Unintelligent Design

“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg."
- C.S. Lewis

Every now and then I look around, look at myself and think "right, must make some changes". A little less often, I actually manage to make some of those changes.

This time, I'm a bit fed up of the house (still a bit of a building site), but have the money to fix it and the time to ruthlessly declutter it. I'd quite like to sort some other bits of life out as well, but they may be trickier to quantify...

I'm feeling optimistic at the moment, so let's see how the current plans turn out.

It occurs to me that I haven't been to the opera for Quite Some Time. As I'm now a little less snowed under (and a little more likely to be in London), this should be fixed.

Any London folk potentially interested in joining me?

Looks as if it's going to be a busy week.

Tonight I'm off to Oxford for Intrusion, which is mostly davefish's fault. Although 'fault' might not be quite the right word.

Clubbing on a week night is allegedly a bad, bad habit - but Tuesday nights have always been goth nights hereabouts. Whether it's been Heresy, Intrusion or The Calling, it's generally been a Tuesday.

(Goth at a weekend has always been some sort of strange luxury. At least when outside of London and Yorkshire...)

After that, it's London on Thursday and Friday. This may involve some horribly early trains. But probably slightly less dancing...

A very leisurely Sunday, mostly due to a full Sunday roast.

My current approach to roast chicken is a very simple one - grab something interesting from the herb patch, stuff it inside the chicken and see how it turns out.

For today's attempt, that meant a bit of 'green ginger' rosemary, lots of oregano and a bit of sorrel. Plus a couple of cloves of homegrown garlic. Seemed to work. Even got half-decent gravy. :)

Also confirmed that 'cosmos' spuds (one of this year's homegrown efforts) make decent roast potatoes. May have to grow 'em again in years to come.

This year's gardening has officially started, despite the snow.

Aubergines (Szechuan), tomatoes (Black Krim) and Queensland Arrowroot now in the heated propagator. With luck, some of them will actually grow, too (the tomatoes and aubergines were the last in the packet and getting to the 'plant now or never' point)...

Many other things to follow, but at least that's a start. :-)

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This is the time of year when I get a bit worried about my plants, especially the new ones.

Pots get moved into the house and I start wondering about watering and light levels. Plants in the garden shed their leaves or simply wither away.

There will be some casualties. There always are - the welsh onions have rotted away in a waterlogged bed. Some of the thyme's gone much the same way. And the Szechuan pepper in the kitchen has gone from healthy to desiccated in about a day (or at least it feels that way...).

New perennials are always a particular concern. An autumn olive bush was planted out a couple of months back and I had a brief panic this week when leaves turned yellow and fell off. Surely it was an evergreen? Thankfully not. But I had to double check.

And then, on the other hand, there's the medlar tree... it looks spectacular. The dying leaves are splendidly autumnal, a fiery red / orange / yellow mix. It was planted this year and I won't get any fruit for a year or two.

But right now, I don't much care about that bit. I'm just happy to have something quite so striking in the garden at an otherwise bleak time.

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I was going to write something about the very pleasant long weekend I've just had in Italy, but then my sister phoned to check I was ok. I hadn't seen the news about the second earthquake.

So, yes, we're back safely. That was more or less where we were visiting, although the worst effects seem to be in small villages rather than Mantova and Bologna).

I hope that everyone we met there is ok after yesterday's events.

It's more than a little sobering to realise that if we stayed an extra day, we'd have been evacuated from our hotel in Bologna Monday morning.

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This year I got my first crop of quinces from the garden. Tonight was my first attempt at cooking them...

Peeled, cored and roughly chopped two, then cooked them 'til tender in a covered pan with butter, sugar and lemon juice.

Nom. Not sure I got it entirely right in terms of sugar/lemon quantities, but very tasty nonetheless. :-)

(2 down, 15 to go...)

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Supper today was my very first homegrown apple, a huge Peasgood's Nonsuch.

It's one of those 'dual purpose' varieties - supposed to be good for cooking, but also edible raw.

I can confirm that they are actually quite tasty. Which is probably just as well, as the tree may be big enough to give me more than one apple next year. :-)

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