Weekend

 

Lisle Street, in Chinatown, Soho

We are back home after two happy nights in London - staying at Ian and Sarah's house in Fulham. After twenty weeks of pregnancy, Sarah is positively blooming.

We just chatted away on Friday night. The evening felt quite Mediterranean as we took advantage of their newly updated outdoor space. We drank wine as Ian ordered in a delicious Lebanese takeaway.

On Saturday morning Ian made us a lovely brunch with toasted farmhouse bread, hummus, grilled tofu and salad seedlings. This was mine:-

It was so hot in London this weekend that we were anxious about having too much sun. Sarah phoned up about the theatre tickets she had reserved at The National Theatre only to discover that the preview show of "Dear England"  had just been cancelled. This was a real bummer so we decided to book another show and managed to get tickets for the musical "Ain't Too Proud" - all about the Motown singing group The Temptations.

Before venturing to The West End, we visited Ian's new "Bosh!" office in Hammersmith and were all duly impressed. It has a kitchen studio, two meeting rooms and a big workspace with several computers. Amazingly they now employ a team of sixteen people. From little acorns grow mighty oaks.

After the show which ended so impressively, we left the theatre and where revellers thronged the Soho streets, Ian spotted a black cab pulling up and was able to grab it as the previous fare disembarked. Soon we were heading back to Fulham where Ian and I watched a recording of The European Champions League final without knowing the score. We got to bed at around one in the morning.

Before heading home this afternoon (Sunday), we strolled out to "The Mitre" pub in Fulham for a delicious Sunday dinner and here we all are, warts and all...

Driving home up the M1 motorway took an hour longer than expected as there was a big hold up just north of Northampton. There had been a vehicle fire and traffic was being directed into one lane of the four lane motorway. For more than half an hour we were completely stationary but at least Clint was not on fire though he was positively fuming because of the hold-up!

London

The National Theatre, London

Contributions by the author of this humble Yorkshire blog will be suspended for two days from today as the aforesaid author will be in London with his spouse visiting his only begotten son and his London-born mistress* who has bought us tickets to see a show at The National Theatre.

* - to clarify, the author of this blog does not have a mistress. The young lady in question is the only begotten son's mistress..

Englightenment

The newly painted Buddha sits by The Path of Enlightenment. He is watched over from The Stump of The Tree of Knowledge by the freshly painted Black Cat of Vigilance...

Also serving and protecting Lord Buddha is The Hosta of Fertility....

And The Gnome of Loyalty...

Further up The Garden of Munificence and just starting to grow are The Courgettes of Zucchini...

At the end of the garden we have an oak tree that I grew from an acorn I had collected  at The Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin. In the last ten years that tree had  grown too big for our liking and was becoming problematic both for next door and for our vegetable plot - creating too much shade - so in March I sawed and pruned  it back  pretty severely. I didn't want to kill it and sure enough new but delayed growth began to emerge from what remained.

You may not get this but some of the oak leaves that have appeared are massive - about the size of my hand. They are seven or eight times bigger than a normal oak leaf. Perhaps a botanist could explain the phenomenon. It may be that in its panic to survive, the tree has sent out bigger leaves to absorb more sunlight and guarantee its survival. I have never before observed anything like this

If only The Lord Buddha could speak. He would surely be able to enlighten me about what is going on with that tree.

Picture

I wandered down to "The Itchy Pig" tonight. There I drank two and a half pints of Abbeydale "Heathen" and had a nice chat with Alan who is a significant figure in the local CAMRA group. CAMRA stands for Campaign for Real Ale.  It is a national organisation. They act as a pressure group for beer drinkers and a source of information about real ales and the local pub scene.

Because of this, all that I have for you tonight is a picture  of me taken by my father in 1957 when I was four years old. I am on my tricycle eating an apple. Beyond me is the field that was adjacent to our garden. I remember being in that field at harvest-time and sitting happily with two farm workers in the sunshine drinking sweet coffee from an enamel mug.  Between 1963 and 1964, the field became a large building site and a private housing estate grew up there.

Dad was a pretty keen amateur photographer and even had his own dark room where he could develop and print his own pictures. I was the only one of his four sons who showed the slightest interest in this process and when I was about ten he taught me the rudiments of this alchemy.  How magical it was to see one's pictures emerging in the chemical fixing bath under a red light.

He died in September 1979 and even now  I think of him every day and still miss him.  Mourning is never over and done with in a week or two. It can go on forever.

Mishmash

The Summer of 1954

"I'm just going up the garden to paint the cat's eyes."

That's not something one says every day.

Yesterday I had painted the flaking Buddha and used the same  black paint to refresh our old stone cat.  He had been crouching on a paving stone for twenty five years. Under that slab is the grave of our first family cat - Blizzard. We acquired him from the RSPCA animal shelter at Bawtry one snowy day in January 1982. By the time we got back to Sheffield  that night,  a full-on blizzard was making driving conditions dangerous. We ditched the car and walked the last half mile back to our terraced house with me gripping the handle of the cardboard pet carrier in which Kitten Blizzard was miaowing in terror. This is how he got his name.

You can't have a black cat with black eyes so I painted them green using oil paint from a tube. And I decided that from now on, he won't be crouching at ground level, he will sit on the stump of  our old horse chestnut tree which we now use as an extra bird table.

I am happy to report that the scaffolding finally came down today and  that the three scaffolders took it all away in their flatbed truck. Now we can see properly that our rendering is the smartest and whitest on the street. It was looking rather shabby beforehand. I am so glad we bit the bullet on that one. I have just got the rendering below our front bay window to paint but before I do that I shall jetwash the block paving in front of our house.

I made a nice spaghetti meal this evening with bacon bits, courgette, cherry tomatoes, fried onion and chopped mushroom with grated parmesan cheese. There was some left - mostly from Shirley's plate. Instead of casting it into the kitchen bin, I chopped it up and chucked it on our lawn. Sure enough, as dusk was descending, I looked out and saw that a fox was cleaning it up for us. The other day the same fox was chowing down a chicken carcass.

Sorry I didn't take photos of the restored Buddha or the stone cat to accompany this writing. Instead I'm sharing two of the pictures that were re-discovered in our attic. That's me with my mother in the summer of 1954 when I was ten months old and the other one is of me with my late brother Simon on my wedding day in 1981.  There were reasons why I asked him to be my best man when there were three or four other blokes I might have picked - including Tony who I went walking with last week.

October 1981

Rugby

Some treasures were discovered in our attic ahead of the installation of a new roof. I found the photograph displayed above. It was taken in 1941 at RAF Padgate near Warrington in what was then Lancashire. It shows the rugby union team and there's my father Philip sitting third from the left.  He can't have made many appearances for the RAF Padgate XV as he was only there for twelve weeks of intensive training   before being shipped off to India.  Prior to volunteering he had been a primary school teacher for four years but had resigned his post in order to join the war effort. I guess that all the other team members had done the same and that a number of them never came home.

Below you can see the Under 16 rugby squad from my old secondary school in Hull. The picture was taken in 1969 - probably around Easter and this time sitting third from the left it's me - the author of this humble Yorkshire blog. I enjoyed rugby and though I say so myself I was good at it  - being picked to play for my city and in the following year  I was the youngest player in the school's first team. I was once described as "tigerish". It's funny but after all these years, I can name nearly all of the other boys... Foster,  Carleton, Tarbotton, Wilkie, Lund, Sumpton, Hawley, Harrison, Hirst, Hawtree. There were a lot of "H's".

None of my three brothers took to rugby but Simon was a pretty good footballer. Paul was into rock climbing and rowing but Robin really only showed prowess in swimming and still enjoys it very much today. Like Cro Magnon, he has his own pool way down in the south west of France.

Snipped from the team photos, there's me and Dad below. Can you tell which is which?  Dad would have been twenty seven in 1941 but in 1969 I was fifteen.

Border

In a shady part of our garden, under aged apple trees there's a border I created a few years back. It contains a laurel bush, a couple of hostas, a couple of ferns, a spotty plant that Old Bert gave me, a garden gnome and a Buddha statuette.

The other day I noticed that this border was becoming overgrown. Fortunately, today I had an urge to tackle it. At our local Lidl store, I bought two bags of decorative bark chippings and then set about the border by carefully weeding it. Actually, most of the plants I took out by hand were not weeds at all but border plants that had extended their territory without permission.

I also pruned back some of the laurel bush and nearby holly.

When all was done I  slit open the bags of bark chippings and poured them between the plants before raking in. I guess this all took me ninety minutes or so. It looked a lot better when I was done but the Buddha still has flaky skin disease. I am hoping to buy a new Buddha to replace the old has-been.

Before:-

After:-

Before:-

After:-

And as I am on the business of gardening, here's the top of our garden looking to the vegetable patch while before it runner beans are already climbing up my wigwam of bamboo canes:-