Where Did Summer Go?

Autumn has arrived, and with it, plans for the next growing season.  It's got to be better than this year.

Not a good summer for me - my painful knee has turned the dial up to agonising, leaving me effectively housebound for the past few months.  I've tried to get help from my GP, but due to government constraints, the most I can get referred to by him is physiotherapy.  First appointment with them is next week.  But at least I got to see my GP before the Home Office decided to pull the plug on his work permission due to being a Commonwealth passport holder (in spite of having been here for years, married & raised a British family).  So for the foreseeable future, the patients at our surgery are stuck with one GP with zero bedside manner and even longer waits for even shorter appointments.

In the intervening time, I've been woken up most nights by the pain - a deep, burning sensation in the middle of the joint, causing me to almost convulse in discomfort.  And if I'm not sleeping, neither are Howard or the cat.  With Howard having a job now that requires him to have his wits about him, that couldn't go on.  So on his first day off that week, we got a cab up to the Urgent Care at Chase Farm, where, after a slight meltdown in front of the triage nurse, a very understanding doctor arranged x-rays, which confirmed absolutely no damage to the bones (in fact he said they were in excellent condition & perfectly positioned), which pointed to ligament damage - possibly cruciate (which having researched, looks a pretty nasty, long term restoration prospect).  So he referred me on to the fracture & joint clinic at Barnet General, who offered me an appointment in little over a week.  Having seen them (after a 2 hour plus wait & another meltdown due to the frustration) I now await an appointment with a knee specialist.  The week after the appointment at Barnet, the letter asking me to book a physio appointment finally came through my door.  Well, I made an appointment, if only to give them an earful.

Howard has been enjoying his job as a cargo bike courier.  It can be hard, physically, and some nights he comes home beyond dog tired, but it's boosted his fitness and confidence.  How he feels about the work in the depths of Winter remains to be seen, but he's enjoying getting out & about, at times providing a vital service to the community, after over a decade in a deskbound job with a long, frustrating commute.

He's has to manage the allotment & much of the garden pretty much on his own, but as ever we've managed a decent haul of potatoes & onions, plus some salads & other greenery.  After such an abundant harvest last year, the fruit trees seem to have taken a break, but the erratic weather, all timed wrong, must have played a part in that.

This coming weekend sees us taking a break and heading out to the Malvern Autumn show.  My favourite show of the year, so I plan to make the most of it, even if I need a walking stick & regular sit downs.  We plan to take in visits to a couple more villages that feature on my family tree, plus a couple of our regular favourite haunts along the way.

So hopefully I'll return next week with renewed optimism & determination to grow as much of our own food as possible.  After all, if Brexit is as bad as we expect it to be, we will no longer be able to rely on the shops to feed us.

It's All Gone Quiet Again

Another Mid-May, another snarl up.

Over the past few years I've had a suspected mini stroke, a bullying by my boss so bad I quit my job (a bit rash, but I didn't want to face him ever again), a fall that jarred my back & left me out of action most of the Summer, and now my old knee injury (thanks Network Rail & your "wait till we're sued" station & staircase repair policy) has flared up so badly I can only comfortably walk in it 1 day in 5.  The plus side is that I've become a dab hand at applying cohesive bandage.  Have another GP appointment next week, hopefully he'll be able to get me referred to see a specialist and after 19 years of problems, finally get it fixed.

Howard now has a new job, as a cargo bike courier for an ethical, zero emissions, delivery company.  Obviously doesn't pay as well as graphic design, but at least it's something, and I get to call him a professional cyclist.  Plus the company has a contract with OrganicLea, so he gets to visit there at least once a week and look around for inspiration while he's waiting to load up (he also gets to drive an electric van for bigger loads), plus sometimes comes home with unsold items from the farmer's market.  The other week he returned with a bag of sorrel leaves, which I used with chopped onions & ransoms leaves as a bed to lightly braise some white fish on, topped with more chopped sorrel & ransoms flowers in melted butter.

On his days off, Howard has worked hard to keep the allotment chugging along on time.  All the potatoes, onion, garlic & shallots for the year are planted, and he's getting other seedlings planted as & when ready.

Not been the greatest year for seed sowing, due to the various cold snaps putting a check on growth.  A mouse got into the mini greenhouse where my peas & broad beans were, and had a feast.  Pumpkin cat went to look for it, but to have a staring match rather than actually catch it.  I've got another batch sown, plus the few surviving peas planted around a tripod in a container in the back garden, so we will have some in due course.

The wall of salad when first planted up

After the mini heatwave in February, I thought I'd risk starting off my tomatoes & peppers in the first half of March, rather than the last week.  Hardly anything germinated, then the back-up sowing I did in early April got hit by the cold snap after Easter.  A few things have germinated now, but I'm annoyed at the wasted time, effort & materials on the whole.  Galling that out of a whole tray, I have just one Gardeners' Delight seedling, for instance.  But at least that's something I can buy as a plant fairly easily.

We've been harvesting salad leaves with great regularity though.  I used the large vertical plant stand we bought from Ikea a couple of years back and filled it with pots of salad leaf mixes, plus a couple of pots each of spring onions & radishes.  With Howard taking a packed lunch with him four days a week, we've been snipping leaves early every morning to go in salads or sandwiches.  Probably getting through the equivalent of three or four bags of salad during weekdays, let alone weekends.  Then you factor in grown in peat free (Dalefoot) growing media, raised organically, food metres rather than miles, plus being a matter of minutes from harvest to table (or a couple of hours for the packed lunches) and no single use plastic whatsoever, and it's wins all round.

The bulbs we planted in pots in the front garden one icy November day have put on a wonderful display and are now dying back until next year (bar one pot that has stuff that should flower until July), and the perennial bed we relaid in February is coming to the fore.  The wallflowers are still providing bursts of bronze & peach, but the main colour at present is purple - centaurea & trailing verbena, plus the foliage of my penstemon echoing the colour of the flowers peaking right now.  My cephelaria gigantea is romping away again, with plenty of buds, as is the clematis, once again seemingly thriving on neglect or is it just growing at a pace we can barely keep up with tying it in to keep us on our toes?

Brown Sugar - my favourite tulip

Not Just a Flower

Nature moves fast in Spring.

We had that blip in February when we had a few days when it was as warm as would normally be expected in May, but this patch of London hasn't had the sudden cold snaps, snow or flooding seen elsewhere.  A bit chilly, but nothing an extra layer or two can't fight off.

As March turned into April, grape hyacinths took centre stage in the tiny lawn in the front garden.  Last year, the grass was getting a little scruffy, not helped by the appearance of self-sown salsify in it, from I know not where.  Pretty pink flowers maybe, but not what I intended.  So in October, we took up the old turf, landscaped the area so it didn't slope down towards the house wall, got the soil in better order & replaced the lawn.  Before we put a new roll of turf down, we planted some bulbs.  Orange flowered crocus, the aforementioned grape hyacinths and a small native narcissus.

Not just any old narcissus, but the strain of native daffodil found in Herefordshire & the borders, most famously around the village of Dymock.  These are the same variety Monty Don has planted in his garden, which I think is a little further north west in the county.  Not sure where he got his from, but we bought ours from the Newent Garden Centre on our now habitual afternoon tea at The Nest, Ledbury on our way home from our weekend visiting the area for the Malvern Autumn show.

Getting those bulbs was a way to have something that kept alive my connection to the area - a tiny nod towards my heritage.  On researching my family tree, I was able to trace once branch back to the villages of Much Marcle & Dymock itself during the mid to late 1500's.  Having that little daffodil in place, ready to show up every spring, is a great reminder.

How Did We Get To Here?

Years ago, when I was working for a music publishers, one of the regular visitors to the company offices was a typical music biz chancer of the time, always on the look for a gimmick that would be a quick way to a hit.  One of the acts he managed wrote a UK Euro entry (One Step Closer - Bardo), which nearly came a cropper because the song had already been released in Japan on the b-side of the original band's single.  A business bigwig got wind of this, but it was all hushed up because our chancer had some knowledge about the other guy that he hinted would get into the press if he went to the authorities, so that all went quiet.  A few months later, he was looking for a 30's/40's novelty song for another set of charges (another washed-up formerly faux mod band, trying to reinvent themselves as all-round entertainers).  As my job required much time in the sheet & recorded music archive, I found the perfect song for them, and it was a bona fide hit.  Unfortunately, the song was so old & obscure, my employers' rights to the copyright had lapsed and no-one had seen any point in renewing them. 

A few years after the music publishers closed down, and I was well out of the music business, I saw the old chancer on TV.  He was claiming to have found film of the Americans undertaking an autopsy of those on board a UFO.  Obviously, this was pretty soon exposed as a complete scam, but the incident was made into a film.  What a let down - to have part of the story of your life on the silver screen, only for your part to be played by Ant.  Or was it Dec?

Why am I reminded of this?  Well, one Christmas, as I wrote my Christmas cards for my colleagues, I found among my Woolies selection the perfect card for him.  Two little cartoon mice, playing ten pin bowling, but using holly berries as bowling balls.  A little bit of customisation of the card and it was perfect for him, and went down a storm in the office: a little word bubble, stating "Keep going - If you throw enough of these at the wall, some of them will stick".

Unless she is genuinely deluded, I have a feeling that the sentiment of that little card sums up the Prime Minister's EU vote strategy.

I despair.