It's a long way from a white Christmas

We woke to snow falling on our Canberra garden this morning. Snow - in Australia! It's not what you expect. It's certainly not what I emigrated from Scotland in search of. I ought not to be too surprised though. We live about ninety-minutes' drive from the Snowy Mountains and, I suppose, the clue is in the their title. 

Spike, of course, was happier than a penguin at the south pole. Not only was it cold (minus two last night and minus four expected tonight), not only was the ground frosted hard, it was actually snowing as we looked out of our window. Wrapped only in her dressing gown Spike went to investigate, to willingly experience the cold (I guess) and take the photograph of our garage roof (which could pass for a ploughed field on a crisp northern morning from my childhood). 

While our intrepid photographer was out capturing her shot I was switching on the fire in our study because ... you know ... it was snowing outside. I ask you, does that seem odd to you?

Toasted

Hot cross and straight line buns by Spike Deane, 2016. Yummee.

Back to the future

Sitting in the shade of the house this morning there came a moment of epiphany. It was hot. The late summer sun - following on from what record-keepers report today is the hottest February recorded in more the seventy years - the front garden looked stressed  That's not helped, of course by the poor soil here in Canberra.

Spike stood opposite me, across the garden, beneath the shade of the trees at the roadside. It was pleasant over there, she said. And that's when epiphany struck. A lawn. Give up the almost certainly doomed attempts to cultivate vegetables in the meagre soil under a burning sun. Grow some sort of hardy grass with underground watering of some description. We can grow vegetables in large terracotta pots (as our wildly enthusiastic tomato plant is proving ... I know, I know ... a tomato is a fruit not a vegetable but you get my point). We shall redirect lost water from the roof to the pots, the apple tree that'll be going in and the grass.

Spike and Thistle-the-cat will have a shaded spot to sit or lounge or sleep in summer. We'll have grass. How retro. Who knew?

The man who gave the world self-assembly furniture

Gillis Lundgren. Pic: Bilder i Syd

A man I had never heard of before today has died. Vale Mr. Gillis Lundgren, fortuitous inventor in 1956 of flat-packed furniture and designer of the self-assembly Billy bookcase. 

We currently have eleven of them; ten up and bearing books, one still in its cardboard container waiting for Spike to finish the job. Gillis Lundgren, an unsung hero of modernity. A man who influenced the lives of tens of millions of us. Me included.

Painting the windows

Not quite what most people mean. Spike has been painting our windows. Love it.

Just say NO

4 times in 2 weeks . Am I becoming an addict? Or is IKEA simply poor at organising its supply chain?

The last Billy

This must be the place ...

What could be more difficult than following the assembly instructions of an IKEA Billy bookcase? Tab A into Slot B - as the excellent movie review team at BBC Radio Five Lives 'Wittertainment' programme often reminds us for no particularly solid reason. (It is the best two hours of informed discussion and reviews you are ever likely to come across by the way. Download the podcast. It has spellbinding extra features).

Buying a Billy bookcase from IKEA in Canberra. 

That's what could be more difficult. Although I confess, for the sake of dramatic effect I have exaggerated the degree of construction difficulty. You don't even need to be able to read - look at the drawings, screw in the screws, locate all the noodly bits you've lost on the floor, insert the shelves, slide the completed bookcase into its place. Easy. Mind you, I'm paralysed from the chest down so Spike does assembly. I observe and resist the temptation to mansplain how simple it is or give advice.

But Jeez - buying the last unit we needed to complete our book nook? It's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

This is a sad, short tale of not very much human suffering. We were in the store last Friday. The App insisted there were 40cm-wide cases in the 'market hall'. Nope. A helpful IKEA person said they were likely to be on a pallet somewhere back of house. They would be on the shelves from 9:00 a.m. Saturday morning. We'd already lost four hours of our lives wandering the IKEA road to Hell - following their illuminated arrows pointing to corporate good intentions. So we left.

We returned on Tuesday because the App insisted there were 40cm-wide Billy bookcases on the shelves in the market hall. Another hour wandering the pilgrim's way to the slough of despond. Nope. Sold out over the weekend apparently. We ran screaming from the building... bearing an IVER unit we had not been looking to purchase for the kitchen . But you can't leave empty handed, can you?

We returned today because the App and a human being said, 'yep - on the shelves in the market hall'. I elected to stay in the car because - to be frank - dying of heat exhaustion in a sun-baked IKEA car park was preferable to another hike around IKEA's path to the underworld. Spike, fortunately, is more clever than I am. She took the short cut via the canteen with its infinite supply of Swedish meatballs before returning, some hours later ... OK forty minutes ... with the slim bookcase to complete our set.

I will bet you good money the Library at Alexandria took less time to construct than our suburban idyll. Next time, we'll just leave the damn books piled on the floor where they do no one harm.

Houston ... we have a Triffid

When we bought the house three years ago there was an old wheelbarrow strategically positioned in an empty spot of the front garden. It contained a bed of small, uninteresting succulents barely reaching the top of the barrow sides. The plants have grown quite a bit in the intervening years and are now in danger of becoming quite interesting indeed. 

About three weeks ago they all began to look bigger, broader, more ... more ... succulent. And in the last fortnight or so, through days when the temperature regularly reached 30 degrees plus and almost touched 40 degrees a few times, despite several ferocious thunder storms and in the face of two wild hail storms, one of the succulents has shot up - straight into the air, heading towards half a metre.  It reminds me of the fictional Triffids.  Who knows what it will do next?

Summer in Australia ...... a winter wonderland?????

Not quite a polar vortex ...

... but enough to trouble a plaster-cast wombat
and his friends - the teapots.

We had temperatures in the high-thirties last week - 38 and 39 degrees, a total fire-ban and plants in dire need of rain.  This evening, as we arrived home from shopping, this lot and much, much more fell in two minutes.

At the end of a hot, frustrating day in a kiln room ...

... the need to prune a rioting bush is irresistable

Spike's first pear

Hogmanay ... but not as we know it

Wake up and smell Spike's tulips, Douglas

I have not been at my best since Tuesday evening.  Today, however, I crossed the threshold into a world in which spring announces its arrival.  And so I tweeted because I've become a man who tweets his news.  Who knows why?  

4 days confined to bed are OVER!!! #WakeUpAndSmellTheTulips Don't you just love being a Quad.? (That'll be a no) pic.twitter.com/Um1YaZj5ZY

— Dougie Herd (@dougie_herd) September 26, 2015

Cold in any currency

Leaf mulch, plastic bottles and a good deal of hope

First day of winter and there was frost on the ground, snow on the southern uplands and, I read in today's newspaper, snow on the streets of Braidwood where Spike and I spent Saturday.  The weather forecast tells us the temperature will drop to minus three degrees overnight, which is cold in anybody's language.  

Spike has been out in the garden, cutting the bottoms off empty bottles of sparkling water to use as mini-greenhouses to protect the sweet pea seedlings planted not so long ago in preparation for the return of warm weather and all that comes with spring.  Here's hoping the plastic bottles are up to the week ahead.

Preparing for spring

Spike's tools on a sunny day for planting garlic & tulip bulbs then hacking down a dead bush

The season of mist and mellow fruitfulness ... Keats tells us.

Choosing is a serious business: Pic by Spike

After a couple of cold, rainy days, just to make the point that summer is long gone, the sun has returned.  As soon as it did I was out there, in the garden, soaking-in the autumnal glow, basking in it like a retired lumberjack in my stylish -  euphemism for cheap - flannelet shirt. Spike captured the moment on camera - somewhat surreptitiously I may say - as I searched the Diggers Club catalogue (The Fruit Edition) which arrived in today's post, to identify the best buys of the season.  

As if I would know the first thing about about which plants to buy.  Not that I'd let a small matter such as absence of expertise stop me.  

My suggestions - which the resident gardener may accept or reject - were as follows:

• a Macadamia nut bush, which I concede is a bit speculative.  It may not like a frosty Canberra morning but if it survives there's the worry it could grow to 3 metres high by 3 metres wide.  I look forward to the day I suggest to Spike she harvests nuts from the top of that bush;
• a blueberry bush - superfood apparently - but not cheap so there's a bargain (if you discount all the hours of labour the gardener will need to put in);
• three types of raspberry - a favourite of the gardener - so I'm trying to curry favour there;
• a loganberry - because one can;
• a marionberry - because they look delicious in the photograph;
• broad bean seeds - because breadth is never a failing;
• spring onion seeds - because you never know when you'll need a spring onion; and 
• kohlrabi seeds - "a cool climate fast growing vegetable that tastes like cabbage but grows like turnip" apparently.  Now there's a root vegetable I never knew existed until today.

ceci n'est pas un navet ...

When the plants arrive - and throughout the growing season - I shall, no doubt, offer the layman's advice.  And the resident gardener,I suspect, may choose to ignore me.

Spike and the bean stalks

Planting beans in our garden's soil ...

... can be hard work

The cat that keeps on giving

Me?  But I'm so cute.

Butter would not melt in the mouth of our relaxed little cat, Thistle.  But she does like to catch, kill and sometimes eat rodents, lizards and small birds.  Large birds she leaves to their own devices.  Thistle is, when all's said and done, a small cat.

The cat often brings her prey to show us with what I cannot help but think is pride.  The parade of the captive animal often occurs at night, maybe three a.m. when we are asleep.  Spike has to rise from bed, chase the cat around the room or house, liberate the shocked, dead or dying small beast from the jaws of its captor then make the sometimes hard, sometimes easy decision.  Dead prey is easy.  In the bin.  Similarly easy are the decisions about traumatised but uninjured little creatures - released back into the wild that is our back garden.  More difficult is the decision about seriously injured, possibly fatally wounded creatures.  On at least one occasion the coup de gace was delivered with a spade.

Tell that to the rat.

Today's assuredly dead rodent - stiffer than a good gin - was not delivered to us.  Now and then Thistle the cat deposits and / or hides her prey around the house.  Does she store them for later or simply forget?  We'll never know.  Spike stumbled across this decent sized dead rat in our spare bedroom.  It was removed but there has been no indication the killer cat remembers it enough to be aggrieved that it's gone missing.

Who would have thought our cute little fur ball could be such a dedicated predator?  But now I think on that question the answer is obvious.  

Anyone Douglas.  

Our cute little cat's a predator.  They kill.

See how Spike's garden grows

Spike, cat and corn

It has been a while since I was anywhere near Spike's veggie plot so I was hugely impressed when Spike and the cat gave me a guided tour today.  We - which is the Royal We - have corn, beans, chillies, capsicum, shallots and rhubarb growing strong in the small space at the back of the garden Spike cleared earlier in the year.  We shall eat well by the time summer draws to a close.  

Had we moved to Geelong this harvest would not now be in the making.  All sorts of signals confirm the rightness of that decision.

It's all (a bit more than) double Dutch to me

The old year is drawing to a close with an unexpected flurry of socialising, which is a bit uncharacteristic for a grumpy old man like me. Yesterday my former colleague at the National Disability Insurance Agency, Ray Jeffrey dropped in to say hello.  He's a Gilmore resident like us but has been based in Brisbane since August to help prepare the ground for the roll out of the NDIS in Queensland from mid-2016.

Shortly after Ray departed our visitors from The Netherlands arrived to stay the night.  I've not seen Klary Van Keulen since 1974 or maybe (at a push) 1975 when I was 17 or 18 years old.  That'll be forty years ago.

Dib, dib, dib ...

We met for the first time in 1973 at the international Scouts Chalet in Kandersteg, Switzerland.  I was there with the 24th Glasgow (Bearsden) Scout Troop on what was my second visit to the Bernese Oberland. Klary was a member of a Dutch Scout Troop which, much to our adolescent Scottish boys' delight, included girls as well as boys.  That would be enough of a reason to be friendly as far as we were concerened but there were all kinds of other attractions, not least their smoking habits - Drum and Samson loose leaf tobacco extracted from bright blue pouches to roll into cigarette using just one hand!  How cool might that be to a teenage boy from Glasgow still wet behind the ears? Forty years on, none of us smokes.

The year after we met I took trains around Europe using the InterRail Pass ticket system which, at that time, allowed you unrestricted train travel in 17 countries or thereabouts for a month for a ridiculously low price. (The same pass today, covering about twice the number of countries, costs a bit under 800 Euro.  Is that still a bargain?  No idea.)  Not that it matters to anyone but me, but the fact my InterRail trip was my second time meeting Klary - this time in Enschede and Hengelo in The Netherlands - means I would shortly go to university which means I'd left the Royal Bank of Scotland (my first job after leaving school) which means I was 17 when we met in Switzerland, so - 1974 - forty years ago.  But I digress.

Klary, her husband Gerrit, Klary's sister Nettie (who I also met in 1974), Nettie's daughter Diana, Klary's daughter Margriet and her fiance, an Australian soldier named Clint arrived ysterday evening.  We talked, ate food, drank wine and beer, retired to bed then started the eating and talking again this morning over breakfast.  And then our Dutch friends left for Sydney where Margriet and Clint will be married on the 9th January.  By ten to five in the afternoon the tourists were posting photos of themselves on the beach at Wollongong having lunched with Clint's family in Campbelltown.  
 
An hour after Klary and her unambiguously Dutch entourage left Gilmore we were visited by a school friend of Spike, Stephanie with her husband Nick and boys Ruben and Fraser.  Outside of a school reunion earlier this year Spike and Stephanie had not seen one another for about 15 years.  It all makes me wonder, where does the time go?  But we both owe it to Facebook for re-connecting us to people we've not seen for years; decades in my case.  It's too easy to have a go at Facebook but you can't really argue with this re-uniting potential that it carries for all of us. Or is that simply an observation for old fogeys like me? Probably but what can a man do?  An old fogey is an old fogey.  Need proof ...?  While Stephanie and Spike were chatting Ruben, Stephanie's six year old eldest son, wupped this old man's ass at noughts and crosses on the youngster's iPhone.

Tragic old man.  But a happy old man who's had a lovely twenty four hours with friends old and new.