I have had a number of careers now, none of them illegal anywhere in the world as far as I’m aware – though management consulting is not a universally admired occupation. For a while after leaving The Firm I ran a local charity shop; I had a bit of money behind me and an appetite for doing something positive and that would directly help the local community.
For eighteen months I had a generally wonderful time, but the back biting from a very small minority of others eventually became too much for me to bear and I moved on. The one Christmas I worked there I gave every member of the volunteer group a small gift. I had gone to the florist intending to buy a bouquet for each or perhaps a small potted flowering plant but my eye was caught by something a little different: attractively packaged and presented aloe vera plants. The shop had enough to go around and one extra so I purchased them as a job lot and presented them to The Ladies.
For those of you who have never had much contact with a Charity / Thrift / Opportunity shop it might be worth me explaining that in my experience they are largely the preserve of ladies of a certain age or certain social standing. But since we hereabouts lack numbers of the latter the work force at this particular shop was largely made up of the former. I was the odd one out being almost two generations younger than most of them and essentially able bodied.
I gave out those aloe vera plants and most of the ladies were, I suspect, rather bemused by my choice of gift. One was left over and I took it home intending to keep it for myself. Initially it thrived but within a few months it left me, then I put the experience of the shop behind me by moving on to other things. I forgot about the aloe vera plants in general and my failure with my own plant in particular.
Then about six weeks ago I was gifted a couple of aloe vera plants. They came to me potted up in flimsy disposable drink cups each in a little plastic bag of the sort you might get for yourself at the self-serve bakery counter in a supermarket. With no greater knowledge now than then of how to care for aloe vera I put them on my magic window sill and, since the weather isn’t reliable around here I left them in those plastic bags loosely knotted at the top to keep them reasonable warm. And every now and then I would remember to water them.
About two weeks ago I noticed that one of them had developed a little baby aloe vera out of its base.
The baby aloe vera
So now I have a problem. Clearly my management of these little plants is doing no harm at this stage but at some point I am going to have to take action. I am going through this with my seed-raised asparagus plants which now desperately need re-homing but still look intimidatingly fragile, too. The difference with the aloe vera is that I have help at hand. These two little aloe vera plants are the offspring of one of the plants I bought and gave as gifts four and a half years ago. One of the ladies, hearing belatedly the fate of the plant I kept has given me these, raised from the plant I had given her.
Nature has an at times astonishing ability to vanquish improbability and so I hold out slender hope for my highly unlikely pumpkins. Last October I did the pumpkin carving thing for my little neighbour. She is into Halloween and likes the lit pumpkin which I sit on the stone fence where she can see it. Pumkin carving is a messy business.
I thought at the time I’d cleared up properly but earlier this year I found a clump of seed that had somehow missed the green wheelie bin and fallen behind a planter. I swept those seeds up with the rest of the rubbish one weekend intending to dispose of it at a later date. Time passed and the small pile of rubbish compacted; eventually I bit the bullet and swept it down the path to be added to some other organic matter to break down. Well I have pumpkin plants growing out of that small patch of decomposing sweepings. Four of them.
Infant pumpkin plants are rather sturdy little beings. I think they’ve left their race for posterity a little late but I’m going to let tham have their chance.
Pumpkin seedlings
In better tended parts of the property the windfall Victoria Plums are piling up. The trees are producing in heroic but rather wasteful proportions. I cannot keep up. I am keeping back some of the rotten ones as they will attract butterflies, freezing them for use latter in the season when the fresh ones are no longer available.
I am nearly certain that I have two varieties of olive tree. While the fruit of the rest are still tiny weeks after the flower petals died and fell away two are racing ahead. Or perhaps this is just an individual olive tree thing. I suspect I won’t be able to know until I have fruit I can compare. Last year there were no olives at all so this year is already a major improvement.
English olives
The pinot noir vines are showing no hint of producing fruit this year but the plants themselves look healthy and are reasonable just as ornamental foliage. The pinot blanc have produced small bunches of grapes that are making progress and I still have hopes of these ripening this year. That too will be an advance on last year.
English Pinot Blanc
The patrol of the garden undertaken today (and during which the outdoor photographs were taken) produced no moths but one mature bush cricket on one of the grape vines, and more Speckled Wood (pararge aegeria) butterflies. I had first spotted them a couple of days ago during a break in the weather and they seem to be drawn, as Red Admirals are, to the rotting fruit.
Speckled Wood (pararge aegeria)
And so to yesterday. As tweeted I went to London which is always a mistake. I step out onto those streets and wish I was back there permanently. Commuting suddenly looks appealing again. I get over it, but slowly. Last year I went to an extraordinary exhibition staged by Wellcome Collection at the centre near Euston.
Something like 30 skeletons had been laid out in the display centre. These skeletons had been selected from the Collection and had been recovered from sites across London at various times and dating back to a variety of periods in London’s history.
They were the remains of individuals who ranged in age at death from pre-natal to advanced old age, and in occupation and socio-economic background. The exhibition including remains from London’s Roman past and from as recently as the late Victorian period. For a fair proportion of the remains, particularly the later sets, biographical had been established.
I understand that such an exhibition will strike many as macabre and visiting such a display as disturbing behaviour. I can only say that I found the tenor of the exhibition curiously reassuring. The curators had made every effort to produce a dignified and enlightening presentation. Well the Trust is running a new body exhibition at the moment and I went along. Closed, for the day. What luck. I may have another chance to get up to London next week. Fingers crossed.
With that plan scuppered I moved on toward Covent Garden. I can’t get vegemite locally and the lack of vegemite for my toast amounts to a domestic crisis. I now have a very large jar of the stuff. The Australia Shop is a treasure trove of half forgotten goodies: summer rolls, twisties, fruit tingles, life savers, minties, etc. I confined myself to one box of barbeque shapes and three (on offer) boxes of TeeVee snacks. And I haven’t opened them yet. Am I not good?
Being good at the sweetie counter meant I could spend up in the bookstore. The Waterstones in Gower Street is a favourite; I prefer it to Foyles in fact. It is close to UCL and has vast quantities of serious reading rather than shelf after shelf of rather banal and lightweight general interest level non-fiction in standard grade Waterstones shops. It also has a cracking remaindered section.
Apart from the other stuff I carried off as an indulgence I am now the proud owner of a new copy of the current edition of the Waring Townsend Field Guide to British (Macro) Moths. My old copy which was secondhand, heavily annotated by the previous owner, can now be donated to the charity shop when next I do a run over there, in the hope that it will assist another budding moth hunter as it has served me.
And that’s about it. No moths to report in the house or outside; aside from another Bird-cherry Ermine and a Brown Housemoth which I turfed outdoors. The weather has been abyssmal and though the sun is out I fear the bulk of the good (and in moth hunting terms, productive) weather might be beind us. But if I’m wrong, I’m now well armed.
Bugs in my bathroom 