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Semi-frozen Sunday
I’m doing my wha’? Huh? on five hours’ sleep today. Sigh. Saturday night has lately become the night I go to bed early because I have to crawl out early for service ring on Sunday . . . good so far . . . and then get overinvolved in the books that just happen to have come to bed with me. There tend to be rather a lot of these.* And since it’s early and I’m still feeling at least half-awake and half-clever I figure I’ll tackle something a bit more substantial than usual and . . . **
Wha’? Huh?***
A surprising amount of this weekend has been spent in the garden despite snow, sleet and freezing rain.† Friday night Peter was playing bridge so we were already locked in at the cottage when the temperature plunged; last night I had the full-bore ice-in-the-mechanism†† car-doors-won’t-open-car-doors-won’t-shut thing when hellhounds and I went back to the cottage from the mews. But the days themselves are making coy little dashes at spring between cloudbursts; I even got up to Third House today to view the situation, which comes down basically to either sprouting or dead. Surprising numbers of both of these.††† But between winter and Atlas—who did a major jungle-bashing for me last autumn—and my own creeping determination to have only plants I like in my garden(s) no matter how well this or that great ugly thug is doing—great ugly thugs have their uses, but as soon as I start running out of room their days are numbered—I HAVE SOME VERY NICE EMPTY EARTH. It won’t last. Every time I hit another bump in the PEGASUS road I go on line and order more plants.
* * *
* Every fortnight or so I have a clear-off before the bed-frame breaks.^ You’d think that changing the sheets would force me to grapple with the problem, but not at all. I just put the books, magazines and other people’s manuscripts^^ in tidy^^^ piles on the floor which gives me somewhere off the floor to put the bedding.
^ Having your attic floor reinforced for carrying your and your husband’s professional backlist is one thing. Having your bed-frame reinforced because you are a cheap literary slut+ seems to me a fortification too far.
+ Helena Bonham-Carter and Tim Burton live in separate houses too. Pass it on. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/feb/06/helena-bonham-carter-interview . . . ‘There’s a snoring issue’ . . .
^^ Yes. Very occasionally.
^^^ Sic. So they don’t fall over and let the pillows tumble onto the not-very-recently-hoovered carpet.
** Last night along with the predictable homeopathic quest for my latest gnomic case I decided to have a look at a short easy touch for plain bob doubles. I am a sad, sick person. At least I could be resisting more. I think Vicky or Niall put something in my beer after making me Deputy Ringing Master.
We had another bad turn-out on Friday and spent most of the evening ringing stuff for beginners—although at the end there were just enough people for Niall to ask me to do my Grandsire-calling trick again. We had a beginner on the tenor, which as a result wandered rather, and the treble wandered a bit too . . . aaaugh. No, it’s okay, I got through, but having an AWOL bell going CRUNCH in your ear and then having the treble disappear . . . when you call depends on where the treble is. . . . I remind myself that the truly useful Deputy Ringing Master can soldier on through anything.
After practise Niall came up to me, eyes glinting. He’s never to be trusted anyway, but he’s worse when his eyes are glinting. He said, Titus told me to tell you that you’d be welcome to come ring handbells at his house on Saturdays. I’m going tomorrow. I could give you a ride.
I looked at Niall. That’s nice, I said. Please thank him for me. How far away is Titus?
Oh, said Niall airily. He’s on the way to Frellingham.
Define on the way, I said. Frellingham is most of an hour from here. What time do you ring?^
Oh . . . said Niall, attempting further airiness. Maybe . . . around ten.
TEN O’CLOCK? I said, thinking of the mornings I am barely out of bed at ten. So you leave around NINE? I have hellhounds I have to hurtle first.
But you could do Saturday morning at ten? said Niall, sensing an opening. I’ll see if I can get Titus and Tom to come here some time.
ARRRGH, I said, poised to flee down the ladder . . . but not quite. Hey, I said, you wouldn’t like to come (tower) ringing Monday to Colin’s practise, would you?^^
Niall looks at me. I look at him. Possibly, he says, still looking at me.
Some Saturday morning in my near future, I predict, is doomed.
^ You’re absolutely right. I shouldn’t even be asking.
^^ Grind only works when you get to grind. I want to grind at Grandsire Triples, which means there have to be eight bells, five other inside ringers and a treble and a tenor-behind, none of which—except the bells themselves—have prevailed recently at New Arcadia.
*** We had a fairly grim turnout for service ring today too. Niall offered me call changes to conduct but I decided this was dangerous on a Sunday morning. I need more practise calling call changes. Kill me. Please.
† COME ON, GUYS, YOU WEATHER GOD RATBAGS, LIGHTEN UP, WILL YOU?
†† Have I mentioned that the locks on both front doors now have an interesting charcoal-and-bronze streaked patina from being melted open with matches?
††† I want to know what’s gone wrong in the greenhouse though. The geraniums, nemesias, begonias and chocolate cosmos are all croaked. I’ve got a couple of snapdragons left—but snapdragons are perverse: I have at least one each still alive outdoors at the cottage and Third House which is frankly not possible—and two frothy little New Zealand clematis, but mostly the stuff that’s come through is the stuff that is relatively borderline anyway. Tipsy Imperial Concubine looks pretty happy . . . and I have a daylily that is getting ready to flower. It was sharing pot-space with a geranium, now defunct, but I’m afraid if I put it outdoors now the shock will make it cry. Although speaking of crying if my two year old wisteria is an ex-parrot I am going to blacken my face and rend my garments. It does not look at all sappy and burgeoning. Sigh. The flipping plant is supposed to be hardy, it’s the sudden last-minute May frosts that take out the flowers. At the old house, which had a killer wisteria, we had flowers about one year in three. Arrrgh.
Life was simpler in Maine, where I had gigantic sculptural boulders in the back garden, a fabulous sugar maple that went flame-red in autumn in the front garden, a stream that went past the porch, and huge overgrown lilac bushes everywhere.
The good news however is that the heeled-in roses from last autumn all look dormant as opposed to deceased. The soil at present is that delightful combination of squishy and still frozen, so I’m not planning on a huge lot of planting right away, but soon. . . .
Valentine’s Day
Peter met me at the bell tower door this morning with five yellow roses.* Not quite, perhaps, as in the picture that this statement is creating in your minds. Peter and five yellow roses met me at the tower door. The roses, unfortunately, were in Peter’s knapsack** and in the process of getting them out he busted the heads off two of them.
Sigh.
But we are resourceful. I bought two more yellow roses at the florist’s—and some tulips—and I now have seven yellow roses. 
Variously arranged.***
Sunday morning, meanwhile, has morphed into the time I spend pretending to have a conservatory, when in fact what I have is some very crowded windowsills at the cottage.
Never come between a hyacinth and its destiny. And its destiny is to tip over. 
I suppose I could try nailing them to the windowsill. But pulling the nails out will leave marks. And there are always more hyacinths.
And you will remember that I had cleverly propped the primrose one up on a pile of magazines? This happened in a day, hippeastrum stems grow so fast when they really get going.
So. More magazines.
I’m not making any of this up, you know.****
And this is the hippeastrum you keep seeing the stems of. It really is this amazing dark red colour. Which is also to say pretty well impossible to get a good photo of. 
. . . So, today, when I finally got down to the mews and turned the computer on, I rushed to my inbox to open (finally) an email Peter had sent me a few days ago and then (laconically) suggested that I might want to wait till Valentine’s Day to read it. I assumed, of course, it was from Peter. This is what it said:
Though shoulder-socket tearing
And licking each ensnaring
Foulness as we’re wayfaring
Provoke volcanic swearing,
We still get sofa-sharing.
Dear Goddess, thanks for caring
Your Dark Chaotic pairing
Send you their love unsparing.
Awwwwwwww. Yes, we had extra sofa time today. While Peter made dinner. . . .
* * *
* I assume because he feels there’s enough pink^ in my life still. (I did finally cut out the lily stamens when lily pollen was starting to turn hellhounds orange. I know this is cheating. It’s a small kitchen.) 
^ Want. Want. Must have. http://www.rhsplants.co.uk/product/_/ClassID.2000006935/
THIRTY FIVE FRELLING QUID FOR A WATERING CAN? Never mind. It’s pink. Hot-blasted rocket-proof enamelled pink from Hephaestus’ own forge. And my £2.99 plastic ones are finding this weather a trial and I’m not sure either of them holds water any more.
** It entirely escapes me why he put them in his knapsack. It’s like fifteen seconds from the church to the florist.
*** One of the charities I subscribe to is sponsor-a-seeing-eye-puppy. You get a free calendar for your efforts. 
You get a free calendar that arrives in the middle of February. ^
^ Much better organised is Dogs Trust where I sponsor (you will not be amazed to hear) a lurcher.+ You get a valentine from your dog. This year it’s a refrigerator magnet. Too frelling cute.
+ Everybody know what a lurcher is? It’s a common term over here but not so much, I think, in the States (dunno about the rest of the English speaking globe). Lurcher = sighthound x something that isn’t a sighthound. Purists insist the something has to be a working dog. Purists also insist that sighthound x sighthound crosses, like my hellhounds, are longdogs, but mostly all sighthound crosses end up being called lurchers.
****And just think, if I had a proper conservatory I could have lots and lots of plants being perverse. And foolish.
Pink etc
I told you I’d show you my floral extravaganza again after I messed with it a little.*
Pink.
And just in case you think I’ve put all the pink in front to make an impressive photo, this is what it looks like from the other side. 
Meanwhile . . . it’s snowing. It’s not snowing like it’s snowing in Virginia, for which I am deeply thankful, but it’s still snowing. I’ve decided I want a conservatory. Once I finish recovering** from putting the weight-bearing floor in Third House’s attic I’m going to knock down the sitting-room wall into the garden and start putting up quadruple-glazed glass walls and solar baseboard heaters. I might put French doors in the main bedroom and have a sort of full-length bay window on that side too. And then I can fill it/them with tea and china roses and sasanqua camellias and orchids and greenhouse carnations and hippeastrums and freesias and maddenii rhododendrons . . . and chocolate cosmos and begonias and osteospermums and geraniums year round, and I don’t know what all else because I don’t have a conservatory and therefore try to avoid knowing too much about what I can’t grow.
And have I told you about the sedum roof? Yes. I also want to slap a green roof on Third House, which, unlike the cottage, has a nice gentle slope so the poor sedums won’t have to hold on with their fingernails. I’m not looking forward to getting planning permission*** for this but maybe by the time I get to that point† planted-up roofs will be commonplace and the government will be giving us eco-promoting grants to do it. A girl can dream.
Meanwhile I need to be grinding on with PEG II so I can finish recovering from putting the backlist-bearing floor in and begin saving up for the conservatory. And then Marechal Niel†† and I will sit with our feet up in the warm at Third House and admire the snow drifts.†††
* * *
* The kitchen magnet, which on my screen at least you can’t quite read unless you already know what it says, declares: They lied. Hard work has killed lots of people. It could have been a lot worse, given my collection of kitchen magnets.^ I tend not to remember to check for stuff like what’s behind something when I take pictures indoors, and this can be a dreadful mistake.^^
^ One tiny benefit to losing the old house and living in a cottage so small that everyone but the occasional urban flat-dweller suffers extreme claustrophobia upon stepping over the threshold+ is that I have felt free to get out my old collection of crass and insolent kitchen magnets and indeed to augment it. In the old house I used to worry about the grandchildren. Who are mostly by now too old to be disturbed by kitchen magnets, but they’re still all so polite.
+ Books not only furnish a room, they crowd you right out of it. Sometimes several rooms. Sometimes all the rooms in the house.= I was very amused when Diane in MN posted in the forum about lining hallways with bookshelves, and how well this works . . . till you run out of hallways. Yes.
= Okay, the bathroom only has books on the windowsill. Well, almost only.
^^ Some of the biggest cobwebs in England live in my cottage. This is a combination of deplorable housekeeping and a slight soft spot for spiders. I don’t want them on me, you understand, but a nice small tactful English spider that stays quietly in its corner will probably be left alone to get on with it. However any spider showing artistic initiative such as manifestations of ‘radiant’, ‘terrific’, or ‘some hellhound’ in web-weaving is totally welcome forever, and if it would like teeny weeny beakers of champagne or slivers of chocolate these will be provided.
** You’re all buying multiple copies of PEGASUS, yes?
*** Both Third House and the cottage are in a Conservation Area which means you need planning permission to prune your rosebushes—careful, you and your secateurs are altering the amenity level of the neighbourhood—and gods help you if you want to change the colour of your house. Which in fact I do. But not this year. I can’t face the paperwork. And Third House has this whacking monster Leylandii which is so frelling tall the army helicopters trip on it when they buzz overhead and I looooong to have the ugly thing down—and my neighbours are longing right along with me—but the Tree Removal Form is forty thousand pages long and looking at it makes me lose the will to live.
† After everyone has bought multiple copies of PEG II.
†† http://www.classicroses.co.uk/roses/m/marechal_niel.html We had one at the old house and while she was in a relatively sheltered position I don’t think her essential hardiness was the problem so much as her habit of trying to produce her first flush of big fat buds early enough to catch the last frelling late frost of a bad year. And unlike, say, Agnes, who is another early one, if she gets frosted, she sulks. Agnes heaves a deep sigh and starts growing a fresh lot of buds. But then Agnes is a rugosa and rugosas are tough. You have to be firm with your rugosas. Undisciplined rugosas eat unwary small children and absent-minded gardeners and are probably John Wyndham’s original source for triffids. I love rugosas. Just by the way. I have Agnes at the cottage. She’s doing really well. It’s a good thing I don’t get many visitors. With her and Souvenir and the three Mmes and a few others I have perhaps not introduced you to yet, it’s dangerous out there.
††† There are of course other problems with indoor gardening. One of the reasons the floors don’t get hoovered very often at the cottage^ is because I’m busy moving all the plants off the windowsills to clean the encrusted plant sludge off the window glass and the painted surfaces. Did you know that dark red geranium petals will stain your white woodwork? Gaah. And I want an entire conservatory? Well. Yes. I am insane. This is not news.
And you know those pretty little hyacinth vases? You put your bulb in the top and just add water? How about the fact that once the flower spike grows your hyacinth will plunge top-heavily over the side?
Creative use of large pile of magazines.
Creative use of Kleenex box. This bulb was a freller to begin with since it insisted on growing leaves at both ends.
^ aside from melting vacuum cleaners
Signs of life
AKA SHORT Monday*
So, this time last week:
Those tree limbs on the left are Mme Alfred Carriere and Mme Gregoire Staechelin–which is to say slender little rose stems. Plus snow.
This used to be a garden.
So yesterday and today with the snow gone** I’ve been looking for signs of garden life. A lot of it, I have to say, isn’t. But there’s a surprising amount that is. I know, I know, people garden in Maine. There are lots of plants that will make it through a lot worse than the last fortnight here. But Hampshire plants ordinarily don’t have to.
Pansies are amazing. The ‘winter-flowering’ pansy is mostly a scam, but this is definitely a flower. In January. Which has spent the last fortnight refrigerated. It’s been hanging over the edge of its pot, all curled up and miserable, during the whiteout. And while it’s a little frosty around the edges . . . it’s a flower.
(Vicky has snowdrops. I’m jealous, but mine are only little green points so far.)
Have you ever seen anything look healthier? This is a proper spring-early-summer-flowering pansy but it’s still been sitting under a four-inch cap of snow for the last fortnight.
The long horizontal stems on the right here are my winter-flowering honeysuckle.
Which is now trying to make up for lost frozen time.
Witchhazels do have an astonishing capacity to flower despite circumstances, but this one has come out while it’s been under four inches of snow. A fortnight ago it was still buds.
On the left, the thing with the big shiny almond-shaped leaves, is one of my ’snow? What snow?’ camellias.
And, speaking of snow-what-snow camellias . . . this is frelling Jingle Bells. It gets bigger and glossier every year and produces more really ugly flowers. But at this point I’d grieve for the loss of a friend if it packed in. Gardeners are as perverse as their plants.
And a primrose. Spring really is coming. Even if it’s only January.
* Or, my latest sad/desperate/pathetic idea about spending less time on the blog: short Mondays. Yesterday was a classic Days in the Life story. I couldn’t possibly not have told it. But could I possibly tell it SHORT? No. I don’t do short. I’m beginning to think that discovering the superphysics for thirty-hour days is more plausible than my ever learning to write short. Yet I am constrained by another zzzt-making electric fence on the other side of this issue, which is that if I drop it to less often than every day–as many, many, many bloggers^ do–the general frenzy level will drop too. And frenzy is how I get stuff done. At all.^^
^ Sane, well balanced bloggers who don’t have to trick themselves into getting stuff done.
^^ Yes. This is another of those ‘and you have ME why?’ moments.
** And may it NOT come back. Please.
Sunday morning
(This had been going to go up yesterday. And then we went hurtling and the scenery won. So I changed a few verb tenses and . . . )
I had about four hours’ sleep Saturday night. I turned the light out at a perfectly respectable hour*, or let’s say a retiring hour I find appropriate to an alarm clock going off at 8 a.m. later that morning. And then I didn’t sleep. After most of an hour of lying in the dark with my eyes burning with openness, I turned the light back on again.
So Sunday did not contain any of my brighter or more scintillating exploits. I got through bell ringing without being murdered by my colleagues, so that was good. And then I tottered down the street to the florist. I have a serious cut-flower habit, and I go in every Sunday morning after ringing and stoke the sucker.** And the florist, who thinks I’m fun to watch, often gives me a bunch of this or that which is on its last legs and past being sold. Then I take my swag home(s)*** and play.
Yesterday she gave me a handful of stocks which, when I took them home and gingerly separated them, instantly dropped half their flowers. However, waste not want not.
You can see the rest of them here. 
The usual system is to buy a few cheap things, like carnations, and one or two (or three) individual roses.****
At this point however it was still comparatively early. Hellhounds had greeted me on my return from ringing† and then retired again to their crate to finish their necessary fourteen hours’ nighttime shut-eye. †† I started doing some of the standard household chores–the first of the twice daily brush-ups of the frelling kitchen floor, for example, followed by the daily mop. And there seem to be a few dishes languishing in the sink (how did they get there?). And then I was seized by the notion of cleaning the kitchen windowsill.
This happens, in fact, a little oftener than you might think. I have to stare at it while I do the washing up, and plants tend to be messy, er, beasts. It’s a nice deep windowsill suitable for . . . jamming more stuff onto than will fit on your counters when you move it for cleaning purposes. I contrived to strip the lot and gave the sill and the window a good rubdown †††. But before I began putting stuff back, I found myself staring, instead, at this.
I have no idea what this was when it first emerged blinking into the light of day from the deranged craftsperson’s chisel. I put gravel in the bottom of it and a plant pot on the gravel. (Real plant. Plastic pot. Sorry.) But how did they expect you to clean it? ‡ 
I use a toothbrush and washing-up soap, but anything you keep plants in gets permanently stained and grotty, and if it was supposed to hold olives‡‡, I’m very sorry. It is at least much loved and admired, in a somewhat baffled and I-have-to-clean-you snarly kind of way.‡‡‡
And here is the shiny clean reloaded windowsill. I love geraniums. 
That one on the left came in with the indoor jungle the first time a fortnight or something ago and didn’t go back out again–this is the one I rescued from a long winter of cardboard-box-hood a few weeks before that, dug it up from under Louis XIV’s skirts §–and I figure, a few less things to carry in and out is good. §§ And it’s going, hey! I’m indoors! I’m warm! GREAT! §§§ –and eagerly putting out flower buds. The one on the right–in the olive/caviar pedestal–has been newly adopted as a house plant, and we’ll see how she does. She’s one of the Butes–I can’t remember which one and (ahem) her label has Somehow Got Lost–but the Bute question is much confused by the fact that I keep buying geraniums that are supposed to be Lord Bute http://www.thompson-morgan.com/plants1/product/p83391/1/ and never are. I have a very nice assortment of dark maroon Lord Bute-ish geraniums–oh, all right, pelargoniums. Anyway. This year I have added the Marquis and the Marchionness of Bute to the fray, and this one may be one of them.
The dark green thing between the two geraniums is a hibiscus I am probably unintelligently allowing to set seed because I’m curious to see what hibiscus seed looks like, the flowers are so wild and flamboyant. And you see the cyclamen going like gangbusters back there.
Life is endlessly thrilling with pot plants.
And I just cleaned that frelling sink. 
Have you ever noticed that you’re often seized by an urgency to clean when you’ve just done something (like scrub the sink or sweep the floor) that you will promptly undo by yielding to the frenzy?
* * *
* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA, stop, I’m killing me
** I know. Very ungreen.
*** I seem to have fallen into the habit of festooning the mews too.
**** At the foot of the vase you will see a little cluster of pink. That’s my birthday posy, still hanging on. Gallant thing. I admit it’s looking a little tired but I’m not going to throw it out till it positively crumbles out of its green block of florist’s oasis. I’m a sort of anti-romantic romantic.
† They have to. It’s in their contract.
†† Well, semi-lidded eye anyway. And to be closely followed by the necessary eight hours of daytime semi-lidded eye, briefly interrupted at intervals for hurtling.
††† The spiders were not pleased
‡ It clearly comes from the same stable as my attack-dolphin lamp. You can’t clean that either. I can’t remember if I’ve told you, the old house used to belong to the widow of an admiral or a general or something who fancied herself as gentry. There was one of her, and she had six indoor servants–live in, I mean, not counting the maids and gardeners and whatnot that came in by day. She’s the one put the wings on, with the crenelations, and the fake escutcheon over the door. Six live-in servants for one conceited old biddy is, of course, obscene, but you look at the kind of dust-catcher nonsense that came out of that era–note that my attack dolphins did not start life wired for electricity–and you wonder, did they make this stuff because they knew servants existed to deal with it, or did they make this stuff to give servants something to do?
‡‡ or beluga caviar
‡‡‡ But it had had a hard life before it came to me: that’s cement, or something like it, and yes, those cracks go all the way through the original base. 
§ It’s a rose
§§ I’ll show you some of the other windowsills later, possibly again. I know I’ve shown you at least the one on the opposite side of the kitchen before, with The Most Amazing Geranium of All Time on it.
§§§ Although: certifiable geranium blooming outdoors in December. Yes, that filthy background is my house wall, and that’s mould.
