ancientbrit

[ancientbrit]

Natter # 12  12/06/2020

Subject: Re: MI MG Natter # 12 12/25/20 - The Christmas edition

On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 11:28 PM Gordon Polson <

[email protected]

> wrote:

Today, (Sunday 12/06/20) -  I was reminded of the course we ran at Shoreline a couple of years ago on 'Latin for Gardeners'. If you didn't see it, the Seattle Times ran a great article on the selfsame topic in their "At home in the NW"  Sunday supplement and it too makes great reading. It rather simplifies the subject and makes it very digestible, which is probably why our class went down so well. If you have never given much thought to horticultural Latin you should check this article out, it is very refreshing and understandable.Let's face it, the use and understanding of it is vital to really knowing what you are growing, and if you have any intent to raise plants from cuttings or divisions to be sold at the Plant Sales, it is essential. With positive ID you will have access to correct soil treatments, pruning, if it is poisonous or fragrant, has spines or flowers and so on. The article was based on a new book entitled "The Gardeners Botanical: An encyclopedia of Latin Plant Names" written by Ross Blayton who comes via the University of Reading (UK), Kew Gardens (UK) and Heronswood. The writer of the article proposes that a little botanical Latin self-study might make better use of some of your gardening off-season hours than re-watching that TV series that you already watched umpteen times already. 'Sounds reasonable. The book costs $30 - $40 or so at Amazon and I have ordered my copy already locally. Our veggies have not done quite so well this year and the outlook is not exactly encouraging either. Jean has a double row of 3 foot high pots along our southern exposure. Well, not exactly an exposure anymore. When we first lived here, we were able to grow a mass of all different veggies, fruit and flowers. Then after a few years another couple built a house next door to the south and erected a close-together row of evergreen trees right on the property line. I complained at the time to the husband that they would grow to be too big and he agreed that he would top the trees when they had knitted together. I wasn't going to tell him that topping was a bad idea - I wanted the trees gone. Two years or so on, they divorced and now the trees are higher than our roof and totally block any sun from reaching the pots until high noon on the longest day of the year. They have also bushed out into our garden, further reducing usable space. In addition, my Banana grove has now reached around 12 trees which effectively blank the western end so that the setting sun, which used to help out, is now totally blocked and it looks like this will be the last year we will be able to grow there. I can and will reduce the bananas but that will only allow a minimal amount of light in, unfortunately. In addition to this, the borrowed raised beds in which I used to grow tomatoes, onions. leeks, lettuce etc, have now been removed as the house has been sold. Right now I am trying to find out if the PeaPatch program will still be operating in 2021 at Luther Burbank and if so, will there be any going spare, 'Not having a deal of luck just yet, but we shall see. Now with Christmas just around the corner, I get a bit maudlin and my thoughts tend to dwell on the past a lot. All the wonderful Christmasses we had during the war, which somehow seems a contradiction in terms. My Dad was one of eight children and my Mum one of four sisters and thus our Christmasses were crowded, exuberant, noisy and memorable. Uncles, Aunts and cousins wherever you looked and the food was to die for.      I frequently threw up! Christmas Eve was always lovely. Walter next door would always take his daughter Mary, my sister Joan and me to the Watch Night Service at St Dunstan's church in the village, right at the top of the hill. Just across the road is ' Whitehall' - a large wooden house from Henry VIII time and still standing and in use today, It always seemed to be freezing cold on these nights and the footpath would sparkle with frost and would ring as you walked on it. It was about a mile and a half to the church I suppose, but we talked constantly on the way and it seemed to take no time at all to get there. These sort of night walks were pure magic during this early part of the war when nothing much was happening, The Blackout was total. No streetlights, not a trace of a chink of light from houses or pubs and only the occasional glow from a bus or commercial vehicle driving slowly behind headlamps that were about 90% covered over. The night was like black velvet studded with millions of stars.  There were so many to be seen, all twinkling away, from horizon to horizon. The number of shooting stars were legion - they would pop into view every few seconds. As I said, it was a magical time. This was before my Dad joined the Navy in 1942 and was sent to India, never to be seen again until 1947. Before he left we would frequently visit his sister Jessie and family. They lived about 45 minutes away by 213 bus down by the Beverly Brook. Uncle Jimmy had a large aviary in his back garden which I loved and of course, there was always my cousin Janet, for whom I always had a crush. Our visits always seemed to last for ages, which meant that when we left it would usually be in darkness. Leaving their house we would walk about half a mile to the bus stop and catch the 213 again which would drop us near the end of our road about 45 minutes later. Halfway along our road there was an intersecting alleyway that sort of crossed the road. It provided rear access to people's gardens and was okay during the day - everything could be seen. But this was now, and now was as black as the ace of spades with nothing in either alleyway visible - just a deep black void. 

I was seven, my sister ten. The only illumination would be by small penlight torch, supplied by a #8 battery - which were always in short supply, so you rarely switched it on so as to save the juice - not that the light was ever more than a sort of sickly, flickering, yellow light! My Dad would take our hands, one on each side and as we walked down the road, with Mum trailing, he would start telling a made-up story that we loved, even though it terrified. And so, in a very low, slow and deep voice, he would start talking, timing the tale to culminate at the alleyway. "In a  dark,   dark  town, there was a   dark,   dark  road. And in that   dark,  dark  road there was a  dark,   dark   alley.  And in that  dark,  dark  alley - THERE WAS A GHOST! This last bit almost yelled loudly and quickly and we would both jump - every time. It was great! At the top of the hill in Cheam Village proper was St Dunstan's -  my church and was intimately connected with the school I attended from 8 till 11 years old. All the Saints days were kept and the whole school would walk to the church in a crocodile. It wasn't a very 'high' church but it was special to me at any rate - I love it still. It is totally built of stone and although old it is not the ancient sort of building to be found in many other places. St Dunstans itself has been serving the community for over 1000 years, although this current building has only been there since 1864. Turning left off the main Malden Road up to the Lych Gate, through the graveyard, and through the main heavy oaken doors, deeply studded with large, square-headed iron nails, you would catch that delicious scent of pine and cedar, overlaid with an occasional whiff of incense as you walked to your pew, surrounded by candles, hundreds of candles, to the low muttering of the organ, as people talked in hushed tones. I love the feeling that these churches propagate in me. I always feel that my voice has to be low, quiet and reverent, as the history all around soaks in by osmosis.  For this service, it always seemed warmer than on other occasions, although I doubt that it would have kept people away if it had been as cool as it normally seemed. The Reverend Dr Hayman, was our resident vicar -  a very softly spoken, nice man whose large Vicarage is built next to the Whitehall, which was on the corner of Anne Boleyn's Walk. He preached great sermons and on these special occasions, it was a delight to hear him. There was always a Creche a little behind the.lecturn with bunches of chrysanthemums and greenery spread about. The service was liberally sprinkled with hymns and carols which I loved. My friend Ken Coleman was in the choir and he always looked out of character wearing his choirboy's surplice with it's high white collar. He was never able to convince me that he was as angelic as he appeared!I loved to sing but I could never summon the courage to apply to the choir, but I did sing descant to many of the carols and hymns for my own pleasure. The service always seemed to be over almost before it had started and then it was back down the hill to home. Goodnight to Walter and Mary, a mug of cocoa and so to bed, making sure that stockings were appropriately hung at the mantelpiece.

   Four of my good friends were married at St Dunstan's, but Jean and I were married at St Lawrence's (built in 1636) as this was Jean's parish church in Morden, but somehow I always felt a bit cheated that I hadn't been married at St Dunstan's.

My sister and I always managed to wake early on Christmas morning, just to make sure that the stockings had been filled. The house would be quite cold at this time as there was no insulation - I don't think the technology existed at this level then. Some heating was provided by a coke-fired boiler in the kitchen which supplied domestic hot water via a hot water tank inside an airing cupboard in the bathroom above, making the bathroom a favorite place to start the day. To even the temperatures throughout the house meant lighting coal fires in the individual rooms each day so that the morning took a little time to reach comfort level. My Dad also had a great habit of preparing Sunday breakfast, frying tomatoes in pork or bacon fat in a tart pan on top of the boiler. They would simmer for ages and reduce to a jam-like consistency which was wonderful spread warm over bread and butter. The windows were all single glazed and a glass of water left overnight on the bedside table would be solid ice come the morning. It all had the benefit of making one move with alacrity first thing. There were no turkeys -  I don't think anybody had even heard of them, I certainly hadn't, but there would be a chicken, a leg of roast Pork with the skin still on, which had been slashed through in parallel strips, - which went crispy when roasted and were delicious (Crackling) Plus the usual and expected, brussels sprouts, roast parsnips, pork chipolatas (thinnish delicious pork sausages)  roast and mashed potatoes, stuffing, Yorkshire pudding and gravy. Dessert was a flaming Christmas Pudding served hot with custard or Brandy Butter and containing lucky silver threepenny bits, so you had to watch out for your teeth This was served around 1- 2 pm, following which the adults would collapse about the place after the dishes had been washed and put away and the children were expected to go for a walk in the park taking Jock, our dog.Taking an extended walk through Cheam Park and into Nonsuch Park we would return a bit muddy and Jock would be carrying his usual gift of a tree branch or quite frequently a lump or two of horse manure in his mouth! He was something of a gourmet! Coming through the door we would find everybody sitting around drinking tea or other brown liquids from glasses, the men smoking cigars whilst they reminisced about Christmasses past, with frequent and not understood (by us) references to past indiscretions - always good for a laugh from them. After a while, there would be a slightly uncomfortable movement towards getting tea ready, which meal was usually served around 7 pm. The table would be set with the usual stiff white linen table cloth on which were placed all manner of great dishes, almost all of which were served cold. There was cold, sliced pork and ham, celery sticks in a special crystal vase. This was a wonderful, slightly pink celery which would be eaten out of hand, dipping one end into a pile of salt on the edge on the plate and eaten with bread & butter. Unfortunately, this variety of celery seems to have disappeared ever since the easier to grow 'Pascal' green celery was introduced. I have never been able to find it in seed catalogues either here or back home, but the flavor was far superior to the self-blanching types extant. Under EU rules if you wanted to keep a variety growing you had to pay some exorbitant fee to the EU government and since the Pascal variety was easier to grow and thus cheaper to produce, this is the one that was sold and so it was too expensive to maintain the pink line I suppose and it is probably lost to cultivation now. So short sighted and sad - just one victim of hundreds. Then there were fruit jellies (Jello here) containing little bits of the appropriate fruit, blancmanges in strawberry and lemon flavors - all of these would be made in fancy-shaped jelly moulds and then turned out upside down on a plate and served from there. And trifle, always trifle!  There would also be a bowl of Libby's fruit salad, plus hot Mince pies, sausage rolls and maybe slices of cold Christmas Pud and finally  - 'The Cake'.This is a very traditional cake with minor variations served at Christmasses, Weddings and sometimes Christenings. It is based on a Dundee fruit cake which is NOT, I hasten to add, anything like the much-maligned, so-called fruit cakes I have seen here thank goodness. The ones that I have seen look like a pile of dried fruit, bound together somehow into a block, which then seems as if it was varnished all over to a high gloss. No wonder they have a foul reputation.

The Dundee top has a pattern of almonds on it and the whole outside is given a layer of marzipan, which is then coated in Royal Icing. It is superb.  Well made, it is capable of lasting in edible condition for years if stored correctly. At weddings, where there are tiered cakes, any that remains is cut into slices, packed in special little boxes and sent to those friends and relatives who were unable to make the event. My brother-in-law Denis  used to take prizes for this cake when he entered it in the local Summer fair. One tradition in eating this cake is to accompany it with slices of a strong, nutty cheese. it cuts the richness and seems to enhance the flavor the same way it does if eaten with apple pie! When once we get back to some semblance of normality, I will have to make one for our traditional 'Bun Fight.'  This isn't an empty threat  - I made my sister's wedding cake and it went over very well -  a real labor of love. Do not imagine for one moment that I will take NO for an answer either! Along with delicious food, there of course, have to be Christmas Crackers and these are handed around, pulled and their contents worn, laughed over or played with. All this largesse was obviously not a daily event. Rationing was severe and continued long after the war was over, right into 1952 and became even more severe than it had been during the war. Ration coupons had to be saved for months just for this one special event. The Christmas puds were made a couple of months in advance and the whole family was expected to take a stir of the mixture (very stiff) as you made a silent wish. To get a true Christmas Pudding takes an awful lot of fruit and other goodies. It also takes about eight hours of steaming in a china basin. After it has cooled, the cloth covering needs to be changed for a clean one and the whole thing stored until needed. When that time arrives, it then has yet another cloth tied over the top of the basin and it is steamed for another four or five hours and served hot as I mentioned. I think it is a wonderful thing to eat, hot or cold but I cannot persuade our daughter in law to even try it. I have to admit that it is very rich but the flavor and mouthfeel are superb. I should also mention that the recipe was formulated when people actually worked physically most days, even if it was just walking to and from shops or whatever - nobody owned a car except our local MD Dr Kerr and so you could work the extra pounds off without even knowing that you were doing so. Then of course comes Boxing Day, a wonderful and most sensible institution. Christmas Day is so hectic and filled with - food, that you really need another day to recover. When you consider that in the States, people travel hundreds of miles to get home for just the one day and then struggle back, frequently battling snow and lousy weather to return the following day, it is positively savage. Boxing Day is all about relaxing. You wake up late-ish - if you want. Have a leisurely breakfast, maybe read the paper, then get dressed and walk around to visit friends. You are invited in and partake of maybe a glass of wine, sherry, beer or just tea/coffee, along with a few comestibles to nibble on as you talk about whatever. After an hour or so, you move on to another favorite friend's house, or not and repeat the process. This can go on all day, or you can return home and be visited in turn. Frequently a long bracing walk is called for after the previous day's excesses and so you are gradually allowed to return to normal.Of course one of the joys of the aftermath of Christmas is that there is always lots remaining, leading to cold meat sandwiches, eggs and bread fried in pork or chicken fat - absolutely delicious, toasted bread spread with both of those fats including the dark jelly at the bottom of the bowl.  And one of my personal delights - 'stealing' strips of cold meat from the leavings.This all has to carry you through until Springtime as New Year isn't celebrated the way it is here.

As I reached my teens New Year was celebrated by my friends and me by trooping up to Trafalgar Square in London, but that is a tale for another time, so I will say goodnight for now. Your fearless leader. Gordon

[ancientbrit]

Natter #11   12/2/2020

Gordon Polson <[email protected]> Wed, Dec 2, 2020, 11:04 PM I am not sure how this will work out as I am not sure what to write anymore. Apparently, the last one must have gone over like a lead balloon and as there are no clinics to draw topics from I tend to write about things I think you might appreciate. It looks like I guessed wrong last time. Right now I am in the midst of editing the old Natters - all the Natters that is that we have been able to recover. Unfortunately, there are some still missing and I think that they are probably permanently gone now. However, there are something over 120 now available with grateful thanks to Tom & Jo, Janet and Carin, who resurrected all those we now have available. It is interesting to read back on them, some I find are likely to still be of interest - at least I hope they will be.This Summer I was positive that my banana palms would produce fruit as they went through last winter with most of their stature intact. This meant that they would be starting their growth from high up with all that potential in their "trunks" which normally indicates fruiting possibility. I kept hoping as the warm weather turned hot but still nothing. Then last week Jean asked me about the weird-looking lump in the middle of the clump.  It was only visible from her bedroom window and when I checked, there were the unmistakable rows of bananas preceded by the large oval flower bud with the point on the end, looking something like a large bird's head. At the same time, I realised that my largest Brugmansia., which had bloomed it's head off all summer planted in the garden, was now devoid of all of its leaves, but the buds (all 35 of them) were still hanging on and twenty eight of them are now open and blooming away! Yet another variety, that I was given by the 'Duchess", which is a variegated type with white blooms, had been left outside in its pot last winter, so of course, it was cut down, leaving just dead stubs. Halfway through the summer, I noticed new shoots just emerging from the surface and right now it is almost two feet high. I intend to leave it again all winter just to see if it will make it. The big “Charles Grimaldi” will surely die back as it is more exposed and it is too big to dig and return to the greenhouse where it spent last winter, but at least I have taken cuttings which are ridiculously easy to root One of the more interesting facts which I re-read dating back to 2012 was regarding the word 'sequester'', which I have used without really understanding it's meaning accurately This example involves the production of material from gaseous carbon dioxide. Apparently, a Dutch biologist planted a willow sapling in a pot containing 200lbs of compost and over a five-year period the sapling was only given water - nothing else. At the end of the five-year period, the sapling was removed, cleaned and weighed, topping the scales at 169lbs.The compost was removed from the pot, returned to the same state of dryness it had been originally and then also weighed, coming in at 199lbs 12ozs! Not too difficult to see why trees are planted to soak up atmospheric CO2.

I just had an Email from a seed company back home in Devon, England where my folks lived. I have bought seed from them for the last couple of years and both Lucy and Alison have had plants that I grew from some of that seed. The mail was offering a 20% reduction on all seed orders before the end of December and I thought some of you might be interested. Their inventory is quite large and unusual and they can be accessed at PlantWorldSeeds.com. Bearing in mind the terrific run there was on seed last Spring and knowing how I was unable to buy any of the seed that I wanted, I will be taking my order there very soon. I don't know if the 20% reduction only applies to me as a former customer or not, but if any of you would like to buy and find that the reduction doesn't apply to you, you can always let me know what you want and I can run the order with mine for the reduction benefit. just let me know ASAP so that we can get in under the wire. One of the stimulating things I re-read was regarding the natural enemies of the Brown Marmorated Stink bug. There is a yellow & black spider, three different Praying Mantids with varying novel ways of dealing with them. One chews off their legs to prevent escape and then munches on it like a sandwich. Another injects a fluid that pre-dissolves all that interior pudden and then sucks out all the protein. And talking of protein, the BMSB is apparently more highly nutritious protein-wise than a good steak. I have no idea who first discovered that but I can't imagine biting one whilst holding one's nose. You've got to be desperate.

Over the last several months we have been visited by two beautiful cats - one a long haired tabby - very friendly and the other a gorgeous white long haired creature with slight  grey marking around it's head. This cat seems to be caught on the horns of a dilemma as it sits at various spots all round the house , just staring at us, but when you attempt to go near - he moves away. Last Summer he and Pickle had a difference of opinion regarding just whose property this was and I had to step in and break them up before they took off. This hasn't fazed him at all - now he comes right up close and stares through windows where Pickle can see him resulting in some foul language. I also believe that he is rather frustrated as he watches Pickle shove through his cat flap - just above and to one side of my bed, but cannot seem to work out how this works. And so last week, after Pickle came through at around 2:30 am with the usual bang, White cat followed him and hammered four times on the flap and ran off. He has since developed the habit of sitting just the other side of the flap staring in and Pickle is getting a bit paranoid. He hasn't used the flap more than six times in the last few months.

Then just a wee while ago, following a couple of days of strong winds, I was reading in bed around 1am. Pickle was sitting upright alongside me, watching the bedroom door - quite unlike his usual attitude, where he lays across my leg and sleeps.  I thought that it was a bit unusual, but was totally surprised when suddenly Big White Fluffy cat casually walked through the door, from the house side. I asked him what he was doing there, but he ignored the question, turning around and disappearing into the dark.

Pickle and I got out of bed and followed BWF cat, turning on all lights as I went, up and downstairs. no sign of him. I noticed that there seemed to be a slight cool breeze coming from my workshop and going in there I noticed that a new service door I had fitted was slightly ajar. I hadn’t yet fitted a lock, but just left a heavy chunk of wood leaning against the door to hold it closed. The strong winds had shifted the block and the door was swinging. I closed and wedged the door tight and fixed the lock next day, but from then BWF cat has never returned. I find small piles of white fur in odd places where he must groom, but no cat! Strange.

I think that I might try to get back into running a PeaPatch at Luther Burbank Park. I have no idea if there are any available right now nor how to find out with the CCMV closed up, but I have to do something. The raised beds that Jill has allowed me to use for some years have now been removed. I was told that she was afraid that I might get dizzy and fall off the edge of the raised ground - a six foot tumble over rocks. But I think it must be that their son has now taken up permanent residence in the house with his fiancee and they want to keep the coast clear. Reasonable.

Anyway, I need to do it as I currently have no place to grow veggies.

Sunday there will be a virtual re-union of those who attended the virtual clinics during the year - BYOB. Rather a neat idea but not to be compared to our bun fights. Another interesting thing that came to light in reading the Natters is that way back in 2013 it was proposed that advanced classes be offered leading to Advanced recognition for those who took it and possibly passed a test. The idea was approved and was to be pursued. 'Have to raise the question as it seems to me that there has always been the threat of MG loss purely because of stasis.Yet another point which should be settled is when existing MGs from outside States move to WA and wish to continue. Many have been turned off & away by being told that they must retake the whole  3 month class again including the $fee. This, I could sort of understand if they came up from Florida say, but two that I know of came from Oregon and how different can Oregonian plants be to WA?     Can we afford to be so profligate with trained and keen MGs, especially now that we will be missing a whole year of intake and possibly losing quite a few from this year too?

I have recently been in contact with a guy who was at my old school at the same time I was - just a year ahead of me. I have no idea how he found my details as I didn't know him at school, but we have been trading emails back and forth now for some time. His wife died recently so he is obviously now alone and I think this correspondence is good for him, I certainly enjoy it. The strange thing is that he lived no more than 1000 yards away from me and from photographs that he has sent I know the masters and most of the swim team he was part of - just not him. We seem to share a huge number of things in common. He also attended the same middle school that I did - well he had to, there was nothing else around. I had to remind him of the various staff names and subjects as he couldn't remember a single one. In biology, he sat next to one of my best friends - Dave Bellamy. His interests are similar. He and his wife worked in the States for years. They had Siamese cats too  He is interested in cars and he is rather lucky at the moment as his two daughters have taken charge of a sports car that he built and ran for years and are having it restored - just needing the glass replaced now and some final tuning work done on the engine. I was to have seen him when I was back home two years ago until my busted ribs and having to look after my sister intervened. Bedtime calls right now, but I am ashamed that I haven't maintained a more regular correspondence with you as I have in the past. I will try a little harder in 2021 - perhaps there will be more happening then - I certainly hope so.

Your fearless leader,Gordon

PS Don't forget - those whose CE levels are a wee bit below par. Don't leave it to the last minute. Talk to me.

[ancientbrit]

Natter #10   11/9/2020

And explosives are yet another subject of fascination for me as with so many others I guess. So what is it then about this fascination with fireworks? They certainly are attractive to watch and I love to handle and light them off myself - always have. In the USA it commemorates the declaration of Independence that saw the founding of this country and it's separation from England. It is held on July 4th, which is fine as far as being able to watch them in comfort, but not so good as it comes in the hot season when fire risk is very high. Many houses are roofed with flammable materials such as cedar shingles or torch-down felts and as they are usually hot and dry the inevitable happens quite frequently. I am not sure what traditions are honored in China and other countries but in England, the fireworks are lit off on November 5th, when the weather is usually cool and frequently wet which is an advantage as far as wildfires are concerned. Rooves in England are almost always covered in slate or tile or similar fireproof materials, which also last almost forever.( thatched cottages are the exception to the rule) I grew up in a house built in 1935 which had a tiled roof. We had to have a few tiles replaced following damage caused by torrents of hot shell fragments from anti-aircraft gunfire which banged down from on high for months during the war. But that roof is still good 85 years on. November 5th in England commemorates the foiling of a plot to blow up Parliament which would have been attended by the King and Queen. All this followed in the wake of Henry VIII’s breaking with the church of Rome, making him the head of the English church and Protestantism and starting the rift with the Roman Catholic church. His son Edward acceeded to the throne when Henry died, continuing his father's Protestant beliefs, but he lived for only a few years, before becoming seriously ill and dying. Before he died he set his sister Lady Jane Grey on the throne, because he knew that if his other, half-sister Mary Tudor came to the throne, being a Roman Catholic, she would reverse all the work he and his father had accomplished. Unfortunately, Mary was made of sterner stuff and managed to depose Lady Jane and have her beheaded. Nice family trait that! Mary reigned for the next five years until her death and in that time she had over 250 people burned at the stake for religious reasons ( ie they were protestants who refused to recant). This earned her the sobriquet of 'Bloody Mary.'   Elizabeth 1st succeeded Mary and Protestantism returned to fashion, and religion as you can see tugged folk back and forth, going in and out of favor over the years. Elizabeth in her turn destroyed umpteen priests just to show that she was an equal opportunity Queen. When she died, James VI  of Scotland became king. He was also a Protestant, which fact didn't go down very well with the many secret Catholics who had been hoping for a return to the Pope. And so those malcontents gathered together to plan a way to change things. Guy Fawkes was a Catholic who had spent some years fighting, as an explosives expert on the Continent against Dutch Protestants who were trying to establish themselves. This war continued for 90 years, amazing as that sounds.Guy had returned to London in time to be included in this group and very carefully they acquired barrels of gunpowder which they gradually moved into the basement of the Houses of Parliament The intent was to ignite the explosives at the Royal opening of Parliament, which would wipe out.not only the ruling Royal House, but also both parties of Parliament. Guy drew the short straw and was elected to light the fuse but was discovered by the night guard before he did so. He was tried and convicted, being sentenced to being "..hanged, drawn and quartered." ( 'Hanged' is the correct term here. People are hanged, meat is hung. Just thought you should know. I am sure that the prisoners would have appreciated the difference!) This is a serious sentence (as you can tell) designed to point up the heinous nature of the act of treason and attempted Regicide and to discourage any others who might consider doing something similar. The sentence is rather vicious, cruel and disgusting and if it interests you you might be better off checking on Wikipedia. And so, on every November 5th, still bearing a grudge, bonfires are assembled complete with a life-sized effigy of Guy on top and lit. Fireworks are fired by one or more people or you can attend a large public event. At almost all of these events, potatoes and bangers (fabulous sausages) are roasted and eaten and everybody goes home hot inside and along their front with their aft regions all wet and cold. Fabulous!  What is surprising is that it was illegal NOT to celebrate the anniversary of the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot until 1959! 'Never knew that and I have no idea what the punishment would have been for not doing so!

Good night and sweet dreams!

Your fearless leader,

Gordon

[ancientbrit]

Natter #9  10/5/2020

You probably have all realised by now that Karin has volunteered to do some work on the Natters after I lost them all and I was saved from bursting into tears when Jo & Tom, Janet and Cathy sent almost everything that I had ever sent out since 2012. I couldn't believe that we got so lucky and I am so grateful. Of course, now that Karin lives over there in West Seattle she has a rotten drive to reach civilization, not that I am inferring that Seattle is the zenith of civilization,  especially these days. I had wondered how those unfortunates in West Seattle were able to access the east with both bridges unavailable until my little lad Alex had to make the drive to visit a friend there and he told me what was involved I have to feel for anybody having to make that trip as I can vividly remember a somewhat similar trip I had to take years ago, At that time I was working for an engineering firm on Fourth Avenue and on        Wednesdays I used to take the afternoon off to crew for the friend of a friend who owned a 45 foot yacht. These were mixed category events with various sized boats competing on handicap. The only time I was able to take the helm for the race start I was able to jockey this large boat back and forth as the time to start wound down and somehow I was lucky enough to cross the start line just as the starting gun BANGED. We were smoking as we crossed the line heeled hard over with the rail almost under and it was one of the most exciting things I have ever experienced, especially as we almost ran down a smaller Blanchard which was in my lee and therefore out of my line of sight behind the mainsail. The only problem with this boat was that it's owner couldn't afford the price of a spinnaker which was a definite negative as far as winning a race was concerned, The whole fleet would sail south to the I-90 bridge from the start, usually with us in the lead, then go about on reverse course, hoist their spinnakers and just draw away from us. But those races were magic to me as we raced for the turn bouy with the sound of "Stayin' Alive" by the BeeGees blasting away. Magic, truly.   One of my friends at the company,  John, who lived on Bainbridge Island, owned a 25-foot yacht in which he fancied the idea of sailing to work. He wanted to drum up a crew to accompany him on the trip home so I jumped at the chance. Another guy in the office volunteered himself and his girlfriend; they had just become engaged and he thought it would be a tad romantic - sailing into the setting sun. And so, the weather forecast was consulted for a decent evening and we settled. We three crew went out on the day and bought comestibles to suit - cold chicken, ham, cheese, crisp fresh bread, desserts and a few bottles of suitable plonk - we were off to the races - ships biscuit be damned!

5:30 arrived and we collected the provender and all four of us made our way dockside, looking forward to a pleasant trip with a jig in our steps. We stepped aboard and unloaded the provisions below deck and then came back on deck to get ready for the trip. John unbrailed the main from the boom and hoisted the jib. We cast off fore and aft and slowly we moved away from the dock and out into the main waterway, gathering way as John had us haul the main. Once we were out into the Sound we canted a little to the nice warm breeze coming from the south as John set course for Bainbridge.into the setting sun. We brought up the meal into the cuddy and laid it all to hand and everything was great. Sun (and plonk) warming us and the evening couldn't have been improved upon. We sailed on eating, drinking and chatting-up a storm having a grand old time, but as the sun slipped below the horizon the temperature dropped and it got a little darker. Unfortunately, the wind, such as it was, dropped too as habit takes it and we drifted awhile. After a time. it occurred to John that maybe we should start the motor for a while just to make sure we would be in time to be able to catch the ferry back. He put in the key but there was no accompanying roar and after a while he announced that the battery was flat. This meant that we had no navigation lights either which was quite serious. We drifted on as night settled around our shoulders and it seemed now that it had become much colder. We, of course, had come prepared for a warm swift sail and shorts combined with short-sleeved shirts don't really do too much to maintain warmth, especially if you are not moving too much.

Onward we drifted, going at least in the general direction of Bainbridge. I dropped a piece of paper over the side to try and judge our drifting speed, but that didn't work out too well as there was nothing else visible to judge it against and anyway it drifted away and disappeared into the dark. We weren't sure that there was anything that we could do to affect the situation. Cell phones hadn't yet been invented, we had no means of signaling, although it seemed that John had a friend who made the two-way trip everyday and so we might see him and catch a tow later - might, he said! Sitting there without much of interest now to enliven the conversation, I suddenly thought that I could hear something - somewhere over there. I strained to hear it again and then there it was - a low, thrum, thrum, thrum sound which seemed to be getting louder as I listened. By now we all could hear it too as the thrashing sound got louder and louder until we all realised that it must be a ship. Looking into the direction from which the sound was coming, you could just make out navigation lights way up high, Gawd, this was a big ship and it appeared to be heading in our distinct direction. What to do? No radio and even if we had had such an innovation the batteries were dead.No flares do we John? No, sorry about that. We dragged out a scruffy looking table cloth and prepared to wave it. Crouching down low, you could see the rough outline of the ship now against the shiny surface of the water and it was rather frightening to realise just how big it was and now that it looked as if it was heading directly for us - it was absolutely terrifying. We stood and waved our table cloth, yelling and screaming at the top of our lungs, but, on she came relentlessly, obviously crewed by deaf-mutes who were not manning the bridge anyway. As she drove closer it became obvious that we might be missed - just - and we prepared to bail as the waves hit us.We were bounced around for quite a time as water poured over the sides, but eventually things calmed down and we were able to resume our previous aimless drifting, although a little more damp and colder than before. However, before long we could see the ferry coming our way from Seattle and we rather thought we might get some form of assistance from her as a huge ray of light suddenly pierced the night lighting us remorselessly and we were blasted by a rather rude voice censuring us for sailing at night with no navigation lights. The light was extinguished and she moved on leaving us pretty much as we had been before - no asking if we needed help at all. Charming! So much for the camaraderie of the deep. We thought of those who had just arrived on the ferry and moaned that they were probably almost home by now, able to look forward to a warm bed after a quick supper. My stomach growled at the thought.  Oh good  Lord, here comes the ferry again, just starting it's homeward run and again we were treated to the light show and bad mouth treatment as he sailed past in all it's glory of umpteen hundred horsepower fuelled by stinking diesel, leaving it's olfactory signature for ages after it had sailed on. Bainbridge was definately closer now, with the lights beckoning us tantalisingly - so near and yet so far. John seemed to be getting a little excited now and he thought that a boat approaching from Seattle might be his friend and such it turned out to be. There followed a bit of rather rude and good natured chit-chat and a line was passed which we made fast and suddenly we were on our way again, landing at the jetty soon after. As the last ferry would not be arriving for a time yet, we all trooped up to John's house for a warming drink and thence return to the ferry terminal where we waited for our lift home. Eventually our old enemy returned and unloaded its returning Bainbridgers, who filed past the one-way gate closed against the returning Seattle passengers. We waited for the gate to be raised after it seemed that all of the returning Islanders had gone. I checked at the ticket office to find out when we could board. The official checked the gate and said "Oh good Lord, is that gate stuck again?" He ran down to it and gave it a nudge and like magic the gate rose, allowing us to race down to the ferry, which was now about ten feet away from the jetty and accelerating towards distant Seattle.I could have cried; after all that we had gone through, to miss it by such a small amount. We had a few words with the official who was now closing up and he felt badly enough that he volunteered to take us home. And so, we loaded into his car and off we set, driving south and south forever it seemed. He was as good as his word and dropped all three of us at our doors and I finally got to bed around 0330. It had been quite a trip!

Your fearless leader,Gordon

[ancientbrit]

Natter #8   9/8/2020

Tue, Sep 8, 2020, 11:14 PM A lovely day today - sunny with a very attractive breeze and I was able to complete the electrical conduit work in the greenhouse without breaking much of a sweat. When I returned indoors for my well-deserved cup of tea I started to read the New York Times and then there was this fantastic article! I don't know how many of you are familiar with the story of the Methuselah Date Palm, but if you have attended any of my Propagation lectures you would know. But just in case you were sufficiently ill-advised to stay home I will run a brief resume. 2000 years ago the Romans were flexing their muscle in the middle east and had captured Judea. Some members of the Jewish community rebelled against the Centurions but they were small in number and untrained compared to the Romans and the last of the zealots retired to the heights of Masada where the Romans besieged them. The Romans gradually erected an earthen ramp up to the summit and the rebels chose to commit suicide by jumping from the peak, rather than be enslaved by the Romans. Jump forward to the 1960s when there was an architectural excavation made at Masada and one of the things discovered was an old pot containing date seeds thought to have probably been left by the Zealots. These were taken and stored in a lab storage cupboard where they were later found again by a Doctor from the Israeli Natural Medicine Research Center. She treated them to gradual hydration, warmth, plant hormone and enzymatic fertilizer without expecting much. She was therefore delighted when she noticed a green shoot spearing through the soil surface a wee time later. The seedling was cosseted and eventually planted outside the facility in a fenced plot to keep it safe. In the meantime, the hard parts remaining of the date seed were subjected to carbon dating and found to be 2000 years old.     It was thought that the seedling, now named Methuselah, might eventually be the progenitor of a returning breed of Judean dates, which had been justly famous in their time, but had been extinct now for years and years They had been somewhat larger than most, delicious and very nutritious, In addition, they had been known to have medicinal properties such as being a laxative and an aphrodisiac. Obviously one would need to be a little circumspect in eating them! Unfortunately, Methuselah turned out to be a male plant and so the good Doctor went searching again and chose more than 30 seeds from archeological sites in the Jordan Desert including Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. They were planted between 2011 and 2014 and six of the seeds germinated. One of the ultimately female seedlings came from an ancient burial cave in Wadi el-Makkukh near Jericho, now in the west bank, and was carbon-dated to between the first and fourth centuries BCE, becoming one of the oldest known seeds to have ever been germinated. This seedling was crossed with Methuselah and this year one of these progeny produced her first crop of dates which were pronounced to be delicious, but there was no mention of their more dubious qualities - the testers probably want to keep that information rather quiet. Proof might prove to be embarrassing!                                           After that initial tasting, the remaining dates were rushed away for testing but I expect to see much more of these before too long. Something like this, able to produce what is an almost perfect food in such desolate conditions is obviously invaluable. My ideal sort of plant has beautiful foliage which is fragrant. It produces beautiful fragrant flowers that ultimately merge into delicious fruit. To date, I haven't found such a paragon but I do get partway with fragrant beautiful plants in my front garden which flower in phases, starting with two different Daphnes in December and running the gamut of Viburnum carlesii, Azalea "Gold Rush," Styrax japonica and Lavender continuing until around July. I am always on the lookout for similar fragrances to extend the year as I know that some of you are too. I have a giant Brugmansia in the back garden which has just finished it's first flush of fragrant blooms. It usually continues until first frost and this year I am afraid it will have to die - it is just way too big to be overwintered in the greenhouse, but I have taken cuttings so it won't be gone forever.                                                                                                                In the vegetable garden Broad Beans (Favas)  add their fragrance to the mix and when you think about it fragrance is one of the most evocative of experiences. Lilac takes me right back to an old Farm that I used to visit with my mother and sister where we picked Gooseberries and Blackcurrants. Their faces and presence are there almost within touching distance.  Scent makes connections with people in so many different ways - it switches on lights from your past, drawing forward little memories. Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter fame separated odors into moral and the immoral - the perfect division. Every scent seems to fall beautifully into that simple dichotomy: Day Lily flowers even switch from the former at noon to the latter when the end of the day crumples their blooms. There is a relatively newly revised book named "RHS Companion to Scented Plants" written by Stephen Lacey - a long-standing contributor to Telegraph Gardening. Stephan says “   that the best reason to grow a plant is it's smell and I could never consider buying a rose if it was not scented; I don't see the point.”                                                                                                  Early winter is a tricky time to find scents, but there are some. Buddleja auriculata flowers in November through Christmas in a suitable position. It might not be the most fascinating plant to look at, but the flowers smell of lemon peel and make perfect scented bunches for the Christmas table.  Winter Sweet (Chimonanthus praecox) has the most amazing scent for midwinter - lemon lipstick!   A couple of stems cut for the house will fill every room with perfume.  And for a little later, there's Oemleria, hugely popular in Edwardian gardens. It flowers before it's leaves appear, bringing the fragrance of almonds in February and March. Shrubs and climbers are often highly scented, possibly because many woodland plants have less opportunity to lure in pollinators in shady positions. Shrubs are out of fashion at the moment, whereas perennials and naturalistic plantings are everywhere, but involve few scents. To make matters worse, many beautifully scented plants are sold only for their looks. Stephen's book uses a rather more scientific, yet understandable classification than Mr Lloyd's. Rose scents, honey scents, spicy scents, and pea scents among them to help readers navigate.As well as being a guide to understanding scent and offering suggestions for the inquisitive, Stephen's book gets into the nitty-gritty of planning a garden around scent and getting the best from it. Building scent into your garden is one thing, but to get the best from it, you have to make it easy to enjoy. At Alderley Grange in Gloucestershire in England - one of the few gardens built around scent - lemon verbenas used to be grown as standards in containers and placed at path junctions, at the right height for the passer-by. Similarly, planning scent around windows and doors, at heights to suit, fills both garden and your life with magic. House plants, too - why would you have a house plant that wasn't scented? Consider a Meyer Lemon with it's superb thin-skinned fruit and wonderful perfume. Gardening with scent makes life more evocative and keeps your nose alert, but perhaps more importantly, it's more fun! A few more scented plants to consider are Rhododendron fragrantissimum with it's white flowers in late winter through Spring. The fragrance is wonderful - complex and lily-like. A good one for growing in containers as it is slightly tender. Philadelphus are very good performers. "Mexican Jewel" which hasn't been around for long, is a small-leaved philadelphus with a sophisticated floral pineapple scent. Another is P. Minnesota Snowflake, with a larger bloom very double looking as if the petals had been slashed with scissors with a lovely scent. Lilium regale with its wonderful scent is hard to beat and then, of course, there is my favorite Cardiocrinum giganteum. The Moss rose William Lobb with it's complex French perfume and the bonus of the resinous scent of the sticky buds. Magnolia yunnanensis is a newish shrub, like a small-flowered grandiflora. Compact, with small leaves and small creamy flowers. it has the same fruit cocktail/lemon perfume of grandiflora. Enjoy the sun and don't burn. Stay safe and we'll come through this.Your fearless leader,Gordon -

[ancientbrit]

Natter #7  9/3/2020

Sorry about the long delay with the last Natter - nothing worthwhile talking about had happened so I hope you were intrigued with further adventures of my younger self.

There still is little of note happening, but there has been a rather interesting thing to mention.The deer, as you must know by now, continue to plague me and I am so frustrated as I have been unable to find their point of access. As you also know they/it attacked my experimental trio of apple tree whips which had just started to grow as I wished. The deer browsed off the new shoots, and so shutting the barn door well after the horse had flown,  I erected a metal plant support 'fence' around them. The deer reached through and browsed some more. I expanded the perimeter fence to make the distance too far for necks to reach across. In the meantime, a volunteer tomato plant appeared next to one of the whips and I left it alone. Surprisingly, the tomato grew like a weed so I trained it alongside the whip to hide it. Over a period of about three weeks, the tomato threw off two side shoots which I didn't notice and they lay down in two different directions to reach two of the other fence barriers. So I trained them up and they started to form trusses and not just a normal-sized truss either; they are enormous. The truss 'fan measures 32" from side to side and of course, the number of flowers is also incredible, I actually counted 500 on one truss, although I do not expect them all to be pollinated. The other two side shoots are also putting up large trusses too. Yet another strange feature is that the main plant is producing round fruit. The fruit on the other two 'plants' seem to be producing oval fruits! Probably find that they will blow up as they get bigger. If the fruit turns out to have great flavor an' all I will have to take some cuttings and overwinter them in the greenhouse for next year. This rather shows up the miserable performance of my greenhouse tomatoes. I took off my first ripe tomato on August 31st when I have been used to getting the first ripe fruit by about July 2nd. This led me to indulge in some serious pruning of four trees which have grown to exclude much of the sun coming into the greenhouse. I had to climb a ladder to reach the offending branches and it was so darned hot in the sun, but it had to be done Today I received my monthly copy of a mechanical engineering magazine, which sometimes features an interesting article or so, but not normally riveting.Thus I was intrigued to find that there is a consortium of countries that have been working together for the last 35 years on a Nuclear Fusion project.

I know that there have been a few publicized Cold Fusion experiments of just this same topic, but they have always failed to reproduce the same results and it looked as if Nuclear Fusion was a pipe dream. Why is this so exciting you ask (you did ask didn't you?). Well nuclear Fission is the one you normally hear about, producing power but also producing dangerous radioactive waste products with a half-life of hundreds, if not thousands of years, whilst also having the possibility of having catastrophic nuclear explosions. Nuclear Fission, on the other hand, proposes to produce more power than it takes to start the initial reaction, which then becomes self-sustaining. It produces almost no radioactive waste and even that has a very short half-life This latest attempt is serious stuff costing serious money. It is being constructed in France and is expected to be online by about 2035. In May, the steel foundation ring, which has taken ten years to forge and weld together, was finally installed. This is the foundation for the Cryostat or 'Giant Thermos' which will hold the reactor and contain it's heat. This Cryostat will be made from 54 parts combined into four main sections and will weigh 3,800 tons! In 2025 all the interior parts of the reactor will have been installed, fully integrated and ready to produce it's first plasma.  That November the reactor will start a month-long process of heating up to 150 Million degrees Centigrade, with a trio of heating elements pulling a combined 59MW of power - enough to heat about 10,000 homes. That will bring the plasma to a temperature ten times greater than the sun's in the doughnut-shaped reactor to generate as much as 500MW of energy for brief bursts.The sun's fusion is powered by colliding hydrogen nuclei (atomic number 1) that fuse and become helium (atomic number 2) whilst releasing energy. But at the heart of this tokamak is a more efficient duo of deuterium and tritium, two hydrogen isotopes that release even more energy when smashed together. This is extremely exciting as it could be the answer to dropping the use of coal and natural gas permanently - clear skies and eventually a return, hopefully, to the days of less extreme weather. I am going to send this off now as I don't want there to be as large an interval as there was last time. I have to tell you that my son and I are working on a slightly different way of sending these Natters. They will be in the form of a blog and one of the features is that they will be saved automatically. In fact, all of the recovered Natters are now in this blog and there are just a couple of things that Alex is writing some code to add the extra features he deems necessary. So we are nearly there. Your fearless and quite excited leader, Gordon

[ancientbrit]

Natter # 6     7/26/2020

I love books. I have a passion for them - always have. My parents were the catalyst really. My Dad would read to my sister and me when we went to bed; stories from a huge volume of The Brothers Grimm and Aesops Fables with fine, thin pages and wonderful, colored plates by Arthur Rackham, protected by sheets of parchment. You could lose yourself in the tales and those wonderful illustrations; we did and I wish we still had that book. We would go out for long walks in the countryside and always packed along a couple of books on birds, plants, and animals for identification purposes. My Mother would take us to the public library, a 213 bus ride away to Worcester Park and we would ride back home triumphant with tales about Mumfie the Elephant and others. Books were always welcomed as birthday and Christmas gifts amongst others and when a public library was set up in our village I was one of the very first to join and I took out a book entitled “Tropical Aquarium Fishes} by William T Innes I had that ook exclusively for over a year. The library was within walking distance along Anne Boleyns Walk so it suited me very well. At school when the class was made to stand and read aloud one by one around the room, when it reached my turn I could never find the place because I was always about three pages ahead. I couldn't stand the slow pace that reading out loud produced. I began to develop a taste for adventure books where the same characters were repeated in subsequent volumes, such as in Arthur Ransome's children's book series, starting with "Swallows and Amazons." I always thought the illustrations were sort of crude sketches but the stories were great. I bought a set for my kids but somehow they never seemed to appeal to them. During the war, American comics were really desirable and they were hard to get. A little girl who lived just around the corner had relations in the States who would send her most of the popular comics of the day - be worth a fortune now no doubt. We found out about this and soon we had developed a bartering system - English comics for American comics. One of the American comics characters was a boy who was always getting into adventures  & scrapes and getting out of them by building various things. What used to fascinate me about this was at the bottom of the pages were instructions on how to build the things that he had used. How to build a passenger rail car with lighted windows from an old shoebox, or a searchlight from a shaving soap container. That phrase "how to make...." has stayed with me for all my life and it still has the power to draw me in; I love to make things. Much more on this later. I became involved and interested in mechanical things and my Uncle Jim next door had a wealth of interesting gadgets which he used to shower on me. Old clocks, crystal sets, old firearms and on. I loved all of these and started taking them apart to see how they worked. Some I even returned to working condition. But eventually, prime movers and engines of all sorts started to take precedence and it peaked when our next-door neighbor on the left, at whose engineering company I later worked on Saturdays, took me and his daughter, Mary, to the Model Engineering Exhibition in London. I don't think Mary had any interest what so ever but I was in seventh heaven, looking at all the model steam locomotives, engines and everything mechanical - and they all worked, they weren't just pretty static models, they were actually miniature pieces of engineering and not long after this I started to subscribe to the magazine “Model Engineer” which I would read avidly from cover to cover, even the ads.This quite naturally led into yet another type of book and ended with my favorite author of all time - Neville Shute.

Mr Shute was a qualified engineer who was involved in the disastrous R-100 & R-101 airship designs between the wars at the same time as the Hindenburg was flying between Germany and New York. Airships turned out to be dead-end technology and the only thing remaining of it in England are the two massive hangers which used to house them. When I joined the RAF I visited this station and at that time they were the biggest single-storey buildings I had ever seen. Mr Shute continued in the aeronautics field by starting his own aircraft manufacturing company - Airspeed, which produced one twin-engined aircraft  - The Oxford. This was a conventional passenger aircraft and was quite successful, but it wasn't what he was looking for really and he started to write fiction. His early works did not involve engineering, but I guess that the old saw - write  what you know, finally enabled him to write winners, with four of his books having been made into winning films, all of which I have seen. In one period he flew his own aircraft to Australia, which became special to him with some of his best stories taking place there. But in my opinion, his best by far was his final story, completed and published not long before he died. It was serialized in the national press and a few months later the book appeared on the street, it was "Trustee from the Toolroom." This book had everything for me. It centered around a humble little guy, Keith, living in a suburb of London, whose mission in life was designing and building engineering miniatures and describing the building process in a model engineering magazine.His sister had married well to a wealthy naval officer and they had a little girl.

Just after the war, England was still rationed until about 1954 and the whole economy was geared towards earning dollars to pay off the huge dept owed to America for all the munitions and food they had sold to England when our backs were to the wall. One of the strictures placed on Brits who fancied traveling abroad at that time was that you couldn't take more than $500 out of the country. This naval officer and his wife wanted to emigrate to Canada in their yacht, leaving their little girl with Keith and his wife to be sent for when they arrived.They had a problem in they had converted his wife's jewelry into negotiable diamonds and wanted his brother in law to help him hide the diamonds in the yacht, which he did. Making this a bit shorter, the yacht foundered off an island in the Pacific and Keith considered it his job to get out there to try and recover the diamonds for the little girl. Not having the money, through contacts he had made writing for the magazine, he was able to scrounge a trip by air to Honolulu, from an airfield just along the road from where Jean & I lived. From Honolulu he picked up a lift from a weird guy who had sailed from the USA in a boat he had built himself. There is a lot more to this story, but after locating the diamonds he ends up landing in Seattle and driving down to Portland where he helps a timber tycoon with a problem he was having building a clock that Keith had designed. The whole story was extremely satisfying for me, touching so many points with which I was familiar and I must have read it at least a half dozen times. The films that were made from his books were:- "A town like Alice", "No Highway" (starred Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich), "On the beach" (Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner) and "The Pied Piper" (Monty Wooley). "On the beach" was a rather grim story about the aftermath of Global Nuclear War, which was a distinct possibility at that time. I have almost all of the books he wrote with the exception of a couple from very early days - still searching for those. Yet another writer of future aftermath stories was John Wyndham who wrote The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken wakes and Chrysalids - all cracking good yarns which I happen to have as a book containing all three stories. This is another that I have read multiple times; I also have  Kindle, a present from my son, which I have used occasionally, but it is not the same as holding a physical book in my hands. Books are - special and I like the fact that I can go to one whenever I feel like it and take down an old friend and feel instantly at home. All you need is a comfortable chair and enough light to read by and you are satisfied. I also like the fact that there is no battery to go down! Your fearless leader, trying to maintain some sort of contact with you all. Stay safe and hopeful - it WILL all come right one day! Gordon

[ancientbrit]

Natter #5  7/9/2020

On the way home from the Edmonds Medical Clinic for a covid check last Sunday (5th), I stopped off at my son's house to see him along with his wife Sari and daughter Willa, now 3 1/2. This was the first time since February and I could not just drive by without stopping now, could I? 

Back in February, I met their new dog Sunny. This time I was surprised that Sunny still seemed to remember me. The last time I was around a dog of this size (about 50 lbs) was when I was 17, just before I went into the RAF. We had owned Jock since I was six. My nine-year-old sister Joan had been offered a puppy by the local Air Raid Wardens post one afternoon and after getting the okay from our parents, off we went to get him.  I suppose that I didn't treat him too well at times when we first had him, although we were good friends, but about once a year he would remember and make it his business to let me know that he hadn't forgotten. I would be playing with all the other kids, making the usual din that kids make en masse and I would suddenly see Jock making a beeline for me, intent on bodily harm. He would jump up and I would stick out my arm to which he would clamp his teeth. As he would let go momentarily to get a better grip, I would be able to whip my hand away and give him a slight tap on the nose, he would drop away and that would be it - honor satisfied for another year. During the Summer holidays, we would venture forth with umpteen friends to the local park - Nonsuch, which is what remains of Henry VIII's hunting park  - his old Nonsuch Castle exists now only as foundations and cobbled streets, all of which is covered over and grassed, which is a shame.The site was originally excavated way back in 1956 for the first time since the building was razed 500 years before and it was amazing to see the things that were found still in great condition - shoes, coins, and tools amongst other things. Unfortunately, it was determined that the cost to cover the whole site to protect it was excessive and it was returned to the way it had been for 500 years. To add insult to injury a house was built over the site to house a park keeper, and to make it even worse, the property was named "Castlemain House."  Barbara Castlemain was the 'lady' who somehow obtained the property following Henry's death. Barbara was something of a gambler - a bad one and she was finally forced to sell off the property in bits to cover her debts. This park is huge and when we were kids it seemed to be infinite as although there were roads around three sides there was almost no traffic during the war except for buses and the occasional army truck. Even so, as you couldn't see them or hear them because of the vast number of trees, they didn't exist as far as we were concerned.The park was always able to absorb our numbers and we would be there from around 10 am, loaded with bottles of lemonade and licorice wood, until it was getting dark and we would make it home again, tired, dirty and hungry. Our days there were wonderful really; camps all over the place, trees to climb, an army training facility, rather like a massive Big Toy at which we excelled. Of course, we weren't encumbered with uniforms, rifles and heavy boots as the army grunts were, but we were able to whip through it in nothing flat. All very satisfying. One of Jock's attractive habits was to sing. He had a good ear for music and would join in when there was any sort of singing on the radio. Joan and I got into the habit of encouraging this practice to the point where we could just say the word 'singing' and off he would go. Until my exam results came through, which took an age then, because of a lack of examiners, who were mostly all away abroad fighting, I had to attend the secondary school next to home whilst I waited. Although over here there is supposed to be no connection between church and State, in England it is totally different.  In most, if not all schools, the morning starts with the usual roll call in class, after which the whole school collects in the hall. The staff assembles on a raised platform and the headmaster reads out any notices. Events to come, sporting awards are presented and hymns are sung, which I always enjoyed. Later at the grammar school we also were treated to a selection of classical music. Jock had the freedom to wander wherever he felt like because traffic was almost non-existent as I mentioned previously. But he normally hated to be left alone and when I rushed off to the secondary school, he would tend to follow and sit outside the school's hall. This was okay until we started to sing and then his musical imperative would kick in and his melodious tones could be easily heard above the concerted voices of the school. After a rather short time, I became known as his owner and the Head would order me to go and do something about him. This I felt must be because the head had rather a tin ear and no musical appreciation. All the other lads encouraged him by singing louder, so I got to take off and take him back home, and try to settle him down. Jock was just one of our menagerie as we also had a cat and a rabbit, quite apart from birds and other animals from time to time. Ginger the cat enjoyed the usual cats' life of independence, sleeping wherever he chose and getting along with the other inhabitants whilst staying aloof in the usual cat's manner.. The rabbit, Whisky was something else - a real character. He had access to the house, although he mostly slept overnight in a large cage at the bottom of the garden under the big apple tree. The first person to sashay down the garden path in the morning was expected, by Whisky, to unlatch the cage front and release him. If this release was not forthcoming and came a bit later, Whisky would jump down and immediately attack the legs of the tardy one. This tended to make a believer of you. 

In the winter Whisky would spend a lot of time in the house - he did like his warmth.  My Mother's favorite chair sat to one side of the fireplace and Dad's was on the other. Mum’s chair was also Jock's favorite. One evening Whisky decided that it perhaps ought to be investigated, but of course, Jock lay across it with his legs dangling into space. Whisky lolloped across the room and stood up on his back legs to case the situation. Jock growled but didn't move. Whisky returned to the other side of the room, turned and galloped back to the chair and jumped, clearing Jock completely, landing between Jock and the seatback. He settled down with his back to the chair and his feet against Jock - and he began to push and push and push. Jock tumbled off the cushion and left in a bad humor, grumbling all the way.  Whiskey settled down and went to sleep.

When I had to leave and join the RAF I was worried that Whisky might not be treated the way I was used to treating him, although why I thought this I don't know as my whole family were also  universal animal lovers. Anyway my Grandad, Mum's Dad, who was a really lovely man of whom I was very fond, offered to take care of Whisky. He had a long record of animal care, breeding birds and chickens. And so I made a crate and when I placed Whisky in it and started to nail slats across the top, Jock went nuts and started to tear at the slats with his front paws to get the Bun out. I was amazed at the obvious care Jock had for his buddy.

During the war, Jock developed an acute dislike for sudden loud noise such as bombs and guns. After the war fireworks and thunder replaced the more dangerous noises. One day, when I had been in the RAF for a year, Jock had wandered off in his usual manner, but after some time a thunderstorm moved in. It was assumed that he tried to hide somewhere but he was never seen again. My friends searched everywhere they could think he might be, They plastered signs everywhere which should have been successful as he was known far and wide, but he was gone and of course, there was nothing that I could do, being so far away. Returning home on leave sometime later the house seemed so quiet - no Whisky and no Jock; a whole way of life that I had known and loved changed. It took a long time to get over that. Walking in the park had lost it's old savor and I only did it a few times after that, once with a girlfriend and then with my sister two years ago.

In 1947 we had the worst winter in memory. We had had a large snowfall which was followed by days of hard frost. During the days the sun would barely put in an appearance, and when it did it was rather weak, trying to shine through the frost haze as a dull orange globe which would put a slight glaze on the snow, and then freeze hard. There were no snow ploughs in the south of England in those days as we never had heavy snowfall! Apart from the rough road conditions making cycling very dangerous - I came off many times going to and from school - there was one saving grace. In the woods of Nonsuch Park, there was a long, wide path from the top of the hill running down to the lower field. As a path, it formed a natural bed to carry rain and because of this, the rain had worn away the center making the path a vee shape. About one sixth of the way down there was a right hand, 45-degree bend and now that snow had covered everything this path formed a natural toboggan run. Snow had been packed on the outside of the bend and snow on the whole length of the run had been packed and polished to a fare thee well, to the point where it was impossible to stand on it without your feet whipping out from underneath you and dumping you on your backside. A friend of ours had a neat little toboggan that her Dad had made which featured half-round steel runners and the depth of the side rails was barely 2". Guiding this bolide presented a problem as there was no way of flexing the runners the way most other toboggans did. You know the type, the toboggans that are about  9" high and have a crossbar at the front which allows you to steer by flexing the front of the runners to the left or right. My friend Brian and I worked out a method that did very well for us. We realised that starting at the top meant that you could pick up some speed, but then had to take the bend fairly close to the bottom of the grooved path, or you would shoot off to the outside of the bend and go hurtling off into the trees and brush, doing yourselves a vast mischief, so it was obvious that placement in the bend was king. We worked out that the only way to steer the thing was to grip the front near to the sides and make a series of upward jerks, lifting the toboggan sideways the amount necessary to get around the bend. Just starting off alone from the top seemed rather slow, so Brian lay face down with his legs bent upwards from the knee, making his two feet into handles. We would start as high up the hill as possible and I would grasp his feet and push as fast as I could until we were running as fast as was prudent, then drop onto Brian’s back, where the extra weight would guaranty a decent rate of knots. I am not sure exactly how he managed to lift our combined weights to steer and at first he didn't get it quite right and we were catapulted off the bend by centrifugal force. But after a couple of these trips into the wild we got things right and were able to get into the groove, sometimes with the inner runner lifting and then we would be sling-shotted around the bend and shoot off down the hill. It was exhilarating in the extreme. We realized that our homemade toboggan had distinct advantages over the high, steerable, shop bought model. because of the way it was built. On those you had to sit upright to be able to steer it and the resulting high center of gravity was their undoing. Every time they attempted the run they would lose it at the bend and crash.This would all continue until it started to get dark which made things a bit risky. It was then that we began to realise just how damned cold we were and we all trooped home to agonize over feeling creeping back into hands and feet. It was all so worthwhile though and we were back again the next day I somehow doubt I will ever get the chance to return. The memories are great though and I wouldn't be without them.

The front garden is flourishing but the deer have returned to the back. All the Hostas have been taken out down to ground level now for the fourth time. All my blackcurrant crop has been eaten and the three plum trees have been stripped of fruit with branches broken. Because of the higher temps lately, I had left the greenhouse door open and they even got inside, taking off the top of the first tomato plant and damaging other potted plants inside. They have even taken a chunk out of my Cardiocrinum 'Big & Pink'. Now that is a diabolical liberty and I will not stand for it. although if I can't be where the deer are when this damage is done I am stumped. I have no idea now where they are gaining access and I totally despair of being able to grow anything. With the trees taking so much room without now getting the opportunity to produce fruit it now seems that their time has come and I will probably get rid of them soon and I am starting to feel very vicious towards them. They are costing me so much in time and effort quite apart from the money involved with nothing to show for the effort. I will check into electric fencing but the shape and size of the garden doesn't really lend itself to making an easy job of it, so I am really not sure what to do. If any of you have any sort of an idea of what might be effective, short of sitting up all night with a gun at the ready I will give it the utmost attention. Thank you all. Your fearless leader,

Gordon

[ancientbrit]

Natter #4    7/4/2020

MI MG Natter #4  4th July 2020I hope you all have had a happy fourth - all fingers still attached and tummies filled. Pickle seems to be getting used to the bangs this year, or perhaps he is a little deaf. Usually, at the first bang, he disappears and hides under my bed. This time he has wandered upstairs and downstairs and doesn't seem to register the bangs much at all - which is good.

I am in contact with a guy back home who runs a regular allotment (PeaPatch here) blog, giving timely advice and other information related mostly to veggie & fruit culture. I find this very helpful as he jogs my memory on those extremely rare occasions when I forget. I know you think that I never forget, but I have to admit that there has been the occasional lapse ever since I stopped eating peanuts. Strange thing that. His words for July remind us that this month is the time to sow seeds for Fall and Winter veggie crops such as Chicory (does anybody actually grow this?), Chinese Cabbage, Kohl Rabi, Lettuce, French Beans, Beetroot, Carrots, Radish, Turnips, and Peas - pick early varieties - early Snow peas are an especially fast to crop

.If you have had the forethought to already start Leeks from seed, now is the time to plant out those starts. The easiest way to do this is to use an old broomstick handle and thrust it vertically into the soil to a depth of about 5-6".Just drop the seedlings carefully, roots first into the holes and then just water in - that's all you need to do. The water will wash soil from the sides of the holes down onto the roots and it will remain cool and moist enough to thoroughly root the seedlings well. The idea of doing it this way, apart from the ease of planting and gaining support from the sides, is that the hole blanches the stem of the leek as it grows to gain more usable parts of the plant. If they are kept reasonably moist they should grow quite rapidly through the Summer and be ready to make fabulous potato-leek soup in time to keep cold days at bay. If you have never eaten P-L soup accompanied by chunks of Crusty artisan bread generously spread with butter - you haven't lived. Food of the Gods this! If you have been growing spuds and have lifted them already, you can follow with a crop of French beans to both nourish yourself and the soil, or if beans aren't your thing try a green manure crop such as Mustard. However, bear in mind that if you have ever had Club Root on your cabbage family plants, do not use Mustard as it is also a brassica. Use one of the Pea family, both for the Nitrogen root boost, but also for the foliage. And now for something completely different:- Once more my friend Valerie Robertson has presented her view on things English on the other side of the pond and is sent all over the world.

Val is a very  highly qualified State Registered Nurse who knows whereof she speaks.

Here we go.

From: Valerie Robertson GAG 14 Hope all is well with all. All Quiet in the Western Front over this way. Seattle’s CHOP was liberated leaving an appalling mess The pubs are open  today so the protesters have disappeared. BLMUK. is proving to be an embarrassment to those who donated, bent the knee and supported a cause that advocates the abolition of the nuclear family (that means dad is superfluous), defund the police,  destroy capitalism and support censorship plus the necessity for every white person to acknowledge that they are all subconsciously racist and privileged, and own up to the “fact” that every institution is inherently racist and disproportionally  White supremacy managed. That’s a big ask, which has bewildered the millionaire black footballers, academics & artists,   Labour leader Sir Keith what’s his name, (why would a Labour leader accept a knighthood?)  and all the national institutions taking the knee, which the other men in the street saw, as bowing to street fighter activists outrageous demands. Ie supporting racial divide and suppressing diversity of opinions and abolishing history. Our moral leader Canterbury Arch Runcton, is also confused. He’s a woke bloke that got it wrong at Easter. Streaming his Easter service from his kitchen with his toaster in the background. For God's sake, he must have a parlour with a row of books as a backdrop, in his palatial abode. He’s now having a think about the effigies in the Cathedral and wondering which ones to get rid of. Should he paint Jesus black?  Jesus loves all the children of the world, be they yellow, black or white. What about the brown ones?  They were precious in His sight too? He’s going to need a lot of colours. The Bournemouth beach sunbathing nutters are bright pink still. The Cambridge academia have just funded a two-year study into the history of slavery to enable the oiks to confront their iniquitous past and say sorry to all offended by history. Waste of time, as it’s been done before, over and over and you can’t change it. I’ve got a better idea for them to study.   Research the Benin bronzes. There are 3,OOO of them but only 500 left in Nigeria, the rest in Europe and USA museums. They are exquisite. The Portuguese kicked off the Atlantic slave trade in 1400 from the port of Benin with gold, which the Africans turned into these fantastic plaques, I think but not sure. I’m too busy doing my epidemic virus studies to go to the British Museum and find out. And we are not allowed yet, to visit Portugal unless keen enough to fly to Spain and walk across the border to check up on the museum artifacts in Lisbon. It’s good to see Lewis Hamilton constructively addressing inequality in the motor racing world.  The aggrieved black community can be placated and inspired by their own incredibly successful race if they listen. We have diversity, we have opportunity, we have laws, education, healthcare, social services, state welfare funding and overall, a tolerant multicultural society, who are very tired of the woke politically-correct champagne socialists agenda over the last decade.  There are deep social and economic injustices which are nothing to do with slavery or racial prejudice. Lewis Hamilton lives in Monte Carlo to save paying a hefty U.K. income tax liability. He was raised in Stevenage and lived in a council house with his family partially supported by the welfare state. Is he a philanthropist who promotes the welfare of others by donating money for schools etc.? No he’s not if he’s a British citizen tax evader. Is he a Monacoan now.? Is he a hypocrite? I don’t know?  Perhaps the academics can ask the uni students to research,  write a paper and make up their own minds. Estate agents will not in future be using Master Bedroom in their ads. Connotations of slave masters etc. Uncle Bens rice is to be repackaged without the jolly black man, Aunt Jemima also and awaiting more news re. MasterCard, Master chef, Master Mind, Headmaster ( the lefty teachers union still keeping schools shut) Masters degree, a tricky one for Cambridge. We are living with the virus and hanging in with our self-imposed restrictions and socially distancing. The copper masks and latex gloves worked a treat when John needed to visit the GP surgery for a blood test to check prostate antigen level insomuch not coughing. Although London has seen a slight rise in the R rate, no doubt due to the mass protests, the infection rate remains stable and patients being more successfully treated with drugs, to avoid intensive care. The disproportionate ethnic infection rate is due to blood group, genetic disparity, and body mass ratio, and a difference in the percentage of T cells. These cells decline with age and are responsible for fighting off infection without causing a major auto-immune response. People past 65, have very few left.   This theory explains why the young can come in contact with the virus but don’t succumb, however, if repeatedly exposed will catch it and manufacture antibodies and can still remain asymptomatic. Mass testing suggests that 40 percent of the population has been exposed with few symptoms, the silent spreaders who have the herd immunity. So we know the virus is still around and can’t trust the idiots to self-isolate if positive. All we can hope for is that they wear a mask and keep away from the elderly. Once the herd immunity and those who have recovered from it reach 60 percent, providing the medically vulnerable and fatties avoid it, the virus will find no host, cannot, therefore, multiply and shed and theoretically die away.  So it’s a balance. As the months go on there is hope for more preventive medication to alleviate the symptoms and of course a vaccine. Last October, the WHO  found that U.K. and USA  were the best in the world prepared for a pandemic.  Cameron had placed an order for millions of PPE equipment with a French company with the deposit to fund the manufacturer to make it.  By the time U.K. needed it, we got the deposit refunded but the stocks were needed in France and they had sold some items at a higher price,  to Italy.  That’s Globalisation for you and the free market. Meanwhile, a couple who were distilling boutique gin in the midlands, altered their equipment to distill hand sanitizers and viral cleansing fluids as NHS  were buying it in from abroad at an inflated price. They now supply the NHS cheaply and in the past 12 weeks have made 30 million pounds profit. Well done as they are donating a substantial amount to Covid research. No doubt as a tax saving incentive, but still commendable. There’s a lot to be said for self-reliance.  The govt. with its 80 strong SAGE - the Scientific, Advisory Government Epidemic advisors, have caused the pandemonium. At the outset, the models and graphs predicting the scale have been proved wrong. Simple precautions were overlooked.  Emptying geriatric wards, filling up care homes with staff untrained in infection control was scandalous. Mask wearing should have been made compulsory on public transport, supermarkets and shops at the outset and at least some sort of temperature checking and contact tracing at airports and ferries. So, onto local lockdowns and long term containment.  Boris is getting on with Brexit and left Hanlon to contain the virus,  Hope the strategy works. I have faith in the laboratory’s scientists and the trials and the guinea pigs testing the emerging vaccines. Meanwhile, tomatoes coming along, being well-nourished and in good shape and we are up to four playing again at croquet. Sainsbury delivering without hassle and Miles and Giles still surprising me with a tablespoon of Baharat in a nifty environment-friendly container. It made the lamb taste different. The kennels are open but missed the boat as all the  rescue dogs are  adopted and long waiting lists for puppies.

A dog called Nigger, I imagine a black or brown Labrador,  who was loved and died in 1878, had a headstone in the animal cemetery in a Sussex village graveyard. The local stonemason has ground away the name as the villagers thought it might cause offence to visitors and that dog’s owners would understand as they were dead anyway and not around to ask permission. Just love kind people. The drought's over and it’s cool as we are and hope you are too. Take care Love from Val And from your fearless leader,Gordon

[ancientbrit]

Natter #3   6/24/2020

So, on Saturday morning, I took part of my breakfast (yogurt) from our backup  fridge in the garage, but when I put the first spoonful in my mouth I noticed that it was warm. Strange that. So I checked the backup fridge and found that everything in it was warm. The freezer contents - weren't.This was a disaster as I had been to QFC a couple of days previously buying frozen and fresh foods including four half-gallons of milk. Jean had been out the day after for the first time in 12 weeks and part of her haul was more milk and ice cream. I imagine that the excitement of being out again at last and back to her old stamping grounds overcame memory. So here we were rushing around trying to save what we could by rearranging everything in the kitchen fridge and then trying to close the door.The old fridge was possibly down on refrigerant and I was a bit annoyed for a brief moment until I remembered when we bought it.  It was when we lived at the 'old house' way back in 1970 and it was already a year old when we got it! My word - 50 years old. I should have remembered as it's color is 'Harvest Gold' which hasn't been seen on store shelves in donkeys ages. I tend not to date things by color though, as modern colors mean little to me - 'Taupe' for instance means less than nothing. My lexicon runs in terms of the spectrum. But forgetting it's date made me think back to those 'Old House days' and what we were about then - those days and other old days that preceded that time.  My memory of 'then' is perfectly clear  - it seems just like it was yesterday even though I know how long ago it actually was. So many friends and relatives who are no longer around to share those times with, One of the things that have remained constant is our phone number. Of course, then we had an exchange name -  Adams 2, which has now been transmuted to numbers - 232, and I think doing this has lost the feeling of romance that it seemed to have for me. When I was a kid many of our dairy and grocery items were delivered to the door by horse-drawn carts - very few people or businesses had a sufficiently high priority during the war to have a petrol ration. Mum had joined the "Co-op" for convenience and of course, there was the benefit of a bonus payout at year's end. I loved these horses and would meet them outside and feed them apples, carrots and whatever else I had to hand. Still firmly in my mind is the Co-op number I had to recite to the driver when we had milk or groceries delivered - 157376.  Being horses, they would leave proof of their passage along the road and my Dad would pay me a shilling per bucket full of 'Golden Apples' as my Dad referred to this natural function  It seemed like it was too demeaning a job for a full-grown adult  and using his term was sort of distancing himself from the unpleasantness. It used to embarrass me a bit too, but you couldn't argue with the reward. it was all grist to the mill, and it did do the roses a power of good. In 1956, I had been out of the RAF for a year and had also just recently returned home from a  very long sojourn in hospital, and my Dad was persuaded, against his will, to have a phone installed. Phones were not then usual to find in most houses and my Dad's reluctance was based on the very real belief that his company could too easily find him at inconvenient times. I told him that it was an absolute necessity in that day and age and so at last it was installed. Our phone number was Fairlands 4725 and as I said, I remember the old exchanges with affection. Others in our neighborhood were Derwent and Vigilant and my favorite Aunt had the best I always felt - Silverthorn - lovely. The Fairlands exchange was essential to me as when I was discharged from the hospital I had left behind a lovely German nurse with whom I had developed special feelings. When I had become sufficiently fit to allow me to leave the hospital and walk around the grounds, I used to collect any outgoing mail from other patients who were still confined to bed and take it some distance up the road, through the snow to a mailbox. Just to make sure I would be okay, Irmgard, for such was her name, would accompany me and we would find a need to indulge in long hugs and exchange lip locks - just to keep the cold at bay you understand? Shared bodily warmth is a great way to defeat the weather! Later, returning to the hospital, which had been a big old private house standing in its own grounds, we would split up at the circular drive with a last goodnight kiss. Irmgard would go round to the kitchen door and I would go the other way to the front door. Knowing that our companion runs were our secret, I was surprised to find the youngish Matron just inside the door. With a twinkle in her eye, she asked if it was cold out and I acknowledged that it was. She told me that I should be careful that I didn't get chapped lips, but then added that lipstick was a sovereign remedy - and departed with a grin. So much for secrecy! Irmgard's phone exchange name at the hospital was Coombe Wood - not exactly what might be termed 'romantic' but association made it so. Our association was quite intense and a forthcoming proposal, whilst welcomed, was at that time impossible for Irmgard to accept. Her sister was soon to marry, another Englishman and they would be returning to England to live after their honeymoon. She would not leave her parents alone just like that. She had been sent to England for a couple of years to improve her English and was soon to return home to Bad Canstatt, just outside Stuttgart. As I was about to return to my studies we were parted and unlikely to meet again any time soon. So our contacts were limited to letters and very rare and expensive phone calls and so the Canstatt exchange also lives brightly in my memory. Unfortunately, long-distance relations tend to strain circumstances and over time our contacts became less and less,     Sometime later I reached a point where I was able to take a trip to the Continent. I wrote to Irmgard to tell her that at last I was able to come over to see her, not being really sure of my reception as I hadn't written for ages. Within days I had a reply and although she was totally delighted that I was coming she told me that she had become engaged. I couldn't really blame her as I had been very lax, but she wanted me to come and meet her family when I arrived. She was really very good and took me all over the city and ended at her parents' home in the evening to a party for her sister and new husband, just returned from their honeymoon on Lake Constance. It was a really nice evening and I got on very well with her parents, but of course, I didn't like her fiance at all! After all this, although I had been given her brother-in-law's name and address back home I was never able to contact him. I would love to have kept up to know how her life proceeded. I still have her framed portrait photograph she sent me when she had first returned home, inscribed "Zur stehten Erinnerung" Deine Irmgard. I have been occupying some of my evenings on the computer lately sorting and printing out the Natters that Jo & Tom, Carin and Janet have been good enough to get to me. As they all seem to have been listed well out of order I am busy trying to see what I have and what might yet still be missing. The job has been compounded by the difficulty I have experienced in opening the Flash Drive. Sometimes it allows me to zip along, opening files, but then will stop and nothing will work. Next day I try again and I am off to the races again. But I am getting there slowly and tonight (Monday) I completed taking off hard copies. Now I can sort through, putting them in chronological order and see what I shall see. Much more later, but there seems to be nothing before 2012 so I guess that was when I started. As I mentioned last Natter I have been attacking Lily of the Valley and I am almost finished - at least with what was visible. Along the way, I have also removed Sword ferns, Cedar seedlings five feet high and Jasmine. The Jasmine was an insignificant rooted cutting, from where, I have no recollection. It had been placed in a pot on the ground and had been overgrown by all sorts of stuff and over the last year had gone nuts. It was to be used at the Plant Sale and now there are five separate plants threatening to strangle you on the approach to the greenhouse so of course, they have to go. The final gap in my deer-proof fencing was completed a week ago but I forgot to mention it to the deer and my hostas have now been browsed off on three separate occasions. As soon as it looks like there might be leaves on “Empress Woo” that might be reaching terminal size, they disappear and I am beginning to think that I will have to curtail totally growing the items they obviously consider their personal snack bar. 'Doesn't really leave much selection but at least, so far, my cardiocrinums don't feature on their menu. 'Have to be grateful for small mercies I suppose. One good thing has come out of this. My neighbor (ex MG Jill) who has allowed me to use three raised beds to grow veg, has been getting worried that I might fall from the area where the raised beds live - on a raised part of the garden with a six-foot-high rock wall as it's western boundary. She sees me stepping back to admire my work and then bailing out over the edge. So she is having a large bed prepared at the bottom of the wall, which will be enclosed by a deer-proof cage. It will also benefit from the heat held by the rock wall - all sorts of interesting possibilities there. She is a good friend. So next year we might actually be able to eat something we have grown once more. 'Haven't been able to do that for the last four years now, except for Onions and Garlic! Got started on removing existing plants today so we might have the new bed up and running before too long with any luck.  I think it was the hardest day's work I have done for ages and I had to have a nap in the afternoon, but I couldn't tell whether that was because I had two early start days or the sheer grind of lifting heavy plants.You have likely realised that I am just stumbling along here so I will finish and get to bed.

You fearless and weary leader.Gordon

PS Jill had a change of mind just following this and the bed we cleared was ordered replanted - and not with veggies or fruit either. Got to find another place - perhaps a PeaPatch again?

[ancientbrit]

Natter  #2  6/6/2020

My Dad moved us from Essex (east of London) to Surrey (Southwest of London) when I was 3 months old (there's that steel-trap memory again) My Dad's sister Kate moved in next door with daughter Joyce and Uncle Jim. Joyce and my sister Joan were the same age - three years my senior. Uncle Jim was something of a character even though he was right under the thumb.

To stay sort of independent he had a workshop at the bottom of the back garden and he built a greenhouse nearby. Uncle Jim was a good gardener and he came up with a great method of getting seeds off to a fast start by placing a seed tray directly above a roasting pan filled with water. The roasting pan was held in a sealed box containing a light bulb. The bulb heated the water, warming the seed tray evenly and maintaining an even moisture content. Ergo the seeds germinated very quickly and the seedlings grew away.

   Being a gardener and living fairly close by Kew Gardens, he wanted to visit and I was one of the beneficiaries when he took Joyce and me to see the whole garden. This was around 1941 when I was seven and Kew made an enormous impact on me. There was the Chinese Pagoda and the Palm House - an enormous glasshouse which had palms which had grown out through the roof. Inside the Palm House are the huge Victoria water lillies with their enormous round leaves which are capable of supporting the weight of a fully grown man. One thing that truly made a lasting impression on me was when I saw bananas for the very first time - still on the tree. These were distributed to hospitalized children who had compromised digestive systems with intake restrictions. The atmosphere in the Palm House was also memorable too, being humid and warm and it was probably the first time I could remember being thoroughly warm during the winter due to the effects of fuel rationing. Of course, coming outside again felt awful. It was obviously much colder and the humidity on your clothing dried off, sucking heat from you for a time. Uncle Jim was also something of a chrysanthemum addict and he raised some magnificent blooms, which lined the central path in pots from the top to the bottom of his garden. When the family went on holidays I was given the job of looking after these beauties and also the greenhouse. This was really my first experience of working in a greenhouse and I loved it. When Jean and I were first married back in 1963 we moved into a new house that had a generous sized garden. The house was located at the end of a cul-de-sac on one of the corners, so of course, the garden opened up radially.

I wanted a greenhouse, remembering Uncle Jim's and my Dad's down in Devon. When we visited my parents, after the usual greetings and hugs, I used to go straight through the house, into the garden and into the lovely atmosphere of his greenhouse.Talking to him about my proposed purchase he advised thinking hard about what I intended to use the greenhouse to grow, calculate what size that would necessitate and then double it.  But it doesn't seem to matter what size you finally buy - it is never big enough.

I finally settled on 20' x 10' as I certainly had the room. The structure was of Redwood which has a similar reputation to Cedar for resistance to rot. When the boxes of goodies arrived I was so excited to get it built, but it took a little more than the weekend I had put aside for that purpose. I did add to the work during the week and finished the following weekend, but a short while later I was working ridiculous hours, 7am - 9pm  seven days a week, week after week and I was unable to do anything with the greenhouse apart from planting tomatoes by moonlight. At the end of this year I was sent to Atlanta in Georgia with a load of my friends to finish off the work we had been doing on the Lockheed C5-A  wing design. Our wives came with us and we had a wonderful time, traveling all over on weekends, managing to get badly sunburned sometimes in the process.  Our work took us about six months and we then returned home to the UK where we found that our company had nothing to offer us - except a contract with Boeing on the 747  In Seattle.

This was a whole new area of the States and Jean and I thought about it for a very short time and signed up. I came over via Vancouver in August, Jean followed on the 20th of December, just in time to catch her breath before we hosted a large Christmas Dinner. I have never been allowed to forget this - understandably. We bought into the oldest house on Mercer Island - built in 1906, which we loved. Loads of garden where I kept bees and raised veggies and fruit Then came 1972 and Boeing famously lowered the boom. I was very lucky as I had quit some months before and was now working downtown with a firm of Architects and Engineers. During the five years here our daughter Heather put in an appearance and we had to return home again as we still had our original house and the mortgage interest rate had been rising over that five years. Partly to counter that rise we had been forced to rent out the house which we did with great reluctance, having seen the state that rented houses were left in after some renters left. Our renter was deliberately nasty - he was just a few sandwiches short of a picnic. He was interested in keeping birds apparently - which he accommodated in the greenhouse, which I had fitted with automatic vents. Of course, when the first warm and sunny day arrived, the vents opened and the birds flew south for the winter. Not to be beaten, this hobbyist fixed the automatic vents by nailing them shut. Although this didn't break the glass, the next warm day did. The vents strained to open against the nails and finally, not to be denied, they burst the vent frames apart, shattering the glass. Eventually, we decided to sell and return to Mercer Island, and I had to bring another greenhouse with us, but because it was going to have to travel I decided to opt for an extruded aluminium, powder-coated structure of the same 20' x 10' size which I had never been able to find time to use. It also was ordered with the same four automatic roof vents as the original,m but as it would be traveling via ship and truck, I decided that including the glass would be too risky.

The saga of it's long time in-crate and subsequent construction I have Nattered about before, so I won't repeat it. Now my greenhouse is doing well, apart from gradually being overshadowed by trees and bushes and I have some judicious pruning to undertake. Before I forget, there is a possibility that we might be holding our September plant sale at the BBG. There will not be accompanying education classes and it all depends on the Governor putting phases 3 & 4 into effect. Also, because it has been sprung at the last minute - sort of -  I am sure that there are few who have much in the way of stock to bring to such a sale. Since NPA was considering their own sale around the same time at the same place, I checked with them and we will be able to use a stall at the combined event. As I said, this is dependent on the Gov. making the appropriate decisions, which of course are co-dependent on the infection rate going down. Quite honestly, I cannot imagine that happening following the closeness of all those demonstrators downtown, many, if not all of them shouting and yelling, expelling breath and CV19 if any were infected. Most wore no masks and I think that infection rates have to rise. They have already started to climb again in a couple of places and it seems inevitable to me. Sorry to be a Jonah but I am just running the idea and my thoughts up the flagpole, so that if I come to you a little later and ask if you have any decent plants that would reflect well on us at a sale you won't be able to say you didn't know. See how I am?

This is all a little different to the Natter I intended to send. The original one was 80% completed a couple of days ago when it suddenly disappeared. I have no idea what if any key I hit or what happened to it, but gone it was - and is, not to be found anywhere. I don't think that computers and I are sympatico somehow and I am sure everybody out there is saying how the heck can he keep losing stuff like this? But this time I was not dumping stuff deliberately to grab back my memory. Incidentally my recent appeal for anybody with Natters on hand that could let me have them has been magnificent. Janet sent me a stream from the whole of 2015, Horst has 90 of them saved and Jo & Tom delivered a flash drive to the house containing 126 Natters - count 'em - 0ne hundred and twenty-six., and Carin contributed a whole bunch too I think that they are safe, so thank you all so much. The grand total is now some 160 odd.

Your fearless and overjoyed leader,

Gordon

[ancientbrit]

Natter #1   05/31/2020

Subject: MI MG Natter #1 2020 (another off topic) I suppose that I have always had an interest in mechanical objects As a kid, my folks bought me things that went around when you did certain things, such as light a flame under a boiler, pour sand into a hopper or pour water into a hole. Either that or I could take items from a box to build things (Meccano and Arkerecto). When I was starting at Grammar school in 1944, bikes were the big thing and I wanted to build my own - just couldn't see anything I liked that was pre-built at a price I thought I could (eventually) afford. I took on two paper routes (rounds in the UK) one in the early morning and one in the afternoon to raise the funds, but it was taking a long time. I was therefore delighted when our next-door neighbor, Walter Woodward asked me if I would be interested in helping him on Saturdays at the small engineering company he and his cousin owned This was something I had been angling for for ages and truth be told I would have worked with him for nothing, but I had to admit that the additional funds would move the bike project right along.The company specialty was a giant blow lamp that was used by the railways and was also exported to Russia where the huge soft flame was directed at rail lines to thaw frozen points.

I loved these Saturdays and learned something about gas welding, turning and threading on a lathe, forming steel tube into coils and on. All very much pleasurable to me.

Eventually, when I had amassed sufficient funds, I had the frame custom built to my specs  at “Claude Butler” and it was a thing of beauty, it really was. The ancillaries came along bit by bit over time, but the wait was worth it and it finally hit the road in 1948, the year of the first Olympics following WW2. I went everywhere on that beautiful machine, visiting Youth Hostels all over the country, cycling to school, training runs most nights and weekends and just cycling for the pure pleasure of it.

My first job after school was disappointing. I had interviewed for two jobs in London. One was with an engineering company (interview went well) The other was with an Insurance company which I knew I didn't want nor need as the first interview had been so great. I remember seeming to be a bit flippant during the interview with the insurance manager. A ten-day wait brought two letters, one from each company. I opened the engineering company's letter first, preparing to luxuriate in the good news. I was therefore gutted to see that although they were impressed they really couldn't see their way clear to taking me on, when I would be in the army, navy, or air force for my National Service stint within the year. They just couldn't afford to train me when there was a good chance that I wouldn't return to them after my discharge in three years' time. I accepted the Insurance job with regret, but it did pay - sort of - and with my first month's salary I bought my first wristwatch - an Oris from Watches of Switzerland which served me well. I still have it.

It was only a basic mechanical watch and not an automatic - they were way too expensive, but I was fascinated with their designs. All those tiny, intricate parts working together and adopting your body movements to keep the mainspring at an almost constant pressure hands-off - wonderful, especially if it was a skeleton watch with much of the face and/or back pared away so that all the working parts could be observed - working. The Oris and I moved all over Great Britain and the Middle East from Gibralter, Egypt , Iran, The Persian Gulf to Sharjah and Dubai (this was before oil was discovered) and Amman in Jordan with no problems. Following my discharge three years later I went into engineering school, following which a variety of jobs were undertaken, mostly in research which fascinated the heck out of me. Eventually, all these experiences took me to London again working on the wing design of the Lockheed C5-A, which then led me to the Lockheed plant outside Atlanta.This was a short contract to marry our wing design to the fuselage designed at Lockheed itself. When this ended Jean and I sailed home on the original Queen Elizabeth from New York.

When we arrived home, Jean presented me with a beautiful Omega Seamaster DeVille day/date watch in stainless steel, which I had seen on board and drooled over.  But the price seemed too much, bearing in mind that going through Customs at Southampton would elevate the price heavily, to a point which I couldn't afford. Jean has never given me the merest inkling of what she had paid for it, although I had a fair idea. She would also not tell me how she had spirited it through Customs either. We went through Customs together and there was never a mention of the watch. Naturally I was over the moon. This watch in stainless was ideal. I have no interest in gold watches, after all a watch is designed to tell the time and the huge extra cost for the gold is a total waste - to me anyway. My London company (CDI) had no further work in England for us, but they did have a contract to work on the Boeing 747 and so back we came. But we had only been back for a couple of months when tragedy struck!I had been to Safeway to do a weekly shop, but when I returned home my Omega hadn't made it with me. I roared back to Safeway but of course, my watch had not been handed in and I never saw it again. Even the insurers robbed me. When I sent in the claim form they came up with some cock and bull story which I accepted like an idiot. I certainly wouldn't let it go today. And so started a long period with el cheapo watches as a form of self-flagellation for allowing myself to be so taken.There were a few electronic watches and finally Jean bought me a great Seico electronic, which allowed me to split-time races, to a gnats whisker, and all whilst sitting on the bottom of the ocean had I so desired. I have worn it every day; every day that is until two days ago when the battery ran out!. Even if I could have removed the back (which I couldn't) I am sure that I wouldn't have a suitable battery. It was driving me nuts, still wearing the watch and glancing at it several times a day and seeing that it was still 10:20! So what to do? I started to look through drawers and any place I could think of that might hold another watch. These did surface but they were all electronic and of course, all their batteries were shot too.  Somewhere my old, original mechanical Oris was resting, but just where I had no idea and wasting more time didn't bring it to light. But what I did discover quite by chance was my Dad's old watch that his friends at work had given him on his 60th birthday in 1960. I know the date is correct as the back was engraved:- "To Joe from the boys of the GWTPO 19-6-60" I don't know where the Joe name came from as he was Gilbert Leonard, but then again I had collected a few myself when I was in the RAF, such as Guss and Zeke - both explainable - but some time later! The GWTPO is short for the Great West Traveling Post Office which was a special train that ran from Paddington station in London to Plymouth in the West Country, leaving London around 9 pm and arriving in Plymouth by breakfast time. Dad had run this train and others ever since he got out of the Royal Navy in 1947. This train comprised a great steam locomotive which Dad had taken me to see years earlier when I was young and impressionable - and I was. Seeing that beautiful piece of mechanical equipment with the paintwork smartly gleaming and the brass and copper all burnished, sitting there panting with a slow mist of steam emanating from various ports and oh that smell of hot oil and steam  - what more could you want? So very evocative. The engine driver so confidentally leaning out from the cab , backlit from the yellow/orange flames from the open firebox made him look other wordly as he smiled at all the mere mortals below. So evocative. The loco pulled a collection of special coaches which were set up to allow the crews to sort mail on the move. At certain stations, there would be a sort of gallows at trackside from which would be hung a sack of mail. On the side of one of the coaches would be a special net and as the train sped through the night the net would pick up the mail sack without slowing down. This system worked beautifully for years, with others running to all the different areas of the country from Lands End to John O'Groats The mail was sorted on the run and was all ready for distribution on arrival. The system was started in the Post Office's glory days when they could guarantee that a letter posted before midday would be delivered anywhere in the country by first delivery (9 am) the following day. I said first delivery as there were three deliveries every day back then. The only exceptions were deliveries to outlying Islands or places way out in the back of beyond where deliveries were by horseback frequently.

Admittedly I now have to exercise like mad once a day to wind the watch, but It started right off the bat and it hadn't run since Dad passed away at 94 in 1989. The TPO system was shut down only a few years ago when it was found to be simpler to truck mail everywhere, but to get to this stage, mailings had to be cut to a single daily delivery  and with no guaranteed delivery by first post following posting before midday the previous day either.- progress will out I suppose!

The very last run was quite an emotional affair and Dad would have loved to have been there as would I. It had massive coverage in the press and I still have newspapers of the day with the reports and pictures. Another one of those old familiar and loved functions that have gone forever. Stay safe - perhaps we will meet again in the not too distant future. YFLGordon

[ancientbrit]

Natter #5  05/15/2019

Subject: Natter #5 May 2019

Nearly dinner time so I'll need to be swift, although I won't finish until a bit later - there's the Bellevue Library meeting tonight to go through the clinic boxes. Maybe I saw you there?

I am beginning to feel like that Mum on the TV ad who phones her son as he is being harassed by Nasties, when she say's "The Squirrels are back. Your father says it's personal this time."

The verdampften deer are back and believe me this is personal!

Mind, they didn't do too much damage - this time, and they did leave a calling card or rather two calling cards, but I haven't been able to find where they got in, so my Hostas are in danger again. Never got any blooms last year as they wiped off the lot, just before they opened.

Today, Saturday the 18th, was Propagation lecture day at the BDG with Alison. All very well received especially the practicum at the finish. We have scheduled another for the end of July at The Grange. There will be basic instruction with the emphasis on practical hands-on work, which always seems to go over well and of course it does emphasise the spoken word. More information a little later.

Sunday was the Plant Amnesty & MG Interns snow day make-up class. Some good information there, but the bit that interested me the most was a photo that Janet showed me. She seems to have come up with a successful design for a Deer Fence. It consists of 6-7ft steel fence posts on 6ft centers, strung with horizontal 30lb monofilament Nylon fishing line spaced 12" apart. This is almost invisible and for sure the deer seem not to see it. They brush against it and stop, then back off. Try again and stop. It's as if they can't understand what is going on. They can't jump it because they can't see what is in the way. This fence has been installed for a few weeks now and so far they haven't twigged what is going on and Janet's garden stays deer free.

If only I could discover where they are getting into my garden I would install one too.

Now that Janet has shown the way, I expect somebody to come up with something similar for rabbit protection! She has incidentally, arranged a section that can be moved to allow access to her veggie garden.

At last we have something to suggest to clients at the Farmers Market. other than to place the deer between a couple of hamburger buns - although that is still an option!

Unfortunately, some weeks later, the deer returned with it’s offspring. The offspring, being much smaller, just walked under the lowest nylon line and went to town, with Mum looking on with an approving expression of her face. Needs a slight tweek to design.

You will undoubtedly have realised by now that tempus has fugited some since I started writing this.

I did experience an unfortunate event this morning when eating my Shredded Wheat breakfast. A strand of the shreds tickled my throat a little, making me cough, which turned unfortunately into a sneeze which happened to coincide with a mouthful of said Shredded Wheat. As the sneeze built up I realised that I was on the verge of a disaster and attempted to stifle the sneeze, which I understand can be injurious - but what are you going to do? The sneeze built up to the point where it was obvious that I could do little to stop it, but at least I didn't redecorate the kitchen. Instead, the Shredded Wheat took the path of least resistance and came down my nose! I don't think I can remember doing that since I was a kid. Happy days!

Just read a rather alarming article in the NYT about earthworms (some earthworms that is).

Cindy Shaw, a carbon-research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, studies the boreal forest - the most northerly forest, which circles the the top of the globe like a ring of hair around a balding head.

A few years ago. while conducting a study in northern Alberta to see how the forest floor was recovering after oil and gas activity, she saw something new - earthworms.

I was amazed, she said,. At the very first plot, there was a lot of evidence of earthworm activity.

Native earthworms disappeared from most of northern America 10,000 years ago - I remember distinctly, during the last Ice Age  Now invasive earthworm species from southern Europe - survivors from that frozen epoch, and introduced to this continent by European settlers centuries ago - are making their way through northern forests, their spread hastened by roads,timber and petroleum activities, tire treads, boats, anglers and even gardeners.

As the worms feed, they release into the atmosphere much of the carbon stored in the forest floor. Climate scientists are worried.

Earthworms are yet another factor  that can affect the carbon balance. The fear is that the growing incursion of earthworms - not just in North America, but also in northern Europe and Russia - could convert the boreal forest, now a powerful global carbon sponge, into a carbon spout.

Moreover, the threat is still so new to boreal forests  that scientists don't yet know how to calculate what the earthworms carbon effect will be or when it will appear.

It is a significant change to the carbon dynamic and how it is understood to work. The rate or the magnitude of that change is not truly understood.

The relationship between carbon and the earthworm is complex. They are beloved by gardeners because they break down organic material in soil, freeing up nutrients. This helps plants and trees grow faster, which locks carbon into living tissue. Some types of invasive earthworms also burrow into mineral soil and seal carbon there.

But as they speed decomposition, they also release Carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As they occupy more areas of the world, will they ultimately add more carbon to the atmosphere or will they subtract it?

That question led to what Ingrid M. Lubbers, a soil researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, christened "the earthworm dilemma" in a paper published in 2013 in Nature Climate Change. Scientists have been keen to resolve it ever since. It is just another reason why more knowledge of systems is needed because there could be an effect that would enhance climate change and enhance the rising temps.

The boreal is special. In warmer climates the floor of a typical forest is a mix of mineral soil and organic soil.   In a boreal forest those components are distinct  with a thick layer of rotting leaves, mosses and fallen wood on top of the mineral soil.

Soil scientists once thought that cooler temperatures reduced mixing, now they wonder if the absence of earthworms is what made the difference.

The spongy layer of leaf litter contains most of the carbon stored in the boreal soil. As it turns out, most of the invading earthworms in the North American boreal forest appear to be the type that love to devour leaf litter and stay above ground, releasing carbon.

It was found that 99.8% of earthworms studied in Alberta belonged to Dendrobia octaendra, an invasive species that eats leaf litter but doesn't burrow into the ground.

In 2015, a computer model, aimed at figuring the effect of leaf litter over time, was published.

It was found that forest floor carbon is reduced by between 50% and 94%, mostly in the first 40 years. That carbon, no longer sequestered, goes into the atmosphere. Not only that, in a 2009 study it was calculated that earthworms had already wriggled  their way into 9% of the forest of northeastern Alberta and would occupy half by 2049.

The Canadian Forest Service found that 35% to 40% of the plots studied in northern Alberta contained earthworms. The leaf litter, which can be more than a foot thick, was thin and churned up where the earthworms were present. If their calculations bear out, it means that the lowly earthworm stands to alter the carbon balance of the planet by adding to the load in the atmosphere.

The global boreal forest is a  muscular part of Earth's carbon cycle, at least one fifth of the carbon that cycles through air, soil and oceans passes through the boreal. Currently, the boreal absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it adds, but that is changing.

On the one hand warmer temps could extend the growing season, allowing trees to grow bigger and store more carbon. But rising temps. also release carbon to the atmosphere, by thawing permafrost and increasing the number of forest fires.

It seems that earthworms are a factor -  if not the main one  - nudging the boreal towards becoming a global source of carbon.

In northern Minnesota, the boreal forest has slowly been invaded by earthworms. They have altered not just the depth of the leaf litter, but also the types of plant life the forest supports.

Endemic species such as the white and pink Ladies Slipper Orchid, Minnesota's State flower - as well as ferns, orchids and the saplings of coniferous trees rely on the spongy litter. As the worms feed on that layer, they allow non-natives, plants such as European Buckthorn and grasses to thrive, which in turn push out endemic plants.  There is a very real danger here of Minnesota's boreal forest being transformed into prairie.

These earthworms have even been found right up at the edge of the permafrost in the northern boreal, with the bigger concern that they will penetrate even further north into the permafrost with the subsequent release of masses of carbon which would be devastating. There is no way existing to eradicate the worms from the boreal forest, their impact is permanent. Hopefully educating people not to transport them up north might slow things down, but right now scientists are keeping an eye on a new invader - Asian earthworms, which have made their way to southern Quebec and Ontario.

Sorry for the lengthy report, but I thought it was fascinating and somewhat scary.

Your fearless leader,

Gordon

[ancientbrit]

Natter #4   03/08/2017

Subject: MI MG Natter #4 2017 Date: March 8, 2017 at 11:41:50 PM PST Just recently, when I read the book featured as the Issaquah book club's choice before we had a meeting to discuss it - "The hidden half of Nature", I was sucked straight into it and so impressed with it I was, that I finished it in two sittings. I was so much impressed, because it re-illuminated things that although I hadn't forgotten them, their ideas had sort of been buried beneath ideas and thoughts from dozens of other books & sources. My thoughts then returned to a book that I have owned since 1971 and over the years have read countless times. The book was written by an English farmer in 1944 and the ideas that he promulgated are so sensible and far reaching that they are even now only just really being exploited. The book is called "Humus and the Farmer" and was written by Friend Sykes. I have recommended it to a few friends, but unfortunately it is no longer in print. There are a few copies available on line, but they seem to be something of a collector's item and go for about $50 apiece. However most libraries seem to hold copies and I would recommend that you all hot foot it to your KCLS connection and attempt to place a hold on this book. It is true that he discusses things related to the way he farmed, but what he has to say is easily as important to anybody gardening on any scale. Although it was written 73 years ago, almost every word he wrote more than holds true today. In fact even more so, as since the end of World War 2 chemical fertilizers have been pushed more and more to the fore. One reason for this being that the factories used for the manufacture of explosives, were readily adapted to the manufacture of fertilizers since there is little difference between them - as has become well known to terrorists. Thus, at a stroke, all the jobs at those factories were saved and production continued without a pause, ramping up considerably over time as the big chemical companies got even bigger and pushed their product heavily. Mr Sykes was a contemporary of Sir Albert Howard, who is recognized as the progenitor of the Organic farming/gardening movement and he has made comments throughout the book. Reading this book once again and setting it's message against one or two other things that I have absorbed over the years, makes me realise just how bad chemical fertilizers are and how much continuing damage they do and have done ever since Justus von Liebig in 1840 proposed his idea that chemical salts could be used to replace elements removed by growing plants and thus maintain healthy growth. That these chemical stimulants do this only for a limited period and in fact destroy the soil's living inhabitants and gradually destroy arable land, has long been known, but is ignored by the chemical companies ( and the EPA apparently) who obviously make a huge amount of money recommending and selling their products. With their growth being forced, the plants are weaker & less able to withstand attacks by disease and insects. The roots do not have to search for nutrients as chemicals are provided right there, so their roots are very small and underdeveloped. Thus there is no way to resist hot weather nor wind. Meanwhile the majority of the chemicals descend unused to the water table eventually appearing in rivers and lakes and the sea where it causes massive algal blooms which are frequently poisonous and anyway remove local oxygen from the water, killing water life.

But what is worse is that the plants do not contain the nutritional value and flavor that organic produce does. Even though produce grown by chemicals might be cheaper, it's quality is compromised and when you think of the multitude of different health problems that have reared their ugly heads since the war, should give one pause. The same is true regarding cattle, pigs and chickens fed on stuff produced in factories, instead of browsing grass and similar forage as the animals would in nature. And of course, guess who is the ultimate consumer?

Taking this thought a little further is the claim that GMO foods provide a greater amount of  nutrients than ordinary plants. The “proof” of this comes via University trials which are funded by - guess who - the Chemical companies. Sort of like setting the fox to guard the hen house.                                               Being unable to trust the “official” figures, one of the larger independent seed companies decided to run their own tests and found that the nutrient values of GMO plants were actually something like 20+% less than conventionally grown plants. This means that to maintain a certain nutrient intake you would need to consume 20% to keep to your needs. This of course means that you are consuming more food than you need, when it settles around the waist!

Much more about this in due course. Thinking some regarding heritage vegetables, I found a very old company back in England who still grows such and sells the seed. Before the usual green 'Pascal' celery was a regular participant in the Super Markets - in fact, well before the Super Market itself descended on the scene and a specialist green grocer was where one purchased one's green stuffs, usually grown within but a few miles, celery was always blanched white. Green celery was unknown. The very best flavoured celery was also blanched, but it's basic color was - pink and my mother used to serve this at tea times, from a special celery vase. One would select a couple of sticks along with a little salt laid on the edge of one's plate. The stick would be dipped into the salt and eaten with a most satisfying crunch together with good, fresh, & crusty bread smothered in butter. The thick base of the sticks was a special treat. This was obviously a different time, before 'Pascal' celery was known , which is so much simpler to grow. Along with this loss of variety and difficulty of growth, flavor also fell a victim. This year I am going to try and correct that loss and grow pink celery once more. As I said, it does take a little more effort, but I believe that that effort to be truly worthwhile. Come October/November I will know if the effort was worth it - hopefully transporting me back to simpler times. Jean has even found a mint, celery vase in an antique shop so we are all prepared. Your fearless leader Gordon

[ancientbrit]

Natter #1  01/18/2017

Subject: MI MG Natter #01 2016 Date: January 18, 2017 at 11:04:19 PM PST My research assistant (Jean) has done it again in her daily trawl. She came up with news of a newly developed vegetable - a fifteen year development hybrid between Kale and Brussels Sprouts. It was originally named "Flower Sprout", but is now officially named "Kallette". Vegetables in the Brassica family are notorious for their profligacy and are renowned for ease of crossing because they are all derivatives of wild cabbage that existed 5000years ago. This one has been under development in the UK, as I said, for fifteen years and will be brought to market for the first time in time for Christmas, after being test grown for the last three years at three different farms normally producing Brussels Sprouts. The flavor is said to be nutty and sweet tasting and thus are likely to be a hit with children and those who dislike regular Brussels Sprouts. The florets, for want of a better term, are produced radially along a stem, just like normal Brussels Sprouts, but are sort of like a small, elongated cabbage to look at, without producing a hard heart. They are picked at about 3" long and are usually steamed or stir fried for about 2 -3 minutes. They have a long growing season, being sown in February, March and April and harvested in the following January, February or March. There are currently three slightly different varieties aimed at an earlier harvest, a mid-season harvest and a late harvest. This latter variety can be harvested in October, November and December, so it makes an ideal replacement for Sprouts for Thanksgiving and Christmas. The icing on the cake is that  for 100grams of leaves, it contains double the amount of vitamins B6, C & E. Right now Johnny's Selected Seeds is the official distributer of the seed Stateside, although some other companies are able to handle them under licence I suppose. They are not inexpensive as you can imagine - 25 seeds cost $6.99 plus shipping. This will obviously drop over time as there is more demand, but you should remember - they are HYBRIDS so you will not be able to allow them to go to seed, because what you end up with will not be Kallette. But I am going to have a go next pre-Spring just to see. I already like B/S ( and that is not a derogatory statement) so we shall see. This was written last year and never sent out to you. Brain freeze or something. Jean has been buying Kalette for a few weeks now and we love it - very tender and a good flavor. Sorry this is abbreviated but the first Natter of 2017 is sitting here in the wings, so off it goes. Your fearless, and apologetic leader Gordon

[ancientbrit]

Natter # 22  11/05/2016

Subject: MI MG Natter # 22 2016 Date: November 5, 2016 at 2:51:58 PM PDT When I was at Swanson's last week I found a couple of interesting ferns there, "Dragon Tail Fern" and " East Indian Holly Fern". The Dragon Tail has a rather distinctive frond shape and the East Indian is the usual dark green frond with the central stem being a bright, almost yellow. Very attractive and I find that I now have twelve different ferns around the garden. Quite amazing, when this time last year I wasn't really bothered one way or another with them! I think I have Beverly & Molly to thank for this state of affairs. It isn't that they nag, but just talk about them with lots of enthusiasm that it sort of rubs off or I absorb it by osmosis or something. Anyway ladies, thank you so much - they certainly add to the woodsy atmosphere under the trees. Last Saturday, the 29th was the Recognition breakfast at CUH which is always an interesting event. Well, the Recognition bit is, not the breakfast - this was the very first time it has been held at daybreak and if I wasn't such a fan of the event in the first place I probably would not have attended  -  early mornings and me being on bad terms. However, Beverly had kindly offered to chauffeur me there and since Elaine wanted me to bring my "Hat" for popular acclamation (as I thought), I accepted gratefully. At least I told myself, I could catch a few winks on the way. However, I was amazed to see how clear the roads were at that time of "day" and I had to assume that I am not the only one who considers awakening at 5:30am, to be the middle of the night. I also had to remind myself that it was but a few years back that I used to get to work at SeaTac Airport at 7:00am. Very hard to believe really that I quite enjoyed that, as it meant getting back home again by 4:30pm. More time in the garden! But I digress. The hall was abuzz, with ultimately, 85 fellow MGs, with the usual meet & greet going on. 'Love this about MG meetings, getting together with old and new friends and lying about how big, how many, how early etc. I even had one lady come up to say hello and I haven't seen you in ages and how are you doing, what are you doing now - and then we finally realised we had no idea who the other was, which probably accounted for her not seeing me in ages. Nice lady though I have to say, but aren't they all? We also had a lady at our table (Ann Watson?) who used to run a MG clinic at the BBG way back when. I didn't know we had ever had a clinic there before and now we are on the verge of returning - a really great fit. The breakfast spread was very good. Two different hot quiches, various types of breads, fruit (six or seven different varieties) and hot coffee. Tea, or rather the water for tea was a non-starter. Just warm and totally unsuitable for making tea or much else really. Perhaps I should do as the Romans do and drink coffee! When I was included in the list of those being recognized I was amazed and really surprised. Listening to what Elaine read out, it was hard to think it was referring to me and I felt a bit embarrassed. To me it is all just enjoyable, but I can see that I will have to try much harder from now on. I also have to say a heart felt "thank you" to those who wrote such flattering & charming comments. ( Such perception!) Now that the Hot Topics & Cool Plants is successfully behind us, it is time to get organized for 2017. The problem is that we are starting at something of a disadvantage. For the first event we had the BBG booked by June 2015 along with many of the vendors  and speakers. In addition we are some volunteers missing, so things have to move quickly if we are going to make it. The September 24th date we want has already gone and right now the only open date is the Sunday after, which as you know is our Farmers Market Clinic day. I am hoping that many of those who helped organize the event last time will reprise their roles. I have a date next week to meet Nancy & Jan at BBG to discuss the whole situation, so I hope we can find a decent alternative date. My Meyer Lemon is in bloom again, but has been dropping loads of embryo fruits since I brought it inside.  To date some 36, but I knew that this was likely with the sudden change of temperature and humidity. I had thought that I had made the transition slowly, but apparently not slowly enough. On the bright side, I knew that I would need to thin the fruit, as it was carrying way too much and now it looks about right. Just to rub salt into the wound, Alison tells me that she leaves her Meyer outside all year, just moved close to the house wall for protection. Also they are supposed to be hardy from zone 8 up, which we are becoming and have officially reached, so maybe next year I will try that too. Since Thursday & Friday have been tailor made for working outside, that is where I have been. Thursday I dug a huge amount of buttercups and oxalis and just an occasional dandelion - so comforting that I have almost rid the garden of them - dandelions that is. I almost filled a garden re-cycle bin with the buttercups and I am nowhere near done. What did rather surprise me was the number of cyclamen seedlings scattered all over. They are now thoroughly established over the whole garden, back and front and obviously blooming like mad. As I worked, I dug them out and transferred them to one location so's I can keep an eye on them. It never ceases to amaze me how far the seeds travel. I am reliably informed that ants are partial to the sweet sticky substance on the seed casing and they are the means by which the seed travels. I am not sure how true this is, but it seems likely and is the story I promulgate. However when you give it a little thought, it would mean that the ant seems to wander off licking the substance like an ice cream cone and when the sweet stuff is no more, the remaining dross is just dropped. Doesn't seem likely somehow. Some time ago, when I was back to the UK & Europe, I bought some massive corms in The Netherlands and gave a couple to my sister who lives out in the Berkshire countryside. She planted them in her back garden, with her house and front garden between the plants and the country lane she lives on. The last time I returned, some five years after this time, we went for a walk down the lane and there, on the other side of the lane and about 30 feet from her house was a cyclamen in full bloom at the edge of the woods. It looked thoroughly at home too. At the 'end of season potluck' we got into a discussion - sort of - about the use of wood chips as mulch, which did raise a few eyebrows, with the thought that "doesn't that result in de-nitrification of the soil?" I would have thought much the same some time ago, but apparently not, as the chips are not incorporated into the soil, but merely rest on top. I have been using them for a few years now, mostly, I have to say, on pathways, where they do a great job of keeping your feet almost totally mud free in mucky conditions, whilst allowing rain and oxygen to freely pass. Any weeds brave enough to struggle through them are easily removed. However Jean, in trawling English newspapers for bits of interesting scandal, frequently discovers little gems of interest as I have frequently reported. Today was no exception and it concerns the ubiquitous wood chip. A Frenchman, Jean Pain, living in the south of France back in the 70's, developed a system using decomposing wood chips to heat his house by running water pipes through the decomposing pile. He also drew off methane gas from the pile which he used to cook with & run a generator. He apparently also ran his truck on the same gas! Now admittedly he must have had rather a large supply of the necessary and the room to indulge this whim, but the compost remaining once the heat and gas had been removed was the icing on the cake. The guy writing the article is an allotment holder (read 'large Pea Patch) and he persuaded his fellow allotment holders to forgather and make a large wood chip pile. As is usual in making a 'hot compost pile', the bigger it is is the better. Their pile was a minimum of 4ft high x 7ft square - making it bigger means that it heats faster and breaks down more quickly. All the material must be chipped and all the chippings thoroughly soaked with water to break down quickly. It is easier to build the piles in layers, watering as you go, tamping down and building the next layer. If you make a moat around the base, you can recycle the excess water. Once you get to the top of the pile, cover it with leaves (preferably wet) and branches to hold everything in place. Then drape over a tarp to retain the moisture. After two months you are supposed to have rough mulch. Four months later it is more like leaf mold; five months and it is near enough humous. Apparently, theirs took a lot longer as they really needed bigger piles and more water at the beginning. But there is no doubt that it had broken down into finer, richer stuff than the chippings that have been left to rot down naturally. I must admit that when I have had chips delivered, they have already been steaming away in the back of the truck - and that is only an hour or so from having been a live tree. I always drench them with water as they are piled in my drive before I move them on to pathways. What remains after that, I make of it a pile below my Cedars, where it is watered daily. This is not as good as thorough saturation at the start as it dries out quite quickly with the heat of composting and evaporation. It does however eventually breakdown and I find all sorts of plants growing in it, which have migrated from various parts of the garden. One bad thing though is to place the pile under the Cedars - those roots are ever intrusive and quest far and wide for sustenance and much of that good compost is now merely grist to the Cedars mill. But I suppose that even Cedars have to live and at least it stood them in good stead in the hot dry weather this year and last, as I haven't seen much flagging in the branches. Penny - good sport that she is, has offered to assist me with making a Power Point presentation for my forthcoming Propagation series again. Once this is an established part of the presentation, it should make things a little more entertaining, being presented in glorious Technicolor and of a picture size that will make things a lot clearer! I have the names of all those who expressed interest from earlier this year, so I will send out a 'call to post' a little later to see if interest is still alive or if it has just withered on the vine. There were many who expressed interest initially but were unable to match their leisure times with my class times, so perhaps we can get a meeting of minds or something next time. Hopefully I will see you - or some of you before too long. Until then, I remain, Your fearless leader, Gordon

[ancientbrit]

Natter #21  09/26/2016

Subject: MI MG Natter #21 Date: September 26, 2016 at 9:27:58 PM PDT Wow, where the heck did the year go? It is almost time for the Plant Amnesty's Tree Hugger Bingo with Ciscoe again!! It seems like we only did this just a few weeks back and here it is again on October 6th. If anybody would like to attend again, individual tickets are $35 or if we can come up with a cast of thousands - well six, then we can get a deal again. A table of six @$175 = $29.16 each! If anybody really wishes to attend this really fun event (I will wear one of my hats again) then let me know ASAP - we only have a couple of weeks to get our money down. Now of course, our Hot Topics & Cool Plants event is in the past, but what a blast!!! The day was perfect so we didn't need to erect the canopies. This was Horst's suggestion.    "You will be grateful at the end of the day"  he said - and we were! The volunteer crews were there in spades just looking for direction and the tables, plants etc were soon up and ready for the day. The string quartet played around the middle of the day and the music was just right - gentle and inviting and all so familiar. I loved it. The classes went off very well and were appreciated. The vendors cleared all their expenses and made a profit and seemed to enjoy their day. There were quite a few MG plants remaining at day's end and overall, sales did taper off after the second class. Parking was a constant problem and I had to position myself at the entrance to inform newcomers that the place was full and they should drive down the hill to park at Wilburton. Some people did do this and saved time. Others drove around me as I was talking  and one lady drove around against the traffic flow in a Fiat 500. Another gentleman drove in and said that his son had parked there earlier in his truck and Dad was going to take the truck out and replace it with the car he was driving - so I waved him through. He backed the truck out and then walked back to his car to park it - and saw somebody else taking his spot. He was not best pleased and rushed over to the offender raised his voice a tad. I didn't want to get between them so I left them to it!   Around 4:00pm we started to break down - although as we had not erected the canopies it was more a case of helping the vendors to take out their plants and then clean and fold the tables. Everything was completed around 5:00pm and we went home very satisfied with the day. We were tired and I should have had an early night as I had to get up early again on Sunday for the Farmers market clinic. 'Didn't happen of course. This coming week we are probably going to hold a post mortem on 'The Day' to discuss what went well and what didn't. What we should change and what was great. One thing that seems to be ever present in all the sales we have, is a lack of direction in which plants to propagate, but it is an almost impossible shot to call with fashions changing from year to year. This results frequently in the usual suspects being dug, apparently at the last minute with little thought given to presentation or appeal to prospective purchasers. So what to do? One thing that hasn't been tried so far (to my knowledge) is to ask you what you all look for at these sales? I don't mean plants like veggies - everybody has a number of those in mind and they are bought - right? What I have in mind are rather perennials. What do you look for when you attend a sale or go to a nursery? Do you have something definite in mind or do you go for something that appeals to you off the cuff. If you could give a little thought to this and let me know ASAP ( I hope to get some feedback before Saturday when we will hold the PM) I am going to leave you now - I MUST get an early night and catch up on sleep. I have fallen asleep at dinner every evening since Saturday. At least it wasn't whilst I was holding a mug full of hot tea - this time! That was back earlier in the year and I have to say it woke me a lot faster than my alarm clock! You fearless and tired, leader. Gordon