Infanticide

teeny weeny baby broad beans

I have been spending the last few days anxiously groping my broad beans. Not out of any wierd fetish – at least I don’t think so – but on my mother’s instructions not to pick the pods until I could actually feel the beans inside them. This is harder than it sounds, like so many of my mother’s instructions (’stop hanging on the small muscles of your back!’) and after a while I was beginning to wonder whether I’d end up with nothing but bruised pods with flattened beans inside them. And besides, the slugs had already started on the biggest ones without me, which wasn’t the point at all. So I decided they were ready and picked and podded a handful for our supper tonight. The result almost – if you squint a bit – covers the bottom of a bowl.

All the same, I think my broad-bean-groping techniques might need a little work. The biggest were okay, but the smallest ones were disconcertingly … well, foetus-like is the only way I can describe them. However, I’m sure they’ll be delicious, and if they’re not you know I’m going to deny it anyway. For home grown vegetables always taste delicious; that’s the rule.

Shiny New Bike

I have been thinking that I ought to do a post summing up the pros and cons of my new bike, now that I’ve had it for almost three weeks – and over a hundred miles. But I will spare you all that and just say this: that whenever I walk into the shed to get it out for a ride, I catch sight of it leaning up against the wall and my heart does a little spring to see something so beautiful and to know that it’s all mine.

And that’s really all you need to know about it.

*Apologies to those of you checking in for a drystone dyking tutorial – I didn’t take my camera on the day and I’m still waiting on someone to send me some piccies before I can complete the post in a way that’s going to make any sense to anyone at all.

Technical Terms

“OK so it’s really simple: you just want to take off the copings and the covers and lay them off to one side. Then break it down with the doubles – which will be your builders – in one line and your hartings in another about a foot from the base. Take off the through stones for the band and set them off to the other side. When you’ve got down to the founding stones you want to start building it up again with the doubles remembering to always pin it in from the back and if it doesn’t quite fit just give it a wee dunt with the hammer …”

Translation tomorrow.

Bitter Harvest

everything's growing, including the weeds

Blimey. I went away for four days and it seems like everything in the garden has doubled in size. Pods have formed on my peas, my broad beans are almost pickable, my solitary lettuce is looking nervous and I’ve had my first proper harvest:

nature's bounty

Two handfuls of potatoes, my neighbour’s surplus-to-requirements shallots, and a pea plant that got uprooted (the leaves made an impromptu lunchtime snack). Given that new potatoes have also spent the intervening time halving in price, this adds another massive 37p to my spreadsheet totals.

Unfortunately, it looks like my potatoes have got what professor Google has diagnosed as blackleg. I wish plant diseases didn’t have such grim names – they are quite bad enough as it is without having to sound quite so mediaeval. I’ve dug up the worst affected plants and salvaged quite a few good tubers, but I think the harvest is going to have to accelerate to keep up with the advancing plague.

Meanwhile, I’m not sure quite when to pick the broad beans. On the one hand, I don’t like them in their pods so I want to wait until they’re big enough to shell. On the other, I don’t want to wait too long and end up watching them die a lingering death of leprosy, or the King’s Evil or whatever ills it is that broad beans flesh is heir to (although not blackfly, at least so far, so I’m spared that).

Who was it that told me growing vegetables was fun? Oh yeah, that’s right, it was you lot…

Losing my Licence

Yesterday saw me sitting on a Northern Line train, staring in horror out of the window. Not at anything particularly horrific – just that the station we had pulled into was Angel and I was trying to get to Waterloo

I was on the wrong bloody branch

To put this into context, I grew up on the Northern line (High Barnet branch, naturally). I am a Northern line girl. Its ramifications are engraved on my soul, tattooed onto the inside of my eyeball. I hadn’t looked at a map, because I didn’t think I needed to (and also because I had managed to pack the Glasgow instead of the London A to Z, but let’s just pass over that one, shall we?). And here I was making the most basic of mistakes, something even newly arrived tourists could master. I have been out of London too long, that’s what it is. I am beginning to lose my city mojo.

It isn’t just the tube lines, either. I found myself walking slowly at times on the – entirely irrelevant – grounds that I wasn’t in a particular hurry to get somewhere (although I did make sure I wasn’t blocking the way of anyone who was). I smiled and exchanged a pleasantry with someone I didn’t know (she made eye contact first). I stood on the escalator instead of sprinting up (on the right, though). And when I wandered down the South Bank among the summer crowds I found that I didn’t automatically want to rip the heads off of the many many people who still – even at my most leisurely pace – got in my way.

And when I got to Foyles on the South Bank, with some time to kill in the heat of the afternoon, and saw that they had put deckchairs out for people to sit in outside the shop, even though my inner Londoner wondered what the catch was* and how much it might cost, my outer visitor – footsore and hot and weary – went and sat down. And spent a very pleasant time as the clouds boiled up over Central London, and the breeze blew across from the river, absorbed in my book.

I’ve been out of London too long all right. Or maybe I’m just beginning to have been out of London long enough.

Oh, and they were free.

*The catch of course is that once you are folded in the embrace of a deckchair, there’s nothing you can do but get out a book and read. And what better advertisement for a book shop can there be than a dozen people all intently reading outside their shop? Very clever.

See You Next Tuesday

I’m off to London today again, so posts will be thin on the ground until then. My oyster card and A-Z are packed, my seats are booked, and I have just realised I have made a major tactical error in arriving in London just after five and having to get from Euston to Waterloo with my wheely suitcase during Friday’s rush hour. Oops. Here’s hoping my city-honed commuting reflexes haven’t grown too flabby over the past year.

Apologies in advance to anyone else attempting the same journey. I’ll be the one trying to feed my oyster into the little slot of the ticket barrier. That is how it works, right?

A Question of Etiquette

So you’re walking down a rural road – a long straight rural road – and you see in the distance another walker coming towards you. The question is not whether, when you do meet, you’re going to say hello to them – that goes without saying. The question is, how soon do you acknowledge their presence during the walking-towards-them process? Do you smile and raise your hand as soon as you have seen them, and then have to maintain a sort of rictus grin until you’re within hailing distance? Or do you find that gosh-that’s-a-fascinating-hedgerow until you’re almost upon them and then suddenly look up and notice they’re there?

Rural Bus Timetables…

… and other great works of fiction.

I was in Bigtown today trying to concentrate in the library through the endless loud wittering of the library staff (where this myth arose about librarians saying ’shhh!’ I don’t know. Not here, anyway, where they never shut themselves up, let alone the punters). I decided to take the last bus home to Nearest Village, which leaves from the train station at twenty to six. Fearing – for some reason which now escapes me – that the bus might be full if I tried to catch it from my normal stop at the bus stands, I went up to the station to see if it really did leave from there, or if this was just some mad flight of fancy dreamed up by a transport official who believed in the myth of integrated public transport. The timetable said it did, but I’ve been caught that way before so I went into the train station and asked there. ‘I don’t know anything about the buses’ the woman behind the ticket office said, as though I’d asked her about unicorns, or metaphysics, or dogging. ‘There’s a bus out there, ask the driver.’

‘I havenae the least idea, I’m not frae here,’ said the driver of the bus, but he helpfully got out and looked at the timetable with me. As his bus was leaving after the one I was hoping to catch he said he could take me to the roadend for Nearest Village if my bus never came. Thus assured that I could at least get to within walking distance of home I accosted the driver of the next bus ‘Aye, Nearest Village, the bus comes in here, but it’s no me, it’s a wee white one,’ he said. ‘You’ll be best to stand out there and wave at it for it comes by this way but it doesnae always stop.’ So I stood out there ready to wave, and ready too to sprint for my backup bus should it show signs of leaving. And finally – just as I was about to give up hope, the ‘wee white bus’ arrived, bearing a destination board for somewhere else entirely and the driver stopped at my anxious waving and admitted she was headed for Nearest Village. She didn’t seem to have a ticket machine, and my money went into a rather unofficial looking purse, but she was undoubtedly driving a bus, and I decided to go with the flow and see where she might take me.

After a tour of the bus stops of Bigtown, she took me off in solitary splendour towards my destination. But she didn’t take the route the bus normally takes, through the back roads and the other village on the way – she went straight for the big A road, put her foot down, and drove me direct to Nearest Village without passing go and without stopping to collect any more passengers. As I got off, I asked her about her route. ‘does it not normally go through Intervening Village?’ I asked. ‘Oh well, normally. But if there’s only one passenger I just go direct. It’s quicker that way.’

I wonder what happens if she gets none?

Summer has come to Bigtownshire

The sheep are lying panting in whatever shade there is – there’s really nothing hotter looking than a hot sheep, even a recently sheared one. The dogs that regularly mark my passage on my bike have stopped telling me in great detail what they would do to me and my infernal machine were they not inconveniently chained up, and have been contenting themselves with a half-hearted ‘wuff’. And – you may have seen the white flash from London – I have recently donned a pair of shorts.

But not in the house. Even with all the windows open, all through the heat of the day, to step inside is to feel the chill clutch of the grave. Up until a couple of nights ago we were still using a hot water bottle. I’m guessing it’s the damp, that or letting the Rayburn out. Still, at least it means that if I’m ever tempted to utter those dread words ‘it’s t** h**’ I can go inside and lie down until the feeling goes away.

All Downhill from Here

I have to admit I find the longest day of the year somewhat depressing – summer’s barely started and already it’s in decline. But I was reading the Observer magazine yesterday and its gardening column had what seemed like sound advice: going out and squeezing the last drop of enjoyment out of the longest day:

“Tonight I make it my mission to sit out with blankets until the last of the light is drained from the sky. It will be shared with the bats which dive-bomb the halo of midges that collect in our leafy huddle of gardens, and I will soak up the moment to slow it a little and try to avoid a small pang of sadness”

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Anyway, there I was at a quarter to eleven, thinking about going to bed, when I noticed that there was still a little light in the sky and I remembered the article and stepped outside to catch the last few moments of the lingering evening. After all, we too have bats and we have midges and we even have a hedgehog who wanders around in daylight looking grumpy because there’s not really enough dark to go round. And then I just as promptly stepped back in again, for it was drizzling. I don’t really know where Dan Pearson gardens, exactly, but I’m willing to bet it isn’t anywhere near here…

Meanwhile, in other news, the other half has just announced the emergence of this year’s crap baby swallows. All together now …