Lights Out!

Years ago, our first ever Wwoofer, Bill, sent us a letter after he'd gone back home.
It said how much he'd liked staying with us, and it enclosed a piece of paper that puzzled us for some time.
There was nothing written on it, just a black, photocopied - well, blackness, relieved by lots of white sploshes and dots, some running into each other, where the original document was obviously getting a bit past it.
Or so I thought.
But after a long time - several hours or days, I don't recall sixteen years on - the light suddenly came on behind the In-Charge's eyes. He didn't exactly shout 'Eureka!' but it was something along those lines.
'It's Europe,' he said. 'At night.'
And then it all made sense.
The sploshes were the huge centres of population, the connecting white areas the busiest parts of each country.
Needless to say, our own wild west coast of Ireland was unrelieved black.

I wonder if it would still be black on a similar image today?
I think, compared with most of Europe, it wouldn't be too bad.

One of the benefits of living in - basically - the middle of nowhere, is that our night sky is choc-a-bloc with stars. They don't have to fight to be seen here. They are overwhelmingly bright and fantastically numerous. The Milky Way is a pale, gauzy scarf stirred through the heavens, Orion marches all around us, sword at the ready, the Plough looks permanently on the boil (it appears to my unscientific gaze more like the porridge pan than anything else) and the morning and evening stars are as bright as the moon. From the hills - even from the sea - you can, if you're lucky, see the Aurora Borealis at certain times of the year. You can watch the satellite stations Big Brothering us. You could lie in the garden and identify every constellation in the Northern Hemisphere, if you felt so inclined.

But drive a few miles along the coast and there is an orange haze in the sky over Sligo Town - just a reminder that in the real world total darkness is a thing of the past, and Sligo is just a village compared with most of the world's cities.

As I am writing this, the lights have just gone out! How ironic.

Fortunately the candles are never far away

Well, our powercut lasted for an hour, but it was about 26 hours too soon.
Tomorrow is Earth Hour, and - as in years gone by - we will turn everything off for an hour, starting at 8.30pm local time, lighting our numerous candles instead.

In the six years since it started, Earth Hour has grown and grown, and now involves 'hundreds of millions of people across 7001 cities and towns in 152 countries and territories'. (Taken from the official website.)

Which is fantastic.
But it's all well and good turning the lights off for an hour, welcoming, for once, the darkness - but what about after the hour? Do we just go back and flick it all on again?
Will anything have changed?
Hopefully. But only if we all join in, talk about it, and maybe turn off the lights an hour every month, every week, every day. Changes start with small things, after all.

Have a look at the challenges on the website. Maybe you can commit to taking up one or two, or starting your own.
I don't know what I will do for mine, I'll have to think about it while the lights are off.

One thing is certain, if we don't face up to some of the real challenges facing this planet that we call home, there won't be any need for an annual moment called Earth Hour, because the earth won't be here anymore.

For some reason I can't upload the YouTube Earth Hour video, but you can find it by clicking on this link:

And here is another link:

Earth Hour

Lions and Lambs

It's been a quiet sort of month.
A heads-down, getting into the rhythm of things type of month. And largely unsociable.
Some ups and downs - like my poor Mrs Smith - but a good month nevertheless.
A month of measured days and new beginnings.  

When we first came to Ireland, someone described March as 'coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb'. It wasn't an expression I'd heard before, but it described that deeply petulant month perfectly.
Twenty years later the climate has adjusted to a different set of rules, or perhaps no rules at all, and now it seems that February has taken on the mantle of March - and this year it did indeed come in roaring.

We didn't have the snow that much of Ireland and most of Britain had, we just had hail and gales and rain, rain, rain. Everywhere squelched and water poured off every inch of the land. But for the last two weeks it has been as dry as a bone. Oh blessed relief.
We've had thick white frosts some mornings, and often an easterly wind like a knife, but I have spent hours of every day gardening with great satisfaction, protected from the north and the east alike by my ten foot, 200 year-old walls

TeenQueenSuperModel likes gardening. In fact, she tells me it's her most favourite thing of all.
Except for racing in the orchard. And breakfast. And walks. And cuddles. And snoozing on the fluffy bed by the fire.

Snoozing after a hard day's work

But apart from those, gardening is what Tiggers like best.
Model Dog also likes gardening, but then she likes doing whatever I'm doing.
It's rather a case of 'Wherever I go, there's always Pooh, there's always Pooh and me,' and I wouldn't have it any other way. I'd be lost without my Model Dog.

So, a-gardening we have gone.
The herbaceous border is practically done. As are my back and general muscle-system, but nothing's free, after all - and the pleasure it gives me to see the bed looking spick and span far outweighs the minor inconvenience of hardly being able to straighten up.
Now I can re-plant the things that have been heeled in here and there around the garden, mulch it as soon as the rain returns (which it will, it will), and then stand back and watch it all burgeon.
I will keep you posted.

Unfortunately, TeenQueen's gardening means that the lawn adjacent to my flower bed (although 'lawn' is perhaps a rather a high-falutin' name for that particular patch of grass)  looks like a graveyard. Or perhaps a charnel house.
It is littered with bones. Mostly just the remains of bones, and there ain't many remains.
While I dig, the dogs lie on the grass and munch their way through any and every marrow bone that Paul, our lovely butcher, can throw their way.
Model Dog used to be happy just lying on the grass, but since the advent of the TeenQueen - with her sharp young teeth and adolescent attention span - it is necessary to keep her constantly amused so that she doesn't get into mischief.
Bones are definitely what Tiggers like best. She demolishes them with indecent haste, and prances with excitement when she sees the gardening bucket come out.

But it hasn't been all gardening this month.
I've been writing again - getting back into my book; and enjoying the last days of winter sunshine in the woods; and the crisp blue days by the sea; and helping a friend; and doing a bit of crochet here and there; and knitting my patchwork squares; and loving the lighter mornings, the longer evenings, the end of the snowdrops and crocuses, and the start of the daffodils, primroses and violets.

It's that moment of the year when the winter is behind you and the joys of spring and summer are all to come - all still to come.

Supper

The last two summers have been so inclement that, by comparison with yesteryear, we have had almost no vegetables.
There was a time when anyone coming to the door in September would have had a bag of runner beans stuffed into their arms, whether they wanted them or not.
I don't know about you, but the idea of a polytunnel just doesn't float my boat.
I know they are wonderful, I know you can grow orchids in them, I know everybody has one.
But I just can't see myself thinking: 'I can't wait to get out into the tunnel!'
However - who knows? A few years ago I'd never have thought I'd don specs in order to focus on the end of my nose.
Needs must when the devil drives.

And if things continue the way they are going, it may be my only hope of surfeiting on runner beans again, because sadly, runner beans - my favourite vegetable - are a bit of a rarity in our house these days.

How nice then, going out to forage in the garden on a damp, chill evening, to come back with this little haul for supper.

I cooked the beans and made a salad with the rest.

Yum yum.
Thank you, garden.

We'll hold on a bit longer before we succumb to tunnelopia.

Les Français sont complètement fous!

I have just been down to the sea with the dogs.
It's a beautiful September morning of cloudless skies and surfer-seas.
Even the tearing gale has abated, and for another day at least, the house still nestles under an ever-reddening blanket. Another gale and the leaves will disappear.
The coast road and verge were littered with surfboards and people pulling wetsuits on or off. As I came round one corner, there was even a bare bum mooning at me as someone struggled to pull his feet free.
Madmen.

But it's so cold it feels like December. The dogs even declined a dip at the headland, but then they hadn't brought their wetsuits. Instead they played in the rough grass while I watched the crisp sets of breakers streaming in, and the breeze ruffling out of the North threatened to slice us into very small dice.
What is going on?

Last night I picked some beans for supper.
I had a jacket on and the hood firmly pulled up. The dogs stood waiting by the gate with their backs to me, letting it be known that coming outside had not been their idea in the first place.
I felt sorry for the bean plants as we hurried back to the warm kitchen, and don't hold out much hope for the flowers and baby beans still trying to grow.
I hold out even less hope for the third brood of swallows eagerly trying their wings in the turf shed. Any day now, the skies will be empty, the roof ridges silent of their hauntingly lilting song and - like last year - we'll be left with straggling youngsters who aren't quite sure what happens next.
The In-Charge says they catch up, that by the time they reach the south coast the adults will be there, waiting.
The triumph of hope over reality, possibly, but let's go with it.

As I headed homewards this morning, I passed a friend walking her dog Maximus. She said her husband had gone in amidst the surfers for a swim.
'He doesn't even wear a wetsuit,' she said, her expression conveying the craziness of surfers in general and swimmers in particular.
I've heard of mad dogs and Englishmen, but he is French and surely ought to know better!
Lunatique.
  

Head in the Sand

Pushy,  pretending she's a statue

 

Pushy, Senior Cat and Custodian of the Vegetable Garden, took me to look at the peas the other day.


We agreed that, all things considered, it wasn't a pretty sight.


These aren't any ordinary peas. These are peas that germinated in a silver spoon.
They were organically raised in a tunnel by green fingers, and tended with nothing but love and devotion.
I bought them at the market at the beginning of May and then had them in the courtyard for weeks, in order to break it gently that life in my garden was not going to consist of cotton-wool and polythene-warmed air.
I told them that, instead, if they climbed high enough they might even get to see the sea!
They didn't seem too fazed by the courtyard, but when I planted them out, they had a hissy fit and said things like: 'We want to go home!' and 'Who wants to see the sea anyway?'

Pushy had grave concerns about the peas

I don't really blame them, in all honesty.
I did a Soil Temperature Test last week. (I stuck my finger in the ground.)
It was pretty parky for mid-June, despite the weeks of unprecedented sunshine, despite it having been warm enough to eat more lunches and suppers in the courtyard in the last month than we have done in years.

No 2 son, who is a very good gardener, and who helped me create the vegetable garden in 2003, had cold comfort (haha!) to offer when I confided in  him on Sunday.
'Well,' he said. 'If 30+% of the Gulf Stream has already disappeared, you'd better start getting used to it. You're heading for another mini ice-age.' He then launched into various depressing explanations of exactly what is happening, or rather not happening in the Atlantic, and around Greenland and Iceland and various far flung and - I have to say - cold-sounding places.

It wasn't exactly news to me. Of course I know these things.
It's not as if I have my head in the sand or anything!
But this is my garden! A bit close to home, if you don't mind.
And surely in my garden, it's all just a blip. Next year, we will suddenly - amazingly - wonderfully - return to the summers of memory.
The summers that lasted forever, full of the sound of bees, summers when peas and beans rampaged up the wires and then went into industrial fast-food production mode, until you were so sick of long, green pod-shaped things that you stuffed a bagful into everyone's arms as they came to the door.
Those were the days.

Later, sitting in the garden, enjoying a glass of wine in the evening sunshine, the In-Charge looked at the pathetic array of pea pods on offer so far.
'Oh good,' he said happily. 'Peas!'

Oh good!

I thought it kinder not to disabuse him. The In-Charge does much, extremely valuable work in the garden, but he isn't on the Vegetable Garden Executive Management Team, neither was he present on the official Stock Control Round that had counted 17 pods plus a thespian one that couldn't decide whether 'to pea or not to pea'.
I don't think he has done a Soil Temperature Test either.

To pea or not to pea

'Nothing like fresh peas,' he warmed to his theme. 'We can have pea soup and all sorts.'
I was momentarily diverted from the Pea Crisis.
Novel croutons! I wouldn't have thought peas would go with All Sorts, but then I am not as fond of licorice as the In-Charge. Perhaps licorice is the new honey. Maybe we will create a mind-blowing culinary combo. They will call us the couple who invented the perfect pea partnership. It will turn out to be like that Wensleydale cheese with apricots, which I always thought was revolting until - by complete chance - I tasted it with celery and realised that the groove in celery sticks is there solely to accommodate Wensleydale with apricots.

'The beans aren't doing very well,' he commented, cutting my thoughts mid-flow.

Pushy showed me the beans as well

So I've just been out and planted a load more bean seeds. Peas too.
17 pods ain't going to make much soup.
But this new lot are bound to grow.

Wishful thinking? Maybe my head is stuck in the sand.
But life surely wouldn't be worth living if there wasn't hope.

The Custodian of the Vegetable Garden on duty