The Bees' Knees

Last night, at the Annual General Meeting of the wonderful Local Nature Reserve, we got to hear all about Bees. Bees are in: the very thought that they might all disappear has got everyone, well, buzzing.

It turns out that the centre of our nation's bee-research is just down the road from here, at the enigmatic FERA which, to avoid complication, was known as the CSL until, ooh, probably last month sometime. FERA run a set of hives for research, will pay to borrow other beekeepers' hives to collect information, keep a map of all beekeepers willing to register on it and run an Agony Aunt service for people whose bees appear to be in distress. They're the people to ring up if your bees develop anything notifiable, and what's more they allegedly have 5 tonnes of honey in buckets round the back that they don't quite know what to do with.

Life, it seems, is pretty damn tough if you're a bee. Spending all day collecting nectar that ends up being eaten by someone else, except when it's raining in which case you're probably spending all day wishing you were out-and-about in the fresh air but don't dare to because there are water-bombs the size of your torso hurtling down fit to flatten you. Summers with too many rainy days will result in either outright starvation, or in some blight that'll hit you while you're down.

The one that most people have heard of is Varroa, which is a type of mite. Except that on a bee it's a bit like being stuck with a 10 kilo leech all day (and still having to work). Incredibly, bees seem to be able to learn to clean up their hives to get rid of it. Then there's the delightfully-named "American Foul Brood", which is not a bunch of loudmouthed spoiled brats in baseball caps but some kind of bacterium, whose presence in the UK is declining because any hives in which it is found have to be destroyed. In case you think Lunchista is displaying a spot of Usophobia here, I'll add that there is also European Foul Brood.

What with all these blights on the loose, there appear to be no honey-bees left in the wild: in days of yore if you fancied a spot of beekeeping you simply put up frames in your garden and waited for a bunch to move in. Nowadays you have to troll off and buy them. Lunchista would find this very sad, but for an interesting thought.

As I went to thank the Sydney Morning Herald for the picture I used for this post, I read the article from which it was lifted. Bees, it would appear, are a bit more brainy than we have previously given them credit for. Most of the transmission of bee diseases is the result of careless handling by humans: infected imported Queens (not the sort that were singing earlier on) contaminated kit and the like. Given the choice of having, or not having, to give up a large proportion of their lunch, and having, or not having, the attendent risk of all the above-mentioned blights, any bees still remaining in the wild may simply be keeping a low profile.

You could call it the sting in the tail.

Time to move the Strawberry plants

Been putting the strawberry runners into their own pots. I wonder what they get up to when nobody's looking...

The sound of salesmen

Someone's banging on the front door of Chateau Lunchista, and I'm the only one at home. There is actually a bell in our house, but it doesn't serve the door. It's a small traditional brass thing painted with pictures of reindeer and sunsets, and was originally made to go on a troika, but now it's attached to the far end of a long piece of string extending from the small Lunchistas' attic "den" down to beside the kitchen door. It was thoughtfully rigged up after complaints that I was losing my voice calling people to come and eat: Mr Pavlov (and his dog) would feel right at home here.

So people have to slum it with knocking on our door. It's probably not DDA-compliant, but then neither is the M6.

Back at the door, it's usually one of two things: either the knock comes soon after the neighbouring little lads' football has sailed gracefully over our hedge and is waiting in our back garden to be retrieved, in which case I can just lean out of the window (the Year-Long Lunch Break comes to you from our spare bedroom, which faces the road) and give the go-ahead to retrieve it. Or it's someone propagating something I don't want, like make-up or the wrong sort of religion, in which case I can say "No thanks" without having to come downstairs.

I leaned out of the window and it wasn't make-up or religion this time. It wasn't even footballs. Incredibly it was someone selling something we actually wanted to buy: wall insulation at knock-down prices (oh-oh, Bad Metaphor Day!) subsidised by HMG. I noticed they'd all cleared off by the evening: had I kept my old job, we'd have missed out.

Now I have my suspicions about HMG's motives here. Home energy efficiency is being encouraged as one of the best ways to reduce the UK's Yeti-like collective Carbon footprint, whereas in fact you'd get a much better dent by taking a leaf out of the old Book and getting us all to go vegetarian (or at least beef-and-milk-free) for one day a week. Note for example the Act-on-CO2 Carbon calculator, brought to you by DEFRA who are supposed to be in charge of farming, has no component about food! On the other hand most homes are heated by gas, more and more of which is being imported from Russia. And UK Plc is having trouble dealing with the gas bill: there are only so many Premier League footie-clubs we can flogoff. So I have my suspicions that what HMG are really worried about is not so much that we turn into the next Sahara, or even that Yorkshire (and London) disappear under rising seas to become the next Atlantis, but that we turn into the next Ukraine (and that dispute, by the way, is still bubbling under).

But Lunchista isn't going to look a gift-horse in the mouth, so I signed up. We are not in an area subject to driving rain, nor are we within a mile of the coast (both of these mean your filled walls may not dry out properly), and the space in our walls is wide enough, just, to push rockwool in. I'm told the alternative is to pour in millions of little polystyrene balls which, if you ever had to have any other work done on the walls, would make for interesting scenery in your garden, as well as making it difficult to retrieve any footballs. I suppose if Global Warming really takes off, you could bag it all up and sell it to ski resorts as false snow.

ps. Kudos to anybody who can identify the origin of this post's title.

Shady rendez-vous

It happened nearly ten years ago, but it's as topical this week as it was then.

What better start for a once-in-a-lifetime expedition like this, than the midnight train? And what better way, given that the end-points of this journey happen to be Glasgow and Basingstoke, to endow the intervening route with a bit of, well, class? Perhaps it's the comforting knowledge that you won't have to stand for all or part of your journey, or that someone will take the trouble to bring you breakfast. Or best of all that, having crossed London, you find yourself, at the height of the rush hour, in commuter trains which are completely empty. It's a bit like stepping into some strange looking-glass version of the UK in which everyone (and you can see them all, crowded onto the opposite platform at each station), works nights.

I wonder if everyone has the equivalent, in their own life, of the friend to whose house I walked from the station. She was one of those characters in whose company events, no matter how well-planned, always managed to take a surreal turn. We'd planned to drive to a guest-house in the west country and get there at some reasonable time, like about eight pm. In the event we got there at about two in the morning, and it had nothing to do with the notorious traffic on the A38 either, and much more to do with the fact that her living-room floor was up, the gas had cut-out and when I arrived she was halfway through laying a patio.

We decided, for the sake of our hosts, to pull up at the far side of the car-park, recline the seats and kip in the car with our coats and some blankets. The following day we thought we'd do a bit of bog-standard sightseeing, but it turned into something of a cream-tea-crawl.

And the day after that was 11th August 1999, and we wanted to get to the beach early and get the best view. We didn't want to miss it and have to wait until 23rd September 2090 for the next one (wonderful to find out that the most detailed timetable you can get, is lovingly compiled by a chap called Fred!) So we were on the road by 4 am. We got flashed at by a speed camera, went round a completely deserted roundabout somewhere near Plymouth twice and then got stopped by the Polis. They shone a torch into the car and, on seeing we were female, middle-aged and sober, let us carry on after asking a couple of questions just for form's sake. I only found out later that our trusty ride had no MOT, and moss growing on the dashboard.

We took our seats on the best promontory by six, had breakfast from a nearby kiosk at seven and were exchanging stories with other "tourists" about how far we'd travelled by eight. Thin, high cloud looked as if it might go away but the weather couldn't quite muster enough warmth to melt it. So we saw the entire eclipse as a play of shadows and sounds.

First the western horizon grew dark, as if a storm was approaching, but without the usual clouds. Then we could see the shadow coming in fast across the sea. As the shade grew deeper I began to notice it seemed to come on in waves from the west, each wave bringing a darker tone. I noticed sea birds were making the kind of sounds I usually associate with evening and the walk back from the beach after a long day building sandcastles. The last few waves brought utter twilight, but with a twist: the shadow isn't large, so the horizon all around us still glowed. Everything appeared lit from underneath. The final wave seemed to bring with it a faint "wuppp!" sound, but I thought I'd imagined it. A minute or so passed with no sound, no wind: no movement. Then waves of paler grey rolled in from the west, and after a short while I found myself thinking of morning walks down to the beaches I'd been to as a child, before I realised why: sea-birds sound different first thing in the morning, and that's what they all believed it to be!

About an hour later I'd started to wonder why I felt so queasy, before I realised I was sitting in the August sun on a Devon beach, still wearing a woollen sweater. You forget about hot summer days after living in Glasgow for three years. From where we were sitting we could walk down to the flat sands and get across, on the "sea tractor" at low tide, to Burgh Island, where the Agatha Christie novel "Evil under the sun" is set.

I found souvenir tee-shirts in Tavistock for the children. it turned out that they'd had a good view of the partial eclipse: the staff of their nursery had thoughtfully loaded everybody into double buggies and wheeled them all out into Kelvingrove Park with their shades. They smiled at the cartoons of the sun and moon on their tee-shirts and announced: "Ut's gooin' tae get darruk a wee but"!

Unlike Lunchista they may very well still be around to see the next eclipse on British soil.

Anyone who's in a bit more of a hurry to see one has until the day after tomorrow to get to, well, almost anywhere in Asia.

Isobars are back!

Yesterday (15th July) was St Swithin's day. The original St Swithin lived in Winchester and by all accounts was a bit of an Outdoorsman. So he asked to be buried outdoors and, being an influential chap, had his request granted. At least initially. When, later on, his remains were moved to a posh indoor venue, there was a violent storm and it carried on being wet for most of the summer. And so was born the tradition, summed up in the little ditty:

St. Swithin's day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St. Swithin's day if thou be fair
For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.

It so happened that, here at least, the afternoon of St Swithin's day was quite wet. And lo and behold, so was this afternoon, so we wonder here at Chateau Lunchista if we're in for 40 wet afternoons. This would go against the Met Office forecast for the summer, which as you may remember from a previous post was talking about dry conditions interspersed with the odd downpour. So Lunchista has started following the TV weather forecasts to see if anyone's willing to pass comment about all this.

About two years ago the quality of information on the TV weather forecasts took a bit of a dive. In particular, Scotland all but disappeared off the edge of a newly-curved map, and the proper synoptic chart, with its isobars, was abandonned, perhaps because some focus group (or more accurately the most vociferous person therein) said they didn't understand it.

So imagine Lunchista's delight when, on the weather at the end of the evening news last night, not only were the isobars back, but they were complemented by a detailed explanation of where all the rain was coming from. The Jet Stream, which usually directs the sequence of lows to which we are treated in winter and then disappears North in the summer to leave us in an island of High pressure (and fine, calm weather with it), has decided to indulge in a summertime southern sortie over the UK.

Now I'm not sure how rapidly the Jet Stream changes its course, but supposing the answer is "not very" that might explain the St Swithin's Day ditty. It will be interesting to see, as the forty days go by, which forecast (wet from St Swithin's, or dry from the official long-range) will be the more accurate.

Meanwhile if it keeps on raining we can console ourselves that at least it will be good for one thing: St Swithin's rain is supposed to "christen the apples" and make for a good harvest.

Investment Strategies

I used to have savings. They used to live in a building society in which, quietly and without drama, they did their stuff. Then the building society got eaten by a larger building society. Then the resulting combo turned into a bank (and handed Lunchista a few shares, which were promptly flogged off). Then that bank merged with another bank, and just this year, in a move that made headlines, the resulting bank-combo was bought out by a bank whose services Lunchista had been studiously avoiding using for years.

It all looked a bit like that video game in which you're a fish and you get bigger by eating smaller fish, while trying not to get eaten by a bigger fish in your turn. Good job I'd long since taken the money and run.

And now for something completely different. A few months ago the Yorkshire Post was offering free organic seeds. Talk about an Offer I Can't Refuse! The new front bed at Chateau Lunchista is now full of Purple Broccolli, Sunflowers and Beetroots. For once I must be doing something right, because they're all enormous. And, might I add, tax-free. The beetroots are called "Detroit". In an effort at Cold War reconciliation, we dug them up and made Borsch.

It's dead easy. Get four beetroots, chop off the roots and the leaves (leave a couple of inches of the stems), wash them, put in a big pan (about 2 litres or 3 pints) of water and bring to the boil. Now either simmer it for an hour, or get a box full of crumpled newspaper, carefully put the pan in, put more newspapers around it and close the flaps, leave it and go to work for the day (or sleep for the night). Return to find nicely-stewed soft beetroots in purple liquid. Lift the beetroots out, grate them back into the purple liquid, add salt and heat up again. Serve poured over diced cucumbers (and diced boiled eggs for a more substantial dish), with a spoonful of Smetana (or plain yogurt) on the top. You can eat it hot in the winter (and make it even more substantial by putting in any scraps of cooked meat you happen to have) or chilled in the summer.

Hell's Kitchen (and how to avoid it)

I don't know if this happens to anyone else but hot weather kills my appetite stone dead. Then after eating next-to-nothing all day I wonder where all my energy has gone (well Duh!, as a passing American would say). If it's difficult to eat, it's even harder to cook, so what's been happening in the Lunchista kitchen of late, and more to the point where have all the lunch ideas gone? Some of us are getting quite hungry out here!

This is what we do in hot weather. In fact, in 2003 when it was ludicrously hot for a ridiculous length of time, we carried on like this for weeks. A family from the Continent were staying so there were eight of us altogether, which made for a great atmosphere.

We have an ancient wooden dining table (the sort that folds down so it hardly takes up any room when not in use) that we bought from somebody's garage for a tenner. We sanded it down and varnished it with "does exactly what it says on the tin", making it almost completely resistant to food stains, burns, and the English summer weather. If sanding isn't your bag, the alternative is a couple of yards of wipe-clean plastic to use as a tablecloth. Thus protected, the table stayed outside all summer, making every meal a delightful garden experience. Anything that fell off it onto the lawn neither broke nor needed sweeping up. Heaven.

We made salads. Not limp lettuce and quartered tomatoes with a bit of salad cream type salad: this is hard-core. First, for the meal's energy, salad spuds with parsley and chives from the garden, plus dill pickles and yoghurt. Then a dish for protein, bean salad (a cupful of blackeye beans tipped into the water in which you've just boiled your breakfast egg, and left there to soak, will only need cooking for 20 minutes or so before lunch), then add, well, anything: peppers, tomatoes, sweetcorn, nuts...

And one for colour: grated beetroot and feta cheese (half-and-half) with some walnuts.

We found lettuce tastes a lot less limp if it just has lemon juice on it. And Lunchista has discovered that strawberries go really well with Wensleydale.

Finally, glasses of wine, and a huge jug of lemonade (thank you, The Homely Year, because I didn't have the presence of mind to get a photo of ours...), or just water with lemon slices in it: Lunchista can't drink just wine in that heat. Some people keep boxes of sliced lemon in the freezer for emergencies.

It is a curious fact of life that people will have better apetites if presented with lots of different dishes and just left to get on with it while chatting, than if there's just one heavy course. Some of our lunches, with the addition of tea and cakes, lasted through until the early evening. By which time the weather had cooled down enough to get the barbeque out...

"Vicious plumbing, Hamish"

I had no idea how this conversation had started. So I asked. “Well the tap made this sort of stuttering noise. And the toilet growled at me!”

At the height of the recent hot spell we were beginning to run out of water-butt water to use on the garden. So it was decided (by Lunchista) that it was about time to install the bathwater-diverter that had been bought ages ago, when I first heard this summer’s long-range forecast from the Met Office (to sum up: hot, and dry except for the odd flood). Installation wasn’t easy; it involved drilling into our house walls which are (apparently) made of “engineering brick” which is hard as nails. Lunchista is lucky to have an other half who is tolerant about all this (and did the drilling). Let’s just say that on a normal house, with normal walls and normal pipes (not the ones with some random diameter like ours, which had to be made up with duct tape), installing one of these things is a straightforward job, and we’re very happy with it. Here it is (before we put a bit of hose on the little output pipe at the top):


All those phosphates in soap that people complain about causing too much green stuff growing in the rivers (and the sea, come to that), are actually just fertiliser. And to cap it all, apparently there’s an international shortage of the stuff, and it’s starting to get expensive. So yes: unless you’re in the habit of bathing with bleach and washing your hair in Round-Up, cut out the middle-man and put wastewater straight on your garden. If it's wet enough anyway, just pull the other string and the bathwater will flow down the drain as before.

Flushed with success (groan!) I thought I’d investigate why the shower has been dripping for ages. Now there are two alternative feelings you can have if you embark on some project: either, “I think I can do this”, or “Oh NO!”. Lunchista’s feeling about anything involving mains water is most definitely the latter. Why, for example, is this post not called “Vicious Electrics”? After all, mains wiring can kill, whereas all mains plumbing can do is get you wet. Well yes, but the crucial difference is that if anything electrical comes to bits in your hands and you have to give up and call in the professionals (who won’t be available for days) you can bend the two wires apart, tape over the ends, put a sodding great warning notice on it, and then put the power back on and carry on as normal. In complete contrast, if a piece of pipe shears off while you’re trying to unscrew something, your house is without water for days. Or under it, one of the two.

As if that’s not enough, all plumbing, unlike wiring, is expressly designed so it can only be dismantled by someone who can muster just a little over the maximum amount of torque that Lunchista is able to apply to a wrench. This includes the stopcock (almost. It’s amazing what a bit of adrenaline will do). So here I am in the shower cubicle taking the tap head off and not getting wet. There’s a spindle underneath it, with a promising-looking brass nut on it. Perhaps if I undo this, there’ll be some obviously-visible fault like a rubber washer that’s worn out. I can run off to Barnitts, and voila! On the other hand (after failed attempt using the largest wrench in plumbing history), perhaps if I try and undo this, nothing will happen until I put all my body weight on it, at which point this entire elaborate-looking spindle will come away along with a foot length, with a hideously-torn end, of the pipe to which it’s connected. And a few tiles just for good measure.

I think the correct term in the business world is “Risk-Averse”.

So I put everything back together and turned the stopcock back on. An hour later the smaller Lunchistas arrived home from school and I sent them upstairs to wash their hands (the school's had a swine flu alert). Of course the air I’d let into the pipes caused the interesting noises mentioned above.

So perhaps it’s not just Lunchista, perhaps everybody finds plumbing scarier than electrics, and we might not be dealing with the rational part of the mind here. Is there something atavistically disturbing about water gushing out of walls, or disappearing down plugholes?

As Lunchista fils expounded over supper: “We’ve got vicious plumbing at school, too. I was washing my pen in the sink, but it went down the plughole. I went to tell the teacher but behind me, SLURP!! It was too late! I turned round and there was a Mrs-Thompson-shaped lump going down the pipe...”

Oh, and who is Hamish? Well he might be a plumber, or a Karate champion, take your pick!

The Orchard Squad

I'd not been looking forward to yesterday's date with the Orchard: the prospect of wielding a mattock to uproot unwanted vegetation in 32 degree heat is a bit too TenKo for Lunchista's tastes!

As luck would have it, though, heavy rain on Friday had taken the edge off the heat, as well as promising to make the digging a bit easier. I arrived at eleven, and headed for the usual hole in the fence. The contrast in atmosphere, going from the road into the orchard, is striking: suddenly the air smells of flowers, trees and grass. On a day like this, just after a night of heavy showers, you can even sense both temperature and humidity changing as you walk the length of the site. Towards, in fact, a bunch of unfamiliar faces, who turn out to be Ecologists (what, I wonder, is the collective noun for Ecologists?).

They are busy explaining the importance of elderly trees, with their gnarled and leaky bark, for the local insect life. It turns out that trees, just like people, can have burst veins, and in fact you could see sap leaking out of some of them: stuff which would keep insects ticking over in the absence of their more usual fare of pollen and the like. The tree, meanwhile, can cheerfully go on producing fruit. Within minutes the team had produced a rare type of Longhorn Beetle, plus another rare beetle whose name, sadly, has slipped Lunchista's memory. A woodpecker could be heard in the trees: given that nobody in the Animal Kingdom is daft enough to waste energy looking for food that isn't there, I think we can safely assume that the bird in question had detected something in the bark and was on to a good lunch.

Talk then turned to what to do about all the stuff growing between the trees: there are still a lot of nettles and "the wrong kind of grass". It turns out, paradoxically, that the best thing to do with the spaces in between the trees is to pull minerals out of the soil, so that meadow-type things can grow there (it also turns out that the UK is short of this type of landscape: a lot of it was lost in the effort to keep ourselves fed, as a besieged island, during the war). Meanwhile the trees, with their deep roots, apparently remain untroubled by all this superficial activity, and in fact this is how orchards were managed in the past. The Ecologists even pointed out the usefulness, to someone like an insect who can't regulate their own temperature, of the temperature changes I had noticed earlier. For a given level of desired activity, you can simply move to the patch with the temperature that suits.

And so we need a Management Plan: one idea was to sow Barley between the trees for three years running, not so much to give us beer as well as cider (although that would be entertaining!) but to deliberately impoverish the top layer of soil, leaving the way clear for the meadow grasses.

And we can't hang about. It transpires that Tesco still has us in its sights...

Some like it hot

Just for the record, here is Chateau Lunchista's weather station showing today's lunchtime temperature: 32 degrees Centigrade if you please! A second glance will reveal that the humidity, at 65%, is kind of tolerable, and that our weather station believes it might rain later. The bottom line shows the date (so you know I'm not fibbing), and the frame, as ever, advises a light snooze.

A third glance will reveal that Chateau Lunchista is not a modern house: the indoor temperature, in the face of this thermal onslaught, is a blissfully cool 23 degrees. Heat is soaking into the walls, ready to re-emerge after sunset and do something useful, like keep the damp off as the outdoor temperature goes down to the 'teens and the dew falls.

Talking about cool people reminds Lunchista that today's lucky recipients of that ticking timebomb that is the rotating EU Presidency (passed to the next player every 6 months) are the Swedes. Yes that wonderful country who brought us 3-point seatbelts (deliberately left un-patented so that everybody could enjoy them, saving millions of lives) and compulsory triple-glazing, saving millions in fuel bills. Incredibly, they have a president called Fred (well alright then, Prime Minister).

They are going to try and clean up the Banks and the Baltic (Sea, not Exchange), and for good measure they're going to get everyone else who matters in these things to agree to the same climate-change targets as the EU already has, while at the same time ensuring economic growth. Lunchista also has it on good authority that they are working on delivering "The Moon, with brass knobs on" by Christmas.

We can all take the mick, but every now and again there are times when you really need to aim high. Lunchista feels the urge to write to the Swedish Prime Minister and wish him luck.