Rose Balling: Rosa Eglantyne

 

What causes rose balling?  Rose balling is an annoyance that dominates in a damp, cool summer exactly like the one we endured in sunny Derbyshire in 2012.  Flower buds develop normally but fail to open fully.  Wet weather saturates the outer petals and when the sun finally puts in an appearance and scorches the flower dry, the outer petals are fused together preventing full opening.  These fused petals dry to a crisp, brown appearance.   

Rose balling can be a problem if you've planted roses in a partially shaded site, and you've got a penchant (as I) for roses with a multitude of thin petals.  Rosa Eglantyne and Geoff Hamilton are particularly vulnerable in my garden, whilst my peonies and camellias appear to be thus far unaffected.  Clearly the site is the predominant problem. 

 

Standard advice seems to be pruning to open up a lovely goblet shaped bush thus enabling good air circulation and rapid drying of the flower buds after rainfall; watering in the evenings only (laughable advice last summer); removing balled buds promptly before grey mould sets in and infects both host and nearby plants with a whole new set of problems; and rather drastically, removing or cutting back overhanging shrubs and trees.

 

Reading this advice last year on the RHS website finally prompted me to tackle my knackered old Warwickshire Drooper plum tree, stalwart of hundreds of jars of my world famous spiced plum chutney (thank you Delia.)  More of that in a forthcoming post.

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.

Wish I Was There, Too

Friday Five: Sound Track To Our Friday Night Barbe

One of the greatest joys of a life full with young grads and undergrads, together with a house in France and a car big enough to cart shed loads of guitars, amps and drums backwards and forwards across the English Channel via blessed saint Brittany Ferries, is this -->

Said grads/undergrads idling about all week, sleeping late and only rising to stagger into the garden via the fridge (thank you, Cora) to collapse into deck chairs and onto rugs with barely sufficient energy to spray on the factor 50 before mum carries out a loaded tray. Jugs, glasses, ice cubes and Vico chips. Happy, happy days. Happy, happy Amalee.

But Friday night is barbe night. "Now darlings, I know you're all exhausted, but I'd really like to hear you play." This is mum's speak for, "I'd like to see some evidence of the offensive amounts of cash that over the years I've poured into the pockets of your music teachers. And your sweethearts had better rosen up the bow too..." They didn't disappoint.

Guns N' Roses Sweet Child of Mine with mercy boo wearing her trademark top hat in adulation of Slash. Well that certainly woke up the neighbours...

AC/DC Whole Lotta Rosie

Eric. Layla. The long version. Only ever heard on Planet Rock.

Mock Turtles Can You Dig It

Top Gun anthem Steve Stevens (played for Billy Idol - need I say any more?)

Greenday Holiday. Ok that's six, so stop counting, Rain Man.

Radio Caroline - 90.8 FM Rennes

If I'm sitting behind the wheel of my car, and it's Monday to Friday between the hours of 6.30am and 7pm, I have the radio on and Traffic Announcements activated. Some mornings, dependant on where I'm working that day, I'll pick up every local radio TA from Yorks to Oxford. Cracking! I love the way TAs dominate my driving day. I love hearing about old friends like the Catthorpe Interchange; delays from Hemel down to Watford; and as bloody usual, southbound delays at Nottingham. Sally Traffic is ofc, the Queen of Traffic Announcements. She often talks about Operation Stack. Find it here.

The Highways Agency is currently working with other EU transport authorities to research drivers' understanding of current and potential future pictograms. Using pictograms rather than text-based messages will mean overseas drivers should have a better understanding of VSM messages. The survey can be found here. But hurry, once 1,000 responses have been logged per language, the survey closes. Give it a go. It's really interesting!

I'm starting to feel a little homesick. Except that no TAs are tuned in here, and all I listen to in the car is http://www.radiocaroline.eu/. It's where I first heard Katie Perry's California Gurls and Troy Olsen's Summer Thing. Catch up on YouTube. Summer happiness in sunny France.

Aquatic Gardening

I can pin point the moment I went right off water gardens, pools, large ponds and lakes. I was sitting on the terrace of a friend's villa in Spain as the Med burned all around us, reading a book by Chris Stewart. In it he describes the process of building a reed bed filtration unit for his Spanish home's grey water. He goes on to describe how on completion, his wife and daughter would swim in this perfectly clear pool, as frogs and fish brushed against their arms and legs. Even now this makes me feel slightly queasy and goose bumpy.

Moving fresh water, rivers and the sea hold little fear for me, and seaside rock pools make the most perfect water gardens.

On Summer Rainfall

Running into St Malo for an ice cream, I parked up near the Channel Isles ferry port and headed straight for the vendors along the Passage de la Petite Hermine. I used to drum it into the children to always try a different flavour, until Beloved Firstborn pointed out that his mum always ordered a coffee ice cream, so why couldn't he always have chocolate? There's no arguing with a child's logic: it's best to admit defeat and give in.

The benches flanking the little square were all taken, so I cut up past the cathedral and made my way up to the walls. This pirate city has been a part of my life for decades, and even as rain starts to fall its still a beautiful place to come for an ice cream.

Announcements For The Public Good

No, April, I'm not going to add you because you'll only give me syphilis.

Friday Five: Why I love The World Wide Web

If I hadn't surfed on into April's blog a million years ago, I'd never have found her brilliant "Friday Five" slot. I need to holiday less and blog more. Here is my entry to an April classic call for blog comments...

I have lived:
1. The life of Riley
2. On three continents
3. By the skin of my teeth
4. In exile
5. Beside the sea
6. A life that’s full, and travelled each and every highway
7. In Belfast during the shoot to kill policy
8. In a house full with sunshine
9. Endless hours stuck in motorway traffic jams
10. To tell the tale


I have witnessed:
11. A car on fire on the hard shoulder
12. Persian Muslim women speaking sign language
13. Birth certificates
14. A NYC police woman control 8 lanes of traffic

15. A woman leap off a plane on the apron in a panic in high summer after 9.11. The aircon was broken, so we couldn’t take off and they opened up the doors. This was the cause of the delay, not the effect of her leap

16. Documents
17. A dead teenager at the side of the road, his motorbike beside him
18. Dawn in the Middle East
19. The closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics
20. A perfect martini made for me in the Oak Room Bar at the Plaza Hotel


I have heard:
21. New York taxi horns at 3am… why?
22. The voices of firemen cutting me from a car
23. The bubbling of a cake as it comes out of the oven
24. Planet Rock at full volume
25. I do
26. The dawn chorus
27. The call to prayer
28. The Angelus in Rome
29. That your eyeballs pop out if you don’t close your eyes when you sneeze
30. If you unscrew your belly button your bum drops off


I have lost:
31. Faith
32. Hope
33. One new earring
34. My temper
35. My university 4x100m relay record to faster women
36. The ability to stay up all night
37. Patience with hypocrites
38. All sense of proportion when buying underwear
39. My taste for chardonnay
40. 41.


I have found:
41. French aluminium coins circa WW2 on a beach near St Malo
42. Lasting friendships online
43. That Nigella’s recipes don’t always work
44. That Delia’s always do
45. Lack of sleep makes me murderous
46. An entire though hollow lobster carcass on a beach
47. That Veronica Wallis’ (RUA) nudes make me cry
48. My best friend at our first meeting, which lasted five hours
49. There’s no such thing as a free lunch
50. The love of my life


I love:
51. Kevin Costner
52. Wearing heels
53. Coco Mademoiselle
54. Lots of detail
55. Certainty
56. Pablo Neruda’s love sonnets
57. Going to the cinema in the afternoon
58. A well-stocked pantry
59. Opening presents on Christmas morning
60. Sainsbury’s tea


I can:
61. Propagate by grafting
62. Follow intricate cross stitch patterns
63. Shuck oysters
64. Do handstands on the beach
65. Stamp about in work boots all day and still look sexy and professional
66. Laugh like a drain
67. Nurture teenagers brilliantly
68. Avoid urgent matters
69. Choose great wine and books by the label / cover alone
70. Discuss Derby County’s premiership campaign


I loathe:
71. Jellied eels
72. Washing poo from baby’s backs when they went up a size in nappies
73. The N word
74. James Woods. Sorry James
75. Missing Gardener’s World
76. People who eat with their mouths open
77. People spitting
78. Being nice to drunks
79. Cleaning the oven
80. Poorly drafted documents


I hope:
81. My gravestone says, “… here lies the beloved wife of Kevin Costner”
82. My passport arrives in time for my holiday
83. To see shooting stars this year
84. I don’t get caught speeding on the M1
85. To awake in Isla Negra, Chile
86. I don’t get my fingers burnt a second time
87. To be as knowledgeable as my head gardener
88. To have an outrageously sparkly ring from Tiffany’s
89. To become Miss Marple (Joan Hickson) on my 70th birthday
90. Therefore I am


I am trying:
91. To find time to get back on a horse
92. To eat more fruit
93. To eat less Marmite on toast
94. To believe, in the chasm of silence
95. To worry less
96. The patience of a saint
97. To read Dante’s Inferno
98. To be good enough to enter paradise
99. To be
100. To stop writing lists

Victorian Treasures In A Clinker Path

The following from late July early August this year:

I started at 5am because the rain was forecast to arrive at 11am, and I hoped to get the back of it broken by then. And right on schedule, it started raining, but softly, so I carried on until lunchtime. The gravel had been laid straight onto a bed of builder's sand, the perfect medium for couch grass and dock weeds, so they all had to be dug out. Garden paths need sturdy foundations as they can remain in place for generations if laid out as part of a well thought out design. Simply chucking in a 6" bed of builders sand and topping off with an inch or two of the more expensive gravel only provides a luxurious bed for deep rooted weeds. So out it all came. I mixed the sand and gravel into heaps and barrowed it across to a quiet area of the garden to await another project over the winter.

Then I began to skim off the layers of hard, impacted soil underneath the path until about four inches down I started to hit evidence of the original Victorian path. Bits of clay pipes, broken crockery, usually blue and white patterned, shards of broken green glass bottles, bottles likely to have contained medicine or poison, given the ridges along the bottle sides, clay and glass marble-shaped spheres used as the stopper in bottles of Victorian ginger beer, even a couple of tea pot lids. All these treasures are the classic domestic detritus of earlier dwellings on a landscape, and point to the origins of my house and garden. At the time they were thrown into waste pits and perhaps later dug out to join clinker when the garden path was originally laid.

Clinker is the general name given to waste from industrial processes particularly those that involve smelting metals or burning fossil fuels. In this area of Derbyshire that's likely to be coal. Clinker often forms a loose, black deposit that can consist of coke, coal, charcoal or grit, together with other waste materials, and was often reused to make hard paths. It is laid & rolled, and forms a hard path with a rough surface. If my clinker path has been in situ for maybe a century or more, it is the perfect structure to reinstate and use again.

Friday Five: Chuck Norris

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Chuck Norris (But You Were Too Afraid of Roundhouse Kicks To Ask)

1. Chuck Norris can divide by zero.

2. Hannibal didn't sack Rome; Chuck Norris did.

3. Chuck Norris can believe it's not butter.

4. When an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger was shown in Iraq, Saddam surrendered to Chuck Norris just in case.

5. Chuck Norris has the greatest Poker-Face of all time. He won the 1983 World Series of Poker, despite holding only a Joker, a Get out of Jail Free Monopoly card, a 2 of clubs, 7 of spades and a Blockbuster Video card.

Prunus Domestica "Warwickshire Drooper"

This is a lovely plum tree, producing masses of yellow plums towards the early weeks of autumn. It's had quite a chequered past, and more than likely started life as Prunus domestica Dundale from Kent. It was grown commercially in the English Midlands under the name Magnum, until that was replaced by Warwickshire Drooper.

Keeper's Nursery describes it thus: medium sized, oval-oblong fruit. Yellow skin speckled with red spots, brownish russet patches and covered with a thin grey bloom. Tender, yellow flesh. Thick skinned. Quite sweet. Fruit hangs well on the tree. Very vigorous tree with a conspicuous weeping habit. Very heavy regular cropper. Attractive tree particularly in the early autumn when it has long hanging branches full of yellow plums.

I've been sitting at my garden table throughout the summer, marvelling at this little tree's ability to live up to its name. It seems as if each week the branches of Warwickshire Drooper become more curvy; reaching upwards all spring, then curling outwards and under the combined weight of DNA and a bumper crop of plums. The June drop took few victims. Then last night I sat near one of the thymes cutting some herbs for a supper of toasted bread and herbed feta, and my eyes were entranced by the sheer weight of plums bending the tree so low. So low that the trunk looked to be pretty much 45 degrees to the soil. Enchantment eventually gave way to the realisation that it wasn't the weight of plums but a loosened trunk where it entered the soil, that was the problem. Closer inspection revealed a gap measuring a good couple of inches around the base of the trunk, and mild panic set in. I called beloved firstborn to help, and whilst he slowly pushed the tree perpendicular, I dug over the surrounding soil, then firmed it in with good, strong boot action. I added a supporting stake and then went through each branch in turn "June dropping" with secateurs and a new sense of urgency. There's only so many plums you want to eat warm from the tree, and I like this plum tree so much, I didn't want to lose it due to carelessness on my part.

It's an unusual variety. I first saw it summers ago, in the Castle Bromwich Hall Gardens, near the flight path of Birmingham Airport and within the suburbs of Birmingham itself. The Hall was built in 1599 by Sir Edward Devereux and extended by Sir John Bridgeman I about 100 years later.The Walled Gardens cover some 10 acres, and were developed by several generations of the Bridgeman Family (later to become the Earls of Bradford) reaching peaks of excellence around 1740 and 1900. The Gardens fell into decline during the second half of the twentieth century until they were rescued by the Castle Bromwich Hall and Gardens Trust in 1985.

The Walled Gardens (listed grade II*); a rare example of formal English Baroque garden design, are being restored as near as possible to the period 1680 - 1740. I like everything about these gardens, especially that they are cared for by a largely volunteer workforce of committed individuals, passionate about our horticultural heritage. And I like the little tea rooms, where they serve cakes and scones made by the workforce, all "ladies of a certain age," and sell you packets of seeds, harvested from the Gardens and made from folded brown paper with hand written labels. RHS Wisley this isn't, but it is a place full with passion and commitment and love.

http://www.btinternet.com/~jimperkins/page66.html

Weekend Lunch In Sunny Derbyshire

Can this be improved?


Oh yes.

Eight Tagged Blogs, Eventually. Notification To Follow, Eventually

It's taken me a week to get my act together and sort out the tagging incident. There are rules for this sort of thing, so click onto Mr Anthrope's blog if, like me, you are a BlogTageeNewbe. Here are 8 blogs selected from the 20 or so that I read regularly, and think that you'll enjoy reading. In no particular order, they are;

1. Laila El-Haddad's blog, Raising Yousef. Laila is a Palestinian journalist who divides her time between Gaza and the United States, where Yousuf's father, a Palestinian refugee denied his right of return to Palestine, resides. This blog is about the trials of raising her son between Gaza and the US, whilst working as a journalist, and everything that entails from potty training to border crossings.

2. The London Underground blog. Oh man, this is blogging at its best. The blog's webmeister Annie Cole and her sidekicks Neil n Chris have taken travelling in a cattle pen to a new level. I just love the disgusting nature of their photos of revolting behaviour of commuters; that creature cutting his nails should be slapped with an ASBO. I really like the pictures of commuters at their sartorial best, sort of a Heat magazine for slobrities, and the polar opposite of the following blog.

3. When Notorious F.A.G. announced last November that he was ceasing all blogging, the screams of panic around the world registered 3.4 on the Richter scale. Notorious may have been emulated, but nothing will replace this; the first, the last, the everythang.

4. Robot Guy convinced me to begin saving not for my teenagers' universities fees, but to buy a ton of nickel and tuck it away somewhere safe. Okey cokey, cowboy! But there is a serious point to this; how can families reduce the risks of exposure to nickel? Leave the shrapnel as a tip whenever you're eating out in Europe.

5. Corey Amaro may describe herself as just an American living and loving in France, but she takes a stunning photo and her blog eases my homesickness for my other home at the seaside.

6. Now this blog really is outrageous, and ought to be headlined by Wikipedia as a fine example of gastroporn. Jules Clancy's Stone Soup makes me hungry for the seasons to come, and the extensive nature of her culinary skills and cooking repertoire seems boundless. I've made her entire dukkah menu many times over the past year.

7. GastroPunk and MathsChick recount their adventures with a Riverford organic vegetable box in this blog, living the good life up in the big smoke, (that's London, for our colonial friends...). Read each entry on this blog; cook everything they make; follow the instructions for prepping artichokes, and you too may one day have a fridge as beautiful as theirs.

8. And your blog. You know who you are. And you certainly don't need any further encouragement from me! Feel free to accept the tagging, and you decide whether to continue with the 8 bits of info, or 8 tagged blogs. You could of course, simply place your favourite photo in lieu of any further effort. Because it's your photos and your words that entrance me! Thank you.

A Pair Of Standard Roses, In Beehive Terracotta Pots

Oh Earth, Wait For Me

Turn me oh sun
towards my native destiny,
rain from the ancient forest,
return to me the fragrance and the swords
that fall from the sky,
the solitary peace of field and rock,
the moisture at the margins of the river,
the scent of the larch,
the wind, alive like a heart
beating among the remote flock
of the great araucaria.

Earth, return to me your pure gifts
the towers of silence that rose
from the solemnity of their roots:
I want to return to being what I have not been,
learn to return from such depths
that amongst all the things of nature
I could live or not live: no matter
to be one more stone, the dark stone,
the pure stone that is carried by the river.

Pablo Neruda from: ‘Memorial de Isla Negra’

"It's hard to do this stuff with only one hand."

Don't you just love the world wide web?

And did you know that Richard Curtis not only wrote, co-wrote or directed Bridget Jones's Diary, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually, (incidentally, one of my favourite films of all time, right up there with Mrs Miniver,) but also the Vicar of Dibley. And of course you know that the starring role in The Vicar is Dawn French; best friend of Joanna Lumley, gifted, gifted actress and star of Absolutely Fabulous, (and secretly whom my best friend and I tussle with each other, to be).

And sometimes I think that the greatest gift the Creator gives to us mere mortals, its the gift of humour. And comic timing. Because without comic timing, humour is reduced to nothing more important that a shopping list. I know this, because I don't have comic timing, and can kill a joke stone dead. Joanna Lumley has shed loads of comic timing. See her in this clip at the bottom of the page, "Patsy's feeling ... peckish?"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/articles/a/absolutelyfabulo_7770095.shtml

...... And that's as far as I got last night, or rather at 1.30hrs this morning, when I fell asleep at my desk. I have absolutely no idea where I was going with this post, or how I was going to bring April into it. But I'd clearly got rolling! But starting work at 5am Thursday morning cutting out, clearing and relaying a gravel path onto the original Victorian clinker path, took its toll, and I fell asleep. How sad is that. I only woke up when my phone alarm went off to tell me Local Hero was starting on Channel4. So like a fool I lifted my head off the keys, and went across the hall to watch the film. You know that horrible bleary look you get when you've been up travelling halfway around the world for two days without sleep? When your eyes are open but there's no-one home? That's what I looked like when I fell asleep 15 minutes into the film.