Village vignette

The civic hall had had better days but had only fitfully partaken of them. Once upon the time its floorboards had groaned to the foxtrot strains of Yeti Ibbotson And His Darling Tarzanettes, all teeth, Brilliantine and accidental syncopation. In later years it was the haunt of jumble sales and the village pig crayoning club. The pig crayoning craze was a nine day wonder: the pigs weren't much fond of it, the farmers didn't see a profit in it and there's not much that you can do with a pig once you've drawn a crude picture of a house on it in thick brown wax that you couldn't have done by leaving the poor beast well alone.

On the sixth day of Chrimbo…

On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

A reminder of two more who passed from us in 2018. As if this year wasn't shitty enough.

Do you want dandelion & burdock with that?

By the merest chance I heard the very last edition of "ITMA" being played on Radio 4 Extra the other day (Radio 4 Extra is what we have to call Radio 7 these days now we have to pretend that the BBC doesn't have more than 6 radio stations so as not to upset the Daily Mail). I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it; ITMA generally being something I admire for its craft and delivery but don't much laugh at. I'll have to hunt down some more of the later editions.

Bill Oddie was acting as Comedy Controller for a couple of hours and was working to a thesis that though he loved radio programmes like this at the time they've not aged all that well because a lot of the material would have worked better as television programmes because the performers were, essentially, variety artistes and actors doing variety acts. There's a lot to be said for this argument, particularly as his next exhibit was "Archie's the Lad!" with ventriloquist Peter Brough and his dummy Archie Andrews.

But there's also a lot to be said for the counter-argument that there's a lot of television that should have stayed on the radio. And not just because Peter Brough's lips moved. The Telly Goons are a prized part of my childhood memory but they were only ever a nineteenth-rate version of the colour and invention of the real thing on the radio. Similarly: Jimmy Clitheroe's knees. How scary were they at Saturday tea time?

And there's no way, shape or form that Round the Horne could ever have been on the television and kept much of its magic.

I'll be coming back to that...

And breathe...

I suppose I should say something about the wedding, having whinged on at length about it throughout March.

Well... it was a lovely day, the food was excellent, the service was good, the bride was radiant and the groom was as happy as a dog with two tails (a cleaner version of what he said himself). The bridesmaid looked lovely (we have argued - at length - about this) and it all went very well. Good stuff. Very nice, thank you.

And the good news is that The Small Object of Desire and myself are still together despite the combination of job stresses and both of our deep-seated aversions to weddings. Personally, I don't have any objections to marriage so long as it's something you can go away and do and then come back and tell people: "guess what we did this morning" without sulks all round. If that's what you could do I think The Small Object would be a lot less averse but she'd still not be comfortable about it, not even if she were allowed to wear a Patrick Stewart onesie and Doc Martins for the doing of it.

So now we're going through a period of reaction to the stresses of the past month or two where we're all lovey and nice to each other. It's enormous fun; it would make you sick.

Planning for next year's snow

Now's a good time to be planting up snowdrops. One extremely good reason is that they settle in better when planted "in the green." Another is that it's a lot easier to get your planting design worked out in practice. One of the big problems with planting dry bulbs is that you soon lose track of where they were planted and you end up either accidentally digging some of them up while planting the rest or ― worse ― planting them in serried rows like some old-fashioned municipal park. When you're planting in the green the leaves stick up out of the ground and you can check what pattern, if any, you're imposing.

When I moved into Railway Cuttings I made a big bed at the end of the garden, there to plant a damson tree underplanted with hardy geraniums, bluebells and snowdrops. By and large it works quite well as all three thicken up of their own accord, self-seeding where they're happy (and they seem to be a bit giddy down there!)

There's a nice easy way to plant snowdrops in the green: stick a pade into the ground; waggle it to and fro to create a slit in the soil; drop the snowdrops into the slit, 1-3 bulbs at a time, about two inches (5cm) apart. Then stamp down the sides of the slit to settle the bulbs in the soil. Now move the spade towards the centre of the line as if to create a T-shape but before you dig the spade in, rotate it slightly so that the new slit's something between 30° and 60° from the first one. The repeat until you've run out of either snowdrops or space. Don't worry that you're occassionally going back on yourself or crossing some of the existing lines of snowdrops: in moderation this is a good thing. If you find yourself naturally gravitating towards a herringbone pattern or a Catherine wheel-like circle ask yourself how much you're bothered about it. (I'm a bit peculiar about this sort of thing and get quite bothered about it; many wouldn't see what the fuss is about.) Whatever your decision on that one, this is quite a good way of creating a fairly natural looking pattern reasonably quickly: it takes a year or two for the lines to blur but the intersections between the slits naturally form clumps almost from the start. Five or six years in and it looks like the snowdrops did all the work themselves, which is nice.

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.

Update from the Matto Grosso

As per usual, the garden is in a bit of a state. In part this is down to my lassitude; in part due to spending half of each week over at The Small Object of Desire's gaff. And then in January we decided to set to it:

• We had a go at installing the fence panels I bought last March. I might have a go at supergluing the bits together again.


• The front garden is piled knee-high with prunings of lilac, hazel, dogwood and roses. I may yet make a bonfire.


• Many of last year's cheeky lengeths of brambles have been grubbed out and chopped back...

Which is where I came a cropper. A particularly egregious bramble shoot ran from the bramble patch on the railway embankment, shot up the air, wrapped itself round a branch of the conifer about twelve feet up and then descended into my garden, rooting itself along the length of the back border. So I decided: I'm having you, you bastard.

And that's what I was doing when I fell out of the tree.

Luckily, no bones broken though quite considerable pain and a full Robert Newton Long John limp right up to the beginning of last week.

In the meantime, the garden's been full of snowdrops and crocus and a cluster of double hellebores has been doing the business since Christmas. Not one daffodil yet, dammit. The big pot that should be chock full of Salome and February Gold has been waterlogged all winter after an ants' nest clogged up the drainage holes (silly buggers). I have hopes of the venerable clump of King Alfreds under the big rose bush but I reckon I'll be doing some bulb-buying come the Autumn.

I intend filling all the gaps with foxgloves and ox-eye daisies.

When I get round to it.

One swallow doesn't make a relationship

We've finally(!) had a drop of rain. OK, then, a torrential downpour, but it's the first we've had since the beginning of April. We've been lucky with the bank holiday weather and took advantage to loll around the garden awhile. Taking care to ignore the neglects of Winter, when I was a bit preoccupied.

The damson, cherries and pears have all flowered and the scent of the rowan has gone over from fishy stickiness to bletted wonder. By the looks of things we'll be well-stocked with blackcurrants and cherries and the first few figs are happily swelling up. The borders are chockablock with hardy geraniums and iris and the shrubs are thick with sparrows, goldfinches and dunnock. We also seem to be hosting nestboxes full of great and blue tits and a blackcap has taken ownership of the sycamore on the railway embankment.

So there I've been, sitting around on the patio, sipping tea and reading The Hotspur. Meanwhile, the Small Object of Desire and Moon of My Delight has been chopping up the firewood and the garden is full of birdsong.

Life is pretty good at the moment.

Thursday singalong

Summertime

Was it only last week we were on a frost warning?

It's been fairly warm this week, though yesterday it was also distinctly thundery (or it could be that work had given me a headache). The daily commute provided plenty with which to be distracted and it would have been churlish not to have been. Over the past few months I had come to the conclusion that the lady with the nice bottom who travels on my train had lost weight she could have done with keeping. The removal of the winter anorak midweek confirmed my fears. The summer skirt still had that hypnotic sway but there is less substance to the allure than there should be. The black high-heeled pixie boots just emphasised the loss.

My garden is currently a riot. Mostly of weed seedlings, with herb Robert and willowherbs jostling for space amongst the horsetails. Midway along the path is a patch of nipplewort seedlings. I'm inclined to leave them alone for prurience's sake. "What's them little yellow dandelion-y things?" "Them's nipplewort." We do what we can for the tourist industry. Littered amongst the foliage is a profusion of feathered hooligans. The goldfinches have gone a bit quiet, which means they have young to feed. The spadgers paraded the first batch of baby sparrows the other day and very welcome they are, too. The noise from the bottom of the garden suggests that the blue tits have decided to grace one of the six hitherto-unused nestboxes. The seventh has been used alternatively by wood mice and bumblebees. We should be OK for gooseberries and blackberries this year.

A jobbing gardener has stuck a flier through my door. I know of his work. His idea of gardening is to prune magnolias in March. I'll stick with the weeds, thank you.

Catching up

What, with one thing and another, I've been neglecting the garden quite a lot this past few months and all the maintenance work which I know needs doing has been left undone. An unscheduled couple of dry and sunny days has given me a chance to show willing, if not actually be very effective.


Cutting back the Olearia which had succumbed to the wet summer I was surprised to find one branch still alive. I've pruned back all the dead stuff and I'm hoping for the best. A broom and the witch-hazel, both sadly deceased, have been grubbed up. Have, indeed, been a load of bramble seedlings and self-sown hazels. (I love hazel bushes but not everywhere in the garden; and certainly not in plant pots full of deawrf narcissi.) A bed has been dug over, a self-sown holly moved to the back to provide a bit of winter cover and one of the blackcurrant bushes moved over here so that I can reach it without having use the cherry tree to swing over a bunch of hebes. The plan is to fill in the rest of the bed with oriental poppies, heleniums and -- yes by jiminy! -- fennel. Like as not, what I'll probably actually get is a thicket of willow herbs, brambles and valerians but you live in hope. Still, I've had a bit of exercise and the robins and dunnocks have enjoyed the new playground already. And it's nice to be able to work in the garden and have seven species of birds bouncing round doing their thing within six feet of me.

The bad weather's hit the tree heather pretty hard. Once I'm sure the worst is over I'll have to give it a trim. Ironically, it'll look a lot better as a result as the dead branches are those I've not had the heart or wit to prune back hard.

This still leaves quite a bit of arboriculture to get to grips with, particularly the syacamores on the railway embankment. I don't understand what's not happening to them: elsewhere on the local rail network any tree on Network Rail land within half a mile of a line is chopped down to its root. Along our stretch there are sycamores lurching precariously on a tiny embankment and they're being allowed to run rampant. I've been able to reach over the back fence to ring bark a couple of them to try and slow them down a bit but they're determined to be forest trees. All I can do in my own garden is chop off the projecting limbs and grub up their progeny.

The good news is that all of a sudden the garden is full of snowdrops, the hellebores are in bud and you can't move for the shoots of crocus and narcissi. And I'm still harvesting black mint from the pots on the patio. So not too bad, then.

Nature's bounty and that

I started the weekend seriously depressed. The reasons for this are entirely rational - worrying about a pile of stuff which were sensible to worry about but which I couldn't resolve - but as usual I took this as an opportunity to beat myself up for not being a particularly practical person. Which I'm not, I have to hold my hands up. Mind you, I must have had my moments: every so often I'll look at something about the house and wonder how on earth I did it (the hall mirror being a case in point - six foot by four, plate glass on oak frame, mounted on the wall single-handedly by my own fair hand). Sigh...

Yesterday I cheered up modestly. A pair of problems I was concerned about are determined to turn a scary incident into a jokey anecdote (I wonder where I get that habit from?)

I picked a few apples and plums from my parents' garden for them. Coming home I had a nosey round and took a few pounds of nuts off the hazel bush. Technically they're cobnuts, I suppose. I like hazel nuts picked in the green when you can crack the shells with your teeth and fingers and the kernels are white and moist and rich in oil. The best thing you can do with them in this state is to just crack and eat, though they'll go well enough with a decent salad, especially if you include a few bitter herbs such as rocket or chicory. Later on, when the shells are brown and woody, they're great toasted lightly on a dry frying pan. This brings on the flavour, which is great for making pastes, dips and sauces.

Quick recipe that works well with hazelnuts or walnuts.
(Quantities are extremely approximate!)
Toast the nuts lightly in a pan. Let them cool down a bit. Dump them into a food processor. Add some garlic - depending on your taste, one or two cloves per handful of nuts. Add roughly a tablespoon or two of not-very-expensive olive oil. Whizz until smooth. Empty into a container you can cover and stick it in the fridge to let the flavours mellow. Eat it tomorrow with some nice bread and a decent strong cheese. It doesn't keep long.
If you want, you could add stoned green olives to the mix before processing - a one-to-one ratio of olives and nuts gives you an interesting paste.

I noticed last night that the figs were colouring up and, much to my delight, I find that despite the lousy weather I have half a dozen of them ripe. Splendid.

Feeling a bit chipper I had a nosy round the bottom of the garden and discovered that I was wrong to be disappointed with the damson this year. It had flowered well but I couldn't see more than just a couple of scabby articles of fruit. I discovered that one branch, well back in the lee of a big rose bush, was absolutely chocablock with fruit, so I've taken a couple of pounds off for now. I do like damsons: they're a bit rough-and-ready and extremely sour straight from the tree but they make superb jams and sauces. I like them simply washed and halved and fried in the pan with a Cumberland sausage. Besides which, I like the wildness of a damson tree, it appeals to the romantic in me.

The final treat was to find that a bramble I'd missed was fully in delicious fruit. The fruit was picked and the bramble plucked. It's not so bad when even the weeds are productive.

Now then... where were those elderberries?

Avifauna

I'm quite enjoying the garden at the moment, despite the hard work involved in keeping it within the confines of the three dimensions available to us. The trees are full of blossom: the damson's just going over, the pear's in full flood, the cherry will be open this week and the rowans are a mass of buds. The bulbs have been pretty good this year, though I've not seen any sign of the cottage tulips so I guess the damp summer and tulip fire have done for them at last, which is a shame. The small species tulips have been game and the daffs and narcissi have been a picture.

I'm not sure where the wrens are nesting, though I suspect it's somewhere in the brambles by the railway line. I scarcely ever see them but each dawn is heralded by a titanic blast of song so I know they're out there. The robins investigated the boxes I've put out but have elected to nest behind next door's garage again. I don't know how the male does it, he's up all night singing and spends all day bouncing round the garden like a particularly feisty Jack Russell terrier. The blue tits and great tits are obviously nesting nearby, judging by the frenzied activity in treetops. They're joined by the spadgers, which seem to be even thinner on the ground this year, which is an immense worry. I like sparrows, they're characterful and comfortable. A couple of years ago I put up a terraced nest box for them which they've pretty much ignored. The occupants to date have been a pair of great tits and a wood mouse.

And I'm particularly enjoying the starlings this year. One of them sounds familiar - this is the second year running we've had one that includes a perfect impersonation of a curlew in its song. New this year is the one that includes really good imitations of other songbirds including phrases of goldfinch, chaffinch, meadow pipit and blackcap. This latter is good enough for the railway station blackcap to come over here to see off the opposition.

A nice sunny day. Happy Easter everyone.

Spring fever

There's a touch of Spring about the garden. The snowdrops are coming to their finale; drifts of crocus pepper the flowerbeds and a group of February Gold narcissi underneath the rowan tree are embracing the day. Me, two robins, a charm of goldfinches and a small herd of starlings have been rummaging around the garden trying to tidy things up a bit. I've pruned and chopped up and hacked about a bit and there's now a pile of composting material the size of the small bedroom. And still it looks like a small branch of the tropical rain forest. All afternoon I've had one eye open for Japanese snipers, just in case. Ah well, I can only hope that at least I've made some headway towards stopping things getting worse.

Spring is definitely in the air. Doves and pigeons are cooing their songs, the magpies are replenishing their nests and the hoodies are grunting at schoolgirls outside the Co-op supermarket.

A friend and I were chatting a while back and we decided that Nat King Cole's is the definitive knicker-dropping music. She also warned me that if I ever tried it she'd kick my teeth in (the very flower of modern British maidenhood). The larger proportion of my friends are female, which probably explains my lack of a love life: it's difficult to buy into the blind romantic ideal when your friends let you into all the grisly detail of feminine reality on a regular basis.

Somewhere in a universe of infinite time and space some poor beggar is listening to "Sing Something Simple."

Conversations

People tell me things. I seem to have one of those faces that say "please tell me your life story." I don't need to know anybody's secrets: I'm not one of those who say: "I won't be your friend if you don't tell me your secrets." Your confidences are your own. I am happy to take you at face value. But people tell me things.

I went through a phase of wearing headphones (sometimes even connected to something) to try and minimise things but in the end I gave up on it. I will smile and be polite and I will listen as people tell me things.

Taxi drivers are notorious for this. It's understandable: it's a fairly solitary existence and I suspect that having a sober fare is a relief from the monotony of drunken drivelling. Sometimes it's just the usual "busy night?" "pretty quiet" pleasantries.

It's quite often football. Now, my interest in football waned with puberty but I can make all the right noises (a survival trick learned at school). And every so often we'll find that we're on the same wavelength: one old chap gave me a lengthy and knowledgeable critique of Ferenc Puskas' career one time. Cricket's safe: I'm happy to talk cricket. Though even I was taken aback the time I realised we were discussing the relative merits of A.C. McLaren and Hedley Verity. (Just for the record we retreated to the much safer ground of slagging off the Aussies and left the best of mates.)

It's not always sport. The cabbie who was doing a PhD. on the munitions industries of the Bury area was interesting.

But there is one that I think is a treasure. I've not seen him for a bit, I hope he's not gone out of business. You see, he had a habit of carrying on with the conversation once you'd paid the fare. We once got chatting about Buddhism and Joseph Conrad. Actually, it started with us talking about metaphysical poetry (we were both reading Andrew Marvell at the time) and I admitted that I struggled to read poetry though I enjoy listening to it. This led on to James Joyce, which he was struggling with. I actually find Joyce unreadable though I really enjoy hearing his work performed. A friend reckoned that my problem is that I was over-thinking it: "you've got to let yourself understand it without thinking about it. Let the words do their stuff without you having to peg them up on the pinboard." Just like the meditation the cabbie was into. He explained the principles of the workshop he was running in the local community centre. For the life of me I cannot remember or work out how we then progressed onto Joseph Conrad. I know that the linking strand was something to do with the Belgian Congo and King Leopold II but I'm damned if I can think what it was. I suddenly noticed the time: he'd been losing money for half an hour. I promised to have a look at a couple of meditative techniques he recommended, he promised to have a look at a couple of Edgar Wallace novels and we parted.

Every so often life seems quite civilised.

Ladies' bottoms

All the papers had pictures of one of this year's winners of the 'Rear of the year award,' awarded by some or other group of bottom-worshippers since time immemorial. True to form, the papers only showed pictures of the lady winner, which is quite right too as it doesn't do for any chap to get too vain about his bottom. And also true to form she stood in the standard A-frame tilted forward at forty-five degrees pose. And very nice too. I won't link to the news reports because you'll already have seen them.

One of my friends used to have an exceptionally nice bottom. She may still do, I've not checked it out recently but given the amount of Killer Attack Yoga she does I can't imagine it will have gone very much to seed. She held onto gawky teenager for an indecently-long time, well into her late thirties. Which, coupled with her habit of wearing leggings to work, could be very distracting. In the old days girls were instructed that ladies bend from the knee, but these days it seems anything goes.

There's a lady on the train I get each morning who has been gifted with a delightful bottom. I'm not sure how old she is: her neck says late forties, her eyes say early fifties (though that could be too much sun and cigarettes). However old she actually is, her bottom is considerably younger. I'm still undecided as to whether this is all down to providence or artfully-selected trouser suits; decency prevents my making a thorough investigation. One of the laments of this modern age is that I feel so damned ungrateful. In a sane and just world I should be able to thank her for making the morning commuter hell a brighter place without her having to worry that I might want to act upon designs on her body (a lad can dream but ambition needs to be grounded in reason). As it is, it's the ingratitude that's so shaming.

Looking in the crystal

In one of my other blogs I've recently described one of the horrors of middle-age: being in a pub full of other middle-aged idiots. To my mind, there are only three types of pubs:

• Wine bars
• Dives
• Old men's pubs

In so far as I have any great affinity with pubs (having been teetoal for a long, long time, God help me) I always feel the most comfortable in old men's pubs, and did all the more back when I was a drinker. These days, it's an opportunity to people-watch in one of the last strongholds of the good old-fashioned barmpot. For those of you with no experience of this environment, No Good Boyo presents us with a lovingly-rendered picture of one of the species.

The world is not so bad a place when there are still snug bars filled with men wafting the froth off their ale with their caps.