Will it or won't it?

Another bank holiday weekend, which should by rights mean that the weather is terrible.  That's the way we do things here in England.  But wait a minute; the young lady who gave us the local weather forecast just after half past ten last night said the temperature today and tomorrow would rise to about 17 or 18 degrees.  That's mid 60s in old money.  If were not so bone idle I could look it up and give a more exact translation but I reckon mid 60s is near enough.  Not that there has been much sign of the temperature matching the forecast so far today.  Indeed, when I walked the dog after breakfast I wore a winter coat and was not too warm at all.  There was still a stiff breeze from the north to keep things from becoming too tropical.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the weather widget in my sidebar tells a different story from last night's forecast, with the temperature for today hitting a high of just 15.

Global warming, whatever happened to that?  Three or four years ago it was suggested that we English should restock our gardens with drought-resistant plants and those we are more accustomed to seeing around the Mediterranean.  This year we have suffered a cold spring, with the month of March being the coldest for more than half a century!

Anyway, if the temperatures do get up to "normal" either today or tomorrow, things are due to start going downhill again during the course of the Monday bank holiday and the children on half-term holiday next week will have to endure cold - and probably wet - weather.

But I must stop off for a while as the Old Bat wants to go to Marks & Spencer.  She fancies one of their "dine in for two for £10" meals tonight.  They are pretty good value with a main dish, a side dish, a dessert and a bottle of wine all for the price of £10.

When I get back I'll look out a picture to post.

~~~~~

Skip was telling us about an earthquake he didn't notice.  We might get the odd tremor in England but they are always very faint - nothing to warrant signs like the one we spotted in a shop in Eureka, California.  It probably seems quite commonplace to many, but to this Englishman it was extraordinary, even exotic.

Landscaping

We have lived in our house for more than 40 years.  There have been times when we thought about selling and moving somewhere else but here were always very good reasons for staying put.  So we did.  I think we have now become so deeply rooted here that we will only move out in boxes, or to places halfway to our boxes.  In all those years there has been only time when I have made an effort to redesign the back garden.  Granted, there have been tweaks from time to time, but only that one complete redesign.  The time has come, or is fast approaching, for me to find paper and pencil once again.

Our back garden - and it is the back garden with which I am the more concerned at the moment - slopes down away from the house.  There are steps down from the house to the garden and then, a third of the way down the garden, there is a steep bank with more steps.  This is why I talk about the top lawn and the bottom lawn. The bottom two-thirds is divided into two parts, the part nearer the house being grass and flower beds while below the fence is what has until now been the vegetable garden.

The top garden is bordered on one side by our garage and consists of a kidney-shaped lawn (although the convex side is really just a straight line) with flowers and shrubs on the concave side.  The straight side has a narrow border between it and the paved path and between the path and the garage is a flower bed.  Our next-door neighbour has a number of trees which overhang this part of the garden and there is a pear tree just at the top of the bank to the lower lawn.  This encouraged me to try recreating a sort of woodland glade here, with the aim that as one walked down the garden, different plants would come into view.

We descend three steps under an arch covered with honeysuckle to reach the bottom lawn.  I shaped this with a sweeping curve from bottom right to top left, halfway along which was another short, curving grass path leading under an arch to a gate to the vegetable garden.  Various shrubs were planted alongside the fence separating the bottom lawn and the vegetable garden with a vigorous clematis scrambling along the fence and over the arch - which has a climbing rose on the other side pushing up through the clematis.  There is an apple tree with daffodils beneath and a bench facing the setting sun.

This all sounds very English country garden; I just wish it looked as good as it sounds.

As I said - or implied - earlier, the whole shooting match was designed so that a person walking down the garden would encounter new plants and flowers and different views while progressing in either direction.  But what I want to think about now is the view of the garden from both the kitchen window and the bedroom window.  The Old Bat has not been into the garden for several months now.  Granted, the weather has not been inducive to it, but I really don't see her getting down there much if at all in the future.  So I need to ensure that what she sees is better then what we have now.  The shrubs in the bottom garden might perhaps need to be taller than at present while I could think of more pots planted with colourful annuals around the top lawn.

I shall need to give this matter some more thought.

~~~~~

Surrenden Road, Brighton is a suburban road with a difference.  It is a dual carriageway for much of its length with a wide swathe of grass down the middle.  Horse chestnut trees line the verge and the centre grass, trees that are allowed to reach their full size, like this one.

Pricy

This is proving to be an expensive week - and it will continue into next week.

Monday: we went out for a meal, driving down to our local Italian, possibly our favourite Brighton restaurant.  Should have checked first: they are closed on Mondays.  So let's try another we have heard good reports of.  It was OK, but we both prefer our local.  It was also somewhat more expensive, but fortunately the Old Bat decided to treat me to mark my not-long-past birthday.

Yesterday: the dog was at the vet's to have her teeth cleaned and polished.  Lucky they take credit cards.

Today: the car is in for service - and might need new brake pads.  Another hit on the plastic.

Next Tuesday:  the car again.  This time at a VW specialist to look at the electric parking brake.

And it's cold.  Here we are, just a month off the longest day and we still have the heating on!  It would be pleasant to have some warm weather like we enjoyed when we visited Turckheim in Alsace.

The awkward squad

There was a programme on the BBC a few days ago about the Dambusters which we were unable to watch at the time.  It was a live broadcast from RAF Scampton to mark the 70th anniversary of the raid.  The BBC saw fit to air it on their second channel but really it should have been given more prominence.  I recorded it and have just got round to watching it and it inspired me to find out a little more about the leader of that raid, Wing Commander Guy Gibson.  It's staggering to think that he was just 24 at the time.  His death just two years later remains a mystery - or, rather, the cause of his death remains a mystery and deserves a post all of its own.  Anyway, it seems that although he was an inspirational leader of men, he could be an awkward bugger.  I was reminded of that other awkward bugger of an airman, Douglas Bader.

Although he was knighted later, he was just plain Douglas Bader - or probably Flying Officer Douglas Bader - when he crashed his plane and, as a result, had both legs amputated.  Within 6 months he had learned to walk again on artificial legs but was ruled unfit to continue as an RAF pilot.  That was in the 1930s.  However, when war broke out he joined up again and was soon flying Spitfires and then Hurricanes.  He was shot down and taken prisoner, escaped - or tried to - and eventually arrived at Colditz, the camp for the determined escapers.

His determination and refusal to be beaten meant that, like Gibson, he didn't always hit it off with others, although he was an inspirational leader.

Another person whom I would describe as a member of the awkward squad is my wife, the Old Bat.  Her lack of mobility due to her condition (corticobasal degeneration) is slowly increasing.  I say slowly, but there seems to have been a marked deterioration over the last few months.  And yet she refuses to give in although it is obvious to me that she finds some things more and more difficult.  I am only too willing to help out where I can, but I do wish she would tell me when things are getting too bad.  I also wish she would accept that she sometimes needs more than just a stick to help her - but I just cannot bring myself to suggest that a mobility aid such as a walker is needed.  Stubborn, obstinate, too proud to admit defeat, that's the problem.

It must be 20 or more years ago now that the Old Bat, our daughter and I rented a cottage fairly near to Paris and made a day trip into the city.  I remember that my hip was playing up and I was struggling to walk but I took inspiration from the Marines who had "yomped" across the Falkland Islands covering goodness knows how many miles a day over difficult terrain and with full battle kit.  Just by imagining myself as one of them I was able to forget the arthritis and walk more easily.  I no longer see myself as a Bootneck (Navy slang for a Royal Marine) but Bader and the Old Bat still provide inspiration when it is needed.

~~~~~

The rape was in full bloom in the Loire when we were over in France a few weeks back but it is only just coming to its peak here on the Downs.  This is the view to the east from 39 Acres, looking directly over the University of Brighton's Falmer campus with the new Amex Community Stadium just to the right.

The golden calf

I have occasionally told of legends connected with my adopted county of Sussex but I have only just learned of a new one.  I was given a book about Sussex on my recent birthday and the flyleaf promises to tell the tale of the fabulous golden calf which lies buried somewhere on the South Downs.  The calf is the one that Aaron had made for the Israelites and some people are supposed to have a pretty good idea of its approximate location.  When I get that far into the book I'll let you know!

Meanwhile, you might be amused to learn of a twist in the Sussex dialect that was once common: the reduplicated plural.  For example, fairies were commonly called pharisees.  Schoolteachers used a nonsense rhyme in their attempts to drum the habit out of children:

I saw three ghosteses
Sitting on posteses
Eating hot toasteses.
The butter ran down their fisteses,
Dirty little beasteses!

In old Sussex, gender was almost always feminine.  The old Sussex saying about this is that "everything in Sussex is a She except a tom cat and she's a He".

Mayhap I'll come back to this subject somewhen.

Could the golden calf be buried somewhere in this picture of Standean on the South Downs just north of Brighton?

I really must learn...

...to pace myself.  Both today and - even more so - yesterday I have felt almost uncomfortably stiff, the result of doing too much on both Friday and Saturday.  I am, naturally, well aware that I am not now as fit or as young as once I was and I have made adjustments to my routine to accommodate my slowly failing flesh.  The flesh may be weaker but the spirit is still willing - and therein lies my problem.  Or challenge.  I absolutely refuse to vegetate but until the latest drug starts kicking in properly - or some other treatment is more successful - I must accept that there is a limit to what I can do.  What really finished things off on Saturday was spending most of the evening on my feet while kurling.

Kurling, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the indoor version of curling, the sport (or game) in which players slide stones across the ice.  Saturday's event was the 6th in the local Lions Clubs' Zone Olympics and I was half of one of the two pairs Brighton Lions had entered in the event.  It might perhaps have been better if the four of us from Brighton had not made a fundamental mistake in how we thought the scoring was carried out.  It was not until halfway through the evening that we learned of our error.  Had we known earlier, we might have adopted different tactics.

Both our pairs had won their first match 3-0 and went on to win their following two matches so at the halfway stage we assumed we were doing very well.  Then we learned otherwise.  We had assumed that each team scored a point for winning a game so that the team which won the most games would end up as overall winners.  But it doesn't work like that.  It's a bit as though, in football, the number of goals scored by each team decides their placings rather than how many matches they have won.  So a team that lost three games but scored two goals in each would be higher in the table than a team which won three games 1-0.  It is, frankly, highly unlikely that any attempt on our part to adopt different tactics would have made any difference, such is the abysmal level of our skill.  We still managed to come 4th out of 7, and other results mean that Brighton still leads the league table by a decent margin.  With one event to go, if we come no lower than 5th we will be the overall winners this year.  Mind you, the next event is skittles, at which we are notoriously useless!

~~~~~

Looking into the garden of Preston Manor, Brighton.

The doctor's letter

I received a letter from my GP's practice during the week. It read, "In view of recent changes in clinical guidelines your Doctor would like to discuss your condition.

"Please can you make an appointment with Dr X or Dr Y."

It so happens that neither Dr X nor Dr Y are "my" doctor.  I am registered with Dr C, although it matters not which doctor I actually see when I need one.  All the same, I have been seeing Dr C reasonably frequently - and exclusively - over the last couple of years and have come to both like him and, far more importantly, trust him.  On phoning the surgery, it was explained that Drs X and Y are dealing with the reviews of all patients with rheumatoid arthritis - I expect they have been on a course or attended a seminar at the very least - and I was offered (and accepted) an appointment with Dr X the following afternoon.

"Oh no!" exclaimed the Old Bat when I told her.  "Not Dr X!  He's useless.  You saw him when you had that cough."  (The old duck is a little prone to hyperbole.)

I tried to calm her fears.  "Perhaps he knows more about RA than he does about coughs."

When I saw him the following day, Dr X explained that it has become apparent that people with RA are more likely than others to suffer heart conditions or osteoporosis so all patients should be examined once a year.  "Have you had your cholesterol checked?" I was asked.

I was astounded.  I didn't think anybody at this practice had even heard of cholesterol as It has never been mentioned before.  Anyway, I have to have it checked next time I have a blood test and I am to be sent for a bone scan.

My doctor's (or doctors') surgery is opposite Preston Park so as it was a sunny afternoon I took the opportunity to wander through the park and the gardens of Preston Manor.  This is the 13th or 14th century church of St Peter, Preston Park.  (One source says it dates from the 13th century, another says the 14th.  Either way, it's pretty old.)