  Granted, my pensions today are about fifty times my Dad's salary back then.  So this observation is about as useful as the endless discussion of house prices!

Annual ramblings, 2021

Still alive (at the time of writing...)

Another awful year.  We keep pretty well, though our bodies keep reminding us that we're respectively in our seventh and eighth decades.  We have each had our three doses of vaccine, but are still being very careful, and doing lateral flow tests before we have guests or go to others' homes.  We aren't doing much shopping, but rather place a weekly order and have it delivered to the kitchen door.

We've said farewell to far too many friends and neighbours this year, but this comes with age: I think I've quoted the late Isla in the past: 'It's a bugger, gettin' auld'.  The art group has not met this year.  Since I need a bit of peer pressure to produce anything, my output this year has been damn' all.  So, for those of you upon whom we inflict a homespun Christmas card, I'm afraid this year's will be a case of 'here's one we prepared earlier', using pieces that, though we haven't used them before, are not from this year's output.

The world of politics has always been a a pretty ugly place, and this year has plumbed the depths.  Of the events of 6 January, all I need say is that I'm astonished that the rabble-rouser-in-chief is still at liberty.  This side of the pond, HMG is an object lesson in incompetence, vacillation, corruption and moral bankruptcy, with quite a few other adjectives competing for the prize.  

We decided early in the year to dispense with one of the garages, and have had the inner one converted into a study for us both.  We got quotes from a couple of local builders, and selected one of them.  He asked for a 50% deposit, which we declined to pay until we had planning consent.  He evidently understood and accepted this, then the day, previouly announced, before the consent came in, contacted Martyn to say he'd given our slot to someone else, and couldn't do the job until next year.  Company name on request.  So, it was back to mybuilder.com, and we had a prompt response from a chap from Eastbourne.  He came in with an estimate half those of the local firms (cartel, anyone?), and sensible requests for stage payments.   Hemen and his Dad, chatting away discreetly in one of the Kurdish dialects, completed the job promptly and well, complying willingly with our wishes on the details, and liaising for us with the Buildings Regs man, who in the course of three visits totalling roughly three nanoseconds, approved the work, and happily relieved us of over £400.  Though not great detail merchants - we'd to do a bit of the snagging and decorating ourselves - Hemen, his dad and their sub-contractors were mostly good workers, and we're very happy with the end result.  H&H Builders.  And it's nice to know that we're still capable of hanging the odd run of wallpaper.

A side issue was where to keep the lawnmower, which had previously occupied the doorway between the two garages.  A quick measure confirmed that we could get a small shed into the space next to the raised bed opposite the back door.  Assembling it almost killed us, but it now accommodates practically all of the garden tools as well as the mower. (We have replaced the petrol job with a battery driven one which works better and takes up less room in the shed.)

Garden

Big changes out the back.  We spent what we'd had refunded by Cunard on some pretty major landscaping.  I mentioned last year that the hideous leylandii hedge had gone from the back of the garden.  In January, Ben and Duncan took out a section of fence at the top of the garden and came in with a digger.  They also sent some chaps to grind out the roots of the leylandii.  Cutting a long story short, we now have two new raised beds; one to the left of the path up to the summerhouse, and another across the back of the garden, and a continuation of the path up to the little quadrant terrace under the goat willow trees.  The chaps did a fine job, fuelled by frequent mugs of tea and a spot of home baking.  We were still pretty much in lockdown, but towards the end of the work, on one of those fine days we so often get in February, we were able to treat them to fish and chips out on the terrace.

Then, of course, came the job of planting it all up.  We moved a few roses and bought more, and have planted a camellia, a Japanese cherry, clematis and much more.  We grew some annuals from seed as usual: the old faithful rudbeckias and tagetes, of course, and also Musselburgh leeks which have cropped magnificently, cheek by jowl with flowering subjects.  The potato crop was modest this year, and although we had a fair crop of tomatoes, the plants succumbed to blight.  We learn that we are incapable of growing carrots, the crop of which amounted to precisely three runts.  French beans were also poor, but the runner beans fed us for a couple of months until the fragility of the wigwams I'd put up brought them down. 

Neighbour Lynn gave us a couple of splits of her acanthus in the spring, so that will quickly take over a lot of the new top bed.  Another neighbour, David, has given us some agapanthus seedlings, which I shall try to bring on in the sitooterie this winter, alongside some penstemon and fuchsia cuttings that we plan to give to neighbours in the spring.  As I’m sure I’ve said before, sharing is one of the joys of gardening.

Arrivals

Our first visitors this year were Celia and Andy, who came round for tea once we were allowed to entertain outdoors.  Afternoon tea out on the terrace one sunny April afternoon.  I froze.  But Martyn's scones and my sponge buns went down well enough.  Topped out with a glass of prosecco.  More recently, we've done a couple of lunches for our neighbours while their kitchen was out of action.  Annie, recently widowed, had signed the contract for the kitchen work shortly before Julian died, so perhaps the need to deal with building work provided some welcome distraction.

Departures

Scarborough 

Very few.  We've taken a few drives down to the coast on fine days, but our only stay away was a few days house-sitting in Cottingham for Annie while she and Chris went off to the Wye valley and Wales.  While there, we got to meet our friends Janet and John from Wakefield for lunch at a suitable half-way point, and had a good catch-up over lunch.  Annie's friend Linda in Beverley invited us to a splendid lunch another day.  We toured a little, visiting Scarborough, Beverley, Hornsea and Filey in unseasonably fine weather (and evidently better than Annie and Chris got further west).  I also got to meet some lovely people at Beverley Urgent Treatment Centre and Hull Royal Infirmary, having attempted to shorten my right thumb with the door of Annie's dishwasher.  Oddly enough, said thumb, now nicely healed and no longer aching much, is rather longer than its sinister counterpart: scar tissue, I guess.

We had a splendid lunch with Christine and Jon in their beautiful garden in the late summer.  I wish I had Jon's grilling skills, and Christine's flair in designing accompaniments. 

Wheels

The only other vehicle I've driven this year is the late Julian's Polo, to move it from their drive to ours while Ben and Duncan were using the drive next door for building materials.  Hardly enough to qualify for a road test report.  My Ateca has had its five-year service, which calls for a new cam belt, water pump, brake fluid and goodness knows what else, leading to a four-figure bill, and rather sweeter running.  Oh well, it's only money, and we're managing to keep the wolf from the door.  The good old Egg2, now 13 years old, drives like a new car, and has just passed, as always, its eleventh MoT.

Food and drink

Since we've been at home so much, we've been resorting to old favourites rather a lot.  A favourite decadent lunch is based on the pizza norvégienne that we used to have at the Grand Café in Limoux.  Ours, on a home-made base made in the bread machine using a handful of wholemeal flour in the mix, is rather more generously topped.  Heat the pizza stone in the oven at max temperature for a quarter of an hour at least.  Wilt and chop a good handful of spinach which, once cooled and chopped, mix with a couple of generous dollops of crème fraîche.  Anoint the base therewith, then lay on smoked salmon, big peeled shrimps and a sliced pavé or fillet of fresh salmon.  Sprinkle on preferred herbs (ideally fresh dill in season), season to taste, cover generously with grated mozzarella, and add a figure 6 of olive oil, then bake for 8 minutes.  A 300gm dough makes two pizza bases, and we tend to freeze the leftover to use later with ham, mushroom and chouriço.

Runner bean soup is not a great way to use up the surplus crop, though it's OK half and half with leek and potato, or broccoli and cauliflower. Better to leave the oversized beans to ripen for next year's seeds.  We usually make stock with the chicken carcass, then use some of the leftover meat together with mushrooms and stellette in a soup.  The recipe calls for spring onions, but chives or some sliced leek greens do the job as well.

Arts

Martyn has dismantled the huge model railway layout in the loft.  It had become a bit of a monster, and he'd got fed up of banging his head on the roof timbers.  This is part of the reason for the garage conversion, which frees his old study to become a model railway room on a manageable and less hazardous scale.  My old study, meanwhile, still houses all my art kit, but also a decent-sized bed.  We’ve neither of us done much painting this year, lacking the peer pressure of the Thursday art group.  Martyn’s brushes have been busy on the new model railway, of course, and I’ve been doing the occasional Brusho piece.  

2022

 

I can scarcely imagine a worse year than the one that’s ending.  But we cautiously hope for better, and send you our most positive thoughts for the new year.

 

Martyn and David 

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.