crab apples – Page 4 – derrickjknight

Mastering The Technique

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Well, I’m still struggling to upload photographs. James Peacock came this morning to get fibre optic broadband under way, but BT Open Reach had not taken the last step in installation. This appears to have been done late this afternoon so James will return tomorrow.

While James was wrestling with this, I chatted to a blackbird enjoying a brunch of crab apples. This one has now mastered the technique of chipping away at the fruit without knocking it to the ground. The bird no longer attempts to swallow the meal whole, but neither does it lose it like a toddler learning to use a fork. In fact it was very like a little person, in that bits of food tended to be plastered over its beak.

Our friends Margery and Paul came to lunch and we enjoyed our usual fun conversation well into the afternoon. Jackie made a delicious spinach soup which was followed by a plentiful salad with haloumi, ham, and pork and chicken pie. After that, ham sandwiches sufficed this evening.

It’s Beginning To Look A Little Like Winter

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Today’s weather was in complete contrast to yesterday’s. Although it was even warmer, rain persisted throughout the day. For as long as I felt I could risk soaking the camera I crept around the garden with it.

The deciduous trees have now lost most of their leaves; the cryptomeria japonica is sprouting new growth; bright yellow bidens continue to bloom; camellias are beginning to bud; even the blackbirds have kept away from the glistening crab apples. Crazy, I know, but it is beginning to look just a little like winter.

At lunchtime Ian came to collect us and take us, via Emsworth, to Tess’s Christmas event at the Village Shop. Whatever time we get home, I don’t expect to be in a fit state for posting any more, so I’ll do a bit more tomorrow.

Alfresco Dining

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There are still plenty enough crab apples on our trees to attract blackbirds daily. This morning I watched them eating. They are quite territorial over their meal table, tending to deter unwelcome guests. They prefer to approach the fruit on the higher branches. If they do not drop them onto the plants below, they are capable of swallowing them in one go.

Later this afternoon, diverting to observe the beach huts burnished by sunset over Friars Cliff, we drove to Curry’s/PC World at Christchurch for some Christmas shopping.

This evening we dined at Lal Quilla in Lymington. My choice was Purple Tiger (tiger prawns and aubergine) and Jackie chose Harayali chicken (not sure if I’ve spelled it correctly, but it is spinach based). We shared mushroom rice, tarka dal, and a paratha; and both drank Kingfisher.

Watching

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Today was pretty murky. This morning, through the window I watched blackbirds feeding on crab apples. They generally dropped the fruit onto the ground, flew down and ate them where they fell.

This afternoon and early evening was spent watching rugby on T.V.

First came Scotland (in striped shirts) v. Georgia (in red).

Wales (in red) v. South Africa (in green) was to follow.

Finally we had England (in dark blue) v. Argentina (in blue and white stripes).

Any text would be in danger of spoiling. That lets me of the hook.

Jackie collected a takeaway meal from The Raj in Old Milton for ou evening meal. She drank Hoegaarden whilst I drank Reserve des Tuguets Madiran 2014. My main meal was naga prawn with special fried rice; we shared poppadoms, pooris, paratha, and sag bahji.

A Blustery Day

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On a day of winds fit to threaten lingering autumn leaves like those on our crab apples, Jackie drove us to our GP surgery at Milford on Sea for our flu jabs (influenza vaccines).

Down at the coast, vociferous waves crashed onto breakwaters and rolled onto the shore and over the sea wall.

Even the gulls found huddling on the car park tarmac preferable to facing the buffeting elements.

Dramatic skies, seas, and lighting effects gave yet another perspective to the Isle of Wight and The Needles.

When I had my fill of being coated in salt water in the interests of my art, I rejoined Jackie in the car, and did my best to clean the camera lenses.

We then continued on to Friars Cliff beach where we brunched at the cafe.

Here the breakwaters also took a pounding,

but four walkers and a couple of romping dogs ventured onto the beach.

The smaller of the two dogs had a debate with its owner about whether it was possible to take refuge in the cafe. This somewhat obstructed my entrance.

This evening we dined on Jackie’s chicken marinaded in piri-piri and lemon; roasted vegetables, steamed cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, with mashed potato, I finished the madiran.

Mellow Fruitfulness

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As we were both up before dawn this morning we took a trip to the coast to catch sight of the dawn over the Isle of Wight. There was nothing to see. It was raining and the sky was covered in grey cloud.

John Keats famously described autumn as “a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. We haven’t had any mists yet in this delayed waning of the year. So I guess we must be patient.

Many flowers, such as

nicotiana

and nasturtiums continue to bloom.

There is, however, a certain amount of “mellow fruitfulness” in the form of

crab apples,

rosa glauca hips,

just a few apples on a tree that was laden last year,

and the seed clusters of six foot tall nicotiana sylvestris,

just one pod of which produced this cappuccino chocolate cloud of minute seeds on the poppy tray.

I cannot remember how to calibrate my scanner to the laptop, so the last two photographs I e-mailed to Emily were produced by

photographing the prints and uploading them.

This evening we dined on Jackie’s spiky pasta beef arrabiata and runner beans with which I drank more of the malbec.

Plastic Water Bottles

A tumultuous thunderstorm during the night had left pearls pendant on autumn fruits and sprinkled on roses and other flowers.
I took yesterday’s walk in reverse. There were no shafts of sunlight piercing the clouds this morning, but cliffs towards the West were picked out, and a lone boat sailed the sparkling Solent.
On the coast road, a bright green plastic drinks bottle seemed to be protecting the metal link gripping a hawser grasping a cable post. This put me in mind of our head gardener’s recycling of our mineral water containers. Jackie cuts the bottoms off these and embeds them into the earth to ensure that the roots of her plants, like this fuchsia Army Nurse, receive an adequate supply of the life-giving fluid.
A sweet young lady waited for a bus at the bottom of Downton Lane. She was pleased with the photograph, and said it was ‘fine’ for it to appear on my blog. Zooming on the portrait, which is already a crop, gives an idea of the quality of my Canon SX700 HS camera.
This evening Jackie drove us to The Firs where we joined up with Mum, Elizabeth, and Jacqueline and went on to Durley to dine at The Farmer’s Home. The meals were all very much enjoyed. Mine was a mixed grill followed by Durley Eton mess. I shared a carafe of Chilean merlot with Elizabeth. At 10.55 p.m. it is too late for me to bother about detailing other people’s refreshment, except to say that Mum, who is not supposed to eat very much, put away a steak and kidney pudding, new potatoes, and vegetables, followed by creme brûlée.

A New Camera

Jackie and I spent the morning continuing the clearance of the back drive. I reached the fuchsia hedge on the North side, while she began redesigning the entrance at the Western end. She has finished pruning the conifers, weeded the bank that extends onto Downton Lane, and used the cuttings to lay on the soil as a weed suppressant and nesting areas for insects and other wild life. The next step was to line the edges with concrete transported from the former kitchen garden. That was my task.
When I came to photograph our work, disaster struck. My camera lens stuck and I couldn’t use it. A Call to Curry’s and an examination of the Canon website revealed that my trusty little S100 has been superseded by the S120. Knowing that any possible repair would require a return to Canon and some time without a camera, I decided to investigate the possibility of a new one.
After lunch, Jackie drove me to Curry’s where I conducted my investigation. The helpful assistant confirmed that I would have to send my now apparently obsolete device to Canon myself. I came away with an SX700 HS, which has the kind of 30X zoom I have been looking for in a compact camera.
Knowing how long it took me to find my way around the S100 by trial and error, this time I downloaded the manual from the internet. The starter guides that come with electronic devices now are really very basic indeed, but I have always been ‘more than somewhat’ (Damon Runyon) phobic about downloading something I probably wouldn’t understand. Well, this one was very useful. The first photograph I took was an accidental close-up of the surface of my desk. That in itself sent me to the page about deleting images. So I managed that.
We have a crab apple tree in the front garden. That seemed a likely subject for testing out the zoom. Even pointed through a not too clean closed window, the resultant picture seemed reasonably satisfactory. I have not cropped the photo, so that the range of the camera can be displayed.
I then trotted down the back drive and took the aborted photograph of our improvements. One problem I had with the S100 was not knowing how to take the frame without a wide angle being employed. This made for the occasional weird effect that often required some cropping. I don’t have this with the SX700.
There is a layer of gravel under the grass. But that is for another day.
This evening’s dinner began with vegetable samosas in tamarind sauce, followed by Jackie’s chicken jalfrezi (recipe) and pilau rice, and a flaky parata. Chocolate eclairs were for dessert. I drank Cobra, and Jackie drank Hoegaarden

Sea Flowers

This morning I made a start on reading ‘Madame Bovary’.

Later, in a successful bid to avoid the rain, I walked down to The Splash and back via the church footpath. The sunshine and showers nature of the day and the speed of the wind produced ever-changing skies, bright blue clouding over in white and grey, and vice versa, with the sun regularly emerging and lending everything still bearing raindrops a brilliant sparkle.
John was busy clearing the elder, that I had thought was a buddleia when I noticed it on 28th January.

Wherever you venture into the forest at the moment, you are likely to come across scatterings of what look to me like crab apples, like those on the bank of the stream flowing under Running Hill. Now I think about it, they are almost always near streams. I can only imagine someone is feeding the ponies in this manner when they pause their cropping to slake their thirst.
One stream the banks of which are not so bestrewn is that which runs beneath the concrete bridge of The Splash ford. There, the water flows fast enough for a build-up of spume that echoes the lichen on the surrounding trees.

Snowdrops have pierced the sward of All Saints Churchyard, and another riven yew rent in two has somehow spared the gravestones between which part of it has fallen.

In fact the rain held off for the rest of the day and Jackie drove us out to Hengistbury Head, making this a two walk day for me. I walked along the beach, up Warren Hill and back along the cliff top to the car park cafe where Jackie sat with her puzzles, cake, and coffee.

This was the roughest sea and fiercest wind I have yet experienced on the Dorset coast. Most exhilarating. Occasionally the incoming surges from the ocean clutched at my feet.

On the shingled edge of the beach I watched the frequent waves rolling towards the breakwaters and turning to cream as they careered up the sand and flung what my Japanese friend Rie Sug tells me her compatriots call sea flowers against the rocks, sending them furling and unfurling along the beach. Our word spume, for this foam, is rather less attractive than the oriental one. This version made the same phenomenon seen at The Splash this morning skimpy by comparison. Rather like comparing the power of a full symphonic orchestra with a piece of gentle chamber music.
The wintry sun that had seemed quite powerful on the occasions it peeped out this morning, when compared with the other elements in play in this wilder environment, seemed rather weak.
Walking along the cliff top I was intrigued by a woman’s voice berating what I assumed to be a recalcitrant child. Peering down I saw that the miscreants were a pair of red dogs. They seemed to have got the message and were allowed to romp ahead.
After I joined Jackie she drove us along the coast road to Boscombe. We had a brief sojourn in a car park at Southbourne, where beach huts clung to the side of the cliff, as we watched the sun doing its best.
We turned round at Bournemouth and headed for home where we enjoyed another very tasty dinner. This consisted of roasted chicken thighs marinaded in lemon juice, coriander, parsley, and a chilli; accompanied by roasted red and orange peppers, onions and baby tomatoes; cauliflower cheese; mashed potato and swede; and broccoli. Jackie drank Hoegaarden whist I drank Lidl’s Bordeaux Superieur, so the drinks choice was back to normal.