I have a mole in my garden, making a complete mess of my lawn.
Mole tunnels in my lawn
It’s not even contenting itself with a few discreet molehills. These are apparently feeding tunnels, just underneath the ground surface, and all have appeared since the weekend. It looks like a young child has scribbled all over my lawn – it’s a right mess! I’m not happy!
Until very recently there was an independent greengrocers shop on the main street in Malvern. The fruit and veg there wasn’t necessarily as beautiful as the offerings in a supermarket – the potatoes often had soil on them, which would never be allowed in Waitrose! – but it was much cheaper. And Pete the proprietor made a big thing of supplying local produce, as well as imported stuff. I’ve bought quince that he grew in his own garden, and have seen a battered Fiesta draw up outside with the back seat loaded with soft fruit from a farm in Ledbury, picked fresh only that morning. You can’t get much fewer food miles than that. Pete was always friendly too, and knew his customers. He used to tease me for being extravagant if I spent more than 10p on a piece of root ginger!
I tried to make a point of shopping there at least once a week, even though frankly Waitrose is more convenient, because I think it’s important to support small independent shops. But it was difficult to spend more than £4 there at a time, and even then only if I was splashing out on local in-season asparagus. So it was hard to understand the economics of how he kept going.
I went shopping on Saturday, the first time for a few weeks as I’ve been on holiday. And as usual I had a list of veg I wanted to buy from the grocer. But the shop had closed while I’ve been away, and I didn’t even get a chance to commiserate with Pete. It’s a real shame, and Malvern will be the poorer without him. I was chatting to the butcher (whom I also try to shop from once a week, even though I’m not a huge meat eater and all I buy some weeks is a couple of sausages) and he reckons that it was the competition from the supermarkets that did for Pete in the end. I hope the butcher can hold out – it seems that they too are really feeling the pinch, and can’t compete on price with the bulk-purchasing power of the big supermarkets. They have to try to compete on quality and service – and indeed I really like the way that they will cut me a joint down to a small enough size for just me, and take the bone out while they’re at it.
Goodbye Veg’n’Things. I’ll miss you.
….and already my holiday feels like a long time ago. It’s hard to believe that this time last week I was sitting at Rome airport waiting for my delayed flight home, and still drying out from the thorough soaking at Ostia that morning. Overall, it was a very good holiday, though it was rather bitter-sweet in places. It was hard scattering Christopher’s ashes in a city where we had had such a good time right at the beginning of our relationship, and I felt much better once I’d actually done the deed – my handbag was lighter both physically and metaphorically, and I treated myself to a large ice-cream in front of the Pantheon afterwards.
Here’s one last selection of holiday snaps, mostly to help me remember what I did, before the details get completely lost in the return to work.
The interior of the Colosseum
This is a shot of the inside of the Colosseum. The original floor level is where you can see the people standing on the far side. All the walls etc underneath that is the substructure, including lots of cages/cubicles where wild animals would have been kept before they were needed. Lifts were then used to raise them straight up through the floor into the arena – must have been almost magical in a world with very little technology or automation. Our guide talked quite a bit about how everyone knew their place in Rome, and how it was reinforced at every opportunity. So in the amphitheatre, you were seated according to rank. The most important had the best seats on the lowest level, some of which remain at the far end in the centre of the image, just to the left of the large arched entrance. Lower-class men would be allowed to sit in seats further up. Women (except for the most important members of the Imperial family and the Vestal Virgins) would only be allowed at the very top-most level, at the top left of the picture. And if you were a retired gladiator, no matter how rich or famous you became, you were always tainted with the arena and were never allowed back inside as a spectator. Interesting!
The Colosseum was the largest amphitheatre in the Roman empire, and could seat around 50,000 people. It was built on the side of a river valley, with the foundations of one half of the building going down onto bed-rock, and the other half into river sediment. There was a huge earthquake in the 14th century which caused extensive damage to the half that was built on the alluvial deposits, which is why nowadays only half of the outermost wall and top-most level of seating remains – that’s the half with firm bedrock as the foundations.
Bust of the Emperor Hadrian
Quite a lot of the holiday seemed to focus around the Emperor Hadrian – we had an evening lecture about him, visited his villa at Tivoli, and saw many of the extant buildings in Rome which he built, including the Pantheon and several temples. I found a statue of him in the Vatican museum, so grabbed a quick snap. You can see that he has a beard. This was very unusual for emperors at that time, and the senators suspected it was due to his suspicious and excessive (by Roman standards) interest in Greece and all things Greek. Since he was also interested in pretty young boys, such as Antinous, which was also believed to be a particularly Greek trait, this just damned him further in their eyes. We had two teenage boys on the holiday, and it was interesting watching the guide lecturer trying to be very careful about references to Hadrian’s sexuality and relationship with Antinous (basically we would call it paedophilia, though the Romans and particularly the Greeks saw it differently) when the boys were around, and how she was much more open and explicit when they were out of earshot!
The Serapeum at the Villa Adriana
Finally, here is a picture of the Serapeum at Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli. It was from around here that the popes found and appropriated several particularly good statues which are now in the Vatican museum. This was a temple to the Egyptian god Serapis, and was apparently built because of Hadrian’s grief at the drowning of his boyfriend Antinous in the Nile. The long thin pond in fact is a representation of the river Nile. There were all sorts of rumors floating around Rome in AD130 that it wasn’t necessarily an accidental drowning, but that Antinous had sacrificed himself (or possibly been sacrificed). Hadrian was suffering from a serious illness, possibly some form of stomach cancer, and the gossip was that he had bargained with the gods to stay alive if Antinous died in his place. Whatever the truth – accident, murder, suicide, sacrifice or self-sacrifice – Hadrian lived for another 8 years and never really got over the death of Antinous, who was the love of his life.
Saturday was the last day of the holiday, and we flew home from Rome Fiumicino airport. But the flight wasn’t until the afternoon, which gave us the whole morning to explore the area around the airport. It so happens that the flight path on the approach to Rome lies directly over Ostia Antica, the old port of Rome. It was here that sea-going ships docked from all over the Mediterranean and unloaded the cargoes of grain, wine, olive-oil, luxury goods and indeed just about anything else you can think of that was needed to support a city of around one million inhabitants. The goods were unloaded into large warehouses, and then trans-shipped into flat-bottomed barges for the short trip up the River Tiber to Rome. There must have been a continual procession of barges going upriver to keep Rome stocked. In fact, on our way to Ostia we passed the other end of the supply chain, the docks at the river-side in the city of Rome itself. There was a huge hill to the side of the river that was entirely man-made – built 2000 years ago out of the carefully stacked shards of broken amphorae, the large jars which were used to transport olive oil. It really made me think about the logistics of supplying the city.
General view of Ostia Antica
Ostia Antica was a huge surprise to me – I knew it existed but had never been there before, so was unprepared by just how complete a city it is. It seems to have been abandoned around the 5th Century or so, and hasn’t been built on since. There were apartment blocks, like the one I’d seen on Tuesday in the basement of San Clemente church, but all above ground, and still standing several stories high. There was a large and remarkably complete theatre, shops and offices, several big bath complexes, a multi-seater latrine, and temples galore.
One of the bath complexes at Ostia
There was only one problem with the visit, and that was the weather. It was absolutely tipping it down! The poor weather of the previous day’s visit to the Vatican had persisted and in fact got worse. We were told that Cyclone Lucy was sitting directly above Rome – you can tell it’s bad when the meteorologists bother to give a weather system a name! There was a Californian on the trip who said that we were clearly the wet-weather equivalent of “mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun”. And indeed our group had Ostia almost entirely to ourselves – no one else was mad enough to go out sightseeing in the downpour! I discovered that my waterproof jacket was nowhere nearly as waterproof as I had believed, and got thoroughly soaked. So much so that the the jacket went in the bin as soon as I got home and I’ve already bought myself a replacement! A side-effect of the rain is that I took no photos at all that morning – my camera was in its case, in my handbag which was in turn firmly zipped under my jacket. But after lunch it stopped raining and I was able to take some snaps on the walk across the site back to the coach. I’d love to go back to Ostia in better weather and explore the site without getting drenched!
On Thursday evening we had a change from Ancient Rome and turned our attention to Papal Rome, with a lecture before dinner on St Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican Museums. Then on Friday morning we piled into another fleet of taxis to take us to the Vatican Museum. It is the most popular museum in Italy with over 5 million visitors last year. If you take into account the days it’s closed, that works out at over 15,000 visitors per day. And I could well believe it! It was pouring with rain on Friday, and it felt like every tourist in Rome had decided to visit an indoor attraction. The queue to get in was over two hours long as we arrived! Fortunately Andante had booked us a timed group ticket, so we were able to queue-jump entirely and waltz straight in. We got ourselves wired up with headsets so that our guide lecturer could talk to us as a group without shouting. That worked pretty well if you got separated from the group – you could re-find the party by seeing which direction you had to move in to get a stronger/louder signal.
Statue of Emperor Augustus in the Vatican Museum
The museum wasn’t too busy at first, and we were able to walk around fairly freely and get a good view of some of the superb Roman statues. The popes were great collectors of statues, even if they did have a fixation with fig-leaves. Apparently there is a drawer in the Vatican basement full of carefully-labelled willies and a gradual programme of removing the fig-leaves and reattaching the appropriate member back onto the statues! It was interesting to be told that originally many of the statues would not have been marble-coloured, as we see them today, but instead quite garishly painted by our standards. So, for example, the statue of the Emperor Augustus I’ve pictured above originally had a bright red cloak, reddy-brown hair, and a decidedly dodgy shade of lip-stick!
Statue of Antinous as the Eqyptian god Osiris
After a well-deserved coffee in the museum café we had some free time to explore the museums further. Most of the group chose not to go to the Sistine Chapel, as we would be seeing it later, but instead picked a particular topic or gallery to explore. I believe that the paintings are very good, with Raphaels, da Vincis and Caravaggios, if you like that sort of thing. I decided to explore the Egyptian gallery, which had some very impressive statues from Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, which I’d seen the day before. Hadrian’s boyfriend Antinous drowned mysteriously in the River Nile, and Hadrian was so overcome with grief that he built a large temple at his villa dedicated to several of the Egyptian gods, and also to his boyfriend whom he deified. The popes swiped many of the best statues, but for some reason the display made very little mention of the distinctly homoerotic overtones of some of the pieces! My rather blurry picture does not show it too well, but the statue of Antinous above has a very definite bulge under his loin-cloth – most definitely not a standard feature of Egyptian art!
There would probably have been time to see one more gallery before lunch, and I was quite keen on seeing the Etruscan collection, which is unrivalled. But as I tried to get there, I was confronted by a seething mass of humanity, all intent on getting to the Sistine Chapel. I could well believe that there were many thousands of people pressing down the corridors along a one-way system – and I wanted to go the other direction, to the exit! If I’d allowed myself to get swept along by the tide, I’d have missed the group rendezvous and hence my lunch! There is no way that anyone in the crowd would have been able to see anything much at all – there were far too many people in the way, and the guards were keeping people moving. I did wonder what would happen if there was an emergency – a fire, say – as there were no apparent fire exits, and the one exit route we’d used earlier was blocked off to make a one-way system to the Sistine chapel. I am sure that if there was an incident, hundreds of people would be crushed in the resulting stampede. It’s a good thing that I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, as the crush must surely induce panic attacks in people. I made heavy use of my elbows as I fought against the tide, and persuaded a reluctant guard to let me through the barriers to the bookshop. It was absolutely horrendous and I was very glad indeed to get out.
We had a long lunch with plenty of wine to recover from the morning’s exertions, then spent the afternoon in St Peter’s Basilica. But that was a mere prelude to the high point of the day. At 6pm, after the official closing time and when all 15,000 tourists had been kicked out, we were let back into the Vatican Museums for a private tour for just our group. What a privilege, and what a contrast to the morning’s mêlée! We wandered slowly through the rooms of the Raphael Stanza with their beautiful frescoes, admired the Gallery of Maps, and finally ended up in the Sistine Chapel – just the 25 of us, plus our two leaders and a lone (and rather bored) guard. It was superb. We had two hours altogether, with the Vatican museum entirely to ourselves. I’m sure the cost of that one visit formed a major part of the total price of the holiday, but it was well worth it.
One of my reasons for deciding to go to Rome was because it was the first place that that Christopher and I went on holiday together, in 1990. We spent a week exploring the city and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves seeing many of the sights. So I felt that he would really approve of me scattering some of his ashes there. The question was, where and when would I get an opportunity to do so, as the study-tour was so packed with things to do, and Rome was extremely noisy and busy. I carried a small pot of his ashes around in my handbag for a few days looking for a suitable opportunity, and my chance came on the Thursday.
The group spent the morning doing a walking tour of the area around our hotel – the Campus Martius. We saw some impressively big Roman buildings that were still largely intact – the Pantheon, the Ara Pacis or Altar of Peace of Augustus (in a very incongruous extremely modern museum building designed by the American architect Richard Meier and only opened in 2006), and several temples some with their column tops sticking out of the ground and their bases well below the present ground level. But one aspect of the tour, which I think you could only get if it was led by a trained archaeologist, was walking around the streets and seeing how the present day buildings and road layout are a direct result of reusing the foundations of 2000 year-old Imperial Roman monumental architecture.
Temple to the deified Emperor Hadrian, incorporated into a later building
So for example we stood on a curving street with a distinct slope to it, and realised that the houses were built on the foundations of the curved outer wall of the Theatre of Pompey, and the slope to the road was due to it being built directly over the rake of the seats in the audience. We went into a bar on the ground floor of a medieval pallazo and looked at the 1st century AD Roman brickwork in the walls. And we stood in the centre of the Piazza Navona and imagined it as the Stadium of Domitian. We had some free time there to grab a coffee, but it’s probably the most fashionable and expensive part of Rome and even after over twenty years the memories were still strong of Christopher and me bring ripped off to the tune of £5 each for a coffee and ice-cream. Goodness alone knows what they would charge now! I sat on a bench and had a drink of water from the bottle in my handbag, and some biscuits that I had liberated from the breakfast buffet at the hotel….
We had a free afternoon to further explore on our own, and that was my best opportunity to scatter the ashes. I wanted to scatter them into the River Tiber, but the embankments were so built-up and busy that I didn’t think it was appropriate. I would have attracted unwanted attention (cremation is very rare in Italy and scattering ashes is not at all the Done Thing) and probably missed the river entirely, leaving his ashes scattered in the dust and vegetation of the embankment walls! So I asked our guide lecturer, who lives and works in Rome, what she would advise. She suggested the Isola Tiberina, a small boat-shaped island in the middle of the River Tiber. It has a walkway around it right down at river level, and was remarkably quiet and peaceful for somewhere right in the middle of an extremely busy and chaotic city.
Scattering the ashes in the middle of Rome
The picture above shows the spot I chose. I went down to the bottom of the steps and scattered the ashes directly into the river. I took the photo immediately afterwards, and you can see how quiet it is – there was no one around at all. The bridge in the background is the Ponte Cestio, or Pons Cestius, dating largely from the 1st century though heavily restored.
Sorry for the break in transmission for the past week, but I’ve got a good excuse. I’ve been on holiday in Rome. I joined a group tour run by Christopher’s and my favourite holiday company, Andante. They are rather an unusual company, owned and run by archaeologists, who run very interesting trips which are a cross between holidays and study tours, led by a guide lecturer who is an expert in the field. So I wouldn’t describe their holidays as totally relaxing, but we both enjoyed them. There was a reasonable amount of free time on this trip for independent exploration, but also evening lectures, walking tours, coach trips and group dinners with good food and plenty of wine.
The Colosseum
On Tuesday, our first full day in Rome, we went on a walking tour of some of the main Imperial sights – the forum, the Colosseum, and a fascinating church, San Clemente. That’s a rather beautiful 12th century church, but the real interest to me was in the basements. It is built on top of a fourth century church, which in turn is built on top of a 1st century Roman apartment block. So many metres below the current street level are the remains of a block of flats put up soon after the great fire of Rome of AD64 (the one that Nero fiddled during). Even more impressive, preserved in some of the rooms of the apartment block was a Mithraeum, i.e. an altar to the god Mithras, which was a competing religion to the early church, with both religions appealing predominantly to the lower socio-economic classes. The theory is that one of the inhabitants of the block of flats was a prominent early Christian, possibly the eponymous Clement, who established a “house church” in his apartment, close to where a neighbour established a competing shrine to Mithras.
The Mithreum underneath San Clemente
I didn’t take any pictures inside San Clemente. Whilst I am sure that Christopher would have done a good job with his digital SLR, I didn’t think that my little point-n-shoot camera was up to the job in the semi-darkness. So here is a picture I’ve found on Wikipedia, so that you can see what I’m talking about.
We got a bus back from San Clemente to our hotel (in a superb location just behind the Pantheon) for an early dinner. Then all 25 of us plus the tour manager and the guide lecturer piled into a fleet of taxis for a visit to the British School at Rome. We were greeted by the Director, Prof Christopher Smith, who gave us a guided tour of the library and parts of the Lutyens-designed building, followed by a lecture on the history of Rome and some recent archaeological projects undertaken by the British School, notably at Herculaneum.
That was a very full day, and Wednesday was also busy. We went by coach to Tivoli, about half an hour outside of Rome. It should have been an easy trip, but our coach was delayed because the driver got caught in a massive grid-lock on the Rome ring road on the way to pick us up. Apparently there were public exams being held for entrance to the Rome Medical school, and 9000 applicants turned up to sit the exam for just 300 places! Desperate students were abandoning their cars on the ring road and running to the exam school to get there on time, leaving traffic chaos in their wake! It was all over the news that evening, with the police saying it was a wonder that no one was killed in the crush and mayhem.
Part of the huge Hadrianic villa at Tivoli
Once we finally got underway, we headed to the Villa Adriana at Tivoli, built by the Emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century AD. He didn’t like the people of Rome very much, and they didn’t like or trust him, so he felt safer and more comfortable in a massive villa outside Rome, yet still close enough to the city to govern it effectively.
The island retreat at Villa Adriana, Tivoli
The above is a snap of the “island retreat”, a self-contained villa on a circular man-made island that would originally have been approached via a drawbridge where the causeway is to the left of the picture. When Hadrian had had enough of ruling and being bothered by his subjects, he could retreat to the island villa, raise the drawbridge and have a Marlene Dietrich “I vant to be alone” moment!
After lunch in the dungeons of a medieval castle in the town of Tivoli, we went to the Villa D’Este, built in the 15th Century by Cardinal d’Este to console himself for never making it to be pope. It is famous for its water gardens, which tumble down a steep hillside in a sequence of cascades and fountains. My mother swears that when she went there many years ago it rained so torrentially that the ducks in some of the ponds drowned! As luck would have it, as I descended the rather slippery marble stairs to the first terrace the heavens opened. I decided that I really didn’t need to look at the gardens in a downpour, so beat a tactical retreat to the café where I had a slice of a rather good apricot tart while I waited for the rest of the group to come back drenched.
Then it was back to Rome in time for a lecture before dinner on the Emperor Hadrian, followed by a group dinner at a rather good pizza restaurant. And so ended another full day!
I hardly think that the weather has inspired me to do some spring cleaning – it snowed heavily all Wednesday morning, and was completely un-springlike. But I have taken advantage of the fact that I’ve been off work all week to do some more tidying up and sorting out things that I’ve simply not had the energy to face before now. That included spending a whole morning sorting out my filing – I’ve been putting important documents, bills etc in a “to be filed” pile for far too long, and decided to grit my teeth and just do it. It was mostly boring stuff like paid bills, bank statements, and so on, which needed to be either filed or shredded. But I also found notes for the order of service for Christopher’s funeral service, and several exercise books filled with notes in his handwriting. It’s a good job my teeth were already well gritted.
One of the things I want to do this year is start to clothe the terraces of sleepers with some plants. My wish list is quite specific – I want year-round interest, preferably evergreen climbers that can cope with poor soil and a north-facing wall, and – most important of all – ultra-low maintenance. But I am not a gardener, and in fact my thumbs are black rather than green. I can kill almost any plant without trying.
Fortunately a college friend of Christopher’s is a keen gardener and doesn’t live too far away. I’m on leave all this week, and she had some time too, so Tuesday saw the two of us contemplating my garden. I got out the plans which the surveyor drew up to help me get planning permission, and Carol stuck post-it notes all over them with suggestions of plants that might work. I’ve got a big book of plants (bought in a fit of enthusiasm when we first moved in, and rarely consulted since!) and I looked up Carol’s suggestions and vetoed a few, particularly if they looked too needy – fully frost-hardy is an absolute must up on top of the hills! We turned the remaining plants into a shopping-list of acceptable candidates.
We then went on a trip to my local garden centre in Guarlford, recently recommended by The Independent as one of the top 50 UK garden centres, and boy are they proud of it. I was only window shopping at this stage – I wanted to see what some of the plants looked like in the flesh as it were, rather than on the pages of a book. I also wanted to price up what I might be letting myself in for so that I can budget for it. Carol, however, did have an “accident” and we left with a boot full of plants! One thing that’s really good about having a friend who is a keen gardener, is that she has a fair number of my shopping list of plants in her garden already, and has promised me some cuttings so that I can try them out and see if they survive/thrive in my garden, before I commit to buying more from the garden centre. So I hope to be able to make some progress on improving the garden this year, though it’s going to be a big project!
I have some badly-needed and much anticipated time off work now that I’ve made it through to the end of the Financial Year. I did little over the weekend except sleep, but I woke up this morning with more energy, and decided to do some de-cluttering and tidying up. The living room and dining room weren’t too difficult – mostly magazines that needed to be recycled and paperwork to be filed. I was on a bit of a roll, so decided to tackle the spare room and Christopher’s study. That was more challenging.
I found a whole stash of Christopher’s clothes that I’d forgotten I hadn’t dealt with. So that meant a tip run to recycle some of them, and a trip to Oxfam for the ones still in good condition. I also took some of his old electronics stuff (including a very old Apple Newton) to the tip since I was going there anyway. Plus I found a bag from Cheltenham Hospital full of an emergency chemotherapy spillage and dressing kit – all unused, but with absorbent pads, a sharps box, sterile dressings etc, in case we had needed to call out the District Nurse to fix a leaking chemo pump. I took that to the pharmacy to be disposed of properly. And I found a spare pair of his sunglasses, which I took into the opticians who donate them to charities in the developing world.
I can think of more pleasant ways of spending a day off, but it’s good to have got it done.
