The UK deserves better than Boris Johnson

It looks very likely that the new Prime Minister will be Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, a man of limited talent and vast ambition.

Don't be deceived by the friendly "Boris" facade and handy cabaret turn of buffoonery.

Here is a man who can handle neither the big picture nor the detail. A man who adopts any cause and tramples over whoever gets in his way.

The tyranny of the celebrity cleaner

The current obsession on social media seems to be extreme tidying, brought to us by Marie Kondo and Mrs Hinch. It's great for their book sales and for IKEA and makers of cleaning products, but is it actually good for us?

All is not well in the garden

The garden has been a bit disappointing this summer, and not just because one of our wood pigeons has died.

I spent a LOT on plants this year and virtually remodelled my border, as well as planting a lot of pots which I don't normally do for summer. The early summer garden was fine:

But the garden today, in late summer, has run out of steam:

There's a huge empty space which would normally be taken by towers of hollyhocks. Unfortunately they were very seriously affected by rust and showed no signs of flowering, so I had to remove them.

Earlier in the summer, I usually get a great display of foxgloves too. But I didn't like the different type that I planted, foxglove x mertonensis; they flowered later, were weird colours and didn't last very long.

I was inspired by Joe Swift's containers of purple plants, and Sarah Raven's white plants in pots. But some of the white plants - the phlox and cosmos - didn't thrive and were dominated by lobelia. The purple and mauve plants, particularly the verbena, looked great but in my trademark green pots somehow didn't have any oomph.  Next year I'll add some bright pink flowers.

I planted a rose in the border for the first time, Olivia Rose Austin, and sadly because she was planted on a slant, she kind of collapsed and didn't grow upright. I will have to replant her when dormant.

Meanwhile Shed Corner was a complete disaster.

I've learnt that if I put containers of tall and very vivid plants by the shed, beyond the decking, it leads the eye down the garden and makes it look bigger.  The previous owners built a garage in the garden which made it a lot smaller;  Shed Corner is a reminder of its glory days.  I planted up osteospurmums, which I've never grown before, along with a salvia and a fuchsia.

The osteos all died;  it wasn't sunny enough. I tried moving the pots but it was a bit too late.  The fuchsia was great but turned out to be a trailing type, which was unsuitable for the pot it's in.

I've rescued Shed Corner a little by buying a couple of celosia which are short lived but very impactful.

Finally, the Japanese anemones were very poor this year - the flowers were tiny! - and my beloved salvia Hotlips, which is actually 2 plants that grow huge like a shrub, started taking over the grass.  It leans forward to try to escape the hedge and and to catch the sun, and encroaches over our tiny "lawn" of artificial grass. The border it's in is particularly problematic, being mostly shaded and very dry.

It wasn't all bad. Some plants were wonderful. The roses in the front garden have never been so good. I've been watering them more than normal and it's paid off: they have hardly any black spot or other ailments. The honeysuckle too was very good.  I was a bit uncertain about pruning it last year but this time I pruned it after flowering, and I'm hoping for the best.

I've already started preparing for next year.  I've got some healthy young foxglove purpurea plants and  a new cordyline to replace the one that died last winter  (it gives some architectural shape to the border). I'm awaiting my bulb order and I've got three trays of forget-me-nots and some wallflowers ready to plant out with them. I'll persevere with the hollyhocks because I do love them. I'm going to move a few things around;  the salvias got very unruly and fuchsia Hawkshead, a white hardy variety, is not enough of a show stopper to retain its current position.

I'm always pleased with my spring garden but next year I'll be aiming for better results in high summer too.

Why Mary Berry was right: bin the deep fat fryer

I don't have a lot of time for Gregg Wallace. I've always questioned his status as a judge on Masterchef based on his credentials of a) eating out a lot, and b) having been a grocer, which makes him an "ingredients expert" as he was once billed.

He's currently on honeymoon with his fourth wife, another young lady he met on Twitter. I'm saying nothing.

Wallace criticised the saintly Mary Berry for saying that no-one needs a deep fat fryer.  He said that Britain frys things, we always have, and there's nothing wrong with chips and spam fritters.

He's a little out-of-touch. Young mums use McCains oven chips. Heating oil to boiling point was never a very safe thing to do. I've never had a deep fat fryer.

On the point that "we've always done it, it's what we do,"  we used to do lots of things that we don't do now.  It doesn't make them right.  Slavery,  sacking women for being pregnant; corporal punishment in schools.

If Gregg casts his mind back to when he was a kid, I'm sure he did enjoy spam fritters and chips. We occasionally had chips cooked in the chip pan, with beef dripping. Delicious. And perfectly fine to have as a treat. Nobody snacked mindlessly between meals or drank sugary fizzy drinks. It was milk or squash in those days. Consequently, hardly anyone was obese. If you watch footage of real people from the 60s and 70s, they were all slim. There was only one boy at my school who was overweight.

It's a different story nowadays as we all know. You only have to see the kids waddling out of school and into the nearest takeaway to surmise that the last thing this lot need is extra chips, even if they are cooked by mum and not by Ronald McDonald.

Three Blind Lice

My husband J often refers laconically to an erring a man on TV as "a louse." I love that phrase and it's unfortunate that "three louses" doesn't really work.  So, Three Blind Lice it is.  Here are three men who have raised my ire.

1) Sir Philip Green

Image: Mirror.co.uk

As doughty old UK retailer BHS sighs and sinks this weekend, like the Titanic when it gave a moan and disappeared for ever, Green is no doubt parading his big belly somewhere in the Adriatic on one of his vulgar yachts. He claimed he would sort out the BHS pension scandal but no sign of that from him or "er indoors", Lady Green, who is said to balance the books. Choppy waters ahead for that dodgy pair.







2) Jeremy Corbyn

Image: Telegraph.co.uk 

To start with, I thought he was harmless enough and would soon be swatted out of the way like an irritating fly.  This week we had the unseemly row with Virgin Trains over their CCTV footage and his claims the train was full (later recanted to a pitiful "I wanted to sit with my wife" which is rich when he's never photographed with her). But it's not that which made my blood boil. If he wants to hire inept PR people, that's his business.

No, I loathe him because he's a bully, and deluded. He smirked when some of his people (men) mocked BBC business editor Laura Kuenssberg. Any decent man would have rebuked his team. He refuses to deal properly with claims of anti-Semitism.  One of his female MPs Ruth Smeeth walked out in disgust at some of Corbyn's ill-judged comments. Comrade Jezzer and his bull necked henchmen remind me of characters from Animal Farm. They certainly parade similar sentiments parrot-fashion. Re-nationalise this, re-nationalise that!

He's deluded because he's convinced that as long as he has the backing of "the party members," he's got every right to be leader.

My message to you Mr Corbyn is: Labour will lose the next election under you and face an even longer struggle back, if it doesn't shatter into pieces. Is it good for democracy not to have a viable opposition party?  Most of your party members are left wing extremists whose views would go down well with Trotsky. Many of us who always voted for Labour WILL NOT DO SO while you are the leader. If you cared for the party you would stand down.

3) Louis Smith

Image: Telegraph.co,uk

I really disliked the way the gymnast reacted when Max Whitlock took the Gold in the pommel horse at the Olympics.

I've long thought of him as vain, petulant and evidently utterly ruined by his devoted mum, who still does his ironing.

No-one likes a poor loser.

Fab Team GB and the naysayers

Jo Rowsell-Shand, Elinor Barker,
Laura Trott and Katie Archibald
image: Telegraph.co.uk

I didn't think we could top the 2012 London Olympics and in many ways we haven't - the empty seats in Rio and the debacle around the Paralympic Games tell the story - but wow, Team GB, you have surpassed yourselves!

Second in the medals table, ahead of China and with gold medals spread across more disciplines than the US, this team has done us proud.

The naysayers are out there of course: losing cyclists making po- faced suggestions, quickly withdrawn, about the British team and how it only does well in the Olympics; some unnamed commentator in the Mail on Sunday today likening the investment in sport and resulting success to the state sponsored drug enhanced days of East Germany a few decades ago.

We used to remember the hapless former Prime Minister John Major mainly for his indiscretions with Edwina Currie, now we should laud him for creating the circumstances that led to our Olympic success this year: in particular, the significant investment in certain sports.

It wasn't "state sponsored."  It's cheerfully funded by us the people, mostly by the lottery. The Labour Party, which has become very dour and patronising under Comrade Jeremy, believes this is a bad thing because it exploits the dreams of poor people. They actually seriously believe that people don't realise their chances of winning are tiny. Oh, but they do, but somebody does win, and that's as powerful an incentive to squeezed middle class people, often subsidising grown-up children and care homes, as it is to "poor people."

The Brownlee Brothers: Triathlon Gold and Silver
image: Telegraph.co.uk

I remember years ago when we didn't invest in sport and we had one or two stand-out competitors who did it all on their own. We certainly didn't jump for joy when we saw the medals table. We were squarely beaten by nearly every country in Europe.

Now we can hold our heads high.

More importantly, children will hopefully be inspired to follow the example of Olympians who really deserve the honours that will no doubt follow: Mo Farah, Laura Trott, Jason Kenny, Nicola Adams, Jade Jones, Adam Peaty and the Brownlees to name just a handful.

One of our pigeons is missing

Pidgie Pigeon, RIP

Oh, I know it's small in the scheme of things. A wood pigeon, shuffled off to the great nest in the sky. A late pigeon;  a pigeon who has ceased to be.

Regular readers to this blog will know that for the past five years a pair of wood pigeons has been visiting the garden several times a day, and I've been throwing down seed for them.

The male, a very plump and gregarious bird, would run towards me as fast as his little legs would carry him.  I named him "Pidgie." Well, I haven't seen Pidgie for more than a week now. So I'm assuming that he has Passed.

Meanwhile his mate, Leg, is spending more time in the garden and has a winsome new habit of perching on the garden gate so that she can fix a beady eye on me when I come down for breakfast.

Leg was named thus because she limps.

An intruder pigeon has started hanging around, and Leg is defending her patch.  J maintains this is probably a new male moving in on Pidgie's turf. Or on Pidgie's bird, in fact.

I wonder if Leg knows that Pidgie is dead, or, as in the case of swans, has to see the body to acknowledge it.

I draw your attention to this wonderful, heart breaking poem by Gillian Clarke.

Swans

She was brave in the bitter river,
the Mary Rose, doomed,
ice-chalice, lily in bloom.

Thaw, her feathers and bones dissolve in the flow
and she's gone, flower that floated
so light under death's undertow.

In lengthening light he patrols alone
ferocious on his watery shore
where the nest from last year and the year before

has drowned to a dredge of sticks and sludge.
In full sail, his body ablaze, bridge
over unfenced water, he waits for her.

The voice on the phone said,
"He doesn't know she's dead.
There is nothing to be done."

Now love rides the river
like a king's ship, all wake and quiver,
and I can't tell him, it's over.