they're here

They're here, the cygnets.  My friend texted earlier in the week to say she'd seen them.  She thought there were five but it's hard to tell.  You can just about see one on her back, and several tucked under her wing. Stop on the bridge and look and you are bound to get into conversation with someone else who has been waiting for their arrival. Children stop on their way home from school - or out on nature study, mothers with bags of shopping point them out to their babies, cyclists and passers by along the other bank slow down to take a peek . It's rather amazing to think that we're all connected by a pile of reeds and plastic bags, two swans and those six eggs.  Now you are too, I suppose.

if ever...

The priest at St Patrick's in Wapping was known to be sympathetic to pets, but even we were surprised when a young woman got up to go to communion and a white furry poodle head popped over her shoulder.  We couldn't stop giggling as it progressed up the aisle.

This little lurcher is not at a service.  The church is deconsecrated and the dog comes along with a most formidable volunteer to keep her company.

If ever I am lucky enough to have a dog when I am an old lady, and this is one of the" if ever..." dream games I play, then I want a dog that looks like this.

deferred gratification

I read somewhere that children who are able to defer gratification are often found to be more socially mobile in later life, which might be taken as a proxy for "successful". Is the same true for gardeners do you think?  I'ver been pondering this as the spring weather has continued to perplex and vex me. With not a little caution, my tender tomato and courgette plants went out as soon as it seemed that the temperatures might be warm enough to sustain them, at least with a bit of evening cosseting until they hardened off a little. But as soon as they started to progress, the day time temperatures would fall and development would stall,  Tantalisingly, cucurbit seed leaves would open wide, only to get stuck like supplicants to some greater authority.  Seedlings were potted on, would grow a bit, then halt. Alliums would start to unfold, then think better of it.  Leek seeds, promisingly named and normally dependable, just never made an appearance at all.

Wild garlic, back of the shed, with insidious convolvulus

None of this matters much I've decided. Firstly because I don't consider myself to be a gardener and success isn't that much of an issue. Indeed, one of the pleasures of growing vegetables is that, apart from a few permanent crops, the patchwork of a plot changes from year to year, perfect for lightweights like me; and for those who love the order of straight lines and grids, there is a great deal to be said for a line of pea sticks, catch crop lettuces, and tobleroned potatoes however long you have to wait.

Lettuce plant from the Chinese lady; my swap was asparagus

Secondly, there are always - always - other pleasures: this year's frenzied bird activity; a female black cap gorging in the blossom before it disappeared, a robin singing for a solid hour waiting for the opportunity to pick over that space where the seeds have been hoed back; a pair of speckled woods twisting upwards.  Or the plants that just get on and do their own thing, when they're good and ready, or those that have stuck out the winter and will just seed themselves if you wait long enough.

Rocket, gone to seed

And if you are really lucky and it rains most of the summer so the rhubarb can establish itself, and the leek moth can't take hold, and the asparagus beetle gets washed off, and whitefly finds it a little too windy or chilly, or whatever, then you can eat just-what-your-body-ordered purple sprouting broccoli everyday for a fortnight, give asparagus to your mates, plan to make fig and rhubarb jam, grill your leeks with peppers at £1 a giant bowl from the grocer on Bow Road.  It doesn't even seem to matter much that when you get home after a day when you seem to have spent most of the day planting or sowing or weeding with your arse in the air in Uttanasana and you feel fit for nothing more than a good scrub and something to drink.

I just may have said this every year since I started writing this blog.  Or I may just be feeling a little more philosophical about the small pleasures in life today.

friday

It's been a busy day. Best cocoa brownies in the oven, first thing  Pilates. Take mother shopping and drop her off to visit her sister,  Market. Back to make rock cakes, chocolate cake, apple and pear cakes. Masses of washing up. Fairy cakes to make yet. So it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask him to make supper even though he had to walk a long way when the DLR was stopped because of...well, let's not worry about that.

And here is the menu: cheese and pickle sandwiches and a glass of cider. Sourdough loaf bought today, extortionate price, must get on and make some myself. Supermarket cheddar,  Last year's glutney from the cellar.

And now a quandary: what would I have for my last ever meal, if I had a choice that is?  It's either the broccoli, anchovy, tomato pasta; cheese on toast; or today's front-runner, the cheese and pickle sourdough sandwich with the cidre du jour, currently Wyld Wood Organic.

I am replete.

Now for those fairy cakes.

two swans, six eggs, one hundred pages

Sometimes I feel negligent.  Deviate for a few days, a week, maybe longer even, and things move on. I hadn't even noticed, for example, that the swans were building a nest - this one just next to the bridge that crosses the canal between Mile End Park and Meath Gardens, where they normally nest. It was last Thursday that I saw it.  The pair were feeding and the six eggs were exposed, neat as can be, unlike the general messiness of the nest with plastic bags and packets tucked into the reeds. I was on my way to the market and had planned to sit in the sun for a while on the way home with a cup of coffee from the corner cafe and read a book.  And that is exactly what I did.  The coffee was good, the sun was hot and I was on a mission to finish a book that was due back at the library.  

I like Meath Gardens for lots of reasons, not least because it has lots of exits..  There are some allotments nearby, a small play space for children, a sprinkling of spring flowers, some very old black poplars and a eucalyptus tree, planted to commemorate cricketer King Cole that leans at an impossible angle. It's busy enough, but not too busy, even when the local secondary school is using it as a playing field. There's a particular bench that I like because it gets the sun full blast and you can actually put your feet up as it's more or less guaranteed that nobody else will want to share the space.  On this hot, sunny day, a few people ambled by with their dogs, a thrush pecked around, a young woman - Italian maybe, put up a poster for her lost cat and asks people whether they have seen him.  (Oh Hernesto, Hernesto, I hope you have gone home by now.)

And that's how I spent a delightful hour reading my book and eating sticky unwashed red grapes with none of the guilt I usually feel if I read novels in the middle of the day. I didn't manage a hundred pages  but I made some progress. Then my son found me and we cycled home together, only stopping to look again at the swans and share the news of the six eggs to another passer-by. 

I felt like I'd been on holiday,  I even got a little sunburnt.  And I finished the book before the library closed.

the 2013 asparagus post

The last time I looked there was nothing to see. Judging by the length of the spears today, they must have started to come through about a week ago, around a month later than last year. I gave half to Emily of rhubarb fame, and promised some to the lovely Chinese lady who brought me some lettuce plant.

Tea today: eggs on pureed nettle tops and the sweetest asparagus dippers; rhubarb crumble for pudding.  Very good indeed.

thirty minutes in april

There are times when April can be unforgiveably fickle, but this year I think we can overlook the way the day changes from sunshine so strong that the lime green of the euphorbia hurts your eyes to...

View from the shed, West Ham allotment

quickly abandoning the tools to hide in the shed among the ivy, sheltering from the hail storm and the blast of cold. 

Pea plants and hail, West Ham Allotment

It has been such a pleasure to be out and about in the open air these past few days.  If the pea plants are happy today, so am I.

five and a half miles

View from One Tree Hill

It was Easter Monday, ages ago now. We'd been promising ourselves for ages that we would walk the River Wandle one day, but you really need to get up and away more quickly than we are used to on cold Bank Holidays. So we checked London's Lost Rivers, and settled on the River Peck. Five and a half miles it said, easy for us to reach on the Overground, manageable on a cold day when sunshine was promised later. We thought it would be a breeze to follow the river from the Thames to the source, the opposite way to the instructions in the book.  We might even get to the Hornimaan for a cup of tea before it closed. Little did we know...

It wouldn't be a proper walk without lichen and barbed wire

There is something very familiar about the old Surrey Docks - it's a sort of non-identical twin to Wapping and Limehouse on the north side of the river where we come from. Only sort of, and I've been trying to understand why. It is something to do with "home", the way we look differently at the places we know well, even when they have changed and continue to change almost immeasurably, that familiarity with long-inhabited space. Somehow your own litter and urban chaos is more acceptable. Even before we reached the sluice where the Peck and its cousin the Earl's Sluice meet the Thames, with the north easterly cutting across our noses, he was halfway into old monologues: the fiasco of the unimaginative architecture built around the old dock, the ridiculousness of planters filled with dying plants on houseboats, the irritating tinkling from boats in the marina, and, oops, the treachery of badly-laid paving stones.  I know his indignation is justified but I just laugh out loud because I've heard it all before.

Tide Gauge House

Around half an hour after leaving the station and inspecting the remnants of the docks, little buildings scattered here and there and fabulous bits of engineering, we actually began to follow the back to front route: down back streets and past the Earl Pumping Station, along past the magnificent railway arches to the road that cuts through...except it's blocked off and we didn't have a map, just the plan in the book - so we had to retrace our steps and take a long cut that takes us up an ugly road that goes on forever swimming against the tide of Millwall fans on their way to the Den.  Reader, I confess I nearly caught a stray bus. Some time later - minutes, hours, weeks, who knows - we reached the main road, bought some chocolate in case we never found our way home, passed some lovely villas, a green, Asylum Road. We turned the book this way and that as we tried to reverse the instructions in our head and finally found our way out of the labrynth and back on the path to the Rye, Peckham Rye where William Blake saw those angels.  The nearest we had come to any sign of a river was the pumping station.  Not even a manhole cover in the road encouraged us with the promise of a hidden river.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Then it all changed.  The west end of Peckham Rye becomes a flat iron of green which widens out into the park.  The sun came out, and there in the distance, an oasis, a cafe. Never has coffee and carrot cake tasted so good. We'd been walking for hours in an enchanted back-to-front maze and we knew we were soon going to find our stream, our river, not far away. And there it was, just inside the gates of the park, a bit slack at first, then as we moved along, a tiny gurgling splashy stream.  You'd have thought we'd found the source of the Nile.  No wonder Blake saw angels.

The Peck

We followed the stream river through the park until it disappeared again, then started to climb uphill, at first gently, past the waterworks, a neat little estate of brick cottages, then, yes, another litter strewn manhole, across the road and into the woody nature reserve.  The path became steeper and steeper as we walked up through the woods and finally came out on top of One Tree Hill with its view across south London towards the Thames. And of course we got out our binoculars and scanned the horizon for familiar landmarks: Tower Bridge became our surrogate for home.

Six hours. Half an hour later we were back in Mile End.  Honest to goodness, there are times when you might envy a crow.

forty thousand bees

Spot the queen

"The bees might not be very happy today. It's been a tough winter for them", this from the expert beekeeper to the novices - not me, I was just there to observe, appropriately suited and booted.  As it happens, the bees weren't angry. I think that just like the rest of us they were glad to see some sun and feel some warmth in the air, though in their case a little puff of smoke tends to have a soothing effect.

There was a sense of apprehension nevertheless. Many hives  have lost thirty to forty percent of the bees this winter, and there had been little visible activity in these four hives.  The novices were told to look for the queen, drones, and brood and weren't quite sure what they might find when they looked inside the hives.  Then the work started.

Smoking the bees

The idea today was to move purposefully so that the bees weren't upset by the fiddling around in the hives, but in spite of this the atmosphere was calm.  The frames were checked systematically then each was returned in strict order. They needed to work quickly, which needed confidence and knowledge: some had more than others. 

Capped cells - sign of brood

Some old frames were taken out for burning, and other super frames which had been left in with last year's honey were also removed. Queens were identified, some more easily because they had been marked with a blue spot. Nobody claimed to see any drones or princesses. Redundant frames were removed, replaced by clean ones.

Now spot the queen

By the time the frames were back in the right place, there was no more than a gentle buzzing around the hives while the church bells clanged in the background.  The beekeeper still looked anxious.  "Has anyone been stung? No?  Well it's about time you were, don't you think?" Then he looked round the garden at the trees: wild plum, - they'll like that; hornbeam - when will that flower?; daffodils - not much use.  If it's a good week and the fine weather keeps up, those bees will multiply.  They'll check next week.

Bees buzzing by

We dropped into the Mudchute plot on the way home.  No asparagus yet, but plenty of flowers for a posy for a friend.  On the way back to the car, we saw a thrush and a pretty little wheatear in Millwall Park on the grass, a summer migrant perhaps on his way to find a mate.

Allotment posy: hyacinths, narcissus, ivy, wild plum, aspidistra leaves

In the late afternoon, on the bus to visit my friend, we could see that the park was heaving with people making the most of the warmth. The scent of the hyacinths overwhelmed the upper deck and I got to talking to the man next to me about his twenty years living in Japan, how the people celebrated cherry blossom time with parties and drinking, the reflection of the mountains in the pools of gardens where he lived, the calligraphy competition on which the children spent an hour a day for one week a year.

Later that night when we got home, I asked John what it was that he liked about the bees.  Well, they're amazing, he said, forty thousand bees, one organism.

twenty thousand years

As I have been pottering about these last few months in a house that has times seemed at times to be as cold as an ice age cave, I have thought about the twenty thousand year old pieces we saw at the Ice Age Art exhibition at the British Museum: the swimming reindeer; the lion man; the small carved pictures of animals on bone; the fat, fertile women; tiny little pieces that to an untutored eye looked like any old piece of stone. Lump-in-the-throat moving and mysterious. What impelled those people to go beyond the sheer practicality of finding food and staying warm?   Were the depictions of fat, fertile women celebratory or appellant? What comfort did they get from their work?

Binding off - at last

I thought about all this as I sat next to the fire in the back bedroom on those freezing afternoons and increasingly, as I could not face getting out on the bike or walking in the biting wind, I took my own comfort in fabric and yarn: knitting a fat scarf for my brother, the quilting on a small piece I started months ago, making a hussif with instructions from Merchant and Mills, cutting out and sewing a dress at a local class under the tutelage of a teacher straight out of the May Martin school of perfection.  I learned how to adjust a pattern so that it actually fitted me across the front and the back. I started to read more - lazy, undisciplined, comfort reading for the most part, but it was good all the same - and much as I hated reading the Hobbit, I at least learnt the difference between goblins and pixies and elves.  On those days when even I couldn't find an excuse to stay indoors, we went out and about to look at drawings, sculptures, photos, collages, curiosities. I went to the ballet and a musical for the first time in years.

Cutting out lining - incorrectly as it turned out

I know I won't forget this winter for years, but as it finally segues into spring, seedlings come up, coughs ease, moths wake up, blankets and woolens are washed and stored and it's impossible to ignore the grime on the kitchen windows, I want to be able to remember when I look back that it wasn't all bad.