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...

Stock romance

"Do you think I should colour my hair?" I asked.

"There's not enough Bisto left in the world to do it," replied The Small Object of Desire.

Prevarication

Reviewing a customer request with a manager:

• My response was: "No."
• The manager's response was: "Fuck, no."

We won't be bothering the man from Del Monte for a third opinion.

Don't mock: it could be one of your own

How bitterly disappointing: the lads at work tell me that Talbot Rothwell didn't write "Game of Thrones."

Siren calls from the potting shed

It's taken me an age but I've finally got the answer to a question that's been bugging me for weeks.

The new siren on our local police cars and ambulances is the music they used to play over the credits on "Gardeners' World," back when it was with Percy Thrower and Arthur from Clack's Farm.

Cold hard reality

I was being principled and professional in the workplace concerning a piece of work involving my working a couple of evenings so that somebody could butter up a high-up in the proceedings.

"Just be careful you don't get the wrong people on your case about this," said my manager.

"I'm 52, what's left of my career has nowhere to go and I've seen more bigwigs come and go than I'd care to count. I'll try to do the right thing," I replied.

It's amazing the change of perspective you get when you hear yourself saying something like that.

I'm like the cockroach, me. Through no particular merit or skill, save the merest accident, I tend to survive the more Spectacular Talents.

Presents past

My father was contemplating his socks. Ordinary, bright orange socks. The small niece child had been interrogating him on the subject.

"Who bought you those socks? They don't go with anything you wear."

At the time she was wearing something floral in pink winceyette and lemon yellow leggings.

In the end she concluded that I must have bought them. I get the blame for all things because I'm "weird." Any conversation I have with her must include the following exchange:

"You bought me rhino poo for Christmas!"

"It had a banana seed in it. Have you sown it yet?"

"You bought me rhino poo for Christmas!"

"It makes the banana grow better."

"I'm not eating bananas that are made out of rhino poo. Rhino poo!"

Present tense

It's coming up to my brother's birthday. He's a bugger to buy presents for. In the end, I nipped into Cats @ Home on my way home from work to see about buying some cat tokens. They're down to just the six cats now and they're suffering a bit from empty nest syndrome.

I was disappointed. The lady behind the counter was quite adamant that there is no such thing as cat tokens and please would I go away.

Черная дама

I was the only one in my year doing Russian for General Studies A-Level. Two lessons a week. In the second year of it I started boycotting these lessons. Not because I was bunking off or doing anything especially political: I was dead bored with them so I'd spend my time in the library or in a corridor working on the other stuff. One day the teacher, a dead nice bloke who's name I have shamefully forgotten, bumped into me.

"Can you come along to one of your Russian lessons? I've been telling the Lower Sixth that you exist and they don't believe me."

We got to talking about why I wasn't turning up. I had a bit of a rant:

"I've done five years of Longmans Russian. I'm fed up of Seryozha and Natasha and their jolly Uncle Vanya and his hedgehog joke. I'm sick of Grigor and Tanya and their holidays in Tbilisi and their stopping off at Gum to get half a kilo of sausages and two apples. I can't be doing with it." 

"So you want to read something real then?" 

"Yes." 

"You like reading crime stories, don't you?" 

"Yes."

Which is how we got to reading Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades." And even though we struggled a bit with the rules of Faro (we should have watched the film as well) it was a pretty good experience. Sadly, my Russian's rusty beyond measure these days  (I can just about pick out what the Russian characters are saying in the Swedish detective programmes before reading the subtitles).

Hacked

Apologies to anyone receiving spam from my email address. Yahoo Mail password change *again.* Grr.

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.

Curtain calls

There's a rich seam of drivel to be mined from the conversations people have at the end of the day when they're too tired to talk but still insist on having conversations. Actually, this is a good description of virtually any conversation between myself and The Small Object of Desire at any time of day or night but we could just be tired.

Anyway, this is how we became entertained by a children's television series called "Bladderpuss," the everyday adventures of a cat full of piss.

The truth is out there

It's true! 99% of gargoyles really do look like Bob Todd!

Love is…

Love is…

Explaining "The Double Deckers" to a loved one while she is having a shower.

And doing the little dance.

Frozen Muzak

Imagine our delight when we discovered that there was a sculpture trail in The World of Pies (not to be confused with Wigan, which is a very inferior land of pastry). We were underwhelmed when we discovered that two of the crap local objects of mystery are part of the collection. Neither the neon lights at the railway station saying: "And there was light," nor the graffiti on the canal bridge saying: "And water made it wet" exactly enthused us. The sort of thing that proliferated when Lottery money was young and spent by people whose bicycle clips were too tight.

We wandered over to the parkland where the old paper mill used to be and had a wander round while it was still not raining. About half a mile along the trail to the main road we encountered a dirty great big block of concrete.

"And what's this supposed to be?" asked The Small Object of Desire, who's even less Avante Garde than I am.

"It's a fucking big lump of concrete," I explained.

"It can't just be a fucking big lump of concrete," she protested.

"Might be," I muttered.

"So what do you think it is?" she persisted.

"Dunno. I expect it signifies something or other."

"Look: there's a plaque at the top up there. What does it say?"

I wandered over, read the inscription on the plaque and wandered back.

"Well?"

"It says it's a fucking big lump of concrete."