Under an orange sky

The sky turned orange.  Was this Armageddon?  Was it the result of Brexit, or the fault of the orange buffoon squatting in the White House, as these are the two Modern Social Evils most often linked with catastrophe, usually for good reason?

No, it was the result of storm force winds picking up dust from the Sahara and the wildfires on the Iberian Peninsular.  Thanks to Google, everyone knew this, and so there wasn’t the sort of low level weather anxiety that we would have enjoyed twenty years ago, religious awe that we would have experienced a hundred years ago or primal anxiety and possibly the sacrifice of the Most Unpopular Member Of The Tribe that would have been the result a few thousand years ago.  And in some ways we should mourn the passing of those simpler, if not happier, times, before the Internet spoiled wonder, awe and a primal fear of clouds.

Just because we knew the cause didn’t make things less impressive.  From about two o’clock onwards, the sky did start to go a very odd colour, normally only found in the 80s action films of directors who loved a bit of a tobacco filter.  By three o’clock, it was unusually dark and cars were driving along with their lights on.  It was not unlike that sort of sickly yellow light you occasionally get before a thunderstorm, or in any city where the regime in charge think a climate accord is just another way for the rich nations to oppress developing countries.

It was actually very impressive.  Everyone loves an unusual weather event and even if this one didn’t result in an alien invasion or a rain of badgers, or rain of rain for that matter, it was still odd enough to be unsettling in that creepy fun way when you know the reason for something, but the part of your brain that’s not that long out of the cave is thinking that if this doesn’t end soon, we might have to sacrifice Darren from Accounts to appease the gods and make the sun shine again.

A dusting of weather

Saaaannnnnnnndddddstooooooooooorrrrrrmmmmmmm!  Sandstorm.  Sandstorm!  Sandstorm.  The Red Death is upon us!
Well, it is if you believe the newspapers.  Apparently the good people of England have awoken to find strange deposits on their cars.  Hardly a novelty if you habitually park underneath a tree, but in this case it’s a thin film of dust.  And not just any dust.  African dust.
Luckily, since the inexorable rise of the UKIP, Daily Mail readers have been trained how to react, instinctively and without thinking, to any threat originating from overseas.  And this is the worst kind of overseas threat, a threat from Africa that has travelled through Europe and crossed the channel to arrive in England, possibly simply to settle on the cars of hard working families, but possibly to claim benefits, or even possibly both.
Apparently the wind (already, along with his villainous cohort the rain, an element as unwelcome in England as a fox turd in the fondue) has picked up some of the Sahara, blown it across Europe and evenly distributed it across the Home Counties. 
Now the English, by and large, know how to react to sand being blown about the place.  Christ knows, any English holidaymaker who has spent time on an English beach is used to eating sandwiches that are at least 7% mineral deposit thanks to the summer ‘breeze’ whipping along the beach.  The correct reaction to a sandstorm is to erect a brightly coloured windbreak, hunker down and drink flask tea until it’s time to go to the pub.
Reality, of course, fell a little short of the full-on award-winning CGI FX that people were secretly hoping for (after this winter’s storms, England has become a nation of not so much storm chasers, but people who are chased by storms and have a smartphone and a desire to get their footage on Sky, the BBC or at least YouHooTube with the tag ‘weather fail’).  As it transpired, this was hardly the sort of weather event that caused the arse of even the most nervous camel to snap shut.
As a weather event, it did give one a sense of perspective, billions of grains of sand blown across two continents, before ending its journey on the windscreen of a VW in Essex.
And it did indeed result in a thin film of dust on many a car, so resulting in many an Englishman taking his car to the local Romanian hand car wash – a foreign import the English are happy not to moan about.

Nature Notes Special - Floody Hell!

Water used to be our friend, our playmate.  We shower in the stuff, we add bubbles to it and bath in it, sometimes with candles.  We add bubbles to it and we drink the stuff, sometimes with a slice of lemon.  We water our plants with it, we water ourselves with it, we fill big pools and swim in it, we fill slightly smaller pools and communally bath in it after rugby games.  We even swim with dolphins in it, we like water so much that we can stop thinking 'fish poo' for long enough to splash about with Flipper in it.
Recently though, water has become the implacable foe, the slow creeping menace that inches towards the nation's doorsteps, or the rushing torrent, the same brown as the underwear of anyone unlucky enough to be caught in it.  The floods have come, and come, and come.
It is now, officially, beyond a joke.  What started before Christmas as the 'storm surge' turned to filthy weather at Christmas, leaving people with no power, a big raw turkey and realising that KFC for your Christmas dinner isn't really all that bad, as it means no sprouts and extra chips all round.  Ironically there was an advert doing the rounds over the festive season that posed the question 'can you barbecue a turkey?'.  Yes, you can is the answer, but you'd only know that if you had a telly, meaning you had power, in which case, you wouldn't be wrestling a reluctant barbecue from the back of the shed where it's become entangled with hose pipe, bicycles, cobwebs and the other Summer paraphernalia, but instead sitting snug getting hammered on red and waiting for the oven timer to ping before forgetting to put the scouts on, like any civilised person.
For future reference, yes, you can barbecue a turkey.  A mate of mine did it one year, even though he didn't have to.  A Webber kettle barbecue is best, lots of coals that are well banked for a constant heat, then drink red wine until its ready and you are pissed enough not to notice you've barbecue a turkey.  As with most cooking, it's all in the preparation, in this case, uncorking breakfast.
As the days turned to weeks, the rain continued to fall.  The television showed spectacular pictures of huge waves crashing over sea defences and nightly heart-rending images of flooded front rooms.  There was nothing to be done, it would appear.

Then Prince Charles visited a flooded village.
Several things then happened, very quickly indeed.
The first was that question 'what use is the monarchy in the twenty first century?' was answered, as the Prince got blanket TV coverage and sympathised with the plight of the flooded villagers.  He then, one imagined, 'phoned the prime minister and gave him a Royal bollocking.  Because the next day the prime minister was chairing the government's emergency committee after which the army was deployed.
Following Prince Charles's example, politicians unwisely began popping up in wellies in villages.  Unlike the Prince, they were bollocked by very angry villagers who wondered what the fucking fuck they had been doing for the last few weeks.  Hint: if the answer was not 'filling sandbags' they you looked like a prize tool.
The other question that was answered was 'Is there more to UKIP than racism?'.  Yes, yes there is.  There's stupidity too.  UKIP's leader, Nigel Farage, was seen dressed in what one imagines a repressed country squire might look like, in suspiciously new wax jacket and wellies, droning on about how we should cut the foreign aid budget and use it for flood defences.  The BBC bloke then asked what he was doing to get relief money from Europe, which is available.  The answer - f**k all, Mr Farage apparently believing that the entire structure of the European Union closes down on a Sunday.  Next item on the news, EU officials making a statement about some ruling or other, on a Sunday.
As with many disasters, this adversity has brought out the best in people.  Communities coming together to help one another, the British Army doing their usual spectacular job in crap conditions, and monarchy leading.

Nature Notes - The feast of St Jude

A perhaps unintended consequence of improvements to long term weather forecasting is that the ever-speculative rolling news is now able to report news stories before they have even happened. 

So it was that when the Met Office started talking about fronts, wind and amber warnings, the weather forecasters suddenly found themselves not just tacked on after the news, but popping up during it.  At last, a chance to sit at the big shiny desk, not just hover in front of a bloody big map of the UK wondering idly where Droitwich is.

As the isobars pushed closer together than the boobs of a bird in a wonder-bra, salivation television began.  Two days in advance of the savage storm, we were left in no doubt that you should not travel on the day of the storm, nor should you go out without an unsecured wig, and that if you have pets, you should staple them to the floor.  Anything up to a pony.  Essentially, unless you were down a mine the weekend of the storm, you could expect trouble.

Actually, the weather forecasters earned their money.  The storm arrived as scheduled, was pretty intense and some damage was done, with branches down and travel disruption (that old chestnut of leaves on the line, except this time they were still attached to the tree).  But people were prepared, that was the key, those that would not be able to travel into work were able to make sure they had panic-bought DVDs and Xbox games to keep themselves amused.

The big concern was the ‘storm surge’, as the wind drove the sea onshore.  So terrifying was this prospect that many immediately took to the sea front armed with their mobile to take what would be, by the look of some of those waves, their most exciting selfie ever and quite possibly the last one they would ever take on their non-waterproof ‘phone.

And of course the storm was reported ahead of time, in real time and in the aftermath.  Because it was concentrated in the south of England, it received blanket media coverage, with even the strongest hair care products being tested to the limits as BBC reporters got a bit blown about.  Personally, it’s the squirrels I feel sorry for.

Pockets

The hot weather has led to a change in the way that people are dressing themselves. A week or so ago, it was essentially wellingtons and sou'westers, now, with the sun out, there is a rush to display as much pillar-box red flesh as possible.

The change in the weather has resulted in a staggering display of age-inappropriate clothing. Not quite grown men in romper suits, although I understand that this is a regular fixture in the swankier dungeons of the better class of knocking shop, but rather blokes dressed like toddlers, and toddlers dissed like grown-ups.

Children are being dressed like grown-ups to protect them from the harmful effects of the sun, possibly by parents who have seen one to many 'Twilight' films. That is; a 'Twilight' film. The reality is that it is easier to force a reluctant toddler into long trousers, a long sleeved shirt and a hat with a kopi than it is to force a toddler into a thin film of sun cream. Children generally, but toddlers in particular, have an aversion to sun cream which defies logic. Usually the little sods are all about getting themselves covered in all sorts of noxious goo that has to be bleached or, in extreme circumstances, burned out of their clothes, scrubbed from their bodies or cut from their hair. But one whiff of the Factor 15 and they take off like cats who have heard that Terry the Brutal Cat Fucker is back in town.

If you catch them, then actually applying the stuff is even more of a chore, as you are basically attempting to grease up a twisting, turning little ball of annoyed limbs. Essentially, one has to employ the same sort of holds that those Turkish wrestlers who cover themselves with oil and use sport as an excuse for slight of hand covert public buggery use when securing an opponent, with the handicap that you can't apply a choke hold. For long.

And when you do manage to slap some protection on, the child usually instantly conquers their fear of the sea and charges for the surf, leaping into the water and leaving nothing but a small slick of sunscreen and a sense of resentment as hot as the weather.

The infantilisation of men's wardrobes is down to one garment - the cargo short. The cargo short is now the single most popular item of clothing worn by men, because it means that they finally have a pair of trousers with enough pockets to carry all the crap that men consider so essential.

In the 1950s books about schoolboys made much of the TARDIS like ability for a boy's shorts to hold many items, such as a grubby handkerchief, a shilling to make a phone call, or to bribe the maid to administer a relaxing tit-wank, a catapult, and a frog, alive or dead depending upon the requirements of the plot. This of course, was in the days when it was wholesome to take an interest in the contents of a boy's shorts, before catholic priests gave that sort of thing a bad name.

Now, when an average chap leaves the house without enduring a panic attack, he will require at least his mobile, iPod, wallet, keys, hip flask, hankerchief, plastic bag to avoid being ripped off if he does any grocery shopping and probably at least three other items that I am far too uncool to know about, Kindle? Some form of bus pass? Whatever, the point is that cargo shorts give a bloke the opportunity to store all of that crap and have it within easy reach, even if it does require a bit of thought to ensure that the right item goes in the right pocket and one does not sit down to a sickening crunch and a bad case of 'Nokia-arse'.

The alternative to looking like a schoolboy is to look like a schoolgirl. I am referring, of course, to the 'man-bag'. Worn over the shoulder on a long strap one may as well complete the outfit with a tee shirt that reads 'look everyone, I have an iPad I must carry bloody everywhere'.

Postcard from Norfolk - Fret ye not

On holiday, the weather may be ‘brisk’ or it may be ‘bracing’. One is on holiday and so holiday speak is employed. ‘Wet’ is a word reserved for the condition of your glass at lunch time, the only acceptable use of ‘damp’ is to describe the bottom of one’s trousers after over-enthusiastic paddling and insufficient rollage. Along the coast what others would call ‘fog’ or ‘mist’ is more accurately described as a ‘fret’. A fret is where the warm sea touches the cold land, or possibly where the cold sea touches the warm land but whatever the cause the opportunity to use the word ‘fret’ is seized upon by one and all, usually incorporating it into a sentence such as ‘I am fretful that it is going to piss down all day today. What?’

In truth, it’s not raining, although there is something of a breeze or, more accurately, a ‘breeze’ of the sort that would allow a wind turbine to power every intimate massager in Holloway, before ripping the sails off.

To get out of the fret, took a trip to Burnham Market. Mid-week one can just about find a parking spot, if one is prepared to circle endlessly like some sort of car shark or just do what I do, which is [do you really think I’m going to say?]. There is an art exhibition put on by a local art club in the village church. As with any art club exhibition, the hang reveals a mixed ability. The very best painting were N.F.S. as the painter has just has a stroke and the family want to hang on to them in case they are the last paintings the chap is ever going to do.

Elsewhere in the exhibition there was some talent and some quirk and, unfortunately, the level of talent in the quirky entries was not always enough to bring off the intent.

Naturally, signed the visitors’ book with gushing praise and told the two lovely Burnham market ladies how wonderful it all was and how lovely the church was (which it is). I like art in churches, it makes one feel less of a penitent and the occasional landscape is a welcome distraction from all the stained glass and scenes from the bible stuff.

Stopping off at The Ship at Brancaster, it made a stab at redeeming itself after not serving chips on demand earlier in the week by coming up with simply the best hot chocolate ever. It wasn’t so much the hot chocolate but rather the sheer amount of whipped cream and marshmallow that they crammed onto the top of it. Any more and it would have had to come in a separate bowl.

Water water

There's an air of magnificence about the British weather. A lot of this is a result of Britain, although geographically relatively small in the global scale of things (not too small, you couldn't lose it under a breadcrumb on an atlas, although a chunk of scone would do the job), apparently extending through more climatic zones than your average continent. So it can be that the southern extreme can bask in Mediterranean sunshine (the price the Channel Islands pay for being close to France), while the northern extremes shiver under snow clouds (affording an excellent opportunity to stoke the peat fire and distill some more whisky). Meanwhile in the west Ireland is famously home to an infinite variety of 'wet' and in the east, farmers are worried about both water shortages and reprisal attacks from otters furious that their habitat is being pumped away to irrigate fields of cucumbers.

Moreover, there's a growing sense that the British weather has a sense of humour, and a sense of timing that would not disgrace a comic actor or a pissed housewife at a party choosing to give her husband a dressing down just as the party's 'mute moment' - the instant at which a room unexpectedly and unaccountably falls silent as all conversations (but one) simultaneously pause - happens.

It has been for years an accepted fact of climatic life that 'bank holiday weather' is best described as trying to keep your barbecue going in a thunderstorm. It could be because the majority of bank holidays are scheduled at times of the year when the weather is unpredictable (January to December) but more probably it is because the weather gods enjoy a laugh as much as anyone. Moreover, if one pictures a weather god, does one get the image of an easygoing bloke in shorts and sandals, giving all a sunny smile and clear skies? No, one gets the image of an angry, constipated looking Viking with a beard that has to be wrung out every two minutes, farting thunderbolts and pissing on the bonfires of a nation.

If there is anything more likely to promote precipitation than a bank holiday, it's the announcement of a hosepipe ban. And lo! It came to pass that a number of water companies in various parts of England, busy pissing away millions of gallons of water through cracked pipes and supplying buckets of the stuff to industry who then use it to mix with poison before dumping it in a nearby nature reserve, imposed a hosepipe ban this weekend.

The English do not like hosepipe bans. They love their hosepipes. They use them to water lawns and floral borders, to spray noisome children, to separate copulating dogs, to fill paddling pools, to wash their cars and, of course, to put out burning sheds and fences, aflame as a result of recent creosoting and carelessness, drunkenness or careless drunkenness near the barbecue.

Previously, hosepipe bans have been enforced by, among other things, helicopter surveillance. The expectation this year was that thanks to the development in airborne surveillance techniques, and with Bin Laden now found, there must be dozens of drone craft knocking about in hangers that could easily be re-tasked to criss-cross the yellow gardens of the South East looking for suspicious squares of green. Just make sure that the drone is disarmed so that the operator's usual response on spotting a likely target - bombing the shit out of it - is not an option.

But apparently in this case it won't be choppers, coppers, drones or eyes in the sky spying, it will be eyes over the fence, with neighbours being encouraged to shop their neighbours. This is something the English can really get behind, and despite appearances owes less to the Stasi and more to the school of 'try winning cucumber of the year at the village fete from behind bars, you tuber growing bastard'.

But given that it has rained every day since the ban was announced, one cannot escape the suspicion that there is a secret order high in the combined ranks of the National Farmers Union, RHS and several water companies who, on certain occasions, pray for rain, then sacrifice a goat.

Postcard from Winchester - the Itchen

Winchester's river is The Itchen (it's too much to hope for that wherever Winchester is twinned with has a waterway called The Scratchen). Apparently in Roman times, the river was a bit of a bother, with being wet an all. The Romans got in their engineers and moved the river a few hundred yards to the left. The result is that today, the Itchen is possibly the most well behaved and mannered river I have ever seen, perfectly in keeping with the atmosphere of the town itself.

The river is about fifteen foot wide and a foot deep, and runs along what is now, thanks to building on both sides of the town, the backs of houses and a rather attractive footpath. It has all the advantages of a river; calming influence of water, ideal location for a riverside pub, ducks and so on, without the disadvantages that they can sometimes bring - raging angry torrents of water, graveyard for shopping trollies, bloated corpse lucky dip, that kind of thing. Apparently the river used to be twice as wide - oooohhhhhh, terrifying.

'Sire, hostile forces are massing on the other side of the river!'
'Worry not, they will never get across its expanse.'
'But sire...they have wellington boots!'
'Arse!'.

And so on.

The town still has a working water mill. Naturally this is now run by the National Trust and so one could buy bags of flour milled at the mill (I trust them, and did not look too closely at the empty bags from catering packs of Tesco value strong white flour in the bins round the back) as well as all the other necessities that populate a National Trust gift shop, such as jams, plush otters and a lady volunteer behind the till flustered by more than one customer at a time.


Because the temperature was so cold it hurt to take a deep breath, there was an interesting effect in the churning waters at the foot of the mill race, the spray had frozen to the lowest parts of the vegetation growing on the riverbank, giving the waterside a festive, decorative appearance, for all the world like those LED icicles that people hang from their guttering at Christmas, except not so chavvy.


The river wanders round the backs of houses and gardens, the gardens backing onto the river. One, rather magnificently, backs onto an area where the river diverts around...well it probably qualifies as an island, just, as 'stump in the water' sounds mean and it did have a population of three ducks. It also had space for somebody to nail up a (small) sign that read 'private'. What might seem like a mean and petty gesture was, in this instance, transformed into a magnificent one - imagine being able to say in all honesty that you had your own private island. Surely that is a privilege reserved for people like Richard Branson or Bond villains. Maybe Winchester is where Bond villains retire to, and the owner of the private island is constructing a death ray in his shed, an occupation he describes as 'pottering'.

G&P review of the year

It’s traditionally the time of year where there are reviews of the past twelve months, and awards and honours are handed out to those that have made a positive contribution to society in general or the lives of the rich and influential in particular. So why not?

The Gentleman and Player review of the year.

It started off cold, with snow and stuff. It then got very warm very quickly. In May the temperatures were such that one was knocking around in shorts and tee shirts while away from the playing field or exercise class. Was this unseasonably warm weather early in the year the ‘Arab Spring’ that everyone refers to? Or is that because it made everyone dress like Mediterraneans? Either way, it was warm.

Which was good, because Summer itself, although not cool, did not live up to the expectation. I had enough barbeque gas stock piled in my shed to fuel a space shuttle launch, had NASA decided to continue with the programme. They didn’t and mankind took a giant step backwards, the space shuttle joining Concorde in the cabinet of things we used to be able to afford to run but can’t any longer. We now have to rely on the Russians to get stuff into space. This is the same people that we rely on for our supply of gas and, if their success at launching rockets is any indication of the quality of their products, it’s probably a good job I never got round to using any of the stuff to cremate some chicken legs.

Later in the year we had riots in England. The media at the time and since tried hard to suggest that the trigger for this was anger. Anger at the police, anger at the ‘haves’ by the ‘have nots’ and anger at society generally. What it seemed to be most of all was anger at plate glass windows of J B Sports shops.

The year rounded off with protest camping. Interestingly, the growth in protest camping and the need for equipment was not enough to stop ‘Blacks’, the high street camping retailer (and so presumably best placed of all to sell you stuff that would allow you to camp on the High Street) going into receivership. This demonstrates that either the campers were actually so angry with society that they looted their equipment, or they bought on-line, just like everyone else.

Oh shit, just realised that Blacks is where I buy my barbeque gas. Good job I stock-piled.

From vine to wine, it's all fine

This has been, in every way, a ripe year for British fruit. The harvest has been bountiful and the fruit itself, taking an invented figure, at least 20% plumper and juicier than average. On the Imperial measure, that's at least one third of a smiling child more than normal and on the Summerisle scale, it means that demand for virgin sacrifices is down one on previous years.

The branches have hung heavy with fruit and the hedgerows were busy with birds at first flitting from branch to branch, then lunging from branch to branch before finally crashing heavily from branch to branch as their now almost spherical forms provided inspiration for any passing app maker. While in the supermarket the bumper harvest brought about by unseasonable, unreasonable but very welcome warm Autumn weather went unnoticed because while more of a product should mean it gets cheaper, rocketing diesel prices meant that transporting the stuff from farm to shop was getting more expensive, it was very noticeable in the fields, in those little roadside stalls you get when you travel the back roads, in the increase in demand for sugar, glass jars and other jam making accessories (jam making kitchens, the crystal meth labs of the English middle classes), and in back gardens.

Especially mine. This was the year that Jeremy, my vine, came good.

Not to say that in previous years he's not tried, it's just that this year he's had help.

Previously, Jeremy has fruited, with tiny buds slowly turning into grapes and those green grapes turning a luscious deep, dark purple (causing me to look again at Jeremy's tag and try to recollect if I had intended to buy a white-wine, sorry, a green grape vine, and had accidentally grabbed the wrong stalk in the garden centre. Of course it may have been that three or four years ago I was going through a red wine phase, which would certainly explain both my choice and my inability to either recollect my intention or to grab the right vine if green grapes had been my intention), I looked on them with pride, turned my back, heard a grey whoosh and turned back to see no grapes and a grape-laden squirrel shooting up a tree, just out of twatting-with-a-spade range.

This year, however, a more relaxed attitude to regimenting the garden has led to the borders growing in a 'wild garden' fashion. The idea was to encourage wildlife such as butterflies and bees, while freeing up valuable drinking time by avoiding excess pruning or trimming. Have no fear though, my lawn has been kept in pristine condition and could, at any time, have been pressed into service as a surface to play croquet, bowls, cricket, polo or, after one particularly close pass with the mower, snooker, on. The move towards wild gardening has led to the arrival of sentinel cats who, apparently, like nothing better than to curl up in the long grass and snooze away the afternoon, watched resentfully by squirrels who are now too scared to enter the garden. Hence the vine has been unmolested and hence there has been a bountiful harvest of grapes.

The cats are tolerated not just because they are even better squirrel deterrent than me running round the garden in my pants swinging a shovel round my head and screaming my dread squirrel-slaying war cry of 'Die Tufty Dieeeeeeeeeeee!' but because they don't crap in the garden. I have nothing against cats in and of themselves, after all, spinsters need love too, but I do have an objection to animals that crap in my garden. Obviously, these cats are fastidious and have decided that nothing puts a cramp in your nap when you are entirely covered in fur quite like poo. This is plainly a view shared by the fox that also took up residence for a short spell this summer, and who could be seen snoozing in the sunshine, moving only when the setting sun threw a long shadow across the lawn and he was required to pick himself up, wander a few yards into the sunshine, and drop down again. I thought for years that foxes drew their energy from bin raids and leftover chicken tikka masala, but apparently they are solar powered. So an uneasy peace reigned in my back garden in the summer of 2011, with the fox, the cats and myself all studiously ignoring one another's existence. I've no idea if the truce will be last and fear some sort of fur, fangs and faeces version of a Tombstone showdown moment next time round.

For this year though, all was calm, the only sounds the uncorking of lunch, the occasional sizzle of a sausage on the barbecue and the sound of my tomato plants, and Jeremy, growing. If ever there was a year for growing tomatoes, this was it. It's amazing that water plus sunshine can equal fruit, and free fruit at that. The things grew even taller than I am, and by August I had had to construct a Heath-Robinsonesque framework of bamboo canes held together with gardening twine to support the vertical and horizontal growths. By the time the crop was done I think there was more bamboo than tomato plant but the result was pleasing not only in the sense of getting free food, but of course the blokish sensation of having built something. The tomatoes tasted great, although the choice to go with two varieties, one that is traditional red when ripe and one that is yellow, caused some early confusion in trying to determine when a yellow tomato is ripe - answer: when it's very yellow.

Getting back to vines though, lets be clear, a vine has but two purposes; shade and booze. In sunny countries, like England in 2011, they are just the job for curling around your pergola or hastily lashed together framework of bamboo canes in order to provide welcome shade. Shade under which one can, if one wishes, set up a table and some chairs, and perhaps serve some cheese, with the wine of your choice. That's breakfast sorted, now all that remains is to call into work with a croaky voice, kick back and make the most of the day. Jeremy is not quite up to this yet, he was curled around my shed instead, but he is up to making wine! With a little help.

I have a friend who makes wine. Well, let me clarify, I have a friend who makes alcohol and alcohol products. To him, nature is something to be washed, peeled, sliced and then put into a bucket with a pound of sugar and some yeast, left in a shed for a couple of weeks, strained, matured in a bottle for as long as his patience can bear, and then drunk. He has made alcoholic drinks out of cherries, pears, rhubarb and, rumour has it, on one occasion a fox that was not quite quick enough after crapping on his vegetable patch. But never grapes. His vine has, mysteriously, always failed to produce grapes, even this summer.

So, I had a harvest of grapes but no knowledge of how to make wine, and he has all the gear and a good idea, but no grapes. So it was that we entered into an agreement, I would harvest and supply the grapes, he'd do all the hard work and we'd split the result half and half.


The process of wine making only fuelled the expectation of the result. I delivered the grapes to my winemaker and left him to undertake the initial stages. This resulted, a couple of weeks later, in a large bucket of grape juice. We then spent an evening straining the stuff into another bucket, while the dregs were retained. My wine buddy had a plan for those. The resulting strained wine juice was added to another bucket, sugar and yeast was added, a mysterious instrument called a hydrometer was used, more sugar was added, the lid was put on the bucket and the whole thing was returned to the shed.


Sheds have featured largely. Jeremy put on a growth spurts this summer and wrapped himself around my shed, while the fruit has turned to wine in a shed. With this in mind, various names for the wine were considered and rejected ('Vin diesel', 'Van Bloody Ordinary', Vin-mto', 'Grim grape') before we settled on the inevitable 'Shed red'. I think that the close involvement of sheds at every stage has leant a certain something to the wine itself, as it fermented away I was imagining that it would have notes of compost, porn and creosote.

Of course, as with all this home made stuff, potency can be a problem. I tried a glass of his rhubarb wine on holiday and lost the power of speech after half a glass, the use of common sense after the rest of the glass and the use of my ability to climb stairs after a second glass. Good stuff. I think.

Come decanting day, we had moved out of the bucket stage, which was something of a relief. While the reality of actually making something usually demystifies the product, and while the sieving, pouring and standing well back as the yeast and sugar got it on was tremendous fun, there is only so much romance to be had from a plastic bucket. But glass demijohns and tubes - this was much more like it.


The resulting wine is actually a rose, a beautiful pink, like the blush of a convent school girl just having her first inappropriate thought about the captain of the netball team. This was rather unexpected considering how dark the grapes were and one wonders exactly how dark the grapes are that produce those really deep red wines, I suspect most of them are beyond the visible spectrum.

I was told by my winemaker that the result tasted like a Beaujolais nouveaux. This would make perfect sense, as that is a wine synonymous with being drunk practically before the corks are hammered into the bottles. The idea for shed red, like all home made wine, is that you make it, bottle it and then forget about it for at least a year.

However, given all the excitement about this vintage, we had to try it. I would say that the result is...interesting. It certainly packs a punch and resembles nothing so much as a light and fruity lunchtime wine crossed with battery acid and the sort of spirit that one buys at a car boot sale to clear your car windscreen of frost, or possibly a home made cure for removing warts, stubborn stains and all traces of life in any awkward family member. Having said that, we finished the bottle.

I believe the correct term for the resulting wine is 'young'. Like all wines it should be allowed to mature and I have to say that putting it away has already improved it tremendously, in that I don't have to drink the stuff. At present, it's enough to look at it, sitting there gathering potency, and feel a warm glow of achievement and not just a little frisson of anxiety about what the stuff is going to taste like in a years time.

The skins and stalks, by the way, were not wasted. Rather, this was used to make grappa. Grappa is, as anyone who has ever shuddered their way to a pulled muscle after sipping the stuff will know, notoriously vile. If it tastes goodj, you're not doing it right. It's supposed to be made of the leftovers when you have made wine and it is supposed to be rough as a mountain goat's arse in Lithuania's goat shagging season. Thus, the bar had not been set high, or had been, depending on your point of view. When the Shed Red was bottled the grappa was still in the bucket stage of the process, so we all trooped out to the shed for a sip. Itw was sublime. I think that served chilled, ideally so chilled that you don't actually taste it, it would actually be excellent.

Getting the wind up

As I hammered yet another chock into the ground in an attempt to stop my fenceposts resembling a metronome in the wild winds earlier this week, I counted myself lucky that I was at the benign end of the blow.

This, of course, has been something of a crisis week for wind. In unlucky America twisters have been leaving a trail of very-much-not-CGI devastation on a grand scale across some huge States. At the same time winds have been blowing volcanic ash from Iceland towards Europe and towards Europe’s runways in particular.

The North of the country got the worst of it and listening to traffic reports brought home how vulnerable to climate the power and transport infrastructure is. As well as power cables being brought down cutting supplies to homes and railway trains, bridges, roads and passes were closed to high-sided vehicles, cars with trailers, motorbikes and – get this – pedestrians! They weren’t even trusting people to be able to cling onto the safety rail and make it to the other side of the bridge.

Also cancelled were the ferries that serve the Scottish islands

In this busy world, a lot of busy people seek isolation. But they seek it on their terms. Connected via their smartphone to their friends and by rolling news to world events, the idea of ‘turning off’ can mean a relaxing stroll somewhere with no mobile signal, or ‘Norfolk’ as it is commonly known.

However, it must take a particular sort of person not to be made anxious when the power goes down and the wind is shrieking. ‘Scottish’, is one description ‘Possessing a wood burner and an Aga’ is another.

Reflections on the royal wedding - the weather

Last Friday's Royal wedding gave the British a perfect storm of legitimacy to speculate about the weather, a Big Occasion on a bank holiday weekend. In terms of micro-climates, there was probably very high temperatures around the server that does the BBC weather Internet site as their weather page got more hits than a butt at an archers' convention, combined with a lot of hot air from folk gassing about the weather every time they met.

On the day, the weather was perfect, cloudy in the morning to keep the crowds cool and then, during the ceremony, the sun actually came out. This was because, it was explained to me, God is an Englishman. This actually makes a great deal of sense explaining as it does why so many previously inexplicably ghastly things happen to foreign people.

Countdown to Christmas

Bloody hell! It’s metrological mayhem as winter grips the nation once again, like an icy fist grabbing at your festive nutsack. Everyone appears to be in a total state of shock that there could very well be a white Christmas. The surprise is, to my mind, totally unfounded – just look at the evidence; all those Christmas cards showing jolly carollers, people going to midnight mass and revellers enjoying themselves, in the snow. OK granted, these are all paintings of jolly goings on in Victorian times but seeing as we are bombarded with these images every year for the last two years in December, can it really be that much of a shock when it actually snows before Christmas?

Well, yes, apparently. Next year’s Christmas card will be not so jolly people, not going anywhere, stuck in a check-in queue at Heathrow while the airport crew try and dig 747s out of snowdrifts. Christmas is indeed a time for friends and family, not a time for trying to jet off to the Caribbean for two weeks, as many people at Gatwick are currently finding out. Looks like this December the only bugger flying will be Santa.

Surely if you are stuck in an airport in the snow the temptation must be to start a rumour that terrorists have taken the place over in order to free the dictator of a banana republic, and see how long it takes for people to stop screaming and work out that that is the plot to Die Hard II.

And it certainly has snowed. This morning I struggled to the small shed in the garden where the lawnmower, garden stuff and, importantly, shovel, is stored. Shovels are fantastic for stoving in the heads of foxes (at least two visited the garden last night, looking at the tracks) and almost as good for digging your car out of the car park space you left it in that morning before the latest big dump. There are no airplanes, there was little traffic and what there was was hushed by the snow, it was a moment of almost perfect peace, with the church bells chiming seven – I could almost hear the frost crackling on the wood of the shed door. Standing there two things occurred; how little time we get to stand and listen to the bells; and what sort of person gets up to be at their bell rope for seven in the morning thinking ‘time for a really good peal!’. I’m betting hearty Christian.

All this snow and ice means that normal service has been severely disrupted – including Amazon and other on-line retailer deliveries. This means that unless I am to face alienation from the family come Christmas, I have to fit in some shopping, as well as trying to struggle into work.

This leaves no time at all for blogging. Hence, some of the chaps from the village have decided to step in as guest bloggers.

Marinade musings

Weatherwise, it's been hot and sultry recently. Over the weekend this was very good as it allowed me to sit in the back garden all day not taking the opportunity to read Tennessee Williams in the sort of soupy, southern atmosphere he manages to evoke even if you're reading him on a freezing railway platform in December but instead listening to Test Match Special, reading the papers, swearing once again never to buy the papers as they just irritate the hell out of me, and alternating refreshing hot drinks (tea) with refreshing cool drinks (cola) before, wired to the eyeballs on caffeine, I decided that it was a respectable hour to switch to alcohol (five o'clock, red wine, it’s acceptable, and there’s an end to it).

The other benefit of the hot weather is being able to use the barbeque on a regular basis. This has resulted in what I am pleased to describe as a well-seasoned grill, what the Food Standards Agency would call a type two health hazard and what the local fox population probably describe as the second most tempting smell in the postcode (the first being the bins of the family a few doors down, but only because they don't use that ultra-spicy marinade that I favour).

Cooking over fire though is, without doubt, the most satisfying of all the culinary arts. Possibly because it taps into a primal urge, possibly because it's associated with good weather and probably because you need a dousing agent on hand at all times and a large glass of red is ideal.

Even vegetables taste good, this is essentially because they have been cooked on a grill that retains the ghost of a thousand meaty dinners. God knows how I'm going to cope when the weather changes but dousing anything green on my plate in gravy has to be an option. Either that or simply crumbling an OXO cube over my salad.

Summertime, and the cricket is easy

Today is supposed to be the hottest day of the year so far.

It certainly feels like it. I have made sure that I have derived maximum enjoyment from it by sitting indoors in the shade, sipping cool drinks and listening to Test Match Special. Something of a cliché? Possibly, but I recall that in the hot summers of my youth, the cricket was the background to whatever else was happening. Cricket is criticised because it takes five days to play a match, but surely that’s one of the many great things about it. Doing anything properly; building a cathedral, erecting a henge, singing a German opera, takes time. Things that are less impressive – instant coffee, Pot Noodle, eating anything that is ‘fun’ sized is less satisfying.

A colleague recently asked me if we weren’t in fact seeing a return to ‘proper’ weather, like wot we ad when we were kids! They have a point. Winter actually came with snow. Real, proper fluffy white snow rather than the brown slush we’ve been putting up with that insinuates itself into your shoes and, for some science-defying reason, never melts once it’s in there!

Now we have the sort of summer that’s turning the lawns the same shade of brown as the faded poleroids that document the last time we had a summer like this. I foresee hosepipe bans and brown lawns for everyone except the Midnight Waterer who is bright enough to realise that he’s not supposed to be watering his lawn, but not bright enough to realise that somebody in authority might make the connection between a street full of sepia grass and a single lawn of emerald green.

The idea then of climate change actually being caused by nostalgia has been added to the other theories about global warming. What nostalgia will not affect is my dress sense. Judging by those same faded photographs I was a big fan of man-made fibres and spent the summer of ’76 sporting nylon tee shirts decorated with pictures of Action Man. Not a good look on a fat adult.

No fly zone

As Iceland continues to pump out ash like a chain smoker at a sexual harassment hearing, all flights remain grounded over Europe. This has led to ‘travel disruption’, ‘travel chaos’ or ‘travelgeddeon’ depending upon your choice of media but it has also led to skies of perfect blue.

This may be somewhat ironic, an ash cloud is blanketing Europe and frankly, I was expecting to see some Hollywood special effects. Indeed I was busy practicing my embarrassing pose to be doused in. In 2,000 years time, bored schoolchildren would be shown round the ruins of the city that was once London and snigger at the natives, frozen forever in the poses of everyday life, texting, sitting slumped at a keyboard or deciding what coffee to order. However, what we have are clear skies.

And I mean clear. This was the weekend to sell your house if you lived near a major airport ‘oh yea, it’s always like this. Flightpath? Nowhere near it.’

So we have a sky clear of the vapour trails that normally criss-cross our skies like graffiti and enjoyed a balmy summer’s day…in April. This has led to the green of the parks turning pink and then red as people enjoy themselves in the sunshine and of course that other great British summer institution. Iceland may have an ash cloud, but Britain has around ten million active barbequeues, all sending sizzling sausage fat high into the troposphere. With luck, we can keep this up all summer – Europe a no fly zone, Britain warm and sunny and the World Cup to look forward to. Let’s just hope to god the lager arrives by boat.

Snow business

The recent extreme weather event that swept Britain (snow in winter) provoked a curious reaction from the workforce. The majority of office drones took one look at a white landscape and decided, as one, to take the day off. In some cases this was a good decision because the roads were full of people who had decided to ‘struggle in’. This sort of person thinks they are indispensable to the workings of whatever company they are part of, the sad truth is that, unless they are responsible for opening up the office first thing, or are a council gritter, one day off will not make that much difference. What they did do was made the roads; already ‘treacherous’ thanks to snow, ice and the bloke who has the key to the grit depot not being at work yet, perilous.

Certainly those who did struggle to get to work have an exaggerated sense of their own importance or, you know, a job that actually matters, as opposed to being in sales, marketing or one thousand and one other occupations that take longer than ten seconds to describe.

At least those that got in were kept warm by their own smugness. During the cold snap it was discovered that our office, which is mainly window, was cold. Cold to the extent that colleagues were actually wearing scarves and, believe me when I say this, not for fashion related motives. Rather, they looked like modern Bob Cratchett’s (although I think he had a ‘comforter’ which, until I learned that this was a Victorian word for scarf, thought was a mid-morning shot of gin).

Because we are supposed to care about polar bears, we’re not allowed portable heaters because that would upset the air con and hence bugger the environmentally friendly nature of the building. Sod being environmentally friendly, all the planet has ever tried to do is kill me in a variety of increasingly inventive ways. Nature can be vindictive and has many weapons in its arsenal, gravity being chief among them. Alcohol being another.

What you are allowed at your desk is a thermometer. Not so you can go home when the temperature plunges like a starlets neck line, but so I can play my favourite game: ‘it’s now the same temperature as it is in…’
(fires up internet) ‘Wesconsin!’
‘Is that good?’
‘Can’t be!’.

It’s a plastic digital job and while I don’t doubt that it’s accurate I do doubt that it’s impressive enough to be taken seriously. That’s why I want three climate stations on my desk. The modern one would be stainless steel and feature flashing lights and one of those wind measuring things that look like a device for taking three scoops of ice-cream in one go.

The second one would be made mostly of brass and banned chemicals, feature dials and be housed in a glass-fronted mahogany case. As certain temperatures a buzzer would sound and it would dispense hot tea or cold Pimms.

Finally I want a rustic one. This is essentially a length of shed attached to which would be a length of seaweed, a pine cone and an old man with a gyppy knee. Also, possibly, an onion. Can you predict the weather using an onion? Given the trouble that the recent cold weather caused root vegetable farmers, I’m guessing not. But if you did come up with an onion based weather prediction system, I bet somebody would bring out the related iPhone app shortly after.

The Biggish Dump

Is that it? Three sodding inches? Given the media hysteria I was expecting to wake up to yetis. I think, to be fair, that my little corner of the world has gotten off lightly. Naturally, we had the usual issues – barely had a flake fallen when all the trains lost traction and all the schools closed. This meant that all the kids had to stay at home but that’s okay because the parents can’t get to work because no trains are running and the council has run out of grit.

In truth, it wasn’t the snow that was a problem, it was the freezing temperatures. The snow fell, then turned to ice. Which English people do not know how to drive on – moving over the ice with about the same level of style and confidence as a sobbing fat kid in a sequined jump suit a confidence building course, about to attempt a triple axle in front of the entire school.

The snow reveals a new landscape. Like Narnia with litter. It also reveals that after a week of snow last year, people still don’t prepare for the weather. Or, rather, the public appear to break down into two groups. There are those that go out dressed in the gear they bought for camping/walking or skiing holidays. The ones that spent a fortune on gear for a skiing holiday don’t look smug, they just look bloody grateful to finally get a chance to wear their expensive skiing jacket, because they can’t afford to go on the skiing holiday after the sterling exchange rate went down faster than a chubby girl on a black diamond run.

The rest fall into two sub-categories. There are those who take the sensible approach that layers of normal clothes are the way forward. This has two results, the first is that everyone is wearing so many layers of wool, gloves and scarves that they are only one top hat and case of rickets away from looking like the front of a Victorian Christmas card, the second is that they are well padded when the inevitable slip and slide occurs.

The second sub-group is teenagers. Presumably the shame of being seen outside enjoying themselves rather than hanging around in their bedrooms being sullen keeps them toasty, because leggings, a track suit top and ugg boots sure as hell is not going to do the trick.

Could the Government do more to prepare the population? Well, I reckon that they should hand out vouchers for pasta meals so that people can put on some winter weight and lower their centre of gravity for safety on the snow and ice (fat people are looking smug in this cold weather, it’s payback for all that sweating they do in August). Personally, I’m eating chips until the crisis passes. In addition, there needs to be a Government approved reading list; starting with ‘to build a fire’ by Jack London (does your spit crackle and freeze before it hits the ground? No, then stop whining). Also on the list – ‘Commando’ war picture library stories for boys; which regularly show plucky paratroopers making their way through the white stuff fortified with nothing more than Bovril, then laying waste to some Nazis.

The one group of people who really come out of this well are the weather broadcasters. People look at their telly screens during the weather bulletins like stone age man looking at the shaman making his way through chicken entrails, hanging on their every wise pronouncement. ‘More snow’ is a pretty safe bet at the moment. I don’t know what they use at the Met Office to forecast the weather, a supercomputer or a KFC family bucket, but for once they can do no wrong. It’s an old wise-mans’ trick; forecast doom and gloom and if only doom, or only gloom, or if neither doom or gloom arrive, nobody minds that much.

Except maybe those who were hoping for another day ‘working from home’. This allows you to do several things, including having a bottle of red with lunch and fortifying yourself with a snooze in the afternoon before knocking off early to get in some tobogganing before the light fades.

Anticipating the Big Dump

England is bracing for the Big Dump. The news and weather shows us that a band of snow is moving inexorably southwards, sweeping down from the north like the glaciers did. The pictures coming in from Scotland are grim, and not the usual grim of social depravation and the sort of dental hygiene only a lifetime of abusing irn-bru can bring. No, the news has decided to ease off on the pictures of jolly people enjoying snowball fights, people swimming in pools and seas where the temperature makes your testicles retract into the roof of your mouth (not somebody else’s, that’s the plot of ‘frozen fun V’) and have instead gone with pictures of people trying to dig their car out of a snowdrift, dig their house out of a snowdrift or, if they are anything like me, dig a path to the shed where the leftover Christmas booze has been stashed.

Danger arriving from the north has obviously sparked some sort of ancestral memory. On the way home from work I stopped at my local mini-mart (a soulless Sainsbury’s that, two weeks after opening, had managed to ensure that the excellent Budgens in the high street closed, leaving us with a much narrower selection of crisps and other corn based snacks. Indeed the only plus point of the store is the ridiculously cheery staff, who always ask how you are and how you day has been – this is a bloody high risk strategy as I always have to remind myself that the chap on the till does not necessarily want to hear a forty minute monologue on the inequities of my train operating system, my constant battle with fuckwittage (some of which, admittedly, is my own) and the million petty miseries and triumphs that make up modern life. Hence, I always answer ‘not bad, how are things with you?’ and, to be fair, he always gives a cheery answer although I am braced for the day when he either says ‘I need a hug’ or says something that sounded like ‘great, I killed a fox with a hairbrush last night’, leading one to have to make an instant decision about whether to ask for clarification or just nod, say ‘great’ and hope that he actually said ‘great, I booked my holiday for summer last night’, because otherwise the next time you see him he’s going to want to talk about bludgeoning garden pests again.) to try and buy some anchovies.

It looked as though the hoards of Gengis Khan had been through the place. The shelves were bare of stock and I expected to hear ‘pony poo clean up on aisle five’ coming from the tannoy at any moment. With no fresh food on the shelves and no anchovies to be had, I panic bought red wine and headed home.

Panic buying is, I think, a very English thing. Foreigners have a different system, they just oil and load their guns and start to figure out which of their neighbours is the weakest and has the best stocked larder. The Scots are able to forage in the wild, in the highlands this means stalking a deer (which does not mean trying to befriend it on facebook) while in the cities it’s rather more along the lines of shuffling to the nearest pie or chip shop. This means living on chips. This is normal. The Welsh, of course can live off their own body fat for weeks and failing that the body fat of any English tourists they have waylaid.

I think in part it’s due to supermarkets now being open twenty four hours a day. People go into some sort of meltdown at the prospect of not being able to visit the shops at three in the morning to by aubergines, or an X Box.

Luckily, I still have a selection of food (and some back-up booze) left over from Christmas. It does present a challenge trying to pull together a meal from what is basically a cheeseboard, pork pies and some nuts, but I find that if you eat all that while pondering what to have for dinner, the urge to cook something vanishes.

Now awaiting the snow.

Postcard from Corsica – weather

As a rule, if you are going somewhere that actually has different names for different types of climatic events, you are going to run the risk of encountering Weather. Indeed, there is a chance that you are going to encounter severe weather.

Weather is the stuff you see people on television prance around in front of as it moves over a big map of where you live. Severe weather is also to be found on television, usually blowing around a terrified reporter bellowing into a microphone while behind him, somebody is whisked away by the wind, possibly having enough time to question the wisdom of unfurling a banner reading ‘hello mum’ in the teeth of a hurricane before being embedded in a tree, probably not.

Lately, severe weather has also been found in the front rooms of many people in the form of a foot or so of caramel coloured floodwater. Floods make places uninhabitable because water is wet and also because there’s a reason it’s caramel coloured and you really don’t want that stuff on your carpets.

Societies give different names to different winds because it’s important not to confuse the wind that brings the rain with the wind that brings a cloud of locusts when you are a farmer. They also name weather because it’s important to find something to do to while away the hours during a monsoon. Most important of all, car makers need new names for new models and so need wind names, otherwise they would just do what the Germans do and give their cars numbers. This is okay up to a point, but what would you rather pull up in, a ‘number 2’ or a ‘El Nino’. Exactly.

On Corsica it had been a long, dry summer with the temperatures steady at 40 degrees. This, we all agreed, was what it was all about. Gently sizzling by the pool during the day, applying camomile lotion to one another’s sunburn at night and all punctuated by visits to the fridge and dips in the pool.

The French have a name for the wind that drives the rain off the bay and lashes it against the windows of the villa we were staying at. So do I, I call it the ‘bastard’. I don’t know if they have a special name for the rain but, if not, they can borrow my name for it; ‘fucking fucking fucking rain’.

And here’s a note for all holiday reps, if you don’t want to be thrown in a swimming pool to fight to death with the robot pool cleaner in a kind of trashy Jackie Collins meets sci-fi way, then don’t look out the window and say ‘you know, it’s been really sunny for months’.

As a tourist on the island, I felt really lucky. Most tourists don’t get to see the island in all its moods, they just get day after day of sunshine, no doubt with all the attendant hazards, such as insects and having fun outside by the pool. It was quite a thrill watching the curtain of rain sweep in across the bay, heading inexorably closer and don’t get me wrong, I appreciate being inside a villa and watching the rain fall outside, it would be a lot worse to be out on the hillside, with your rifle damply misfiring and the wild boar you were hunting closing in on you with tusks quivering and bristles backcombed. It must be like being gored by a bog brush.

Corsica attracts cyclists, walkers and motorcyclists almost as much as it attracts wasps (of which it attracts a LOT), God alone knows what they do when the rain comes (the tourists, not the wasps, the wasps come inside). Walkers are used to being damp I suppose, but anyone on the road must be wondering, among all the twists, turns, hairpins, goats, cows, pissed Corsicans and hunters who are bad shots, just what else could happen to make travelling by Corsican highway interesting. The answer is weather, lost of it, delivered horizontally or vertically or both horizontally and vertically at the same time. It snows in the winter – the locals probably taboggan. Pissed.