Robin McKinley's Blog, page 53

Putting stuff in your garden

 

 

Ravenandrose

Treasure Trove officially added to a (short, so far) list of house-eating roses I NEED.

Excellent choice.  I would have had to have her if Peter didn’t.  I’m presently trying to decide if I could figure out a flight path for Paul’s Himalayan Musk up at Third House.  Rosa banksiae lutea is a house-eater, and, ironically, is getting going comparatively slowly.  I hadn’t planned for either Mme Alfred or Mme Gregoire at the cottage to turn into house-eaters—or Ghislaine—they just did.  I actually did know I was being silly about Souvenir de la Malmaison.  She’s not a house-eater, she’s just PERVERSE AND DANGEROUS.*  But the only house-eater at Third House at present is Bobbie James, who is cooperatively climbing the copper beech that hangs over from the cemetery.  Hmmm.

I wonder how I would keep the deer from eating them until they were big enough not to mind?

Ahem.  Have you read SUNSHINE?  Yolande’s peanut-butter-baited electric deer-repelling fence is not only for a world with Others in it.  Go google peanut butter deer fence.  Nothing works perfectly—and it’s a huge faff to set up and maintain—but it is pretty much your best bet.  The problem with all the repellents is that deer get used to them.  Oh, yeah, lion dung, big deal, have you seen any lions?  No, I haven’t either.  –And they’re apparently capable of developing a taste for hot chillis.  Electricity goes on working.

Angelia

My Ghislaine de Feligonde is veryvery pale yellow, aging to white. Even though orange is my least favorite color, I think that Morris is beautiful–does it have a scent? I always try to have an Abraham Darby, even though here it is always a less-than-beautiful beige color because I think it has the most wonderful scent of any rose I have ever grown!

Proof of the whole variable thing.  My Ghislaine comes out a deep orange gold and pales to primrose yellow—eventually, sometimes, almost white.  William Morris isn’t really orange, more peach, but she looks ORANGE next to the vivid, very lavender-pink James Galway.  Yes, she has a good scent.  But if Abraham Darby is a dull beige in your area William Morris will probably be grey.  One of the best rose photos I’ve ever taken was of my old Abraham Darby back at the old house.  She’s another of these gold-peach roses, but with a lot of deep salmon-pink as well.  And the flowers are HUGE.  This photo of Morris is a particularly romantic one:  if you like that style you should go cruise the ‘English roses’ aisles of whatever nursery you bought Abraham Darby from.  There are other choices, most of them not orange.

Thanks for the lovely photos…they have me wondering if I couldn’t fit just a few more roses in my yard.

Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Diane in MN

Deer, at least in my neighborhood, are quite used to dogs and not put off by them (or their scent) at all. Especially since they usually do their roaming and devouring when dogs are in the house and asleep.

Yes.  Suburban deer get totally blasé about all the usual human things.  It’s genuine countryside around here, but English villages are organised on a different pattern—houses tend to be squashed together in a relatively small area surrounded by swathes of farmland. **   There are lots of deer—Roe, around here, mostly—and don’t they just love people’s gardens.  And they get so frelling tame you can’t trust them to run away even if they see you shouting and throwing things.  Or to not panic and try to self-immolate under your car’s tyres.

Here are some suggestions: original scent Irish Spring soap, hung around the plants (temporary if you get much rain); blood meal-based commercial repellent (kept them out of my hostas for a long time); hot pepper spray (also temporary with rain). I’ve ordered a new repellent based on citrus that gets fairly good reviews; I figure if I put out a variety of stuff, they won’t get too accustomed to any of it.

No repellent ever worked for me or anyone I ever talked to for more than a year, and often less than that.  Maybe your MN deer have enough more options to be more amenable to being repelled.  One of the few clear benefits of a move into town is we no longer have a deer problem.  I’m still kind of half-expecting them to figure out Third House.  It’s only one block over from farmland and the fencing is inadequate even for keeping next door’s frelling terrier from crapping in the drive and the entire neighbourhood of cats from crapping everywhere.  It wouldn’t slow a hungry deer down for a moment.  Arrrrgh.

Judith

If you’re not a rose person, what are you doing on this   blog?

I do wonder that sometimes, especially since I also dislike pink.

Snork.  The funny thing to me is that while I like pink I’m not the pink obsessive that the blog persona is.  It’s a handy hook to hang silliness on—and it’s true that if the colour choices are black, white and pink—I’ll take pink.  This is a rant for some other evening, but I spent most of my life bucking against my inner girlie girl, because when I was a kid and a teenager forty and fifty-plus years ago being a girlie girl—especially with a girl-next-door face like mine—was death to any kind of being taken seriously.  I professionally hated pink for decades—and burst out of my parents’ house into jeans, Frye boots and black leather.  I revel in pink—and pearls—now partly as a nanny nanny boo boo to all those jerks who tried to make me believe that frilly and trad feminine equals stupid and wet doormat.

I do feel awfully ignorant sometimes when looking at the rose pictures. I’d never guess that some of those flowers were roses. If I were walking through a garden with a rose person, I’d embarrass myself saying, “Oh, look at those peony beds!” And, “Aren’t those great carnations!” I think I referred to the (hydrangeas? I forget) in my yard in front of an expert once as “snowballs”, but the expert never blinked an eye. Someone else later told me what they were, but I then later forgot again…

Well.  There are roses bred to look like peonies and peonies bred to look like roses.  Ditto carnations.  There are begonias and geraniums that look enough like roses that if you aren’t paying attention to the leaves you’ll think they are roses.  And there is a perfectly good category of hydrangea called snowball so the expert probably did blink, in appreciation of your terminology.

I know petunias, and crocuses, and daffodils, and tulips, and lilacs, and (my favorite) lilies of the valley, and daisies, and black-eyed susans, and poinsettias, and marigolds, and sunflowers, and forsythias…and that’s probably about it!

There are pink lilies of the valley you know . . . the cottage garden is OVERRUN with them.  I like them, but I also rip them up by the bucketfuls.  Not my fault, by the way:  my predecessor put them in.  I also suspect there are petunias, crocuses, daffs, tulips, lilacs, sunflowers and marigolds that you wouldn’t recognize as such, because that’s the way plant breeders are—oooh, they say, let’s see if we can breed something that doesn’t look like what it is.  I personally think trailing snapdragons, which usually have weird little turned-up faces that look more like roses than like snapdragons, for example, are a mistake.  And black-eyed susans . . . there are a million daisy-ish things that get called black-eyed susans:  the rudbeckia family is GINORMOUS.

Oh, yeah, and another favorite: Morning Glories.

Ah yes, bindweed by any other name . . . bindweed has the prettiest little morning-glory flowers.  It’s the same family.  Here’s another rant for another night:  how narrow the line is between fabulously desirable garden plant and migraine-inducing detestable weed.

Gardening.  Eh.  Another of those pursuits of the mad. . . .

* * *

* It’s been drizzling just enough for frelling Souvenir to say YAAAAAAAAH!!!!! and ball like crazy.  No proper RAIN just Souvenir dis-enhancing mist.  Note that I am ALREADY sick to death of watering.  It is my least favourite garden activity:  I like weeding and pruning and tying up and tying down and swearing and all that:  I HATE WATERING^.  And apparently we’re about to have a hot dry stretch^^ like what the rest of the world calls summer, I can do without it.  I like a little light complaining about not having the opportunity to wear my more amusing t shirts, since it kills the purpose if you cover them up with a sweater.  And sunlight is nice.  But we don’t need it all the time.  Grey and miserable!  YESSSSSS!  That’s what I moved to England for!^^^

^ The woman whose garden is full of pots.  Whose pots are full of pots.  Whose pots’ pots occasionally have pots in them.

^^ The moment the last of Souvenir’s gigantic midsummer flush has gone GREY-BROWN AND MOULDY. 

^^^ Oh, and Peter.

** Although this is changing.  Not in a good way.

The next chapter of an infinitely extendable series on other people’s roses

 

In this case, Peter’s.

Treasure Trove, doing her annual amazing thing.

That riot in the centre and left is all one rose, you know.  The bigger, more intensely coloured but rather overshadowed roses on the right are James Galway and William Morris.

Close up.

Some annual events are really eventful.  Treasure Trove in bloom is one of them.  Also, speaking of house-eaters.

A closer close up.

We actually see her better here than we did at the old house.  At the old house she was busy raging through the treetops, forty or fifty feet up.  She did drop a few stems downward so we could appreciate what we were missing, but mostly you had to stand under the original tree where her trunk, which was a clump of stems easily as big around as my thigh and of a toughness that would not have disgraced teak or ironwood, soared out of the mere earth, and look up.  She’s usually described as ‘thirty foot’.  Sure.  For the first year or two.   Peter was afraid she’d take over the universe with only a small end-of-mews cottage and garden shed to overwhelm but I was all PUT HER IN!  PUT HER IN!!!  I bought her–I’m the rose buyer in this family–and THRUST her upon him.  Well, it was his idea.  I was only abetting.

I say all this every year, right?  Eh.   Some stories are worth retelling.  If you’re not a rose person, what are you doing on this blog?  –Fantasy novels?  What?*

 

HAVE I MENTIONED LATELY HOW MUCH I HATE COMPUTERS? THIS PHOTO HAS TAKEN ABOUT HALF AN HOUR AND THE GOOD AUSPICES OF BLOGMOM TO LOAD.

It was taken with the same camera on the same memory card as all the others.  BUT NOOOOOOOOO.  THIS ONE IS POSSESSED BY DEMONS.  Okay, let’s see what fascinations await when I try to load the next one.  The screen will go black except for a fiery ring and a mysterious voice that is not coming from the speakers will intone:  One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them . . . Or it will be a photo of the B&B from someone’s holiday in Blackpool.  There will not be a neon campfire in the window.

James Galway. Doesn’t play the flute though.

 

William Morris.

I personally think Morris would be spinning in his grave if he knew that they named an orange ‘old fashioned’ rose after him.   I like orange in begonias, dahlias, gazanias, osteospermums, cardigans and topaz rings.  I find it varyingly problematical in roses.  And a rose bred to look old and ORANGE is like Queen Victoria in Jimmy Choos.  NOOOOOOOOO.**

But if you want an orange rose, this is my vote

This is Westerland.  You get a burning intense ORANGE bud . . .

And when she comes out you get orange-to-gold-to-peach.

She also smells fabulous, repeats well and is spectacularly tough.  I’m surprised she’s not more popular.  Relatively trouble-free roses are not thick on the ground (ha ha ha ha ha).  Maybe it’s something to do with the colour. . . . But I always loathed ‘Just Joey’ which for years kept being voted ‘Britain’s favourite rose’.  Whyyyyyyy?  The flowers are stupidly big–too big–and floppy and shapeless, and a creepy orangey-bilious-jaundiced-Caucasian-flesh colour on a revoltingly feeble bush that keeps falling over every time it produces one of its unpleasant blooms.  UGGGH.  Sue me, I’m American.

Now isn’t this a face you could love? Well, I can.

Love love love.

Oh, and Rachel is good too.

Although she is the pink end of orange.***  I’m going to make my usual caveat about colour varying with that year’s weather and what you’ve been feeding her and where you and she live.  Westerland can be a lot more in your face OOOOOORANGE, and Rachel can be more orange than pink.

I’ll post photos of my (orange) Ghislaine de Feligonde as soon as she’s out a little more. . . .

* * *

* There’s a joke here somewhere about retelling fairy tales, but I haven’t got it quite worked out.

** I should explain that Galway and Morris are artefacts of Peter’s predecessor.   Even if you like orange old-fashioned roses, the strong pink Galway is a perverse pairing.  Maybe the photos looked different in the catalogue.  As they so often do.

*** Did someone say PINK?

Fiber Festival

Guest post by Diane_in_MN

When I learned to knit thirty years ago, fiber festivals were probably around but must have been even less publicized than dog shows, at least where I was living.  I know there were people producing handspun yarn for sale, because I bought some in the late eighties, but I bought it from a shop.  These days, one does know about fiber festivals, and I went to a local one on Mother’s Day weekend (mid-May, for anyone not in the US).  For a change this spring, the weather was cooperative—cool but bright and clear, very windy on Saturday but not too blustery on Sunday when I went.  The festival, Shepherd’s Market in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, was held at the county fairgrounds where my dog clubs’ shows are held, so the layout held no mysteries.  Events included competitions, demos and classes, none of which I attended, but there were buildings full of what I wanted to see—critters, in this case sheep *, and of course stuff, ranging from fleeces to yarn bowls.  Impossible to resist!

Elmo the sheep welcomes visitors.

The sheep barn featured what the organizers called a “living catalog” of sheep breeds, which meant, in practice, exhibiting sheep (and goats, too) raised locally for wool or for meat; many of these breeds are quite rare in the US.  The barn was a little dim and there were quite a few people there, most of them accompanied by small children, with or without strollers, who wanted to SEE THE SHEEP.  So I didn’t get usable pictures of all the breeds there.  And by Sunday afternoon, the barn was not entirely full as some exhibitors had left for home, but there were still quite a few occupied stalls.   One of them was occupied by a cashmere goat, who did what animals tend to do when a camera appears:  he moved, so you’re not getting the best view of his head and beard.

Maybe he was dodging the minimal flash from the camera.

Some of the sheep were shorn, and some weren’t.

I think these are Romeldales. I didn’t have a notebook.

 

Lincoln Longwool, shaking her head (of course).

There were a few very sweet Karakul lambs having a nap in the back of a stall.  (This is not a very good photo, but the lambs are so cute, I’m including it anyway.)

Karakul lambs. There was a black one, too.

The best pictures I got were of some Lincoln Longwools.  Pepper here

She has a really pretty fleece, black fading to a silvery grey.

was outside her stall with her owner.  Her sheep buddy,whose name I didn’t catch, wasn’t happy about being left behind and, without going so far as to jump the door, made it clear that she wanted to get out of the stall, too.

She actually had jumped out on Saturday.  She was quite the energetic girl.

She didn’t hold still long enough for a good portrait, but you get the idea.

I’d gone to the barn first because I didn’t want to be encumbered by the results of any shopping, a good thing to do because there were lots and lots of vendors with lots and LOTS of good stuff on display.  I didn’t find anyone selling interesting and beautiful buttons—finding buttons worthy of handknit cardis hasn’t been easy—but that was probably just as well, because it made it easier to concentrate on yarn.  There were people there selling wooden or pottery yarn bowls, baskets with or without fabric trim, leather handles for knitted or crocheted or felted bags, spinning wheels and looms, fleeces, top, and roving for spinning, and even finished objects, but by far most of the booths had yarn.  A lot of that was from local farmers, spun by small mills or handspun.  And there were a lot of hand-dyers.  Some of them produced a rainbow of solid colors,

So how many colors of socks do you want?

while others preferred to create variegated painted yarn.

There’s a lot of variety in pink.*

I wandered through three buildings full of vendors and practiced some serious restraint (probably helped by the fact that I went alone and had no enthusiastic and encouraging enablers with me), but I did end up succumbing a few times to the budget-busting atmosphere.   Blue-Faced Leicester wool is my new favorite thing, and I bought three hanks of beautiful silvery-brown light-worsted yarn from English Gardens farm and woolen mill in southern Minnesota.

This is undyed yarn, with great luster.

The owners have a flock of Blue-Faced Leicester/English Leicester crosses and spin their wool into various weights of yarn.  I think my three hanks will want to be a vest for next winter.  I also bought some hand-dyed sock yarn from Crosby Hill Farm, north of the Twin Cities.  The wool is from their flock of CVM-Romeldale sheep, a rare breed developed in California about a hundred years ago, from Romney-Rambouillet crosses.  Some colored lambs that appeared in this normally-white breed about fifty years ago were linebred to set the characteristic and became known as CVM, or California Variegated Mutant, Romeldales.  Some of the folks from Crosby Hill were spinning sock yarn at their booth: here’s what it looked like on a busy wheel.

They kept two wheels going while I was there.

My sock yarn seems a tad heavier than commercial sock yarns and may want to be a shawlette instead of socks.  A swatch will tell.

This color is called Lavender Sky. Yum!

In the course of my wandering around,  I’d also noticed a vendor who was selling, in addition to her stock of hand-dyed yarn, wooden knitting tools and accessories.  Sitting on a shelf between the yarn bowls and the nostepinnes were some beautiful darning eggs.  I love darning eggs.  These, made from maple or poplar or walnut, were calling to me.  So one of them came home to live in my sewing basket.  I actually did need one.  Really.

Maple, of course; I’m a New Englander.

I’m already looking forward to next year.

——————————————————-

* There are plenty of alpaca farms in Minnesota, several of them within a few miles of my house, and a lot of alpaca yarn was on sale at the vendors’ booths, but for whatever reason, there were no living breathing alpacas at the fairgrounds.  Maybe they take turns with the sheep?  I’ll find out next year. :)  Quite a lot of angora rabbits were on site, as well as quite a lot of angora yarn^, but angora makes me itch and rabbits, as a species, are high on my list of destructive ratbags, so I didn’t waste any pixels on them.

^ Just to keep things interesting, there were angora goats up there, too, accompanied by angora goat yarn.

* BUT NEVER ENOUGH.  –ed.

KES, 85

EIGHTY FIVE

Mike roused himself with a visible effort, like Swamp Thing rising from the murky depths.  “Several thousand?” he said.  “Into five figures.  At least.”

“Maybe,” I said, my sympathy evaporating.  It was a small van.  “But you got a fabulous sandwich out of it.  And the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to start a durable and tenacious feud between me and my new neighbors.”

“It was a good sandwich,” said Mike, trying to look modest.

“Oh, wow,” said Serena.  “Your neighbors were there?  They’re never there.”

I gazed at her with as much dislike as was possible toward someone who made a pear and ginger crumble as divine as Serena’s.  “If one more person says that to me, I shall become violent.  I will crush your front lawn with my terrifying new juggernaut.  I will order my dog to throw up on your shoes.”

“You haven’t seen our front lawn in daylight yet,” said Serena.  “Nothing Merry could do to it, unless you’re planning on hiring a hydraulic hammer, in which case get the large size, okay?  Our front lawn would be a lot more interesting with a couple of craters and a rock pile.  And I’m sure Sid is too polite to throw up on anyone’s shoes but her owner’s.  I’m sorry about the Lanchesters.”

“You know them?” I said.  “This small town thing could get on my last remaining nerve.”

“Yeah.  Well.  You’ve signed the lease, right?” said Serena, stomping on my last remaining nerve more comprehensively.  “Get used to it.”  It is perhaps not generally known that even divine pear and ginger crumble will take you only so far.  I repressed a snarl.

At this critical juncture of developing interpersonal relationships, there was a shambling noise behind us, like maybe Frankenstein’s monster wearing badly fitting shoes.  I turned around gratefully, and there was JoJo.  There might have been a smile on his face.  It was hard to tell through all the hair.  The bits that weren’t hairy were pierced.  And he couldn’t walk properly because it was beneath his dignity to tie his shoelaces.

“Hey, JoJo,” I said.

“Hey,” he said.  “Keh.”

JoJo was perhaps not a great talker.  Mr Screaming Skull had done all the talking when I’d visited his garage, in that slightly too emphatic way that suggested he was used to doing all the talking.  The several large, hairy, well-pierced young men lurking in the shadows had done no more than twitch slightly when he’d said their names—calling it ‘introducing’ them was a little extreme—although JoJo had stopped whatever it was he was doing long enough to gesticulate vaguely in my direction with a tool of arcane purpose that looked like something Gurgsmeel the Malevolent might have used to unpleasant effect, when Mr Screaming Skull identified him as the chosen one to fetch the van home again.  I wasn’t sure in the present instance whether JoJo didn’t remember my name, or whether the bolt he was wearing through his tongue was preventing the crisp utterance of sibilants.

He was wearing a black t shirt with what I feared was a design of exploding heads on it.  I didn’t want to look too closely.  And I didn’t know they made even black death metal jeans that size:  approximately 26 waist and 48 inseam.  He’d been wearing some kind of overall at the garage.  He should have been cold.  Maybe what I had taken for a smile was a rictus of frostbite.

He lumbered past us and went straight to the van and put his hand on the hood like a man petting a favorite horse.  Awww.  He didn’t quite raise the lid but you could see he wanted to.  He was right, anything might happen to a motor vehicle in my hands.  I might put molasses in the radiator.  (Did cars still have radiators?  I knew more about horses.  Horses did not have radiators.)  I might put antifreeze in the gas tank.  In New Iceland in April you needed to have antifreeze somewhere.  Mike should not be turning a rare, valuable antique like Merry over to someone like me.

JoJo turned back to me, keeping his hand on the van.  “Okay?” he said.

Okay what?  “It runs great,” I said at random.  I decided not to mention my doubts about the shock absorbers.  “I’m really grateful to Mr Scre—er—to your boss for letting me have it at such short notice.”

JoJo now opened the driver’s door and stared at the steering wheel.  Then he stared at me.  I was involuntarily reminded of Sid looking at her bowl of dog food.  “Key,” he said.

“Oh—uh,” I said, fishing in my pocket.  String.  Tissues.  Jackknife.  Bits of dog kibble.  Three quarters and a dime.  Arrgh.  Ah.  Keys.  Including, fortunately, the two belonging to the van.  I gave them to him.  He was clearly about to get straight in the van and drive away.

Serena said, “D’you want a cup of coffee or anything before you go?”

 

Not the Greatest Day That Ever Was*

 

But hellcritters are all crapping solid** so it could be a lot worse.  I was saying wearily to a friend recently that it’s a little pathetic when the height of your aspirations are that your critters crap solid and keep eating but . . . life is like that sometimes.

The weather’s  gone all thick and clammy-hot and muggy and horrid, with enough rain to wet down you and your hurtleable creatures but not really enough to do your garden any good, although you’ll get soaked brushing through wet leaves trying to bring top-up cans of water to various and sundry.***  I had approximately zero sleep last night, worrying, which is just so useful and intelligent.  The thing is that your freak-out mode eventually gets stuck on and there you are twitching like the eveready bunny, your adrenals resemble exploded balloons and you’re having trouble remembering your name, let alone your phone number.†

Which is my excuse for bottling out of singing for Oisin yet again today.  I’ve missed several weeks of my cup of musical tea on Friday afternoons for the standard recent reasons plus Oisin occasionally has to play for an inconveniently scheduled wedding.  But here I’m singing like mad this week. I’ve learnt three new songs.  THREE.  Am I overcompensating for the frelling German lied?  Yes.  Absolutely.  Or you could say fleeing in terror with a few adrenaline tatters adding depth to my tone.  Also they’re only little folk songs.††  Still, you know, THREE.†††  But with reference to Nadia needing to reset me every Monday lately . . . by Friday afternoon, even without any comprehensive anatomic tightening-up experiences like a sudden outbreak of domestic geysering I’ve slipped a lot from the level Nadia had vellicated me to the previous Monday.  I, you know, squeak.  Insomnia tends to be fairly squeaky too.  So Oisin and I merely discussed the state of the world‡ and music.‡‡

But I paid for this lack of moral fibre.  I tried to go to the evening prayer at the monks’ tonight and the door to the chapel was locked.

* * *

* Although there’s a seriously long afterglow to some recent news.  Which makes a change.  We’re all up on DOMA and Wendy Davis, yes?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/26/doma-ruling-legally-married-equal-rights

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/26/supreme-court-doma-prop-8-rulings

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/28/wendy-davis-texas-abortion-bill

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/26/texas-filibuster-wendy-davis-abortion-bill

Although ugly reality will apparently re-intrude soon in Texas

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/06/26/wendy_davis_filibuster_texas_republicans_could_revive_abortion_bill_next.html

I’m one of those who believes that big noisy symbolic acts are worth making.  Self-righteous self-absorbed Republican white boy ****heads mouthing that their abortion bill is to protect women makes me puke on my own shoes.

** So far.  Two hours to midnight and there’s always tomorrow.  Also Chaos has decided that dinner is not to his liking.  ARRRRRGH.  I’m 95% sure he’s just being a 100% jerk, but I can still do without it.  Remind me why I have dogs.

Skating librarian

In defense of cats … I am reading a book called Cat Whisperer . . . her point is that cats’ emotional make up doesn’t include vengeance, but does include anxiety and stress and a need to defend one’s territory with marking.

She has also studied the lives of various wild cats and thinks many of us make the mistake of judging cats in comparison to dogs, an animal genetically programed to a very different way of life and much longer domesticated. As a cat behaviorist she apparently has considerable success in knowing what will make puss happy and training humans to provide it. If it saves kitties from abandonment, more power to her.

It is possibly worth remembering that I write the blog late at night when brain cell function is low.  And while I am certainly cranky even when I’ve been getting enough sleep for the last several months, some of my more provocative statements are from failure to express myself clearly and not from a desire to poke anyone in the eye with a sharp stick.^  I believe individuals, human and critter, are fully capable of malice and vengeance.  My first whippet, Rowan, never forgave me^^ for bringing her overseas to a new house, a new country, and a new situation where she was a dog among dogs.  She didn’t have the sweetest, most wonderful personality to begin with^^^ and she spent most of her last fifteen years trying to make me pay.  I’d say my friend’s cat who threw up along the row of LPs had a pretty good idea that she was being ultimately annoying.  But to call cats or dogs as a species ‘malicious’ or ‘vengeful’ is clearly nonsense.  You can also reverse ‘ . . . thinks many of us make the mistake of judging cats in comparison to dogs . . . ’ which has indeed been more my experience:  writers or fantasy writers or the writers I’ve known run more to cats.

As I did manage to say last night, it’s what the human caretaker is willing or able to put up or negotiate with, when the local critters start acting out or falling from the grace of perfect health.

^ Happy to poke anyone in the eye who wants to take abortion rights away from women however.

^^ See:  if you want stubborn, GET A SIGHTHOUND.

^^^ She was one of those arguments against backyard breeders.  Sigh.

*** Bad language not really optional.

† When I moved over here I adopted the British habit of repeating the last three digits of your phone number when you answer the phone.  Lately I’ve gone back to ‘hello’.

††And Beethoven, Haydn, Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten all set folk songs.  So hmmph.

††† Plus Linden Lea, speaking of Vaughan Williams.

‡ Oisin’s wife’s sister and husband are visiting.  The husband wandered through the kitchen while Oisin was making tea and I was knitting.  This is a piano lesson? said the husband.  Piano and voice, actually, I said, still knitting.

‡‡ It bothers me you never see or hear anyone singing just to be singing any more.  When I was a kid you did:  your mother sang, your neighbour sang, the school bus driver sang.  They may not have sung very well (especially the bus driver) but you knew what they were doing and it wasn’t all that weird.  Now the only time you see or hear anyone singing in public is a mum (or occasionally dad) to a little kid.  Mostly people are plugged into their iPods.  Now some of those people are listening to ANNA KARENINA or the podcast of Cardiff Singer of the World.  But some of them are plugged in because it doesn’t occur to them not to be plugged in.

Death, Decay and Lungworm

 

Peter and I went out to dinner tonight because it is a 26th -ish, which is to say that I went bell ringing last night:  Wild Robert was having one of his roving last-Wednesdays at a tower I can actually find.*  Tonight we were so fortunate as to be sitting next to a table where a gentleman with a carrying voice was describing his misfortunes in rich and graphic detail, including, as they did, the decline and eventual death of his mother and the social benefit and moral uplift of donating corpses to forensic science because you know one of the things they do is let them rot under carefully controlled conditions and then keep detailed notes of what happens just like on CSI and WE’RE TRYING TO EAT DINNER HERE YOU KNOW and then there was his dog, which had lungworm and epilepsy and a cough that went on and on and . . . eventually it died too.  We at the next table meanwhile were losing the will to live.  Even the cards didn’t love us:  we do this thing of laying out bridge hands and then Peter tells me how I should play them HAHAHAHAHAHA.  Although sometimes this is pretty interesting and while I wouldn’t have a hope of successfully doing any of it** I can at least follow, especially when we’re playing with all the cards face up and I don’t have to REMEMBER anything.***  Tonight all the hands were ‘hmm, difficult’ from my seventy-years’-experience bridge-playing husband.  Plus lungworm.  And did I mention that next table’s mother never regained consciousness after her final stroke, although it took her a while to die?

This morning I had been planning on telling you a funny story about Dog Throwing Up.  Maybe you have to be a critter owner.  But I heard the Telltale Preparatory Heaving Noises when, as ill luck would have it, the hellterror was loose in the kitchen, and the Heaver was Darkness, who is still apprehensive about her, so I was trying to drag him out of the hellhound crate onto the floor and she was saying, oh!  Playing with Darkness!  I loooove playing with Darkness and mostly he won’t play with me!, so I’m trying to fend her the flaming doodah off, and meanwhile every time I let go of Darkness he . . . doesn’t necessarily bolt into his crate but he does bolt for another piece of carpet.  Now the kitchen is chiefly lino, but I have those dirt-attractor mats by both doors, and a rug-like item in front of the Aga because hellcritters like to lie there.  NOT ON THE CARPET YOU IDIOT HELLHOUND.  Previous canines of my acquaintance do a quick hack and it’s all over, but hellhounds approach the process of throwing up in a gradual, cumulative fashion.  This means that, hellterrors and other distractions aside, you have quite a good chance of getting him onto a piece of easily washable floor, but on an occasion like this morning it’s more Keystone Cops.  WHY A PIECE OF CARPET?  WHY, OH WHY, A PIECE OF CARPET?***  I ended up chasing him around the kitchen while he trailed bile-tainted spittle, so I had far more cleaning up to do than I would have if I’d just left him alone in the back of his crate and let him get on with it—even if I did just change the crate blankets a few days ago and don’t much feel like washing any more right away, involving, as this does, several subsequent loads of human laundry coming out VERY HAIRY because BRITISH FRELLING WASHING MACHINE FILTERS DON’T, ACTUALLY, YOU KNOW, FILTER.  As it is, the kitchen floor is a good deal cleaner than it was yesterday.  And I think I got away with scrubbing the mats with my super-bristly [flower]-pot cleaning brush and some biological detergent. . . .

At that point it was still more or less a funny story.  Then we went for our morning hurtle and the geysering began.  Nooooooooooo.

What I haven’t told you is that all hellcritters are now on homeopathic treatment for environmental pollution by a bloke who specialises in detox.  Darkness has always been more affected by whatever-it-is, and Chaos after about five days of the stuff is clearly brighter and bouncier and eating better and it’s kind of to be expected that Darkness is going to be having the rougher time, even if we are on the right track.  Whatever-it-is is, after all, highly erratic, and they’ve cycled out of it before without benefit of anything but time and what I can figure out to do for them myself.  I got frantically on the phone to the bloke today after we got home and he agreed that Darkness is due to struggle more, but he said he’d do a bit more research and have a think.  Meanwhile Darkness, or, more to the point, Darkness’ insides, have settled down again, so Peter and I went out to dinner after all, and were much edified by the stories of death, corpses, and lungworm.  This wouldn’t have happened if we’d gone out on the 26th.

* * *

* Old Eden, in fact, whose bells do not improve with absence, nor does the heart grow fonder, although it may thud harder after some time trying to ring the wretched things.  I don’t understand the frelling physics of the way they behave:  how can a bell, swinging higher with every frantic yank on the rope by the ringer-up, and however grudgingly said bell cedes every fraction of an inch, how can it suddenly just fall on you^ out of its arc, so you suddenly have a big floppy snarl of rope in your hands and no responsive weight of bell at the other end.  ARRRRRRGH.

^ In terms of full-circle ringing, I mean:  the bell is firmly attached to its frame and doesn’t literally fall out of it.  Can’t, if the steeplekeeper is doing his/her job and keeping an eye on the fittings.

** Partly because a detestable amount of successful bridge playing is based on keeping track of how many of a given suit have been played, and which ones:  is your jack high or is the queen still out?  When you drew trumps did you get all of the frellers or not?  COUNT?  REMEMBER WHAT I’VE COUNTED? ARE YOU BINGLEFARBING KIDDING ME?

*** See previous footnote.

† And don’t tell me splash factor.  Trust me, it’s not splash factor.  It’s not malice either:  none of the three current incumbents have a malicious neuron in their entire twitchy, hairy bodies.  Perverse, intractable, deaf and stubborn, yes.^  Malicious, no.^^

^ If one more person tells me in a hushed and earnest manner, oh, you know, bull terriers are very stubborn, I’m going to say GET A FRELLING SIGHTHOUND.

^^ It’s all what you’re used to/what your own neurons are wired to put up with.  I had a friend whose cat, when it was cross with her, used to throw up along the top of her shelf of LPs—you old folks will remember LPs, with their narrow cardboard sleeves—I have a friend now whose cats pee on her bed if she dares go on holiday and leave them.  I am not wired to put up with this kind of thing.  I’m pretty sure I’ve told you the LP story before, it’s just one of those, BINGO!  WHY I DON’T HAVE CATS! stories.   That cat would have been at the shelter the next day, if it had been mine.

Dark chocolate mezzo I wish

 

 

Did anyone else listen to the Cardiff Singer of the World competition last week?  Twenty to-die-for singers from all over the planet trying, and mostly succeeding, to knock your socks off.  Meanwhile last week was again not a great week locally in terms of sleep, stress levels, and hellcritter digestion, and while I can tell myself that singing cheers me up—and intellectually I do know this—after you’ve listened to the latest elimination [no puns intended] round, for someone who only hits high C when she’s found a slug in her tea pot* it’s like why bother.**

I missed some Mondays due to exigencies of the above plus Nadia had a week of streaming children and cancelled so voice lessons have been patchy anyway.  But I think I’ve had them three weeks in a row now because I was musing driving over there this week that it’s beginning to be just the thing I go for, I don’t have a voice lesson, it’s much more basic than that, I need Nadia to reset me.  So I can sing.  At all.  Every time a hellcritter starts streaming again my throat closes up and my chest gets all tight.  Arrrgh whimper gacking noises etc.  So I go in and croak at Nadia, Please reset me!  Ah the life of a singing teacher.  She has me lying on the floor practising breathing and then on my feet doing complicated calisthenics that involve figuring out which is your right hand/ear/shoulder/hip/knee and which is your left hand/ear/shoulder/hip/knee. . . .

I am supposed to be learning my first German song.  It’s some blasted Schubert thing with a name like Noswurrdvegglfruzngnarlgarglefrau.  You haven’t even looked at the music yet and you already know you’re in trouble.  Nadia has patiently and painstakingly dragged me through the frelling pronunciation several times and the tune is actually rather jolly, except for the places where you have to enunciate BLORGLERFFIED at the exact same moment you are supposed to be taking a breath.***  Jeepers.

This explains why I’ve been learning another Italian song—there’s nothing like German to make Italian look dead easy—and handfuls of folk songs.  But I am singing.  And it is cheering me up.†  I could sure use more sleep though. . . .

* * *

*  Yes.  The memory lingers.

Diane in MN

If you held on to the teapot while recoiling in horror and hitting the high C, you’re a better woman than I am.

I’m fond of that tea pot.  It came overseas with me twenty one and a half years ago.^  And the slug was on the inside.  And slugs don’t move fast.  If it had been a SPIDER. . . .

Helbel

Reminds me of the time I was about to take a big drink from the mug of water beside my bed and thankfully opened my eyes first. SPIDER.

 I now refill a plastic bottle of water beside my bed.

Yes.  I have a cotton handkerchief over the glass of water by my bed because I got tired of things drowning themselves in it.  Furthermore the handkerchief is a pretty Liberty pattern so it’s a positive addition to the décor.

EMoon

If I found a slug in the teapot (or any container I was about to put something to drink in) I would undoubtedly make a noise (not a lovely high C) and drop the container, probably on something hard even if soft things were available.

It was not a lovely high C.  I believe the neighbours have been discussing the distressing noise that accompanied the earth tremor last night.  And I could tell you a story about how the hellterror rushed up just in time to be in the way for the tea pot to land safely–she having assumed that the noise I was making must have something to do with FOOOOOOD since what else could cause such emotion?

Gwyn_sully

And then, right after reading [last night’s blog], someone asks “does the coffee taste funny to you this morning?” No. No it does not. No. Nope. Not at all. No no and furthermore no.

::falls down laughing::

Ravenandrose

I think I’d have to wash my teapot about fifteen times before I could bring myself to drink from it.

Yup.  Wire brush and industrial strength cleaner.  Plus the sulphuric acid and the blowtorch.

B_twin_1

This incident shows the importance of warming the pot – it can double as a Unwanted Guest Removal Procedure!!!

NOOOOOOOO.  DO NOT WANT MELTED SLUG COATING THE INSIDE OF MY TEA POT EITHER.  ::polishes her blowtorch::

^ Although it has had a change of lid.  Since the first lid broke by falling off onto a hard surface once too often, I cannot understand why the second lid, which, not being made for it, fits even less well and falls off even oftener, hasn’t gone the same way.  Yes, I should hold it on while I pour.   But it’s, you know, hot.

** The Cardiff competition only happens every other year so I can’t remember if I always say, oh, it’s a particularly amazing group this year, or not.  Well, I’m saying it this year.  At the same time I think the woman who won—won both categories, the lieder and the opera—blew everyone else out of the water WHAAAAAAANGGGGGG BOOOOOOOOM.^  But I would also eagerly and rapidly pay money to hear two of the other finalists, the bass-baritone^^ and the Argentinian soprano^^^ sing anything they had a fancy to.

^ If I’m going to be snippy, however, I’ll say I was just a weeny bit surprised she won the lieder.  She totally won the opera, the rest of ’em might as well have not bothered, she’s got one of those ginormous, dazzling dark-chocolate mezzo voices, and I hope she spends a long time singing Verdi before she moves on, as I’m sure she will, to Wagner.  But while her lieder were spectacular, I’m not absolutely convinced that you don’t want a classy intense sorbet for your lieder rather than the death-by-chocolate approach.  If you follow me.

^^ Who just by the way is cute.  He also has a nice deep speaking voice.  I always feel cheated when baritones talk tenor.

^^^ Who is GORGEOUS and has a yowzah figure.  Yeep.  And she sings?  UNFAIR.  —Our winner, Jamie Barton, is another big girl, like Stephanie Blythe, but while I’ve read reviews of Blythe’s earlier performances that praise her timing and her footwork, that hasn’t been my experience of her:  she can sing but she can’t move.  Barton, on this showing, can do both—she did a very funny take on an aria as the witch in Hansel and Gretel—I hope she keeps this skill.  I agree that casting should be blind in terms of age, weight, race and so on, but I feel  you need to have the stagecraft to inhabit the role to some extent, like mezzos in trouser roles clearly must.  I seriously want the stand-still-wave-your-arms-and-sing style of opera to be over.

*** And furthermore there may be a trill involved.  Because you’re SURE it’s not possible, you break training and go look up professional performances on YouTube and . . . I think professional singers have an extra lung or surgically altered throats with teeny-tiny hinges put in or something.  I’m way too mortal.  And skittish.

† So long as there is no more streaming.  And at least a certain amount of eating.  Knock on wood.

I was going to write about something else entirely and then . . .

 

STOP PRESS.  THERE’S A SLUG IN MY TEA POT. 

GROOOSSSSSSSSSSS.  How the (*&^%$£”!!!! did a slug get in my TEA POT?!?  I make a pot of peppermint tea every evening at approximately blog-writing time.  The salad stage of the day—when, I acknowledge, unfortunate encounters may occur, the whole organic thing does have its downside—is long over.  I am not programmed for slugs when I’m getting my tea pot down from its shelf and scooping two heaping teaspoons of loose peppermint tea from a tin.  WHAT IF I HADN’T NOTICED?  WHAT IF I HADN’T NOTICED THERE WAS A SLUG IN MY TEA POT AND JUST WENT AHEAD AND . . . I mean, do you usually check your tea pot for slugs?  Is this standard defensive behaviour as described in one of those rule books I missed, like checking your shoes for scorpions if you live in scorpion country, if you live in slug country CHECK YOUR TEA POTS?  AAAAAAAAAAUGH.*  I may give up peppermint tea.  I may give up drinking.  I may give up EATING.  The hellhounds can teach me how.**

. . .  Well, that threw me the flipping doodah off my stride.  Where was I?  Um . . . so I hope everyone was outdoors last night admiring the supermoon?  http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/gallery/2013/jun/23/supermoon-elliptical-orbit-world-in-pictures **  I wanted to add that on midsummer night, the 24th of frelling June in the south of England, I had to put my coat on to take hellterror and hellhounds for their last nominal hurtle(s), it was 48 degrees when I went to bed and my highest/lowest thermometer informs me it got down to 45.  That’s 7 to you moderns.  I remind myself that I’d much rather have it too cold than too hot, and that’s still true, but it is disconcerting to be wearing thermals and a woolly jumper when it’s daylight at nine p.m.

And can we have some rain, please?  It’s too cold to be sloshing water over your feet when you miss the pot or the plant or whack the side of the barrel as you’re lifting your refilled watering-can out of it.†  I’m also wondering if it’s this bizarre weather that is filling my meconopsis(es) with the joy of living?  I’ve got a second one flowering now and there’s going to be at least one more—and there are at least three further pots that I just hadn’t got round to throwing out the contents of yet that are now eagerly putting out hairy meconopsis leaves and thinking about stems.††  One of them, I’m embarrassed to say, has four meconopsis in it because when they arrived as plugs a year or, cough-cough, maybe two years ago, they sat there and sulked and didn’t come on at all so when the time came that I should have potted them on again, I snarled inarticulately and slammed all four of them in a pot that should have held one of them, if any of them had bothered to grow.  They’re growing now.  Maybe next year I should bring all four hundred and twelve of my meconopsis forest††† indoors in March and put them in the REFRIGERATOR for a few weeks??

 * * *

* During which Robin hits that elusive high C, the hellterror barks, and the hellhounds sprint for cover.

** There are people who claim to live on air, on chi or prana or what have you.  I admit I’ve always suspected this to be a trifle bogus . . . but maybe your metabolism can be SHOCKED into plugging into ethereal nutrition by . . . oh, something like finding a slug in your tea pot.

If I find a slug in my Green & Black’s stash, it’s air from that moment on.

***  I am frequently confused by the difference between the on-line version and the hard-copy version—this happens most often with the GUARDIAN since it’s the only thing I read regularly in hard copy that lets you link full-content stuff for free.^  But I liked the selection of photos in the paper paper better.  Is there some additional selection process going on, what is deemed to look better on a computer screen?

^ I know they’re supposed to have a financial survival plan but I really don’t understand why they haven’t crashed and burned—or aren’t going to, tomorrow or the next day.  I would love a system that allows more media to do what they’re doing but . . . it just looks like the Charge of the Light Brigade from where I’m sitting.

Says the fiction writer who would like to worry less about where the next bag of gold-standard hellcritter food is coming from, and is freaked out all over again by every instance of piracy.

† Sigh.  If clumsy idiocy were an Olympic sport, I’d’ve found my niche at last.

†† You can’t have everything however.  My eremurus robustus is GIGANTIC . . . but there is no sign of a flower stem.  Sigh.

††† I’m not surprised I have bought so many—they’re so pretty, and they frelling die so briskly—I’m a little surprised I haven’t thrown more of them out.  The labels are, of course, long gone but there are always kind of a lot of maybe-empty maybe-not pots lurking in corners in the cottage garden.  A surprising number of them evidently contain meconopsis, who is a lurky kind of plant even when it’s happy.

Drivelling on about roses (again)

 

Yes, well, a garden post is highly suitable for midsummer day.

Bratsche wrote:

Any idea what the yellow & red (orange?) rose is in the 6th picture down? I’m planning to put more roses in my garden next year.

It fascinates me that this is the rose that got the most attention—I even had a couple of emails and one text about her.  I don’t like her much myself—aside from the fact that all roses are good—and almost didn’t run the photo, but then I thought, no, no, people like different things, and I’m trying to run a range.  So the photo went in.*  Clearly this was a good decision.

I’ve not grown her** but if you want a guess, I guess she’s Tequila Sunrise.  There are some awful photos of her on the web if you google her, but she does look just like this:  a very intensely yellow rose with a lot of petals and scarlet edges.  The amount and intensity of the scarlet edge varies with the weather—and the usual caveats about a rose planted in a different location may look different apply here too.  The only other rose I can think of—and I had a quick google too—that is vivid yellow with scarlet edges is Golden Jubilee, and she’s a classic Hybrid Tea shape, high-centred with fewer petals, and in my experience less scarlet edge.

If you like the red, orange and yellow thing you might look up Masquerade and Joseph’s Coat.  I grew Joseph’s Coat at the old house and have a Masquerade, compliments of the previous owner, at Third House—both climbers although they come shrub sized as well.***  You might also look up Harry Wheatcroft, erm, the rose, which is bright red and yellow stripes.  Again it varies with weather and climate, and there are some dreadful photos out there† but at her best she’s zebra-striped, if there were red and yellow zebras.  And then there is Oranges and Lemons, which is orange and yellow striped. . . .

Note:  Do not, repeat not, now assume that I can identify all roses from a casual glance at a photo.  Or even a studied stare in a garden.  Both Aloha and Tequila Sunrise are memorable in their different ways.  There are a lot of—pink, say—roses out there that I wouldn’t have a CLUE about, unless they were something I’d grown and got to know up close and personal.  Also a lot of roses are in the garden centres for a year or five and disappear forever, and maybe ten years later you walk past the only one who ever really got her roots down and thrived and you want to know who she is . . . My best advice to anyone—anyone who doesn’t want to go totally doolally and grow over five hundred roses and learn everything the hard way—is to find a local nursery that is run by people who grow at least some of their own plants and ask what does well in your area.  If you want half a dozen moderately well-behaved roses††, blindly follow their advice.  If you have a few rebellious thoughts of your own, buy a book on growing roses††† and hit the internet for specialist rose growers. . . .

Heh heh heh heh heh heh.

* * *

* I’ve grown quite a few roses I don’t love, either by whimsy, a spirit of experimentation, or being sold the wrong frelling plant.^  And the bottom line is that anything that does well will keep her place.  I had a fair number of ‘great bush, pity about the flowers’ at the old house, and one or two here.  You keep flowering, honey, you’re golden.

^ Leafless bare-root roses do look rather alike.  It’s like the dahlia Russian Roulette I play every year with dahlia cuttings from the National Dahlia Collection.  When something you know has black leaves shows up with green leaves you know you’re in trouble.  Mostly you just have to wait till the flowers appear.  I’m watching the first buds swelling now.  Nothing is the wrong colour yet but the summer is young in dahlia terms.

** I love Aloha, which is the other one someone on the forum asked me to identify.  She’s beginning to get hard to find however.  All named roses are clones—grafts—cuttings—and you can clone something only so many times before it starts wearing out.  Some roses go on for centuries but most don’t.  Aloha is apparently losing her vigour, which makes me sad.  I grew her at the old house but I’m having trouble getting her established at the cottage.

*** They’re also both old, so availability may be patchy.

† The one on the David Austin site, for example.  Fie.

†† Moderately is the best you can hope for.

††† And buy one written in your country.  If you go the doolally route and start a rose library, then you will certainly want books by rose nutters all around the world.  But a basic rose book for Australia is going to frustrate the well-rotted farmyard manure out of you if you live in the UK and are just starting to grow roses.  Ask me how I know this.  Things may have improved in the twenty years since I was a beginning rose-grower however.  One thing I think hasn’t changed is that the same rose may have three different names in three different countries.  Good luck.  Sometimes the best idea is to go somewhere during the blooming season that has roses in plastic pots, and go, ooh, I’ll have that one.  And take her/them home.  Be sure to buy rose food.  Anything that blooms as hard as a good rose does is hungry.

Surviving the installation of a new bathroom iii (guest post by AJLR)

 

After all the trials and horrors of the first eight days, we were looking forward eagerly to seeing the new bathroom fittings going in and being able to wash in comfort again. I’m sure that anyone who has had similar work carried out can remember the feeling of simple gratitude when the work nears its finish and what one had taken for granted beforehand seems almost luxurious. For example, I would no longer have to drag myself to the gym every day at an abnormally early hour to use their showering facilities, we could stop using the kitchen sink for late-night teeth-washing, and my husband could stop performing his early morning artistic tableau of ‘Man engaged with his external environment’ method of showering in the garden (he doesn’t like using the showers at the gym).

The shower tray went in, together with the Mermaid wall panels that we had chosen to have in the shower area – I was fed up with tiles in a shower area. Either one is forever trying to keep the grouting clean and white or one feels perpetually guilty because one isn’t managing to keep it pristine. So solid panels it was, with a colourway of ‘Cream Amber’. The glass wall between the shower and the rest of the bathroom was also in (see final picture in last blog post). The shower system we chose was a Mira Platinum, both because we liked the idea of something digital that manages the water temperature and also because it was…er…fun. All those different types of water jet from the swivelling shower head, and the easy-to-grip-when-soapy handle, and a digital control that tells you the time when it’s not showing the temperature! What’s not to like? OK, I know one doesn’t often need to know the time when showering but if I needed to, I now could!  We’d gone for a pumped system, as living in a single-storey house has always meant that our hot water runs with no great force. If we wanted a reasonable stream of water from the shower, a pumped version it had to be. An overhead extractor fan, vented through the roof  space to the outside, ensures that we don’t have to grope through clouds of steam or worry about condensation affecting things.

The wash basin and tap had been a cause of considerable angst during the design period. I am definitely not a tidy washer and neither is my husband, so the water tends to spread a little. We therefore needed a large enough wash basin that we weren’t going to flood the floor on a regular basis. As regards the tap, I have had to stay in so many hotels for business trips over the last 10 years that I’ve lost count of the number of them where the basin tap is a monolithic lump of chrome sticking out and up so far from the centre back of the basin that one is practically asking to be concussed when bending over to rinse one’s face. So our tap had to be something safe and with a swivelling spout to take it out of the way when required. I am pleased to say that the one we chose hasn’t attacked either of us yet. I also wanted a basin without those hard-to-clean little indented areas for soap tablets to sit and fester in, gradually disintegrating because they don’t drain properly. I refuse to use liquid soap from a container – they are about as un-green as you can get, with all those containers being thrown away once empty – and instead intended to get a soap drainer dish that would stand on the back shelf of the basin (we eventually had one made by a local pottery, as none of those in the bathroom shops were exactly what I wanted). So, this is what it looked like when in:

The loo we had chosen was one that was suspended from a nice streamlined wall cabinet, so we could clean easily underneath and round it.

The radiator was installed and immediately became a hot favourite (no, really). With the new circuit in so that we can turn on the heat at any time, it’s so comforting to have warm dry towels for all ablutions and very handy indeed to have all those hanging surfaces if anything needs to dry quickly. And a storage cabinet – oh the joy of being able to get everything Put Away out of sight. With the drawer under the basin as well as the cabinet, I now have so much storage space in there that I can actually find things easily, rather than having to search through small stacks of things. And when I was thinking beforehand about how using the bathroom would work, I realised that we would need some towel hooks at the dry end of the shower area in order to avoid dripping across the floor to get to the radiator/towel rack. So some well-designed and shiny double hooks went up.

Anyway, you’ll have gathered that we were pleased with how everything was working out. The flooring looked good and is easy to sweep round now with barely any ledges or extraneous corners, with the tiling on the window and basin wall looking clean and simple. We’d gone for large plain tiles (less grouting…) in ivory and with a slightly matt finish so that we weren’t dazzled by reflections. The downlighters in the new ceiling were doing their job well and once the decorator had been in on the penultimate day to do the walls and ceiling (in Dulux ‘Apricot White’)) then the lights were pushed back up into their recesses (the bathroom people had left them hanging down, looking like the ends of alien tentacles, so that the painter could easily avoid splashing the bits that would later be flush with the ceiling) and there we were. All done – and everything in the 9 x 7 foot space worked well together.

Keeping clean – us and the bathroom – has never been such a pleasure.