Laid at last...

New stair carpet arrived finally last month. We had been five months without. All that bare wood and echoes... I was beginning to embrace the French farmhouse look and wondering whether we should really have gone to the expense of stair carpet after all. The original had lasted 37 years. In fairness it was well past its prime and in places it was truly Fred Bear (as they talk round here). By the time it was due to arrive, I confess to being nervous. I hoped I would still like it as much as I had all those months ago.
It is also not carpet in the traditional sense; it is a flat weave, more of a thick fabric really.
Finally it was fitted and I have to say that we are delighted.
The pattern is quite busy. As a result, I have decreed that Saturday night inebriation will be carefully regulated . One gin too many and both I and the carpet will be doing some serious weaving.

Sobering addition to the household

Giving it a Brazilian...

Gosh, you made me jump! I was quite in my own world. Binoculars trained on my fuchsia. Yes, fuchsia. The last remaining bush.
We came back from holiday to see that the garden, small, but many-potted, had been well-watered by Lewis, a neighbouring nephew. However, our two hardy fuchsias were leafy but showing little sign of the usual rampant display of colour for this time of year. I'd attributed their slowness to a late-in-the-year pruning. And might not have looked further, had not a visiting Prodigal pointed out that they were being attacked by something nasty.
I put my glasses on. Possibly something I should do more often in the garden. I could then see clusters of mutated leaves and flowers. Eeeuch. Whatever it was, was not simply chewing but turning the plant into something quietly grotesque.
So I did what any modern gardener does, and I googled it. Depressing reading.
The Fuchsia Gall Mite is a microscopic sap-sucking pest that is specific to fuchsias.
Fuchsia Gall Mites are small between 0.20 and 0.25mm long, The mites feed by puncturing individual plant cells with their needle–like mouthparts and sucking out the cell contents. The feeding activities of the mites cause the plants cells to grow abnormally and proliferate, causing swelling (galling) and disfigurement of the growing tips, leaves and flowers.
Does not respond to insecticide, either. These ghastly creatures have been brought over from Brazil.
So I gave the bush a Brazilian.
Suck on that suckers! The old girl is fighting back.

Last summer...

And now....

 

Lost in Translation...

I learnt a lot about gout on our family holiday on Dorset last week. Like I thought gout only made its appearance in big toes, for example. No, it can attack any joint. This time it targeted my Dearest husband's wrist. He manfully ignored the pain before the holiday, saying that he had probably strained it whilst lugging a legal tome round London he'd purchased, alongside a few other must-haves from Daunt's Book shop. He cursed on the four-hour drive to Lyme Regis. But no more than usual. The wrist was, upon arrival, pink, swollen and extremely painful.
Don't ask me why, that in addition to the kitchen sink, I had brought a roll of crepe bandage.. In a matter of minutes, I had the squishy cool pack out of the picnic bag and had very proficiently strapped it to his wrist. This provided temporary relief until we could see a doctor on Monday who would prescribe jumbo-sized Naproxen pills.
At night, I suggested that he slept diagonally across the bed, supported by a pillow under the poorly paw. I took the couch and slept like a log. (Like every good night nurse.)
He really was heroic. By day three we were making progress and had discovered that liberal glasses of fine Provençal rosé  were helping enormously. After several of these, I toasted,
"A chacun son goût!"
Which I found extremely funny. (Not so much, by the time I'd explained to bewildered children that it meant Each to his own..)
That is probably why I found myself back on the couch that night.
Gout is no laughing matter.

Hanging out in Dorset . (A junior's leg)

Only Stopping to Smell the Coffee....

Coffee is good for you! Yes, three cheers, big ears, and make mine strong and black. All that recent stuff about having to cut down the caffeine has been knocked into a cocked hat by the latest research. Apparently initially the research sample included coffee-drinkers who smoked. Well, that, of course was certainly going to skew the results. And not in a good way.

One of our daily pleasures is a cup of Monmouth coffee. Monmouth is an independent roastery in London. Every month Dearest calls to select four different coffees from Columbia, Guatemala, and Brasil from small private estates. So it's a different selection every time. I can smell today's delivery from here, and I haven't even opened the box.
Each week it is delivered by the same delivery man, Fabio.
Each month I send a text to my husband.
"Fabio has delivered!"
The first time I sent it, I thought it created intrigue and a little insouciance, perhaps. Keeping my marriage fresh.
No response. Ever. I keep sending it though. Even though it's not as fresh as today's coffee.
One day he might reply,
"Who the hell is Fabio? I'll give him a bloody nose!"
But then that wouldn't be my husband.

Rookie pianist strives for recognition...

Look, I know, I've banged on about piano-playing in a couple of posts. I would be disingenuous if I didn't confess that I am like a woman possessed. It's just a shame, really that I'm not possessed by the spirit of Moura Lympany. Would be better for all around me. And for one in particular. In lieu of which, I am truly giving it some practice. As I have already stated, alcohol does not improve things. It does help, I understand, to anaesthetise the audience.
This evening, for example, I asked if I could give the Don Giovanni a run through . (Impressed? Yes, so am I!) Dearest had come home to watch the evening tennis. I gave it my best shot (twice). It had a few slight hesitations, a couple of cock-ups, a few reversals and moments where I had to take a bit of a run at it. You know the kind of thing.. But such an improvement from a week ago. I waited for some sort of recognition. And I waited. I went into the living room and waived. No response. Dearest was watching the tennis in a catatonic trance.
"Well, how was that?"
"Brilliant game..."
Tennis obviously also dulls the senses, it would seem.

Last week my piano teacher left behind a Book of the Shows. I thumbed through and decided that I would tackle, "Maybe this time.." I picked it out on the right hand. Emboldened, and with an image of Lisa Minella in my head and suffering from the sort of summer cold where snot explodes like an oyster from one's left nostril, I sang, raspingly, it has to be admitted, "Maybe this time, I'll be lucky/Maybe this time, he'll stay..."
"Jeesus! Are you alright, Lesley?" A voice from the bathroom. Such concern, I was touched.
Dear Reader, I was lucky. He stayed.
Until it was safe to come out. Win some. Lose some. Love all .

If you can read music, then you will see this is very elementary...but if you can't, then you can be wowed like me!

Handling cacti requires care....

With a twelve year old granddaughter, you have an arbiter of taste. What's hot and what's not. From pink flamingos to gilded pineapples (not so much the pineapples, Grandma) to cacti. Yes, definitely cacti. So on her recent birthday, I thought I was doing quite well with cacti wrapping-paper. Indeed, smugly satisfied with my homage to current style. But not so, my Dearest. He has to go one better. In fact, he has to go six better. He orders six of the real deal through Amazon. Late for her birthday, but, he told me, they are in short supply. (Proof of current craze, obviously.)
Now I have some idea of what Izzy will constitute as a stylish addition to her already busy window sill. I am thinking something like:


Instead of which, Husband-who-thinks-cacti orders this. They finally arrived last week:




I was appalled. Why on earth did they have those ridiculous everlasting flowers stuck in them? Hid-e-ous...
"Jolly, aren't they?"says colour-blind husband.
"They might look better without the cling film... And after I have removed those ghastly little flowers."(God, I sound churlish Even to myself.)

Come closer. That de-flowering involved a lot of painful little pricks. Cacti are vicious buggers, it turns out.
But they look a hell of a sight better now. And actually, quite cute.

Ok. So I retained the little orange pompoms....The white hairy ones are obviously the grandparents...

Where Did You Get that Hat?

I've sat down and done bugger all today. That is, if you discount piano practice and a pile of laundry. A pile made larger by the the roll-on, roll-off stream of visitors last week. Three different male friends, on three different days, accompanying Dearest husband up to Lords for the cricket. Usually it's spread out across the summer, but not this time. Fast and furious they came. Each and every one bowling in, brandishing a bottle and bonhomie.

All fairly relaxed stuff, if you disregard the 5.30 starts to leave at 6.30am. To get a good place in the queue. Of course, I get up to lead the way with coffee and toast. I am nothing, if not game.
They are old codgers who have known each other since school days and this is now, an annual ritual.
No wives involved. So that leaves me as the nominal matron in charge. I don't comment on the serial smoking of Mehari's Red Orient cigars.
In the garden, if you please.
No, I didn't. Who do you think I am? Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard?  How could I say that, when his look of contentment was far from the disapproving eyes of his other half.

I rescue another guest's giant packet of pork sausages, Costco's finest,  from being left overnight in the boot of his car:
"No, Malcolm, they will not be fine. No, Malcolm, freezing them when you get home will not do the job..."

Harridan that I am, I announce at 10.30pm that it is time for bed. Regardless of how much is still being said. Dear Lord, they have the whole of the next day ahead to sit and talk and snooze and count the runs. I ignore the comment about Boot Camp and stick to my guns.
Dearest unearths the cricket hat after his father. It sits porkpie fashion on his head, a tad too small. But makes him look a little like Don Draper (after I've had a couple of gins and I squint).

As I watch these men from an upstairs window, setting off together in the early hours of the morning, I always smile. For this moment in time, they are young codgers, all over again.

I say, anyone for tennis....?

Not me, guv. Useless. Always was. In school, tennis was yet another sport I could write off as a lost cause. My lost causes in the sports department are innumerable .. At the age of 18, I was taken to Centre Court by a school friend whose father had acquired tickets. It was a very good introduction to being a sporting spectator.

So now we are in the Wimbledon season and you won't find me sitting in front of the telly all afternoon. Not until the finals when Dearest and I will sit down and watch together. However, I have got a new racket.

What do you reckon? Could give Roger Federer a run for his money with this one. That is, if I switched on the button that fires an electric current through the strings. Yes, it's a bug zapper! And I have always wanted one of these. I've seen them advertised in the small ads in newspapers since I was a child and secretly yearned to own one. What a sad child whose burning ambition was to fry flies? And an even sadder adult who pounced on this in the gardening centre, last week.

The second heatwave of the season has meant that the French door is ajar all day which means it's open season on flies,wasps and the perishing flying ants, which even managed to slow down play at Wimbledon this week. Now I am armed and ready with a mighty forearm swing and the accompanying bottom-sashaying, as I wait to take aim. It is however, not as easy as you'd imagine, as I pointed out to Dearest who wrested the racket from me, thinking he could do better. You have to corner the insect against a wall and then zap it when there is no escape.

 As flies to wanton boys, are we to the the gods, they kill us for their sport. I'm not sure this is what I want after all. In the height of the fly season, it's not a great time to discover one's inner buddhist.

Hasta la Pasta, Baby!

I have eaten the forbidden fruit. I am naked and unadorned. Well, not exactly, but I should have stuck to apples. And as I write this, I am fully clad, actually. It's just that the waistband is a tad tighter than previously.
My neighbour, Lillie, was all intent on tackling her wisteria with my electrical hedge shears, if I had been foolhardy enough to lend her this inappropriate weapon of wisteria destruction.
"No," I said, "Have my long handled pruners; have my secateurs."
She was just about to balance on a chair outside the house,
"I've done it before.." she reassured gaily.
I quickly assessed my First Aid prowess, and decided that in this potential for disaster a Band Aid wouldn't cut it, so to speak. I went back to the shed to get a step ladder for her.
An hour later she was back with all the equipment and a lasagne. She had been batch-cooking and insisted.
Well, her parents are Italian and this was the real deal. No Slimming World version: it was the full fat exquisite version.
I find myself strangely moved by these acts of neighbourliness. Moved, but not in the same direction as the needle on the SW scales tomorrow.
"Bugger the consequences," as my dear old Dad would have said, "We'll fry another goldfish!"
Which might, come to think of it, be my next dietary tactic.

I've got my eye on you, Charlie..

Raising the Volume...

I shout on the phone. Apparently. No-one on the receiving end of a telephone conversation has actually complained. To the best of my knowledge. For all I know, they all might be putting the receiver down and listening from a discreet distance. No, the complaint is more localised. It comes from this end.

The other evening when we had guests for supper, the phone went. I answered it in the kitchen. Before I had a chance to inform the caller that we had company, the kitchen door was closed. No it didn't close itself. Dearest had done the business. Well, he certainly had done the business as I coolly informed him the next morning.

I accept that I speak, possibly more loudly than I need to. It is probably a less lovable idiosyncrasy of mine. But I can think of worse. Like leaving your socks on the dining room table. For one.
So last night when I was on the train home from London, having met up with Son et Lumiere who was joining us for an evening meal, I was appalled when he told me I was talking too loudly in the carriage. Honest to God, everyone around me had earphones in, so I thought I was talking at a reasonable level. Have you ever tried addressing someone in the street when you need directions? You get firstly a  look of bewilderment that someone can't Google their way out of lostness, and then they have to remove an earphone before you repeat your request. Nobody can hear a bloody thing.

So after a few drinks last night, I decided I would impress with an impromptu piano recital to demonstrate how I've come on. I foolishly thought that alcohol would lubricate my tinkling of the ivories. No such luck. My fingers seemingly had turned into over-ripe bananas and were just as responsive. I laboured on. In the way that only the truly intoxicated can suppress shame.
I finished with a final flourish. Dearest had a glazed expression on his face. Son explained that Dad had retreated to his "happy place".
At least he did not close the door....
Progress.

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