Word of the Day: Hiatus

Word of the Day


HIATUS.

Meaing - pause, break, being up shit creek but still sure you do have a paddle, somewhere.

I wrote a Ghost Story

The Friday the 13th Garden

Behind a tall, old brick wall there was once an exclusive, private garden, with fruit trees and curved flower-beds, an oval fish pond and a crowd of climbing roses on a wide pergola. It was also full of self-seeded buddleia, infested with nettles and partly covered with ivy, ragwort and other uninvited guests. One other fact that you need to know is, this overblown private garden was in Chelsea. To have a private garden in Chelsea, you need to be posh, or rich or preferably both.

Sylvie was neither posh nor rich, but she was a gymnast and proud of it. This particular day, Friday the thirteenth of May, after a row with her now very much ex-boyfriend Simon, in the crowded pub known locally as ‘The Plastic Meat,’ due to the display of fake foods beside the serving hatch, Sylvie found herself walking alone, beside a high brick wall. She was still angry and felt lightheaded and seething with adrenalin after the fight. A black cat ran across her path and shot up and over the wall. The wall was six feet high, Sylvie was five foot four, but she followed the cat.

She’d walked past that wall often enough, and never felt the urge to climb it before. It was on her way home from college and she assumed, like everyone else, that it backed onto the row of garages which were clearly visible from the next street. Yet somehow that Friday evening the sight of the agile cat almost thinking itself up the wall triggered an unfamiliar instinct in her. Once on the top of the wall, a position that surprised her for a moment, Sylvie looked back at the street, which seemed duller and further away than quite made sense.

When she turned and looked into the garden, she found a large apple tree was reassuringly close, with an adjacent branch which she leapt onto, then she saw the cat on the ground, looking up at her.  Although it was getting dark, she could see the cat quite clearly, as if the air in the garden was brighter than the street outside. The cat made an inviting sound, a sort of loud thrum, then turned and walked off into the weeds, its tail a dark question-mark above the greyish grass heads.

Dropping to the ground, Sylvie felt soft, mossy turf beneath her feet. She began to follow the cat; its tail was still visible in the undergrowth. She found the stems of grasses and ragwort parted before her, they were very tall, so were the nettles yet brushing against them didn’t harm her hands or face

She found she was approaching a huge wooden structure that loomed skyward, with the vast stems of climbing rose that enveloped its posts swaying in the evening air far above her head. The scented roses, white and full, seemed to dot the sky like stars.

Then a deep, charmingly melodious voice called out her name.

‘Sylvie! Why hello, Sylvie, thank-you for gracing us with your pretty presence.’

Sylvie arched her back, she felt the hairs on her neck stand up, then those on her back and her tail. The entire sensation was so surprising that she ignored the voice. A hiss escaped from between her pointed teeth as she worked mentally through her body; eyes, nose, ears, whiskers, paws, tail…

Whiskers? Paws? Tail?! She yowled in alarm.

‘Don’t trouble yourself, dear’, the voice said calmly, then there was something under her belly and she was lifted up three times her height and placed onto a huge, white cushion.

‘…you’ll find it a little startling to begin with,’ the voice continued, ‘but you will become accustomed to your new state. You may even come to prefer it, others have done so.’  A large, pale face was smiling down at her, hugely sparkling eyes and mouth with a smear of dark, strange smelling lipstick.  

Then the black cat appeared on the cushion beside her, seeming much bigger than before and he rubbed his cheek against hers.

‘Judas! You clever boy, thank you so much for finding Sylvie for me. She is delightful, look at her velvet coat and amber eyes. She could almost be your sister if it wasn’t for those white claws.’

 Startled, Sylvie looked down at her front paws, they were black and soft, with curved, pale claws which were clinging to the cushion for all they were worth.

‘Sylvie dear, I know this seems a little strange,’ a hand was stroking her back, it was somehow soothing. ‘Judas brings me new friends every Friday the thirteenth, as I can’t leave my garden.’

Sylvie opened her mouth to ask a question, any question, there were so many buzzing around inside her mind, but all that came out was an anguished, ‘Mmrrrooooww..?

‘You shall be my newest friend,’ said the voice, ‘allow me to introduce us all.  Judas you have met, he has been here the longest. Over there in the camellia bush are Dante and Gabriel, tabby brothers, such naughty boys, they constantly squabble. By the pond you will find grey Derek who tries quite obsessively and yet fails to catch the goldfish and my dear Caroline nests in the overgrown ivy, I so wish she would come and play with me as she once did. Her delightful white fur has become knotted with roots and spiders’ webs. There are so many others, I seem to forget all their names.

However, I am Gwennifer Drew-Jones, my father was Viscount Hubert of Llanmaes and I have resided at number 2, Cadogan Close all my life, and all of my death. When my nephew inherited the title, he had me smothered and buried underneath this lovely rose, since I was still an embarrass-ment. Having a witch in the family, even a very old one, is apparently most improper, so he buried me like an animal.’

Sylvie felt her fur starting to prickle again, and then there was more stroking.

‘Please be calm, Sylvie dear,’ Gwennifer said, ‘I am by no means the first spirit you have met this delightful evening.’ The black cat called Judas licked the giant cheek, then turned to Sylvie and purred a confirmation. ‘There, you see, Judas was here before me. He was my kitten when I was quite a child myself. He was buried by the wall, following a disagreement with a hansom cab. Being a young cat, he can easily surmount the wall and go into the street to look for likely passers-by. I myself cannot go beyond the garden, since I am permanently an old woman.’

Sylvie’s fur had settled beneath the soothing of the giant woman’s hand, but it felt disarrayed, without thinking she found herself twisting her head around and licking her shoulder, combing the disobedient hair flat with her rough tongue. It was a satisfying sensation and she felt a throbbing purr begin inside her chest.

‘There, there, Sylvie,’ Gwennifer said, ‘You could return to being a young woman, if you choose, but you must leave my garden to do so. There are some who choose to go. There was my lovely Geoffrey, he was a beautiful ginger fellow and his companion was lovely Soo-Ling, they came here together. Dear Geoffrey went away and even Soo-Ling can’t tell where he is now, can you dear?’

Sylvie became aware of the slim Siamese cat who sat on the other side of Gwennifer’s vast, tweedy, tree-trunk legs. The Siamese put its head on one side and stared intently at Sylvie. She knew that for a cat, a straight stare was usually a challenge of some sort, but this cat’s expression held something entirely different.

Words formed in Sylvie’s mind… ‘Geoffrey had the right idea. If you stay too long, the instincts take over, though your mind remains human. You’ll find you can’t leave, you’re without solid food, or love, or sex. Your body will starve, then you will just be here forever as her toy in this damned ghost garden. Go, while still you can.’

Word of the day; Execrable

Word of the day:

Execrable. 

Synonyms of execrable. base, contemptible, currish, despicable, detestable, dirty, dishonorable, ignoble, ignominious, low, low-down, low-minded, mean, nasty, paltry, snide, sordid, vile, wretched

Apply where you will.

Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan - my Desert Island Discs three

When are song lyrics actually poetry?  The basic types of song lyrics, 'I will love you forever' and 'I love you but you're nasty to me,' usually bore me. Occasionally such songs can be raised by a sublime tune and rendition, such as the Righteous Brothers' 'Unchained Melody,' but mostly they aren't any more meaningful than Max Bygraves' 'You're a pink toothbrush, I'm a blue toothbrush.' Things can get far more raunchy, but are basically about one thing, sex. Poetry these are not.

Slightly more interesting song lyrics tell a story - Tom Jones 'Delilah' tells a story of jealousy and murder but with a sing-along chorus which diminishes the impact of the plot. Bobbie Gentry's 'Ode to Billy Joe' is a more obscure and possibly even darker story which leaves the listener wondering what actually happened on the Tallahassee Bridge, but this is still storytelling, it's not usually considered to be poetry.

There's has always been any amount of snooty, academic opinion which tries to dismiss anything beyond a certain highbrow canon as simply lacking the cachet to be considered proper poetry. Their dismissal naturally includes song lyrics. I always disagreed with them, I still do. Who are they to dismiss anything which doesn't fit their preconceived notion of poetry - 90% of which has been written by academic, western men? Answer, they're mostly academic, western men!

More of Me by Kathryn Evans - Book Review

My goodreads review:-

More of Me
by

Kathryn Evans (Goodreads Author)

Sue Gilbert's review

Oct 21, 2018  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: might-read-again, novels, sci-fi

I would have read this in one session but for needing a night's sleep. It's remarkably well written, I can't fault it. Anyone who's ever been a teenage girl will probably recognise the uncomfortable feeling inside their skin, even if this story is teenage angst and weirdness taken to the max and beyond. 

But am I allowed to like it? I was a teenager a very long time ago. If all so called YA fiction is this good, I will read a lot more of it. But I hate fiction being put into these boxes, YA, SF, mystery, crime, fantasy, etc. Good books are good books! I was reading adult's stories and children's stories when I was eight, I didn't differentiate then. I'm certainly not starting now. 

*****************************************

This is the first of my Hastings Litfest prize books which I've so far read. The others will need to be extremely good to be as immediately engaging as this is. 

I won a Prize! No, not for my writing

Simply for turning up to Hastings very first LitFest.

I only found about the LitFest by chance, even though I now live in St Los, which is to Hastings what Hove is to Brighton, i.e. an attached twin. But I found out in time to attend a couple of the events. Hastings Lit Fest isn't famous, this was its first year, but it will become famous - I'm told that most events were very well attended and all the workshops were sold out. Already it has playwright David Hare as its patron and attracted speakers such as Patrick Gale, Sophie Hannah, Ed Boxall and Mavis Cheek to name just four of the 36 involved.

I only attended two events, but they were very worthwhile. First was in a garage behind a pub where I watched excellent performances of 2 long, Shakespeare derived monologues written and directed by writer/performer/ producer John Knowles. I then attended his scriptwriting workshop the following day. I'd never heard of him, but the workshop was very worthwhile, I'm now engaging with three separate monologues of my own, one of which may even get performed, Mr. Knowles is staging another production and was quite keen on what I did at the workshop. I have submitted a piece, not the one I began at the workshop. We shall see.

So how come I won a prize? My name was just pulled out of a proverbial hat which contained, so I'm told, the name of everyone known to have participated in any of the events. I went to a meeting of Litfest volunteers where I was presented with my prize, a bundle of signed books by some of the festival speakers. Can a writer own too many books? Of course not! I'll review them as I read them. 

In no particular order, here they are:-

Prague Spring by Simon Mawer

Angels of Islington by Sam Davey

More of Me by Kathryn Evans

Me and My Alien Friend by Ed Boxall - book and CD
Of Men and Angels by Michael Arditti
Dogchild by Kevin Brooks

New Header Picture again

I'm a photographer as well as a writer. I enjoy taking, and hoarding, photographs, so I may as well use more of them here as headers for the blog.

In this picture there's a family in the Amazonian rainforest, crossing a rope bridge over a small but busy stream that rushes down a gulch between cliffs, on its way to refresh, just slightly, the turbid Amazon miles downstream. Are the family in danger of falling prey to a lurking jaguar, or an undiscovered dinosaur left over from the last great extinction? Are they on their way to meet a friendly local tribe... or is one of their number doomed to become lost in the jungle, having to revert to the wild, eating fallen fruits from the massive branches above, learning to catch fish from the stream and compete with the jaguar for prey?

Or are they just at the Eden Project in Cornwall, enjoying the experience without the travel, or the potential danger.

Every picture tells a story. Writers can tell any story we like, we don't have to use all the information in the picture.

Pictures are definitely a great provider of stimulation and sometimes even inspiration for me as a writer.

Signing Petitions.

In the past month I've signed ten petitions. I've been sent a request to sign about twice that number, but I'm selective. I have to be, I can't become a petition junkie like at least one person I know.
It's the environment, it's the NHS, Brexit and the atrocities happening because of the arms trade which I try to concentrate on.

Should I feel guilty not signing petitions about the plight of individuals, whether they're murdered journalists, sick children or people imprisoned for their beliefs? I don't believe I should really, I try hard to look at bigger pictures.

I do try to take part by signing and sharing if I feel the petition may have a chance of :-

A) Reaching and being read by the person it's addressed to. Any petition addressed vaguely to a government or corporation will undoubtedly find its way to the bin/delete button without anybody senior having to bother with it.

B) Not be disregarded, because I'm not in the USA, or Saudi Arabia, or wherever the topic of the petition relates to. Foreign signatures may devalue a petition in the eyes of the people it's aimed at, particularly if it's on a local issue.

Pareidolia; I learn something new every day

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus, usually an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists. Common examples are perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations, the Man in the Moon, the Moon rabbit, hidden messages in recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing indistinct voices in random noise such as humming machinery or electric fans.

Hence Surrealism I suppose, for the visual effects at any rate.

Saturday by Ian McEwan - book review

This is why Ian McEwan is one of my favourite authors, when he is good he is very very good, the writing here is completely gripping. I don't mean in the thrills a minute takes you on a roller coaster kind of gripping. I mean the kind of gripping which takes you right into the nuances of character, situation and emotion so you can't shake them off. This is why it took me a month to finish the book. I reached the climactic scene and didn't want the journey to begin to unwind, I didn't want the cast to have to react to a terrifying situation, I was afraid they would act out of character, or worse that I had misinterpreted their characters.

I stopped reading the book, I would look at it by my bed and keep thinking, I'm not ready to go back there, not yet. The story takes place during one day, it took me a month to finish reading.

I hadn't misinterpreted anything, the denouement for the main character was entirely appropriate while not being flagged up. The ending worked perfectly, the final scene mirroring the opening pages, but with the added frisson of what has gone between. 

So remind me again why McEwan won the Booker prize for 'Amsterdam', with its unremittingly dislikeable characters and silly ending, and not for 'Saturday'? 

No spoilers, I won't describe the plot. Read it for yourself and enjoy.

Gerald Durrell; the Authorised Biography by Douglas Botting - book review

Gerald Durrell has been one of my favourite authors since I read The Bafut Beagles when I was nine and I've always admired his determination to conserve endangered species, the little, un-noticed creatures more than the spectacular, headline-grabbing ones. Douglas Botting's biography was approved by his family and presents a detailed and unflinching portrait of this charismatic, driven and creative man. GD wasn't a saint or any kind of paragon, he was a high functioning alcoholic and could have lived so much longer. His remarkable achievements have altered the way endangered species are appreciated and conserved. His Jersey Zoo is a model for conservationist worldwide and his books are many and varied. All this Douglas Botting catches with zest and a plainly enormous quantity of research. The details of GD's final illness are not for the faint hearted but are honest. My only qualms are with the way the treatment of Jacquie, GD's first wife, seem to be glossed over. Otherwise this is a fascinating read for any GD fan, and for anybody interested in how attitudes to conservation have progressed since the 1950's.

It's the Environment, Stupid.

My recent reading matter has brought something to my attention. I read 'Reservoir 13', I have just finished Gerald Durrell's biography, now I am reading, with a little difficulty, 'H is For Hawk.' All these books have at their centre a depth of knowledge of and care for the natural world and man's involvement with it. This morning I woke up and realised that this is what I care for and about, more than anything else. How have I not been able to acknowledge this before?

Online, I read stories about environmental destruction and devastated communities, about for example, rhinos slaughtered for their horns and children suffering from terrible diseases. All these make me feel sad, more than sad, but the ones that make me feel desperate are the environmental stories and the slaughter of endangered, irreplaceable species. And so then I feel guilty about not caring enough for the suffering children. Maybe this feeling of guilt has clouded my sense of what is fundamentally important.

But thinking about it, my care about suffering children is innate. I'm a mother and grandmother, of course I care about the suffering of children. However I have to protect myself. If I grieve over every little boy with incurable brain damage or every little Yemeni girl starving to death before her mother's eyes, then I will die of exhausted grief and nobody will gain. Empathy can only go so far if an individual human being is to survive and remain sane. Think of the X Men founder Charles Xavier as a young man, having to learn to control his empathy before the mass of human suffering over-whelmed him. We all need to learn this - or switch the internet off.

A love for 'God's Creation' wasn't dutifully pumped into me as an infant, although christianity was vaguely involved. I was read bible stories involving animals at a sunday school that I attended for a couple of years. And I was read Kipling, the wonderful, poetic Just So Stories, the more adventurous Jungle Books, all about man and animals in natural settings. So partly by their chosen reading matter it was the adults in my family who began my deeper involvement in creatures and nature in general.

My mother's mother taught me many things in the garden, when I was very tiny, including the names of all the wild and tame flowers and that worms were good and should not be killed. My father's father, on the other hand, showed me that nature was to be tamed, controlled and turned to production in his burgeoning fruit garden, he would trap and shoot the pretty brown rats that dared to venture into his compost pits. Meanwhile his wife, my Granny, was allowed to feed 'her' robin, Bobbity, at a little bird table on the kitchen window ledge.

Their son, my father, loved wild and solitary places, marshes and mountains, deserts and rocky coasts. He was a twitcher and more. He showed me that nature was wild and free. When I was a confused, sulky teenager he drove us for many hours to Loch Garten, to show us the only ospreys then nesting in the UK. All I saw then was a distant bird, soaring, silhouetted against the grey sky and water. Nobody controlled that bird.

Today there are probably 300 pairs of osprey breeding in the UK. Should this give me hope?

The Fairweather Gardener - We're Having a Heatwave

We've had absolutely no rain and some very hot weather for the past six weeks at least. This could be described as the ideal summer, but it's far too dry for farmers and too dry for most UK gardens. Temperatures in the high 20's C have been recorded most days but one notable Sunday, the first of July, when the met office admitted it could be 32 outside, that was in the shade on my patio.  I put out a cheap thermometer and it shot up to 39 in the sun. That's over 100 degrees in old money! Even the cats stayed indoors.

So what's in flower? More than I expected, there are daisies and day lilies, miniature roses and oregano, clematis and thunbergia - also known as Black-eyed-Susan! Grown from seed, the marigolds and viola are just coming out. Also from seed, nasturtiums in pots were doing fine until the small white butterflies found them, now they are a scene of devastation, I think the caterpillars are running out of leaves. Should I take pity and transfer them to the remaining nasturtiums under the apple tree? And I have numerous pots of vivid, gorgeous red geraniums  - yes I know I'm meant to call them zonal pelargoniums, but I refuse!

My small lawn is completely brown and crispy, not a single blade of green. The plus side is that I don't have to mow it, I expect it will come back once we have some significant rain; this will happen at some stage, we are in England not the Sahara and grass rhizomes are very tough. The other plus is the ground elder has vanished. I kept mowing it in the lawn and rooting it out in the beds but it's an everlasting task. I don't suppose it's gone forever, some roots will survive even in bone dry soil, but I'm pleased for now that it's reduced so much.

The interior of the compost bin is dry and dusty, even though it's in the shade. The tiny fruit flies which normally swarm up in a miasma when I open the lid to tip in kitchen waste are growing sluggish. Slugs and snails have hunkered down, though some are still alive enough to know when I've watered the cucumbers in their gro-bag.

For over a week the sun was too much for those cucumbers, every day they wilted even though I was watering three times a day. I even tried shading them with a light-filtering parasol but it didn't really help. We've had a few small crisp cucumbers from them, though the skins are tough, and a couple more still on the plant. I haven't grown cucumbers before, a neighbour gave me two seedlings. They're short cucumbers and taste very good, but a lot of effort and a lot of water for ten small cucumbers, don't think I'll bother again.  Prickly pears might be a more appropriate crop for the weather! Is this continuous hot, dry weather a sign of climate change? Well  one swallow doesn't make a summer and one summer doesn't make global warming, but overall the signs aren't good.

Dada Baroness - it's her birthday!

Today is the birthday of the utterly fabulous and more than slightly bonkers Dada Baroness (1874-1927)  Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven. She has been largely written out of the history of the Dada movement by male chroniclers. She probably invented performance art in 2015-16 on the streets of New York. She was a painter, poet and creator of art objects. Her poetry has recently been published, her art is almost all lost.

Portrait of Elsa by Theresa Bernstein 1918

Elsa was friend/lover/collaborator of many more famous people in the dada period including Marcel Duchamp, Berenice Abbott, Man Ray and Djuna Barnes. She wasn't really a Baroness - a bigamous marriage to a dispossessed Baron lasted only a few months. She lived in poverty much of her adult life. There's a fuller account of Elsa below -

https://sugswritersblog.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-dada-baroness-elsa-von-freytag.html

The Fair Weather Gardener - British Flowers Week

It's British Flowers Week from 18-24 June 2018. Every day seems to have become something-or-other day or week and we all wisely ignore most of them and get on with our lives. My take is to stick a comment on my FB feed if a particular one catches my attention, it's usually for being daft! However this one caught my attention by making me think about the flowering plants in my garden; how many are endemic species?

Started at the Covent Garden Flower Market in 2013, the official week is a promotion for florists and flower farmers around the country who grow and sell UK blooms, in the UK, as opposed to the giant flower markets in Europe. It could be interpreted as a bit Brexit-ish, but has a point, the international movement of billions of blossoms around the world is not strictly necessary - we can grow plenty here.

The current situation is obviously deleterious to the environment, you can't put flowers on a ship from Kenya to the UK and expect them to survive the journey in good condition, so they're air-freighted. Flying, as we all know, is bad for the environment. On average a plane is said to produce over 50 pounds of CO2 per mile of flight, although Eurocontrol International claim that aviation creates less then 2% of climate change gases. I'm trying to present a vaguely balanced argument here!

Back to the plants. I'm not a florist, just a gardener, but apart from the foxgloves, which are almost over and the glorious oxeye daisies, I wasn't sure which of the flowering beauties in my garden are native and which originated far from British shores. Much research is needed.

The Innocent by Ian McEwan - review

I was disappointed reading Amsterdam (reviewed in March), how the hell did that win the Booker Prize? I thought I'd better try a different Ian McEwan book, to see if he was still one of my favourite authors or if I should demote him. I went shopping, came home with The Innocent, written in 1990 but set in the mid 1950's.


The Innocent has been published with a number of different covers, trust me to buy the least interesting (the one on the right). Book covers are important but in this case had no influence on me, I was buying for the author.


It's sort of an espionage story, set in divided West Berlin during the 1950's. I was there as a teen-ager some time later so I decided I had to read this particular book. The setting is pretty real, a city still struggling to recover from the second world war, whilst suffering under the domination of the cold war. Although set before the Berlin wall was built, it felt familiar enough, I'd seen the check-points, the bomb sites. The main character is Leonard, a GPO technician seconded to work on a top secret project in the American sector of the city. I won't tell the story, impossible without spoilers.

The Innocent is very well written, as all McEwan's books are, he's a professional in every sense. The narrative is tense, a very good story. It does take a bit of digesting... hmm.  Maybe digesting is the wrong word. Is it a good read? Oh yes, definitely but maybe don't read the second half just after a large meal. 

Has it restored my faith in the author? Yes, it has. Although a very different story it takes me back to his first book, The Cement Garden which was also about innocence.

Danny Kirwan - Desert Island Discs

Fleetwood Mac's fantastic heavy rock number, 'Oh Well' was my previous desert Island choice a few days ago. Danny Kirwan, one of three guitarists in the band at the time the recording was made, has just died at the age of 68.

It's very sad, he was a talented musician and songwriter who never quite made his mark after he left the band in 1972. He was just 18 when he joined Fleetwood Mac, after his own band, Boilerhouse, had supported the Mac at several venues in London. Drummer Mick Fleetwood invited him to join the Mac, he then became Peter Green's protégé for a few gigs before as a fully fledged band member his passion for blues music combined with his creativity, he contributed his own compositions to their repertoire and their next five albums.

I saw him play with Fleetwood Mac twice, at the Leas Cliff Hall in Folkestone, in 1968/9 when the band were at their very best. I have his autograph.

Farewell Danny Kirwan, blues boy.

The Fair Weather Gardener - Triffids

Things that I don't recognise still come up in the garden. The latest, looking like triffids, appeared in April, pushing up through the undergrowth by the pergola. Several stiff stems with dark blueish green leaves arranged regularly up the stems. I believe the term for the leaf appearance is glaucous, good word! So, glaucous leaves, stiff straight stems and once three feet high, it produced thin branches with softer bright green leaves.


My triffids were interesting looking and quite architectural so I left them for quite a while as I didn't know what they were. The soft green leaves became bracts around tiny yellow flowers, which insects seemed to like, so I continued to leave the triffids alone. Hover flies seemed especially keen on the miniscule flowers and last weekend I saw my first wasp this year, also showing great interest in the triffids.


Then the flowers began to produce large, green berries, each with three lobes. At this stage I decided I really should take them more seriously, they were about to produce seed, did I want them to spread? I'm not in principle opposed to immigrants, but the garden's quite small so invaders are another matter, I have enough trouble with hops and ground elder.

I asked a few people, posted a pic on Facebook, but nobody seemed to know. So in depth research was in order. How did people ever do this type of thing before the internet? Google is an amazing research tool, almost everything you can think of is out there, somewhere in the aether!

After a few hours going through a range of search terms and looking at hundreds of photos of plants with green leaves, I came across the euphorbias. Now I've admired euphorbias in other people's gardens, but the triffids didn't much resemble any I could remember seeing, until I saw a photo  labelled Euphorbia Lathyris. So my triffid is Euphorbia Lathyris, otherwise known as caper spurge, also known as the mole plant because it's said to repel moles - old gardener's wives tale?

Caper spurge facts - it grows over much of Europe and Asia but has probably been introduced to the UK. It's now widespread and often comes up in abandoned ground. It's a biannual so that makes sense, it likes to be undisturbed. I remember seeing the stems and glaucous leaves last year, but the bed was overgrown and anyway they weren't nearly so tall, so I didn't register that they were something unusual.

The other important facts about caper spurge: when ripe the seed heads expel seeds quite explosively, scattering them far and wide. Also the berries, which are said to look like capers although I can't really see it, are very poisonous and the milky sap is also poisonous and corrosive, causing skin irritation and serious harm if it gets in your eyes. In days of yore, beggars were said to have rubbed the sap into their skin to cause sores and so get more sympathy - another old gardeners tale? 

Anyway the caper spurge is now in the bottom of a garden bin, waiting to go to the dump. I compost a lot of things but decided this toxic plant might be unsuitable. I did enjoy watching it grow and I've no doubt that there are more triffids seeds lurking in the soil, just waiting to spring up. I might once again let them grow for a couple of years before they seed, because they're interesting plants.


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Bedside Reading - American Teenagers

Reading in bed is serious reading, not just for putting me to sleep.  There's a small pile of paperbacks on a precarious triangular shelf by the bed, and three of them have bookmarks a few pages in, meaning I have actually started them.

With one the bookmark is at page 32, that's as far as I've got in three weeks and I'm not likely to get any further. In one of Waterstones' three for two deals, I picked it up in the shop because I quite liked the cover but mainly the title intrigued me - Paper Towns - by John Green. Shows how important titles are!  I read the blurb on the back and a couple of the reviews, but I should have read them all. It's not a badly written book, in fact the use of the language and structure is fine, but it hasn't really engaged me. It's my problem, do I really need to read yet another coming of age story set in small-town America? 

It's not as if there's been a shortage of them over the years. I've read some of the best - Catcher in the Rye when I was an actual teenager and To Kill a Mockingbird which made an impression as it's actually in the POV of a girl - very unusual at the time. My favourite is Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees - a strange, beautiful, dramatic story of a lost girl being cared for by three beekeeping ladies.

Anyway, American teens are always all over the TV/cinema; I've enjoyed Buffie the Vampire Slayer, The Breakfast Club, The Lost Boys and even Heathers. But now I've been there, a very long time ago and I have far too many tee-shirts to really care about the self-obsession of American teenagers!

I should have read all the reviews of Paper Towns, it's described as, "A coming of age American road trip that is at once a satire of and tribute to its many celebrated predecessors."  OK. For me there's only one road-trip book - Jack Kerouac's On the Road.  And so the answer is I probably don't need Paper Towns - by John Green, so it's likely to find it's way to the Oxfam shop. I'm sure it's a perfectly good story and I don't suppose the author will really mind that it's not for me, I hope not as my lack of interest isn't a judgement on his book. I have paid for it, so he gets his probably miniscule royalty, and it will be passed on to benefit charity and for others to read. I hope they do enjoy it.

the Fairweather Gardener - Mini Beasties in May

Plenty of bees around now which is good, my foxgloves are just flowering and the bees love them. Also hover flies around, which are not only good pollinators but have nice fierce larvae, which the same as ladybird larvae will happily munch through loads of aphids. I like hover flies.

Male orange tip feeding on cranesbill flowers

Early in the month the butterflies began to appear, the first one I saw was an orange tip, flew up from the geraniums and away over the wall. They're quite unmistakeable, or the males are, the females are more discreet and have no orange tips, so they look more or less like another white butterfly.

Next, there were a few nests of untidy silk with small caterpillars in them. The first one I found was on the car, which was a bit weird. Then one or two appeared in the garden on the apple tree and I started finding small brown hairy caterpillars in random places. I wasn't worried until the cat sitting on my lap suddenly stood up and stated intently at my shoulder. I found a caterpillar on my collar, I just brushed it off, but too late. I came up in a horribly itchy rash all round my neck! Online I found a few hysterical headlines about toxic caterpillars. I took a closer look at mine, they're brown tail moth caterpillars, not toxic, they just have irritating hairs. So I kept away from the apple tree until they had dispersed.

Brown tail moth nest with caterpillars hatching -

photo from the Forestry Commission

Loads of ants, there are some tiny ones living under the patio by the house, which is fine, they excavate little piles of sand and I don't mind, I just sweep it away from their holes and down between some other stones. But I do have to discourage them from coming into the conservatory, found several in the cat's food bowl. Am keeping the floor cleaner and have blocked a couple of small holes from the outside. It's working so far.

Lily beetles mating on the stem of my fritillaries -

blooming cheek!

My current garden infestation is spiders - tiny ones just hatched out and clustering in small mobs in unexpected corners. Slightly larger, more independent minded ones are hanging out all over the clothes lines. My laundry will soon be covered in silk or, more problematically, the remains of dead flies etc. I do have a bit of a spider phobia, but can live alongside them most of the time without freaking out.

Every time I move a flowerpot the woodlice hurtle around in panic and sometimes a few springtails too. I just let them disperse, they're quite harmless. Wish I could say the same about the snails. There are hundreds, I sometimes gather them in handfuls and lob them into the vacant, nettle filled lot behind the house, but I know its a waste of time.

None of the creatures in my garden are going to be fed or sprayed with anything toxic, not even the pretty scarlet lily beetles which have devastated my poor fritillaries this year.

World Turtle Day 23 May

To celebrate World Turtle Day, make sure you know the difference between a Turtle and a Tortoise - they are not the same creature.

Fleetwood Mac, 'Oh Well' - My Desert Island Discs - 2

I loved Fleetwood Mac as a blues band, long before they became a pop group. I saw them live more often than any other band apart from John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, where three of the band originated anyway. Mick Fleetwood and John McVie were Mayall's rhythm section when Eric Clapton left and Peter Green stepped in. It was an improvement! Clapton is technically brilliant but his guitar playing has no soul. Peter Green has a true bluesman's soul, his voice and songs are from that soul and his guitar is sublime.

All three musicians - Greeny, McVie and Fleetwood - subsequently left The Bluesbreakers and became Fleetwood Mac.  Mayall didn't miss them, that band has always been about him anyway, I don't think he ever really liked others in the limelight. He frequently changed his line-up and he's still touring today.

The last time I saw Fleetwood Mac live, at the Leas Cliff Hall, Folkestone in 1969, they played 'Oh Well', written by Peter Green, which was on its way to becoming a hit record - it reached no.2 in the UK charts. For the live version they were loud, though not as loud as Led Zepplin who I'd go to see a month or two later. However by this stage Fleetwood Mac had three lead guitarists - Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan. As a live band they were unsurpassed and though the opening riff and the major part was played by Greeny, the others joined in - the intensity of the sound was incredible. As far as I remember, they didn't play the eight minute full length version.

As the rules don't allow me to take my copy of Fleetwood Mac's first album (known as the dog & dustbin album) to the desert island, I chose  'Oh Well', because of that live performance and for the defiant lyrics -

"...don't ask me what I think of you,
I might not give the answer that you want me to!"

I didn't love Fleetwood Mac after the three guitarists had left and the Mac became just another pop group.

Shape of the Beast

Chew

grass is bad now

smells not sweet

grass is dry now

taste of dust

sticks to tongue 

Not filling hunger

Smell 

smell of Acacia tree 

tree here good 

makes shade from hottest sun

between nights.

Tree makes food shade 

Smells of gerenuk

so no leaves to reach up

in the sand 

fallen leaves fallen fruit

good good fruit sweet chewy 

plenty fruit fill hunger…

fill...

fill…

Itch

itch on shoulder

no tick birds here

Acacia tree here

good for scratching…

gooood for scratching...

Listen 

Distant

Small roar not of lions

lions are beyond the hill

small rumble

not of elephants…

rumble bigger…

not stampede of wildebeest 

no wildebeest when ground is driest…

Turn 

turn from tree

face ears to sound…

listen more...

smell more...

taste the air...

Rumble not of rhino

no smell of rhino…

rumble and chatter clatter…

not monkeys…

not porcupine…

not wind, no wind, much heat

chatter of hyena...

Louder

smell of…

smell of… 

smell of the long black track beyond the lion hill

The beasts of the black track are here 

beasts that roar and sting

beasts that kill lions

kill elephants

kill  

Turn

face them 

Face Them 

Rumble not of thunder,

smell of the long black track

shape of the rumbling beast  chatter clatter

Flashes
flashes not of lightening

Face the beast 

Horn down…

CHARGE...