A short farewell.

This time last week I said a fond farewell to Margaret, my Aunt. Having met with the rest of the family many memories of my childhood were revisited and I found myself reminiscing with them.
It is quite extraordinary how I can recall memories from 40 years ago and yet I can't remember where I put my bloody glasses 40 seconds ago!! 

It is at times like these that I realise how privileged those of us are that have had such an abundance of interesting, supportive and friendly extended family members. Margaret was one such Aunt, married into my mother's side of the family, a professional oboe player, she became a smashing mother to two of my cousins. I remember going to see them as new born babies when I was but a child myself, I had not encountered babies in the family before as I was the youngest up to that point. I remember Margaret was very relaxed and despite trying to encourage me to come and say hello to Sally (my baby cousin) I stayed a safe distance away on the big squishy couch.

Once, when I was about 11 years old, Margaret called me over to the big black Grand Piano that sat comfortably in their large London townhouse living room. "Right" she said, "lets see if you can sing...."  She struck a note on the piano a c or perhaps an f sharp, "Repeat that note", she asked.  I did as instructed but even I could tell that it was not anything like that which she had struck. Bless her she tried again with a g or a d or something. "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" I repeated in vain. She looked a little saddened this time and after a further 3 or 4 attempts she had to graciously give in and diagnose a condition of complete and utter tone deafness.

You might think awe that's a bit mean, but in fairness I knew that I could hear when music was out of tune, after all I could tell that the notes I was singing were definitely out of tune. However my problem was trying to mimic notes and for that she was spot on, I was indeed crap.   However this diagnosis then made it all become clear as to why in my junior school I was the only kid in the so called Orchestra (2 cellos, 6 violins, 2 drums, Sir on the Piano and 35 squeaky recorders) that was NOT allowed to sing in the choir. Instead I was told that I had the important job of working the reel to reel tape deck, playing the music for the choir to sing along to. The only skill this required was the ability to see Sirs head nod and to be able to use the index finger to press stop or play as appropriate.

I couldn't understand why I wasn't allowed to sing with the rest of the choir (I think the music teacher tried to sell it to me as a really, really, reeeeeally important job). It didn't work as I thought he just didn't like me, ahhhh. So being diagnosed as 'tone deaf' actually started me off on my long list of ailments that I would slowly incur over the many, many following years see my blog of 10th January 2011.
I am told that Margaret was an avid reader of this blog, a bond that I did not know we had and a demonstration of how she kept an interest in what I (and my family) were up to from a long distance away. That was Margaret allover.

Good bye Margaret, You will be missed.

x

Dear Worried of Norfolk........

Dear Worried of Norfolk,

You say he runs your B&B and holiday cottage, cooks breakfasts, does the washing, ironing, cleaning and tends his allotment. No wonder he found himself 'unexpectedly called away'!

And.... he finds time, apparently, for photography whilst serving up a little afternoon delight for the local ladies.

I don't know about praising his multi-tasking but it seems to me that he must have some stamina there.
I note that you have apostrophised the words 'afternoon tea', is this some kind of Norfolk euphemism  for a nibble on a French Fancy, a munch on a Muffin, a bit of crumpet with a slurp of Earl Grey to wash it down? Frankly I prefer a nice tart in the afternoon.

May I suggest that you welcome wholeheartedly his efforts to embrace the local community but quietly take him aside and suggest that in future he just embraces one at a time as 12 does seem a little too......  'common'.

 Yours, Marge Proops, Claire Rayner, Mrs Mills et al....


 

Dear Marge Proops..........

Dear Marge Proops, Claire Rayner, Mrs Mills et al....

I have been very happily married for almost 30 years. However I have recently become concerned that my husband is clearly not busy enough single-handedly running our B&B and holiday cottage, cooking breakfasts, washing, ironing, cleaning and tending his allotment.

When he was unexpectedly called away I picked up a message on our answer-phone from a lady who he has been in correspondence with, thanking him for the photos he sent her.

She then went on to say how delighted she was with the invite he'd written in the letter she had just received inviting her over for the afternoon. Not only that but she had immediately phoned a friend who wanted to come too and between them they could think of 12 ladies that would like to spend the afternoon with him.
Her next question was 'Is 12 too many for you to handle?"

When he returned I played him the message and he denied all knowledge of inviting them around for 'afternoon tea'. He now claims he just wants to get this over and done with and is clearly keen to entertain all these ladies at once and very soon. (I didn't realise he was so adept at multi-tasking). 

Should I be worried or should I just be grateful that he is trying all avenues to drum up business?

Yours sincerely,

Worried of Norfolk

Ode to Asparagus.....

Ode to Asparagus

Six foot tall and woody and dry,

last years growth that shot us by.

'Tis Autumn and the old stems die,

fallen they stay just where they lie.

Cleared away the patch lies dormant,

a dead bed of sand looking unimportant.

Their shallow roots make the weeding a torment,

weeded by hand the crop the gardener strives to augment.

So why do they bother, why do they care?

Well the answer lies underground the answer lies there.

This magical root grows with a panache quite rare,

a royal among vegetables with a tasteful flair.

In May pushing out from the sand in just a short while,

this green column grows fast with an elegance of style.

Pick it young and build up your pile,

for this touch of luxury will make you smile.

So eat it slowly with Eggs Benedict at a dinner party,

or perhaps as a noble soup strong and hearty,

but beware my friends the hidden evil of this Moriarty,

for too much Asparagus will surely make you quite, quite farty!!

I have an Asparagus plot in the allotment which is quite coveted by mine neighbours, a plot laid with meticulous care by the previous owner about 3 to 4 years ago. This is rather a shame, for him, as Asparagus should not be picked for the first two to three years after planting and as a result it is I who am literally reaping the rewards of his hard work and very nice it is too!
It has indeed been a prolific provider of strong thick Asparagus shoots and to date we have had Asparagus quiche, Asparagus steamed, poached, fried, we've had Asparagus Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday too. (Thursday was an anomaly I feel). We have had Asparagus up to HERE!

So A few days ago I felt the urge to 'share' the joy that is Asparagus with some of my nearest and dearest (and even the nearest that are the farthest) by posting some little love bundles out across the nation to promote Norfolk's great 'foody' heritage.

I thought it was a fun idea until my wife informed me that one of the recipients was actually away on holiday in Kenya or some such place for the next two weeks. I don't think that by the time she gets home her little 'bundle of joy' will be quite so joyful! Furthermore I am concerned that the asparagus once decomposed and runny will then remove all the ink from the card of explanation enclosed with it. She will then return home to find a package full of  a slimy sludge and she shall instantly think that some nutter has got it in for her. Oh God, what have I done??
 I do hope she switched the central heating off!!!


So if you are saddened that you have not been sent any, my apologies but the above tale has led me to put a halt to my grand plan after all the intention was to spread the joy and not to lose the friendship of those self same nearest and dearest. Lesson learnt, I think!




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And so to the allotment.........

There are three of us in this marriage....... Alison, myself and The Allotment and one of them is high maintenance and needs much attention, daily.

So having spent the last two and a half years knocking walls down , building new walls up, starting up a B&B business from scratch, decorating, serving guests, decorating, gardening, decorating, serving more guests, more decorating, starting up a Holiday cottage business from scratch, making jams, marketing and even more decorating. We decided that we needed something to do in our spare time.....   Ha!

And so to the allotment.........


Now you may recall that when I first obtained the allotment it looked more like a plot for the production of wild flower seeds.

There were all the usual offenders such as bindweed, stinging nettles and thistles then just to add a little glamour to the mix there was a splash of purple poppies, a sprinkle of mare's tail and a plethora of perennials.

I make no apology for my first action which was to weed kill everywhere unless there was existing fruit or veg worth saving.

Then many weeks later all the dead debris had to be cleared and the plot planned. I reckon that with something like this you only get one chance to start from scratch and so I took some time in measuring drawing and even painting a watercolour plan so I knew exactly how I wanted the plot to be like.

I thought Alan Titmarsh would have been proud of me. To the far left (West) are my 3 plots for vegetables thus allowing for a 3 year rotation. Then at the top centre I have current bushes with Gooseberries below and raspberries to the right. These I have set from North to South to ensure the sun swathes both sides of the canes throughout the day. At the base and centre there is an existing Asparagus bed and to the right a large bed of Rhubarb. I like rhubarb! To the right of this is my 'orchard' which swings behind the shed next to the pond. From left to right we have an Ellis Orange pippin, A Conference Pear, a Cox's pippin, a Greengage and a Damson. Above the orchard there is a bed for flowers and above that there are two Strawberry raised beds with the compost bins to their right. The boundary on the right has two thornless blackberry bushes and a Loganberry too.

The following photographs will show you a little of this journey and a lot of before and after shots as well........

At first glance it seems that there is one shed but that green mass in the centre of the picture is a shed under a camouflage of Honey suckle.

Then after I had cleared the weeds and rotavated 'hay presto' a shed............

And present day.................

No I'm not very tall, it was a late evening photograph. The Union Jacks and England Flags are not a statement of my loyalist tendencies but are simply there to scare the pigeons which they have done with great effect... Rule Britannia!

The above photos were taken from the top west corner of the plot. The next ones are taken from the bottom west corner.

My shadow makes me look a little like a cowboy, I guess it is because.... I have a hat. You are not an allotmenteer unless you have a HAT! This was after the rotavating and I had just used it to 'plough in' half a tonne of ripe cow manure. That evening I was not welcomed home by the loved one!

No hat!!  OK same position as above but I have now broken the soil down to a reasonably fine tilth and neatened the edges of the bed by creating a raised bed and a ditch. I stole the idea for netting support from an excellent National Trust property nearby called Felbrigg. It is simply some wooden 2"x2" banged into the ground with some cheap bamboo canes supporting the net. Sadly an unexpected frost killed off my first plantings here of dwarf Borlotti beans.

At the time it was one of those where do I start first. Some of the stinging nettles that I dug out were more like small shrubs. I was also plagued by a large colony of Jerusalem Artichokes which were worse weeds than many of the others.

Again here I have got to the stage of laying out my plan in a rough form. In the foreground you can see a raised bed with nothing in it, I may have leeks here. Then behind that is the Asparagus bed then the Rhubarb bed is taking shape and behind that you can see 3 of the trees making up part of the new orchard.

Same position again but I have leveled things off a little and done some tidying up. I had laid grass seed on all the paths and as a lawn under the trees in March just as the weather forecasters said it would rain. Well they were wrong! After the January snow we have hardly had any rain what so ever. Forget April showers.... In April we had just 6mm of rain!!

Here my mother looks at me with incredulity believing that I may have bitten off more than I could chew.

A few days later......  Ha,ha, more like several months. So to the right (North) you can just see the Strawberry raised beds and straight ahead the Raspberry canes. Some were given to me by a neighbouring allotmenteer but the remainder we salvaged from the old pre-existing ones. However I have no idea if they are Summer or Autumn Raspberries, or indeed if they are still alive... Exciting isn't it?

This is the second shed or more of a sort of corrugated greenhouse. There is a pond hidden in the weeds at the back of this photo.

And after.....

Weeds cleared, ground found I have placed two big water tanks to capture the water from the sheds roof and with my dad's help built 4 large compost bins.

Same place as before and just as over-run.

After a little work.

You will see that there is a pipe into the water butts and  a long piece takes the surplus water over to the pond now. That said, because of the 3 months drought here I have had to use most of one of these tanks (1,000 ltrs) on the plot already. I NEED RAIN!!!

The Raspberry canes.     Somewhere.

Same scene but a little more organised. I have chosen to use heavy duty weed suppressing material as I simply cannot afford to spend hours weeding areas that are not to bu grown in, nor do I want loads of mowing.

Just weeds.

The Currants, Redcurrants, Blackcurrants and White currants too. At the far end there are 5 Gooseberry bushes.

Asparagus plot to the left and Rhubarb to the right.

The Onion patch.

The Asparagus patch, MMMmmmmmmm.

The reason for it all!

I'd just like to say thank you to all those that have helped, you all know who you are, not least my parents. Here you can see my legless father helping to sort out the net. Just kiddin' he is actually kneeling down but it was an odd photo

So that is it then. I now have a greenhouse full of plants and a high possibility of frost tonight. I just want to plant some vegetables but the Weatherman,  well he still say NOooooo. We will have another look in 2 months time to see if any vegetables ever got to fruition!



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' My overiding thought, that saddened me greatly, was that dinner was orf '.

At times and especially in the evenings it is so tranquil sitting on the patio whilst allowing my eyes to feast on the picture before me. A lush grass green lawn speckled with tiny white daisies and bordered by a myriad of different coloured Primula. The evening sun adding a touch of drama by spot lighting, as if it were a Super Trouper, the sweet statue of a small girl reading a book whilst sat on a tree stump.

All around the only noise that can be heard is that of song birds whilst Goldfinches, Great Tits, Robins, Dunnocks, Blue Tits, Green Finches and even Sparrows tussle over the bird feeders. Amongst the Chaffinches picking up fallen seed on the sunlit lawn are a pair of Pied Wagtails. They have been visiting us every day for at least the last two weeks and I assume that they are nesting nearby but as yet I have not discovered where. Above me every now and then there is the sound of wood being chiseled. It is not a carpenter but rather a somewhat smaller creature, a Blue Tit who has taken to building a nest in our sparrow lodge. Why I do not know for it clearly says in large letters "Sparrow Lodge" and it has holes designed for Sparrows and also it is an apartment block consisting of 5 flats. Sadly however the Sparrows show no interest and prefer to live in the eves of the main house instead. There is only one other sound which bubbles over our high garden flint walls, cascading like a waterfall the continual bleating of lambs in an adjacent field.

Spring has definitely sprung as all and sundry are plying their wares in an effort to find a mate. Down the allotment in my pond (sounds grand but it is only 3' wide and surrounded by weeds) there are at least 20 frisky frogs and they're either doin' the business or just playing leap frog.... very sloooowwly.

Back in the garden the cat is sitting on the edge of the patio table intently watching one of our Pied Wagtails. Peck, wag, peck, wag, nasty infliction that.... peck, wag as it wanders behind some daffodils then like a shot and in just 2 seconds Scribble (the cat) was around the blind side of the daffodils and just a claws reach from the Wagtail before it's instinctive wag launched it into the air and off over the flint cottage garden wall. Immediately the gardens karma returns and the foiled Scribble returns back to sit by my feet. The sun dropped out of sight and the daisies all shut their petals for the night and peace ensued.

This tranquility can be disturbed, not least by myself in cutting all those tiles, how many was it now?
However I think my wife wins the disturbance of the year a few weeks back, when she set fire to our dinner which was being 'cold smoked' in our smoker in the garden.

For those of you who have not been making an effort to keep up with the blog (may the fleas of a thousand camel's infest your armpits) you will need to flick back to the blog of Wednesday 20th of March 2013. Here you will read how we bought a cardboard box for use as a 'cold smoker' and yes I probably tempted fate when I joked that....

 "Firstly for cold smoking..... a cardboard box! Sounds daft as there is no smoke without fire and with fire there is good reason to think that after a while there would be no box."

Well the idea of starting a small fire in a cardboard box does sound bonkers but all we do is light a Tealight  in a nifty little gadget, remove the Tealight when the sawdust in the gadget smoulders and then insert the unit into the base of the box where it slowly smoulders away causing the oak sawdust to smoke.


Well this is what the cardboard box should look like......

And after a few minutes this is what the box looked like.....

And a few minutes more ......

Unfortunately  a fundamental principle of this is the removal of the Tealight which a certain person that a husband is too honorable to mention by name forgot to do. Within minutes the box had caught light, I valiantly tried to rescue the Duck breast within (our dinner) but all I managed to get was a couple of burns to my fingers. I went to get a bucket of water but as I filled it in the kitchen sink I looked through the window out to the smouldering box which suddenly escalated to an inferno.

' My overiding thought that saddened me greatly was that dinner was orf '.

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Apart from 26 piles of washing (and ironing), preparing the guest rooms, vacuuming, shopping, gardening and the allotment I've really got nothing better to do!

I found myself kneeling on the floor of the shower struggling to lay another bead of sealant for what felt like the 100th time in this house. I wetted my right index finger and run it along the base of the wall smoothing the bobbly bead of silicone into a watertight strip. God, I thought to myself how many times have I done this since we moved in to the house some two and a half years ago. Too bloody many times I curtly replied as the cat sat on the hall carpet looking through the open bathroom door probably wondering to whom I was directing my conversation.

This was our shower room, the last room to require tiles and this was the last task on the last piece of tiling in that room. I wiped my sticky siliconed finger clean and prepared for the onerous task of getting my self back up onto my feet again. My first tiling job in the house was the Kitchen floor way back in January of 2011 and since then I seem to have been tiling for the following two and a quarter years. Literally the day that I started this marathon tiling event my knee received a trauma and although I had an operation to fix it I still suffer some stiffness and so getting from the kneeling position in a cramped shower to a standing one is a challenge.

As I struggled to get upright with an awkwardness that only a camel could replicate I started to wonder just how many tiles I must have stuck to the walls and floors of this place in that time.
My knee gave a reassuring click, much like the clunk of the car seat belt, as I stood at my full 6' 1" as if to demonstrate that it is safely locked into position and we are safe to move on. Stiffly I squeezed out of the narrow pivoted shower door (I made an error of judgement there and wished that I had plumped for the concertina style door). By now the cat had got bored and wandered off to terrorise my new lounge carpet with her sharp unforgiving claws.

This left me with my thoughts, pondering....... Mmmmm, I wonder how many tiles.... in fact I wonder how many times I had cut a tile. It had seemed to me that I had cut absolutely hundreds of the damn things. Well of course that was it, I had just simply gotta know so I started counting.....

1,2,3,4,5,6, No this'll never work it will take me for ever, no I need pen and paper. Now how shall I break this down? After much thought (2 minutes with pen, paper and a chunk of cake to aid the little grey cells) I had created 3 columns.

Whole tiles                  Cut tiles                          Meters of Grout

I marched around the house late yesterday evening collating this wholly useless information. I became quite pedantic about getting it absolutely correct, garbage in - garbage out I reinforced the necessity to be accurate with myself. Only to then find that I had to immediately stop the count as I had just prompted myself to put the dustbin out for tomorrows collection!


So here it is, the end result of all that hard work (not the counting, but the tiling). In the 2 years and 3 months we have .......

Laid 829 whole tiles.
Cut and laid a further 518 tiles of which I estimate I have made approximately 1,030 cuts.


 That is a TOTAL of 1,347 tiles laid!

(887 were wall tiles and 460 were floor tiles)



The most painstaking to measure were the lines of grout but with very careful calculation I even managed to calculate how long all the lines would be if they were all lined up end to end. I know, I know, you're thinking hasn't he anything better to do?
Well apart from 26 piles of washing (and ironing), preparing the guest rooms, vacuuming, shopping, gardening and the allotment I've really got nothing better to do!

So how much grouting have we slapped onto our walls and floors then?

100 meters?


200 meters?


Perhaps 500 meters!


Nope.........


We have inserted some 756 meters of grout, or 2,480ft.


To put that into perspective it is approximately two and a half times the height of The Shard !


All this work done despite my wonky knees and having guests coming and going throughout whilst at no time seeing any evidence of our vivacious tiling frenzy that we have perpetuated in the pursuance of our dream.

Perhaps I can steal a moments rest-bite from this all consuming task..... Fat chance. The grouting in the Cottage's shower are becoming a little stained and so I need to head over there soon and give them a freshen up.............

Will it never end!






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