Day 284: Bear Necessities

What do you do if you meet a bear?  Today I meet a woman who recently encountered a bear not once, but twice. 

The action takes place in the Canadian wilderness.  She and her husband are hiking, and have considered the whole bear encounter scenario, but not seriously. What are the chances?  Pretty good, it seems.  They stumble across a bear in their path, so back away slowly and carefully.  Bear disappears.  Big relief all round.  Some time later a noise makes them turn round, to find the bear BEHIND them, and ADVANCING.  There are no climbable trees nearby.  So, being religious, they do the only thing they can think of.  Pray.  Magically the bear stops.  Disappears into the undergrowth.  Panic over.

No chatting.  Or praying. 

Inadvertently, they have done exactly the right thing.  Not necessarily the religious content (although whatever floats your boat), but talking out loud, calmly.  The 'talking out loud' tells the bear you're human, and the 'calmly' tells the bear you do not consider them a threat.  So they tend to back off.  The words you use are immaterial.  It's not what you say, but the way you say it.

So now we know. 

I give you this story as it is the single most exciting thing about today.  And who knows?  It might prove useful.  (Please note - this is a technique for black bears.  Not grizzlies.)

Day 283: Daarn Sing + Tears in Migh Yighs

Today's job requires me to sit in on the last fifteen minutes of the very dull introduction to a graduate induction programme.  The woman doing the talking has a very strong Welsh accent, which is quite soothing and pleasant.  I drift off mentally to a blur of business speak, but wake up at the words 'Midge Ure review'. 

It takes a couple of beats before I realise (disappointingly) that what she actually said was 'mid-year review.'  (Try it out.  Say 'Midge Ure review' and you've got a pretty convincing Welsh accent on the go.)

How I wish I had been right first time.  That's a properly maverick and despotic way to make sure your graduates are up to speed.

'No, I don't want to know about your lousy business development ideas.  Just gimme a critique of 'Vienna' and make it quick, goddammit!'

 

Day 282: Book Thief

Work is still slow during the dog-end of August, so I make the most of a free day by taking my book to Heartwood Forest.  Behind one of the pieces of ancient woodland, there's a brilliantly sturdy bench, warm in the sun, and looking out over rolling arable fields. 

The forest behind me is very lively, full of creaks and rustles, but I don't see a soul as I shamelessly steal a couple of hours of reading.                       

There are blackberries ripening in the hedges.  I will be back soon.  With a container and crumble-intent. 

Day 281: Bank Holiday Bacon

Woke up with a pressing need for a bacon sandwich.  No bacon in the house.  Faced with the walk up to town, I would normally find my need less pressing than I originally thought.  Not today.  A purposeful march to the supermarket.  Bacon sourced (not any old bacon - 'Finest' bacon).  Head straight for the self-service tills, and scan bacon, money at the ready.  Not so fast!  'Approval needed.' 

For bacon?  What if I don't get approval?  What if the management at Tesco's (other supermarkets are available - and indeed preferable, but this is a proximity decision) somehow know that my diet is already dangerously high in salt, which I love, and they decide not to grant me approval? 

It's fine.  The guardian of the self-service tills doesn't give me a second look as she swipes approval.  She's preoccupied with doing induction training for a new member of staff, who is getting all the attention.  Unsurprising - particularly as she (the inductee) is around six foot five and distinctly Adam's apple-ish. 

I like your hiring policy, Tesco's.  But you're going to have to lift the bacon approval requirement if you really want to win me round. 

 

 

Day 280: Sign of the Times

Walking through Soho I am very pleased to spot the old facade of 'The Hobbit' - the newsagent on Wardour Street that closed a few years ago.  I remember it with more modern signage, but I vastly prefer this version, which smacks of the 1970s, and has been hidden under more up-to-date layers for years.  Only to come to light in this most recent renovation. 

I'm a sucker for any of this sort of thing.  I like ghost signs - painted on the sides of buildings back in the thirties, and so worn they're barely visible.  Or when you're decorating and you find wallpaper strata, revealing decades of design choices.  But I like shop fronts best - mainly because they are so well-preserved behind new frontages.  I love that they've been sitting there, quietly dormant as years come and go outside.   

Marks left behind and forgotten.  In my old Muswell Hill flat, just outside the back door, carved deep in the brick work, were several sets of initials and the date 1963.  Who put them there?  Why?  And were they wearing flowers in their hair?  How many other people wondered these things, in the decades before I lived in the flat?  Were they wearing loon pants?  Satin trousers?  Ra-ra skirts?  Thinking about this gives me a strange feeling.  Like cheese jaw. 

Feel the urge to carve a message somewhere.  Not just on the internet. 

Off to find a penknife.   

Day 279: Hot Tea Dance

This morning I set off to get a newspaper.  As I leave the house, the sky is dark, and there is a fine mist of rain on the wind.  So I pop back for a plastic bag to protect the paper in transit.  Weirdly, I do not choose to pick up an umbrella or a raincoat.  Half-way to the shop, a rude amount of rain comes down.  Hard. 

But I have a bag for the paper.  So it is snuggly and warm and dry.  As I could be if I'd picked up an umbrella/raincoat.  But at least I am waterproof.  I will not turn into papier mache (cannot be bothered to seek accents - insert them for yourself).  Even without consciously weighing things up, you make a calculated choice.  If someone passes you a mug of tea, and you take it by the body, not by the handle, and it's red hot - you will not drop it like the proverbial hot potato.  You will shout and swear until you find a flat surface.  Then and only then will you let go and dance around in pain.  Mind over matter.  You will endure the discomfort because the alternative involves a broken mug, tea everywhere (possibly on your lap top), and more widespread scalding. 

So - I made a subconsciously calculated choice.  But it was a bad one, because I failed to consider that I am still wearing my glasses (too early in the day to contemplate contact lenses) and I cannot see a thing. It's like driving with no windscreen wipers.  Nearly get taken out by a car as I cross the road. 

Lucky.  Could have been a broken mug.  Tea everywhere. 

Day 278: Spiritual Level

I have just bought one of these.  It is massive and ugly as hell, but it has GPS!  I can now track my run distances via satellite!  I will never get lost again. 

When I visited the Lost Gardens of Heligan earlier this year, I was given a tiny plastic compass on entry.  The leaflet has some friendly blurb along the lines of  'although the gardens are lost, you don't have to be.'  Unsurprisingly, the compass is very rudimentary.  Without a spirit level to keep it on the straight and narrow, north becomes a  distinctly movable feast.  I rarely travel with a spirit level, so the compass is nice but ultimately useless.

I have another more robust compass.  It does have an in-built spirit level and cross-hairs.  It's in a folding metal case, and it saved my bacon when I foolishly trusted a walk route that I found on the internet.  But it's pretty hefty.  Not about to run around carrying this. 

So - I bought this ugly bug.  It looks like I've been electonically tagged.  But it is a powerhouse of information.  How fast I'm going.  How far I've gone.  My heart rate.  But best of all, it will direct me home if I ever get lost. 

Very happy to have this.  On a spirit level. 

Day 277: Stitch Itch

I started making clothes as a teenager.  Using any fabric I could get my hands on.  In the sixth form I wore a skirt made from my grandmother's 1950's kitchen curtains, and one from a piece of mattress ticking. 

Then I stopped.  I don't know why.  I've made the odd costume, and always enjoy the alchemy of bits of cloth, cut and stitched into a thing that until that point did not exist.  But with a free day on my hands, I'm suddenly in the mood to make something.   

The task in hand takes all of my focus.  There is nothing else in my head.  Eight hours melt away effortlessly.  The floor under the dining room table is covered in stray pins, snippets of materials and pieces of thread. 

A new dress.  There is only one like it in the whole world.  Satisfying.   

 

Day 276: Maximum Nonsense

As the Edinburgh Fringe judders into the final weekend, the Fosters comedy award nominees are revealed.  This year I've been backing Tony Law to win the main award, so very pleased to see that he's in the running.  It just feels like the right time for him.  Although also very pleased to see James Acaster in the list.  I did a gig with him a couple of months ago, and thought his new material was excellent. 

This time last year, I remember seeing one of the nominees in the performer's bar at the Pleasance.  He was laughing, drinking champagne, and surrounded by people.  As I left the bar, I passed another performer.  The year before there'd been a real buzz about him, and his star was definitely in the ascendant.  But his follow-up solo show had failed to impress, and had been roundly panned in reviews.  He looked broken.  Two sides of the same coin. 

Edinburgh is a fickle bitch.  I hope the nominees are allowing themselves to enjoy the moment, without skipping ahead to thinking about winning, or next year etc.  For any comedian at the Fringe, to be on those lists right now is as good as it gets.  Anybody who tells you different is lying.  And the coin can flip all too quickly. 

I know of a few who have been broken this year.  I wish them a swift recovery. 

And best of luck to my horse.  Go, Mr Tony Go! 

Day 275: Black and White

Day two of the intermittent fasting trial.  It's not particularly pleasant, but it is surprisingly easy.  Probably because it completely suits my all-or-nothing proclivities.  I like simple black-and-white rules.  That's why I've always found elimination diets simple.  No carbs - no problem.  I think I'd struggle with anything that requires complicated systems, weighing and measuring.  Tedious and too all-consuming. 

On that level, I'm also enjoying not having to think about meals - the planning, shopping, and cooking.  Makes me realise how much time I spend doing all these things.  Sometimes I enjoy them, but more often they feel like a chore.  Today I have loads more time to do other stuff, which is good. 

But what I'm really enjoying is the psychological advances - ignoring the part of me that is panicking about not eating every four hours.  Interesting to find that I don't have to listen to it.  After a while it stops wittering, and eventually it shuts up completely.   

Admittedly, I've chosen to do this on a couple of slack days.  It might be a different story if I were very busy. 

Day 274: Big Dangly Carrot

Last week the BBC showed a programme by Michael Mosley about intermittent fasting.  There are lots of different approaches.  You can do three days fasting on the trot every month.  You can alternate days of fasting and eating freely.  You can fast for a couple of days a week.  You can simply skip breakfast.  Whatever the method you choose, the benefits seem extraordinary - from the things you'd imagine, like improving liver function and lowered cholesterol, to things you wouldn't.  Like significantly cutting your chances of developing cancer and Alzheimer's.  This goes against everything we've ever been told about eating healthily - ie not skipping meals, breakfast being the most important meal of the day etc.  But there is clear evidence that it works.  All in all, it's too big a dangly carrot for me to resist. 

I ate last night at around half-seven.  The plan is to go a full twenty-four hours before eating anything.  And then a smallish meal - around 600 calories.  Repeat.  Then five days eating normally.  This is purely an experiment.  I am interested to know how I feel.  The last time I did a deliberate fast was when I was seventeen, and I ate nothing for three days, with the aim of achieving a higher level of consciousness.  I felt pretty damn rough for the first two days, and on the third day I remember feeling that my mind and vision were crystal clear.  It was good - but the first two days were so awful, I never felt encouraged to try it again. 

But I have fasted in different circumstances.  Following my hospitalisation with a head injury, I completely lost my appetite.  I didn't eat anything at all for about ten days.  It is interesting that the documentary I watched showed that in a fasted state, neurons are able to generate, and the brain is able to repair itself (hence link with prevention of Alzheimer's).  I wonder whether my body expressly didn't want food as it was busy doing brain repairs? 

Anyway - this is different.  Only twenty-four hours before eating, which is completely do-able.  If unpleasant. 

I won't lie.  I am hungry.  But it's a small price to pay for hanging onto your marbles. 

Day 273: Sunday Roast

Another sweltering day.  But this is not enough to deter me from a Sunday roast at the Norfolk Arms off Judd Street.  Fortunately there are outside tables, albeit so closely packed that you are back-to-back with the person behind.

Inside the doll's house

The Norfolk Arms seem to have a thing about constriction.  The tables inside, although pretty and white-washed, are tiny.  For doll people. 

And their roast dinner is served in a small earthenware bowl - the sort of thing used for tapas.  The sides are high, so cutlery must be sharply-angled.  Which makes for a tricky roast beef wrangle.

Yes.  I do mean a bowl like this. 

I do not have a pudding.  In case it comes in a tight-squeeze thimble. 

    

Day 272: Heatwave to Crimewave

Crime statistics rise with the mercury.  According to an unverified but appealing source there are increases in 'violent crime, spouse abuse, hornhonking and delivery of electric shock'.

I am lying low, because today is risky.  It is jungly hot.  If this was the suburbs of New York, it would be wife-beater vests and liberated fire hydrants.  If this was the Deep South, it would be mint juleps on the veranda.  But as this is St Albans, it is almond Magnums and trips to Sainsburys for barbecue charcoal and sausages. 

Front and back doors open for ventilation, with a half-eye out for cat intruders.  Buttercup is on my mind.  Cat, not cow.  Long dead, but forever memorable because of her mission in life, which was to get upstairs and shit under the beds.  Accomplished on many occasions. 

Today cat crime is non-existent.  Probably because all cats are sensibly lying down.  Rather than indulging in violence, spouse abuse, hornhonking and delivery of electric shock.   

Day 271: Not a Number - A Free Man

This morning I go to Starbucks.  Not for their coffee, which I don't particularly like, but for their power sockets, which I do.  I'm on a back-up laptop, which wheezes and rattles like a lawn mower.  The battery is on its last legs, and won't hold a charge so I need to be close to the source (man).  I order a drink (to justify power usage).  Then this happens:- 

Barista: 'Can I take your name, please?'

Me: 'No.  No, you can't.  You can take a number.  Ten.'

Barista:  'Ten?'

Me:  'Yes.  Call me Ten.'

I have no idea why I do this.  It just splurts out.  I know they have to ask.  But it is early in the morning and it takes me by surprise, and I instinctively baulk.   

We are not friends. 

Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got.
Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot.
Wouldn't you like to get away?
Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,
and they're always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows
Your name.
  
Yes.  And sometimes you prefer to remain anonymous.     

Day 270: The Wall

I done 20 A*s.

Today it is hot and humid, and I have a newly acquired mosquito bite.  Despite all this, I can sense the first wisp of autumn in the air.  I have a job in Wimbledon, which takes me across the Common (like a Womble).  On the horsechestnut trees there are conker cases hanging fat and green.  A gaggle of teenagers are in front of me, linked like pick-up-monkeys, shrieking and flapping bits of paper.  It's exam result day.  And with that comes the inevitable wind of change.  Whatever it is.  Retakes without your peers, or university or travelling or a job or watching day-time television and raiding the biscuit tin, it's going to be different.   

William the Conker

There's a sense of forward motion, which muggy and stagnant mid-August needs.  Up in Edinburgh, acts will be hitting The Wall.  That mid-Fringe stage where everything slows, and flyering feels particularly tough.  It only last for a few days, and then speeds up.  Like a lorry struggling to get to the brow of a hill, and then coasting back down, with its own weight creating momentum. 

I'm not in Edinburgh, but even so I feel The Wall.  Delighted to get a sense of September round the corner.  Bring the mists and mellow fruitfulness on. 

Day 269: Pass the Parcel

A deeply mundane day.  Mostly postal.  A trip to the local parcel office to collect two parcels.  A trip to a slightly more distant parcel office to send three parcels (not all parcel offices will do the sending bit).  My parcels weigh 20.20kgs.  This is possibly the headiest moment of the day. 

I arrive home in time to intercept the postman who is just about to leave a while-you-were-out card.  I get a letter and a parcel.  This afternoon I am under house arrest waiting for a courier to deliver... a parcel.  Three out; four in.  Go, go, go. 

All the parcels are work-related.  Not presents.

If these had been presenty parcels, this would not have been a deeply mundane day.  It would have been a birthday. 

Enough now. 

Day 268: Hard Pill to Swallow

Lunch with my sister, which is a rare occurrence.  She eats fisherman's pie with dedicated focus, and regales me with a list of the medication she is currently taking.  A total of eighteen pills every day.  I can't remember everything she lists.  Anti-psychotic drugs.  Beta-blockers.  Diazepam.  Statins.  HRT - thanks to a side-effect of the anti-psychs, she went into premature menopause at thirty.  Stuff to stop her drooling.  Which is another side-effect of the anti-psychotics.  She's more overweight than I've ever seen her.  She says this is partly to do with the drugs, and partly to do with the fact that she finds food comforting (especially trifles and Victoria sponge cake).  Who can blame her for wanting to find some comfort amongst all this shit?  But now it looks like she has diabetes.  And her current consultant very much wants her to have a stomach bypass, because he doesn't think she has the ability to lose weight on her own.  Brilliant.  Why even bother trying a nutcracker if you happen to have a sledgehammer to hand? 

We're sitting in a pub, not two hundred yards away from the shop where, aged nine (her) and six (me), we would buy ice-pops to suck on the bus going home from St Margaret's.  She was always different and difficult, but I'd never have guessed what the future had in store for her. 

Drive home to St Albans with a lump of sadness pressing down on my solar plexus.  And a sense of guilt for the times I have whinged and moaned about stuff in my life that's not worth whinging and moaning about.  Who knows how close I came to an unlucky roll of the genetic dice?  Could have been me.  But it was her. 

I realise how lucky I am.  But right now, it doesn't feel good.         

Day 267: English Bazaar

Sissinghurst is unphotographable. 
Have a picture of the beautiful Weald of Kent. 

Sissinghurst, Vita Sackville-West's glorious fairy-tale garden complete with tower and moat.  It's part of the fabric of my childhood, buried deep in the Kentish Weald only a couple of miles from where I went to school.  I've lost track of how many times I've visited.  Its beauty is much-photographed, but impossible to capture on film.  It has to be experienced first-hand.  The scent.  Sweet with roses and lavender and figs, but with a haunting herbal undertow.  Smoky and bitter and compelling.  The most perfect grass - springy, velvety green.  Tawny Elizabethan brickwork, mellow and warm.  Bees humming gently and pottering contentedly.    

And the planting.  Everything spills and tumbles in soft drifts of muted colour.  No serried ranks or harsh tones here.  The atmosphere is unique.  Deeply English, but also exotic. 

Which makes total sense, when you read this - Vita writing about old roses:-

I remember that many years ago, in the bazaars of Constantinople, we used sometimes to spend a fabulous, Arabian-tale of an afternoon, not propped on banks of amaranth and moly, but on divans and cushions in the warehouse of a great carpet merchant, sipping sweet-thick Turkish coffee from cups with filigree containers, while the treasures of his collection were rolled out at our feet by innumerable servitors, picturesque in their blue blouses, broad red sashes, and baggy blue trousers.

But what has all this to do, you may ask, with the old roses which are the subject of Mr. Graham Thomas’s book? Perhaps not so very far removed. Mr. Thomas swept me quite unexpectedly back to those dusky mysterious hours in an Oriental storehouse when the rugs and carpets of Isfahan and Bokhara and Samarkand were unrolled in their dim but sumptuous colouring and richness of texture for our slow delight. Rich they were, ripe as a fig broken open, soft as a ripened peach, freckled as an apricot, coral as a pomegranate, bloomy as a bunch of grapes. It is of these that the old roses remind me.

It's right there in those words.  That atmosphere of magic carpet which is so distinct in these gardens. 

Like a bloodhound I track the fantastic herbal smell to a small, white-flowered plant.  Hyssop.  Used in Ancient Greece for cleaning sacred places.  I cannot stop sniffing it. 

A small plant accompanies me home in the car.  I hope it will survive the cats, the pigeons and the slugs.  As I drive the car is filled with scent.  Car becomes magic carpet. 

 

Day 266: Close of Play

The closing ceremony.  Emeli Sande gets three more opportunities on a global stage to prove she can sing in tune.  All of them wasted.  The Who talk about their generation again (they've been yapping about it for almost half a century now - what's left to be said?).  Madness's house is still in the middle of their street.  Annie Lennox, wearing Ann Summers gothic-lite, plastered inexplicably (and bawling unpleasantly) to the prow of a vampire ship.  Liam charmlessly intones Wonderwall.  George Michael does his relieved-not-to-be-dead-from-pneumonia dirge. 

Who'd have thought I'd be so happy to see the Spice Girls?  There is proper excitement as they whiz around the stadium, standing on the roofs of taxis like Spicy charioteers.  And they sound good (take note, Sande). 

I check in with myself.  Is this really happening?  Yes, it is. 

Freddie.  If only you'd been there in person.  You'd have torn us a new Stadium.

The flame is extinguished.  Darcy Bussell does a metaphorical dance.  Coe does some words.  Rogge does some anti-charisma (he's like the safety curtain coming down). 

And finally, it's all over. 

Let's hope a generation is inspired (preferably not The Who's...).

  

Day 265: Weed Free - See Tree

Face the crud at the bottom of the garden.  Trellis and fence choked with dead climbers, killed by successive Arctic winters.  Earth colonised by bindweed and snails and spiders with tiny peppercorn bodies and long delicate legs.  The skeletal remains of shrubs-gone-by still bear faded plastic tags, announcing what they were in life. 

But under the sticks and the leaf mould and the snail shells, there is some surprising green.  A tiny oak sapling - about four inches high, but with three unmistakable oaky leaves.  There are no oaks nearby.  But there are squirrels.  I can only think that this is the result of a forgotten buried horde. 

 Mighty oaks from little acorns grow. 

But first they are tiny. 

Day 264: Long Shadow

A beautiful day wasted in an air-conditioned room.  So an evening walk, to salvage what's left of it.  Up along the remains of the Roman city wall that cuts across the park, my shadow lengthening and flaring in the low sun.  Knots of people are lounging around on the grass down by the lake. 

With a bit of manoeuvring I find I can touch them with my shadow head.  I start a tally, and then feel weird about what I am doing, so I stop.

It's been a long week.

Day 263: Living on the Fringe

Townshend comes to Buccleuch St

I'm normally in Edinburgh for all of August.  This year I am not.  I am at home planting grass seed, and fighting cats, pigeons and slugs.  Which is the equivalent of Townshend planting his eponymous turnips.  I'm putting some metaphorical nitrogen back into my soil, man. 

But since loads of people I know are up in Edinburgh, it's still very much on my radar.  Facebook status updates chart the progress of the terrible, beautiful rollercoaster.  It's only week one, but you can feel it gathering speed.  Some people are strapped in securely, and others are already clinging on for dear life.  But that can change in a day.  There's nowhere like the Edinburgh Fringe for reversal of fortunes. 

That's one of the things I love so much about it.  The extraordinary expansion of possibility.  Which makes for intense living.  Everything is concentrated and magnified in the bubble of the Fringe, so an inevitable byproduct is a warped perspective. 

One of my favourite moments last year was appearing at Lynn Ruth Miller's late night gig.   She's eccentric and full of grounded positivity.  With the wisdom of her seventy-seven years, she is fully aware of what's really important about being at Edinburgh - the absolute privilege of being part of the world's largest arts festival. Lynn Ruth is, like me, taking a year off.   But she's not rotating her turnips.  She has a more robust reason - a broken ankle. Get well soon, Lynn Ruth. The Fringe needs you.

Day 262: 5-Step Programme

Prepare to hyperventilate

A failed attempt to buy my mother a birthday present.  The vast majority of the shopping that I do is food-related.  I'm pretty good in a supermarket.  (Good as in professional.  Not talented (that's taking it too far), but certainly skilled.)  But when it comes to any other sort of shopping, I have noticed a distinct pattern emerging. 

Stage one: first attempt.  This is dreadful.  I trail around EVERY shop.  There is NOTHING to buy.  Everything is SHIT and WRONG.  I am desperate.   I even go into TK Maxx for a whole five minutes.  I get hot and tired and trail home empty-handed. 

Stage two: second attempt (because it will not buy itself).  Revisit a few of the shops (not TK Maxx) that, by rights, aught to have something to buy.  Even though yesterday they did not.  Start to see a few vaguely feasible possibilities.  Tire quickly, and in slight panic buy one of the feasibles.  Slink home, feeling second-rate, but at least carying something.

Stage three: third attempt.  Recognise that the panic-bought item WILL NOT DO.  Gird loins.  Re-enter fray (not TK Maxx).  This time it's different.  Now I've got my eye in.  Suddenly can see and buy something suitable.  Relief.

Stage four: happily forget how to shop.  Time passes (more than you might think).

Stage five: need to shop.  Da capo*. 

I know I can't cheat the system.  There's no skipping straight to stage three, unless I'm prepared to stay limber with constant low-level shopping, but I simply can't do this to myself. 

That's fine.  But I need to remember that it WILL take three attempts.  The stress comes when I do not leave myself enough time for all of these. 

This time I'm on schedule.  Tomorrow - the purchase of something barely adequate.  Then on Saturday a small window to take back the adequate, and find the appropriate. 

At this point it's essential that I have faith in the process.  If I doubt it, all is lost (it's the panic that gets in my eyes, and stops me from seeing).

Day 261: Seedling Watch II

Fuck off

A new entry on my seedling-related black list.  Slugs.  Today I notice lots of them, trailing around the new grassy shoots like damp ghosts.  Are they just enjoying the view?  A quick internet search confirm my suspicions.  For a slug, a patch of new grass is much like a tube of Pringles.  They start munching and they just can't stop. 

The seedlings have been up for a scant two days.  And the slugs have arrived.  So there are two possibilities - either they have an incredibly advanced communications system complete with GPS capability ('ALL slugs to report to new grassed area, N 51 45, W 0 20.  Over').  Or there is a huge underground army of slugs, just sailing around everywhere on the off-chance.  Either way I feel overwhelmed.  I cannot condone the salty approach.  So the only option is flicking them away, but that means a level of vigilance and a lack of squeamishness I cannot maintain. 

And you. Fuck off.  

Please also fuck off

Cats.  Pigeons.  Slugs.  I briefly wondered whether these would cancel each other out in correct food-chain heirarchy - the pigeons eating the slugs; the cats chasing the pigeons, leaving me to terrorise the cats with a pump-action water pistol.  Turns out they are utterly indifferent to each other in the face of fresh soil (cats), grass seed (pigeons), tender shoots (slugs).  I - the apex predator - am the only one bothered by all of them. 

It's too stressful.  Once again, I am going to resort to survival of the fittest.  There's no room for weakness in this garden.  Trial by cat, pigeon and slug.  If you can make it through these, then you move to the next level.  Where you face dandelions, months of neglect and then aggressive strimming. 

Good luck, grass. 

Day 260: Seed Watch

The grass seed I planted less than a week ago is starting to do its thing.  I've been checking on a daily basis, and suddenly here they are - tiny green sprouts, bold against the damp earth.  Sunshine-and-showers has become my favourite weather forecast.  Pigeons are on my black list (keen seed-snackers).  As are cats (soil-disturbing shit-distributors). 

It is disproportionately exciting.  There are simple steps for success, but also an element of luck (weather) and danger (pigeon/cat peril). 

I may have to do more of this seed/sower business.  Today, grass.  Tomorrow - who knows?  A cress flannel?

Day 259: All About Business

The men's one hundred metre final, and there is no doubt as to the stadium favourite.  As evidenced by the roar when Usain Bolt's name is announced.  He clowns about at the start line, gangling and mugging for the crowds.  Some competitors have their game face on.  Bolt has his goat face.  Is he focused enough?  Is he taking this seriously?

And then he lets rip - supercharging his way to the finish line.  Then a bit more goating. 

This is why we love him.  So much talent, worn so lightly.  Everything in balance - the talent excuses the hint of arrogance, and the humour tempers it further.  It's a glorious combination to watch.  National allegiances fall by the wayside - everyone wants him to win so the legend can continue.

In interview he speaks in well-constructed sound bites.  Articulate, considered, confident.  'When it comes to the championships, it's all about business for me.'   

Business, yes.  But with some room for goating. 

That's how all business should be done.

Day 258: Double Thumbs

I didn't think I was particularly bothered about the Olympics.  But it's got me.  Today is epic.  Watching Jessica Ennis, under unimaginable pressure, hold her nerve and coolly deliver above and beyond.  Rutherford jumping long.  Mo Farah putting the pedal to the metal and sailing past his rivals. 

High drama.  Tension.  Triumph.  Tears.  You'd have to be dead inside to remain unmoved.

Cycling.  Rowing.  Now athletics.  What is going on?  Since when did we WIN stuff? 

National identity rebooted.  Double thumbs up, indeed.

Day 257: Taking the Cake

I cannot escape from sport at the moment. Work takes me to The Stoop - the Twickenham home of Harlequins. I thought rugby stopped in the summer. Maybe games do, but training certainly doesn't. The pitch is swarming with shouty meat. I have no idea what they are shouting, or what they are doing, but it's incredibly impressive to see so many physically fit human beings in one space. These people are in a different league. And those in the Olympics a league beyond that.

Back home, I walk through town amid normal mortals. It's Friday afternoon, and as I pass the cupcake shop (yes, really), people are queuing up to be served.

Cause and effect.

Day 256: Chicken or Egg?

Today, something I thought wouldn't work, didn't work. I'd piped up about this well in advance - but it's interesting how deaf people can become when you're telling them something that they don't want to hear.

I could have chickened out. But instead I gritted my teeth and did it. It bombed.

I feel no sense of smugness at being right. It's impossible to be smug while you're sponging metaphorical egg from your face.

Sense of injustice. The wrong person ended up wearing the egg.

.

Day 255: Bald Medal

Wiggo keeps his metaphorical chimp in the cage and gets gold to become Britain's most prolific Olympian.  Stanning and Glover - gold, and a first for women in rowing. 

As I mentioned yesterday, it's all about the role models.  So - without further ado - CLARE BALDING!  Britain's head girl.  Intelligent, articulate, warm, funny, enthusiastic - and damn good at her job.  And she's one of those people who's utterly absorbed in her work.  Which makes her immediately likeable.  No icky sense of her keeping a sneaky eye on the mirror of self-regard. 

Balding is truly ACE.