Scorchio

A weekend 'phone conversation with my father:

Him: "Sorry to bother you but I need a bit of advice, I'm feeling very warm and I'm starting to get a bit breathless."

Me (feeling breathless due to the combination of asthma, heat and the effects of having, on Tuesday, taking advantage of the cat I don't have's practising for her Backwoodscat Badge to fumigate the house after she'd brought in little friends): "Have you had one of those ice lollies I bought you?"

Him: "I'm saving them for when it gets warm."

If you ever wonder where I get it from. (He had an ice lolly and he was "100% better!")

I had thought the cat I do not have was being uncharacteristically sensible in not sunbathing in the back garden this morning until I saw that she'd found a patch of sun by the closed front gate which meant the postman had to jump over the wall to post today's junk mail. She came in briefly but any hopes that she might come in and stay cool were dashed when she used the litter tray and trotted back out again, demanding tuna with menaces. She's lying on her back in a clump of marjoram with a woodpigeon sitting in the cherry tree not four feet above her head and they're both fast asleep. I'm staying indoors and leaving the silly beggars to it.

Gladness

The Small Object of Desire is in that mood where she needs to have been drawn by Leo Baxendale.We'd been round to my parents' for lunch and they'd had "Pollyanna" on the telly, the one with Amanda Burton as the auntie. We were back at mine with pots of tea when she asked:

"That film your mum and dad were watching..." 

"Pollyanna?" 

"Yes. Pollyanna. What was that all about?" 

"It's a timeless classic. Haven't you seen it before?" 

"No. What was it about?" 

"Well... Gladness and the redemptive power of positive thinking. And that." 

"What a lot of toss. I'm going for a poo."

Jolly

2014 set out its stall on day one: more dark and dismal at noon that during the midnight celebrations. The Cat I Don't Own has been bored silly: punctuating periods of mad tear-arsing up and down the stairs with moody longueurs at the doorstep. When I suggest that she may want to go outside for a romp in the garden (or at least a crap) she gives me a look, mutters something about it pissing down then goes to have a kip on the pile of books on the spare bed. (There's a pile of books on the spare bed because the bookcase in the living room fell to pieces again, irreparably this time, due to overloading.)

Strangely enough, it's been mild enough outside for there still to be some bumblebees floating round the garden. There's thin pickings at the moment: just the Mahonia and a few primroses. The cyclamen finished a couple of weeks ago and the snowdrops are only just above ground level. I keep meaning to do something about the Winter flowering in the garden. If 2014 pans out the way I'm hoping it will I should have slightly more time for sorting these things out.

Spoor

I had a slight gardening mishap. Nothing too bad: I'd just jabbed myself with a garden implement. Unfortunately it was in one of those places where the amount of blood pouring out is entirely out of proportion to the size of the wound. I thought I'd managed to patch myself up without spilling any on anything that couldn't be wiped clean, but apparently not. A couple of hours later I heard a shout from the bathroom:

"Eeeww... Is this your blood on the bog roll?"

I don't know what she imagines I get up to while she's out having her hair done.

New term

In a fruitless effort to find the pruning saw (it was in the kitchen, under the cat treats) I discovered that we've had a nice little crop of damsons this year. I've had more fruitful years but they've always included a large percentage of wastage. This year I got down a few pounds of nice, show-quality damsons so I'll have to have a bit of a worry about doing something useful with them (I'm thinking perhaps a damson cobbler).

A few weeks ago I cut back all the dead bits off the old flowering currant at the bottom of the garden, revealing that the old currant's gone the way of the great wardrobe spider and that a couple of layered shoots have taken nicely just in front of the original. This has them competing a bit with the damson and a couple of self-sown Cotoneaster. I'll grub out the Cotoneaster as they're not bringing a lot to the party, not even very much in the way of berries. Once I've done that I'll put a heavy mulch over most of the area, taking a bit of care around the hellebores' evergreen leaves and a bit less care where the hardy geraniums will have died down for the winter.

The pruning saw was for the first stage in my "tidying up that hazel tree," The Small Object of Desire's way of saying: "Chop most of that down." I'd already decided that it was time to do a bit of coppicing; I'd last done it five years ago. And I'm not so worried about losing a year's crop of hazels as the squirrel only left the one on the bush (and a huge pile of hazel shells in the back border). So I've taken down the first couple of dozen two-year-old pea sticks and a couple of four-year-old trunks. This involved finding new homes for some red admiral chrysalises (chrysalides?) which puzzles me rather as the nearest nettles are a couple of hundred yards away.

Cutting back the hazel is just one component of this summer's effort at resurrecting the patio. I've cleared out most of the old pots, which had become a bit tatty and haphazardly-supplied with various species of willowherbs, dismantled the relict rose trellis and tidied up most of the paving. I've decided that the marjoram, lemon balm and self-sown black violets can stay but the flag irises (I know, I know) will have to go (I have a home planned for them) and some of the more thuggish elements of the hardy geraniums will need curbing quite a bit. All this will please The Small Object no end as she has a dream of being able to sit on the patio playing tennis with The Cat I Do Not Have.

I've not told her yet that I'm planning on a buying splurge on new plants for the bottom of the garden...

Garden news

The garden's full of baby magpies and singing robins and twice a day a huge troupe of spadgers descent on the feeders and bounce their way around the gooseberry bush.

Having hacked down the boysenberries to a manageable size they've taken advantage of the warm wet past couple of months to regroup and repopulate the borders. As, indeed, has the dog rose by the blackcurrant bush: the two of these have conspired to take over those bits of the path that haven't been obliterated by geraniums and Lysimachia "Firecracker." This last is a rather thug in my garden. The idea had been for it to be the under-story of the bed in front of the living room window, its dark red leaves providing a backdrop to the orange standard Azalea in late Spring and the vivid red Crocosmia "Lucifer" in the Summer. It had other plans, leaving the border and scampering its way across the path. Early each Spring I dig it out of the path and plonk it back into the border. Each Summer that stretch of path becomes obliterated yet again.

This border's getting a bit lank and there's a bit too much grass in there so I'm inclined to dig the whole thing over again this Winter. When I first planned this garden (it was planned, I promise you) the idea was this this border would be dark and bright: reds and golds and purples. Most of the garden was to be yellows and pinks and whites with the bottom end being blues and purples (I was trying to do an aerial perspective thing there). It didn't all work the way as planned but it's OK.

Sings the wise thrush

Today is International Dawn Chorus Day. As if to emphasise the matter, all the feathered hooligans are in fine fettle, whether it's the wren and the blackcap blasting out their song from amongst the brambles; or the sparrows and goldfinches chirruping from the treetops; or Frankie Howerd the cat muttering to itself from next door's garage roof.

The cat I don't have made damned sure I was awake for it by jumping on my head at four in the morning.

Ramsons

There are those who would say that my planting wild garlic in the garden is an act of folly, and I'd be amongst their number when I'm grubbing them out of the path. But this time of year they provide a nice picture of glossy fresh green leaves and starry white flowers and I forgive them quite a lot. Especially as they also taste nice, the leaves having that flavour of strong spring onions with a small back-note of garlic about them.

Tonight I made some garlicky mushrooms to go with the pizza. I melted some butter in the frying pan, added a glug of olive oil and then slung in some finely-sliced mushrooms. I'd grubbed up a coiple of wild garlic bulbs, so I cleaned and trimmed these, squashed them with the heavy chopping knife and added these to tne mushrooms. Finally I rolled up a handful of garlic leaves and finely shredded them then added this to the pan.  A minute or so later they were in the serving dish ready to eat.

The sound of gypsy violins in a tin of Ovaltine

My turn to be full of a cold. A tear-stained, snot-ridden idiot.

The Small Object of Desire gets home from work.

"How do you feel?"
"How do I look?"
"A bit grim."
"You're supposed to talk me up, make me feel better.
"You look fucking awful."

Pipe and slippers and the missus and the nippers

I've just found myself standing on the doorstep shouting at The Cat I Do Not Have as she strolled down the path:

"Have you washed behind those ears? Be careful with the traffic, don't get yourself knocked down. And don't be late back in!"

A chap walking down the road glanced over at me and shook his head.

"They don't listen do they? Bloody kids."

Calm waters

It's an argumentative little body I've hitched myself onto.

Today's …discussion… was about whether, if a duck could sneeze, that sneeze would echo.

Wedding tackle

We are going to a wedding. So far the conversation has consisted of:

• "You're not wearing that."
• "That shirt doesn't go with that suit."
• "What do you think you're wearing?"
• "No."
• "If you think you're going out with me wearing that waistcoat you've got another think coming."
• "She's had to invite their Elaine's lot from Bolton so don't be showing me up."
• "You don't need to wear a hat."

I tried to have the cat go in my place but neither of them were wearing it.

Dancing with tigers

Judging by the state of the The Cat I Don't Have the growing season is upon us, which is a tad premature given that the Daily Express is promising us another Ice Age and all the musk oxen you can eat at your local MacDonald's. At the moment it is 55% by volume fur, 10% garden debris, 5% exotic fauna and, optimistically, we'd like to think the rest is cat. I'm happy to take it on trust, I'm not going in there no matter how insistent the invitation.

Last weekend we were ripped from our slumbers by the most appalling caterwauling. The Small Object of Desire sat bolt upright, looked at her watch, realised it was not quite yet noon and said things Not Fit For A Sunday. I looked outside and saw that it was cat. She was sitting in the rosemary bush yelling like The Banshee Who Stood On Some Lego at Frankie Howerd, the cat from two doors down. They are not friends. We call him Frankie Howerd partly because he looks like the late Frankie's last Irish but mostly because he has the same vocalisations. It's quite unnerving to be lying there in the footstep hours of the night listening to something outside going: "Oooh... No. I'm down to my last titter." If he ever encounters the collared dove that sounds like Lesley Philips we'll be having Elstree on the doormat asking for royalties.

Fancy dress

The Small Object of Desire and myself are going to a wedding this Spring. Not ours, I hasten to add; we've had that conversation and although (a) we both have the dressing-up togs and (b) we intend living together for a bit, it turns out that neither of us are fussed enough to go to the expense and neither of us could fit into the clobber anyway. Somebody else's.

The tension, as always in these affairs, is clothes. The bride-to-be told her bridesmaid (The Small Object) that she can have any colour dress so long as it's mid-blue. Luckily, in the end they both fell for something in royal blue with a blue gauze-y thing overlaying it to make it look shimmery mid-blue which they can both live with. So that leaves the shoes. Women and shoes. You know what I mean. Made worse by the bride's having Very Strong Views On Shoes and the Small Object having completely different Very Strong Views On Shoes. As only women can. Even intelligent women capable of being quite sensible and practical when the mood takes them. Or perhaps especially so. I suggested wellingtons. I don't know how I survived into my fifties.

And then there's the elephant in the room: my suit.

"We need to think about getting you a suit."
"We did that last month."
"No. A suit for the wedding. What sort of suit were you thinking about getting?"
"I wasn't. Can't I go in my new suit?"
"No, that's your work suit."
"How about one of the beige linen suits I've got?"
"Because they're beige and because they've all got stains along the arms where you've spilt tea and leant in it."
"They're good suits. Very comfy."
"Not with those trousers. I can tell your religion when you're wearing them."
"So not them then?"
"No. What sort of suit are you getting?"
"How about something nice in Black Watch tartan?"
"We'll talk about this later."

The awful thing is: I'm now at an age where I can see myself buying and wearing a suit in Black Watch tartan.

Feathered seasons

The school playing field across the road from Railway Cuttings are as good an indicator of the season than many. Better, indeed, than the flowers in the local gardens (we've primroses, roses and magnolias in bloom currently). The wood pigeons are there throughout the year, I'm astonished they find enough to get by with (there's obviously enough for forty-odd of them to have littered the grass over the weekend). Black-headed gulls, starlings, rooks and goldfinches are also year-round habitués. I don't know where the mistlethrushes have disappeared to, I hope they've not been got at by something.

Autumn starts in August when the common gulls come back. They've generally made themselves scarce by the end of April, though there's generally one or two lurking about in the crowds. By mid-November they outnumber the black-headed gulls. Completing the set is the odd one or two lesser black-backs. Their arrival foretold the start of the school holidays, they'll drift off at Easter. I'm never sure why it's only ever one or two lesser black-backs; it's never three or more.

We only recently started getting jackdaws round our way. I've no idea where they're nesting but the feverish activity over the summer suggests they had plenty of mouths to feed. They move away from the field this time of year, moving on instead to the school playground and the local car parks with the pied wagtails.

Soon we'll know we're in for it: the meadow pipits will turn up and we'll have to get out the big quilts. Hey ho, soon be Christmas.

Bone idle

All those things I put off until I had a bit of time to do it...

• Get some sleep.
• Read some of the books in that big pile on the sofa.
• Clean the bathroom.
• Vacuum the window ledges.
• Watch The Small Object of Desire de-flea The Cat I Do Not Have.
• Chop down all those dogwood bushes that have erupted in the front garden.
• De-flea  The Small Object of Desire after she's finished de-fleaing The Cat I Do Not Have.
• Do something about that back fence without hurting myself this time.
• Chop back the boysenberry jungle in the back garden.
• Write some blog posts about Julian and Sandy; the rôle of licorice allsorts in parliamentary democracy; speckled woods: bully boys of the brambles; and, perhaps Titch and Quackers.
• Do something about that pile of clothes on the spare bed.
• Take those jackets to the dry-cleaners.
• Clean that window. You know, *that* one..
• Write some posts in the serious blog about systemic failures in public library strategy; social media as stock promotion tools; and integrating back-office systems.
• Empty the cat litter tray that The Cat I Do Not Have only uses as my 4 o'clock alarm clock.
• Edit the contents of the fridge
• Find that sock that fell behind the cooker

What I actually did...

A weery drudje rite (chiz, chiz)

Well, I'm well under the cosh... (Caution: This post includes middle-aged bloke whingeing)

The Small Object of Desire is out with her mates again, having coffee and cakes and a gossip while I'm left behind cat-sitting again. Cat-sitting at Railway Cuttings mostly involves being sat on by The Cat I Do Not Have, in between its being asleep and its eating. It saves going out for a romp* in the garden for three o'clock in the morning and the moment the breakfast toast is just starting to singe. Yelling at the door for me to let her back in is saved for four o'clock in the morning and the moment we're trying to leave for work at the latest possible moment because it takes The Small Object of desire about four hours to wake up enough to be safe to drive. Tonight I had to rescue the silly pillock† from the wash-house roof (because it's raining and it didn't want to get its feet wet). Stone me, what a life...

The Small Object of desire has been abandoning me to wanton Fate quite a bit lately. The other day it was to go to a Johnny Morrissey concert, the local stop in his I Opened Chester Zoo You Know Tour. She was there amongst the crowd waving their Linda MacCartney vegetarian sausages, which he made speak a quirky commentary with a series of unlikely voices from the corner of his mouth. He's a game old bird and she came home happy with her "Surly Brute From Stretford" T-shirt so all ended well.

Me, I'm just pootling along. There's a phenomenal load of stuff going on at work at the moment, to silly deadlines, so I'm pretty much crashed and burned before I get through the doorway. Which may pass as half an excuse for the state of both house and garden. Somewhere out there there's about six pounds of boysenberries to pick, once I force my way past the roses, geraniums and boysenberry runners. Much to my surprise, and probably due to the vile weather, the gooseberry bush hasn't been ravaged by sawfly this year and we got a pound or so off safely. The downside to the sawfly leaving the leaves alone is that I forget that the bush has inch-and-a-half-long thorns (that's forty six kilometres in the new money), which gave me the opportunity to teach the new goldfinches a few new words in basic Anglo-Saxon.

And aside from all, next to nothing's been happening lately.


* "Going out for a romp." As in: "I'll just scrape my shoe on your doorstep, I trod in a romp on my way here."
† The cat, not The Small Object of Desire. She hardly ever gets stuck on rooves these days.

If it's raining it must still be Summer

Up with the lark, tra la! -- so long as someone had coshed the lark with a sock full of wet sand -- to minister to the breakfast needs of The Small Object of Desire and The Cat I Don't Have. It is not a morning for delicate masculine sensibilities.

Looking at the state of the bath I wonder, yet again, that The Small Object isn't bald.

"You could stuff a good-sized middle-aged man with all that hair," I said.

"That had been my plan," she replied.

Waving her off to work with a cheery smile (which prompted her to point out that there's nothing erotic in "a grimace and a lot of snot-filled grunting"), I turned to look at the hall. Railway Cuttings will never be an Ideal Homes photoshoot but even by my standards it's got a bit untidy so I took to giving the stairs a sweep with the hand brush. The look of disgust that The Cat gave me as she stalked out of the front door will haunt me till lunch time.

On hearing the first ice cream van of Spring

Dear sir,

Kevin and The Small Object of Desire cannot come to work today because it is a nice day and they want to spend all morning in bed and then go and play out they are not well

Yours sincerely,

Our Mum (Mrs.)

I remember when all this was fields

The small niece-child is learning a bit of Spanish at school, which I think is no bad thing. As is the way with these things, it is the purest accident: one of the teachers happens to be Spanish, it's not in the school prospectus. The idea of a school prospectus bewilders me slightly as I'm of that age when you went to your local primary school unless your parents were particularly keen Roman Catapults in which case you went to the nearest R.C. similar. And that was the end of it, none of this trawling through prospectuses, web sites and league tables and poring one's way through the Ofsted reports. Not that I hold much faith in the latter anyway: every school I go past in the course of an ordinary week has a big banner strapped to the front boasting of its Ofsted plaudits ("Sums were enthralling" — Harold Hobsbon). It pisses me off to think that the money schools are spending on Ofsted Plaudit banners could fund a medium-sized county library service book fund for a year.

Anyway… We went to our local primary school, which was good because it was within walking distance, which was good because hardly anyone had a car and them that did only ever used it for their dads to go to and from work.

Our local school was out in the middle of a big field just by the motorway. Over the years the field got bigger and became a school playing field as the wilder edges were given over to dutifully-manicured grass. At the end of the field, behind the first houses of the estate, was a particularly wild stretch full of mustards and thistles and the occasional haunt of lizards. Through this ran the brook which started off from out of nowhere near the cornflake factory and ran for a couple of miles before trickling into the Irwell at Barton. At the school end it was a bit sluggish and fed a small pond choked with water mint. Further up you could squeeze through the railings behind the builder's yard and look for sticklebacks and stray frogs. I wonder how many kids these days get to see a stickleback; it is a concern.

Over yonder, where the shopping centre car park is now, there was a field of Friesian cows, gently a-mooing and chewing their cuds. Behind would be Barton Power Station, a miniature edition of Battersea. I miss that almost as much as the annual air show, three days of random aerospace history to-ing and fro-ing to the aerodrome for the Sunday event. Gypsy moths and a Vulcan bomber were a given. Sometimes there'd be the thrill of a Hurricane or Lockheed Lightning and, just that once, a Spitfire and a Lancaster. Sunday tea time would see everyone standing in their front gardens to watch the Red Arrows and then it was officially over.

Behind the school was the freight line that fed goods to the western half of what was then Europe's biggest industrial complex (that was the reason why we were semi-rural as far as the rates were concerned). Just the other side was a scabby field of scrubby grass, home to partridge, lapwing and many a courting couple. That's concrete now, with a warehouse stuck on it.

Now it's all cropped green fields, car parks and triple carriageways serving the shopping centre. The quiet Sunday afternoon walk behind the church and round to the main road is an expensive leisure complex. And kids trapped in the school run are taken round the shops to socialise them.

I'm under no illusions as to just how rough things were really in the sixties. But the brook at Longford, now culverted and covered over by concrete and beer cans and old mattresses was once lively with yellow flag irises and water boatmen and I don't think much of the swap.