Winter garden
THE PLAN WAS THAT THEN I WAS GOING TO SHOW YOU A COUPLE OF PHOTOS FROM THE GARDEN TODAY TO DEMONSTRATE HOW FAST THINGS RAMP ON THIS TIME OF YEAR. AND THEN PETER TOLD ME WE’RE DUE TO GET A FROST TONIGHT. WE’RE WHAT? YOU MUST BE JOKING. IT’S THE MIDDLE OF MAY AND IT WAS OVER EIGHTY DEGREES LAST WEEK.
And this is England, and we’re due a frost. And I have chocolate cosmos and osteospermums and busy lizzies all over the place, including the one osteospermum that made it through the winter and is now covered with huge buds which are beginning to crack . . . no, no, no, I will have to bring that one into the kitchen, I can’t bear it. This year’s osteospermums are just little things in pots that don’t even want to be potted on yet; they’re fairly portable on a tray. I have probably half a dozen second-year snapdragons too, but they’ll stand a wisp of frost . . . it better be only a wisp . . . but the chocolate cosmos have to come indoors too. I am not going to be without chocolate cosmos.
This is from February. It was fine in February. And yes, that’s my bell tower: this is the view from my office window. I wasn’t joking about the tower being only two garden walls distant or the way the sound of the bells slides through the crevices and runs down the walls and pools on the floor. Why everyone who lives in earshot isn’t compelled to learn to ring I cannot understand.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH. This is from February too.
This was also fine in February. . . .
Cranky
Cheeeeez I am tired of this weather. It’s been raining pretty much since Hannah left–no, since before Hannah left. It rained off and on the whole week they were here (I went round with my Bin of Umbrellas* to fit them out for London: fancy coming to England without at least one umbrella per person) but it’s like when Hannah and I hugged goodbye Sunday morning and the lightning flashed, some wet magic** went gloop and since then it’s raining like it really means it. Like it didn’t mean it before? It sure looked like it meant it last time. It looked like it meant it the time before that, and the . . . stop, stop, stop. This is Poor Sad Person Marooned*** Outside Her Culture and Her Understanding of How Things Are.†
But it wasn’t that many weeks ago†† I was muttering damply about thirty-nine days and thirty-nine nights and counting . . . well, we’re back on that track–that sea lane–again, slosh slosh. It’s the sort of weather that I don’t want to take the pillow off my head in the morning for the dread that there isn’t any sunlight waiting to wake me up. The sort of weather where I can barely get hellhounds out for twenty minutes at a go, which, when it’s teeming down, is about the limit: by half an hour they’re soaked right through and miserable, at twenty minutes they’re still merely wet. Then we come back indoors again and destroy another towel, and go upstairs and pretend to work for a while, till our accumulated restlessness becomes too much for us and we go out for another sprint. By the third sprint even my raincoat is demoralised, and I need a conveyor belt for that ultimately-desirable drying space in front of the Aga.†††
Yesterday I’d had enough of it and we got in the car and drove, and I simply aimed for the break in the clouds because there was one, and then we spent an hour and a half dashing around trying to stay under it which surprisingly worked out pretty well. But the car is where the car is where the car, and there’s not a lot you can do about it, barring a strong gift for teleportation. You do have to go back there, even if it is raining frogs and basilisks in the immediate vicinity, and today we were not quite so lucky, although the Weather Fairy did try. The ME has been kind of a bear‡, speaking of undesirable wildlife, the last few days, and when the Weather Fairy suggested that we take another little detour to the south while the latest belt of torrential downpour spilled across the north, I whimpered that I didn’t think I had an extra half-hour in me. So she did her best to hurry said downpour on its way, and it was gone within the twenty-minute limit, but we still got kind of wet. And cranky.
But it broke up enough this afternoon that I planted‡‡ a rose. And potted on several hundred‡‡‡ little green things gasping to get out of their wet newspaper/mailing trays. And there’s a rumour we might have a nice day tomorrow, before it shuts down again for the weekend. . . .
* I was delighted when they invented teeny umbrellas that fit in your knapsack. I was even more delighted when they invented being silly with them. The umbrella that lives in my knapsack has roses on it but I also have pink, orange, turquoise, purple and zebra, just in case I’m going somewhere that I want my umbrella to match my Converse All Stars.^
^ Did I tell you Becki wears All Stars? What I keep remembering is the years in the desert when the only place on the planet that sold Converse All Stars was Magic Shoes in lower Manhattan. For the first few years after I moved over here you could get them occasionally in dusty little shops in London, and then, nothing. When I went to America (and I don’t go to America without stopping in Manhattan) I took an empty duffel bag with me in the hopes of new Converse All Stars–I bought anything they had in my size.+ But the specific story of All Star deprivation was going into a new whopper sports store in London where I could see from the pavement outside they had walls of trainers++ and asking about All Stars and having the pimply 17-year-old clerk tell me condescendingly that they didn’t carry them because . . . [quelling pause] . . . only old people wore them. That was a good few years ago, but even then I hadn’t seen 17 in a decade or two, no. And I hope . . . no, whatever I say here, I will get angry comments from someone who is that thing, wanting to tell me that it’s Not Like That At All. Well, I hope he grew up to be something where people are tactless to him a lot.
And now cool 14-year-old girls wear All Stars. How satisfying is that. Well, it may surprise you to hear that this is not ideal either. Fifteen years ago they didn’t want to sell me All Stars because both the All Stars and I were deeply uncool. Now they don’t want to sell me All Stars because I am deeply uncool and they want me to leave the store quickly before I give their proper clientele the wrong idea. Sigh.
Furthermore, I have a weakness for painted All Stars which you can’t wear in the rain. Which is kind of where I came in. In England. Where it rains a lot. Perhaps fortunately I haven’t seen All Stars with proper roses on them yet. Retro 60s flowers, yes. William Morris on a bad day trellises, yes. Roses, no.
+ Extra super large.
++ sneakers
** All respects to E Nesbit
*** a nice soggy feel to the word marooned: and here I am on an island where it rains all the time. Nearly.
† It doesn’t rain like this in Maine! No, and all roses but a few gallicas and rugosas and anything you want to overwinter in a pot in your sitting room are annuals!^ Take your pick, McKinley! –I already have! I still get to complain!
^ Also Chaos would hate it. He’s a tender flower, our Chaos, in his swashbuckling way.
†† Spring! Aaaaaaugh! And I even like spring. I was/am going to post about the Loveliness of Spring one of these days. Supposing I can get the water out of my eyes–and perhaps more to the point off my glasses–long enough to see some of it.
††† I wear All Stars in this weather too. (Not the painted ones.) Which means I also have a little–or not so little–row of All Stars strung by their laces over the rail in front of the Aga, nicely at hip height so I can get smears of mud+ on my dangling shirttail while I’m trying to make a pot of tea (which of course sits on the Aga to keep warm). And I have been known to do loads of laundry that are entirely of socks. But I have spent hundreds of pounds on (*&^%£”!!!!! Goretex walking shoes and hated every pair. So I’ve stopped trying.
+ Especially farmyard mud
‡ Long claws. Long teeth. Nasty attitude. And possibly amphibious.
‡‡ Slowly, because of the amphibious bear.
‡‡‡ Well, it seemed like it. But I see octuple a lot when the amphibious bear is around.
Bell ringing woman, IV
REACH FOR IT, SUCKER.
Or rather, Hold onto it, sucker.
. . . First Rule of Bell Ringing: Never, ever, ever let go of the tail end of the rope.* But you actually want your arms straight, like this, at the top of the backstroke; it’s supposed to give you better control or something. Gods help me then if I rang with bent arms. Ah well.
* You have several hundred to several thousand pounds of mad bell up there on your leash, just longing to do a bolt.
Bell ringing woman, lll
Person thinking beautiful thoughts while waiting for her next go on a bell. I think this was right after I got through the Stedman Triples. I’m suffering from disbelief.*
Note square halo. Okay, definitely right after the Stedman Triples. It’s off centre because I’ve been penalised for failing to keep my hands together.**
* Bizarrely in many of these ringing photos my eyes are closed. I really didn’t want to know there was a Man with a Camera present. But it does make choosing a few to post a trifle more fraught. I don’t want to give you the impression that I ring with my eyes closed. Although if I did it would mean I’m a much better ringer than I am in real life. One of the things whizzy ringers do sometimes is ring facing outward so they have to do it only by ear and rhythm. Gives me the whimwhams just thinking about it.
** See previous posts. And I have to find out if you can hang more than one photo per entry.
Bell ringing woman, ll
Ringing a touch. Note that everybody’s rope is at a different point of its rise or fall: because every bell is in a different location. (Or had better be. But probably is here, or we would be looking a lot more agonised.) All of you who have watched the bell ringing videos–or any of you who ring yourselves–will recognise what’s happening. It looks a little strange caught and frozen like this.
Oh, feh, and my hands aren’t together again.