Hedgewizard in the City, Part 2

People watching is one of my principal joys on a visit to London. The capital seems to be populated with some splendidly contemptuous females, although why this should be I have no idea. As Witchypoo and I were hurrying to catch a central line tube* at Embankment I was treated to a suitable display. My eye was caught by a man flapping his hands in an unmistakeable 'calm down' gesture while his twenty-something girlfriend, hand on one hip, regarded him through narrowed eyes. People were boarding the train behind the couple, but something in her face was creating a bubble of clear space around them, and straying into it would have clearly meant an agonizing death. If I was to use the word glare accurately here, I would first have to bash her gaze against an anvil a few times to take the edge of it. She absolutely blazed at him, and whatever he had been saying trailed away into nothing.

There was a long pause, and everything around them seemed to go still before she spoke.

'You know your problem?' she asked him. The pause stretched on. He didn't dare reply, but silence wasn't going to help him. 'You're such a wanker.' And with that she turned on her heel and stepped onto the train. He visibly reeled from the force of this pronouncement, and by the time he'd collected himself the doors were closing and the girl was whisked away into the bowels of the city.

Excellent.

"Watcher" on Google Images. Couldn't make it up.

Later that same evening on the platform at Paddington, I tuned in abruptly to a conversation that was going on right behind me. I'm not sure if it was the words that alerted me or the accent, which was a bizarre mix of cockney and north african, overlaid with a twist of a hackneyed carribean lilt that sounded suspiciously like Hollywood jamaican.

'What you have to remember, man,' the voice said (although it was more like Wad-ya hev-da re-mamba, mon) 'Is that this is Africa, right here. It doesn't matter what it says on the maps, this is Africa.'

I felt myself turning involuntarily, as if I was on casters. There was no way I could not look at the speaker. My mind's eye had already painted him in as a Rastafarian version of Obi-Wan Kenobi, but the reality was more surprising; he was a dapper little man dressed in a sharp suit and a pair of eye-watering winkle pickers** with the ensemble completed by a little Tommy Hilfiger paper-and-string carrier bag, which he carried in a way which made it clear that it held something small and hysterically expensive.

Africa, indeed. Excellent.

The last noteworthy conversation sat itself down right beside me, as Witchypoo and I slogged our way back to Victoria to catch our coach back to Hicksville. These two were office workers in their late twenties, and apparently firm friends. It transpired that the male of the pair had been touched, er, somewhat intimately by the office letch who was;

• Creepy
• Of senior rank, and
• Unexpectedly bisexual in one of those terrifying rumour-mill-failure moments that life likes to throw into the mix from time to time.

The Fondled was very obviously embarrassed about this, and markedly reluctant to share any further information with his friend, the Gossip Queen. The letch must have said something, she said, and in an unguarded moment the Fondled admitted that it was so. The moment the words were out of his mouth he looked horrified, because the Gossip Queen immediately wanted to know what had been said and he really, really didn't want to tell her. Over the course of ten minutes on the tube she threatened, she cajoled, she winkled and she coaxed, and just as the two stood to leave the tube the Fondled dithered. It was only a fraction of a second's worth of dither, but the Gossip Queen saw it and pounced like the professional she was. 'You'll feel better,' she urged him, making direct eye contact.

The Fondled was lost. 'Oh, all right,' he said in a tone of defeat, just as the doors opened and the pair were carried from sight.

There are eight million stories in the Greater London Area; this was the one I most wanted to hear the end of.

Bogus. Most, most bogus.





*For non-Brits, I should mention that 'the tube' refers to London's underground railway network, sometimes referred to as 'thundergrind'. Constructed by the Victorians, apparently entirely out of soot and pigeon crap, it is where English people go to apologize to each other. If you have never tried it, I recommend a visit to London purely to stand on someone's toes on purpose. They will apologize to you, I guarantee it.

** Shoes with painfully pointed toes. I mean, seriously. A health and safety violation on the tube, I would have thought.

***Ooh, I nearly forgot - Happy Hallowe'en, ladies!

13 Words

Picking up on Kitchenwitch's "thirteen words" meme, here I go. I've taken my time over this one; since words are alive until you write them, I wanted to catch you some good ones.

...

...

My head empties, which at least doesn't take long.

1. Er...

...

...Ameliorate. Don't ask me why, but this word so clearly relates to an elderly lady with a peony in her hair that I am unable to grasp any other meaning for it.

Shade. I love the meaning, I love the sound. Works equally well when sung by Sting, although perhaps not when he's in court.

Ethnosphere. Wade Davis's word for "the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination". It's intended to parallel the word ecosphere, because human cultural variety and different-ness is being eroded at a horrifying pace.

Skink. This is one of my Dad's words, and it means to mess about with water - what a child does in the bath. Interestingly, it's a real word meaning "to draw or serve, as drink" which I didn't know until just now. Anyway, here's to skinking.

Yonder. A sadly now archaic word, yet highly useful; we know here and there, which derive from hither and thither. Hither means right where the speaker is; there means not-here, but within the speaker's sight, and yonder... yonder means over there, but a bit further than the speaker can see. Right over that hill, behind the drunk germans. Some languages still have it, as with the japanese asoko.

Wasabi. This is an extremely hot radish from Japan, or the sauce made from it - it's hotter than horseradish but the same sort of flavour, which means that it irritates the nose and eyes more than the palate. It's eye-watering stuff, and I love it. That's not why I like the word, though - I like it because at our table it is always delivered in a rasping bellow, like a war cry from a cod Samurai movie.

Gravitas. Oh, it sounds great, doesn't it? Gravitas. Grah-vit-ahhhhss. One of the more easily described of the roman virtues, gravitas is a sort of personal dignity or seriousness. Somebody with gravitas is difficult to mock without seeming rather facile or even spurious, so it's an important quality for anybody involved in serious debate.

Lackadaisical. Another remnant from a cooler age, lackadaisical means "Lacking spirit, liveliness, or interest; languid" and derives from "Lack-a-day", although it has become closer in sense to lax over the centuries.

Tranquility. I don't know why I like this word, but I think it's a combination sounds and meaning. Mentally I hear it said in a calm female voice, and if I think about it there's Vangelis "heaven and hell, part 1" in there too (probably Carl Sagan mentioned the Sea of Tranquility when it was playing - hell, I don't know). Oh, I could meditate on this word...

Partial. But only - only, mark you - in the phrase "I'm rather partial to...", where it gives a lovely Mr Kipling vibe. Mind you, it's only any good for fondness; I'd rip your arm off for a chocolate sauce-festooned profiterole, so saying I'm partial to them just won't cut it. Must have. Now!

Tinternabulation. Okay, this one isn't in the OED, I admit it, but it shouldn't be confused with tintinnabulation. It dates back from my school days, when my English teacher (Robin Glendenning, now a playwright) was prodding us through the apparently endless Tinterne Abbey by Wordsworth, and he was as bored as we were. He spent so much time out of the classroom doing urgent tasks (read: anything he could find that wasn't Wordsworth) that it took us three weeks to get through it. Tinternabulation came to mean "wondering about things, pointlessly and out loud". Neatly enough, I find we weren't the only ones to create the word - try here.

Iridescence. Oh, this was a close one - but this word finally defeated scintillate to make the list. Was there ever a word more sparkly? It kind of conjures up a Journey to the Centre of the Earth vibe, doesn't it?

Necronomicon. For my thirteenth word (and particularly since it's Samhain in a few days) I thought I'd take a saunter into the Dark Side and give you a word from fiction. The American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft made the word up as a title for his fictional book of dark occult secrets*. If you've never read any of Lovecraft's work and fancy something creepy, jump right in with an anthology. His style, antiquarian even by the standards of his time, invites suspension of disbelief and his subject matter is genuinely disturbing. Genuinely. Disturbing. Anyway, I love the sound of Necronomicon, which is taken from three Greek roots νεκρός-νόμος-εικών and can be translated as "an image of the laws of the dead".

So there you are. It's only taken me since the 27th of July to prepare this meme. A new record! Since it's been so long I'm not going to tag anyone else - but if you feel up to the challenge, sign up here. Next up - Hedgewizard's bookshelf...




*Needing to reference a similar book in a roleplaying game some years ago, and not wishing to directly rip off HPL, I scoured my brain for some fragments of classical languages and came up with the Modulus Necros (intended to mean The Way of the Dead). Sadly, my friend Browless was a far better scholar of languages than I. "Modulus Necros?" he spluttered, spraying the rest of us with beer. "The Length of the Dead?" Ahhh, modulus... modus... it's a mistake any halfwit could have made.

Hedgewizard in the City, part 1

Still not recovered from being spread thinly on granary bread, although spending the weekend in London probably hasn't helped. I could really have done with lying in a twitchy little heap for a couple of days, but it had previously been ordained by She Who Knows Such Things* that it was our fifth wedding anniversary and as such, time to see some hobbits. It's the law, you know. That's how it goes; paper for the first anniversary, cotton for the second, then leather, then rubberwear, and then hobbits. So off we went to see Lord Of The Rings, the Musical.

I'm not good on coaches as a rule, unless I'm allowed to sit up in front and preferably to drive. On this occasion I was allowed neither, but was treated to a Smell Symphony. The first person to sit down nearby (the armpit virtuoso, fresh from a tour of Europe) had a personal odour problem so acute that for a moment I thought someone had actually boarded the vehicle bearing a container of hot fried onions, but sadly this was not the case. Happily the next passenger, who sat down right in front of us, had dowsed her hair so liberally with sweet coconut oil that she quite drowned him out and left me wishing heartily for a glass or two of piña colada. I spent the rest of the journey with my attention torn between a Bill Bryson book (which caused me so much near-silent mirth that I'm sure people thought I was having an asthma attack) and the chap across the aisle from me, who was obviously preparing for a papier-mâché workshop. His method was this.

• Buy yourself a coach ticket. It doesn't matter too much where you go, but a journey with too many turns is to be avoided since it will adversely affect your neck balance.
• Put your supply of newspaper for pulping into a plastic bag, folds facing downward so that the edges of the papers spill naturally to form a sort of ragged funnel. Stuff the bag into the net magazine-holder on the seat-back in front of you.
• Drink plenty of water as your fellow passengers embark. It is essential to be well hydrated.
• Loosen all neck attire, and relax completely.
  
• Let sleep overtake you. As you feel drowsiness descend, avoid the temptation to allow your head to loll to either side. Instead, hunch forward in your seat until your forehead is resting flat on the seat-back in front of you, directly above your newspaper funnel.
• Commence deep and regular breathing through your nose, allowing your lower lip to fall slackly into the shape of the spout on a teapot.
• If you have followed all these steps correctly, within a few minutes a long string of mucus will have descended from your lower lip to the centre of the newspaper funnel.
  
• Without any further action on your part, a steady stream of slightly opaque saliva droplets will abseil (rappel) down the mucus string into the paper, for as long as your journey lasts.
• At the conclusion of your journey, sit bolt upright without the slightest sign of drowsiness and examine the contents of the plastic bag with some astonishment. Your papier-mâché, pre-softened by the motion of the bus, is ready for use.
• If you are forced by circumstances to use a plastic bag with a hole in the bottom, on no account should you position one of your discarded trainers directly below the hole in the bag. There is only so much astonishment that one can demonstrate without appearing foolish.
  
  

Going to London affords me a rare opportunity to people-watch, since nobody really wants to meet your gaze - or my gaze, at any rate. More on that next time - but for now, I really must go and drool into my own shoes for a while. Good night.

*Witchypoo, obviously. I'm extremely grateful for her uncanny knack of knowing things. She knows when my sister's birthday is, what Auntie Kathleen's children are called, and when my parents' wedding anniversary is coming up. She doesn't even need to look at a calendar, but simply hands me an appropriate hand-made card and bids me scrawl my mark upon it. I, on the other hand, am perfectly capable of forgetting my own date of birth and have to be dissuaded from sending birthday cards to dead relatives. I write these things down in a little book so that I do not have to remember them, and then forget where I have put the book. There must be at least a dozen of the damned things somewhere, but I can never find them until I'm looking for a dictionary in the middle of a game of Scrabble that is threatening to turn violent.

Bees and Brews

This post is a bit late, because just lately I've been yanked back into the 9-5 (or rather 8.30-6 but that's another story) by the illness of a colleague, for which I've had to provide cover. Subsequently, I'm spread a little thin on the ground at the moment so if I'm quiet for a week or so, you know why.

Saturday was a day for getting the Slope under control using sheet mulch. Witchypoo and I had registered the presence of some masonry bees near the path, but it wasn't until the mulch was down and a noise like a B52 warming up began to build that we realised there were rather more of them than the dozen or so that we'd noticed. Word spread amongst the bee population, and by the time we'd got to the other end there must have been close to a hundred of them, agitated but not aggressive, trying to get back to their beeholes. We cut some slits through the mulch, but to be honest we needn't have bothered as within a few hours the bees were finding ways in down the sides of plants, and making new holes in the grassy area upslope. It was a bit unnerving though, in the same way as patting a dog that growls and wags its tail at the same time...

Next there were the sloes - ah, the sloes. Against my better judgement we took both boys along with us to the corner of a nearby field, where N1S picked what I can only very generously call "a few" berries, while N2S did his level best to make everyone regret bringing him along by whining, moaning, arsing and complaining for two solid hours about wanting to be in the hedge, wanting to be out of the hedge, wanting a book, wanting to go home... you name it. Sometimes I find parenting a trying task, and am sorely tempted to delegate it to the television. Sometimes.

Anyhow, with five or six pounds of sloes* under our collective belt and covered in so many scratches that it looked like we'd gone ten rounds with a sackful of angry kittens, we decamped to a nearby ford with the intention of letting N2S have a bit of a paddle. Unfortunately, we neglected to warn him that he should take his socks and shoes off first...

Finally, and much later than would have been wise, it was time to see to the wine. Kitchenwitch has already posted about how she's "a compulsive wine-finishing-off avoider" and I can quite sympathize - there's many a five-gallon batch of mine that's spent several years sitting on the lees (and sometimes still sitting on the pulp) because, and there's no getting away from it, bottling is a drag. There was no putting it off, though, because I needed to free up a brewing bucket so that I could rack the cider - which basically means pouring it into a clean bucket leaving all the crap at the bottom behind.** The cider had a suspicious film on the surface and a small mould bloom, but my cider-making friend assures me that this is quite OK and the alcohol content has probably already killed it. Which is nice.

There were two contenders for the bucket to be freed; Mouldyberry wine (which is currently existing in that particular level of homebrew hell known as Stuck Ferment) and Elder & Black, which won the crown by default. The Elder & Black, although delish, was still looking decidedly misty even though I put finings in it a fortnight ago, so I decided to run it through a filter which was a freebie from a few years ago.*** Normally I'd as soon gnaw my own leg off as waste time filtering something that'd clear if I ignored it for long enough anyway, but I was in a hurry - and it is very pretty now. Since I had the filter out anyway, I chased it through with a big jar of blackberry whiskey that had gone a bit manky when I attacked it with the potato masher. That too became very pretty.

Bottling wine is a job for the anally retentive, I'm sure of it. First of all the bottles have to be cleaned of dust and spiders inside and out, and then "sterilized" (a laughable word) with sulphite before being rinsed and drained. Then you syphon the wine into them carefully, which is a slow job, before putting corks into them. Then you need to put some kind of label on them, unless you're happy to take pot luck between your five-year-old Best Elderberry and your six-month-old Dire Peapod.

So what to do? Well, Hedgewizard's own solution is that for unspecial wines, I don't bottle at all. Instead the finished wine goes into stoppered, labelled demijohns which are stored in the dark until they are needed, and then when it's time to drink them they go into reusable one-gallon wine boxes which you can get from a number of places. I see you can get bigger ones now too. I do tend to bottle one gallon though, for presents and take-alongs - and of course really promising wines get bottled too such as the Elder & Black, so named simply because "Elderberry and Blackberry Wine" is too much to write on the labels. Speaking of labels, which have a tendency to fade and fall off and aren't reusable in any case, Kethry has recently suggested blackboard paint as a clever alternative, and I may well give it a go if I can find some. Take a peek!

Beer and cider is worse, because bottling takes longer (smaller bottles, see?) and it gets drunk up so much faster. I've never had much luck with pressure barrels in the past (somehow the beer always ended up tasting like cold tea) but with the bottling horror fresh in my mind I found a very reasonable polypropylene pressure system in Wilkinsons the other day and decided to splash out. I'll bottle the cider with nary a whimper because it'll be special stuff destined for keeping for special consumption, but I'm intending to whack out a kit beer now and again and I'm damned if I'm going to spend many a happy hour bottling that!

So. By collapsing time we'd dealt with - and labelled, Kitchenwitch - 26 bottles and one large glass of Elder & Black 2004, and two bottles and one large snifter of Blackberry Whisky 2004. A happy co-incidence, that - two perfect nightcaps.



*Or more accurately, a mixture of bullace and sloes. I've often wondered why some sloes are bigger and juicier than others, but I've just now realised that the bigger ones don't have thorns - and a quick search tells me that they're not sloes at all but a subspecies of bullace. Frankly, I couldn't give a rat's ass - they taste so similar no-one will ever know.

**Said crap including a few leaves, a fair quantity of grit and, against all probability, a small plastic soldier. It just screams "natural product", doesn't it?

***This was from a spell working in Wolverhampton in a shop where the previous owner had been a keen homebrewer back in the 70s, and his friends all came in for supplies. He sold the shop to a large multiple, and eventually his friends all died or moved away or gave the hobby up, leaving me as the only person to benefit from all the free stuff when the shop finally gave up trying to sell it. Kind of a case of "dead men's Boots", really.

Blog Action Day thingy

I'm told it's Blog Action Day, and that I should post something concerning the Environment - whatever that means. Actually, I think pretty much everything I write about concerns the Environment in one form or another, but hey. Anyway, in the spirit of the thing, I'm not going to speak about the weekend today - no, tales of angry bees and killer kittens will have to wait, as will my reinstatement as an Ecoblog Soak. Because, ladies and gents, I'm going to go out for a walk now and enjoy the environment. There are no streetlights here, but my eyes will get used to the dark. I won't use any electricity while I'm out there (in fact I'll use less because the lights and the PC will be switched off), nor will I cull any seals*. In fact, I can't think that I'll be doing any damage at all beyond my metabolic needs, which I admit are not inconsiderable. So please, let my modest contribution to this event be to ask you, wherever you are, to get out and enjoy your environment for a little while. Take a different route to normal, or raise your eyes higher and look at the skyline. Connect. And ponder.

*At least, it's unlikely.

Hedgewizard 3, Numpties 2

With much thankfulness and not a little bile, I'm pleased to say that we've had the final meeting with the Architect and the Chief Numpty, the one where Chief Numpty had to decide whether to sue us or not. A month or so back he sent us a, er, fairly inventive final bill which contained some sparkling gems of creativity which he had attempted to hide behind vague language. I posted the list on to the Architect along with a note which basically said "he's havin' a giraffe, ain't 'ee?", and we had a meeting to iron out the wrinkles. The bill has gone down by £2000, and happily Chief Numpty is just bright enough to realize he'd be best to settle now (as there were other items I could have argued about). Job done, bar the paperwork.

As a reward to myself, I ignored two large boxes of donated eating apples awaiting Keatsing and instead opted to visit Mrs Whisky-Sniffler to give her back her poor horse's fly fringe and reclaim my little garden knife, without which I feel curiously naked. While I was there I attacked her hedge for sloes, and then worked my way up and down the road collecting them. I had to call a halt when without warning my fan club arrived, so WP got to pour scorn on my scant 2lb of berries when I got home. Into the freezer they went, with the rest.

To the sloe cookers (see what I did there?), I'll be gathering one final batch of sloes this weekend before warming up the jam pan - but my recipe calls for two pounds of cooking apples for every pound of sloes, so you might like to put on your scrumping trousers. Only trouble is, I've had the flu jab and now feel as weak as American beer, and have eyes that look like pissholes in the snow. Wish me luck.

Knobs (part 2)

Further to my "knobs" post at the weekend, it occurs to me that I'm being somewhat dismissive of City types. Please note - that's City with a capital C, i.e. London's financial district.

Some years ago in Shropshire (the Hedgewizard's haunt prior to the Incident of the Vampire Wife) some newcomers came to the village. Shropshire villages tend to fall into one of two types; terribly posh ones (original inhabitants evicted by early 1980s and every barn converted) or terribly poor ones (original inhabitants still there, road access usually horrible, people very nice but at least one family producing lots of children which look like they might be handy in a banjo duel). This village was a type 2 village in the process of being swallowed by modern developments - don't get me started - but by and large everybody just got along.

Until the Wimblety-Flange family arrived.

The scuttlebutt was that Bertie Wimblety-Flange had been "Something in the City", but had burned out quite impressively a couple of years before, and come within a whisker of bankruptcy. I know exactly what that means, having had a nervous breakdown** myself once before; you have to reconstruct yourself afterwards, and unfortunately it looked like Bertie was trying to remake himself into the brash, privileged, egotistical City gent he'd been before, except - and this is the crucial bit - without making any allowances for the fact that he wasn't in the City any more. No popping into the local to introduce himself for Bertie - oh, no. He and his poor beleagered wife slammed into their modest but very nice house as if they were under seige by Belgians.*** The very first thing they did was to get contractors in to install a high wooden fence, security lights of about a bazillion watts that went on if you even thought about walking up the street, and a burglar alarm that could have woken Jimmy Hoffa. And he's dead, you know. Thereafter no-one saw much of them except when they made grim excursions into what they obviously thought of as hostile territory to organise things like ponies and private schooling, or when they came out to shout at the Marks & Spencers driver who came to deliver their groceries. And then the letters started.

The church was first with a letter about bell-ringing, which apparently upset Mrs Wimblety-Flange (the church being nearly a mile away on the other side of the village). The local farmer got a letter about his cows, which allegedly mooed outside business hours. A neighbour got a letter advising him that he should shoot crows nesting in his trees, which Bertie claimed were a noise nuisance. Then Bertie took to standing in an upstairs window with binoculars, and shortly afterwards there was a flurry of sollicitors letters advising various local farmers that they should desist from driving tractors up and down the lane outside his house, as Bertie felt that the vibration would eventually damage his property. And so it continued until suddenly, a year to the day after they moved in, a "for sale" sign appeared and the Wimblety-Flanges were gone.

I'm not saying that Bertie Wimblety-Flange was typical of City people moving to the country, but some aspects of his story do seem depressingly common when comparatively well-off folk move out from the Smoke. Forcing up of house prices and failure to properly engage with the remnants of the local economy aside, the core problem is that city people usually have a funny idea that "The Country" is a quiet and virtually deserted parklike playground for them and their visitors - instead of which they find that it's a busy and often noisy working environment, full of pesky locals with whom they have no intention of socialising. This doesn't make them the easiest people to deal with.

So for any City types contemplating a move out to "The Country", do take the time to find out exactly what you're buying into. Don't buy property straight away - rent for a year and see what the place is like. During the first few days, get yourself out to the local pub, or village shop, or even (Goddess forbid) the church - and say hello. Not to Mr & Mrs Fartwatering-Smythe who moved here from Kensington six years ago and own the local stables - but to Dave and Shirley who live next door, and Bill who brings the mail. If you really want to live in the countryside, then stop thinking of it as somewhere you pass through on your way to go somewhere else!




*But then, when have I ever needed a reason to be rude? I've always felt that the best approach with rudeness is to use a very wide brush, or possibly even a pressure hose. That way no-one should take offence, as everybody gets a taste of it. "I treat a duchess like a flower girl", as Henry Higgins once said. Or as I more succinctly put it at the end of a party lately, "Bugger off, the lot of you. Haven't you got homes to go to?"

**Nothing terribly impressive - but in the shrapnel storm that accompanied the Incident of the Vampire Wife, I found myself overwhelmed by all the demands on me and sliding down the slippery black wall of a worsening depression. I knew the signs, having learned how to recognise them in other people, so I decided to act early and declared myself Unfit for Everything. I cancelled a month's worth of work and fled, child in hand, to my parents' place in Ireland where I collapsed into thankful numbness. I think I got off lightly because I didn't wait for the numbness to come and get me, but it was still the least fun I've ever had in my life (falling even lower on my list than seeing John Innman in Charlie's Aunt).

***Why Belgians? Er... why not? So far as I'm aware no-one has ever been beseiged by Belgians, so I thought I'd give them a virtual seige for the hell of it.

Of Seals and Shaggy Ink Caps

I've got a bit of a fungal problem, and I'm not sure the doctor can help.

It all started mumblety years ago when I was a carefree student type with hair (or at least, more hair than I have now). People may tell you that I was shorter then, but this isn't true; I was merely sitting on a thinner wallet. Now it so happened that my thin wallet and I were doing a sponsored walk with some friends for something involving seals and a woman named Brenda*. The craic was good and it was a fine October day, so at the finish line we decided that instead of going home we'd do another few miles and see if we could squeeze a bit of extra cash out of some of our sponsors - which is how we came to be in a wood near Welwyn Garden City just as darkness was falling and our hostess for the evening remembered that she'd forgotten to buy any food for us all. Which is not what hungry walkers want to hear at 6pm on a Sunday with no shops still open.

"No problem," said Ratgirl. "We'll just get some mushrooms."

In those days I was neither so Wizardly nor so Hedgey, and had no idea at all about mushrooms. So far as I was concerned there were two main groups of fungi; watery supermarket things which were tasteless and pointless, and toadstools - which were obviously so poisonous that they could kill you if you just looked at them too closely. This strikes me as absurd now, but it's amazing just how little people know about edible fungi (my neighbours won't eat them unless they come shrink-wrapped "with a proper label on"). Ratgirl made some reassuring noises about having eaten wild mushrooms for ages, so I relaxed a bit and waited for some technical instructions about how to identify the good ones. When they came, though, they were neither as technical nor as instructive as I might have hoped.

"Have a good look round," she said, "And if you find something interesting, give me a shout."

So off we all went, in different directions. I had no idea what I was looking for other than a vague notion of what sort of shape mushrooms should be, and simply stumped along through the undergrowth wishing I had brought my cigarettes, and waiting for someone to shout that we were all saved because they'd found a splendid specimen of chicken tikka masala of the woods.** It therefore came as a bit of a shock to me when I nearly fell over one of these.


What happened next was something of a revelation to me. Just as when your brain finally decodes a Magic Eye picture suddenly you can't help but see it, when I looked up to shout for Ratgirl I found that I was standing in the middle of a large ring of them, ranging from two to eight inches across. I couldn't have been more surprised if one of them had spoken to me, and all of a sudden I could smell them; a musky, nutty smell that made me feel as if I was standing on the back of a gigantic creature. As it turns out, I was right; the bulk of a fungi is a network of underground filaments which are mostly microscopic but which can collectively weigh many tons.

"Oh, well done - parasols," said Ratgirl, as she came to see what I was squeaking about. "There's enough for everyone." And so there was - she just cut the caps into quarters, dipped them in beer batter, and we ate them as fritters with onions and chutney. They were superb, and nothing like the watery commercial ones.

And that was it, I was hooked. Over the next few years I got hold of a good field guide and taught myself a few of the most easily identified species, and blagged walks with people who knew more than I did (the best way to learn, provided they know their stuff). Now I'm up to about thirty, with wonderful names like shaggy ink caps, chanterelles, penny buns and hedgehog fungus. Mushrooming makes for an interesting seasonal hobby because it gets you out into the woods and fields early in the morning,*** because you'll find yourself in hidden corners you didn't know even existed, and because you get to call yourself a "field mycologist" if you're in the mood. Then, of course, there's the notion that the two groups most likely to find a dead body are dog walkers and mushroomers...

But none of this blather helps with my problem. I can tell the eaters from the killers just fine (so far), and I know how to cook them. I've even got a fair idea of where the little blighters are likely to be, and when they'll be there... it's just that this year I don't have the time to pick 'em!




*Isn't it funny how memory works? Normally the only thing my brain will give me at a moment's notice is the first letter of someone's name, so when I bump into a casual acquaintance unexpectedly all I can say is "Oh, hello Baahrnfd" and hope that they're as bad with names as I am. Yet hear I sit twenty years later, and I can confidently tell you that the walk was for the West Norfolk Seal Rescue Service which is run by Alan and Brenda Giles. Now if only my brain would consent to tell me the names of my own children in the correct order when I need them, I'd be laughing.

**Not quite as funny as it sounds, because this is a "chicken of the woods" mushroom, so named because of the texture. And yes, it's quite nice in a curry.



***To be there first, you understand. Although if you live in an area rich in people from eastern Europe, you may have to get up an hour before you went to bed; the British may have forgotten how to pick and eat wild mushrooms, but the rest of Europe certainly hasn't! My first mushroom mentor once told me "If you want to know where the mushrooms are, follow a Pole - but if you want to eat any of them, get there first."

Salad, anyone?

Ow. Today I dug manure into two and a half raised beds and one soil bed, a process that reminds me how happy I am that I only dig each bed once every three years, and the asparagus bed has been cut down and capped with manure and a little topsoil. The end of clearing in the tunnel is finished and the beds hoed and raked, with lime added to the brassica part of the tunnel rotation which was running a bit on the acid side at 6. I've also planted up the tunnel with chard, spring onions, radish, autumn carrots and another bunch of earlies (just to see which is ready first), mooli, mizuna, land cress, winter lettuce and regular lettuce (for speed), rocket, coriander, pak choi and corn salad. I'm now stiffening up a bit, and am forced to admit I may have overdone it just a tadge. Damn my flabby, cappuccino-infused hide which is even now itching to go and see if all the fuss about Charlie Jade is worth it.

Still, I'm glad to get the autumn planting in even if it is about three weeks too late. Metcheck reckons there's still a week of this abnormally warm weather ahead, so I should get away with it; there's even a belt of heavy rain coming in to settle the beds back down again - perfick. Mind you, my hedgewizardly eye detects a couple of interesting signs - unusually heavy loads of hawthorn berries, and very vigorous squirrel activity. I wonder if it's going to turn out to be a cold winter?

Knobs

Ah, so 6,500 workers in the City are to lose their jobs then? I weep. Oh, I weep. Oh, hang on a minute, that probably means a few hundred burned-out cash-laden assholes will be selling their London properties and moving out to their second homes in Dorset permanently.

Oh, knobs. Time to buy shares in the green welly factory, I fear.

Want That One

Disaster.

Not the clearing out and resowing of the polytunnel, which is now almost completely produce-free for the first time since I put it up (and not entirely intentionally). Not the maincrop carrots either, which I lifted yesterday and which seem to have got a bit too much nitrogen this year. Nor even last night's experimental "black and white bake", the "black" of which turned out to be undesirable and the "white" bland to the point of pointlessness. No, the disaster is that against all expectations, N2S likes physalis fruit. He's been itching to get at them for the last couple of days, and I can't say I blame him.

I couldn't leave the damned things in the tunnel because I wanted to plant in there, but not many of the berries were even approaching ripe. With hindsight I probably could have hung branches upside down in the log store for a few weeks, but I was so keen to get the plants moving that I picked all the sizeable berries, stripped the undersize fruit off the rest, and lawnmowered the stems when I was cutting the grass (a good way to chip the slightly floppy things, which don't want to go in the chipper). The undersize fruit went to the chickens, who love them, and it won't matter if they self-seed in there provided I keep chopping them off the electric fence. The full-sized but under-ripe fruit came into the house to live on windowsills until they ripen up.

Trouble is, they look quite tempting. Crispy-teary for little fingers, plump yellow berry in the middle. He can scarcely help himself, not having much in the way of neurological brakes at the moment. "No problem," I said to WP, "I'll just feed him one of the under-ripe ones, that'll soon cure him." So I took him down to the undersized fruit pile and invited him to try one, holding out the pippy, sour little green nubbin.

"Don't want that one," he said promptly. "Want that one." And what does he do next but stuff his hand into the pile, and pull out a single perfectly ripe one that I'd missed.. rip, tear... "Mmmm! It's lovely - tastes like chocolate!" he says, and rummages through the pile. Rip, tear, rip, etc. "None of these other ones have gone yellow yet. I know! The ones on the kitchen windowsill are yellow..." (charges off)

Answer Me These Questions Three...

Righto, time to sort out the international Christmas mailings like a good ecological gift-giver. I wonder what the last posting date is to send surface mail to Ozzigirl in, er, Oz?

...

...the first of October??? You've got to be fucking kidding! There doesn't happen to be a container ship making the trip to Oz in less than 12 weeks? Well done, the Royal Mail, who are apparently taken aback that anyone still wants to send letters other than on an airplane...

Carrier pigeon, anyone?

Hmm. Royal Mail takes eight weeks to get a card to South Africa by surface mail, whereas airmail takes three weeks - which ties with the time an unladen swallow takes to make the same trip. The question is... African or European?

Growing Physalis

Commercial growing is not an art. It's not quite a science either, but compared with the challenge of growing six cabbages in a crowded allotment, bringing on a field full of plug plants is as easy as ABC. Once you get away from the edges of the field, the only thing that changes from year to year is the climate; but in a smaller-scale arrangement the whole thing is an edge. Our six imaginary cabbages have been carried to a different part of the plot to last year by our rotation; the heights of the plants around them have changed; watering patterns will be different; pest numbers will be affected by anything you care to mention, including what the neighbours are growing; and soil fertility will be determined by what the gardener could lay hands on the previous winter. Small wonder we have a lot to learn.

There's always an experimental element to gardening too, and that's what stops us getting bored. Shall I try Walmsley's Purple peas this year? Maybe I should give the shallots a miss. I wonder if the leeks would get less rust nearer the fence? Perhaps the runner beans would do better if I buried next door's cat under them?

In my experience, gardeners are very ready to tell you about their successes, but much slower to tell you about what didn't work. This is something of a shame, because it would be really useful to know when something's likely to be a waste of time, or space, or whatever. For which reason I might equally have called this post "Physalis - What Was I Thinking?"


Physalis, also known as cape gooseberry, fits neatly into my mental list of "exotic things I could grow in the polytunnel" and so when I saw the seed in the Dobies catalogue I thought - well, why not? At this point, hand on heart, I'll say that when I decided to grow it the only advice I could find on the net* was that it grows to 6' tall (hmm... more like 8' in the tunnel) and that the plants grow "something like a tomato". Well here I am one season later, and I can tell you that physalis grows nothing like a fucking tomato. It grows more like a buddleja! If I'd come across a photo like this first, I'd have had some idea of what I was letting myself in for;

I planted four physalis plants in the tunnel, and they got a bit big. And then a bit bigger. They sprawled out over the paths, and I roped them in with blue string.** It reared up like a wounded bear and then threw itself over the blue string, so I had to do it again. There were hundreds of fruits, but very few of them were showing any sign of swelling properly until last weekend I finally decided that at 8'x 10' and dominating the polytunnel, Enough Was Enough. Out it came, with only four punnets of vaguely-ripe fruit to show for it. The mistle thrush who's been living in there eating the seeds of the spoiled fruit is bereft, but hopefully she'll stick around.

So what have I learned? Well, "it gets too big for a polytunnel or greenhouse" is one thing. "It only ripens properly in a long warm summer" is another. This is a bit of a pity, since the fruits are delicious (if pippy), dry well and are reputed to be good in jams and jellies. I'm betting I could make a really strange wine out of them too... Happily, all is not lost as it's a perennial and thrives on neglect. I'm going to give a few plants a try outside next year; although physalis isn't frost-hardy it will survive the winter down here in the West Country with a bit of protection. Who knows, perhaps it will get off to a better start next year - especially if the sun shines!

The only interventions it should need are nipping out the growing tips when it hits 30cm tall, and mulching around the roots once the frost knocks the stems back. It needs a sunny, sheltered spot with poor soil, so the perennials area at the far end of the tunnel is the place to be - 3' apart. Being a southern-hemisphere plant it isn't prone to many diseases or insect attacks in the northern hemisphere, although it'll need some protection from slugs until established. But then, what doesn't?




*Well, all right. The only advice I could find on the net in the 20 seconds I actually allowed for looking. All right? Happy now?

**I am so ashamed. When we first moved to the Hollow we found that previous occupants had been Disciples of the Azure Line, which basically meant that they thought that there were no crises in life that could not be salved by the application of copious amounts of blue baling twine. It's turned up grown into the trunks of trees and shrubs, which it has been strangling for decades; it was an integral part of the old deathtrap heating system; it held the door of Mythago Shed open; and of course it's been found in hundreds of botch-job repairs inside and out. I hate the stuff, but it is so very strong that sometimes it's the only way to go.