Month: October 2010

My spells are working well. Must be the time of year.
This year, everywhere is selling Blue Witch costumes, and they even had blue Witchy hats, with attached long blue hair, in the local post office. I’ve had over a hundred Google Alert emails on the phrase ‘Blue Witch’ this week, And none of them were me. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery I always think 🙂
Michael Fish is back doing London area weather today, so I can remember what’s been said at the end of the broadcast again. Hurrah. We decided he must be in his mid-70s, but unless Wikipedia have his date of birth wrong (which is very doubtful) he is, in fact, only 66. Poor him.
It’s Mr BW’s WitchDay, and I got presents: my lovely Furniture Man delivered my made-to-my-design solid pine bookcase and gigantic blanket box (for only just more than the price of IKEA tat), but, as ever, the stairs foiled us (I know how the daleks feel), so we (that’s the royal we) had to do a bit of witchery pokery and magic it up a ladder and over the balcony to get it into The Studio. That was fun. Haven’t done that for… oh, four years or so.
I’ve just set up my kitchen and utility sinks and worktops replacement spell to kick in when we get back from Ooop North. Installed in 1979, by the former owner, a master carpenter, who made just about everything wooden in this house, the formica with wooden edge kitchen tops have seen much better days. We’ve been ummming and ahhhing for about five years about this, but finally found a colourway that we liked (ie almost identical to what’s there now). I’m still trying to work out why one company quoted me only two-thirds of the price of three others. But as it is a very specialist product, with only a few accredited manufacturers and installers, I obtained the mobile phone number of the chief technical bod at the material manufacturers. He assured me that the company in question are excellent and is sure that there won’t be any problems, but that, if there are, he will take personal responsibility for sorting them out. I don’t know why, but the fact that both the company involved and the technical bod are ‘northern’ inspires much more confidence than if they came from round here. I have asked very searching questions, and have done extensive internet searches, but I can’t turn up anything negative about them. I have all agreements in writing, but, one third less is just too good to be true. I may yet live to regret this, but, as this company is the only one of the four that don’t require 100% payment up front, I am less worried than I would otherwise be.
I’m not saying how much one third difference is, but, let’s just say that it nearly pays for the repeat visit to Turkey next summer (same place in the middle of nowhere, we liked it immensely), for which we have been accorded (on the strength, I strongly suspect, of my written comments on the feedback form about the behaviour on the plane this year of certain other passengers’ children) a free outward-leg upgrade to Business Class. Blessed are the complainers for they shall sometimes be rewarded.
We’re going to Lindisfarne on Hallowe’en, then will cosy up by the open fire in our farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in the evening. I doubt I’ll bother to put a sheet over my head and make spooky noises, but, who knows?
What are your plans for Hallowe’en / Samhain?

…working on the 2011 census, to be taken on 27th March 2011.
I wish them well recruiting all the people they need, with the skills and experience they are expecting (see job descriptions on the site – which doesn’t allow linking to individual pages), for the money they are paying…
Most census co-ordinators outside major cities (team leaders – responsible for a team of around 15, the sort of job you’d see advertised for maybe £30K+, plus perks) will earn £9.27 an hour (flexible working hours, including evenings and weekends, expected, car with business insurance, and storage space in home)(this is an annual salary of £17,884.48, from here). Most of the people delivering and collecting census forms will earn £7.41 an hour (flexible working hours, including evenings and weekends, expected, car with business insurance, and storage space in home)(this accords to an annual salary of £14,296.01, from here). You can earn more than that working in Aldis…
It’s bloody hard work and unsocial hours (I have a friend and a brother who have worked on past censuses – both in very ‘good’ areas), and many of the general public are extremely unwilling to fill in their forms, and go to great lengths to be out, pretend to be out, or be rude, when you call to collect them. Still, if you want to apply, don’t let me discourage you…
And if you want to see the sort of questions you’ll be answering, here is the ‘rehearsal questionnaire’.

“The British Library is asking the public to help it track how pronunciation is shifting in Britain.
Volunteers are being asked to record a chapter from a Mr Man book to see how certain words and accents are changing.
The library wants as many people as possible to record the opening paragraphs of children’s book Mr Tickle to track differences in vowel sounds.”

I would attribute these changes to TV rather than to anything else…
“…youngsters are now more likely to say “haitch” than “aitch” when pronouncing the letter H.”
That started in the 80s, around the time Neighbours and its Australian ilk hit our screens. As did using the term ‘uni’ for ‘university’.
“…when saying the word “mischievous”, they prefer to pronounce it “mischeevy-us” rather than “mischivus”, curators add. Young people are also more likely to have different way of saying words such as garage, schedule, migraine and harass.”
And that would be mainly due to American TV imports methinks.
But, the British Library’s forthcoming exhibition, “Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices,” (12th November 2010 to 3rd April 2011, free admission) should be interesting.
And would someone please tell the BBC employee with the urge to be gramamtically pedantic (who wrote the original item I’ve linked) that the books are ‘Mr Men‘ and not ‘Mr Man’.

“Memo to my leftie friends: you’d feel better if you tried not to hate us so much.”
(and I’d advise against reading the comments to the linked article, because they may make you feel like repeatedly hitting your head against a brick wall in frustration…)

Why are some people so bad at time-keeping?
Today I expected one person at 9.00am for two and a half hours, another at 9.15am for an hour, another at 10.45am for two and a half hours, and another at 1.45pm to pick something up. Precision timings had been calculated, and I could just about fit it all in without ending up in a Blue Pool myself. I hasten to add that I’d originally worked out these timings to the convenience of the people involved, rather than my own.
It started well. The 9am arrived on time. I set him to do what he had to do.
9.15am came and went. I was on the point of making a phone call to find out if she was still coming, when the doorbell rang.
It was the 10.45am an hour and a quarter early. Closely followed by the 9.15am a quarter of an hour late. Neither of the girls’ mothers appreciated that they were late, until I told them, at which point they both admitted they’d forgotten and guessed at the time they were due. For one I’d even written down the time two weeks ago, and the other had claimed she’d put it straight in her phone, so didn’t need to take my ready-prepared post-it note.
Somehow it all fitted in, although by 12.15pm when the last one left, I was rather worn out.
The 1.45pm finally showed up at around 2.30pm.
And then came the frustration of trying to move large sums of money electronically, from a joint account to accounts in one or other of our names, at different institutions, by either faster payment, or debit card payment (ie so they go the same day). Don’t ever try it. Nightmare. The limit seems to be £1000 on a faster payment, and while you can do a debit card payment for up to £30,000 by ringing your branch just before, they will only keep the instruction on the account for an hour, so, if the bank who is supposed to take the debit card payment batch-process (eg overnight, as apparently, so I’ve discovered, many do), the payment is bound to fail as there is no instruction on the account from you, as it expired an hour after you rang them.
So… next time I shall just write a cheque in the good old-fashioned time-honoured way, a couple of days ahead, so it clears on the day I need funds available. Except that a couple of banks (at least) are not going to guarantee cheques with cards any more, after 1st May next year, and no bank will issue cheques after 2018 (ah look, that date has been extended, I’m sure it was originally in just a couple of years time, when I first mentioned it here).
Technology is meant to help, I thought… instead it just gets more and more complicated and customer unfriendly. “It’s to stop money laundering!” I was told. Ha bloody ha. It’s to ensure that banks try to send your money by BACS which takes three/four days, so they get three/four days free use of your money. And they didn’t deny it when I accused them of it…

Not feeling up to travelling up to Northumber1and from here at the weekend in one hit, as we normally do, having asked around, the consensus of opinion of those who travel the highways and byways of the country regularly is that we should stay in York on Friday night (it also being Mr BW’s WitchDay we’ve decided to add an additional day to our usual week away).
I haven’t been to the National Railway Museum since I was 21 (when I went to see the paintings I’d used for my first degree research into memory), and Mr BW thinks he went when he was at school, although as Mummy Mr BW and Sister Mr BW pointed out to him at yesterday’s family Birthday Meal (4 of them have October birthdays), that’s rather a long way to have gone for a school trip, and suggested that it might instead actually have been a railway museum about 20 miles away from here. And I’d like to go to the Qui1t Museum. I know it’s Mr BW’s WitchDay, but.
Now, it may not be entirely sensible to consider going to York on the last weekend of half term, but. It might be better than spending the next week in bed after seven hours in the car, which is the other alternative.
So… please has anyone any recommendations for places to stay in York (preferably with parking, and close to the centre, or on an easy public transport route into the city) (and hopefully not Travelodge type – good quality B&B or small guest house/hotel preferred)? And somewhere to eat for a WitchDay meal? And anything else to do (bearing in mind that we will be there from Friday afternooon until Saturday afternoon and won’t have too much time after doing the NRM and Qui1t Museum)?

If you’ve caught any of the excellent British Museum/Radio 4 series, A History of the World in 100 Objects, they’re on Object 100, the final one, this morning (and repeated this evening) (9.45am and 7.45pm). I’m slightly disappointed that they’ve already posted an image and description of today’s final object, because it’s spolit the surprise.
The 99th object yesterday also surprised me a bit: it was a gold credit card that obeys Sharia law (ie has a service fee, not interest). Neil MacGregor, the presenter, and Director of the British Museum, made a very interesting point – the fact that the world now revolves around the fast movement of money through the use of plastic means that the materiality of currency has been lost. How many people these days handle large amounts of cash? If you don’t see a tangible representation of something, is there any wonder it means nothing and has no ascribed value, so can be abused, misused and overspent?
I wonder if anyone else has a (securely stored) shoe-box sized box of old credit cards as I do (original design Access and Barclaycard, from the late 1970s, anyone)? Other than The British Museum, of course. And I think I’ve seen some displayed in the V&A, and possibly also in the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge? I caught Mr BW cutting up an expired card (of a discontinued colour/design) the other day, rather than donating it to my personal collection, and I was most upset…
The whole series of 100 programmes retells two million years of humanity’s history through the objects we have made. Fascinating stuff. It is available online, and to download as podcasts. Well worth a browse if you haven’t heard/seen it. And there’s a blog (isn’t there always?).
What’s your favourite radio/TV series at the moment?
(if you put a link (URL) in your comment and it doesn’t immediately appear, don’t worry – I will pick it out of the spam (all URLs as links automatically go to spam) and publish it later!).

First white-on-the-ground hard frost here last night.
Anyone else?

Would you send a business email like this?
I, for one, am jolly pleased to see that the BBC gravy train has been frozen on its rails for the next six years. How many of them did it take to cover the Chilean miners’ story after all? 26? 40? Sources vary. Too many, for sure. £145.50 per year is far, far too much for the privilege of avoiding a few commericals.
And why over 75s should *still* be getting free TV licences, just on the grounds of age, is beyond me. Or why should over 60s continue to receive non-means tested bus passes, heating allowances, free prescriptions and eye tests? All paid for by us workers of today, who will not be allowed to retire (on state pensions) until we are, probably, 70 plus. The governmint are clearly very, very scared of the Blue Rinses revolting.

I’m glad I’m out today with the Patchy Ladies, because I’d otherwise be likely to spend the whole day watcing Parliament on TV and scouring the internet for details of, and reactions to, the (remaining) unleaked morsels of the Spending Review.
Of course, we wouldn’t *be* in this mess were it not for Goldfish Brown and his Cronies’ total mismanagement of the economy… It’s amazing how short some people’s memories are.
Let’s blame the Coalition for having to take drastic measures to keep UK PLC financially viable, while saying it’s all the fault of the bankers/gloabl economy.
*If* that were the case, then every other developed country in the world would be in a mess too. And most of them are not.
I’d rather it got sorted sooner rather than later. Short-term pain for long-term gain. It’s how we’ve paid off our mortgage years early. Sort the debts out and then you’ve got real choices. And that applies to country-debts and equally to personal-debts.
And let’s not forget that the new Shadow Chancellor, Alan Johnson, doesn’t even have a maths O level/GCSE (and I’ve known kids with IQs in the bottom 5% of the population manage a ‘C’, so his lack of basic qualification must be due to a basic lack of understanding of number, which does not bode well for his understanding of the wider implications/economics). In my opinion, the personal monetary affairs of anyone in a public or private sector budget-handling job should be closely scrutinised. If you can’t keep your own house in order, you shouldn’t be given the responsiblity of caretaking anyone else’s.

Commentator Gordon (who is not the same as Blog Gordon) emailed yesterday as follows:

“My local freebie newspaper’s current issue ran the story above, and I recalled you’d mentioned in the Comments box recently that you’d been to the Kn1tt1ng and St1tching Show at Ally Pally. It occurred to me to wonder if Blue Witch has an alter ego, a “guerilla textile graffiti artist” as described in the article?
The online version – with a rather distant picture – and is that your coach behind the bus shelter? – is here”

Now, I’ve been overdoing it a bit recently, trying to get everything work-related dispatched before I hang up my [whatever education people hang up when they dip out]. So my memory isn’t terribly good.
But, the settee in The Studio tells me I bought all these things at the Show:

And a big box that arrived last Tuesday told me that I accidentally bought one of these:
Only it got sent straight back because I was not accepting delivery of a state-of-the-art computerised sewing machine that came in an almost-solid box with that sort of dent in the top corner. Buying direct from the manufacturer has a great advantage: I got £550 off the normal selling price (which is £250 below the RRP), plus a free wheelie carry case (RRP £80), plus twenty quid’s worth of plastic bobbins, plus a free 5 year warranty, had no hassle rejecting the dented box, and they sent a new replacement machine out immediately their courier had collected the damaged box. “Oh, we’ll check it over and sell it as a re-boxed product,” I was told when I asked what would happen to the one I’d rejected. Which just added to my resolve never to buy reboxed items.
The nice lady in customer services who’d handled the replacement rang me earlier on to check that I was completely happy with my purchase. “I don’t know yet,” I said, “I’m too scared to use something that costs more than my car is worth, until I’ve rung the insurance company to add it to the policy as a ‘specified item’…” It is the only specified item we have, actually, as the only other things we have that are worth that much are furniture, and that doesn’t need individually specifying.

So, you decide: am I the guerilla textile artist Gordon describes who ‘cushioned up’ the bus stop near Ally Pally?

I may be a Witch, but I cannot abide mice. Living next to ten billion acres of arable farmland, it’s the reason we have four cats. Who all live outside lest they bring their ‘treasures’ inside and negate the reason for their existence.
The first farm cottage I lived in when I moved to the West Country in 1985 had lots of mice. We discovered them when some unfound-from-an-Easter-egg-hunt tiny foil-covered chocolate eggs were being rolled across the bedroom floor in the middle of the night. Thousands were then found in the loft, under the bath and in the understairs cupboard. It took months to get rid of them. And hundreds of bottles of Dettol.
After that, I bought two brand new houses, one after the other.
And then I met Mr BW and we moved here. I had Mr BW to protect me from mice after all.
Although we had a few in the loft a few years ago (just after the blog started in early 2003), they responded to treatment, and they weren’t actually anywhere visible, or other than the loft, which anyway became The Studio in the summer of 2006. Only one of their number was found by the builders as they took off the roof and removed the insulation, and that was small and very dessicated. Actually, I still have it on a shelf.
But, I never quite recovered from the trauma of the mice in the original farm cottage, as I discovered at the weekend.
Mr BW went off to see his harem for the weekend on Saturday lunchtime, leaving me unprotected from mice. After a day with the Rotating Ladies, talking about blue dye1ng, I was exhausted and went to bed before 8pm. At 11.50pm I was awoken by the rustling of a plastic bag. I put the light on and searched for the mischievous cat who’d somehow got past security and crept into the bottom of the bedroom-long wardrobe with slidey doors. Quite a common occurrence. Couldn’t find a stray cat, so went back to bed, and was nearly asleep again when I heard more rustling. I still couldn’t see a cat, so went outside to the workshop where they all sleep. All four were present and correct.
On the way back inside, The Terrible Truth dawned. If it wasn’t a cat in the wardrobe, it must be a mouse. Or, worse, a rat. I gingerly re-entered the bedroom and quickly slid all the wardrobe doors across, hoping that whatever the monster was, it hadn’t come out and gone under the bed while I’d been checking the workshop for cats.
I was convinced The Monster was under my bed, and lay under the duvet, waiting for it to run over me, or worse, bite me. I couldn’t go back to sleep. I considered moving with the duvet into another room, but decided against it, as there could be more mice hiding wherever I moved to, and wherever I moved would undoubtedly be a lot less comfortable than my nice warm bed.
About an hour later, I heard the rustle of plastic bag again, and couldn’t decide whether it was coming from behind the safely closed wardrobe door two feet from my head, or from underneath my bed. I lay motionless, hearing every little noise emanating form within a ten mile radius. Occasionally there might even have been a scamper or a rustle.
I cursed Mr BW’s absence. Where was he on the one occasion in over fifteen years that I needed him to protect me from mice? I considered phoning him up, but decided that he’d be too far over the alcohol limit to drive the 90 miles home anyway.
By now it was 5am. Then I heard the rustle again, a bit further along, so was sure that The Monster was contained in the wardrobe. I must have dropped off for a couple of hours, as it was light by the time a further noise – this time scratching from inside the slidey doors – awoke me. I wondered if the doors could be slid by a rodent. I decided they could, so went to make some tea.
After drinking an incredibly large cup of Earl Grey, I felt braver, so slid one of the middle doors along a few inches. I saw several black specks, and picked them up with a tissue. Mouse rather than rat droppings, at least.
I was still in bed, sat up, on guard/working on the netbook, finishing a report, when Mr BW arrived home at 2.30pm. I hadn’t heard any more noises, so concluded that The Monster had either gone to sleep until nightfall, or had somehow escaped. There is, after all, a six inch hole in the wardrobe ceiling, made by Electrician BW four summers ago when he rang the cabling for the extension into the fuse box (which is in the wardrobe), that Mr BW has never got round to filling in, despite me asking (although, to be fair, I’ve never written it in The Job Book, and things not in The Job Book don’t get done, as one has to have the satisfaction of crossing jobs off when they are done, in order for it to be worthwhile doing them, if you see what I mean).
Anyway, I’m getting a bit bored writing this story, so you must be really bored reading it, so I’ll cut it short:

Mr BW’s rat trap (we don’t do things by halves at The Coven), baited with peanut butter, caught The Monster sometime around 4am. I know, I was awake, hearing every scamper and rustle. Two nights without sleep. I feel more of a zombie than normal.
There weren’t any more rustlings after the trap had sprung, and the offending Monster appeared to be a boy Monster.
But if there’s one thing I know about rodents, it’s that they never exist alone. Unless, as Mr BW reckons, this one climbed in the open bedroom window, on its own. Which I doubt. But, just in case, the wardrobe doors will remain firmly closed for several more nights, and the rat trap is re-set. I shall get some of that anti-climb paint to paint the wall outside the bedroom too.
But – have you ever seen a mouse 5 inches long, plus tail? This chart suggests that it must have been super mouse.
I’m just off to the estate agents to see if there are any nice new houses available… and to get a gallon of Dettol. And some sleeping tablets.

The weatherbods forecast temperatures down to 1 degree C here last night. Mr BW had dashed around when he got home from work, collecting up the citrus, datura/brugmansia and small fuchsias that might suffer, and stashing them into their winter homes (greenhouse or summerhouse).
But, temperatures dropped to only 8.8 degrees.
Judging by the sky tonight (the clouds in the photo were the only ones to be seen), we’re going to get the first frost of the year tonight.

Which is a shame as it will destroy many of the autumn colours in the garden:

I can’t remember the last time we had a frost here before late November.
I’d totally forgotten about the need to take the final crop of leaves off, and then protect, my po1yganum dye1ing plants, until I went to my Rotating Ladies Group today. About two hours worth of picking leaves off stems coming up, then we’ll have some more Blue Magic.
I wish we (the collective ‘we’) could summon up the interest in our futures that they have in France. 3 million people taking to the streets to protest about the retirement age going up from 60 to 62. Over here most people aren’t interested enough to actually know what their retirement age will be, let alone protest that it has gone up. Long gone is the Anarchy in the UK of the late 70s. Apathy in the UK is more appropriate these days.
And, for posterity, I’d just like to note that what I (after working in education, at all levels and stages, for the past 26 years) believe is needed for young kids from deprived backgrounds is not billions of pounds more from the Treasury, to include 15 hours a week from the age of two in a nursery, it’s for their parents to have some parenting/budgeting/homemaking/personal communication skills lessons, preferably before they have these kids… That is, for secondary education for the teenagers who will be parents before they get into their twenties to be relevant to where they’ve come from, and where they, realistically, may be going. Continually throwing money into pre-school education, which takes the responsibility away from these young parents, who are locked into cycles of deprivation, just is not the answer.

I had to go to the dentist this morning. I never like going to the dentist, because when I was a Small Witch, I had a nasty Australian dentist, who filled all my teeth (and those of every other small child in the area who he could get his drill on), made a fortune out of the NHS, got found out, got stuck off, and then went back to Australia where he continued to practise. Which left bad and indelible memories. But, one of the protective pieces of white plastic (not the technical term, but that’s what they are) at the gum/tooth juncture on one of my top front teeth had disappeared, and needed replacing urgently as it was incredibly sensitive, to the point that just breathing in hurt.
My normal dentist (who was Mr BW’s dentist, and who I adopted shortly after meeting Mr BW, so nearly 18 years ago now) couldn’t see me until mid-November (holiday and teaching commitments), so the practice manager, who knows all about how much I hate dentists as she used to be his dental nurse before he opted-out of NHS work and opened a swanky new practice in a national architecture award-winning building, recommended I see his associate, who, she said, “Is even better with patients like you.” About which I was none too happy, or convinced, but about which she was right, and he even has ‘magic gel patches’ for numbing gums before introducing big needles. Anyway, he sorted out all my junctures, and as he was much gentler and a thoroughly nice dentist, and his prices were cheaper than my normal dentist, he may just get a new patient.
But, dentists are not the point of the Friday Question. That was just a bit of preamble to the fact that, while I was there, I had a moan about the fact that they have recently decided to change to using 0844- numbers. The numbers that have sprung up so that companies using them can continue to revenue-share with the telecom provider, after OFCOM decreed last year that 0845- and 0870- numbers should not involve any element of profit to those using them.
The practice manager said that one could carry on using the old geographic local number (which I already knew, as I’d done it). She also said that she didn’t think that people minded using 0844- numbers when ringing a (very expensive, private-patient only) dentist. I said that while (depending on provider) up to 9p per minute, plus over 10p call set-up fee might be peanuts compared to the price of dental treatment, it would probably cost around 50p per call from a landline, and more than that from mobiles. The woman waiting behind me let out an audible noise, and looked shocked. She turned around to the man behind her and asked him if he knew how expensive it was to ring 0844- numbers. “Oh no, they’re free!” he said. The woman behind me was, by then, busy asking the four people waiting if they knew how much ringing 0844- numbers cost. Only one other person did, and two said they weren’t worried, it was just one of those things you had to accept these days.
All of which got me thinking. Are companies getting away with using 0844- and 0871- numbers because people don’t know about how they work, are unaware of the actual costs of calling them (the pricing structure is hugely complex: 52 plus 36 pages of BT pdf), or simply don’t care?
Do you actively avoid buying from companies that use premium-rate non-inclusive telephone numbers?

Bit of a long shot this request… but, does anyone have (or know anyone who has) one of those kitchen taps with built-in water filters? I’m trying to work out the pros and cons of the ceramic filter ones (eg Franke Triflow) compared to the carbon filter ones (eg Brita), and am failing miserably…

Continuing the Mr BW breaks all the Coven Power Tools series, a tiny little rubber gasket, smaller than my little finger nail, that sits inside the rubber squeezy petrol-prime bulb on the garden strimmer, failed, meaning that it ceased to function. Mr BW swopped it for one from another machine, and sent me off the local garden machinery shop to get a new one.
I am probably their best customer of late. “Ah, Mrs BW, what can we do for you today?” said the cheerful elderly man behind the counter who was probably born before garden power tools were invented. “You mean, what has my husband broken today!” I joked, passing over the tiny defective piece, wrapped in a squiggle of cling-wrap. “He’s written the machine number on that post-it.”
He umd and ahd and punched some numbers into his computer. “You’re not going to like this… it’s £20 plus VAT for a new one.” “I think you mean 20p!” I said. “No, seriously, they only come as part of the whole replacement priming bulb kit, and it’s £20 plus VAT.” I gave him a BW hard stare. “But it’s only a little washer thing… not fixed into the unit or anything…” At that moment the scruffy engineery bloke, who can mend anything broken in the garden power tool line, slouched up to the counter. “How’s the hedge cutter?” he enquired. He fixed that last week. “It’s fantastic now, thanks, great job as ever!” I smiled. “But, I’m struggling to understand how a teensy weensy piece of rubber from the strimmer is going to cost me £20 plus VAT…” He picked it up. He shook his head and sucked his teeth the way these chaps do. “Hen’s teeth!” he said and walked back down into his workshop end. He fiddled about for a few minutes, and came back. “Here,” he said, thrusting an unbroken version of the one I’d taken in, into my hand. “Present for you. But I haven’t got any more old carbs of the right sort to take another one off, so tell him not to break it again in a hurry!”
There is a (nice, independent) garden centre on the same site. I went in to get some garlic bulbs (it’s imminently time to get them planted), and to get this month’s free gift (with a voucher out of their magazine and a £5 purchase). On the way out I saw some terracotta pumpkin paraphernalia:

I wondered what the world was coming to: you can’t buy tiny rubber gaskets individually any more, but you can buy pottery ghosts and witches’ hats.
Then I went to Sainsbury’s and saw a huge pile of large orange ‘pumpkins for carving’ and thought of all the wasted pumpkin flesh that would be going into landfill over the next few weeks.

There seem to be a lot of people I know with significant (ie ending in ‘0’) birthdays of late.
And a spate of famous people (note I do not use the term ‘celebrity’ as I dislike it, and everything it stands for, intensely) dying.
This morning Claire Rayner.
Whilst I never read any of her newpaper or magazine columns, or indeed any of her many books, I do remember her good old-fashioned bossy common-sense approach on the Wednesday evening radio phone-in programme on Capital Radio in when I was a student in London in the 1980s. In my opinion, Claire Rayner and the Capital Doctor did more to inform Londoners of the time of the dangers of the newly-discovered HIV virus, and its dangers, than anyone else of that era. They were the main source of information on health matters for many. It seems odd now, in these internet-enabled days, but, back then, there was a lot of ignorance of even basic medical facts, and no way to easily and reliably check doctor-given information or diagnoses.
A nurse and midwife by initial training, Claire was a tireless campaigner for so many health related causes, and patients rights. I was pleased to discover a couple of minutes worth of video clip of a piece I originally saw live, and remember vividly, from a couple of years ago, where she was interviewed about the hot topic of the day, smiley nurses. Everything I admire about her is neatly encapsulated in that clip.
Why can’t the health journalists and presenters (and indeed nurses) of today have her degree of energy, professionalism and clear-thinking authoritarian, yet friendly and acceptable advice? Absolutely irreplaceable.
I’ve just realised, looking at the Google returns, that Jay Rayner, the restaurant critic who judges on Masterchef (and who I find obnoxious in the extreme, in that role), is her son. How that fact escaped me until now I do not know…

I realised that I haven’t posted any pictures of the main sculptural form that Mr BW made on his b1acksmithing course back in April.
That was largely because it was initially the wrong colour (shiny silver as Hammerite have stopped doing gunmetal grey, but then I found a tin in a Homebase sale of discontinued lines, so Mr BW got to repaint it), the wrong height (so Mr BW got to chop off the dead tree in which it stands a bit lower down) and unstable (so Mr BW got to make the hole deeper and the sculpture’s spike shorter, as the damage to his forehead where the angle grinder disc sheered off will testify). So, finally, it can be unveiled (although, due to the sun’s low position this morning, and the dew, it still look shinier than the subtle colour it is in real life):

A closer detail of the top:

Here’s the cushion cover I made in patchw0rk last week, which you can almost not discern in the photo: the green ce1tic kn0t is subtle but not that invisible:

Everyone else sewed the bias binding cut for the kn0t on by hand. That’s nearly 8 metres of tiny ladder stitches. My hands and my eyes just aren’t up to that. I said, “Bugger that!” and got out my fabric glue. I got some funny looks. Strangely, mine looked better than everyone else’s… And I wasn’t too popular when I pointed out that the ‘kn0t’ on the pattern we were given was actually only a series of ‘loops’, although I’d irreversibly stuck one down before I realised, so I couldn’t modify the unders and overs to make an accurate knot. Most people didn’t understand/see what I meant. It’s a curse, being a perfectionist.
And I’m not sure if I showed you the finished barge110 cushion:

Yes, there is still room for more cushions at The Coven…

It’s 10.10am on 10/10/10.
It’s a gloriously sunny autumnal day.
Mr BW is filling the house with the smell of smouldering oil and setting off all the smoke alarms servicing the Aga. The Feline Familiars are helping him. It is 6 months overdue a service and very coked up. Somehow it got forgotten seemed the least important thing to worry about amidst all the events of late. He’s then going to finish cutting the hundreds of yards of hawthorn hedge we have here. About every 5 years it gets a really good ‘cut down’ and thin, rather than just a trim. He’s already broken the (made for professional all-day every-day use) hedgecutter once, such is the enormity of this task.
I’m restructuring the storage in The Studio to accommodate all my purchases from the Knitting and Stitching Show as I’ve decided to store all my textile ingredients, including all but machine threads, by colour rather than type, as I think it will make for simpler working.
Then (or rather, concurrently) I’m going to make quince chutney, because we’ve been given a laundry basket full of the things and there is only so much quince jelly, with or without included herbs, that one can consume in a year. I’ve just found a recipe that roasts the quinces first, which will be fine, provided Mr BW gets the burner back into the Aga, and gets it relit, before the temperature drops too much (the Hot Method, method, taught to him by the Daddy of one of Mi1dred’s Friends who does it for a living).

I’ve just discovered half a dozen huge ripe strawberries in the galvanised tub on the balcony, and we still have autumn raspberries, and blackberries, so I shall make meringue too.
Best get on then…
What are you doing today?

“Short poems do not have a plot, just a crisis from an unwritten story.”
I saw a poster on a wall in a school recently with that phrase on it. I was hoping that it would be a quote from someone, but a quick Google doesn’t give a direct attribution.
Anyway, I rather liked it as it crystallised for me why it is that I don’t particularly like poetry as an art form: I always want to know more, and I’m not happy with my version of more, I want to hear it from the poet. Yes I know that’s not the idea, but, if I want to have to use my own imagination, I’d sooner see something visual, with no words at all to constrain where my mind might go.
Plus, I had a friend at secondary school who wrote lots of terribly angsty poems and made me sit through hours of readings. That, and studying A. E. Housman for ‘A’ Level English probably put me off for life 😉
Do you like poetry?
Do you know, I began writing this post at 08.45am, and my phone hasn’t stopped ringing since, so I’ve only just been able to get back to it. This week’s been rather too much like that…

Oh dearie me. The playing with the public continues under this new governmint. Sort-of announcing stuff just to gauge the reaction. I had hoped they’d be above that. And already I have an email from an accountancy firm telling me how, as a self-employed person, I can avoid losing my child benefit. Which would be great if, (a) I had any children and, (b) I paid higher rate tax. Apparently all you have to do is pay your wife and kiddies salaries for work that they could justifiably be doing for your business (washing your company vehicle is suggested for the kiddies…), so reducing your own taxable income below the higher rate threshold. But, of course, it needs properly setting up so you need to pay them to do it. I hate this ‘jump at every opportunity to make a fast buck’ world we inhabit. The ‘idea’ floated yesterday doesn’t come in until 2013 (if then) after all. The only thing I’m interested in hearing is about transferable tax allowances between married couples, as used to exist up to sometime in the 70s. That would neatly solve the full-time mother/higher rate taxpayer problem, and allow for a lot more flexibility. Including for us 🙂 I do think the current governmint need to read some of my BW Party posts on taxation from way back. I have it all worked out. All they need to do is read and elaborate. But, I’m shocked, shocked, shocked to discover that the amount of money those who choose not to work can get out of the state those of us who pay tax, is even greater than I thought. The Daily Wail wasn’t wrong after all.
Nice little article on typography here. I quite like the daily emails from How to Geek, but I don’t like the way their email lists have either been sold or been hacked into in the last couple of weeks. I’m getting a lot of spam sent to the address that I set up specifically for them, so I know where the weak link is… Anyone else who is on the HTG list had this?
And the amount of spam being posted in the comments currently is making my wand very cross. First time in nearly eight years that I’ve had truly revolting stuff. I do not understand why people do it: it doesn’t post automatically, and my comments boxes are Google protected. Good job I believe in karma… and my spells.

Kitten BW decided she’d explore other parts of The Coven Grounds this weekend, while we were doing autumn cutting down, replanting, and harvesting jobs. At 3 months old, she is already scarily good at climbing and hiding.

As an only kitten, I feel quite sorry for her. She’s grown up a lot more quickly than any other kitten we’ve ever had, as she’s only had older cat examples to follow. She could get in and out of the 12″ off the ground workshop cat-flap at three weeks old, without the aid of a provided-by-us as we normally do wooden ramp, simply by copying the others. I was watching her from the kitchen window, while on the phone, earlier. The three others were snoozing on the cushions under the large parasol/umbrella by the pond. She was going from one to the next, nudging them with her nose, biting their tails, or jumping on top of them, and her efforts to get her mother or one of her brothers to play invariably end in them batting her over the head with an extracted-from sleep paw.

I love the contrast of the reddening virginia creeper leaves with the other foliage in the Mediterranean garden at this time of year.
And the textures of other leaves:

And the smell of less-than-perfect end-of-season tomatoes roasting in the Aga ready for making into tomato sauce:

I probably shouldn’t have put 3 harmless-looking chillis in that mix. Did you know that lemon juice calms down chilli heat? I found that out quite by accident, but it seems to be very effective. I suppose the addition of the sour lemon must alter the perception of the chilli taste.
Some good news in that Mummy Mr BW was told this morning that they seem to have got all the cancer cells with the second op; she now has to wait yet another week to find out whether radiotherapy is to be recommended. I do not understand all this waiting. 9 weeks today since she was diagnosed, and in that time she’s had two operations and done lots of waiting for appointments, results etc etc. The psych0l0gy of that is daft. Ill people will get better much more quickly if they have definite information on which to base their understanding of their condition. Uncertainty (ie waiting around) increases stress, and therefore, ultimately, risk. Is it any surprise that we have the worst survival rate for cancer in Western Europe (and that’s six whole percent less than the best…)?
Mr BW is off to Londinium for a conference about now: Liverpool Street to Marble Arch takes how long to walk? Bloody strikers. Mr BW (and everyone where he works, CEO down) hasn’t had a pay-rise for 2.5 years, worked a 3-day week all through the summer of 2009, and is set to get a mouldy 1% in a couple of months. People who work in unionised firms or the public sector don’t know they’re born. I have less than zero sympathy for them. They need to wake up to the realities of our age and make the best of things, the same as the rest of us have to. And all praise to Boris for saying what many of us are thinking.
Update 19.15: Mr BW reports that the Central Line was part open with no one on it, so he got most of the way then walked down Oxford Street. He says, “This is Oxford Circus as I walked past (18.18 from the photo time stamp) so I think it might have reopened.”

Health and Safety clearly don’t apply…

Having heard the Gardeners’ Weather Forecast on R4’s Gardeners’ Question Time earlier this afternoon (no let up in the rain for everyone for the next few days), I was slightly depressed and decided to check it online.
Either there is a Metcheck employee taking the piss, or the heating will need to go on by next Friday…

AKA – Jo I’ll see the tropical storm you describe in the comments and raise ya 😉

Ah, October 1st.
The first day of the autumn term that LEAs used to allow heating to be put on in schools. Those were the days. LEAs in charge of administering schools, teachers in charge of teaching and deciding what was taught, and when, according to the needs of the pupils in front of them, and local events. There was less money pumped into education, but overall attainment rates were higher, and fewer pupils left school illiterate, and more pupils slotted into jobs that were right for their levels of ability and attainment.
The major subject of conversation recently seems to be whether or not people have yet turned on the heating in their homes. Which is probably a reflection on the ageing demographic of the people I’ve mixed with this week, but, nonetheless, an interesting question.
Being Thrifty Witches, and having an Aga whose permanent warmth permeates the house, we’re unlikely to put ours on until at least the second week in November. If it gets chilly before then, we’ll light a woodburner or two and burn some of our huge stack of free fuel. There’s no mains gas here, and heating oil is up to around 43p per litre again (although I mostly filled the tank at 39 point something I can’t quite remember, pence, a couple of weeks ago, just before ‘winter supply and demand’ kicked in to raise the price).
Do you have the heating on in your home yet?