Comment catch up, part one
I’m always going to write some posts around your forum comments and then I forget. So let’s see if I can remember long enough to catch up a little.
Jkribbitdesigns
. . . while reading tonight’s post [Chilly singing] I was humming the Gloria from Faure’s Requiem and was going to recommend Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna as I feel they have similar airy, light, and joyful qualities. Then I realized I was humming the wrong song. :/ The Lauridsen (and the Faure, for that matter) are still worth the recommendation.
I love the Faure but . . . Good old YouTube. I’m listening—first to Lux and then to the Songs of the Roses that Diane in MN mentions later in this thread—as I type. I’d never HEARD of Lauridsen. I’m so ignorant.
Although I could have done without the banner ad: How to sing, really sing. Breakthrough method releases your unique voice. Watch free video here!
I’m only interested if it involves chocolate and champagne. And I’m a little worried about the escape clause provided by that ‘unique’. *
Maggie
Speaking as someone who’s seventeen, I always write drafts by hand – but that’s actually because I’m a really good typist. When I write things by hand, I can write one sentence and think of the next, then write that sentence while thinking of the next, and carry on. If I try to type a first draft, my fingers catch up to my brain and I get stuck.
YES. EXACTLY. I AM EXACTLY LIKE THIS. I TYPE A WHOLE LOT FASTER THAN I THINK. And it’s like falling off a cliff when you reach the end of your thought and your fingers are still whirring away wanting something to do.
It’s true that I write the blog straight on the computer—it would be way too much like work if I didn’t—and I start other stuff on the computer a lot more than I used to. Still. Paper is the real deal. Paper doesn’t disappear at a (usually mysterious) keystroke. And I have more little notebooks (spiral preferred, so they lie flat) with pretty or striking or tactile covers than any four people need. I tend to write drafts in pencil, but I take notes in ink, and I just like the process of an old-fashioned fountain pen gliding across the page.
Though I also just like paper–I usually type up the draft, then print it out to make edits and then type those in… But most people at school with me think this is insane.
When you win the Nobel Prize for Literature you will have the last laugh.
Skating librarian
How many people are there in the Muddles?
Do you sing with piano or organ? I only ask because I am part of a group which can run to twenty or more and we gather in homes (those belonging to folks with parking not entirely filled with snow) where the living-dining-kitchen areas are one glorious (or not) space.
I know that kind of space is rarer in the UK, but we make do.
Both piano and organ, but mostly piano for rehearsal. As long as there’s an accompanying instrument I don’t think it matters that much till the next concert is getting close. There are something like forty Muddles members on the books but I would have said we rarely have more than twenty-five at practise, and we were about fifteen last week. I know. I think about this. So does Gordon, because I’ve spoken to him about it. But it’s unlikely anyone has a drawing-room big enough if all forty of us showed up—and since I’ve never managed to sing at a concert, possibly the last couple of rehearsals or so everybody turns out. Except the superfluous first soprano who is going to the opera, unless she has flu or a deadline rendered intolerable by said flu, and doesn’t go to the opera either.** My murky fantasy is that we start a splinter group of oh, twelve or so.*** There are lots of living spaces that could hold a mere twelve—including Third House’s sitting room. Mwa ha ha ha ha. I would throw in use of my cheap portable electric keyboard free.
Susan in Melbourne
I find that commercial and public interiors in the northern hemisphere are kept unnaturally warm in winter. [In the UK] I moved between hotels, restaurants, meeting rooms in universities, public transport, and everywhere I was too hot. On arrival in a new hotel room, I’d rush for the window to fling it open, and then to the heater to turn it off. A colleague who has recently moved back to the UK from Australia was telling me that she and her partner just had to leave a restaurant recently because it was too unbearably hot.
WHERE? This sounds like America to me, not frigid chilblained England. I acknowledge that I’ve been too hot occasionally, like in the Heathrow hotel room where Peter and I saw the original CSI for the first time (this was long ago) the night before flying to the States. And there are still, I believe, criminally insane stores that leave their front doors open to the street and blast the entry with the best their central heating can do. And anybody can have a Bad Wiring Day when the on switch gets stuck. But generally speaking . . . I like pubs with open fires, and then I want to sit next to them.
Robin, you obviously mostly inhabit private spaces rather than communal ones, and I’m guessing that you wouldn’t be burning fuel at the greenhouse-layer-thinning rate that commercial premises seem to be doing. Yours is the more realistic experience of the real (chilly) world outside.
Indeed. This is why my laptop and I crouch by the Aga in the kitchen. It’s not because my office is still full of stuff waiting to be doodled and I can’t bear to go in there with all of it staring at me reproachfully†. It’s because I get COLD in my office. At very least I’ll turn the central heating on and I’ll probably dust off the electric fire and open it up too. If I’m sitting by the Aga, if there are penguins in my office I don’t care.†† Also, there’s the hellterror. The hellterror does not truly grasp the concept of GO LIE DOWN yet, and her big crate lives in the kitchen. The Aga system is not popular with hellhounds, whose favourite bed, as I’ve told you, is in my office†††, but Pav will grow up. Or maybe I’ll just rope her feet together.
DrDia
^ Also: token footnote. So no one complains about the lack of footnotes.
Seriously? You have very demanding readers if they’d complain about a lack of footnotes
DEMANDING. TOTALLY. VERY DEMANDING. MY READERS. THEY ARE.‡
* * *
* Nadia is a little cynical about poor old Dido. Drama queen, she says. ‘Remember me’ indeed. —I’ve always liked Dido although I agree that topping yourself because your boyfriend dumps you^ is not a healthy, balanced reaction. But—I’ve gibbered about this before—your attitude toward a piece of music changes spectacularly—unrecognisably—as soon as you start developing a relationship with it by trying to perform the sucker. However inadequately.^^ So I’ve been engaging with Dido on a whole variety of new levels as a result of trying to sing her. And it may be entirely the wrong kind of courage, but it does take courage to do yourself in. I think there’s some steel there—and some anger. I’d like to get that into my performance, cough cough cough, with the despair and grief.
Purcell is Radio Three’s composer of the week. Today we had Dido. The presenter went on rather about the recording he’d chosen, and I have loved the soprano in other roles and agree she has a fabulous voice. And when we got to the famous Lament, for which no stop has been left unpulled, I’m all: STOP FRELLING WHINING YOU MAUDLIN COW.
^ I don’t find his offer to defy the gods and stay very convincing. Just by the way. Aeneas the creep. Aeneas the faithless. All he is is a pretty pair of biceps.
^^ Which is about as much explanation and excuse as anyone needs in answer to my craven question, why should mediocre amateurs even bother? This is why. Because performing widens and deepens your understanding of a major art form. Your brain and your emotions are not limited by your technical skill. Horizons beckon. Angels+ whisper. Doodah doodah.
+ Or supernatural being of choice. Djinns. Fairies.#
# Out hurtling hellhounds today I saw a van. Gremlin Landscaping I read. I blinked and looked again. Gemini Landscaping. Okay. That’s better. I don’t think I’d hire the first guy. But I think I may have a creating-my-own-reality problem.
** Sigh.
*** Assuming SATB, four part music, there have to be at least eight of us because I’m not singing all by myself. If there are second sopranos we have to be at least ten.
† Believe it or not, all you amazingly, astonishingly, superlatively, supernaturally patient people, I’m still turning the frellers out at about two a week. Or I was, up till the last fortnight when there was too much generalised illness in this household and I lost the plot for a while. But I should be starting up again next week. But you are all aware of the refund button on the side bar of this blog? Not only is there no disgrace^ to asking for a refund . . . remember that some day in the fuzzy distant future WHEN I’VE FINISHED THE BACKLOG Blogmom will put up a doodle shop where the refund button is at present and you can reorder. We will be taking commissions at a strictly-enforced rate of about two a week.
^ The disgrace is all mine+
+ Including my continuing failure to knit square squares which means the rose and pawprint requisitions are still in the aaaaaaugh stage.
†† As long as they clean up after themselves.
††† And this was true before the arrival of the hellterror.
‡ However there is no footnote shortage today.
Weekend
It was a fair old flaming rubbish tip of a weekend. And it started off so well. I made it to Aloysius’ early Saturday morning silent prayer meeting. Did I tell you* that in response to my nagging about a silent prayer service at a more civilised hour than eight frelling a.m. on a Saturday** he’s begun, just for the duration of Lent, a Wednesday afternoon silent service before the daily Lenten (ordinary) prayer service . . . which I think chiefly gets me off his back for three (?) more weeks but hey, whatever works. I had told him about taking a blanket to sit in the monks’ chapel and he looked thoughtful and said that I’d probably want a blanket for St Margaret’s lady chapel. So I went along this Wednesday with my becoming-well-travelled blanket and YAAAAAAARG &^%$£”#@???**{~] COLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! St Margaret’s*** chapel makes the monks’ look tropical.† St Margaret’s is relatively new build, but the electric fire on the wall in the chapel I swear is older than I am. And I was sitting RIGHT NEXT TO IT on Wednesday afternoon and all that happened was that the right side of my face got rather warm. Saturday morning at 8:30—and who is at their best at 8:30 on a Saturday morning—I had to sit against the wall so as not to block ingress (and heat) to other worshippers—all of whom, bar Aloysius and me, got to sit in CHAIRS††. As it happens we were—ahem—thin on the ground on Saturday††† so during the five-minute break to thump some life back into frozen extremities I also shifted over to sit next to the heater again. This meant that for the second twenty-five minutes of life-sapping cold I had a little hot space between my shoulder blades. . . .
But the rest of the weekend was a trifle dire. Darkness started his double-ended geysering trick again on Friday . . . which I initially thought was a one-off but was nothing of the kind, and indeed has been much more severe than his having-bolted-a-sandwich-end-found-in-a-hedgerow-when-the-hellgoddess-wasn’t-looking usual and . . . I’m kind of worried. This is not only hard on my nerves (and my washing machine) but on Darkness, whose gut is already not of the strongest and most resilient. I will probably take him in for a chat with the vet, but I don’t want to put him on ConMed drugs unless I absolutely, absolutely see no alternative. His ‘picture’ has changed and I’ve changed his homeopathic remedy accordingly, so it’s possible that next time we’ll be back to getting through it faster. But . . . I’m worried. He’s six and a half years old, which means he’s in his mid-forties in people time, and wear and tear starts catching up with you. . . .
I missed my Saturday evening service—my favourite church service of the week—with the monks, because I didn’t want to leave Darkness that long, and my concentration wouldn’t have been up to much anyway.
And then Peter went down with one of his streeeeeeeeeeeeaming colds, I will leave it to your vivid imaginations, but he does stream like no one else and his colds tend to roar up on him like a charging lion.‡ And while it does seem only to be a head cold, still, when you’re eighty-five, it’s all a little precarious.
Oh yes and then my front door lock at the cottage jammed and WOULDN’T LET ME IN AND MY HELLCRITTERS, one of them in a somewhat parlous state, WERE ALL CLAMOURING ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR AND WONDERING WHY I WASN’T COMING IN TO TELL THEM HOW WONDERFUL THEY ARE.‡‡
I had very little sleep Saturday night between worrying and lurching awake every time I thought I heard a hellhound change position downstairs, and very nearly bottled out of ringing on Sunday. I only dragged myself to New Arcadia because I knew Niall and Penelope were away and so they were very likely to be short-handed—and I was out of bed and dressed and everything, I was just brainless. There were exactly six of us, and I was the weak link—and I tend to get buoyed up a level if the rest of the band is good. So not only did we sound not bad but it was fun. I’m really not used to Sunday mornings at New Arcadia being fun.
Darkness seemed to be stable enough that I went off, with only a few languishing backward looks, to the abbey for the afternoon service ring . . . and that was not bad either despite quite a plethora of rogues. I appreciate that they want to shovel as many unsteady learners as possible into a touch to give as many (unsteady) learners as possible time on a rope but having the gorblimey treble going walkabout when I’m ringing inside on bob major, which I haven’t rung nearly enough to have any automatic pilot for and am still very dependent on the treble being in the RIGHT PLACE, was not friendly. And there were three of us with erratic wanderlust in the Grandsire triples plus a rogue conductor and . . . nobody died. I wasn’t brilliant, but I kept my line, even when some of our other variables were not keeping theirs.
It was a beautiful, very nearly spring day today . . . and Darkness has eaten both lunch and dinner with evidence of pleasure . . . and no unseemly results (I think). Maybe the week is going to improve. . . .
* * *
* I looked back in the blog and I don’t think I did
** Not that a freelancer cares that it’s a Saturday. But it’s the principle of the thing. Also, eight o’clock . . . no way. It’s almost cruel that they decided to move it to 8:30. Because then I did have a chance. Rats.
*** I seem to have named St Margaret’s of Scotland a little too well.
†Of course I’m not sitting on the frelling floor at the monks’, where there are definitely polar winds. Yet. I haven’t yet clawed my courage together to ask a monk if it would be acceptable for me to sit zazen—cross-legged on a cushion on the floor—so long as I pulled myself together and behaved once the service starts. They know Aloysius—and I’d be very surprised if they didn’t know something of the Zen Christian subset in the Christian contemplative tradition—so this won’t be entirely bonkers-sounding. I hope. Except for the polar winds of course. Maybe I’ll just not get around to asking till later in the season. Although I kind of suspect that while St Margaret’s chapel may warm up by June, the monks’ old stone sanctuary with the vaulted roof is going to stay brumal.
†† I know. I’ve just been saying I’m going to ask the monks if I can sit on their floor. I’ve never been sane, rational or consistent, why should turning Christian make me morph into someone else entirely? I will merely become a sort of heightened insane, irrational and inconsistent. Or maybe God will improve my circulation. He’s known to move in mysterious ways.
††† There’s a lot of flu going around. That’s a lot. What is it about March? Doesn’t this happen every year? It’s like all the bad evil germs and dormant viruses that have been lying around going la la la la all winter suddenly wake up and think, Hey! Spring! I was going to cause way more mayhem before spring! —And explode into unseemly activity.
‡ I guessed wrong about the homeopathic remedy for him too. The problem with Peter’s head colds is that they come on so fast you don’t have time to change your mind if the first thing didn’t work. It’s not this simple, of course, but it is this frustrating.
‡‡ I got in eventually. Atlas took the freller apart today and OILED THE CRAP OUT OF IT and at the moment it is working beautifully.
‡‡‡ Even if I did have to go to my voice lesson today without having practised properly first because Peter had A Guest and the cottage was full of Atlas.
Whimper
I want COMFORT FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD.*
I do have some excuse for being a little frantic.** It’s nine p.m. and I’m finally eating lunch. It’s been that kind of a day. A whimper kind of day.*** Fortunately I turned over a new leaf recently and began to take breakfast seriously. Heretofore—well, menopausal no-metabolism heretofore: there are photos of me eating breakfast in the garden at the old house† but that was a long time ago in many ways, including metabolic—I have felt that an apple and sixteen cups of tea was adequate. But advancing age and/or (advancing) ME deem otherwise: protein, they spoke in one voice. And a very interesting time I’ve had hacking out sufficient calories from the rest of my minimal-ingestion day to permit frelling protein before noon. However I have to admit that the new system makes the double-hurtle requirement presently in force†† a good deal more likely not to kill me.
The GUARDIAN tweeted this today:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/feb/22/breakfast-characters-james-bond?CMP=twt_fd †††
My characters have tended to the caffeinated beverage and breadlike substance breakfasts—Maggie in SHADOWS drinks too much coffee and adds a little toast for ballast—although the ones who know they’ll be waving swords later may also indulge in protein. I will have to think about this. Sylvi will need to keep her strength up in PEG II (and III. Moan). At the moment out here in the real world I favour scrambled eggs or cashews—speaking of CALORIES—but when you’ve spent years not eating breakfast, six cashews is luxury. And the smell of them roasting—I buy raw organic—is so decadent it ought to be fattening.
And now I have to get on with dinner so I’ll have time to sing. Before I go to bed again. I have to get up sharpish tomorrow morning both because all hurtling must be done in daylight while this infernal cold spell‡ continues and also because I’m having my horrifying second lesson in playing bridge tomorrow afternoon. In one of my wilder moments I suggested that I should learn enough baby bridge to be pressganged into playing a fourth when they’re short. Why Peter’s local daughter couldn’t have two boyfriends so they could play four without me. . . .
* * *
* I think I’ve been hanging around with a hellterror for too long.
** Very like a hellterror, in fact.
*** Although we may have The Wall sorted. I hope. I had a letter through the door this morning after I finally staggered downstairs after a bad night even by my standards . . . from my neighbour detailing her bad night after our phone call. Siiiiiiigh. One of us needs to be calm and capable and confident. Um.
† Homemade marmalade on homemade bread. We bought the butter though.
†† And I mean FORCE. The troika still only goes out after midnight. And only when I’m feeling strong.
††† With the I think daft headline ‘the sexiest meal’. Anyone who pantingly turns to it is going to be disappointed. But for sheer journalistic idiocy I assume at least some of you know about the absurd and fraudulent hoohah about Hilary Mantel’s essay Royal Bodies?
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n04/hilary-mantel/royal-bodies
I’m a republican all the way when it comes to the royal family, and the paragraph about hurting the queen’s feelings roused in me that most American of reactions, the Bronx cheer. But the point Mantel is making about royal women being acceptable by being fertile and dutiful—this even into the twenty-first century—I think is only too grotesquely true. Enter the DAILY MAIL shrieking and waving chains and truncheons and condemning Mantel’s ‘vicious attack’ on the latest pretty, dutiful and pregnant royal wife. ARRRRRGH. I’m torn between ‘get a life’ and ‘get either a brain^ or a bottom line sense of frelling ethics’. If this is what it takes to sell newspapers then I’m ready for newspapers to be over with. However the GUARDIAN which is usually pretty good about this sort of thing^^ published this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/19/hilary-mantel-duchess-cambridge-scandal
And, yeah. I spared myself reading the original MAIL hysteria—I give the DAILY MAIL a wide berth: I have an OCD friend who is pretty urgent about brushing herself off after she’s been on public transport: I feel that way about passing too near the DAILY MAIL—but reading the original article I admired Mantel’s courage not least because I knew they’d get around to saying that the only reason she was going on about the Duchess of whatsit is because she’s fat and childless. She’s fat and childless, just by the way, because she was very badly botched by the medical profession. Which is another story. Anyway. This all produces lying-in-a-darkened-room time for me and it’s nothing to do with me, and I hope Mantel is resting in her own darkened room with a good friend and/or a good book and a bottle of cold champagne. And that it’s worth it to her. I can’t believe she didn’t know she was being dangerously provocative, but you can misjudge this kind of thing. Don’t bother to ask me how I know this. But I’m not famous enough to get yelled at by anybody but my agent. There are advantages to obscurity.
^ Can they possibly have genuinely misread what she said?
^^ Even if its willingness to bash homeopathy is deplorable
‡ IT’S THE END OF FEBRUARY IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND. GO AWAY WITH THE SUB-ZERO TEMPERATURES AND THE SNOW. You’re making my little flowering cherry miserable. And the hellhounds. And me.^
^ The hellterror says, Cold? Is it edible?
Moan, etc
So yesterday I thought I was dying* or at least coming down with combined typhoid and cholera** . . . which might very well have had a sinister effect on my life expectancy.***
Today . . . I am not too bad. A little wombly, but not too bad. Despite the arrival of the new refrigerator which . . . remember the good old days when you ripped your appliance out of its cardboard and Styrofoam and plugged it in? This one is apparently a doctoral thesis in practical engineering ARRRRRRRRGH. Atlas is coming tomorrow to examine the problem.
* * *
* Or at least losing the will to live. A new foreign edition of BEAUTY arrived recently.
Moan.
I’m really delighted when my message of active roles for women successfully crosses the translation/culture barrier.
** As a result of the little adventure with the hellterror the other night. I can’t have Lady Macbethed hard enough. Although my hands were positively sore afterwards. I did try.
*** I spent the day frantically popping homeopathy pills^—I have an assortment of hellcritters to hurtle! I have a copyedited manuscript to painstakingly de-correct^^ someone else’s idea of standard^^^ punctuation and word usage through 273 pages of in the next I-think-it’s-ten days! I have Green & Black’s to eat! I can’t be ill!
^Mockorange
I was appalled at the statistics quoted for conventional drugs, particularly the cost of treating the side effects of those drugs.
Yep. Iatrogenic—doctor-caused—illnesses are a major killer. Depending on who you read, the third biggest killer in America, after cancer and heart disease.
Abigailmm
I understand the bafflement, though I don’t condone the vitriol, of the establishment. I was trained in cause and effect, and I sure wish somebody could explain to me a mechanism that makes sense. Not to mention how an umpty-umpth dilution of a deadly poisonous heavy metal can help the innards.
But I agree, if it helps Darkness, it’s not just a placebo.
There’s some fairly well-documented evidence out there about what is usually called ‘the memory of water’—that water that has been succussed, which means whacking your bottle against the palm of your hand or a big heavy book or thereabouts+ has undergone permanent structural changes by the now ex-presence of the remedy base: white arsenic (Ars Alb) or club moss (Lycopodium) or whatever. So after you’ve diluted it beyond the likelihood of any atom of the ‘remedy’ remaining . . . the water is still different than it was before it was treated.
And the foundation philosophy is ‘like cures like’. Ars Alb is likely to help people presenting symptoms similar to arsenic poisoning. ::HIDEOUS OVERSIMPLIFICATION ALERT::
Placebos are another tool. The placebo effect is real, and useful. I’m sure that sometimes it’s placebo causing positive change rather than the drug—homeopathic or allopathic—but homeopathy isn’t placebo, any more than allopathy is.
True skeptics would say that Darkness’ difficulties had merely run their course and it was nothing to do with the homeopathy. I know better, of course, since it took me four or five years to figure out what worked with least trauma on these occasions—it’s a ratbag having a patient that won’t talk to you—and I remember how protracted these affairs were before I figured it out.
But you only have to see homeopathy work like magic a couple of times to realise there’s something in it. Some bruises fade as you watch, after you’ve taken your Arnica. I stopped getting black fingernails AGAIN after I shut my hand in a door AGAIN after I discovered Arnica. I’ve told you my Cantharis story, haven’t I? Speaking of being a moron+++. I’ve been baking for fifty years but I CANNOT learn not to grab a handle . . . even if it’s been sitting in a hot oven for the last hour. A few years ago I grabbed the handle of an iron skillet that had been in the Aga’s hot oven—really grabbed it, and so couldn’t let loose fast enough, and heard my flesh sizzling. By the time I let go I already had a big angry red welt . . . and I knew what a burn like this was going to be like. Among other things I wouldn’t be ringing any bells for weeks.
I ran for the Cantharis with my hand going THROB THROB THROB THROB. And started popping pills. In an ‘emergency acute’ situation like this you take them pretty rapidly—say five minutes apart—and you keep taking them till they start working. Hellhound digestion and a bad burn both take pretty serious application.
But the Mare-Crisium-sized blister that was coming up by the time I got the bottle open paused and . . . went down again. I don’t remember how many pills I took. But finally all I had to show for the experience was a faint reddish mark. It didn’t even peel. I didn’t have to interrupt my bell ringing. And I am not kidding about hearing my flesh sizzle.
. . . Did I ever tell you how Chaos got his notched ear? That’s another Arnica story.
(And Diane . . . I bookmarked the anti-bloat stifle acupressure point the last time you posted it. I don’t mean to discourage you from posting it again++ as the subject comes up again, as it will do, because the hellhounds and I are surrounded by careless idiots who throw sandwiches into the hedgerows, but it hasn’t worked for me. I don’t know if that’s because the hellhounds’ problems don’t respond or I’m doing it wrong. I incline to the latter, since I can rarely learn even a simple three-dimensional skill without someone demonstrating in three dimensions.)
+Homeopathic pharmacies have machines to do it of course.
++ http://www.hmgdc.org/Links/It_Simply_Works.pdf
+++ For which so far as I know there is no homeopathic treatment
^^ Under extreme duress, the splitting of infinitives is permitted.
^^^ Well it very well may be standard. Ask me if standard is likely to be the method I adhere to.
Wall
So. I’ve got some wall photos. Remember the wall?
The view from my kitchen door, if you turn your head to the right. No big deal, right?
.
But step closer. Um. Well, maybe it’s a little bit of a deal.
.
To give you a little more sense of scale, that was all wall where there is plywood now holding my greenhouse together. Atlas and I recovered most of what you see from the mess in poor Theodora’s garden.
Eeep. (Atlas put the barbed wire up as a temporary measure because my walled garden is now open to the road AND I DON’T LIKE THIS AT ALL.)
This is after Theodora’s Strong Young Men did major clearing. This used to be a flower bed.
The long view. Ouch. Theodora’s garden took 98% of the damage. Mine took 2%. Plus the back of my greenhouse.
That’s Phineas’ house you’re looking through the hole at, my semi-detached neighbour. The cottage is hidden behind the greenhouse.
Some dizzy and confused tulips are trying to grow.
And there’s still a lily pond under the rubble.
Sigh. Poor Theodora.