Thanks Fiona & Danny

I picked up my next assignment last night, and as it's due in a fortnight I thought I'd set to and start this morning.  Of course, in true avoidance style, I then started going through my emails... which I haven't looked at since just before Christmas.  Thank you Fiona and Danny for your lovely New Year's card, which I can just about say arrived at the beginning of THIS month. 

Slacker Diaries, or what?

How To Propagate Mistletoe: Part 2

As we have already discussed, mistletoe is so easy to propagate we can safely leave it to the birds.  Or, armed with Marigolds, we can squish the berries into youngish branches of apple trees and hawthorn hedges.  And wait until next year to see if the seeds have sprouted.

Helena & Najm

"Like me, you were late coming.  The shepherds were here long before; even the cattle.  They had joined the chorus of angels before you were on your way.  For you the primordial discipline of the heavens was relaxed and a new defiant light blazed amid the disconcerted stars.

          How laboriously you came, taking sights and calculating, where the shepherds had run barefoot!  How odd you looked on the road, attended by what outlandish liveries, laden with such preposterous gifts!

          You came at length to the final stage of your pilgrimage and the great star stood still above you.  What did you do? You stopped to call on King Herod. Deadly exchange of compliments in which began that unended war of mobs and magistrates against the innocent!

          Yet you came, and were not turned away.  You too found room before the manger.  Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully away, for they were brought with love.  In that new order of charity that had just come to life, there was room for you, too.  You were not lower in the eyes of the holy family than the ox or the ass.

          You are my especial patrons, and patrons of all late-comers, of all who have a tedious journey to make to the truth, of all who are confused with knowledge and speculation, of all who through politeness make themselves partners in guilt, of all who stand in danger by reason of their talents.

          For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for the learned, the oblique, the delicate.  Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom."

From Evelyn Waugh's Helena, a prayer made by the Empress to the Three Wise Men before finding the Holy Cross

Thanksgiving

"It seemed to Myop as she skipped lightly from hen house to pigpen to smokehouse that the days had never been as beautiful as these. The air held a keenness that made her nose twitch. The harvesting of the corn and cotton, peanuts and squash, made each day a golden surprise that caused excited little tremors to run up her jaws.

          "Myop carried a short, knobby stick. She struck out at random at chickens she liked, and worked out the beat of a song on the fence around the pigpen. She felt light and good in the warm sun. She was ten, and nothing existed for her but her song, the stick clutched in her dark brown hand, and the tat-de-ta-ta-ta of accompaniment.
          "Turning her back on the rusty boards of her family's sharecropper cabin, Myop walked along the fence ti it ran into the stream made by the spring.  Around the spring, where the family got drinking water, silver ferns and wild flowers grew.  Along the shallow banks pigs rooted.  Myop watched the tiny white bubbles disrupt the thin black scale of soil and the water that silently rose and slid away down the stream.
          "She has explored the woods behind the house many times. Often, in late autumn, her mother took her to gather nuts among the fallen leaves. Today she made her own path, bouncing this way and that way, vaguely keeping an eye out for snakes. She found, in addition to various common but pretty ferns and leaves, an armful of strange blue flowers with velvety ridges and a sweetsuds bush full of the brown, fragrant buds.
          "By twelve o'clock, her arms laden with sprigs of her findings, she was a mile or more from home. She had often been as far before, but the strangeness of the land made it not as pleasant as her usual haunts. It seemed gloomy in the little cove in which she found herself.  The air was damp, the silence close and deep.

          "Myop began to circle back to the house, back to the peacefulness of the morning. It was then that she stepped smack into his eyes. Her heel became lodged in the broken ridge between brow and nose, and she reached down quickly, unafraid, to free herself. It was only when she saw his naked grin that she gave a little yelp of surprise.

          "He had been a tall man. From feet to neck covered a long space. His head lay beside him. When she pushed back the leaves and layers of earth and debris Myop saw that he'd had large white teeth, all of them cracked or broken, long fingers, and very big bones. All his clothes had rotted away except some threads of blue denim from his overalls. The buckles of the overalls had turned green.

          "Myop gazed around the spot with interest. Very near where she'd stepped into the head was a wild pink rose. As she picked it to add to her bundle she noticed a raised mound, a ring, around the rose's root. It was the rotted remains of a noose, a bit of shredding plowline, now blending benignly into the soil. Around an overhanging limb of a great spreading oak clung another piece. Frayed, rotted, bleached, and frazzled - barely there - but spinning restlessly in the breeze.  Myop laid down her flowers.

And the summer was over."

The Flowers, Alice Walker

In Love and Trouble

Hosta Bressingham Blue

Early to mid summer.  The following were taken mid to late November.  Autumnal decay at its most beautiful.

Remembrance Sunday 2011

The National Memorial Arboretum Staffordshire

How To Propagate Mistletoe

I've gone down a size in jeans.  I'm telling you this only because I've just had to go and change into my M&S 15£ black exercise trackies as sitting here catching up with my favourite blogs was edging over into the pervy side of painful.  I rather like wearing a snug pair of jeans as Christmas approaches; keeps my hands off the snacky, nibbly loveliness that's starting to appear when eating out.  "I just thought I'd try a few recipes before the big day, you don't mind do you?" is starting to become a regular feature of midweek suppers and weekend lunches with friends.  And mostly it is a gastronomic trial run.  A couple of wretches will try to pull off their usual one-up-manship nonsense, but we'll give them short shrift... will they never learn?

Some time in late winter 2009 (January or February 2009) I scrubbed the mistletoe into the branches of a couple of my least favourite apple trees.  There is a tremendous lot of nonsense written about propagating mistletoe, none of which your garden birds have bothered to read and if a bird-sized brain can do this, so can we.

Essentially you must try and buy English mistletoe, but don't worry if your provider can't tell you where it was grown; in all likelihood it will be French and just as good.  It's just always lovely to try and have a go propagating British natives.

Take your mistletoe berries (which will be a bit withered and dead-looking by February) and push the black seeds inside the white berries into the bark of apple trees in your garden.  Hawthorns are also good host trees.  Try and pick a youngish tree, as the bark tends to be a bit thinner and thus easier for the seeds to penetrate.  Then just leave them alone and forget about them.  With any luck, a year later you'll have a few tiny leaves just like the ones below.

These pictures were taken in January 2011.  I'll take some more this weekend and add them to this post.

I loathe that Hebe.  I don't know why I keep it.

Friday Five: Ireland

"I was raised in an Irish-American home in Detroit where assimilation was the uppermost priority. The price of assimilation and respectability was amnesia. Although my great-grandparents were victims of the Great Hunger of the 1840's, even though I was named Thomas Emmet Hayden IV after the radical Irish nationalist exile Thomas Emmet, my inheritance was to be disinherited. My parents knew nothing of this past, or nothing worth passing on."
Tom Hayden

Moone Cross Co Kildare, picture credits unknown

"Could he not find in his heart the generosity to acknowledge that there is a small nation that stood alone not for one year or two, but for several hundred years against aggression; that endured spoliations, famines, massacres in endless succession; that was clubbed many times into insensibility, but that each time on returning [to] consciousness took up the fight anew; a small nation that could never be got to accept defeat and has never surrendered her soul?”

De Valera, on VE Day May 8, 1945, responding in a radio speech to criticism by Churchill of Ireland’s neutrality in WWII

"I tell you this - early this morning I signed my death warrant."
Michael Collins, after signing the treaty on December 6, 1921 with England creating the Irish Free State as a dominion within the British Commonwealth

"No person knows better than you do that the domination of England is the sole and blighting curse of this country. It is the incubus that sits on our energies, stops the pulsation of the nation’s heart and leaves to Ireland not gay vitality but horrid the convulsions of a troubled dream."

Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), in an 1831 letter to Bishop Doyle

"Ireland, thou friend of my country in my country's most friendless days, much injured, much enduring land, accept this poor tribute from one who esteems thy worth, and mourns thy desolation."

George Washington, speaking of Ireland's support for America during the revolution

Sean O'Casey says it best: "Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity."

The Slacker Diaries Part 22

Whilst I fully accept that this blog is a Gardening Blog, in my defence I feel I should point out that I have been doing a bit of gardening and taking photos; I just can't be bothered to upload them... Life of Riley, or what?

Backdated entries for October to follow, if Robbie Savage goes out this week.  Noooo...

My Grandparents' Best Man

Happy birthday Míċeál.

...As she stepped away from me, and she moved through the fair.  And fondly I watched her move here and move there.  And then she turned homeward with one star awake, like the swan in the evening moves over the lake...

 

Lonely Island; Rap vs The Power Ballad

"Hi guys.  I've written you a big sexy hook for your track." 

It starts off innocently enough; a hook; a Yeahhh; a Come On. Then this massive power ballad takes over.  Don't you just love The Lonely Island?  "You complete me."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI6CfKcMhjY

Hosta Bressingham Blue

Rosa Constance Spry & Zantedeschia Aethiopica Crowborough

This most beautifully scented of all David Austin's climbers, mixed in with my MiL's Easter lilies, Zantedeschia aethiopica 'Crowborough' and a repellent zebra striped invasive grass that I so dislike I refuse to remember its name.  But just look at that rose; not a speck of blackspot.  "Constance Spry" smells like my childhood Tiny Tears.

Part of November's Slacker Diaries Part 22 catch-up posts...

Vera Atkins Memorial Seat Dedication Saturday 24 September 2011

I always like to be home from France by mid-August, because I need to be in sunny Derbyshire for the start of the drupe harvest.  Buckets and buckets of Warwickshire Drooper plums together with six varieties of apple (ok, so I like apples) and a sack of onions from the Asian food stores in Hyson Green were transformed as if by magic into a year's worth of Delia's finest spiced plum chutney.  Recipe and pictures here.  My jollies in France this summer meant I missed the tayberries.  I'd netted them off at the end of May, of course, but as I just threw the damned netting over the canes in a rather hurried fashion, it really wasn't surprising that I returned to a smug resident blackbird population and ZERO fruit.  I didn't make the same mistake with my mulberries, and when they started ripening during September on went the netting and off kept the blackbirds.

And then August filled up with weddings; two each week until last week.  Beautiful churches, handsome grooms, delightful brides; chinking flutes and everywhere women guests in fabulous hats and too much gossip.  Pane, amore e chi chi chi.  This week I went to my first funeral of the year.  On and on the year turns.  Tomorrow I'm off to the National Arboretum in Staffordshire.  

http://www.thenma.org.uk/index.aspx

At 12.30pm the Allied Special Forces Association will dedicate the Vera Atkins memorial seat remembering the women of the Special Operations Executive who lost their lives during WWII.  They really did give their tomorrows for my today, and my love affair with France.    

"Vera May Atkins was the Intelligence Officer- French Section of the SOE, formed on 22 July 1940 to conduct warfare by means other than direct military engagement.  SOE's mission was to encourage and facilitate espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines and to serve as the core of the Auxiliary Units, a British resistance movement. 

"As an exile from Romania Vera came to Britain before the start of the Second World War. She joined S.O.E and was soon managing most of the men and women agents who were being sent into France to carry out clandestine work behind enemy lines. This memorial seat is a tribute to her courage and that of her women agents who lost their lives. Her dedication and resolve to go into Europe and find out what had happened to them after the war ended was not well recognised, except by the families of those lost. The tree at the centre of the memorial seat was grown from a seed found in a Fir cone picked up in 2005 from inside the electric fence that bordered Natzweiler Concentration Camp, which is near the village of Moussey, in the Vosges mountains of eastern France.

"The Natzweiller Tree is also a special tribute to S.O.E. agents Andree Borrel, Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden and also to Sonia Olschanezky, who was a locally recruited member of Robin, a sub-circuit of the Prosper resistance network.

"After capture earlier in the year the four women were taken to Natzweiler Concentration Camp on the 6th July 1944 and executed by lethal injection and their bodies burnt in the camp crematorium that very evening. Three had landed in enemy territory to work as clandestine radio operators, couriers and resistance fighters to assist the French Resistance Forces. Eight other woman S.O.E. agents had also been captured and 4 executed at Dachau and 4 at Ravensbruck, including Lilian Rolfe, Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort and Violette Szabo.

New York

Sitting on the New Jersey shoreline, drinking coffee from the early opening Starbucks, and watching the sun come up over Manhattan.  We left the same day to fly to Vegas en route to the Grand Canyon.  2008.

Gladiolus Plum Tart

Summer Picnics With Elizabeth David

"Not long before the war I was staying with friends in Marseille.  One Saturday night a picnic was arranged for the next day with some American acquaintances; it was agreed the two parties should proceed in their own cars to a little bay outside Marseille, and that we should each bring our own provisions.  On Sunday morning I and my friends indulged in a delicious hour of shopping in the wonderful market of the rue de Rome, buying olives, anchovies, salame sausages, patés, yards of bread, smoked fish, fruit and cheese.  With a provision of cheap red wine we bundled the food int the car and set off, stopping now and again for a drink; so that we arrived at our rendezvous well disposed to appreciate the sun, the sea and the scent of wild herbs and Mediterranean pines."

Elizabeth David

Of Pageants and Picnics

Plage du Guesclin

If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944)

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_du_Guesclin

On Early Morning Weeding And William Blake

One of the most unexpected consequences of finishing the steps in the kitchen garden is my daily weeding expeditions, usually early in the morning, invariably with a cup of tea in hand.  I  finally have "access all areas" and just love to begin my day with a trot around the beds and borders, weeding as I go.

I have a few nettles under the hedge, some docks and tons of that blasted Cardamine hirsuta or hairy bittercress.  It's such a small, innocuous looking plant; a tiny rosette of leaves topped with simple, pretty white flowers.  Oh do not be fooled gentle gardener, by this pretty little plant.  It may be a short-lived annual, from seed to seed takes about a month, but it overwinters successfully, just waiting for you to start turning over the soil in spring.  It spreads rapidly by the sudden and explosive release of seed heads, usually when you've got the plant between your hand ready to lift.  Now you have thousands of seeds scattered... and within days the damned things are sprouting and the whole sorry life cycle begins again.  Surely Blake wasn't thinking only of his rose when he wrote;

"O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy."

Some people actually eat hairy bittercress.  Beggars belief.

http://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/problem-solving/weeds-hairy-bitter-cress/

And Was Jerusalem Builded Here?

Picture tweeted by PC Stanley West Midlands Police. 

Look how young they are.  12 hour shifts, many of them unpaid Police Specials, all of them facing the next day at work for their daytime employers, many of them graduates with Student Loans, whilst their regular colleagues face redundancy and slashed budgets and insufficient equipment.  And no, Dave, there aren't enough riot shields to go round.   

SNAFU-in-Chief Dave does holidays whilst England burns.

Photo from Sunday Mirror

If I Just Lay Here, Would You Lie With Me And Just Forget The World?

Back home is sunny Derbyshire.  Although it's raining right now, a little after sunset, and by the look of things, my garden needs it.  Cooling, low-lying clouds envelop the valleys and shrink my world to more immediate concerns.  The roses have come with their second flush, the lilies are all about to pop and a couple of perfectly beautiful baby-cheek pink lilies are already giving up their delicious scent to the warm garden air.  The pinks are pretty much done, my most favourite rose Tess of the D'Urbervilles is climbing sweetly through the Akebia Quinata and the Merlot vine, nudging the espalier pears towards the sun and autumn sweetness.  The climbing Borlotti beans are already showing, the sweet peas struggling against my natural inability to grow them successfully, and everywhere my kitchen garden looks parched just waiting, waiting for the reviving drenching of midsummer rainfall.  Rainfall at this time of year always always makes me think of that most perfect, perfect scene from Lady Chatterley.  And of you.

And still the rain falls, splishying splashing onto the window ledges through open windows as I give my house the airing its needed for so many months.  I'm home, and listening to these tracks first heard this summer on Radio Caroline.

On The Graduation Of The Harry Potter Generation

It wasn't 300£ for the five books... it was nearly 300£ for ONE book.  I now have a greater appreciation of my daughter's growing manipulative skills where her mother's Shock And Awe tactics are likely to be deployed.

She graduated magnificently.  My little angel looked utterly, utterly fabulous; long, long legs; long, long hair; discrete but smart clothes underneath her Ede & Ravenscroft.  And I wasn't the only parent marvelling at their daughter's voice squealing with delight, "OMG it's like being at Hogwarts!"

"...At the college we were met by a wall of academic women: young ones and old ones and in-between ones, all gowned, some in their scarlet, and the gossip and chatter and disputation and anecdotes, and the smell and sight and sound of clever, focused, happy women which is the nearest we'll get to heaven on earth."

Michael Bywater 

The Independent on Sunday

28 March 1999;

On The Edge Of Glory With Lady Gardener

I've spent the day with an HB pencil, my trusty calculator and pages of columns of figures.  Some people actually do this sort of thing, from choice, for a living.  Actually, I quite like it, especially the part of the totting up where I cross-referenced a fat bonus with a due date.  And right now I'm singing along with Lady Gaga.  You can too, and because you really oughtn't to be exposed to her VEVO version, I've enclosed the following fan/lyrics version...

I'm on the edge, The edge (6x) 

Also this; Mercy Boo informs me that no-one says "Oh My God" or texts OMG any more.  It's OMLG.  Outrageous.

... Salut Maman, êtes-vous occupé?

MBED: Salut maman, êtes-vous occupé?

Maman: Non ma chérie, je suis juste se prélassant dans le jardin. Qu'est-ce que tu fais là?

MBED: Je viens de recevoir une lettre de la bibliothèque uni me disant que si je ne paie pas mes amendes de bibliothèque par 30 Juin je ne peux pas diplômés.

Maman: Payer les amendes. Combien sont-ils?

MBED: Eh bien, ils ont été £1.60 quand ils m'ont envoyé la première lettre sur le sixième de Juin.

Maman: Que sont-ils maintenant?

MBED: £12.

Maman: Payer les amendes.

MBED: Ils ont dit aussi que j'ai 5 livres encore sortir et j'ai parlé à des bibliothécaires, ce matin, et ils ont dit si je n'ai pas les ramener d'ici jeudi je vais avoir à les acheter.

Maman: Achetez-les (en pensant combien peut être 5 livres?)

MBED: Cela coûterait près de £300. Aussi je pense que je les ai emballé avec mes trucs que vous avez pris plus au début de Juin.

Maman: Faire note mentale pour vérifier les coûts du vol contre le coût de précieux livres des bibliothèques universitaires ...

MBED: Aussi je viens de lire le prospectus des diplômes, et il dit que si je ne commandez pas ma robe pour le 20 Juin je ne peux pas diplômés.

(A ce point, je pense qu'il vaut la peine d'expliquer à mes lecteurs charmant, spirituel et urbain que j'ai développées au fil des ans un masque ressemblant, le visage insensible pour toutes les fois professionnellement et personnellement quand les mauvaises nouvelles doit être donné ou pris. Je appelle mon visage Réponse de Botox. Ce n'était pas un de ces moments.)

Maman: QUOI!  (Ronde 1 à maman ... choc et effroi)

MBED: Je sais, je ne sais pas quoi faire. (Ronde 2 à Mercy Boo ... jeter l'auto sur son épée)
Maman: Laissez-le avec moi.

(Because my French farming neighbours wanted to hear this in the vernacular... oh ha, ha, ha!)

Picture The Scene: Imagine The Language

Picture the scene; your favourite Lady Gardener is lolling about in the garden at our house in France feeling relaxed and happy and terribly smug.  I've been in France since the beginning of June, and it's now Tuesday 28 June and the sun is shining; the birds are chirping and our farming neighbours are careering around sifting new potatoes from their sandy fields.  I've been to Cora for a little shop for the next few days and had lunch in the restaurant there, and am now back home, with an espresso and a Cóte D'Or mignonnette, when the phone rings.  It's Merci Beaucoup Enfant Deux, phoning from England.

MBED:  Hi mum, are you busy?

Mum:   No darling, I'm just lolling about in the garden.  What are you up to?

MBED:  I've just had a letter from the uni library telling me that if I don't pay my library fines by 30 June I can't graduate.

Mum:   Pay the fines.  How much are they?

MBED:  Well, they were £1.60 when they sent me the first letter on the sixth of June.

Mum:   What are they now?

MBED:  £12.

Mum:   Pay the fines. 

MBED:  They also said I have 5 books still out and I've spoken to the librarians this morning and they said if I don't bring them back by Thursday I'll have to buy them.

Mum:   Buy them (thinking how much can 5 books be?)

MBED:  That would cost nearly £300.  Also I think I packed them with my stuff you took over at the beginning of June.

Mum: Making mental note to check cost of flight against cost of precious university library books...

MBED:  Also I've just been reading the graduation prospectus, and it says if I don't order my gown by the 20th June I can't graduate.

(At this point, I feel it is worthwhile explaining to my charming, witty and urbane readers that I have over the years developed a mask-like, unresponsive face for those times professionally and personally when bad news has to be given or taken.  I call it my Botox Response Face.  This wasn't one of those times.)

Mum: WHAT! (Round 1 to mum... shock and awe)

MBED: I know, I don't know what to do. (Round 2 to Mercy Boo... throwing self on her sword)

Mum:  Leave it with me.

Google up the uni library then ring and pay fines with my flexible friend.  Get the closing times for rest of week.  Google up the airline and Thank You Jesus there's a seat Thursday afternoon, and with a hire car I'll make it to the library before it closes.  Google up the graduation prospectus and follow the link to Ede & Ravenscroft. 

Do you know why Ede and Ravenscroft, London's oldest tailor and robe maker has been in business since 1689?  Because it has an excellent business model that requires universities to enforce strict deadlines with their graduating students so it has the vast bulk of graduation orders already in the bag when the inevitable surge of parental orders appears post-deadline, and its website doesn't crash.  Genius.

On Pumpkins And The End Of An Obsession

My obsession with buying wooden kitchen chairs has come to an end.  At precisely 8.30am on Bank Holiday Monday, I realised that I just couldn't be bothered hoking and poking around in all those little straight bits and pieces and the arching backs with a little paintbrush. It's taken me roughly 25 minutes per coat, per chair; three different paintbrushes for the three colours (I can't be bothered to wash and dry brushes between colours); a six hour wait between coats with three paintbrushes wrapped in clingfilm (I can't be bothered to wash and dry brushes between coats); and a visit from an odd neighbour (let's call him Santa's Little Munchkin) who insisted on chatting to me whilst I finished off the second coats.  That I had my back to him for most of his visit was rudeness itself on my part, for which I was punished when I finally stood up and turned around to see him absent-mindedly scraping dog poo off the underside of his shoe over my Moroccan mint bed.

I'm planning to invite him round for mint tea. 

Or kill him. 

I don't think that's a figure of speech; it's an actual threat to kill.

And I have nearly 200 pumpkin and squash plants to shift by next week.

Why Stalking Can Pay Off

Only joking.  Although like most Virgos (that includes you Fiona,) there's a fine line between being terribly interested in a subject and being obsessed with it, and from there it's a short hop, skip and a jump to stalking Helen Yemm and cluttering up your house ready for a visit from Kim and Aggie.  My current interest (bordering on the obsessive) is buying wooden kitchen chairs.  It began ordinarily enough with a swan-backed elm Ercol chair, which I have in my kitchen near the radiator.  Then I clapped eyes on another Ercol chair outside a charity shop on my way to Sainsbury's.  Then I found another and then got a set of four for a fiver.

I'm planning to paint them dove grey, pale cream and other lovely washed-out colours and use them as garden chairs, since I'm now at an age when fabric-backed director's chairs just don't give sufficient back support for an afternoon spent feasting and chatting around my garden table.  Billy Connolly does a great sketch about becoming an age when you can't get in and out of a chair without growling and groaning with your back...  I used to laugh at that sketch; now I understand it.

Helen Yemm is opening her garden in Wadhurst, East Sussex, on Sunday 5 June as part of the Wadhurst Open Gardens 2011 weekend.  Check out Helen's blog for details and tickets etc.  I'm seriously thinking of going, if I get some assurances that Helen hasn't called the police department; got some marksmen...

Making The Greatest Advert... Ever

The kicker is the final, triumphant sweep of those little hands as the doll levitates.  Genius.  Pure genius.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM3s37fZZts&feature=relmfu

The Greatest Advert... Ever

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R55e-uHQna0

An English Country Churchyard In Mid-May

Off to meet girlfriends for coffee and a trot around the Vulgate Bible exhibition at Southwell Minster, Nottinghamshire.  Horse Chestnut.

 

Flagstone path and daisies.

Stained glass at Southwell.

Home Again & The Difference Between Summer & Winter Squash

I'm knackered.  I've worked like a slave this spring mostly ego-stroking and hand-holding (things I find terrifically difficult), and shuttling back and forth between airports (which I love).  Last night I threw my laundry on to wash, opened a bottle of Gavi and sat out in my garden and just looked at the greenery.  I further stoked my sense of well being by taking something out of the freezer and by the time it pinged I knew I'd be fine. 

My garden has survived its sporadic attention / neglect quite well.  The carrot seedlings are all through, the radishes too.  All my delishy climbing beans and French beans are all through and looking very lush and eager to climb.  The tomatoes are small and look a little on the "struggling" side, but we're still in May so there's time enough for a growth spurt.  All the apple, pear and plum blossoms have developed into lovely little fruitlets.  The Merlot vine has gone bananas after its prolonged freezing under the winter snows, and my lovely tayberry and blackberry canes are rampaging over their wires and up into the hedges and trees.

The pumpkins and squashes are a bit hit and miss, probably due to the less than ideal, erratic attention I've given them since early May, and the age of some of the seeds.  Never mind; over 48 Butternuts have germinated, and at least 7 Turk's Turbans are already stretching upwards.  I've even managed to grow three Harlequin seedlings from seeds I scraped out and saved from the parent squash I bought in April 2006 at Sainsburys.  All it took to break a 5-year dormancy was a good soaking after planting and then a fortnight's neglect in the heated glasshouse.  I've had similar success with my summer squash and courgettes.  Here's the laundry list;
Black Beauty
Grisette de Provence
Patty Pan
Yellow Scallop
Golden Zucchini
Di Nozzi

What's the difference between a summer and a winter squash? It pretty much boils down to keeping qualities.  Summer squashes have generally thin, edible skins and soft flesh and seeds (think of all those watery courgettes); winter squash have generally harder skins, firm flesh and hard seeds (think of the real threat of amputation each time you attempt to halve a butternut.)

Quod Erat Demonstrandum

What makes women so perfect is that we are always right.  And because I'm a woman, I'm always right (except when I'm kidding myself, of course.)  In August last year, Hilary Clinton announced the Middle East peace talks... Yeah right, another round of US inspired peace talks going nowhere, as many people thought.

 

At that time, as YOU well remember, I correctly stated that Hilary may be leading, but Senator George Mitchell would be in the wings, working his magic.  For all Irish and Ulster people, Sen. George Mitchell holds a dear and special place in our hearts.  He brought us hope, and helped us bring forth our future.  I advised you throw your weight behind the Peace Process.  You went off in a strop... nothing new there then.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/palestinianauthority/8492932/Hamas-and-Fatah-defy-Israel-with-power-sharing-deal.html

But I was right.  Of course.  Another step forward, another step towards peace.  I think all Irish and Ulster men and women agree that without David Ervine, there would have been no Good Friday Agreement, because he led loyalists to the table.  Great courage, great commitment, great far-sighted vision.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2007/jan/08/obituaries.northernireland

"I believe there’s no such thing as a conflict that can’t be ended. They’re created and sustained by human beings. They can be ended by human beings. No matter how ancient the conflict, no matter how hateful, no matter how hurtful, peace can prevail."  Sen. George Mitchell.

The Arab Spring continues to blossom, fingers crossed.

There Is No Bread Without Freedom

June 1979 Pope John Paul II arrived in Warsaw, Poland in the first year of his papacy.  He celebrated Mass in Victory Square before 300,000 people, ending with a Pentecostal plea:

''I cry from all the depths of this millennium: Let your Spirit descend. Let your Spirit descend, and renew the face of the earth, the face of this land.''

In August 1980 a strike in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk gave birth to the Solidarity trade union. It was a movement for workers' rights, but it had taken on a Catholic iconography. The barricades were decorated with pictures of John Paul II, wooden crosses, and images of the Black Madonna. The Pope and his message of human dignity had emboldened millions of Poles to express a yearning for freedom

"The 10th of September 1989, when the Hungarian borders opened for Germans arriving from the GDR as well, was a historic milestone for both our states and peoples. On that day, it was Hungary who took the first brick out of the Berlin Wall."

Helmut Kohl

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2011/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20110501_beatificazione-gpii_en.html

And on 4 January 2011 the Arab Spring began...