Two very busy weeks back in the UK, and no sign yet of much in the way of R&R - rest and recuperation. The tree surgeons very expensively took down one dead ash tree and trimmed another very big live one, cut down four dead elms, a dying maple, a very dead plum tree and trimmed a large elder blotting the sun from the lean-to tomato green house. They left a huge pile of detritus which I have been working my way through for 2-3 hours every day. It contains quite a lot of log potential and useful kindling, but this has to be sorted out, sawn and stacked for storage. The rest is going to a planned big bonfire (but maybe not if the drought continues) and three huge wild life sanctuaries in the wooded area. It's taken a lot of time and energy, but I am nearing the end of it.
I've learnt a lot about wood in the process. Elm is very tough to cut and doesn't snap. Try to break a branch off and you end up twisting it round and round. I have a vague memory that hurdle or trug makers used to exploit that characteristic in some way. Elder strikes me as completely useless. The Bullas trees are hard to cut too and dangerously prickly. Compared to them, ash is a doddle. Anyway when I'm finished, I think I'll have probably four to five years worth of firewood for the wood-burner. Given the soaring cost of energy that might be quite a bonus.
So one of
the sounds of the past two weeks has been that of sawing interspersed with the
odd bout of cursing. Another one I've missed over the past four months is the
sound of heavy agricultural machinery trundling past. A further rural sound of
course is that of horse-riders trotting past. It's a kind of background one
gets used to and doesn't really focus on. Except one day recently that these
seemed rather fast. So, I went to investigate, and found two riderless white
horses in the front garden panting deeply but clearly about to have a whale of
a time. So having failed to rouse the local farmer, I dialled 999. I was trying
to explain to the local police (whose
record in attending to public calls, rather like the ambulance service, is
amongst the worst in the whole country)
where my village was when I heard an explosion of hooves and through the
window saw the horses racing off down the road, clearly having the time of
their lives. No reports of subsequent accidents, fortunately. Selfishly I closed
my gates that evening. It clearly alarmed my newspaper deliverer who simply
threw the Guardian over the gate instead, American style, but without the
protective plastic wrapper. So I gave that up pretty quickly The nervousness
remained for a day or so. A bout of clip-clopping the following day sent me
rushing to see, but it was only a girl from the village riding past.
The other
adventure of the fortnight was a talk on the South China Sea for a long time friend
and colleague to an organisation called Probus. It has nothing to do with the
saint my prep school was named after, but stands for Professional and Business.
'Oh it will be at the High Rocks Hotel Tunbridge Wells' he said blithely, ' you
can't miss it.' The project was complicated by the fact that the same morning I
had to take the car into the garage in Salisbury and collect a hire car. Assuming
it would have a satnav I didn't take a map. It didn't but the young lady connected
my US phone(the UK one wouldn't work) to
the car's audio system , the route came upon the car screen and off I went. The
system flipped out before I had left Salisbury. So I stopped, having correctly
guessed which road to take, and dialled up satnav just on the US phone, and
switched the car audio system off. Fine. There was no phone-holder of course, so
I laid it on the passenger seat and did
what Vera (the satnav voice) told me to do. It all worked and I made such good
progress I decided to stop for a cappuccino at Fleet services on the M3.
Resuming I realised that Vera had gone. The picture was still there, but I
couldn't restore the sound. But with a lot of looking down at the passenger
seat I ploughed on.
The issue is
that High Rocks is to Tunbridge Wells what Stonehenge is to Salisbury, only worse because it's
inside a maze of very hilly single track roads with inadequate signage and a
lot of other cars hurtling about. Sudden stops and the phone slid onto the
floor, its map screen included. Nowhere to pull off and find it again, a car
right behind me invading my space. It was awful. At one stage in the middle of
this unexpected nowhere, I had the help of a glamorous young lady-receptionist in a
nearby Restaurant called the Beacon who assured me that the steep track by the
side of the building was indeed a road and that if I kept on down it I couldn't
miss the High Rocks. She was right. Weirdly I was only ten minutes late. Much
more delay was caused by my friend and his colleagues trying to a make the
electronics work ! Getting the hotel 'techy' in solved the problem eventually.
After that everything went fine.
I went on and
stayed the night with Ruth, Simon and Violet. The occasion was the latter young
lady's graduation from pre-school. The parents all gathered for this charming
celebration to watch them all miming with hand movements the lyrics of two pop
songs. It was all very sweet, bordering on the hilarious. Equally so were stories
of Violet's attempts to put spaghetti up her nose, one of those issues where
the 'how' is as difficult to understand as the 'why.'
The other family catch-up event was the hot weekend before when I was privileged to see both Barney and Martha in the school play - 'Legally Blond' - the musical. It was a lot better than I had been led to expect and I was really quite impressed by the overall standard, though I could see why some parents had reservations about the school's choice of play. The following day the whole dynasty turned up for a splendid day chatting, eating, drinking, staying out of the sun and being splashed by the kids in the paddling pool. It was terrific. Many photos of course, including the one above with me and all four grandchildren. Somehow I never imagined that one day I would be in a photo like that !
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