Month: August 2021

Sweeter Corn TWTW # 141

On By TontowilliamsIn books, Garden / Allotment, Kindle, tech, The Week That Was, tv, work

I’ve been bird sitting this week, or rather popping into one of our neighbours to check on their pet cockatiel, change his water and seed and have a ‘chat’ with him. Our conversations are pretty limited I think, and I’m not sure that he’s actually pleased to see me.

I was asked to take a Covid antibody test as part of the Zoe study this week. This test can tell whether you have actually been exposed to the coronavirus and developed natural antibodies to it, as opposed to ones you may have develop from immunisation. My test came back negative, which to be honest was what I was expecting.

Reading

I finished reading Roald Dahl’s Short Stories Volume 1 about middle way through this week and then picked up Len Deighton’s Mexico Set. I read Berlin Game by the same author earlier this year and was intending to read the trilogy – Game, Set, (London) Match at some point, and now feels like as good a time as any.

Watching

We sat down to watch a couple more Clint Eastwood westerns this week – Joe Kidd and Hang ’em High – again I don’t think I’ve watched either of these from start to finish in a very long time. We enjoyed them and I suspect we’ll end up watching some more.

Work

I have a meeting arranged for next week to discuss the proposal I submitted last week. Hopefully this is to discuss any refinements and give me the go ahead with the work. I doubt that they would have arranged a meeting just to say ‘thanks, but no thanks’. This is a reasonable piece of work in terms of the time and mental challenge that it presents so I’m hopeful that they want to proceed as that also means I get paid obviously.

It’s possible that I’ll also be returning to in-person allotment talks soon too. I’m trying to work out how this will actually happen and what changes there will be in order to be Covid-safe. I’m not sure whether I actually want to be back in a room with a group of people of unknown vaccination / negative test status at the moment given the high levels of the virus in the population. I’m waiting to hear back from the organisers of the first of these talks about their new arrangements, but they seem to think that this is down to the owners of the venue.

Allotment

Photograph shows some sweetcorn cobs on a tea towel

As the photograph evidences I’ve managed to harvest some sweetcorn this year. If you’re a regular reader here you’ll know that in previous years harvesting sweetcorn has always been a race against time with the local badger population or some serious fence construction to stop them getting to the plants. In previous years they have pushed over the plants to get at the ripe cobs, devastating the entire crop. Whilst I don’t begrudge them a feed, given how persecuted they are, I don’t intentionally grow the sweetcorn for them. This year I beat them to it.

I suspect the truth is that the set that was behind the allotment site is actually dormant at the moment and the badgers have moved on elsewhere. There’s no sign more generally that they have been about.

In addition to the sweetcorn, I got a good harvest of French beans, patti-pan squash and autumn raspberries.

It’s the time of year when I am thinking about whether or not I am going to continue with the allotment for another year – fees for the year ahead are due in October. This year has been a hard one, with more failures than successes and contaminated manure has lead to a lot of problems with weeds. I am honestly not sure what I am going to do.

Links

The All-Seeing “i”: Apple Just Declared War on Your Privacy – by Edward Snowden

Amazon’s older Kindles will start to lose their internet access in December (US only)

Well that’s it for this week. Have a good week ahead and take care and stay safe whatever you’re up to.

Book Review: Light Rains Sometimes Fall by Lev Parikian

On By TontowilliamsIn Book Review

Light Rains Sometimes Fall – A British Year Through Japan’s 72 Seasons by Lev Parikian

My Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars

This is a beautiful book; an intimate nature diary that takes much more of a detailed look than perhaps the cursory glance that many of us will pay to our local surroundings each day.

Splitting the year into the same time periods as Japan’s 72 seasons – 4 to 5 days at a time – and writing detailed observations during a time when we were all getting through pandemic restrictions, lockdowns etc. I did wonder whether I needed to read another book written during lockdown as there have been quite a few but I am glad that I did in this instance.

The authors keen eye and attention to detail make for a fascinating discourse on his local “patch”, I admire the focussed local knowledge and the chance to wonder at it and draw in the reader to the same space, but one which they have likely never been. This is much more than a simple record, it’s not the “first swift/swallow or daffodil” recordings that many of us make or see others persistently recording. This is written with a depth of feeling and innate curiosity that each one of those things becomes an exposition.

Whether you read this books as I did, from it’s beginning to end or pick it up at the relevant date when you start it is a wealth of fascination in the natural world, written by an observer with an intense passion for the natural world around him.

From The Publisher

ln the West we consider the passing of the year through the prism of four seasons. When Lev Parikian set out to write a nature diary, he turned instead to the structure offered by the traditional Japanese calendar which recognises the subtle changes of the natural world with a total of seventy-two ancient micro-seasons (ko).

From the birth of Spring (risshun) in early February to ‘the greater cold’ (daikon) in late January, Lev draws our eye to the exquisite beauty (and sometimes mundanity) of the day-to-day across a whole year. Mirroring the Haiku-like names of the Japanese micro-seasons, which reflect nature’s gradual progression, he guides us through his year in charming short chapters such as ‘Great tits scout for nesting sites’, ‘Lavender assumes massive proportions’, ‘Spiders appear in sheds’ and ‘Christmas trees are released into the wild’. For Japan’s lotus blossom, praying mantis and bear, he offers the bramble, wood louse and urban fox.

Fans of Lev’s writing praise the warmth, wit and lightness of touch that he brings to his observations of the natural world. By turns reflective, joyous and melancholy, this wonderful journal demonstrates how much there is to gain by ‘looking, looking again and looking better’ at nature’s gradual progression.

‘l know that without all this – the focus on small things, the conscious paying attention, the birds and the flowers and the trees and the bees and the dragonflies and spiders and fungi and the mosses and lichens und the weeds growing in the cracks on the pavements, and yes, even the bastard squirrels – my year would have been substantially less bearable

Lev Parikian

About The Author

Lev Parikian is a birdwatcher, conductor and author of Into The Tangled Bank (2020) and Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear (2018). He lives in West Norwood, London with his family, who are getting used to his increasing enthusiasm for nature. As a birdwatcher, his most prized sightings are a golden oriaol in the Alpujurras and a black redstart at Dungeness Power Station.

Light Rains Sometimes Fall – A British Year Through Japan’s 72 Seasons by Lev Parikian is published by Elliott & Thompson and available from 16th September 2021

[Disclaimer: The publishers very kindly sent me a proof copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I have received no payment for this review, and the thoughts are my own.]

Rain Stops Play TWTW # 140

On By TontowilliamsIn books, Film, Garden / Allotment, The Week That Was, tv, work

Well a slightly earlier post than I’d planned today.

I’m just back from the allotment where I’d planned to do a series of different jobs until it started to rain hard.

The forecast must have changed a bit overnight because I thought I’d at least have 2 to 3 hours before the rain arrived.

Anyhow I finished up what I was doing and then headed for home, I’ll try again tomorrow in the meantime I’ll just have to finish my flask of coffee at home in the dry.

You know I’ve had that flask the best part of 30 years. I got it when I was working in the woods all day and needed a warm drink, particularly in the winter. It’s served me well, and still keeps my drinks warm even today.

The outer green paint is flaking off on one side and it’s a little bit rusty underneath. I did look to replace it a while ago, but that was during the first lockdown and you couldn’t get them. They’re available again now, but I really don’t want to replace it now. I think I’ll just keep going until it doesn’t anymore. Maybe it will even outlive me?

Watching.

We seem to have watched a lot this week. We’ve been continuing to watch Ghosts which I think I’ve mentioned before and have finished series 3. We also watched a couple of movies; Green Book which we really enjoyed, even if it does make for some painful watching because of some of the historical treatment of people of colour; and Pale Rider which I don’t think I’ve sat and watched from beginning to end for a very long time. It still stands up well, and the finale with Eastwood taking on an overwhelming force has been repeated many a time in the western genre and it’s a great example of it. It’s made me want to watch a few more of the old Eastwood westerns too, and perhaps some others that I haven’t seen in a while.

Reading.

I’ve been reading Arthur C. Clarke’s The Lost Worlds of 2001. A bit like The Odyssey File which I mentioned a few weeks ago, it’s more of a making of the movie, although it does contain some original stories that went into 2001.

I’ve also started on Volume One of Roald Dahl’s short stories, which are incredible pieces of work. Some I’ve read before – including Lamb to the Slaughter which has just the best telling of the the disposal of a murder weapon that I’ve ever read – but some are completely new to me. I’ve got the second volume to read as well so I could be reading these for a while.

Work.

I’ve been working on a proposal for a client at their request. It’s actually revisiting one that I worked on back in February that didn’t go anywhere due to budget cutbacks. However it seems like they now have some funding in place so I’m hopeful. They’ve also expanded the brief a bit, so it’s slightly more work than I bid for before. Fingers-crossed that it works out. It was submitted on Friday, so hopefully I’ll hear something in the next week or so.

That’s all I have for this week. It’s still raining outside, so I think I made the right decision about the allotment.

Whatever you’re up to in the week ahead, stay safe and take care.

Late Night Grande Hotel TWTW # 139

On By TontowilliamsIn books, Garden / Allotment, The Week That Was, tv

The start of this week was plagued by some ghost alarms on my phone. For an unexplained reason my phone started playing an alarm at 05.30 each morning, even turning itself on to do so. There were no alarms set on the phone and it took a couple of days to work out what was going on. Fortunately I’m normally up before this time and my phone charges in another room to the bedroom overnight so it was more of a nuisance than a disturbance.

Eventually it turned out to be a problem linked to a fitness band that I haven’t used in over a year which (at the time) had synced to the health app on my phone and was causing the alarm from there as part of the sleep / wake function.

If this happens to you, turn off the “sleep schedule” in the health app and the alarms should stop – unless of course you want to be woken at a specific time.

It seems that a recent OS upgrade has caused this and a number of other problems. I’m also suffering from my podcasts app mislabeling the podcasts in the library so that sometimes it doesn’t play what it says it is supposed to be playing.

Sometimes these things are just too complicated for our good.

So how are you? Other than the above my week has been pretty good.

I had a visit with my Mum in her care home. She was in good form, all other things considered and it was one of those lucky visits where there is no one in the slot after mine so that the staff let mine overrun so we had extra time together. It doesn’t happen that frequently but it’s good when it does.

Reading

I finished John le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy this week. It’s set in a very different time period, but it’s interesting how pertinent it is to today with different conflicts around the world and with Russian spies surfacing in unlikely places.

I had planned to read something else next but thanks to Hermes the rather useless delivery company who appear to have lost the package with that book in, I’m probably going to have to change my plans. Hermes only seem to have AI for customer service and no humans, the AI is insistent that they are trying “very hard” to deliver my package but I fear that they are just very trying. Sadly they also have another package of mine which is a part of Ann’s birthday present, so I’m not hopeful that they’ll manage to deliver that one either.

Allotment

The weeks of rain and warm weather have been kind to the weeds and I spent a long time on Saturday on my hands and knees weeding different bits of my plot to try and get on top of them. I had some success and the piles of weeds speak in testament to my efforts.

It’s also been good for other things, and as usual the squashes and courgettes have gotten away from me to the extent that I was leaving some on the site’s “swap” table for anyone who wants them.

I also lifted the last of the onions – it’s been a really good year for those and I’m considering switching permanently to the new supplier I tried this year for all my onions. This is in part down to the consideration that I’ve heard our allotment shop is not going to be ordering potatoes or onions sets this year.

RIP Nanci Griffith

Watching

We’ve been watching the new series of Ghosts this week. It doesn’t feel as strong or as funny as the previous series but it’s still much better than a lot of things on at the moment.

We’ve also been watching Hemingway which has been interesting and has added quite a bit to my knowledge of the life of the author.

Well that’s it for this week, I have a proposal to prepare in the week ahead but other than that my diary is looking quite empty, although I dare say I’ll be waiting around at some point for a parcel that may or may not be delivered.

Whatever you’re up to, stay safe and take care.

Like a Wet Weekend TWTW # 138

On By TontowilliamsIn books, Dogs, Garden / Allotment, The Week That Was

It’s a rainy Saturday post again. I’ve already been to the allotment today and done a quick harvest of a few things; tomatoes, squash, beans; but it’s far too wet to do much else today. The forecast looks better for tomorrow so hopefully things will have dried out enough that I can get down there without the fear of trampling everything into a squishy, muddy mess. We’ll see what happens!

For fun I’ve started an online drawing course this week. I doodle and draw quite a bit but have never really taken much instruction and have probably reached the limit of my abilities to date. The course was on special offer, so I thought I’d take a risk on it, and so far I’ve been pleased with it. I can go at my own pace and have completed the first module and am working my way through the second. The first drawing task was to sketch the tools that you use for sketching, so here are a few of mine.

We had another vet trip this week. This time with Ruby who was due her booster injections. All relatively straightforward and in and out before our actual appointment time. We don’t have to take Wilson back until the beginning of September (unless there is something that we’re worried about) so we might get through most of a month without having to visit the vet.

Reading

I’ve been reading John le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy this week. It took me a couple of attempts to get through the first chapter, but I can now see how it ties into the previous book Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Although these are very much cold war era spy stories they still stand up well today and actually there is an element of history repeating itself with modern events.

Links

My friend Christian (@documentally) is planning on riding his bicycle from London to Edinburgh to celebrate the 100th anniversary of The Great North Road being renamed to the A1. He’s never cycled more than 32km in a day before so it’s going to be a bit of a challenge. He’s also aiming to raise some money for Choose Love, a charity that supports refugees around the world. If you’d like to know more, follow him on Twitter or visit Cycling Hertz where you can sponsor him should you be so inclined. I’m sure he’ll also be sharing some behind the scenes stuff in his newsletter.

Scientists Spot Signs of Gulf Stream Collapse – I’m beginning to think that I might see the extinction of man in my own lifetime.

Ban urban and garden pesticides to protect bees, other wildlife and human health – Petitions – If you are entitled to vote in UK elections please consider signing this petition.

That’s it for this week. I’m off to do a sunny weather dance, whatever you’re up to this week, take care and stay safe.

Eggstatic TWTW # 137

On By TontowilliamsIn books, Garden / Allotment, The Week That Was, tv2 Comments

The sounds of workmen and the smell of newly laid tar have been the soundtrack to my week as the road outside my house is being resurfaced – slowly. It’s not been too bad and at times quite interesting to watch. There are a couple more weeks of associated works to go before it’s finished although hopefully after the middle of next week we won’t be as affected.

Allotment

I’ve been doing a lot of harvesting this week. Mostly things that we won’t immediately eat like onions and potatoes. This years onions have been a good crop, both in terms of their quality and quantity. I’ve had a few that have split – probably down to inconsistent watering – but the vast majority are good.

I dug the final row of potatoes too, like the previous row they weren’t a fantastic yield but they were good quality with very little slug damage or scab. I did have one that was a little odd though.

As I dig them up I always brush off as much of the loose dirt as I can before putting them in a bucket. This one particular potato wasn’t particularly remarkable except when I went to brush the mud off and it burst open revealing that it wasn’t in fact a potato but an egg – a very old egg judging by the smell. Unfortunately when it burst it also sprayed me with it’s contents, so I had to take a moment to wash off the leg of my shorts and my t-shirt.

My assumption is that a fox or something similar had cached the egg there – when the soil was loose – with a view to eating it at a later date and then forgotten about it.

I did a quick check and I’m pretty sure that it was a wood pigeons egg (see below). I didn’t completely destroy the egg when I broke it so was able to get some photos of the other side of it and had a fairly good idea of its size and colour, so I’m pretty confident with my choice.

Reading

I no longer believe that dolphins are really intelligent. They are much too friendly to man.

Arthur C. Clarke

I’ve been reading lots of bits from lots of different places this week. The above quote is from the correspondence between Arthur C Clarke and the screenwriter/director Peter Hyams when they were collaborating on the film of 2010. Their correspondence via Kaypro computers as an early form of email is captured in The Odyssey File which I was given as a birthday present back in the early 1980’s when the film was released. I’ve been rereading this in part this week, and it’s making me want to go back and reread all of the 2001 to 3001 sequence of books.

The quote comes from a sequence in the book / film where the lead character is at his home which happens to have a pool with dolphins in it. This is based on a real home which had this “feature” and they were hoping to use it in the film. As they discover however the house is still in existence but no longer has dolphins in the pool, so they built a replica at Seaworld in San Diego for the filming.

Watching

A few things come to mind this week, we’ve watched the latest season of Baptiste which is being shown on Sunday evenings but is also available on iPlayer. As it still hasn’t finished it’s Sunday run I won’t spoil it. We’ve also been continuing our Star Trek movies rewatch and are now firmly into TNG sequence of films. We also rewatched Timecop, which if you don’t know is a Jean Claude Van Damme action movie. Although I enjoyed the silliness of it, it was also interesting watching an 90’s movie that is pretending that it is set in the early 2000’s with time travel backwards – “you can’t go forwards because it hasn’t happened yet”. The self driving cars and 90’s fashioned that seemed to prevail for over ten years were a little cringeworthy, but that said it was a pleasant diversion for an evening.

Sidenote: It was also directed by Peter Hyams.

Well that’s all I have for this week. The week ahead is looking quite quiet, roadworks excluded. So whatever you’re up to this week stay safe and take care.