Small hours stock taking

Even at this hour, not too bad, all things considered

(as if all things can ever be considered).

Memories keep badly on the whole it’s true,

but anger mostly used up now, so much the better

there’s little use for it these days.

Contentment is in good supply, and peace;

love in abundance, I grow quite fat on that;

enough of busy-ness, plans, a good pinch of resolve.

The mouse shit, dirt and cobwebs, fear and accidie

are regularly swept away and kept at bay.

I know, however, that the debt is mounting.

I’ve made an application to my creditors, several times,

at least to let me pay off some of the accumulated interest,

tried to persuade them I can embrace frugality,

cope with hardship, am even willing to take on the costs of others

more hard-pressed than myself. But now I’ve given up,

they just won’t hear of it, preferring, I’m afraid

to close in later with the bill in full.

Friday 19th August - six, no less than six, beautiful things.

 The pretty new checkout girl at Ecomarché looks puzzled when we ask for our Radio Times.  Her colleague at the next till grins and goes and fetches it - she doesn't know the routine, I say.  Then we go to the fish van in the car park, and buy sleek and fresh lemon sole fillets; no, no winkles today, I say.  

The lemon sole, dusted in flour and fried in oil and butter mixed (I'm too lazy to clarify butter) is perfect, firm and golden. I enjoy our Friday morning shop in Quessoy.

~ 

Our friend D is weak and dehydrated with radiotherapy, and of course with what it is treating.  His wife J is more desperate and tearful than we have ever seen her.  The taxi/ambulance driver, Vèronique, when she takes him into the clinic, insists he sees the duty doctor, who admits him straight away, fearing that a hot weekend at home might be the last straw, and then requests a consultation with the chief oncologist, and by this evening he is settled in, on a drip, and already more comfortable .  J is high with relief.  These back-up, ancillary/para - medical people - taxi-ambulance, pharmacists etc - who are not afraid to issue directives and insist with the medics (who, in their turn, are not too proud to listen) are one of the things that make the health system good here, I think.  

J and I arrange to go and pick sloes in the arboretum tomorrow, and then I'll take her on to visit D at the clinic.

~  

Tom makes a very handsome jar of pickled vegetables: cauliflower, carrots, and shallots - to go with a meal next week.  The recipe called for small pickling onions, but shallots were what was available, and they are much prettier, with their soft mauve-pink tint, and I'm sure a better flavour.  There is honey in the pickling liquor, and tarragon, fennel and bay leaves.  I snitch a very small floret of cauliflower as it is cooling, but don't say.

Then he goes and does final battle with a flatpack chest of  drawers, which the leaflet said would take 30 minutes, but which has been ongoing since yesterday, and Tom is no slouch when it comes to assembling flatpack furniture, believe me.  The drawers don't line up, and need re-jigging, it is heavy and awkward, and by the end some slightly off-colour remarks are being made about the manufacturing credentials of the PRC, but by tonight we have a completed chest whose drawers open and close properly. Then he sets about rubbing down the gesso on a canvas for a still life.

I say I don't believe anyone else has a husband who is so Good At Jobs.  He shrugs modestly, and says perhaps M does, and he's sure P does...  

Pshaw - I snort - they can keep them!

~   

An on-line friend sends me a link to a beautiful short story she has written.

~  

I weed the whole azalea bed.  The camellia (sorry Dumas) we put in this year has plenty of strong green shoots on it, but also a tight ligature of bindweed. We don't - touchwood - get enormous amounts of bindweed in the garden, and I am reminded of not only its strangulating ruthlessness, but also the satisfaction of carefully unwinding its spiral from the host plant and, with a final sharp tug, removing it.

~ 

Photo: collage

- best of the webs, and a Japanese anemone (might be worth a click or two to enlarge.  B/W shows up line, as well as form).

Thursday 18th August

~ A misty, dewy morning and for the first time for ages I wandered around the garden with the camera before breakfast.  The swallows, I counted twenty-two at one sitting, were lined up preening and chuntering on the wires, and the garden was festooned with beaded spiders' webs, which an hour later had all but disappeared, evaporated with the mist.

~ Molly and I went out a little later in the morning to pick blackberries.  We didn't get too many, but I came back with a few scratches and nettle stings, and my sandals (not good footwear for foraging really) and the bottom of my trousers wet and seedy, so something of the job description of blackberrying was fulfilled.

~ Photo:

Snailtrack, also early this morning.

Frosty morning 4 - hellebores

I don't really give these the attention they deserve.  Not quite Christmas roses, but budding and flowering bravely when little else wants to know.

As well as the daintier purple and yellow ones above, we have quite a lot of the big light green ones, which tend to grow rather monstrous and sprawl about in a fleshy and ungainly manner,

 but since they are doing so in an otherwise somewhat lost space under the birch trees, we leave them to it.  lately, however, after many years, they underwent and explosion of self-seeding, and their engaging still small-leaved offspring are scattered all over the soil in their thousands.

Not quite sure what we'll do when they all grow into grotesque splayed-out triffids, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Frosty morning 3 - bark and black plastic

A garden is a lovesome thing God wot, but our garden has a fair few unlovely areas, it must be said.  Still, a degree of dishevelment  is good for the wildlife, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.  So the ceanothus which died in the cold winter we had last year mostly still lies where it fell, its bark peeling off, as the frost picks out..  I daresay something is using it for food or shelter, if only micro-organisms.

Black plastic has always played quite a significant role in garden management hereabouts, the heavy duty kind sold for making silage clamps.  Currently its holding the raised vegetable beds in stasis. I can't really claim that it's especially eco-friendly as its main purpose is to stop anything growing, but toad and newts and bugs and snails and such like do live under it, and it does do interesting things when it freezes, and the puddles  which collect in it trap dead leaves and other litter.

It's held down by pieces of old roof slate and rocks, which the thrushes use as anvils to break the snails they find in abundance in the many neglected corners of the garden.  

Frosty morning 2 - Jack in the Green

Living in Gloucestershire, I worked with a local girl who used to say 'It's right Jack out there!' on frosty mornings.  I don't know if this was a regional expression or something of her own.

There is new green growth, (there always is) but I've been too lazy and recalcitrant to look at it, until the frost showed it.  

Foxgloves leaves unfurl again into their two year cycle, dreaming in the ice of towers of summer purple,

and buttercups never give up, stubborn, pernicious globes of sunshine that they are.

Someone gave us a bundle of these little palm plants, last year perhaps.  We were rather unimpressed, stuck them in the soil and  more or less forgot about them, now their splayed and folded fans of leaves are revealed more boldly,

and the evergreen ferns and mosses wait patiently on the granite.

More to come.

Frosty morning 1 - dead matter

Post after post and barely a new photograph to be had. Sorry times, but in truth this month of January does not inspire.  I look at the camera as I go out and mostly can't be bothered to pick it up, and rarely regret it.  Little is emerging in the natural world, and I lack the time or motivation to look further afield.  And most of all, the light is dismal just now, rendering the colours of the landscape the shades of brown and green drab which I associate with this time of year and which have little to recommend them.  Reason tells me I can't complain, I am thankful for safe roads on dark mornings, and the milder temperatures mean a saving on electricity and firewood. The evenings are perceptibly lighter already, if the mornings aren't, and in fact there are catkins and a few leafbuds here and there, and I have a tentative feeling that perhaps we've come through, and it could have been worse.

But I have so been missing taking pictures, and I was happy yesterday (Wednesday) when the daylight revealed a crisp white frost, and a bright sun just loitering below the horizon, and it wasn't a work morning.  So a walk around the garden was called for, in dressing gown with bare feet in plastic sabots, ending in wet hems to pyjama trousers, to catch the moment.

Ice often seems to me like nature making art.  Frost suspends everything alike; growth and decay, living and inanimate, are arrested at the same moment, their forms preserved, delineated and enhanced. What appeared to be brown dead matter and other garden  rubbish momentarily regained a new and bolder identity, and drew the eye afresh.

Stalks and seedheads,

dead leaves like kraft paper, and hollow spent pods,

all caught and commemorated before they turn to dust and earth again.

(I took a lot of pictures, so I'll put them up in several posts.)

Unseasonable

We shouldn't really be waking up to this at this time of year.

We've not even really had any frost yet; the flowers were still enjoying a last fling,

and the autumn leaves and fruits were still in full swing,

and the hydrangeas were still only mid-purple, their autumn colour, between summer blue and winter brown, as they're really leaves, just posing as flowers, of course.

It's all rather pretty,

but I'd sooner not have to drive out in it tomorrow morning - it's still here tonight.

Matters to smile about

A hard morning's rising, but tea and  toothpaste, orange juice and toast, coffee and marmite and marmalade, all combine to make the waking world a place where I'm happy to be again. 

~

The bamboo steamers stood stacked in the middle of the table like some marvellous dream; each time it seemed we emptied them, another layer was removed, revealing yet another filled again with the steamed dumplings. And the smells of plum sauce and honey, star anise and cloves sweetened the house for days.

~

On the road which passes through the market gardens on the way to St Brieuc, I pull up behind a tractor with a trailer loaded with Brussels sprouts. It makes me think of Christmas.

~

My friend G, he of the Gallé cat etc, has just opened a Wordpress blog for his paintings, which are glorious coloured abstract landscapes, or at least the two he's posted so far are.  He's being sniffy about blogging and says he probably won''t do much on it, so I reckon that means he has to be chivvied a bit.

~

(Stansted Mountfitchet, Essex.)

Rosy-fingered dawn

From not so long ago, about the 21st October.  There are still a lot of flowers, no frost yet, but so much of the lovely autumn colour is being washed away by the rain.