Tulip Time

I live near Chenies Manor which is famous for its tulip beds - see?

It also has a wall, facing London, with no windows. This was designed to stop the plague. And chimney stacks. Oh come on, you know what I mean.

Editorial Policy

This was the big thing a few months ago. The thing I remember (and right this instant I don't remember too much, for reasons which will become clear) is that Patroclus (I am not worthy, I am not worthy, I am not worthy) started off this discussiona about editorial policy. I remember hers. Not blogging about blogging, and no blogging about sex. (Huh! she hasd this thing abot Marimekko! Chenck out her blog if you don't believe me.) I used to have no editorial policy. Any post is a good post, I thought. Especially when it gets something down for the day.

Well here's a thought. How abnout NOT WHEN YOU ARE DRUNK? Ont he other handm, how else is one supposed to enjy a movie like OUTBREAK? Preposterous. Preposterous. Preposterous. Preposterous. Preposterous. . (See? I can still ctrl-c with the best of 'em.,)

Really really reallly., Is this supposed to be a metaphor for the Cold War? that's supposed to be over but clearly isn't? Unknown virus affects small N. american town, and the powers that be (Donald Sutherlang *groan* *no in a how-does-he-stay-so-HOT kinda way) have to bomb the town into OBLIVION or else their SECRET BIOLOGICAL WEAPON is compromised util Dustin Hoffman (tres small, tres cute) find s the anti-whotsit and saves EVERYONE including Morgan Freeman who discovers hois own humnanity JUST IN TIME) and the only reason this movie makes any sense is if you get progressivly MORE SPANNERED on your own margaritas (did Imention I make the BNEST MARGARITAS in the western hemisphere?) and then TWO CHHERS FOR DEMOCRACY o hell now I'm channelling G. Orwell. Buigger.

Tulips tomorrow. Especially for Dinahmow.

More T-shirts

My sister is back from ten days in Las Vegas. She came round for our bi-weekly House-fest, bearing tall stories and T-shirts. She said that there is absolutely no natural light in Vegas, none at all. That you never, ever leave your hotel. Because everything you could possibly want is there, in the hotel. Cocktails, chemists, clothes, 'coffee' shops. That, drinking their 'coffee' and eating their muffins on touching down from the helicopter ride to the Grand Canyon, and having been SERIOUSLY warned by the pilot NOT to feed the wildlife, they were surrounded by a ring of chipmunks three deep. Clearly bent on saying Hello, and harbouring no expectations of muffin crumbs from the grockles, none at all. And of course no decent coffee to be found, not even for ready money.

Not quite . . .

. . . the post I had in mind. Got most of it written, and looked for the picture to accompany it, and -

I have no idea where it is. I guess it got deleted in some sort of flurry. Bugger, eh? I think I may have a little lie-down. With - I dunno - maybe a book? It's been so long I've forgotten how.

Oh, the pressure

My friend Lin is of Singaporean extraction. That is, her parents are both Singaporean, she was born and brought up there, but studied medicine here, practises here (STDs. Ugh.), married an Englishman (ok, Lithuanian Jew. But seriously English.) and raises their son Matthew. They live in a lovely bit of Chiswick. Some four years ago hubby was offered a prestigious post in Singapore - Lin's theory was that she herself was a major factor, on the grounds that she would so love being 'home' again she would persuade hubby to stay longer than the two years he had agreed. Ha - fat chance.

ANYWAY. She found what she thought was a lovely nursery for Matthew, where he seemed happy enough, until she eventually got round to buying the required uniform T-shirt, and promptly removed him from the school.

Isn't it FANTASTIC? I reckoned that if I had made up a batch and hawked them around W4 I'd have made a killing.

HA! I knew it!

I quote from the Observer, April 1st 2007* -

'. . .(Donald Rumsfeld) was appointed to run an ailing pharmaceutical company in Chicago (in 1976). The company's one ray of hope was that it had the patent for aspartame, the artificial sweetener; the problem was that the Food and Drugs Administration suspected the company of falsifying its trials and feared that aspartame could cause brain cancer.

Rumsfeld duly brought in various cronies with whom he had worked in government and who knew nothing about drugs but everything about the inner workings of the corridors of power in Washington. Before long, the FDA magically approved the use of aspartame and the fortunes of both the company and Rumsfeld were sealed.'

You remember that stunt that John Selwyn Gummer pulled, with the hamburger and a small child (HIS OWN)? I have visions of Rumsfeld spooning the stuff into his face in front of the FDA chiefs, who bestow approval just to get him to STOP.

* I know. I really don't think it's relevant.

Rob

Rob was in church today. He's the bloke getting the church website up and running, and he helps out at the youth club. He's about 32, slightly built and quietly spoken. He turned up this morning sporting a new beard and two new kidneys.

His own failed him in his early teens, since when he has had dialysis twice a week. He's been catheterised for all this time. He has lived with almost constant pain, and been strenuously advised against taking painkillers, as they would mask symptoms of other, serious conditions. Death has, on a number of occasions, been uncomfortably close to claiming him.

My understanding is, that for each kidney a hospital acquires, they elect two potential recipients. Of course the closest match gets first dibs, but in the event of, say, even a slight cold, then there's a backup recipient. On the day of the operation, all three others disqualified themselves, and Rob was given both kidneys. Apparently he's set some sort of record for shortest stay in hospital. Five days does seem pretty short.

And now, his biggest concern is that, often and often through the day, he has to stop what he's doing and pee.

I don't know the gender or how the donor died, but spare a thought for the parents of that two-year-old, who cared enough to make the death of their child mean life for someone else's.

The best laid plans

Oh, sod going green by managing my life better. How about just going into the garden and watching God do it for me.

Last year I had this fantastic scheme for a tulip bed, based upon the beautiful Princess Irene. Isn't she lovely? This picture doesn't do her justice - the orange is good, but the streaks are a much deeper purple. So I put together a bed of solid purples, orange Ballerinas and these Irenes. I would so love to show you what it looks like, but whaddaya know? The purples, which are significantly shorter than the oranges, ha ha, are seriously past their best just as the oranges are looking beautiful. Princess Irene, on the other hand, is still abed, a tightly wound green bud whose intended playmates will all have packed up and gone home by the time she decides to show.

Current state of play:

Still OK if you don't look too closely. But if you do look closely, you notice that one of the Ballerinas has flared. You win some, you lose some, eh?

It makes sense if

. . . a) I tell you that that humming noise you heard in the background was the dusted-off breadmaker, and b) you look at how late it was. I was really very tired. Oh look - I still am.

Waste Not Want Not

It gave me quite a turn to hear, the other day, that we in the UK throw away about 30% of the food we buy. I had recently noticed in my own household that an awful lot of food gets chucked, so to hear this horribleness made official made me look at what exactly happens chez Mangonel.

Adopting the Pareto Principle, I figure if I can control Bread and Vegetables that will be 80% of the problem solved. Bread is such a big deal, partly because it's so damn cheap. (I'm not talking about anything which has its price quadrupled just because it has sunflower seeds in it.) I buy big because, ooh, once or twice we've had guests, or actually that week we've just happened to eat a lot of bread. The result of this statistically unsound buying method is an embarrasse du mouldy riches by the end of the week.

Vegetables are, of course, an Outward and Visible Sign of my pious approach to Good Eating. But the end result is the same - a binful of unidentifiable green spongy bits.

Irritatingly, there are fixes for these symptoms. My compost bins for one, and the Green Bin for the other. Here in Bucks we have a separate collection for anything food related. Separate bin, separate garbage truck, separate destination, to wit a high-temperature composting facility near High Wycombe. Apparently landfill use has dropped by something astounding like 35%.

But that's not a cure, is it. There's a man called Mel Bartholemew, whose Big Idea is Square Foot Gardening. Basically, vegetable growing by the Square Foot rather than the Long Line. Not only is he extremely sound on veg. patches, he also gives recipe suggestions which, if you cook them in the right order, and a little more than you need so you freeze the leftovers (all in one great tub), by the end of the week you get a delicious and perfectly balanced meal for two ready for defrosting. And he's got a beard.

(And now I've started thinking about the ethics of bread so cheap, and wondering if there's a case to be made for the harm it does society. And why the hell I don't par-boil and freeze vegetables before they rot. I'll never get to sleep now.)

Chocolate

That's Easter over and done with for another year, then And what have I learned this Paschal tide? That while it might say 85% on the wrapper, it may very well not do.

Those bloody eggs. Having lovingly put the patterns in different coloured chocolate, and filled the moulds with careful layers of the plain stuff, ON MY OWN, it was time to put the eggs together. The little ones popped out of their moulds very easily, and it was the work of moments to paste the halves together. Well, it would have been moments if I hadn't had to keep washing my hands.

I'd used blimmin' cooking chocolate, hadn't I. All organically grown and fairly traded and all, but the stuff, as indeed it's supposed to, melts at a breath, never mind body temperature. The little eggs are all smeared messes, and the two big ones, destined for my mother and my sister, JUST WILL NOT COME OUT OF THEIR MOULDS. Without breaking into tiny little pieces, obviously.

Though a big upside to all this has been my discovery that as a method of taking and storing clearly defined fingerprints, cooking chocolate is second to none. I'm going to write to Gil Grissom. Maybe he'll want to discuss it over a bottle of wine . . .

Craft(y) Fair

I do enjoy a good Craft Fair, me. From the beautifully made walnut console tables to the garishly-blotched 'Your name painted FREE!' childrens' coat pegs, the artisanal bread to the production line stuffed olives, the mouth-blown glass lamps to the wine-glasses decorated with that dreadful glass paint. Negotiating that tricky line between needing to have a look at some fresh horror involving hand-twizzled clay fairies and tea-lights, while avoiding the eye of the maker sitting behind the stall. The shocking needlessness of the be-ribboned plastic egg cups, the shocking prices being asked for some very average cuff links, and the total gorgeousness of a child-sized wooden motorbike on rubber wheels.

And the story I heard of some people setting up a stall with jars, with hand-written labels and gingham-covered lids, and priced outrageously, filled with jam bought for £2 a ton at CostCo.

Book List

What I am Reading Now is The Fortune of War, by Patrick O'Brian. Within the first 50 pages, our heroes have one ship sink under them, another shot out from under them, and are now held prisoner by the fledgling US of A. Phew. This is the sixth book in the series, and I'm already getting anxious that there are only 13 to go.

What Made Me Cry? Most recently, the pair of deaths at the end of The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman. I'm talking wailing aloud, rocking back and forth, tear-sodden face here. Really, really crying. Closely followed by the death of Jo the Crossing Sweeper in Bleak House.

The Book That Made Me Laugh most recently is the O'Brian - there's a dry chortle every couple of pages. The most laughing out loud has to be Tennyson's Gift by Lynne Truss. Funniest. Book. Ever. Closely followed by The Diary of a Provincial Lady. A blog by any other name . . .

I Raged at The Bookseller of Kabul, by Asne Seierstad. She lived with an Afghani family for a few months, and her account of the treatment of everyone not the male head of a household made me weep for the sheer bloody waste of human potential.

What Book Made Me Crap My Pants (I'm so sorry, I think that unfortunate phrase is mine . . .) has to be The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. For months I couldn't walk up any stairs for fear I would see Peter Quint looking down at me. Still makes me shudder. Miles was well out of it, I reckon.

The Most Impact On My Life would be The Road Less Travelled, by M. Scott Peck. It's the only self-help book I have ever read, and I only read it because the most astonishingly diverse range of people recommended it. The only thing I can remember from it, is his injunction not to lie. Never, ever. It's a betrayal of the soul. That's not to say I have never lied since, of course, I'm just very conscious of it when I do. And sometimes I turn not lying into a game (a not very honourable game) by saying something which will be taken to mean something else. Occasions for this might be how to phrase a response to a particularly hideous new baby, or a meal badly cooked by the Mother in Law.

What Book Ought I To Have Read, But Haven't? Boringly, I'd have to go with Ulysses, by James Joyce. For a graduate in English Literature, that's actually quite an admission. Here's something even more shocking - I don't feel even the slightest urge to make good the omission.

If Realdoc, Dave or Wyndham pass this way, I'd love to hear what they have to say.

Yesterday

It was Palm Sunday, which meant that we got to Process. The congregation congregated in the Surgery car park, was handed palm fronds and hymn sheets, and off we went, Choir Mistress, Band, Choir, He-priest and She-priest, and Uncle Tom Cobbley and All. Up the hill, down the dale, over the road, past the duckpond, across the green and into the church, all singing like mad things. Because no-one could hear anything, the back of the procession was anywhere between three bars and an entire verse behind the front. But hey ho, Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam and all that. Then the children turned their palm crosses around, holding them like swords, and started a fight in the church. Argh. No wonder there's a very vocal faction within the church community which doesn't want the little beggars in church at all.

UPDATE I forgot to say, Yvonne (a grandmother deeply loved by the entire flock) read the first Lesson, telling us it was from Paul's Letter to the Filipines. I had no idea the early church was so far-reaching.