The garden in July

I'm horrified to see that my last post was as long ago as May, and then it was "The garden in May." Now I am back with "The garden in July."

I am very pleased with it this year; the raised bed border has certainly bushed out. No gaps now!

New this year were sweet peas, scrambling up an obelisk;  (still to flower); a jasmine; two more salvias to attract bees, and various additions including dianthus Doris, fuchsia Display, dahlias, love-in-the-mist and amberboa Sweet Sultan.

The raised bed border is mostly pink and mauve with touches of white.

Meanwhile my hot border, on the other side of the garden, has been a bit of a let down so far. I have fewer nasturtiums and cosmos Bright Lights died. Three salvia Hot Lips have gone completely crazy though.

The garden in May

After a late Spring everything is catching up. I normally have a few roses out by St George's Day  (April 23) but still none in bloom yet.

The tulips have now been dead headed and the plants in the border are filling out nicely. 

The new clematis montana Superbra with large pink flowers is draped like a garland over the fence.  You either love or hate those rampant Montanas: I love them.

To the right is the new addition of an obelisk which has perennial sweetpeas planted at the bottom. There's a new cordyline "Pink Passion" to add some structural wow.

I have sown some hardy seeds including nigella and larkspur, and Sarah Raven's Sweet Sultan mix which will hopefully give me some tall pom pom plants adored by bees.

Some stalwarts from last year are also looking good: lupins, dianthus, hosta "White Feather", hebe "White Paradise" and phlox paniculata.

I took a risk with some dahlia tubers. I planted them in containers at the front, which is south facing. As yet, no sign of them, although tubers planted in a container at the back have delivered small plants. I love dahlias but haven't had good results so far. Last year they seemed to come under airborne attack and all the leaves were scissored.

The other thing that looks great at the moment is the hawthorn tree. It's so gratifying to hear the bees buzzing in it. The gnarled old apple tree also excelled with blossom this year.

Tiptoe through the Bluebells

Last year we didn't go to bluebell wood.  I felt it was getting too much like Groundhog Day. The previous year, we were too late and the bluebells had gone over.
Well, this week we visited the wood during a cycle ride, and we were at exactly the right time. The sweet smell was overwhelming as we approached.
Our clothes make it a little less like GH I suppose ---- I didn't use to be seen very often in cycling garb!

I

The Garden in Spring

Finally! Spring has arrived and the bulbs are bursting into life, a vivid crescendo of colour.

I'm always slightly surprised by the different colours of my tulips, even though I buy new ones in a set colour scheme every year. Old ones linger  (I plant them in the border) and so there is every colour imaginable, but somehow for spring this is right.

This year I planted muscari and snake's head fritillary for the first time. Very pleased with both. "Must get more" is the memo to self.

The front border is heavy with the scent of hyacinths, blue, cream and white. There seem to be a lot more than I originally planted so they must be naturalising. How generous is nature's bounty!

 

 

Tortured by crewel past

Here's one I made earlier 

I thoroughly enjoyed the first episode last night of "The Great British Sewing Bee," even though I ran the risk of being traumatised by watching it. 

The reminders of "bias binding" and "A line skirt" took me back to school and never-forgotten humiliations.

Mum and I cannot sew. For us, velcro is a godsend, as is the dry cleaner's that hems trousers.

My humiliations started aged around nine.

The girls had been given a piece of "Binker", that holey cream stuff that you embroider. Mrs Thompson, the spiteful teacher, held mine up in front of the class saying "The boys could have done better."

It got worse at the big school. We were expected to run up little aprons during the summer holidays edged with bias binding in the colour of our school house.

Bias Binding

Armed with the Crewels and Sharps which had been on the domestic science shopping list, I attempted this. But in the end my friend Shonagh had to step in and finish the job. There was a big difference between her stitches and mine.

Double domestic science lessons were an utter nightmare. Our school had lavishly equipped "labs" and cookery with Mrs Johnson was fine. However, sewing with Miss Coleman was not.

After I repeatedly failed to thread the needle of the darned Husqvarna sewing machine, she told the class I must have a turnip on my shoulders instead of a head with a brain.

Another time, I was summoned to see her during a break to show her the A line skirt I had been struggling with for over a year.   She made me model it, whereupon the sixth form girls who were there for the next lesson all started sniggering.

Reader, I never wore that skirt.

Cow Handling a Musket

It was perhaps even worse for my mum because her mother was an expert needlewoman and made her wedding dress, having to go "off pattern" because the Elizabethan style stand-up collar wasn't standing up.

Mum hated it when she was expected to produce a fancy dress outfit. I was bemused to be sent to a party as a "flower girl" wearing a normal dress and a headdress with a few flowers stuck on with glue. Daleks and Oliver Twists kept asking me what I was.

The instruction to make a PE bag resulted in a pillowcase that had an elastic drawstring at the top.  When the plimsolls were inserted, the bag gently stretched from the peg to rest on the floor.

At least mum was good at knitting. I was memorably described as "a cow handling a musket" by Grandma when I tried to take up the hobby.

I have nothing but admiration for people who can take those utterly incomprehensible patterns and turn them into something fantastic. It would be terrific to make my own clothes.

But it's never going to happen, and the nearest I get to needles nowadays is creating the birthday card above.

Beckhams: Get Over Yourselves!

We hear that the fine monument to modern taste, Beckingham Palace, occasional home of David and Victoria Beckham, is up for sale. But not for sale to just anybody. They don't want to sell to a developer  (even though they bought the mansion, real name Rowneybury House, from a developer. It had previously been a council children's home).

They want to sell it to a family who will "continue what we started."

I would imagine that any family with enough money to move into Beckingham Palace will probably want to impose their own taste on the gaff. They may well gut it and install subterranean underground basements (seems all the rage among the Saatchi / Lawson set in London).

I doubt if they will leave it as it is, a gleaming paean to the taste of former Leyton boy David and his wife, the former Spice Girl - one of our tackiest pop bands.

Perhaps there is a subliminal message as well that they don't have to rush into a quick sale. They can take their time to find the "right" buyer.

Really, the phrase that came to mind when I read about their plans was "Get over yourselves!"

Easter

The one picture I took!

I hope you're all enjoying the Easter break. Shame about the horrendously cold weather which has no doubt put paid to a lot of plans for cycle rides, trips, gardening.

I did something different yesterday - I went to St Paul's Cathedral. I've never actually been inside the building. So at 9.40 I found myself among an excited throng of tourists, clamouring to be admitted for the 10.15 service.

I am a great admirer of ecclesiastical architecture.  Cathedrals in particular. St Paul's is amazing. Awe inspiring. So beautiful.  Add the soaring voices of the choir and the dignity and spectacle of the service, and you start to feel sorry for aetheists and their somewhat holier than thou  (ironically) attitudes, which have been all too prevalent on Twitter lately.

It would be a great pity in my eyes if we did become entirely secular in the UK.  Christians are already becoming marginalised thanks to some of the bonkers councils and organisations like the Red Cross, who think that usig "Christmas" as a word offends other religions.  Complete rubbish, because in a highly tolerant place like the UK, we see nothing wrong in taking joy from each other's tradiditions.

The one great thing that ALL religions bring is the setting of standards. A framework for decent living. You may be a Buddhist or a Protestant but having beliefs means you aspire to being the best you can be. Loving your neighbour and so on. Seculurisation has cost us dearly in the last few decades. It's every man for himself. People just don't care about anyone but themselves.  We saw this just now when a car driver selfishly pulled out in front of the lovely little family on bikes.

Determined efforts are made to commercialise Easter but it remains a time for contemplation and new beginnings.

"Revenge of the Food Fascists"

A new film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Calgary Avansino and Inga Dirzuite!!!

(or at least a couple of books, where they make loads of money)

 

 

The papers are full of the food fascists today. Probably a good ten years after dear old Gillian McKeith urged us to embrace spelt and agave, the big new food thing is eating raw with no carbs at all, no cow's milk and no wheat  (makes sign of the Devil).  

 

The Mail today has someone called Inga Dirziute clainming that her family's ailments have cleared up since she imposed a raw food diet on them. And it does sound quite tasty, the lunch of chilled soup, salad, stuffed tomatoes and "burgers" made from walnuts and mushrooms. How does today's harried working mum find the time to either learn how to cook like this, or shop for the ingredients? Dirziute spent £4,500, as you do, on a month-long residential course in the US to learn how to do it.

 

Meanwhile, the Sunday Times offers up someone called Calgary Avansino, who boasts about her breakfast smoothie for all the family which contains in excess of 20 ingredients. And some days, the children only take a sip! You need to be Croesus himself to dine like this. No wonder they're all writing diet books.

 

I wonder about the substantiation for the lies perpetuated about cow's milk and wheat. I'm sure a few people are intolerant. But not many mums can afford coconut water or milk, almond milk, coconut yoghurt - all the things Avansino trots out.

 

Some of her advice is good. Parents should educate their kids about balance. When Avinsino's children go to the parties of mortal children, they eat ordinary (ie bad) food, but expect to have raw vegetables as a penance for tea.

 

The goddess of fascist food is actress Gwyneth Paltrow, and the Mail today includes more of her recipes day from new book It's All Good.

 

I'm a bit disappointed with Gwyneth.  I honestly thought that with her website Goop, her personal trainer and macrobiotic diet, she'd been living clean and healthy for years.

 

But in last week's intro in the paper, she said that a fainting exercise not so long ago, where she thought she was going to die, led her to create the recipes (no doubt with a nutritionist and personal chef). Hmmm. I remember a book by someone else called "Spent" where Gwyneth babbled on about how she had felt completely exhausted, nay spent! And promptly changed her diet. That was a few years ago. To mix my metaphors, I suspect Gwyneth has not been eating her own dog food.

 

A good message from all these pious utterings would be to try to make a few small changes.

 

But really, the facts are thin on the ground about the dangers of cow's milk and wheat. And for most of us, life really is too short to source coconut water, frozen kale, chia seeds,  green powder, baobab powder, lacuma powder and maca powder -- just a few of the ingredients in the Avansino smoothie.  I very much doubt if they are all available at Holland and Barrett!

 

I leave you with one sobering thought. Remember all the fuss about aloe vera juice and how cleansing it is?  Clinical trials were halted when it was found to give rats cancer.  Chew on that!

 



Good news for Pigeon Fanciers

A few weeks ago I wrote about Lieutenant Pigeon, the lone pigeon who has been a daily visitor to our garden for the last two years.

He's not so lonely.

Lt Pigeon now has a pigeon fancy who has accompanied him for the last couple of weeks. Their visits have been less frequent:  I can no longer set my watch by them.  So J believes they are building a nest. Our garden, he rightly points out, is a bit low on nest materials.

Here they are, looking for dropped seeds from our bird feeders. Lieutenant is on the left, but I may be mistaken.

Where have all the good laughs gone?

Nothing on TV seems to make me laugh. Titter ye not, said the late and great Frankie Howerd, and I don't.  Miranda occasionally provokes a titter -- "such fun!" and "bear with," but it's also a little overdone. It tries too hard.

The last times I spluttered with mirth were watching Father Ted, The Office, One Foot in the Grave, Phoenix Nights and the early episodes of The Royle Family.

Monty Python was before my time but I inherited my brother's albums and videos and can recite many of the sketches word for word. Many of the phrases are used endlessly in my family: "Be fair, Pascal;"  "the comfy chair" and "no-one expects the Spanish Inquisition."

I don't want to sound like Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, but what passes for humour these days courtesy of Judd Apatow and the Coen Brothers, and even Sarah Millican, seems to revolve around bodily functions and bottoms. Funny to male adolescents. Do we really still laugh at it when we're grown ups?

How I long for the wordplay, the bathos, pathos and character development that symbolised some of the truly great comedies: Porridge, Steptoe & Son, Dad's Army, Citizen Smith, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and Open All Hours. Some of the characters exhibited greed, sloth, meanness, frailty, foolishness, thwarted ambition, lust. But sometimes we felt sympathy for them. Sometimes they made us cry.

Some of the longer running sitcoms today -  I am thinking of the inexorable My Family and My Hero - have that self conscious, shouty "am I on stage?" thing going on, a bit like a farce but supposed to be masquerading as real life.

Most of the "comedians" seen on TV occasionally leave me cold: Lee Child, Jimmy Carr, James Corden, Stephen Fry. And they say women aren't funny! Michael McIntyre, John Bishop and Milton Jones have gentle humour without resorting to bodily functions but they don't make me titter much. Peter Kay used to be wonderful but he's run short of new material over the last few years.

The only ray of light in recent times has been the wonderful Getting On, with Jo Brand. Set in an NHS hospital, it has a gentle humour and doesn't resort to cruelty to get a cheap laugh.

What do you think?  Have I turned into Victor Meldrew?  Or are we currently in a desert when it comes to clever comedy?

The blizzards of 1963

It's snowing.
As usual, the UK is grinding to a halt: there have been angry scenes at Heathrow airport.
But it all pales into insignificance compared to the blizzards of 1963.
If you get chance to see it, BBC2 showed an amazing programme from then entitled "Winterwatch: 1963."
That winter, the snow came in December and didn't disappear until March.

With temperatures so cold the sea froze in places, 1963 is one of the coldest winters on record.
It began abruptly just before Christmas in 1962. The weeks before had been changeable and stormy, but then on 22 December a high pressure system moved to the north-east of the British Isles, dragging bitterly cold winds across the country. This situation was to last much of the winter.
Many people didn't have central heating. People were literally trapped in their houses, with snow piled in drifts up to the roofs.
My parents were living in St Budeaux, Plymouth, and my dad was unable to get home from Bickleigh Barracks for four days. My mum couldn't get outside the door. Eventually a truck brought my dad home and he dug us out (I was two years old). My dad still went to work the following evening. He put on his great coat and boots and walked to Bickleigh, several miles away.
The TV programme showed scenes you would never imagine seeing in Britain. The sea, frozen. People "commuting" to work across the Thames on skates. Trains so buried under snow, it took teams of dozens of men days to liberate them.
 The snow was so deep farmers couldn't get to their livestock, and many animals starved to death.Several people died as a direct result of the weather.
This snow set the scene for the next two months, as much of England remained covered every day until early March 1963
The first thaw was gentle and everyone heaved a sigh of relief. But just a few days later, the freeze was back - and the second thaw was fast and brutal causing floods.

Me out in the snow today

John sets off early this morning

A great day in broadcasting history

Viewers of BBC Breakfast News today will be aware that today marks the 30th anniversary of the birth of breakfast TV in the UK.

That's not the only milestone. This day, 30 years ago, two new local radio stations were born, BBC Radios Devon and Cornwall.  I was hired by Radio Devon as a fresh faced reporter called Gail Tyler, and I was proud to be there on launch day.

When the station launched it came from Broadcasting House in Plymouth. The studio complex in Exeter was still being built, and two Portakabins were being used on the building site.

We all came together a few months before the launch and spent six wonderful weeks in London training. I was the youngest, and the only one with absolutely no radio experience. So there were quite a few memorable faux pas along the way. One of our training projects was to "find" someone interesting and interview them.  My great friend Julie Skentelbery, who was also in London with Radio Cornwall, facilitated a meeting for me with one of her former colleagues on the Sunday Independent:  Alastair Campbell.

He had played the bagpipes as a busker in the underground.

We recorded the interview at Marble Arch underground. Alastair didn't have his bagpipes. I was not in full control of my equipment (a Uher tape recorder) so used the Auto setting, and the sound quality was terrible.  Worse still, I had about 20 minutes of Alastair rambling on and I didn't know how to edit. Fortunately Julie seized the razor blade and saved the day.

The fledgling radio station played host to the Director General, Alasdair Milne, who sadly died last week.  Mr Milne is seated on the right, looking as if he might go for a spin on the turntable. I am "at the controls" in the Plymouth studio. My colleagues in the picture were Mary Saunders; the late and great Reg Henderson Brookes (second right), and the wonderful David Bassett, whose booming voice would announce "Bon bons for all, this day!"  He always came into the office with a great flourish, and if we didn't pay enough attention he would go out and come back in again.

Alasdair Milne was mentioned on the very popular Treasure Hunt quiz show presented by Douglas Mounce.  The question was: "who wrote Winnie the Pooh?" and quick as a flash the listener replied "Alasdair Milne."

Other memories:

• My first live news bulletin, which went out on a Sunday and was four minutes long.  Mike Gibbons, our Programme Organiser, was on the beach in Weston-super-Mare and managed to pick up the transmission. He called me to say it was very good, but I'd forgotten to say who I was.
• As a more experienced newsreader, I became adept at editing copy as I read it. During a bulletin Allan Urry rushed in with "news just in," and as he and David Willis were great jokers, I didn't trust the copy and ended up saying "The dead man....is not thought to be seriously hurt."  I came out of the studio with great poise, hoping I had got away with it, but then picked up the phone to a listener who said "tell your newsreader she made my day"  (I had denied being the newsreader).
•  Evelyn the cleaner had her favourites and fortunately I was one of them; one of my colleagues had to suffer the indignity of Evelyn Hoovering outside the news cubicle as she read the 10 minute bulletin.

David Bowie: Where Are We Now?

Goodness knows how it was kept a secret, but when millions of Davis Bowie fans woke today they learned that their hero, 66 today, had come out of retirement and issued a single.

Not only that, an album is to follow in March and can be pre-ordered!

Friends will know that David Bowie has been an obsession of mine since I was 12. I've written about him several times on this blog. In 2007, I was worrying why we never heard anything about him.

I've downloaded the single, of course. It is a gentle, dreamy, poignant evocation of Bowie's time in Berlin. The accompanying video shows his face superimposed on the body of a puppet.

There have been rumours for years that Bowie is not in good health. There is something of a farewell about this song and the video, where he seems wistful and almost tearful at times. I just pray that isn't the case.

Lieutenant Pigeon

Introducing the sad, lonely pigeon who lives in our garden.

I'm afraid he's a bit camera shy, so he doesn't pose very well for photos.
There is he, enjoying the rare flash of sunshine that we had on New Year's Day.

This plump wood pigeon has lived in our garden for the last couple of years. We didn't realise it until we got rid of the previous owner's leylandii trees and started to notice the pigeon roosting on the fence. He came back day after day. When spring came, a year later, he was still on the fence but occasionally joined by his mate.

Now he is solitary again.

He turns up every day at 8.30 and spends the hours pecking hopefully beneath the bird feeders, picking up the seeds that smaller birds have dropped. I imagine he must have several gardens he visits because I doubt if he would be so plump on the strength of our dropped seeds.

When the sun comes out, he perches on the garage roof and his head droops to his chest as he enjoys the warmth on his feathers.
When it's windy and wet, he sits gloomily on the fence and his plumage gets ruffled.

I've grown attached to "the pidge" and look out for him during the day when I'm working, with my view of the garden. He could be around for quite a while. I'm told they live between 3 - 5 years, occasionally up to 15.

The real reason we put on weight after a diet (it might surprise you)

Are you on a diet?  It's that time of year. 

I am a little smug, having lost a stone and a half in the run - up to Christmas, and not having put any weight back on. That meant that there were no festive niceties in the house. No cheese, no Christmas cake, no trifle, no chocolates.  J didn't mind - he still had his favourite items, nuts, beer, cheesecake and cream.  I enjoyed a normal Christmas dinner; I just didn't have anything else that day. And I treated myself to a couple of mince pies over the break, outrageously calorific at 250 each. I painstakingly worked them into my weight maintenance target of 1400 calories.

Yes, 1,400 calories. That's the MAX number of daily calories I need to keep my weight stable.

I discovered this by having my metabolic rate tested courtesy of Alizonne. Using a device called a MedGem, I discovered that far from the generous 1,878 calories quoted for my daily needs by Nutracheck and other diet sites, I require no more than 1,400.   Astute dieters among you will know that 1,400 is actually the number quoted for weight loss. It's the target Nutracheck set me when I said I wanted to lose one to two pounds a week. I stuck to it and couldn't understand why the pounds wouldn't budge.

I'm now convinced the main reason why we put the weight back on is that we're not given a realistic picture of how little we should eat in order to keep our weight stable.

No wonder Joanna Lumley talks about mainly eating lettuce.  Her words "don't eat that cupcake, you'll get fat, you fool" ring in my ears. I've decided I don't want to put on weight again. I hate having to wear clothes in a larger size, and it becomes harder and harder to lose weight as you get older. Do the maths:  if I gain weight on more than 1400 calories a day, I'm going to have to drop to 900 calories a day to lose weight.  Each pound gained is equivalent to 3,500 calories. If I was blissfully unaware and keeping to 1,878 calories a day, I would have gained a few pounds already.

I'm still using Nutracheck daily but now I use it to ensure I don't exceed 1400 calories a day. If we're going to the pub on Friday, I eat frugally during the day to ensure I can have scampi and chips. (The pub doesn't offer many healthy options - and life is too short to always go for poached fish!). Occasionally I do what I call "an offset" to have something I like. A very long walk on Monday meant I could have one of those mince pies.

Now you can see as well why people start to see exercise as a necessity. Elizabeth Hurley and Nigella Lawson have both talked about taking more exercise in order to be able to eat more. If I exercise more, my metabolic rate will rise. I look forward to warmer weather when I will happily get my bike out.

So if your New Year's resolution is to lose weight, I wish you luck ---- and recommend very strongly that you get your metabolic rate tested at the end of it so that you have every chance of success in the harder science of keeping the weight off.

Christmas decorations remembered

Watching "Wartime Farm: Christmas" and seeing Ruth Goodman making paper lanterns, I was catapulted back into Geasons Primary School and our messy endeavours to make decorations every Christmas.  One teacher had us painting tree branches white, and hanging baubles from them. Another had us making paper chains. Everyone had them - strips of coloured card that formed a circle.

When I was a child, we hung paper streamers across the ceiling and bunches of balloons in the corners. The decorations looked like these (right) - they were made by a company called Harlequin and were intricately cut and bright colours. These gave way to similar "drop downs" where several metres of coloured foil cut out decorations were concertina'd between two end plates.

Our first artificial Christmas tree arrived around 1969, courtesy of Freeman's catalogue. It was very tall, right up to the ceiling, and turquoise with silvery bits.

We had a faithful old collection of baubles that came out year after year, and long plumes of tinsel and strands of lametta. Mum liked to hang lametta from the chains across the ceiling, which used to constantly drop down and drive my dad mad.

Some of the baubles were those delightful old-fashioned ones with the side cut out. I've seen similar ones on eBay. We had a couple of glass birds. I loved them and was thrilled to find a very similar one at one of the Christmas shops in Oberammergau.

The fairy lights were big and chunky, some of them with a sugary texture. When one bulb failed, the whole lot stopped working.  They looked similar to those on the right.

And at the top of the tree was a shabby fairy who resembled a ballet dancer. Her white crepe paper dress became a dirty yellow over the years.

One thing I've found is that there isn't much on the Internet about Christmas decorating traditions. I'll come back tomorrow with an update.

A Tudor Christmas

Last year I wrote about the Christmas traditions of other countries. This year I thought I would step back in time to look at the Tudor Christmas.

I'm fascinated by the Tudor period, and knowing how devout they were, I imagined their Christmas would revolve around church with the rich enjoying a "bird within a bird within a bird" roast.

There would be no Christmas trees - this didn't start until Prince Albert popularised them in Victorian times - or "Father Christmas," who came along courtesy of the Coca Cola company.

The Tudors' Christmas festival lasted from December 25 to January 6. Some fasting was required as preparation, so on Christmas Eve they didn't eat meat, cheese or eggs. As a bonus, they didn't work during this period except for those who had to look after animals. Flowers were wrapped around spinning wheels to stop women from working.

Christmas Day was a busy time for Henry VIII. He had to go to Mass three times and was expected to wear new clothes. He banned any sports taking place on Christmas Day except for jousting and archery.

Feasting

During the 12 Days of Christmas people visited friends and relatives and shared "mince pyes,"identical to the mince pies we enjoy today. They had 13 ingredients representing Christ and the apostles.

They did indeed enjoy a bird within a bird ---- in the form of a Tudor pie. This was traditionally a turkey stuffed with a goose stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a partridge stuffed with a pigeon. It was made into a pie. Turkey was made popular by Henry VIII who was one of the first Britons to eat one at Christmas.

Feasts were accompanied by the "wassail bowl" of punch. A piece of bread was soaked at the bottom and always given to the most important person in the room, becoming the tradition of toasting.

The Tudors also had a Christmas pudding, but it was shaped like a sausage and contained meat and spices.

Presents and carols

Gifts were not exchanged until New Year's Day. Carols were popular in Tudor times as a way of spreading the story of the Nativity. Celebrations came to an abrupt end in the 17th century when the Puritans banned Christmas. Carols became extinct until Victorian times.

Other traditions

The kiss under the mistletoe harks back to the Tudor period. In the 15th century it became customary to create a "kissing bough" made of a bendy wood. An effigy of Christ was placed inside and the bough was hung in the house where the local priest would bless it. Anyone visiting the house would embrace under the bough to show they brought goodwill.

The silly world of Claridge's

A programme on BBC Two took us into the hallowed portals of posh London hotel Claridge's last night, "for the first time ever!"

In this old-fashioned, fusty looking place rooms cost around six thousand pounds a night.

The guests are the uber rich:  Arab royalty, little known US designers and popstars  ("Mr The Edge" has lost any edge now we know this is where he holes up).

No guest's request is ever refused. It's as if the abundance of money has rendered common sense and good manners redundant.

Some of these rich guests demand for their room, nay suite, to be redecorated! At their own expense, of course. It reverts back to beige blandness afterwards  (the uber rich are not very tasteful - look at the Trumps, the Ecclestones). One imagines an Arab princess stamping her foot like Veruccae Salt and demanding a new carpet for her stay.

Talking of Arab princesses, Claridges' staff were hard at work transforming a whole floor into an Arabian palace. They weren't sure when the retinue was arriving: the guests were too busy flitting around on planes and no-one had the decency to lock down on an actul date  (how suburban!). In fact it was possible they could cancel. But in this fiercely competitive world, Claridge's just has to grin and bear it in case the spoilt family went somewhere else. So bedrooms were turned into banqueting halls and kitchens, and two rooms were set aside just for the shopping.

The rich guests sometimes stuff safes or carrier bags with wads of cash, we were breathlessly told. And leave it behind! Hmm, I would be a bit suspicious of that. The late Michael Jackson carried cash because he was in such debt that anything paid into his bank account would have gone straight to creditors.

Does all this money buy you happiness? Well, no-one does much work, it would seem, and they spend their time flitting from one gilded cage to another. Paris today, London tomorrow. The only one who seemed content was Sammy the dog, whose Botox'd owner told us that he liked coming to Claridge's where he has his own bowl and basket. The concierge was probably less happy when she gave him what looked like a coin for the privilege of walking Sammy.

This hushed and hallowed world seemed very vacuous and silly. These people can teach us nothing about humility and good manners. They should take a leaf out of the book of Bill and Melinda Gates, who have dedicated their lives post-Microsoft to spending their fortune on good causes. They travel a lot too but it's not to race tracks or fashion shows. They travel to places where women are forced to give birth to children one after the other because their corrupt governments don't spend on women's health or contraception.

I suspect we would not find Mr and Mrs Gates arguing about their carpet being the wrong colour or needing a room set aside for atrocities purchased in the Egyptian room of Harrod's.

Art for Art's Sake

Good art, like good newspaper columnists, should divide opinion.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and it would be a sad world that didn't encourage diversity, variety and controversy.

So I was amused when the Daily Mail in its usual heavy-handed, "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" style launched a broadside against Damien Hirst this week. The writer told us gleefully that Hirst's works are falling in price, and that the adulation around him was Emperor's New Clothes, because he can't paint or draw and has dozens of minions who churn out his works.

Tracey Emin wasn't free from the broadside either, as the writer poured venom onto her "dirty bed."

No, real artists are the likes of JMW Turner, said the writer.

Hmmm. I admire the works of JMW Turner but I'm afraid their...well, sludginess, and high percentage of ship content, does not induce any sort of emotional response in me. Nor does the work of Damien Hirst, but I wouldn't be so naive as to criticise one artist over another. Indeed, the Bishop of Chichester has defended Hirst this week, saying he is an agent of Jesus Christ, a man of substance whose "exquisite" work draws us to a contemplation of Heaven.

And that is as it should be. Everyone perceives art in a different way and has a different reaction to it.

A few years ago, I had an encounter with the three Rothkos in Tate St Ives. I was completely floored; sat transfixed, feeling myself consumed within those boundless colours.

I'm sure that Daily Mail writer would sneer at the work of Mark Rothko. He would probably say a child of six could do something similar.

This writer even sneered at the wonderful "A Bigger Picture" David Hockney exhibition a few months ago. I had a less emotional response but nonetheless I was breathless and awe struck at the energy and passion that resonated through the galleries. This was not the work of an elderly man, and in this lies the beauty of art. Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon were still painting just before they died, and their work had lost none of his power or vigour.

Art makes you immortal.

The garden in November

This has been the first year that our garden truly became "mine." We had a lot of work done and I planted from scratch. I have loved keeping the garden tidy and buying new plants and spring bulbs, but it's come at the expense of my crafting hobby. I'm not sure everyone appreciated the hand-made cards anyway!

I have been keen to put the garden to bed ----- pruning the perennials and putting down manure to improve the soil composition (very claggy clay) ---- but the garden has other ideas! The phlox, hostas and ferns are the only things showing signs of going dormant. The dianthus, nemesia, salvias and fuchsias are still going for it, as shown by the photos taken on Sunday.

Looking forward to next year now when the snowdrops that I planted in-the-green will be the first to emerge, along with the hellebores and then all the crocus, hyacinths, daffodils and tulips. Happy times!