Blue Witch

Let them eat cake!

Because I know that Mr BW is not the only one around here who likes chocolate, and for posterity, here is the chocolate cake I made him:

It's gluten free (but no-one would ever guess), made from this recipe (although I use 35g of ground almonds instead of 35g of the Dove's GF self-rasing flour, walnut oil instead of vegetable oil, and bake in a 2lb loaf tin for around 45-50 minutes, oh, and I never use xanthan gum as it is a highly questionable product), with lots and lots of ganache (for those who don't know, this is basically hot double cream poured onto an equal quantity of chocolate and stirred until smooth, thick and cool).

The recipe makes a dense, easy-to-cut cake which is not too sweet, and of a perfect even texture for using as a celebration cake.

I split the loaf-shaped cake horizontally into 3 and then sandwiched it back together with ganache, and I didn't bother to stand the cake on a wire rack to allow the ganache to drip through the wire mesh as it slid off the cake as I decided the surplus on the cake plate could usefully become part of the scene. The daisies are made from roll-out sugar paste (bought - gone are the days when you could only have it if you made your own), using a set of nifty daisy-creating-devices from Lakeland. The bees had stripes made of chocolate, although they were a little shaky as my hands aren't as steady for perfect piping as they used to be.

Here is the cake with its fountain candle alight. The numeral candles should have been gold, but I had substitutions on gold candles every time I ordered them with the grocery delivery. All 6 times. On the 6th occasion, the driver took pity on me and told me to keep the white spotty ones they'd sent that time for free. They looked less awful in real life than in the picture.

And because eating that much chocloate makes me feel really ill, I made myself a lemon drizzle courgette cake:

Although I forgot to remove the cling wrap before taking the photo.

Flying tonight

Treasure hunting

At the beginning of last week we went to an auction of household items and antiques.

Mr BW was not going to come, but, after having followed me round the preview (in a big barn-like building), decided he would; I suspect because he'd seen how many notes there were on my catalogue and he was keen to be present to, erm, deter purchases.

Now, I've been to many auctions of objets in my time, ranging from those in discrete sale rooms in nice market towns, to those in farmyards, fields, and even marquees.

But, I have never been to one held in a livestock auction mart, where the same auctioneers who usually deal in animals are knocking down 170 to 180 lots an hour. Usually 100 lots is more of an average for an auction of household items.

Neither have I been to an auction held in the Mart Cafe, where farmers were buying and eating food, as well as talking in their normal voices at the same time as the auction was going on! I was totally exhausted by the constant barrage of words and the constant background of other competing voices, together with the lightning speed of proceedings, by the time we got home.

But I did buy some nice shoe lasts to add to my collection, some glass bottles, old milk bottles and crate, an old foot warmer, some more old irons and trivets, and some other items thrown in to the boxes seemingly randomly: for instance, old dark brown plates that will be useful under plant pots in the greenhouse next summer when it is hot, and a grubby old electric kettle (in a ghastly dirty maroon colourway) that will go to Kettle Recycling Heaven next time we go to the tip.

It's interesting how cheaply lots are sold up here compared to down south. My collections of objets are definitely going to flourish, and now that Nice Nearest Neighbour has expressed an interest in attending future auctions with me, there is future in the past.

While on the subject of old things, does anyone know anything about metal detecting? I fancy having a go at being a detectorist, largely because we keep losing hand tools - including ones that Mr BW has loving hand-forged to be perfect for particular tasks - around The Coven. Plus, of course, there are bound to be lots of Roman objects just waiting to be located and exhumed.

Happy 60th Birthday Mr BW!

All my love, BW xxxxxx

Pumpkins and figs

If there's one thing I hate about Halloween (aside of the rampant commercialism that we have increasingly imported from acrosss the pond - what's wrong with a sheet anyway?), it's the waste of good food. All those pumpkin insides that end up in the bin as they are scooped out during carving.

This year we had three huge pumpkins that grew, two of them unseen, in the field veg plot. This wasn't the biggest:

There are lots of lovely pumpkin recipes here, which is just as well as we have a lot to get through. Those onions are also our home-grown - and large.

Pumpkin freezes exceptionally well, either raw in cubes, chunks, or cooked and pureed.

I have been steaming diced pumpkin in a metal colander over a large pan of water (put foil over the top if your pan isn't big enough to accommodate your colander, but be careful removing it as steam burns hurt. DAMHIK), letting it drain until cool, and then running it through the food processor before freezing it in plastic takeway-size containers. It takes up much less space in the freezer in puree rather than chunks, and is great for soups, and pumpkin pie recipes (and others from the link above).

For anyone who may have green figs that are unlikely to ripen now, here is a wonderful South African recipe for making a delicious sweet accompaniment to cheeses, or for eating mixed with oats, yoghurt and other fruits for breakfast.

We discovered this delicious preserve in South Africa back in 2012 when we first visited, but the recipe came from one of Mr BW's southern wood carving friends.

Sadly we are now on our last batch: we picked the unripe figs from the south house wall at Coven Sud on the day we left. I can't imagine we will ever have that sort of quantity again, although we have managed probably a dozen ripe figs from a plant in an old tin bath in the greenhouse. Mind you, if global warming proceeds as fas as it has over the last 5 years, never say never.

Finally finding things

Reunited with many things now that we are thankfully no longer custodian of two houses, the barometer is back on the hall wall. I've missed my tap-taps as I pass it.

It's been pouring with rain on quite a few days in the last couple of weeks (although beautifully blue-sky sunny and unseasonably warm on others), but the barometer now seems to fall no lower than 'change'. It was hitherto very accurate.

And then I remembered: the atmospheric pressure is different at 600 feet up to what it was at 100.

Here's how to adjust a barometer.

Now, this, from that link, is interesting (well, I think so): "hPa (hectoPascal) is the unit that pressure is measured in, and generally varies from about 950 to 1050hPa. It used to be called millibars (mb) which may be the units shown on your barometer. If your barometer is even older, then the pressure will be shown in inches, with a range of perhaps 27 to 31 inches. To convert from hPa on the Met Office website to inches, you will have to divide by 33.86. So, for example, if the Met Office observation shows 1013 hPa, then you should set your barometer to 1013/33.86 = 29.92 inches, or as close as possible to this."

That was an item for Mr BW who is currently making a table for an 80 year old engineering lathe out of a piece of the old kitchen worktop that I saved from the tip a year ago. "That will never be useful!" he decreed at the time. The legs appear to be constructed from offcuts of roof trusses that I also saved from the builders' skip and put in the shed.

Here it is in the back of the car yesterday (and this is just one reason that I am against buying a new car until needs absolutely must):

And for those who appreciate old engineering, this is the oil thingy:

I hasten to add that that is not my thumb nail. You wouldn't believe that there are nail brushes by every sink in the house would you?

Probably not a good enough initial image to blow up a small section, but:

Now that Mr BW no longer has access to other boys' kit for fettling pieces for Mi1dred, and (more likely in my opinion), because he is due to enter his seventh decade in the next few days and needs to re-find his 16 year old self who learnt to play with lathes to make all kinds of high tech thingies, at the beginning of last week, he was trying to decide whether to buy a modern lathe (made in China) for a few hundred quid (which would likely be a juddery mistake), or a fully refurbished by the original manufacturer old lathe for a few thousand. I knew he'd been looking at all sorts as they kept popping up in pop-ups on my computer - even though our computers are not linked in any way other than by sharing a router.

When I asked how much a new Made in England (or at least Made in Europe) one was, as I thought it was false economy to buy/inherit someone else's problems, and cheap is always cheap for a reason, I learnt that it was about £10,000.

Now, even I draw the line somewhere, Big Birthday or no Big Birthday.

And so it came to pass that yesterday, after he had consulted Technical Boys' Forums, various of Mildred's sisters' parents, and the classified ads on the internet, rather than having the recuperative day in bed I'd planned, I was pulled from my restorative dreams, bundled into the car and driven over to the East Coast where an old lathe, made in England in the 1930s or 1940s, that had been carefully and lovingly restored by its current owner in the tiniest workshop I have ever seen, was heaved into the boot with brute force, in exchange for little more than the price of a couple of boxes of good wine. Bargain. And if, in a year's time, Mr BW finds it won't do all he needs, and that he is using it sufficiently to justify the expense, he can buy a different one and sell this one on.

Here's where we went:



There was evidence of a lot of recent building - for instance, the building in the right foreground and the houses on the hill between the two foreground buildings - but, for once, I felt that it had been done sympathetically, and with respect to the existing local architecture, which included old warehouses and fishery buildings, as well as older terraces of fisherfolk cottages.

I was delighted to finally find not one but four fishmongers, none of them as ridiculously over-priced as the two in our own county - which has a coastline of close to 80 miles, but, seemingly, no longer a fishing industry.

This one was posher-looking and open longer than the other three (which shut by 2.30pm) and in a different location in the new-ish 'bar and restaurant quarter' (gentrification hits a once poor fishing village, although not with the usual accompanying inflated pricing, and I didn't see any amounts written to only one decimal place), but was fresh-off-the-boats fresh, reasonably priced, had a huge variety of fish and shellfish, and sold the most delicious smoked then roasted fillets of salmon we have ever bought anywhere. And the staff could not have been more friendly or helpful. And they didn't charge extra when we asked for a bag of ice to keep our purchases cold until we got home.

Is there Life on Mars?

No idea, but Space.com will tell you if there is.

A daily newlsetter briefing on everything going on in beyond-the-world.

More info thrown at you than you will ever be able to assimilate. But fascinating stuff and refreshingly different to the squabbling, fighting and consumerism that currently pervades/peverts this world.

Sign up half way down the page here.

The Friday Question

Rather late today as we decided yesterday that we weren't up to a trip to Cumbria to go to Potfest in the Pens (a ceramics fair) today, and then decided at 7.40am (having watched Countdown as we usually do of a morning - how I do determines what sort of day I am likely to have) that we were going to go, so somehow managed to be up, showered, dressed, hens and cat fed, flask of tea made and home made vegetarian gluten free pasties heated from frozen, and out of the door by 8.30am.

The ceramics were fab, we bought a few pieces, got a few ideas to copy/adapt in glass (particularly adding textile panels into hard material frames with strings of various materials and thicknesses), and went to test drive some cars on the way back.

Over the past week I have discovered that National Insurance Numbers (NINOs - how I love that acronym) are the new currency in opening bank and savings accounts (and not just ISAs) but also for confirming details when test driving cars.

People are always surprised that both Mr BW and I both know our NINOs by heart. I know mine as I worked for an agency for several summer holidays as a student and each week's 'hours worked' form required it to be handwritten in before submission. I also know Mr BW's, but that is a special skill perfected from opening online bank accounts for him many times over the past 30 years.

Do you know your NINO by heart?
And if so, why?

It never rains but it pours

Yesterday's online grocery delivery was 20 minutes late. It's rare that they arrive outside of the given hour-long slot.

The driver was new. Morrisons seem to have a problem retaining staff, so there is a new driver every other week it seems to me.

He didn't greet me (against company policy - I know as our favourite driver is the Branch Trainer of new drivers and has told me exactly what should happen), he didn't apologise for being late (also not following the rules), and all he said (in a very thick Geordie accent - try to imagine this) as I opened the door, was,

"It's bloody flooded eveywhere!"

Rather nonplussed, as his non-arrival at the expected time had caused us issues, as my car was due to go for service and MOT and we had intended that I follow Mr BW to the local garage and then we go on to the local town in the other car (nice that the two are now finally reunited after 4.5 years and we have some flexibility in movement again), I decided to take the piss.

I can nearly do a reasonable Geordie accent (although once-blogger dave, a native of the NE, would disagree). Read the words in quotes in Geordie.

"Is "bloody flooded" worse than "flooded"?" I enquired, innocently.

"AYE!" he shouted. We laughed.

It rained and rained all day and night. I wondered whether we would be better off buying a lifeboat rather than the planned lawn (field) cutting tractor. Little Garage Man told us that he has never seen flooding like it on the fields and lanes in these parts in over 40 years.

But that nice Mr Trump still says that climate change is a myth.

Vegging out

Doing as little as possible after several weeks of over-exertion.

The those who grow veg and don't already know, D T Brown's £1 a packet sale on all varieties of seed (veg/flowers/herbs) is on now. Order £35 or over (and it needn't all be seed) and it's free delivery. It's been on since last Friday, and there doesn't seem to be a final end date, but availability last night when we finally had the time to do a seed audit and order was still good.

DTB/Mr Fothergill's (same company) are now the only mainstream seed merchants we will buy from.

Thompson&Morgan and Suttons are now part of the same huge conglomerate ("Branded Garden Products Ltd") and woe betide you if you have a problem. The germination rate of their seeds and the quality of the plants they send out is appalling and if you dare to complain, customer disservice and indifference appears to be their aim. The founders of those once- excellent companies must be turning in their graves at what their offspring have done by selling out.

We do use home-saved seed and also buy from several smaller companies, including Tamar Organics, Chiltern Seed, and Premier Seed Direct, but the basics at £1 a pack (a quarter of the standard price on many varieties) is a very good offer.

Help Please (Question 3)

This one isn't about buying something, it's about sending it back.

A couple of weeks ago I researched and then bought a new small laptop. We've been using HP laptops and printers for many years up to now, but Mr BW has had issues with his last two needing to use a wireless plug-in module as their internal gubbins stopped working after a year or so, and mine - only 2 years old - has also been doing strange things making it unreliable and frustrating. So we decided to try Asus. Biiiig mistake.

Mr BW (bless him) spent 3 days on-and-off making it look and work exactly like my old one, which included taming Windows 11 and making it look and work exactly like Windows 10, loading all my transferred profile and favourites, loading my preferred mail, browser and anti-virus programs (I am very non-standard), and finding a new image manipulation program as my exisiting PhotoShop disk would not work under any parameters. Oh, and, making the right-hand scroll bars wide enough to use.

While my old HP would start up from lid closed in 3 seconds flat, this new one takes 40 seconds (we timed it) to get through all its start-up screens. Apparently this is a Windows 11 security thing, which I find hard to believe. Given that I probably open it 15 or 20 times a day, I do not have more than 10 minutes to waste each day waiting for a machine to wake up. 10 minutes a day is over 50 hours a year! It has also already black screened 3 times, the touchpad does not always work, it will not stay on the network reliably, and refuses to print wirelessly. It is supposed to have over 10 hours of battery life but it runs out in 3. Repeatedly reinstalling drivers and apps hasn't helped.

It is not fit for purpose and is going back.

It also does not do a page refresh on an 'F5' which is very annoying as I have never known any machine not do this. Oh, and, if you have the speakers muted (which I always do as extraneous noises drive me mad), every time you open the machine you have to re-mute them.

But... what is the best way to clear off all my personal information so that it cannot be retrieved by anyone?

On disposing of old computers I usually remove the hard drive and put a big magnet over it and then hammer it to pieces, but I obviously can't do this with an almost-new machine being returned to the retailer.

Help Please (Question 2)

Any ideas where to buy wine glasses?

When we first moved up in 2020 we sourced a few from charity shops, and I was of the belief that we had lots of decent ones still down south. But, it turns out we don't! Several have got broken recently, probably because they are constantly going thorugh the dishwasher, and we are tireder than normal, so clumsier than normal.

We have some large ones, but they don't fit in the dishwasher, and some crystal ones, but they soon go cloudy in the dishwasher, and life is too short for having to wash delicate glasses by hand.

I looked in Waitrose last time I was in there, but all they had was over-sized ones. I just want normal sized! I don't like super-cheap ones like those IKEA sell, and we have limited access to high street shops so they probably need to be able to be delivered.

Anyone seen any anywhere?

On arrival...

The Friday Question appears to have proved that we got it wrong.

We left a kitchen drawer full of 'important info' for our buyers, including all the (many) keys, as Mr BW had told them we would.

With solar panels (electricity), solar tubes (water heating), two incoming water supplies (one upstairs, one downstairs), an Aga, 2 wood burning stoves, an alarm system, and being 96 years old, Coven Sud is a little quirky and there are lots of light and control switches that you would never find or work out unless you'd been told.

Mr BW had already spent 3 hours at the house with our buyers when he was down south back in August, going through everything. Lady Buyer took notes, but we also distilled the essentials onto printed sheets, which we left together with all the instruction manuals and other helpful items. We also labelled every single switch that was not obvious. Oh, and left 'helpful post-it notes' on things too. That probably annoyed them, but we were attempting to be pre-emptive and to dissuade ongoing contact.

On the top of the pile in the drawer, right next to all the carefully-labelled keys (that would be needed to access anything except the front door - that key was provided to them by the estate agent once our solicitor received the pennies), was a pre-printed sheet with info about all the utility companies, a column for the final meter readings (which we filled in by hand just before we left), and a notes column.

In the 'notes' column against 'water' we had written that both mains stopcocks were off and needed to be turned on before running any water.

We assumed (wrongly, apparently, according to the results of The Friday Question) that the first thing anyone arriving at a new home would do would be to read the meters.

In order to read the meters, they would need to look in the drawer for all the keys, including the one to the electric meter cupboard, see the the meter readings sheet (right on top, covering the keys, with bright fluorescent yellow highlighted boxes) and read the note about the water stopcocks needing to be tured on.

Given that the new owners apparently didn't, it wasn't surprising that Mr BW received a text message shortly before 9pm on Thursday night, politely thanking us for the card and gifts we had left, and asking what the secret was to getting cold water out of the kitchen and utility taps.

In common with most older houses in the UK, there is a system of cold water storage and header tanks which feed into the hot water systems and supply some cold water taps. Only one end of the house has a Megaflow hot water system (which won't allow water to be run without mains cold water pressure), but the main system has tanks that will enable toilets to be flushed and water to be run, at least until the tanks run out due to not being replenished when the mains stopcock is off.

Only 2 cold taps actually come directly off the mains (the kitchen and the utility, that they were enquiring about).

Now, I don't know about you, but if I was in that situation, in a new-to-me house, I would apply some logic and check that the mains stopcocks were fully on, just in case.

But, apparently, common sense is not that common.

The Friday Question

What is the first thing that you would do when you move into a house?

HURRAH!!!

The sale of Coven Sud finally completed at 12.57pm.

I have spent all afternoon feeling really really sick and shaking. I guess I've been running on adrenaline for about a month now, especially since Saturday. I think I also probably have PTSD, after all the dramas...

I hope we finally get a decent night's sleep tonight!

It's good to be the owners of just one house again, with one set of bills, one set of maintenance, and one set of concerns.

Just before we got the call to say it had all gone through OK, there was a flypast of jet fighters and then the grey sky turned sunny. A good omen!

And I have just discovered that the last remaining hen that we moved up with us in 2020 (a Black Minorca) who lays white eggs but hasn't done so for months, did one today. She must be about 7 now, which is geriatric for a hen. To do an egg at that age, at this time of year, when the light levels are falling so fast, is a minor miracle.

We're just about to open a bottle of bubbles - cheers!

Help Please (Question 1)

Now that we are (nearly) solvent again (roll on tomorrow lunchtime) there are a few things we need that we can finally afford to buy.

But, it is very hard to order some things just from online, and there is nowhere near here where we can go to look at all the choices on things side-by-side. Actually, I doubt if such places even exist any longer these days, but at least in a populated area, you can go to a few nearby shops to inspect before purchasing. Plus, online reviews are not as reliable as they once were, as there are 'professional review writers' who attempt to subvert the for-the-common-good process, and reviewers who write reviews before they have even got their new toy out of its box.

So, as I think of them over the next few days, I have some needed products about which I would appreciate any thoughts from the hive mind.

Q1: we've had 1GB fibre broadband for a couple of months now (thanks to rural subsidies and a lot of perseverance by a few stalwart campaigning locals), but there are a few 'dead spots' in our old longhouse with two foot thick stone walls externally and internally (it's 30 metres long but only 5m wide and the router is right in the middle, in the place where our previous 'less than 2MB copper from the cabinet 3.5 miles away' worked well) . This situation is not improved by the thick silver-foil-coated modern insulation installed in the new bits and the parts that have been renovated.

Surprisingly, given the rural area they serve, with lots of similar 'old properties with thick stone wall problems' the ISP do not provide their own fixes to this issue.

Our previous two plug-in system boosters have worked fine up until now, but were brought up from down south where they ably supported a 4MB connection and are at least 7 years old. Unsurprisingly, they simply do not do the job with the new 1GB system, especially in the converted single storey bit where our bedroom now is, which is where we most use our computers. This is only about 10m from the router, but not in line-of-signal-sight.

Mr BW has been reading reviews on system boosters, and keeps sending me links to ones recommeded by magazines, newspaper gadget guys, and Joe Bloggs who is being paid to promote, but every time I research them further, there are lots of one star reviews from people who seem to be techie and know what they are talking about who say 'not this one there are security/compatibility/splitting/reception/IP cloning/security/bridging/support/reliability etc etc etc problems!' It's very hard to understand the difference between mesh systems, signal boosters, things that cost £30 and things that cost £300.

What we need is a good product that will give us good coverage everywhere.

And because I am a security freak, I also need a VPN system as our new ISP only provides static IPs, but it needs to be not based in a country which can't access i-Player.

This is probably a separate issue, but I'm just wondering, having confused myself reading techie forums that are now way beyond my level of understanding (which was once OK), whether the 2 products might be able to be combined?

Any ideas or recommendations, on signal boosters or VPN setups, please?

A new chapter

We are at Coven Nord.

Up before 6am yesterday, got home at 9pm last night.

Didn't stop all day... totally successful, left with happy memories in the sun, and everyone did exactly what they were meant to, as agreed, and with good humour.

Let's hope this is the beginning of a more settled and less stress free time for us!

More later once the removal men have been to offload and some more of the 50 necessary loads of washing have been completed.

The Final Countdown

We are at Coven Sud.

We got here yesterday, early afternoon, and will be leaving again on Tuesday afternoon.

Forever.

On Wednesday afternoon, after four and a half years, we will, finally, have wooden tables and wooden chairs, sofas and armchairs, and garden benches and tables, at Coven Nord again.

By Thursday lunchtime, all being well (and judging by progress to date - every possible thing that could go wrong has, and absolutely none of it was our, or Coven Sud's, fault - I'd say that there is every chance we will be the one in over a thousand that isn't), we will finally be solvent again, able to pay of all the accrued debts, and to have the funds to complete the final projects on Coven Nord.

It feels very weird, after 29 years and 2 months as Custodians of Coven Sud.

These last 10 weeks have taken up every bit of energy and head space that I have, and even Mr BW (the most optimistic and grounded person in the world) has been seriously challenged. It has been seriously and totally shit.

Fingers crossed please...

Is it really August?

There has been a need for lots of spells recently.

Yesterday Mr BW found a dead sparrowhawk in the greenhouse and all The Bales got speared and removed. Bales of glysophate-dried OSR stems for winter feed for sheep. Lamb chop impregnated with a suspected carcinogen banned in much of the rest of the world anyone?

My latest stamp swop order (yes, the scheme is still open, luckily, as I keep finding more stashes) came back £20 short of new-style barcoded stamps. My last order was incorrect too. I suspect most people never check that stamp value in = stamp value out, so Royal Mail have probably made a goodly deal overall. The man on the phone was horrible. Even so, I still got my missing stamps back. Well, I haven't yet, but I should soon.

This morning my 8 item online grocery delivery had 6 substitutions and 1 missing item.

I don't like this weather. It's like November.

It's a good job that most supermarkets have 25% off wine for the bank holiday...

Coven Update

Up on our rural northern ridge it is hot, but with a wonderfully cooling breeze.

We are drowning in paperwork for 'The Hopeful Event That Cannot Be Mentioned In Case It Jinxes It' (even though, in reality, it is only updating forms we filled in 2 years ago), and The Bales have appeared again, this time outside our front windows.

In fact, the whole of the big arched window is filled with them.

< insert photo, eventually >

This could, in itself, be a jinx, because long-term readers might remember how The Bales have followed us menacingly around the world.

Yesterday, there was a field of oil seed rape in front of our house, killed off and dried by the farmer's application of glysophate 3 weeks ago. Officially it is called 'pre-harvest dessicant'. Despite being banned in many countries now, glysophate is still allowed in the UK for use to dry crops that are to be used for food.

Use canola oil at your peril people, and also remember that almost every crop used for cheap carbohydate (wheat, barley, oats) is sprayed with carconogenic products to hasten its harvesting date.

Do your own research, but I will give you this as a starting point.

And they wonder why there are so many people these days with severe food allergies, and why there are inexplicable rises in the numbers of people suffering from so many degenerative neurological conditions such as dementia!

Big Pharma and Big Pharma-Agriculture have a lot to answer for.

I just don't have the brain space or time to distill all I have learnt over recent years about hidden chemicals in food from farm production, but it is beyond concerning. I am just glad that we grow the majority of our food for a lot of the year.

Vegetable production is at its peak here; we are stretched to pick and process it as fast as it is currently growing. This morning I decided that the runner beans were like Dr Who's Angels (I can't remember what they are called and CBATG) - they literally grow while your back is turned.

Have you seen the Perseids yet this year?

The night skies have - finally - been clear for the past couple of nights, with the Milky Way very visible. The meteors have been brilliant, and they're not quite at their peak yet. The shooting stars move from north-east to south-west in the sky. They start in Perseus, which is north-east of the North or Pole Star (follow The Plough's two right-hand stars up, and it's the brightest star you see), or east of Cassiopeia ("W" shape) which is to the NE of The Plough (or Great Bear). A few meteors shoot off westwards, but they are basically NE to SW.

Truly stunning, and puts anything going on in our world into perspective.

And, if you can find a sky dark enough, you'll probably see some satellites too. Space junk for the future. Earth's gift to the Perpetual Universe.

Off to watch the Olympics' Closing Ceremony now, hoping it will be better than the Opening Ceremony was a couple of weeks ago. But, what glory in between.

Chemistry

I like large mugs.

Of the bone china sort.

I especially like the shape of the Dunoon Glencoe range, but those that have been in constant daily use, in and out of the dishwasher for over 30 years now, are slightly faded. I think 6 of them still exist, out of an original 8, but I cannot check for certain as they currently reside over 300 miles away from me.

Sadly Dunoon do not make the original designs we had any more (bees, sheep, pigs), so when I replaced the originals last year (when all builders, so all the majority of dangers) had gone, I had to content myself with buying Constellations, Beaufort Scale, Planets, and Periodic Table. Just looking at their website, I'm glad I bought them last year as they have gone up more than 50% since then. I guess due to increases in energy, other materials and labour costs.

The Periodic Table has expanded since I was made to memorise it at school, and, despite studying the new version religiously while I drink my morning cups of tea, I have been struggling to add the new entrants into my pre-existing mental representation. Largely, I think, because I have no idea what most of the new elements are used for.

I was therefore delighted when I recently discovered "The Periodic Table of the Elements", in 2 versions: in Pictures, and, separately, in Words, available under Creative Commons licensing, for printing or using in other ways (including online), free of charge.

In today's crazy world, it is heartening that there are still people like this who happily give away brilliant content for the common educational good.

The accompanying blurb says, "This pictorial periodic table is colorful, fun, and packed with information. In addition to the element's name, symbol, and atomic number, each element box has a drawing of one of the element's main human uses or natural occurrences. The table is color-coded to show the chemical groupings. Small symbols pack in additional information: solid/liquid/gas, color of element, common in the human body, common in the earth's crust, magnetic metals, noble metals, radioactive, and rare or never found in nature. It does not overload kids with a lot of detailed numbers, like atomic weights and valence numbers."

The other version, "The textual periodic table is packed with even more information. In addition to the element's name, symbol, and atomic number, each element box contains a textual description of the element's physical properties and a list of several of its human uses and/or natural occurrences. The table is colour-coded to show the chemical groups, and each group is described in a panel of the same color. Other info panels describe atomic structure, chemical bonding, and radioactivity. It does not overload kids with a lot of detailed numbers, but it does provide some simple rules-of-thumb about atomic weights and valence numbers."

A list form also exists, here

Might be worth passing on to anyone studying chemistry or general science - although, having just checked, it seems that students are no longer required to know it by heart, as copies are provided in GCSE and A Level exams these days.

Colours

Now, don't worry, I'm not going there in these times.

Other than to say, if my first-hand experience at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park a week ago is anything to go by, I can begin to understand what the current 'rioting' is about. And that is me who doesn't engage in social media, does not have a smartphone, spent a professional lifetime fighting for the repressed, misunderstood, unsupported and marginalised under-dog (irrespective of any 'characteristic(s)' they might have), and now deliberately lives in the middle of nowhere to get away from all the officially condoned social and mind control.

I like the 'light parma violet' colour of the Paris Olympics athletics track. It suits my visual problems, and allows me to clearly see what is going on. Hopefully other future events will follow suit.

I dislike the fact that it is almost impossible to tell the different countries' athletes apart this time.

Teams come out with each member sporting a different 'uniform' (sometimes in different colours), and strips are largely nondescript and unimaginative. What's with GB often in black? The Netherlands, the Brazilians and the Australians are the only ones I can usually easily identify.

Uniform is meant to be just that: uniform, and its idea is to make its wearers easily identifiable.

To me, the different colours, and the different garments, sported by each country's athletes (even within an event when there is more than one athlete from a country competing, let alone within team members of a country in a particular event), have failed this time around.

Don't tell me that last sentence is appalling English. I know.

And don't start me on the scantiness of much of the kit foisted on women. Designed by men?

I was a county-level athlete back in the late 70s, and selected for the England squad at 15. If I'd chosen sport over study, I might have made the Olympics. But - if I'd been given a very high-legged garment with a one inch under-gusset to compete in, I would have refused to wear it. It is not comfortable, practical, fit-for-purpose or decent.

In these liberated days (and many women fought very hard for what is enjoyed but unappreciated these days), why are young women acquiescing to such styles? Actually, thinking, I've seen some young men's futures that I'd have preferred not to have viewed too...

Do the designers of sports' competition wear consult any athletes, or get them to trial it, or have any personal experience of competitive sport themselves? Fashion over functionality designed on (or maybe 'by') a computer I fear.

Signs and the times

I've always wanted one of those signs that they used to have on railway crossing gates (when such a thing existed).

We were up in the Scottish Borders a few weeks ago and saw a LNER one in a nursery/salvage yard. I wasn't totally convinced that it was an original as the back wasn't rusty yet there was rust around the holes for attaching it to a gate. Plus it was a lot more than I was prepared to pay.

On returning home I started researching them, and found that original ones are very rare and very expensive, so the one we'd seen clearly wasn't an original, as I'd suspected.

I discovered on a Men Who Like Trains website (god, don't some of them talk rubbish?!) that someone had taken a mould from an original sign and had some re-cast. New, but from the original's mould, they were the same price as in the place we'd seen, but I found one place selling them for a third of the price (presumably trying to clear them).

And so it came to pass that a sign duly arrived, had its back and holes properly coated with anti-rust protector, and became attached to the gate into the orchard/ field as a reminder to people passing through to close it. I think Mr BW currently owes me 120 shillings. The gate does get closed much more than it used to now. Plus it makes me smile every time I look at it. This picture is the view across to Cumbria:

Long-time readers will remember the pretty southern sunsets we had. We still get them up here. This one a couple of weeks ago:

We've had very few totally clear nights this summer, and I'm missing my star and Milky Way fix. For a month each side of mid-summer, there are only about three and a half hours of darkness this far north anyway.

I've not yet seen the Perseids this year, but hope there will be a clear night next week when they are at their peak (12-13th).

Northern gardening

The Hedge Border (the Hedge of which Mr BW has been cloud pruning - I had my doubts about deviating from straight, but he is quite right, it fits the landscape much better) is white with daisies:

The top veg area in front of the greenhouse is in full production: send a SAE if you'd like runner beans or courgettes, and spot the cat:

And the Post Box Seating area (under the plum tree above) is so inviting. If only we had time to sit in it...

A woman from the Council involved in promoting 'community resilience' came out to pick our brains today. She thought she might have covid, so we sat out in the garden. "Do you look after all this on your own?" she said. I was tempted to tell her that not only do we look after it all, but we have designed, built and planted it all from scratch (mostly with plants we've grown or propagated ourselves, or moved from Coven Sud), but we weren't meeting to talk about us.

We went away to Yorkshire last week for 2 nights. That makes only 5 nights in the last four and a half years that we have been away together.

In other news... no, that might jinx it, sorry, can't say.

They're everywhere

Labour Party glasses.

Have you noticed?

Fêted

One thing I love about the rural NE is the tiny village fetes. They remind me of my childhood, with guess the weight of the cake/cockerel/jar of sweeties, guess the name of the doll/ferret/baby, guess the number of buttons/sweets/hen pellets in the jar, and raffle tickets for prizes for things no better than those for sale on the bric-a-brac. The cake and produce stalls often sell things for less than they cost to make. Despite this, the combined takings on a day often top several thousand pounds. Which is good, beause rural churches, churchyards and village halls, on which the local populace depend, simply would not survive without these quaint events.

I found an interesting old plate at a fete last weekend. 50p. Another objet for my collection, and I might serve some part of an afternoon tea off it sometime.

The strings do not seem to be moulded, but are beautifully formed:

The only mark is this stamped number on the reverse:

I think I have seen something similar at the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle. Somewhere similar in recent years anyway.

I don't know what this type of ceramic work is called, and cannot find any examples online anywhere.

Anyone have any clues?

Tyred

I was a newly-qualified teacher when I bought my first car (40 years ago now - how did that happen?), and I have had a car continously ever since, so insurance renewals always come in the school summer holidays. We also have one car that needs MOT and service at this time. The end of July and beginning of August are therefore annoyingly busy with car-related admin, and it is getting harder and harder to work out how to get the best deals. More technology = more headaches, not fewer.

One thing I discovered when renewing house insurance last month is that GoCompare gives you £250 of excess cover free-of-charge on motor and home policies. And I found their website the easiest of all the comparison sites to use.

Moneysavingexpert seem to overlook this in their cheap insurance guides, which I find odd, as adding in £250 voluntary excess when asking for quotes online reduces the price of policies considerably. Fully comp on our 2 cars, £129 and £156. Cheaper than last year. Although not by renewing with the existing companies, who wanted £100 and £125 more than last year respectively, a 70% to 80% increase on each despite nothing at all changing! And no, I didn't even bother to ring up to ask them their best price as it was never going to come down to the level of new quotations (despite the new legislation saying exisiting customers must get the same deals as new ones).

For the past couple of years I have found the best deals on insurance through confused.com and taken the £20 reward voucher on each policy, but the savings on both house and car insurances using GoCompare with the increased (but refundable) excesses dwarf that.

I've written before about car legal protection cover - don't buy it with every car insurance policy, but buy one policy for all the cars/drivers in your house: Driver Guardian, £18 for two of us (although I think it is £15 per car plus £5 per driver in the first year). Hasn't gone up for at least 5 years.

Has anyone bought new car tyres recently?

In the past we have invariably bought car tyres in Costco as they were better priced than anywhere else, and you could have them fitted while you shopped.

But now... as we discovered yesterday, you have to book ahead online (about 10 days), and you can no longer just drive in. Despite them having the tyres we wanted in stock, and only one of the 4 fitting bays occupied (and technicians standing about chatting), they refused to serve us even though we were stood in front of them, credit card in hand, with a tyre with a cracked side wall needing replacing.

We looked online for other places in and around the area's Metropolitan Centre, and in Not-Very-Local Small Town, and went into another tyre quick-serve place. Same story, no walk-ins allowed. Book online, at least a day ahead, choose your time slot, and premiums (up to £10) apply to popular times.

These aren't unusual sized tyres. Although I do accept there are far too many types of tyre and sizes now for everything to be kept in stock everywhere, I do think they should be available everywhere on (at worst) a next-day service.

Now, is this just a NE phenomenon, or is it countrywide?

What happens if you have a puncture or a tyre with a problem I wonder? Particularly given that no new cars now come with any sort of spare wheel/tyre. And what happens if you fail an MOT unexpectedly on tyre faults? You have to wait days to get it fixed?

And don't tell me that where you live they will come to you to fit at no extra cost, because they certainly don't do that up here!

Value Motoring

The joy of older vehicles is that they often need money spending on them.

The new car market is an utter mess. No longer can you get good deals by paying cash upfront, and there are no 0% finance deals around except on PCP and similar plans. Manufacturers no longer want you to own your vehicle outright, and make it hard for you to so do.

Only our existing vehicles can meet out needs for small car towing power, so we plod on replacing bits and pieces regularly. Given the costs of running alternative fuel vehicles (insurance, tyres, auxilliary batteries, depreciation are all hugely more than conventional cars), we reckon we can spend several thousand pounds a year before we are out of pocket cf replacing vehicles. And, of course, the longer you keep a vehicle, the more environmentally friendly it is as much of the environmental impact comes from the manufacturing process rather than day-to-day running.

There is so much conflicting information around, and we have concluded that much of it is simply intentional greenwash. Given that the environmental impact of just one flight outweighs many thousands of miles of fossil fuel motoring I am not losing any sleep over our choices. It amuses me greatly that those people we know who drive electric also go on holiday by plane, often several times a year. The more evangelical they are, the more flights they seem to take.

3 years ago we had the aircon regassed in the Blue Broom and it cost £130 then. It's again not working well. Mr BW's car has climate control, and that needed regassing too. £300 at least for the two, we thought. Mr BW had a brainwave and searched for DIY regassing. Basically, there are 2 sorts of aircon in cars: pre-2026 and post-2016. Regassing involves attaching a gauge to a pipe in the engine compartment, testing it, attaching the can of gas, squirting it in and then retesting. Even I could manage it as it comes with very clear instructions! Budget versions are available from online retailers of questionnable repute, but a recommended kit to do 2 pre-2016 vehicles is £65 (eg search for 'Car Aircon R134a Compatible Refrigerant x2 + Professional Type Hose amp Gauge Kit' on Amazon). Once you have the gauge, further refills are just the cost of the gas, around £20. Quite a saving...

Just in case it is of any use to anyone reading. And yes, I know one can just open the car windows, but this does not work when stuck in traffic on a hot day.

What's in the box?

The BBC's Olympic presenters didn't seem to know yesterday, so I looked it up.

It's a poster that took 2,000 hours to design. Much better than flowers, and a nice memento, although if you were 18 you might not think so.

There were only two things it could have been, after all.

The linked page also shows the soft toy medallists get on returning to the Olympic Village. In the shape of a Napoleon hat. Well, OK, strictly it's a Phrygian cap (pronounced “fri-jee-uh”), but.

"Totally tedious, fragmented, with amateur production"

...is how I'd sum up last night's Paris Olympics opening ceremony.

The Guardian were slightly kinder: "soaring ambition deflated by patchy delivery".

"Bring back Sushi to stop the boats!" was another pertinent comment Mr BW read somewhere.

Dull as ditchwater on TV, not helped by some appalling filming (ever heard of lens cloths to remove rain spots, French cameramen?), bad cutting between scenes, and dreadful sound quality with far-too-variable volume.

Goodness knows what it must have been like for the spectators on the banks of the Seine, or indeed for the athletes who spent most of their time getting soaked on boats so won't have had the normal drama of the 'shared opening ceremony experience' of an epic, fun, show. Here's hoping that they are all young and healthy enough to survive the prolonged drenching without falling ill.

It seemed as if the TV commentators had been very badly briefed and had insufficient information to keep continuity and the interest of their audiences.

Little thought appeared to have been given to the possibility of rain - and it wasn't as if it hadn't been forecast all week. The number of rain ponchos allocated to the boat contingents seemed to vary by nation, with the Ukraine contingent having more than most. Why did no-one think to provide a big long rubber wiper blade on a pole to regularly clear the 'catwalk' of water?

Best commentaries and pictures seem to be coming from the US media: CNN and LA Times. If only the BBC commentators had had access to many of the facts in those articles, it would have been considerably more interesting.

But... first morning, first medal (bronze) for Team GB in the women's 3 metre synchro springboard - but, due to a last-dive error by one of the Australian girls (and one can't help but feel so sorry for her, despite her loss being GB's gain).

Boring GB team uniforms this year (from what I've seen so far) with extremely skimpy swimsuits and extremely large and shapeless white tracksuits (looking more like judo suits). And what's the 'take a selfie with a phone provided by an official at the end of the medals ceremony' all about?

If you don't like any kind of sport (surely everyone likes something?), BBC1 seems to be broadcasting nothing else for the next 2 weeks, so bad luck.

Potatoes, Olympics and New Banknotes

We usually buy potatoes from a potato farm up near the Scottish Borders. They have a shipping container just inside their gate and you drive into the yard, pick up a sack of 20kg, put it in your car, and put your money in the honesty box. They only have two or three varieites available at any time, according to what they are digging at the time.

They also do a lot of processing for northern businesses, particularly chip shops, and most of that happens inside a series of polytunnels. One day I will pluck up the courage to wander over and peer in, because I imagine it would be interesting.

We haven't been up that way recently, and they might be sold out currently anyway. It's hard to know when they will start digging new potatoes.

So, our last sack being finished, I've had to order spuds with my online grocery order the past couple of weeks. I noticed that the 2.5kg bags I bought last time I had to buy from a supermarket have shrunk to 2kg, but the price has increased drastically.

Yesterday I sent back the bag of baking potatoes as they were from Israel. I have a problem both with Israel, and with potatoes needing to be imported from there. The delivery driver told me that the crop had failed on many UK farms due to persistent flooding and that was the only place from which their buyers could source enough potatoes to meet need.

I noticed that the bag of Maris Piper potates were grown in Suffolk, and the potatoes were (as is often the case) actually larger than those being sold specifically as bakers.

I did a bit of research and found that last year 105,624 tonnes of fresh potatoes were imported into the UK, plus 829,438 tonnes of processed potato products.

We have near-perfect growing condiitons for potatoes in the UK. Why on earth are we so dependent on importing such a basic foodstuff?

And why oh why are we exporting potatoes to the same countries from which we are importing them? I don't think it is about varieties either, and seasonality (early new potatoes, for example) is not enough to account for that kind of imported tonnage.

35 minutes into the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony. Will we survive 4 hours of this? Hmmm. The Thames Pageant for Maj's Diamond Jubilee back in 2012 was more impressive, surely?

And talking of Maj'es, I finally have a new £5 note (issued 5th June). I have yet to see any of the new CIII coins though. What on earth have they done to Charlie's left eye?! How many people must have signed off on that design? Presumably he did too? Even my poor Photoshop skills could have managed to correct that...

Antique glass

We often dig up things in the garden which were buried in the days before from-the-house rubbish collection. Mostly they are fragments of plates, cups, jugs, ceramic tiles, or some sort of glass receptacle or glass marble. Occasionally we find intact items.

I often think, "Now, what shall I do today? Go to a junk shop" (increasing numbers locally, with the huge influx of tourists in recent times) "or have a dig in the garden?" *

This is (I think) a meat or fish paste jar, although it isn't as deep as those I remember from childhood teas at Grandma and Grandpa's (the only time we had such delicacies):

I found these in a cupboard the other day when I was looking for something suitable for rhubarb fools:

I did a lot of miles in the mid- to late- 80s and still have many of the petrol station drinking and sundae glasses that were given away free - with tokens - then.

They were made of quite poor quality glass, and most of them are now probably broken and buried in landfill sites. You certainly don't see many around in junk shops or charity shops. Not that many people would actually want them to use these days. Except me.

Anyone else still have any relics of the past of vehicle fuel retailing Or remember any?

* this may not be true

Lastly

You may think they're a load of old cobblers, but I like my lasts. I actually like them lined up rather better than this, but I did not take this picture specifically to illustrate this post so had not straightened them up and spaced them out first:

These are just some of my collection: the ones with wooden 'legs' attached (that would rot outside) are usually displayed in the summerhouse, but we don't have one of those currently, so they are in a pile of boxes in the conservatory, awaiting availability of funds for the purchase of a new summerhouse. The property market down south in our price bracket finally seems to be waking up again (maybe because of confidence increasing with the change of government and likely fall in interest rates on mortgages, or perhaps as the million pound plus bracket, hitherto unaffected by the bad economic times, has now crashed after the news that 20% VAT is to be added to private school fees in 2025), so fingers crossed that the day of the return of financial security comes soon please.

The metal triangles are from the floor of a foundry in the next village to us down south that was stripped out and converted into flats. I wish we'd bought more of them when we had the chance 20-odd years ago.

Anyway, Nice Nearest Neighbour was having (yet another) clear out the other day (I fear she has the 'death cleaning' bug rather prematurely) and presented me with a very unusual example, that belonged to her father, for my collection. He died in 1999 and rescued it from a cotton mill in Lancashire, where he once worked, when he retired:

It is mounted on a piece of wood, but offset, which Mr BW thinks was to allow it to be held in a vice for use. The right hand part slides in and out to make different sizes.

The tiny child's shoe part is just so sweet:

I've not seen an example like this before and it's not in any of my reference books of objets. I have done a quick bit of searching and found a couple around on the internet, but neither has this small piece.

I shall treasure it.

Dippy

I like dips, with fresh veggies or crackers/pittas/crisps.

What I don't like is those packs of 'dip' available from supermarkets at inflated prices. It's so easy to make your own by popping ingedients into a food processor or blender and giving it a quick zap. Yoghurt, creme fraiche, soured cream, mayonnaise, Philly or yoghurt (in any combination) along with anything you've got to hand: avocado, cucumber, tomatoes, chilli, chives etc etc.

What is harder to find is good non-dairy dips.

Here's a bean and olive dip that is absolutely delicious (all the other recipes on the site - all vegetarian and many vegan - that I've tried have all been excellent too).

I've been ringing the changes using all sorts of pulses: chick peas, butter beans, red kidney beans etc etc, green olives instead of black, and handfuls of whatever herbs or lettuce-like salads are needing a chop back.

They've all been delicious, but of particular merit was butter bean, basil and black olive with garlic salt.

Anybody got any other good recipes for dips?

Fresh

I love cabbage.

I bought a variety of brassica plants on a really good deal (so good that it was no more than the price of all the different packets of seed), delivered in 3 tranches, from DT Brown this year. We now have rather a lot, under enviromesh hoops to protect it from The Cabbage White (although sadly - in biodiversity terms at least - there are maybe 10% of the usual number around). I found a great recipe for cooking them a little differently: roasted cabbage steaks with mustard vinaigrette (or, just the recipe without all the annoying adverts here). The mustard dressing is worthy of eating with many other things too, and the amount of jar mustard used emulsifies it, so it can be kept in the fridge for a while before using.

Here are the cabbage 'steaks' before cooking:

We have probably 40 peaches on a tiny patio peach tree, now 28 years old (I found its original sale particulars recently). It used to live on the balcony at Coven Sud, but now lives in the Big Greenhouse at Coven Nord as this meets its needs rather more in Northern Climes.

We also currently have figs for breakfast, along with redcurrants, raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants, jostaberries, gooseberries and blueberries.

HFW aims to eat 30 different plants a week for health. We aim for 30 a day, almost all of them home-grown. But, the HFW book is worthy of a look. I ordered it from the library first, but it is so good - lots of original ideas - that it became the first cook book I have bought for probably 10 years. Given that I have several hundred cookbooks from all eras, that must be a recommendation.

Anyone else got any good recipe or cookbook recommendations?

Country ways

If you eat my garden, rabbits, The Black Familiar will eventually eat you:

If you eat the head of my hen, rats,

we will eventually get the better of you, snappy snappy:

And what's more, I will cut off your tail with my secateurs when I put you in the bin, crunchy crunchy.

If I have to look at this stuff, so should you...

Weather prediction

St Swithin's Day yesterday.

It didn't rain for the first time in many weeks.

It won't last.

Non Sun Sunday

Well, Meadow Guru thinks it's a common orchid, and The Last (Elderly) Tory Voter in WitchPig, whose garden we visited this afternoon in the pouring rain, in aid of continuing to cut the grass in the churchyard of the church (that doesn't really have a viable congregation any more) 16 times a year (yes, there's a story, best not to ask) reckons it's an Early Purple. So we are no further forward.

But we did manage to have our included-in-the-entry strawberry tea under the raffle gazebo without being obliged to purchase any raffle tickets, thanks to the opportune arrival of a 12 year old whose parent obviously thought that £5 a strip is an OK amount for raffle tickets. Raffles are definitely a form of accepted/expected extortion in rural areas.

It's strange that the people with whom we feel most at ease all seem to be very churchy types, which is very much Not Our Thing.

Mi1dred was 91 yesterday and The Black Familiar was 12. Here is the latter on the former.

We had planned to take Mi1dred to see some similarly aged friends at The Mines today, but it isn't a short journey to get there, and the rain was just too torrential.

Not wishing to watch knocky ball or kicky ball, a quite local open garden was the next best thing.

What did you get up to today?

Wildly exciting

It didn't rain yesterday, so we took the opportunity to take our Meadow Guru's advice to pull out and cut down a lot of the seeding coarse grass heads in the orchard/meadow/field, and also rebattled the nasty field thistles (48 huge black sacks full now in 3 years, and still counting - probably forever) and re-mowed the paths.

Mr BW has marked all the (now many) patches of yellow rattle with bamboo canes so we don't accidentally cut them down before they are ripe and can rattle out this year's seeds to continue to field-to-meadow process. He gathers armfuls of cut-off grass heads (some 18" tall) and puts them on a tarpaulin, then folds it over and drags the lot off to a huge and growing pile in a scrubby area that may one day be something else, but that is a project that will involve a bulldozer and a dumper truck, and we haven't yet had adequate inspiration, let alone time, so won't be doing that for several years.

As he pulled out some clumps of grass from around one of the fruit trees (protected against rabbits with posts and wire netting) he saw something very exciting!

We just need to work out which one it is.

As it is mostly over now, and the pictures we took yesterday aren't great (and it's raining too much to take any more yet) it's hard to tell: perhaps common or early purple? Any experts out there?

Later he found a wasps nest in the ground. When you keep b33s, the last thing you want is wasps a few metres from your apiary as they can kill a hive in a couple of hours in late summer. It's the b33s or the wasps. They are now ex-wasps. We hope.

"Summer"

On Monday, summer finally arrived and lasted until 4pm.

Early afternoon, our Local Guru on Traditional Wildflower Meadows came round to inspect how ours is coming along, give us further advice and have tea. It was mid-20s and we sat out in the garden in the shade and shared stories of loved ones dying with dementia.

Within 10 minutes of her leaving, the temperature had dropped 10 degrees and it started to drizzle. Since then it has been grey, cold and raining at varied intensities. It is currently 14°C and overcast.

I don't like socks. Usually I abandon them by the beginning of May and don't re-find them until at least the beginning of October. But this year, even if I start the day without needing a pair, a few hours later my feet are so cold that I have to put some on. That is annoying as I can't stand the feel of socks on feet that aren't totally clean, so it always involves footwashing first, and getting feet dry enough - when the atmosphere is so moisture-laden - to put on socks is challenging.

This is not summer.

We need to get outside to cut the seed heads off the coarse grasses (that have grown on what was sheep field for hundreds of years and are not inclinded to desist unaided) before they shed their seeds everywhere and swamp the yellow rattle that Mr BW has finally got to grow in significant quantiies this year, after 3 years of trying. The first year with commercial seed (useless) followed by 2 years of seed we gathered from Local Guru on Traditional Wildflower Meadows's historic 25 acre field. Which currently looks glorious:

Ours will never look like that as we are only aiming for 'species rich' meadow - in between fruit and native trees - and happily seed, plant or relocate anything in there that will provide nectar and pollen for the b33s.

I've tried to upload a larger file, or to upload just a part of it to show the many different flowers present, but annoyingly the software isn't playing ball and says the files are too large.

For those wondering why anyone would keep and maintain wildflower meadow in this day and age, a field that size qualifies for a £2,000 annual grant (£80 an acre).

By contrast, planting just one tree (which can include hedging trees) will get you £42 (cost of sapling plus tree spiral guard is around £2 in bulk, plus labour to plant, but grants are available to farmers and landowners both for these costs and for the costs of establishing and planning the venture). There are then (significant) ongoing annual payments, separate income from carbon offestting schemes, and a final timber value. The ancient sheep pastureland fields around here are quickly being forested. Small patches each year. Who'd farm sheep (a non-stop responsibililty with unknown costs and no final prices guaranteed) when you can plant trees, sit back and watch the money roll in?

I hasten to add that we did not qualify for any incentives or grants at all to plant our 700 trees, and had to meet the costs from our own pockets.

Slimy

We had summer today. Well, at least until 4pm when it clouded over, the wind got up and it's now drizzling. Hang out the flags!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, due to the amount of water that has fallen from the sky this year (including hail on Saturday), there are more slugs and snails than we have ever seen anywhere.

Down south we successfully used nematodes to control slugs for many years, but then the price went up dramatically, and we calculated that for 6 applications on the size of garden we now have, it would cost over £1,000 a year as they don't seem to sell packs any larger than to treat 100 square metres. Even if we had £1,000, I wouldn't think that was good use of money. Plus, nematodes don't control snails or the largest slugs, and they require the ground to stay moist, which it doesn't on top of a windy ridge, even when there is rain.

Now having created an allotment-sized vegetable garden in the orchard, as well as the flower and vegetable areas in the main garden, we have been using what market gardeners and farmers now use to protect crops - so-called organic slug pellets, "Sluxx" (3% ferric phosphate), which are (allegedly) pet and wildlife friendly, but you do have to buy it by the sack and it's not cheap. Plus when you find a slug and chop it in half using a piece of slate (revenge is sweet) it oozes blue which is the same blue as the nasty recently-banned metaldehyde pellets, which is really most off-putting..

Having tried all the other recommended mechanical methods of slug control over the years (baked crushed eggshells help a bit around seedlings, provided it is a thick layer, but the rest all unsuccessfully), a few weeks ago I finally got round to trying beer traps.

I cut a 4 pint plastic milk container in half, just under where the handle starts, and fill the bottom section with one-sixth of a can of cheap beer (Sainsbury's do 'tramp beer' that is 2% and the cheapest I can find: 4 x 440ml cans for £1.45 - would that there were any local pubs left who might give me their slops - Aldi and Lidl no longer seem to do cheap beer), some old dried bakers' yeast (mine is from 1998, yours might be younger), a tablespoon of sugar and add water to two-thirds of the way up.

Then simply give the mixture in the pots a good stir, leave it in the warm for half an hour to start fermenting (on the kitchen worktop should be fine), then put these traps amongst your flower or vegetable plants and and be surprised when they are absolutely full up with slugs and snails in a couple of days. I've watched a procession of slugs simply crawl up into them in the early morning, just after dawn (about 3.30am up here - your sleep paterns might be better than mine - but it is absolutely the best part of the day). The small slugs that cause the most damage seem especially partial to my concoction.

Now, I would imagine that in hot weather the smell might get rather pungent, but, as we've only had 3 weeks of 'summer' in total (2 weeks at the begining of May, a few days a couple of weeks ago and today until 4pm) I've not been troubled by it yet. At least the slugs die happy.

I have been absolutely amazed at the efficacy of these beer traps and wish I'd discovered them years ago. Now, if there was something useful one could do with the dead drunken slugs....

I spared you a picture, be grateful.

It's not over 'til it's over...

... but thankfully it is now.

The Sushi's off.

"Mrs Sushi looks like a zebra!" I exclaimed.
"She doesn't, she looks like dazzle camouflage used on WW1 ships to make them difficult to spot!" noted Mr BW.

Now then, who's left to take over as Leader of the Opposition? Cruella, *unt, Badenough (having had her as Consituency MP and seen how utterly useless she is, that would be the worst option), Pratel, The Man Whose Name Doesn't Even Finish Its Own Sentence?

We now live in the midst of a solid Red Wall. Pretty much mirroring Hadrian's Wall.

Every seat in the NE bar one.

This proportional map from here.

It was fascinating to see the usual/historic Blue 'vote for me' signs all across huge swathes of the central County feudal ruraldom turned Red.

The landowners and the farmers had clearly had enough: well and truly Trussed Up.

Tactical voting means that for the first time since 1991 when I moved from Paddy Ashdown's Yeovil LibDem constituency, I have an MP I voted for.

Into my seventh decade, it's also the first time I've ever voted Labour, but, I'll get over it, and back to voting for Independents or Person Not Party. On the positive side, as a collector of many odd things, I can now claim a complete set of votes for all the major Parties.

Interesting times.

Tory Lite though.

And plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, undoubtedly. And that comes from 1849, or possibly earlier.

Who's happy with what they've now got? Predictions for new Leader of the Opposition?

Spring has sprung; hibernation is over

The bulbs are looking OK this year. Not too many not-the-colour-on-the-packet, which makes a change. We seem to have overcome the tulip blight episode of last year by junking all the bulbs and compost, soaking all the pots in strong disinfectant for several weeks, and starting again this year.

The b33s are flying well, and collecting lots of pollen (which they only collect when they need it - to feed to the baby b33s they are raising, so that's a good sign) in the sunny intervals between rain and almost-zero degree nights, but it's not been warm enough to inspect them yet, so we don't know exactly the state they are in. Down south we'd often had our first swarm call by now, and done a month's worth of weekly inspections. Our sheep's fleece filled pillowcases under their lids and Lidl's windscreen protectors wrapped around their boxes (one-twentieth of the price of the sold-for-b33s ones that have become popular in the last couple of years) seem to have done the trick. Only one colony loss this year.

The Meat Factory in the field behind us is in full production. Once again the ewe mummies assume human roles. This one here is a child-minder.

It is our 30th wedding anniversary on Sunday.

Still being the lucky (not) owners of 2 houses, we are now completely broke and juggling not-our-money between 0% credit card offers in an attempt to stay solvent, so we are having to make do with a '4 nights in a cheaper-than-Premier-Inn Airbnb in Lancashire' to celebrate. We nearly went to stay in a field in Bri@n (the pod micro-caravan), but one look at the promised weather for this weekend made us see sense. An attempted Easter in a torrential storm in a small tent in a South Devon field many moons ago - maybe even before we were married - taught us well.

RHS Garden Bridgewater (quite new and which we've not yet seen) and Crosby Beach (the Anthony Gormley men that drown and resurface twice a day - I know exactly how they feel) aren't quite the Kirstenbosch Gardens of my 50th, but are better than the 'being very ill in bed thanks to germs coughed up by the builder's labourer' that I got for my 60th. Hopefully we will have some funds again before Mr BW's 60th at the end of October, but I'm not holding my breath as there are now 86 houses for sale in Parish Sud (cf fewer than 10 normally) and still almost nothing is moving (who wants to live in a now over-developed area?).

How are things in your world?

Coven Life

A few weeks ago we got up ridiculously early and tootled up to the other end of the county to an auction because Mr BW desired an old engineering lathe (they don't make 'em new like they used to). It had a guide price of £80 - £100.

The auctioneer was only knocking down 90 lots an hour, and seemed to be spending far too much time on lots that went for £10 or remained unsold. But, eventually, we got to the desired lot number, although not before I had bought three lobster pots for £12. I've always wanted lobster pots and if I get bored of them in my objet displays, I can always drop them in the local burn and see what they trap. Rats, probably.

Mr BW dropped out when the lathe got to £260; it went for more than £300, and the auctioneer later told us that the eventual buyer (on a commission bid) would have paid up to £450 for it. Crazy, when buyer's permium was added, it would have cost them almost as much as a brand new one, and, something an absentee buyer would not have known, it did have a serious fault, albeit repaired at some long-distant time.

We've been making glass flowers for the garden (winter is long in the north and I love my flowers):

And chopping up Sunday Sherry bottles to make blue glass rings, for another arty installation:

It's been a lot of trial and error to work out the best way to get the blue rings to melt into a pleasing form:

The strelitzia has been flowering non-stop since my WitchDay:

What I hadn't realised until now is that flowers emerge from the horizontal green bit, and that the older the plant, the more individual flowers emerge.

We have destroyed two burning bins now:

It is really difficult to work out the most environmentally sensible way to dispose of unwanted burnable things (wood, paper, cardboard, not plastics). Burn them on site, or take them in a car on a 26 miles round trip to somewhere from where they will be taken by lorry to another plant, 50 miles away, to be burnt. Do car journeys plus lorry journeys equate to more environmental pollution than burning on site and then using the ashes as a garden fertiliser (potash), meaning we won't have to buy it in (with all its associated processing, packaging and transportation costs)?

Mr BW has been making a log box out of old pallets. Our existing one (in the background) was too small for the quantity of logs (for which read, old roof trusses and joiners' leftover cut-offs from the building works) that we get through on a cold day, and the cost of a decent new woven one is beyond our present means. As ever, we are future-proofing, so, for ease of future movement of firewood, it's on castors, repurposed from one of those 'dollys' that can be bought for £15 in Lidl or Aldi, if you are there at the right time. We 'misplaced' ours when we needed it (later found hiding in plain sight in the workshop - I reckon the Black Feline Familar was playing on it in the night) so had to buy another, then having too many, chopping one up was considerably cheaper than buying new good-quality castors on eBay:

And that strip of masking tape on the wall? Well, there's a shelf there now, made out of a piece of oak that we acquired from a local estate. It was meant to be for the kitchen, but was too heavy to install. Kitchen's loss is living room's gain.

Disguised

It's World Book Day. The day (almost) every parent/grandparent hates as they are required to produce a costume for their offspring to proudly wear to school.

I'd go as Patricia Coombs Blue Witch of course.

What about you?

Supermarket Sweep

The weather has turned grey, misty and cold again after a couple of days of sunshine warm enough for b33s to fly. It's almost bad enough to send me back into hibernation.

I have a few superpowers.

One is perfect line: like perfect pitch, but involving the ability to see when things are not correctly aligned. No need for a spirit level, but distressing when things aren't hung or set straight.

Another is super-smelling, and my nose is usually as sensitive as a bloodhound's. That Witchy Power has been absent for 10 weeks now, until yesterday, when I realised it had finally returned from its holiday. Most useful for knowing when milk is on the turn well before it is otherwise detectable, when the dishwasher needs its filter cleaning, what spices are in a blend, or when there is a tiny fuel leak in a boiler, machine or vehicle. Or when there is an item of residual cat-kill decaying somewhere.

A third is being able to make things happen that should happen, under natural justice, without actually needing to do anything. A good example of that happened last time we went into not-very-local nearest town a couple of weeks ago.

We don't go there often, and only go when we have a long list of things we need to do or get. The majority of our grocery shopping is delivered, but there are a few things that can only be sourced in Waitrose, Aldi or Lidl, and hen food has to be collected from the feed merchants. By the time we have been round all of those places, I am usually very tired and strange things can happen.

We had bought about 20 items in Lidl, mostly pickled things in jars - the few things that we can't produce ourselves, that they do well and cheaper than other places: olives, gherkins, red peppers, baby pickled onions. Mr BW got to the tills before me, and, being red/green colour blind, did not realise that he had chosen a checkout with a red light behind its number-in-the-air rather than a green one. Most sensible supermarkets realise that 8 per cent of men (one in 12) and 0.5 per cent of women (one in 200) have such issues, so put a 'checkout closed' bar across the till belt, but not Lidl. By the time I arrived, Mr BW had most of the shopping on the belt, before the operative, still serving the customer before, noticed. "I'm closed, you'll have to go to another till!" he called out.

I could see several other customers heading down the aisles towards the tills, so thought better of wasting time remonstrating with him, muttered, "For fuck's sake!" under my breath but loud enough for him to hear, quickly picked up a few items and headed for the next door till to secure my place ahead of the descending hordes. Usually I'd have pointed out that people with colour blindness are not mind readers so cannot tell when particular tills are open or not and insisted he served us, but I was too tired, beginning to feel wobbly, and just wanted to get home.

I dumped my grabbed armful of purchases on the till belt and turned around to see where Mr BW and the other having-to-be-moved items had got to. As I did so, and I genuinely have no idea how, a jar of mini-pickled onions bit the dust. The woman in front of me, wearing trainers, stepped back and onto some of the glass shards, but didn't seem to notice. I nudged her arm and pointed to the floor, but she just shuffled ahead. There were 5 people between me and the cashier, and no-one had noticed, so I shouted out, "Broken glass, dropped jar!" and he looked over, left the till mid-transaction and started rolling the penny-sized spilled pickled onions about with his foot. "I'll get a mop in a minute!" he said, "You'd better go to the the next till." This till being, of course, the one we'd been made to move from. Off he ran, leaving the 3 customers in front of me waiting.

As we were unloading the items back onto the original till's belt, the same operative who'd sent us away reappeared.

I decided to assume Northern Style Dialogue rather than Southern Politieness, and pointed my Witchy finger straight at him. "This is all your fault!" I declared in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, "If you'd done the sensible thing and served us before, as we'd got most of the shopping already on the belt before you chose to tell us you were closing the till, rather than send us over there, then a glass jar wouldn't have got broken and lots of people's time wouldn't have been wasted!" he sensibly said nothing, probably because there was nothing he could have said.

It occurred to me that it would be very interesting to go around supermarkets dropping things, for fun, to see how much chaos one could create. Power, in a world where little people no longer seem to matter.

Hare today, gone tomorrow?

Sometime just before seven we were enjoying our first cup of tea of the day in bed, watching Countdown (a great way to start the day with an added benefit of providing a marker for how alive my brain is, and so what sort of a day I might have) when Mr BW noticed a hare sitting nonchalantly on top of the waist-high front drystone wall:

Meanwhile, in the workshop/garage just a few metres away, The Black Familiar was snoozing gently. She has a penchant for game, so this should provide some fun for her later.

I used to like hares.

That was before I learnt from unfortunate first-hand experience how very destructive they are.

We're having to repurpose some old electric hen netting to go around the new vegetable patch extension Mr BW has been creating in the orchard becasue of the number of hares and bunnies that seem to have descended recently.