First of all my apologies for not having blogged for a few days. It's been a busy week - Long Melford on Wednesday, which was a good and successful antique fair. Sold quite a lot and also bought quite well, including rather a nice brass tinder box, which needs a little tidying up and should keep me busy for a few hours. Since then it has been quite busy socially.Being high summer, we've all been busy giving lunches/dinners/teas, in our gardens when possible, and the weather has been most obliging. The problem with that is that I feel I can't turn up for a meal with friends, carrying my camera; and if we're the hosts it's still a little awkward (even - not done) to say, in the course of a meal, "Hold it everyone and smile for the camera". I have done the latter occasionally, though, provided the guests are all old friends and know I keep a blog.
One thing I think I must record is regarding the Saturday Telegraph Crossword Puzzle, which I do every week, usually with the help (swapping clues) of friend Sheila and senior daughter Sarah. The last few weeks' puzzles have been absolute stinkers and the three of us have had to make every effort to complete them. This week (probably following complaints to the Telegraph about the impossibility of their Prize Crossword, and corresponding threats to cancel the subscription unless matters improved) was a perfectly reasonable one, and I sailed through it in well under an hour.
Now for the photographs : the top one is of Ann admiring her handiwork in the garden (she spent an hour or two yesterday, whilst I was at Scrabble Club, tidying up the borders). The lower one is of a small corner with one of those blue onion thingies.........got it - an allium (I think), and a montbretia.
12 comments:
I wish my garden was half as well kept as yours is.
Thank you Liz. Although we both like it, I must, in honesty, admit that Ann does rather more in the garden than I do at the moment.
There is a Japanese soldier somewhere in our garden who doesn't know that the war is over.
How very worrying, Sir B.! He will, of course, be very elderly by now, but they were well armed during the war, and it seems probably that he will be thoroughly nasty tempered by now. I think the best thing you can do will be to purchase a reliable flintlock blunderbuss (comprehensive weapons !) from a reputable specialist antique dealer (modesty prevents me specifying further), with which to protect yourself and Ursa Minor from this Niponese nasty.
Best wishes to you both, Mike and Ann.
Would this reputable specialist antique dealer (who shall remain nameless) be able to provide a napalm canister or, possibly, a small thermo nuclear device? I have a mind to do a bit of weeding as well.
The slight problem there, Steve, is that, owing to an enlightened and generous government, any weapons I deal in have to be bona fide antiques, kept as ornament or curiosity. In order to keep within the boundaries set by our good and understanding government, I will be on the lookout for the devices you require, but of a venerable vintage that remain within the requirements of our thoroughly well intentioned legislature.
I remain, as ever, your supplier of legal weaponry.
Dear Sir Bruin,
Napalm is not easily to be come by, (I believe a substitute may be synthesized from naptha mothballs and diesel) but if you should obtain a small amount may I recommend the addition of 20% cornflour, the starch in it provides extra calorific value and the stickiness achieved encourages it to stick to the foliage rather than drip off. (One of Nanna Trower's principles for economy and thrift with medicaments and domestic cleaning products such as Cardinal Red, Reckitt's blue, Zebo grate-black and Agent-0range was 'put a little bit where it does most good.')
PS. May I also recommend wearing an ex-naval fire-crew issue asbestos suit during application to your jungle infestation. This also treats fungal infections
Dear Mike,
I'm sure you could bodge up a small thermo-nuclear device for Sir Bruin in your garden shed; Yellow-cake may be found on the black market in Haiffa but extracting Uranium 235 from it is a complex process which will require your forge to be up and running for a few days and you might need to wind a big electro-magnetic coil to deflect the U235 plasma from the U238. A four inch thick lead suit is a sartorial necessity for this pass-time.
PS if you feel a bit gippy and get weeping sores stop immediately and call your undertaker as radiation sickness may resolve your other health issues rapidly.
Dear Crowbard, I must disassociate myself from your last two comments. Even black powder may not be held without a black powder permit. Since I let my shotgun certificate lapse some years ago, I am not in a position to meddle with the substances of which you speak so freely, and indeed, so enthusiastically. I'm not even very keen on nitro powder, the propellant used in modern cartridges. Nasty, sharp, corrosive stuff. There's a lot to be said for the longbow in my opinion.
You know what the sixteenth century poetaster said of gunpowder :-
"Oh curst device, base imstrument of death,
Framed in the black, Tartarian realms beneath.
By Beelzebub's malicious arts designed
to ruin all the race of human kind."
He may be understating things a little, but he's got the general idea right.
P.s. If the quoted verse turns out to be by Shakespeare, I withdraw the term 'poetaster', of course.
P.P.s. I think I'd better withdraw the term poetaster (meaning 'a petty poet') anyway. I've just been checking the lines I quoted, and find they are by the poet Ludovico Ariosto, an Italian poet who lived from 1474 to 1533. I suppose the chunk I dug from memory (and quoted) must have been a contemporary translation from the Italian. Good rousing stuff, anyway.
You do well to remind me dear Bruv, I had forgotten we have moved from an era of personal responsibility to one of 'Political Rectum-itude'. I hold by 'alle man's recht' and the ancient law that declares 'Do what thou wilt an it harm none'. I suppose I shall never again make blotting paper bangers of nitrogen tri-iodide nor pour oil of vitriol on permanganate of potash to make billowing purple smoke. I shall just have to bite the bullet (if I'm still allowed to use such scary terminology) and buy professionally produced fireworks if their private ignition is still permitted! I realise that cornflour, mothballs and diesel may only be used by learned folk with post-grad certification in inappropriate & unnecessary form-filling Mike but my suggestion that you smithy up a small thermo-nuclear device was facetious, I am aware you do not have the strength to don a 4 inch thick lead-suit and do hot and heavy forge-work in it. Please remove or amend my comments to retain the proprieties of which I have regretably been negligent.
PS. have you any idea how much of America's federal silver reserves are now radio-active because copper was a reserved material so they spun their deflecting coils from silver instead.
PS How long would it take you to wind an electro magnetic coil weighing 14,700 Tons
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