Month: August 2024

Antibiotics

Suddenly this morning I felt caught up in a rush making me feel like the plants in the fast moving winds of yesterday.

Soon after 9.30 a.m. Paula, who had carried out my medical checks with scarcely any notice for me and none for her on 14th, telephoned to say that the urine sample had revealed an infection and I needed to collect antibiotics today when I had received a call from my GP. I should start taking these immediately and it would be up to the surgeon to decide whether he would perform the booked cystoscopy in two days time. This meant that we wouldn’t know until we got to Southampton General Hospital on 21st whether the journey would be a wasted one. The surgery receptionist rang just as Mike Dutton arrived to clear our gutters and clean the windows. I was in the shower and they would not speak to Jackie, only me. I called back quickly, and had to jump through the hoops of press this, press that, press the other and listen to messages offering me the option to go on line to avoid waiting. Eventually I was given the message that a prescription had been sent to the pharmacy. When I expressed some frustration that they were unable to tell my wife that, I was told I could collect a form to sign giving them permission to speak to her. Next, the pharmacy rang to say the medication was ready. We waited until Mike had finished, while we were having lunch. I had needed to cadge some of the money for Mike from Jackie, therefore to collect that from an ATM as well, and post two letters, one, not ours, having been incorrectly delivered.

The only thing to do after that was to sit down with a short book, which I did, then posted

The Hundredth Story of A. E. Coppard

This evening we dined on Jackie’s liver casserole with boiled new potatoes; crunchy carrots; and tender broccoli stems.

The Hundredth Story of A. E. Coppard

A.E. Coppard (born January 4, 1878, Folkestone, Kent, England—died January 13, 1957, London) was a writer who achieved fame with his short stories depicting the English rural scene and its characters.

Born in humble circumstances, his father being a journeyman tailor and his mother a hostler’s daughter, Coppard left school at the age of nine and worked first as an errand boy in Whitechapel, London, and later as a clerk in Brighton and Oxford. His love for literature, painting, and music led him to abandon his office career; he settled in a cottage in the country, and his first book of short stories, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, was published when he was 43. His talent was recognized and other collections of stories followed, including Fishmonger’s Fiddle (1925), which contained what is perhaps his best story, “The Higgler.” The charm of his stories lay in his poetic feeling for the countryside and in his amusing and dramatic presentation of rustic characters. https://www.britannica.com/biography/A-E-Coppard

Alongside the Title Page I have placed the Notice To Subscribers explaining why my limited edition is one of 1,000 copies instead of the planned 750.

The prose in this delightful book I most poetic, beautifully descriptive and rich in alliteration, simile and metaphor. Examples will be given with the four pages containing Robert Ribbing’s splendid wood engravings to follow. Here is another: “The soul of man is like a tree that in autumn is shedding its leaves, the golden fruit of his ideals. O vanity! They fall softly, serenely covering the sweet soil until they are trodden by some hoof or scattered by winds. A few lie safely in nooks and crannies – until they rot. But the tree lives on. …….. There are tens of thousands of trees in this forest, and on every tree each year there are thousands of leaves……..they are my companions, I love them……Few birds haunt these glades, and few animals. The trees sometimes die and fall and rot…..”

“Once or twice an hour a train came snoring across the viaduct with a racket that tore the sky and made the ornaments topple on the mantelpiece” is another.

Apparently based on his own life the author has written an emotional life of literature and loves in fifty eight pages.

The fictional protagonist doubts his own emotions, believing he can only feel through his characters. His love life is mostly transitory.

The story is well crafted, fluently written, and with a good grasp of dialogue.

Here are Robert Gibbings’s engravings which I would recommend enlarging in the galleries.

Not Just About Plants

Jessie returned to her Primrose Hill home this morning.

A warm breeze swept the garden as I walked around with my camera this afternoon.

Mat and Becky gave us the bigger owl in this picture some years ago. I bought the pedestal from Molly’s Den and the leaden hat from a First Gallery Christmas exhibition. Including the one on the wall these are just three of the

100+ owls which can be found around the garden.

Other birds include ceramic white doves and various examples in coloured glass;

two others join an owl at the feet of Florence sculpture bought at the long gone Molly’s Den.

The Water Boy was found in bits in the undergrowth covering the south end of the garden; the frogs a little nearer the house;

the butler sinks, painted peeling blue by our predecessors, lay full of weeds in the middle of the Dead End gravel path – I moved them to their current position.

We have a number of ladybirds and various dragons.

The curlicue resting on mossy stone is a collapsed plant stand; we inherited the wheels form our predecessors; the tortoise was a present from Shelly and Ron;

Becky gave Jackie the bull head sculpture fixed to the shed wall; I

gave her the pig (galvanised container came from the Efford Recycling Centre when it was simply the Council dump);

Elizabeth gave us the wooden poppy when our granddaughter Poppy was born. It stands in the Rose Garden where

the Summer and Autumn lichen-covered sculptures span one of our reflecting mirrors;

the hanging trowel and wooden mushrooms were presents from me;

the fairy light feature given by Jessie some years ago has lost its original illumination so Jackie has rigged up a solar powered alternative.

Gardening is not just about plants.

This evening we reprised yesterday’s roast lamb meal with fresh vegetables.

No Protection But Each Other

On an increasingly warm late morning we took Jessie for a forest drive and brunched at The Potting Shed at Hyde.

The heather-filled landscape off Holmsley Passage reminded our friend of her childhood home in Scotland.

Ponies crowded along the road outside Burley.

We tracked a veteran vehicle until entered The Elm Tree car park.

At South Gorley the usual donkeys played with the traffic.

Ponies on the green at North Gorley enjoyed no protection from marauding flies but themselves;

others found shade at Frogham Hill;

a further group forced traffic onto the green on our way back through North Gorley.

After another afternoon’s pleasant conversation we dined on tender roast lamb; crispy roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding; crunchy carrots; firm cauliflower and Brussels sprouts with meaty gravy. I finished the merlot. Later we reminisced more.

Catching Up

I spent the earlier part of the day posting

The Secret Garden

This afternoon our good friend Jessie arrived to spend the weekend with us, and after several hours of convivial conversation involving reminiscing shared memories and catching up with each other’s news we dined at Rokali’s where I enjoyed prawn Ceylon; Jackie’s choice being chicken shashlik; Jessie’s I disremember. We shared aloo bhuna, special rice, and a plain paratha. I drank Kingfisher, Jackie drank Diet Coke, and Jessie, water.

The Secret Garden

Last night I sat up late reading

My first Folio Society edition,

having boards and spine decorated by the artist comes in

a slip case bearing one of her drawings.

This delightful book, in fluent descriptive prose, charts the journey of Mary Lennox, born to an ex-pat English couple in India, until the age of ten when she was transported to Yorkshire. It is a tale of her transition of cultures and the consequent adaptations.

There is a touch mystery apart from that of the eponymous garden.

The prose contains many similes and metaphors, yet is itself a metaphor to the resurgence of neglected yet apparently pampered lives upon the introduction of loving kindness.

We learn how Mary encounters a kindred spirit with similar experience and emotional deprivation in the midst of wealth; and how this is balanced by a loving family with very slender means, but with a generous maternal mother who really knows children and their needs. Two of her children in particular are instrumental in Mary’s gradual learning to love.

We learn how crushingly destructive grief can be, but how it is possible to be helped to rise from despair.

I often find attempts at reproducing vernacular accents in speech, but Burnett uses it as a method of bridging cultures and engaging her characters. As Mary becomes closer to the Yorkshire people she learns their language. The dialogue in this book is faithfully rendered with the author’s perfect control.

The garden of the story, largely neglected for ten years, through the changing seasons, the gradual resurgence of plant life, and the lives of small living creatures, is the metaphor for life.

The robin, a particularly significant character threading a link through the story, first became imprinted on Ben Weatherstaff as a fledgling. Masterman’s drawings, although including many of the robin do not include a fledgeling. I am therefore taking the advantage to feature my

3rd August 2019 drawing of Nugget, who, still with blueish feathers and lacking his adult red breast, first arrived in our garden a short time before. Longer term readers will remember the many photographs in those earlier posts featuring him.

I have not included my usual quotations from the text, because there are many examples of the author’s prose alongside this selection of Dodie Masterman’s drawings. Those not taken from within the text are smaller tailpieces from most of the chapters except for the final one which might give too much away. I recommend enlarging these pages in the gallery.

Current Condition

Early on this unusually increasingly cloudy morning, clad in my dressing gown, in silence save for the sough of the unusually warm rushing winds, wandered around the garden with the idea of using the diluted light for photography.

When admiring yesterday’s further clearance work by Martin I had

noticed the amount of blooms gracing Lady Emma Hamilton, and determined to come back today with my camera.

More roses, in the Rose Garden

and elsewhere, are clinging on to summer

in this season of dahlias and

Japanese anemones.

I also admired pink petunias, white myrtle and marguerites, pale lilac crinum lilies, yellow St John’s wort, and red/purple fuchsia Magellanica.

Some areas, like the Pond Bed, the entrance to the Back Drive, and the patio, contain their own range of blooms.

As usual, all the images bear titles in the galleries.

When Jackie noticed me pointing in her direction while she was

working on the patio she hid behind an owl.

By lunchtime the Head Gardener had finished clearing the patio and its surroundings, including refurbishing the Butler sinks. The wind, though now much cooler, persisted in blowing down the pot planted on the water fountain – she had already righted it 5 times before I set it on the ground.

I have chosen to display these blooms in location and current condition.

Jackie rarely uses a recipe and is sometimes reluctant to apply a name to a dish she serves for dinner. So it was today; it was certainly a delicious minced beef sauce containing chillies, onions and stuff on a bed of pasta which probably has a name – it was one of those where you can stick the prongs of your fork into the tubes making it easier to manage than spaghetti. I drank more of the Merlot with mine.

Somewhat Confused

In my post https://derrickjknight.com/2024/08/02/bcg/ I described the treatment plan for my bladder cancer. When I was recently telephoned booking a date for this to begin, I was told I would not need another cystoscopy before it commenced. I therefore have been anticipating the vaccine installations sequence to start in one week’s time. It now seems this is wrong.

At 8.50 this morning I received a call asking me to attend a pre-assessment appointment, fortunately at Lymington Hospital, at 9.30. This would be a questionnaire from a nurse, checking on current details. We arrived at the hospital at 9.25 to be told that I was booked in for 9.45. I was called at 10.10, which was just after the nurse herself had been informed.

The staff were all very friendly – I attributed this mix-up at least to the fact that the arrangement had clearly been arranged in a rush.

Nurse Paula Rickard was thorough, friendly, and efficient. She was quite clear that my appointment on 21st is in fact for a further cystoscopy which does, as Consultant Miss Vickie Dawson had informed me, need to be carried out. The meeting with Paula involved much more than the usual questions: she gave me another ECG, checked blood pressure and pulse, followed by escorting me to a blood test and asking me to deposit a urine sample. We agreed there was no need to measure height and weight again.

Neither consultant nor nurse had, of course played any part in this confusion and the message from them is consistent. So – I think I know what to expect at my next procedure, and will await a date for the vaccine application thereafter.

This took the whole of the morning, after which I made good headway in reading “The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett, a wonderful book making me feel very much at home that I will review when I have finished it.

Tonight we dined on tender baked gammon; piquant cauliflower cheese; spring greens and green beans; crunchy carrots; firm broccoli and boiled new potatoes, with which I drank Luis Felipe Edwards Gran Reserva Merlot 2021

Relief In Shade

On this cooler, pleasant, summer afternoon, after a visit to Ferndene Farm Shop for the purchase of vegetables and salad ingredients,

we took a forest drive via Beckley Common Road.

After passing ponies in shade alongside Pound Lane, we turned off into a car park whence we admired the

landscape with heather

and a variety of daisy slightly larger than normal but smaller than marguerites.

Further down the road we turned into Burley which

was pulsating with visitors.

Cattle having slaked their thirst in the stream under the ford on Forest Road wandered slowly up the road frustrating some drivers while

ponies further along sheltered beneath the usual trees,

adopting their customary head to tail fly whisk technique.

This grey seemed to have caused a kerfuffle resulting in thudding head butts, sudden scattering, and clopping on the tarmac. I was pleased I was no nearer these heavy animals whose hooves could have landed on my sandalled feet.

Along Holmsley Passage on our way home we followed a cyclist climbing the hill. When he reached the top, he pulled over to the gravel on his left and we exchanged waves.

This evening we dined on baked smoked haddock; piquant cauliflower cheese; tender green beans; boiled new potatoes and carrots al dente, with which I finished the Tempranillo.

Still, Silent, Sounds

Before the temperature soared, in the early morning of this, another hotter day, as I stayed inside working on my blogging comments and replies, a faint breeze entered through the French windows allowing admission to the occasional buzzing bluebottle while I listened to the gentle scraping of Jackie’s garden tools; the glinting tinkling of the wind chimes adjusted yesterday; the rattling clanking of the magpies which have wiped out our smaller songbirds whose eggs and chicks they have stolen; and the amorous cooing of mated wood pigeons whose size has protected them from the predators, despite their numbers being reduced by egg theft.

This afternoon I posted

The Lay, And The Tragedy, Of Horn-Skinned Siegfried

This evening we dined on tender roast duck in orange sauce; firm carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, and very flavoursome Brussels sprouts, with which I drank more of the Tempranillo.