And we begin again ...

After Midnight. Happy (and hopeful) New Year to all. Pic by Spike Deane

Spike's spuds

Picked this morning

Before ...

and after.

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.

Imagining writing spaces

Music to lose oneself inside

Week 2 of my writing course has started and I'm enjoying myself. So that's not at all bad. It's free. I think I'm learning something (about myself if nothing else). And I'm writing, inspired by Andy Warhol in a way and with track after track of Brian Eno's mesmerising* 'ambient' music playing in the background. It has a meditative, trance-inducing quality that seems to help me write, distraction-free, like I have never known before.

Here's an exercise completed during this afternoon's three-hour session. The time flew past unnoticed.

Trying to picture the worst place for you to try to write can help you realise what your best venue might be. Imagine two different venues for writing – one that seems most suited to you, and one that you would find bizarre or too difficult. Write a paragraph describing two writers at work, one in each of the venues.

(Edit of previous attempt, still describes my imaginary writing-space from Hell. All those responsibilities!) 

The Kitchen Table 

It's crowded with belongings that are not mine. Some, I suspect, have no known owner. Space is at a premium and we tussle over any new area that opens up temporarily. It's like the universe described by Dr Steven Hawking - constantly in motion and expanding. Chaos rules. Meals take place there sometimes and a fruit bowl, like a giant black hole, devours any object falling into its clutches. Were there not bananas once, a handful of pears, perhaps a pineapple? All vanish no matter how often we replace them. There are stacks of books - his, hers, theirs - like ancient standing stones in far locations set by the great librarian in the sky. Layers may shift and change over time but the columns remain. Inviolable. Like the pillars on Mount Olympus. There is mail too - who could imagine so much could still be sent and received in this online age? And homework - there is always homework; three sets at varying stages - not quite finished, waiting to be checked and ... "oh, is that where my homework went?" 

So. Not a place to write. But what a place to live our lives.

And the positive alternative:

"Andy Worhol - superstar"

My Place 

I have a room of my own, as Virginia Woolf advised us almost a Century ago. I know I'm lucky. 

It's a small room at the end of the hall and the cat is my most frequent visitor. She, by and large, is entirely disinterested in a mere mortal like me. Unless she wants fed. 

My desk faces an almost blank wall, except for the paper carrier bag I've hung there: large, square, white with giant black letters down one side. 'MoMA' - from the gallery store. It contains a print of Andy Worhol's image behind these words, "art is what you can get away with". I think that's a bit like my mind. Words are in there. Hidden. They might be art. I just have to work at taking them out of the bag. 

There's a PC on my desk and clutter - my clutter - which only I may move: a teapot, books I've read or am about to read, and my new writer's notebook, never out of reach now. I have bookshelves behind me, a radiator for winter and a window with a seductively uninteresting view of the world beyond: our back garden which is world enough when I'm working. 

We've agreed it's my place. To think. To be not distracted. To take small risks as I write. To make mistakes. To learn. Make more mistakes. And write again.

* By the way, "mesmerising" seems to be this week's fave word. I'm using it all over the place.

Booked

Firs stop - Tokyo

Our itinerary is more or less sorted.  The flights are booked.  The day has been given over to the search for accommodation. Looking for wheelchair accessible showers is always a challenge but we've started.  One hotel booked for four nights.  3 nights sleeping on long haul flights.  That leaves 30 nights to resolve while the clock ticks down to departure. Excited.  Bit freaked out but we'll be fine.

Hogmanay ... but not as we know it

News from the colonies to the old country

So my name cropped up in a Facebook wander down memory lane by some old friends peppered across the UK now.  In the late 1970s and early 1980s we were part of the same student politics organisation.  There were ups and downs, as I recall those times, but it was fun to be involved.  They were exciting times in which we helped to move the world forward in some areas, were beaten back in others.

I felt no real need to enter into the nostalgia but then my name came up.  Someone then asked, "is Dougie Herd still alive?"  Time, I thought, to intervene.  So I added these words to the conversation:

Call this living comrades? Call this alive?

I'm in a Tory Hell with a Prime Minister that thinks the 16th Century was a bit advanced, that global warming is a left wing conspiracy, that Prince Phillip needed a Knighthood from the Australian people, that women have a place but only one of them is good enough for that place to be in his Cabinet, that it's ok for his sister to be gay but not ok for his sister to marry the woman she lives with ... and that football is played with a rugby ball and goals with no nets. 

I could go on but then I look at home and see George Osborne is considered by some to be an economic progressive and free-thinking, intellectual power house.

If that's all not bad enough .... and it is ... we have three types of spiders in our back garden that could kill you if you look at them, brown snakes that'll stop your heart beating if you even think to breathe in the same space as them and a giant chicken-like bird called a Cassowary that could rip your lungs out in five seconds. And that's before we even mention the sharks, sting rays and crocodiles.

All things considered though ... one mustn't grumble.

A luta continua!! A luta continua.

Preparing for spring

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

It seemed like a good idea at the time

Worked through the night.  I should have left that way of being back there in my student days when I was young, lacked wisdom and could rely on black coffee to see me through.

Now ... I am just a wrecked, old hulk waiting for dawn to come and birds to sing.  So what if my work is further forward?  A week from now no one will care. Not even me.

The artist formerly known as Cat Stevens.  He'll see me through.

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.

Won't you roll away the stone?

Sleeping man dreams of chocolate, Easter Sunday 2015. Pic by Spike

One is ready and willing for neither the message of Easter nor a return to Mott the Hoople and 1974.  

The chocolate I will engage with.  But later; much, much later.

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.

That's a lot of melon for two people

Cat with melon - getting to know one another

That, I thought, when I saw Spike approach our car parked outside the supermarket, is a big melon.  It seemed to weigh her down, as an obdurate child who did not want to leave the chocolate aisle might weigh down a mother forced to carry her reluctant four year old off the premises.

Since I first set eyes on the monster melon, however, I have been contemplating the many and varied ways it will be incorporated into our diet over the next few months ... melon juice (obviously), fruit salad with extra melon, melon on toast, deep fried melon (in honour of my Scottish culinary roots ... but even that may be a deep frier too far), melon au gratin ...

No, I don't think so either.

As for Thistle - well, she's in charge of everything so the melon (having been scrutinised carefully) was deemed to be a) not an immediate threat, b) not edible (if you're a cat with a discerning palate) and c) not really that interesting, not even as a plaything.