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Sunday, we went to Surrey, to look at planes being noisy. Ear-tearingly noisy, but at the same time very impressive. Lots of flying very close to each other, so their wings are almost clipping, and two women standing on […]

Two weeks. Unless I’ve been travelling, I think that’s about the longest it’s ever been since blog posts on here.
It’s been a frantic fortnight, though, with busy days at work, and every evening taken up either with writing or sorting out the house.
Things are moving along nicely there now. The bathroom is finished (bar the […]

Rich flies
I haven’t done it in years, but today we went to the beach and flew a kite. Just a little kite in yellow and orange with fluttery green tail strings; it looked quite weedy beside the huge black and grey canopies being held aloft further along the pebbly shore.
Neither of us having done it […]

The first batch of tomatoes
Today was an exciting one, as the first batch of tomatoes was finally ready for picking. It’s a lovely thing to do, as the vines smell so good when you snip them, and of course you get the bonus of a colourful bowl of fruit, too.
In terms of the whole crop, […]

I’m having some problems with nibbling nasties on the plot. Something is eating my lettuces, and it certainly isn’t me.
Here’s what most of them look like:

And here’s what one once-fine specimen now looks like:

That was taken a couple of days ago, and now the tiny remnants of that plant have totally disappeared. And yet whatever […]

A Year in the Merde was one of the funniest ‘Englishman abroad’ books for years. It started as a word-of-mouth self publishing project in Paris, that eventually found a publisher and then went word of mouth through the UK two or so years ago. I must know four people who have read it, which for […]

Freshly-pulled beetroot
Another two first-time harvests this weekend, after five and a bit hours of shovelling five tons of shingle from the front drive to the very back of the garden.
First was broccoli on Friday night. You cut it off as individual florets, rather than taking off the whole head in one go as they do […]

Squash saplings
We’re starting to run low on beans. We took another 580 grams from the runners and 225 grams from the French on Wednesday, and while there are a few slim pickings left on the runners, the French are pretty well exhausted.
I think that’s down to growing them in pots rather than the ground, as […]

Senate House, from he BT Tower
Today was a strange one. I’ve been invited to three Christmas ‘do’s in the last couple of weeks, but BT trumped them all but holding its one at the top of the BT Tower.
I’ve been up before (see here for a description of the inside of the tower from my […]