Scenic Saturday

For some months I have been toying with an idea: finding a picture of something or somewhere in each county of England that encapsulates the spirit of that county. Part of the reason for doing nothing about the idea is that although I have visited or driven through every county in England - at least, I think I have - I have certainly not taken photographs wherever I have been. However, I have decided to set myself a challenge. My goal is to beg, steal or borrow pictures where necessary and provide a scenic tour of England by featuring a different county each Saturday.



The first county on the list is Kent, situated at the most south-easterly corner of the country. It seems a pretty good place to start as this is the county of my birth. It is also the nearest to the continent (as Europe is known to us), so it is the first county that many Europeans see when they visit England. Kent calls itself the Garden of England on account of the many fruit orchards and hop fields there once were in the county. Sadly, many of them have now disappeared and the county is better known as the route of the high-speed rail link to France and beyond as the route of the M20 motorway linking London to Dover, the busiest port in the world, and ferries for Europe. But Kent is more than that. There are the extensive marshes in the north of the county along the Thames and Medway estuaries and, in the south-east, Dungeness, a wild and desolate promontory which is the site of a nuclear power station and a landfall for many migrating birds. And Kent is also the cradle of British Christianity and the "home" of the Church of England's senior Archbishop, Canterbury. In past centuries Kent was also the site of two of the counties main naval dockyards - Deptford and Chatham. In fact, Nelson's flagship, HMS Victory, was built at Chatham.

Talking of historic buildings, two of the county's castles are very well-known: Hever and Leeds.

My first thought for a picture was Canterbury cathedral but then I had second thoughts. Why not use a picture of something which is the first many people see of England? So here are the white cliffs of Dover.

Blue hydrangeas

We have no fewer than four hydrangeas in the garden, two of them having grown into pretty large bushes. Although she has never said as much, I reckon that the hydrangea is probably one of Mrs Pensioner's favourite plants. I have noticed that, apart from clipping out the dead flower-heads at the appropriate time, she never cuts back those plants. They must be about the only ones in the garden that never succumb to the secateurs. But, much to Her Ladyship's disappointment, all four plants produce pink flowers. That is because our soil is very chalky and hydrangeas in chalky soil produce pink flowers. One of them was bought for its blue flowers and even though it was planted in ericaceous compost in a tub, the flowers, which were blue when we bought it, came out pink the next year. We have tried other ways of producing blue. Mrs BP heard that one could bring out the blue by burying iron in the soil so, when we planted one of the them, I had to trawl junk yards for a load of iron and dig a hole large enough to bury said metal beneath the hydrangea. But it didn't work. Madam was, therefore, absolutely over the moon when she found we had a large (very large) hydrangea in the courtyard of the house we bought in France - and it has blue flowers!

Pensioner accepts challenge

Makes a good headline, doesn't it?

One of the blogs I follow is written by Jim 'Suldog' and he recently listed 100 things he loves about America. Having done so, he challenged readers to come up with their own lists, whether about America or their own countries. Now, there's one thing some of us Brits (Limeys, Pongos, Rosbifs) can't resistn, and that's a bit of a challenge. It might take us some time to really get a response going, but we usually get there in the end. And I have.

What follows is a list of 100 things I like about England. Some of the are essentially English, some uniquely English (or even British); some are sentimental, some quirky or downright zany. Some can be found anywhere, some can be found elsewhere than England but not everywhere. All of them can be found right here in the land I love. Yes, I am proud to be English. Anyway, here goes.

1	Cheddar cheese
2	Cricket
3	Country pubs
4	Double-decker buses
5	Big Ben
6	Fish & chips
7	Nowhere is more than a couple of hours from the sea
8	The temperate climate
9	Bovril
10	Cottage gardens
11	Village greens
12	Roast dinners on Sundays
13	Bonfire night
14	The way the scenery changes even in short journeys
15	Ancient churches
16	The National Health Service
17	The South Downs
18	Melton Mowbray pork pies
19	The British system of justice
20	The monarchy - especially the Duke of Edinburgh
21	Royal Marine bands
22	The Last Night of the Proms
23	A stable political system
24	Policemen who don't carry guns
25	Stately cathedrals
26	Free speech
27	Public libraries
28	Free bus passes for the over 60s
29	English apples
30	Fresh cream
31	Crumpets
32	Cornish clotted cream teas
33	Tea - made the English way!
34	Electric kettles
35	A tolerant society (on the whole)
36	Morecambe & Wise
37	Public parks with grass in them
38	Our love of animals
39	The English Channel
40	The Lake District
41	Clean water at the turn of a tap
42	Roast potatoes
43	Mince pies
44	Victoria sponges
45	Cadbury's crème eggs
46	Bournville chocolate
47	Chris Barber's jazz band
48	Elizabethan manor houses
49	Bright red pillar boxes
50	The Commonwealth War Graves Commission
51	People not wearing their hearts on their sleeves
52	The BBC
53	Lack of the death penalty
54	A TV channel devoted to repeats of old programmes
55	Christmas pudding
56	William Shakespeare
57	Red telephone boxes
58	The musical drive of the Royal Horse Artillery
59	Freedom of religion
60	Thatched cottages
61	A reliable supply of electricity
62	Bitter beer
63	The British banking system
64	Strawberry jam
65	Blue tits
66	Chelsea buns
67	You can drive from one end of England to the other in a day
68	The Old Crock's Run
69	Punch & Judy shows
70	English understatement
71	Branston pickle
72	Independence of the press
73	Internet banking
74	Steak & kidney pudding
75	Oxford colleges
76	Cambridge colleges
77	Postman's Park
78	Most people speak the same language as me
79	Buses with signs advising the next stop
80	Seaside piers
81	The Royal Pavilion
82	Thick-cut marmalade
83	The song of the blackbird
84	Toasted teacakes
85	Train-spotters are tolerated
86	The massed bands of the Brigade of Guards
87	Not too many dangerous wild animals
88	Men wearing socks with sandals (thereby giving me a laugh)
89	Going abroad is easy
90	Digestive biscuits
91	The white cliffs of Dover
92	Full English breakfasts
93	No land borders with other countries (except Wales & Scotland which, for the purposes of this exercise, don't count)
94	The ability to poke fun at ourselves
95	A wide range of affordable foods
96	Hot, buttered toast
97	Christmas cake
98	Sea water spray in a storm
99	My family is here
100	A warm bed on a cold, windy, rainy night

I've included just a very few links, but I'm sure you can find more if you want to.

An eye for an eye?

When I visited the public library last weekend I spotted a Grisham book that I had not read - The Innocent Man. I only came across it because it had been wrongly shelved in the fiction area. Part of the blurb reads: "If you believe in the death penalty, this book will disturb you". Now, I do not agree with the death penalty - I don't think I ever have. My main problem with it is that there have been times when an innocent person was executed, but neither can I agree with the "eye for an eye" philosophy.

(As an aside, I find it a little confusing that the Old Testament talks of an eye for an eye, whereas in the New Testament we are urged to turn the other cheek and to forgive our enemies.)

Having stated my opinion, I must accept that proponents of the death sentence do have points with some validity. They might, for instance, worry that a life sentence is not quite what it purports to be and that some murderers will be released from prison after serving only 14 or 15 years. Do we, they ask, really want to release a murderer so he can do it again? But they are overlooking the fact that the vast majority of murders are committed against family members and the released murderer poses little or no threat to society in general. As I understand it, only seldom is a murder committed at random, and in those cases the guilty party is imprisoned for very much longer periods; indeed, they are often imprisoned for the rest of their lives.

It is when those who want to bring back hanging resort to complaining about the cost of keeping a man (or woman) in jail that I start to be concerned about their pro-death penalty stance. Yes, I know it costs many thousands of pounds a year to lock up someone, but that doesn't strike me as a very good reason for killing them instead.

Then there are the difficult cases, the people who might be described as truly evil, like Fred & Rose West, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Yes, their crimes were horrific, but I can't be sure that they were not insane as opposed to evil. Is there such a thing as a truly evil person? I'm not entirely sure there is.

But to get back to the book. Reading it, one forms the opinion that justice in the Oklahoma town of Ada was, back in the years when those events occurred, very much a hit or miss affair. But is that picture accurate? District Attorney Bill Peterson was sufficiently incensed to set up a web site to counter Grisham's alleged inaccuracies.

I suppose the reader pays his money and makes his choice, but it doesn't alter the fact that another innocent man was very nearly put to death.

I forgot to mention...

...that it rained yesterday evening. Although in the interests of telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth I suppose I should say that it nearly rained yesterday evening. What we actually had was three or four minutes of gentle (very gentle) drizzle, nothing like what we need.

Diamond Geezers

Brighton Lions Club is 60 years old this year and way back last autumn I took it upon myself to produce a history of the club during those 60 years. It was an interesting experience to learn just how enterprising were the Lions of Brighton in the years before I joined the club, some of the challenges they took on being quite enormous. At last week's meeting I told the club that the book was finished and ready to go to the printers. What I wanted was a rough idea how many copies to have printed, thinking that twenty or so would be ample. No, I was told, the club thought every member should be given a copy, some should be given to important people like the Mayor, and some should be kept to be given to new members. 60 should be enough. I was flabbergasted but agreed to order 60 copies.

I had said the book was ready to go to the printers, but in fact there was still a little more to do. I had to convert the file to .pdf format and burn it to a disc. Now that would normally cause no problems. Normally. But this time, of course, it did. I decided to finish off the August issue of Jungle Jottings before starting on Diamond Geezers (as the book is called). Now I always send out JJ in .pdf format having produced it in WordPerfect. Conversion is simple enough: I have a freebie program which converts as part of the printing process. But no matter how many times I tried to convert, only half of JJ would emerge in the .pdf document. I finally decided the .wpd (WordPerfect) file must be too large. With several pictures in this issue, it was a pretty big file. I reduced the size of the graphics, and lo and behold - problem solved.

It was the same with Diamond Geezers. No matter what I did, the .pdf file contained less than half the .wpd file - and there was no way I could reduce the size of the file. However, although the printers could not accept WordPerfect files, they could accept Word files as well as .pdf. So, I saved the .wpd file as a .doc file. But that threw up other problems, principally with the formatting.

(This is where I must insert a prescript.)

Flashback twenty years: PCs (personal computers) were not called that in those days - they were desktop computers. It was about then that, in my capacity as general manager of a small company, I bought myself my first computer. Well, the company bought it for me to use in the office. That computer didn't come with all sorts of goodies pre-packaged and any software had to be bought separately. I decided to use WordPerfect as my word processor. I can't remember why I chose WordPerfect: I don't suppose it was simply because I liked the colour of the packaging but it might have been for an equally inane reason. Whatever the reason, WordPerfect it was. And I still use it today. Eventually, of course, I upgraded my computer (several times, even since retirement) but I have loaded good old WordPerfect onto each one. I did try using Word, but because I had become so set in my ways with WP, I just couldn't get to grips with it. And I still think that WP is the better program for some things.

Anyway, Diamond Geezers was now on my desktop in Word format - but everything was skewwhiff! It took me ages to sort out - and I still can't get to grips with section breaks! But sorted out it was, so I burned it to a disc and went off to the printers yesterday afternoon. They checked it out and it looks good for printing, so in three or four weeks' time Diamond Geezers will be in print. And the printers gave me a very good price as well.

Talking of crops

Well, I was the other day.

It was on Friday that I picked the first peas of the year. There's something very special about the first picking, even though the peas are always very good when they go from the garden to the plate in no more than 30 minutes on any day. The first runner beans should be ready in a week or two.

On Friday I also lifted my entire crop of potatoes, onions and garlic. The garlic took very little time as the entire crop had failed. The onions weren't much better and those that had done anything are no bigger than shallots! And to think that we finished last year's crop only three or four weeks ago - both onions and garlic. The potatoes were an experiment - which didn't work. I have grown potatoes in the past, although not for many years, but this year I bought three planter bags with 15 seed potatoes as a special offer. There were just enough potatoes for one meal. I will not be repeating the experiment next year.

I also picked the first of the gooseberries and found a few more blackcurrants. Most of the blackcurrants were picked three weeks back. The raspberry canes produced a handful of fruit, but that is very early as they are autumn-fruiting canes. And this year, for the first time in many years, I managed to beat the birds to some of the cherries. All of three of them, and the birds have got the rest.