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The Dawn Chorus

I never thought I’d say this, but I shall be relieved once the Summer Solstice is over next week and the nights start drawing in again. I really enjoy the light evenings, and it’s so much less depressing in the summer when I can go to work and come home in daylight, rather than in the dark. Even the regular early-morning trips to our Hampshire office (at least weekly occurrences at the moment) are somehow more bearable when they happen in daylight. But it is getting light quite ridiculously early at the moment, and that’s causing me problems. Not the sunlight itself, as I have good blackout lining on my bedroom curtains. Rather, it’s the associated dawn chorus that is causing me grief.

It started at 04:29 this morning. I know, because it woke me up! There is one particular bird who has clearly decided that the fence post on the new terracing directly outside my bedroom window is the ideal place from which to mark his territory. For what is presumably a small song-bird, he has got the most incredibly loud voice, and is very, very persistent – he can, and does, sing for what seems like hours at a time! Then he seems to get into a slanging match with another bird, and the two of them duet ad nauseam. I’m not sleeping too well at the moment anyway, and could really do without being woken up at quite literally the crack of dawn by a bloody bird. At least the recent spell of atrocious weather means that I’ve been sleeping with the window closed, so that the double glazing muffles the sound a bit. It was even more unbearable in the warmer spell a few weeks back when I was sleeping with the window open!

15 06 2012 icyjumbo invective
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Gardening Leave

No, I haven’t been sent home from work in disgrace. I have quite literally been on gardening leave today – I put in an annual-leave request to my boss with the express intent of spending it gardening. Christopher’s college friend Carol and her partner Mark came here yesterday with a car full of garden implements, a big bucket of chicken manure, and tray after tray of seedlings and cuttings from their garden. They stayed overnight, and spent all yesterday afternoon and this morning doing a “Groundforce”-style makeover of significant chunks of my garden. Carol directed operations, weeded and planted; Mark wielded a spade expertly, dug out brambles and nettles, and did loads of heavy lifting; and I did a bit of supervised light weeding but generally felt I was surplus to requirements – they are a well-honed team and I felt I was in the way! My main role was to keep them supplied with cups of tea and hearty meals.

Carol has really taken on board my strong desire for a low-maintenance garden, so all the plants she brought are perennials and I’m promised that none of them are attention-seeking prima-donnas. I now have one bank planted with alpine strawberries, another with sedums and potentilla, and a third with comfrey and acanthus. A significant part of the rose-bed is now cleared of weeds and under-planted with hardy-geraniums and violets, there are more ornamental poppies next to my existing ones under the apple-trees, and a whole new flower-bed has been created out of a semi-infertile patch of weeds, and planted with geraniums and day-lillies. Plus my herb-garden has been significantly augmented with a rather large and surprised-looking sage bush, a bronze fennel and some golden thyme. I don’t necessarily expect all of the many dozens of plants to survive being transplanted, but it will give me a really good indication of what plants do well and are therefore worth investing in buying more of.

I know that there is a lot more to do in the garden, but we’ve made a really good start. I’ve also spoken to my regular gardener and asked him to spend half a day per week during the growing season doing the weeding, so that I can keep on top of the garden and not let it regress now that we’ve made a start in getting on top of it. Carol has suggested that, if I get the gardener to clear the weeds in the rest of the rose-bed, she has plenty more seedlings and cuttings which she could bring along in a few months time to under-plant amongst the roses. That sounds good to me – and when she and Mark left after lunch I suggested that they borrow some books and CDs from me, to give them an even greater incentive to come back soon!

Carol has really taken on board my strong desire for a low-maintenance garden,. so all the plants she brought are perennials and I’m promised that none of them are attention-seeking prima-donnas.
11 06 2012 Gillian garden Comments (5) Permalink

Another tradesman comes to call…..

Our friend Carol is planning on visiting tomorrow, weather permitting. And since she keeps teasing me about my apparent inability to go more than 10 days without a visit from a tradesman, it was clearly incumbent on me to have someone turn up beforehand to do something about the house / car / garden!

Today’s visit was from the RAC, though not, fortunately, for an emergency. I’ve been a member for years, and earlier this week they wrote to me offering me a free check of my car’s tyres, battery, lights and fluids. Since I really haven’t got to grips with car maintenance (that was always Christopher’s job) and it’s about six months until its next planned service, I decided to take them up on it for some peace of mind. The only problem was that, because this is a “free” extra, the RAC clearly doesn’t want to have its patrolmen tied up on vehicle checks at peak times when their priority should be attending to broken-down motorists in distress. So they only offered rather awkward time slots for these appointments; either 12:00-16:00 on weekdays (no choice to specify a tighter slot than that, so it would entail taking an afternoon off work) or 08:00-10:00 at weekends. I decided to go for the latter, though I really didn’t relish the idea of being up and dressed by 8am on a Saturday – I like to have a lie-in at the weekends!

So at 08:15 this morning, as I was blearily eating some toast, there was a ring of the bell, and a very cheery patrolman asking for the car keys. He said he really liked doing vehicle checks as the first call of the day, as it got the day off to a good start. He also asked “Didn’t you use to have a VW Polo?” – turns out he was the same chap who rescued us when the Polo broke down in the centre of Malvern many years ago. I complimented him on his memory, and he said that it was our drive that he remembered. Which in turn reminded me that, yes, we did have a major palaver trying to get the broken-down car safely off the main road and up the slope onto our drive – no wonder it was seared into his memory!

He spent half an hour doing a basic check on the car, pumped up the tyres which were slightly below pressure, topped up the screen wash, and told me to make sure the mechanic changed the brake fluid at the next service. He also said that the battery was at less than 50% capacity, and advised me to take the car on a decently long run, of at least half an hour, to give it a good charge. I suppose it’s not surprising that the battery is a bit flat; I rarely drive further than pottering around Malvern, in a triangle between home, work and the supermarket, so the car seldom gets a long drive. I’ll have to make a special effort in the next few weeks and drive further to give it a chance for a good charge.

The other interesting comment he made was when he was checking the tyres. Most new Minis come with run-flat tyres, so don’t have a spare wheel. So he initially assumed that I too didn’t have one. But I do – there is a space-saver spare wheel hidden away under the bottom of the boot. I made a big fuss when we bought the car, saying that I really wasn’t convinced by run-flats and that, if I was ever going to drive the car at all, I absolutely insisted on having a spare wheel. According to my cheery RAC man, that was a very good call – he’s not convinced by run-flats either. He said that they get lots of call-outs to Minis which don’t have a spare wheel, and where the so-called run-flat tyre isn’t drivable. Although a space-saver spare isn’t as good as a proper spare, he’s all for them – at least they allow you to get home!

09 06 2012 icyjumbo car Comments (2) Permalink

Jubilee Beacon

If you squint you can just about make out the bonfire on top of the hill in the distance!

Malvern has been making a big fuss about the Diamond Jubilee holiday, with street parties and “fun for all the family”. But I really wasn’t feeling in the mood for a party, so I just hunkered down at home and ignored as much of it as I could. On Monday night the celebrations culminated with the lighting of a huge bonfire on the top of the Worcestershire Beacon, one of a chain of beacons that were lit across the country. Apparently, several thousand people climbed the hill to witness it being lit – but I wasn’t one of them. However, I did think, a bit like with the Olympic Torch, that it was unnecessarily churlish to completely ignore a once-in-a-lifetime event.  So I thought I ought to at least see if I could see the lit beacon from the house, so that I could accurately claim that I had witnessed it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see it from my front room as it was hidden behind a tree. So I climbed to the top of my garden and could see it in the distance from there. I took a very blurry hand-held photo as evidence of the event – I’m sure Christopher would have made a big production of using a tripod and multi-second exposure with his DSLR. But a blurry snap will have to do.

06 06 2012 Gillian garden
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Oh darn it!

It’s got a bit colder over the last few days (inevitable I suppose since it’s a Bank Holiday) so I looked out my cardigan to put on. I’ve been attacked by clothes-moths! The cardigan was absolutely full of holes! I’m not particularly bothered about wearing the latest fashions, but even I draw the line at wearing something so clearly moth-eaten…… But it was cashmere, and so far too good to throw away, so I thought about alternatives. The mail-order company I bought it from does a repair service: you post it back to Scotland and they’ll invisibly darn it for £25 a hole. Well, they can forget that! The cardigan was like lace, and for the amount it would have cost me to get it mended I could have bought a whole new wardrobe of cashmere!

So I’ve spent much of this afternoon sitting in the window seat in the living room, where the light is the best, darning my cardigan, to the tune of several hundred pounds worth of holes at the going rate…… I think I’ve done a reasonable job, and it is at least wearable again. Of course, what’s bothering me now is wondering how many of my other sweaters have been attacked. My darning skills could get highly honed if my worst fears are borne out!

04 06 2012 icyjumbo invective Comments (3) Permalink

Found another stash of his clothes……

I thought that by now I had recycled/donated to charity all of Christopher’s clothes. So I was rather surprised and a bit upset when I came across another stash of them that needed to be dealt with. There were several of his jackets and coats which had been hiding in full view in the hall cupboard ever since he died. I don’t know why I hadn’t spotted them a long time ago. I think I had got it into my head that I’d already dealt with all of his coats – I do remember donating several of them to a homeless shelter, and just assumed that I’d done that to all of them. But when I had a proper look in the hall cupboard, I realised that nearly half the coats in there were his rather than mine. So that entailed another trip to Oxfam to hand them over. I did check the pockets first. No £10 notes unfortunately, but in his leather jacket I  found a letter of appointment at Cheltenham hospital for radiotherapy. Ouch! That knocked me sidewards for a bit……

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Red Poppies, Yellow Poppies

The garden is full of poppies at the moment – it seems that the recent sun after the heavy rain earlier is just the sort of conditions they like. Most of them are small yellow Welsh poppies which grow like weeds. In fact, let’s be honest, they are weeds. At least, they’re entirely self-sown and not consciously chosen or planted. Christopher used to try to wage a totally ineffective war against them, but I rather like them so am happy to tolerate them in my flower beds, as long as they’re not crowding out any “real” plants.

I do also have a couple of big, showy oriental poppies in the bed underneath the apple trees. They are rather tatty, straggly plants, but the flowers are spectacular. I just love this deep red colour. Each flower only lasts a few days, but there is at least another dozen buds in various stages of maturity, so I should have a constant supply of poppy flowers to admire for the next few weeks.  Christopher planted them this one and its neighbour (which has lighter orange-red flowers) the year before he died, and I have simply left them to their own devices since. Fortunately the poppy plants seem to thrive on total neglect!

29 05 2012 Gillian garden Comments (1) Permalink

Yet another day at the pottery

Jugs and saucers

I spent this morning through to about 2pm at Eastnor Pottery again, practising my throwing technique. I wasn’t making anything to keep this time, but rather throwing pot after (nominally identical) pot, and cutting each one in half once I’d thrown it to check the thickness of the base and sidewalls. I tried to keep the starting lump of clay relatively constant, at about 600-700g (about the size of a small grapefruit), and by the time I’d thrown over a dozen pots the afternoon ones were significantly larger than the first ones this morning, as I was able to mobilise more of the clay and lift the pot walls higher.  Mind you, it’s physically hard work centering the lumps of clay, and my wrists and back were complaining by the time I called it a day. I came home and crashed out in bed for an hour to recover! While I was at the pottery, I picked up the completed jugs and saucers which I made last time. I’m very pleased with the way they’ve come out, and I can report that all four of them pour surprisingly well, with minimal dripping!

27 05 2012 Gillian art
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Torch Fever?

I was asked last week if I was succumbing to Torch Fever, by which was meant over excitement at the thought of the once-in-a-lifetime experience of having the Olympic torch pass briefly through Malvern on its travels round the country. Well, no, in fact I can’t say that I was. But since I then found out that the torch would be going directly past my house, at exactly the time I would normally be going to work, it seemed churlish to ignore it completely. Plus if I tried to get in to work I’d only get caught up in rolling road-blocks and traffic chaos, so it was better to sit it out at home until all the fuss was over.

Blink and you'd miss it!

The torch was in “convoy mode” as it passed over the county boundary between Worcestershire and Herefordshire, at 09:39 this morning, so there were no runners to be seen (for that I’d have had to have actually made an effort and driven into Great Malvern or Malvern Wells). So there wasn’t going to be a great deal to see, but I thought I ought to at least have a look.

So I put the front door on the latch, took a kitchen chair out onto the drive, and settled down with a book to wait for the “excitement”. Mostly what there was to see was a whole load of police – both police cars and motorcycle outriders. I reckon it must have been a free-for-all for the local villains, as it seemed that half the police in West Mercia were guarding The Flame.

There was a yellow bus, a yellow car (I think carrying the torch, see the blurry photo opposite), three garish sponsor’s trucks, and yet more police. It was all over in a few seconds, so I went to go back inside to get my stuff together for work. At which point I discovered that the front door had slammed shut in the wind, and even though it was allegedly on the latch, I couldn’t get back in! I kicked the door a few times, but it was definitely not going to let me in. And my house keys and car keys were on the other side of it. I did at least have my work mobile phone in my pocket, so if all else had failed I could have called a locksmith to come out and rescue me! However, it didn’t come to that in the end. One of my neighbours has a spare key for emergencies and to keep an eye on the house when I’m away, and fortunately he was also running late for work because of the torch procession. So I was able to borrow back my spare key and let myself back in. Phew! Not a good start to the day, though it could have been much worse!

25 05 2012 Gillian photograph Comments (1) Permalink

A case in point

A week or so ago, I wrote “I suppose it’s always the same – when one has specialist knowledge of something, one can almost invariably pick holes in a written description of that subject, whether it’s inaccuracies in a news story that one knows about first hand, or a technical subject that has been dumbed down for a general audience.” And today I got clear evidence of the former.

Here is a cutting from tonight’s Worcester Evening News:

Fire scare at petrol station

10:40am Tuesday 22nd May 2012 in News by Robert Hale

THREE fire engines rushed to a petrol station in Malvern Wells after smoke was seen coming from one of the petrol pumps. The call came at 7.45am this morning to the garage on the A440. Two appliances from Malvern and one from Upton were sent out. When the crews arrived they found a small fire in the electrical display on the pump, and put it out. The stop message came at 8.10am.

I actually passed the Wells petrol station at about 08:12 this morning on my way into work, and can indeed confirm that there was an incident there. One single fire engine was parked up by the side of the road outside the garage, with its blue lights flashing. There was no sign of the other two reported engines, which had presumably called it a day by then. But the road is very definitely the A449, not the A440. as reported in the newspaper. So there is one clear error of fact in five sentences of news! It really does make me wonder how much of the news I consume each day I should really be taking on trust!

22 05 2012 Gillian invective Comments (2) Permalink