Summer roses

These are Perle d'Or, Whisky and Princess Margarethe, with jasmine. Somehow the scent of jasmine seems to accentuate the scent of the roses and vice-versa.
  Having strange weather here, very humid and cloudy, but without rain, which we really need. I don't like humidity, it makes me feel as if I am ill and feverish, bathed in sweat at the slightest exertion; I prefer dry cold or dry heat. Not much we can do about it though. Tomorrow there is a street party, down at the nearby park - it will probably rain then!
  Reading George Eliot's first published work, the compilation of three novellas known collectively as 'Scenes of clerical life". I'm quite enjoying the stories. Also reading a book called "The adventures of Henry Thoreau" by Michael Sims, a biographical work which looks at what Henry did before he went to live at Walden Pond and wrote his famous book. He was an oddball, no doubt about it, and many of his non-Transcendentalist neighbours thought him mighty peculiar. Today he'd be diagnosed as autistic or with Asperger's syndrome no doubt, and have his brilliant peculiarity medicated away. 
    It seems that each age has a puritanism particular to itself;  witness the furore over Mr Cumberbatch's gaffe with 'coloured people' when he should have said 'people of colour'. So many things are now offensive to so many people, that we dare not say anything anymore, even if well-intentioned. Sigh.

Lazyday

Wednesday is my Lazyday. After three days of boring, repetitive and demanding work, I do very little on Wednesdays. Thomas has joined me on the bed, but pretty much every day is a lazy day for him. What I envy is his lack of guilt; he can relax totally, without thinking "I must do the washing-up. Ditto the vaccuuming. And pay those bills". Just. Forget. About. It. That's the way.

Taylor's Mistake

Photo from Paragliding New Zealand's website.

Bit of a wasted day today. I decided to go out to a nearby beach called Taylor's Mistake, just to take some photos and have a walk. I haven't been there since before the earthquakes, and the road and the walkway have been intermittently closed since that time. The road is a winding one, up one side of a headland and down the other. It used to be one of my favourite places, so I have put off going there, as it was bound to be changed by our earth tremors; much of the cliff around the headland fell away into the sea.
   But my trip was not to be. I left too late in the day and caught the lunchtime traffic. There is only one road in and out and it was closed for about 15 minutes while houses on the cliff are demolished and carried away. (The road is bad; full of pot-holes, bumps, lifted-up bits and sunken-down bits). I got into Sumner, but had forgotten that it was school holidays and the traffic was everywhere. Long story short, I gave up and came home again, without getting there at all. I will have another attempt later in the year, not in school holidays, not when the road is partially closed and not at lunchtime.
   Here is a link to Christchurch City Libraries' information on Taylor's Mistake, quite interesting:

http://my.christchurchcitylibraries.com/taylors-mistake/

Hatshepsut

I'm reading this biography at the moment. I've been fascinated by the story of Hatshepsut, the female Pharoah, ever since I read Pauline Gedge's excellent novel "Child of the morning" many years ago.
  This is one case where the novel is better than the truth. The author's problem with the life of Hatshepsut is that there are so few sources to go on. Official records are the only records that survive, stamped on stelae or on tomb walls, and these give very little idea of the real people behind the names. Kara Cooney is forced to make a lot of conjectures about Hatshepsut and her reign, and the word 'perhaps' appears ridiculously often. Perhaps Senenmut, her architect, was also her lover. Perhaps her nephew had her killed. Perhaps her father fully intended to have her made Crown Prince. And so on. The novel avoids all this by just going with an invented narrative framed and supported by the few facts we know about Hatshepsut, and is far more enthralling, full of gold and heat and the inexplicable wills of the gods, a really good read that just sucks you into an Ancient Egyptian timewarp.

Lime marmalade and other harvests

Got up early this morning to make lime marmalade before it bacame too hot. The limes come from a friend's tree; we were in her garden the other day and I pounced on them. They cost a fortune in the supermarket, but Maggie kindly gave them to me for free. So they've yielded 6 and a half pots of delicious marmalade. I made it with jam setting sugar, as my previous attempt at grapefruit marmalade availed me 8 pots of marmalade syrup; the stuff never set, and there's only so many things you can do with grapefruit syrup. My breakfast this morning was two slices of toast with freshly made marmalade - heaven! Lime is my favourite marmalade flavour (other than ginger) and every time you get a chunk of peel you get a real zap of intense lime flavour. So, thankyou Maggie - there is a large pot of marmalade coming your way.

The apricot harvest has been much better this year since I got a Moorpark tree to cross-fertilise my Trevatt. Moorpark is the better fruit for eating and looks better, but Trevatt has a great flavour for preserving (but you can eat them as well). This is the second picking, I've got three jars squirrelled away, and have eaten heaps. Of course they are a favourite with the birds, the ones at the top of the tree are now hollowed out.

Onions and part of the garlic harvest. Not a huge amount but much better than nothing.

Poppies drying for their seeds.

My spare bedroom has become a drying room for herbs. Oregano, thyme, purple sage, lemon verbena, lavender and rose petals. Smells nice!

Private McPhail

As part of the Library's remembrance of the First World War, I'm researching a local soldier, Private Leonard Thomas McPhail. We've all been allocated a name from the Waltham Park Memorial Gates, (picture above) and asked to find out something about "our" soldier. The Library's reference team have provided us with Internet addresses for research, and some of the material is available digitised by the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Private McPhail's army record turns out to be an interesting one.
    The records are handwritten, which makes for difficult reading. I've got to decipher these records, and make a timeline for Private McPhail. He enlisted in the Otago Regiment, although he was from Christchurch, as he was working in Dunedin at the time. He travelled with a large group of reinforcements, and was in France from 1917-1919. He survived the war, but drowned in a ditch after a drunken fight with another soldier, while waiting to be repatriated. He is buried in a military cemetery in France.
     Private McPhail was no saint; he was listed as AWOL fourteen times, was fined for disobeying an officer's orders, and at one stage was about to be posted as a deserter, but he was stationed at Etaples, a large military camp with hospitals attached, which was considered such an awful place that wounded soldiers would escape from hospital to go back to the front line. Medical care was surprisingly good - the death rate was low, but the segregation of officers and men (officers in luxurious accomodation in nearby Le Touquet, men in stinking, muddy tent-cities) caused on-going problems with morale. The men mutinied in 1917, and this episode of the was was covered in the book and TV series "The monocled mutineer".
      I'll continue reading about this aspect of the war, and about Private McPhail.

Blackcurrants and JAM!

This year's blackcurrant crop is twice last years, so more jam! When I was a child, my mum always used to complain that the blackcurrants were always ready on Boxing Day, but now I'm picking them after New Year's Day. Our summer here has been on and off, so perhaps this is the reason why. There seems to have been a city-wide failure of cucumber plants owing to a sudden cold night about 2 weeks ago. They've all got some kind of mould.

Anyway, blackcurrants have been fine. I've made some of this year's crop into jam and have frozen the rest for use in cakes and desserts in the winter. Plenty of jam for wintertime scones with afternoon tea. Yum!

Order versus chaos

This, believe it or not, is my vegetable garden. Every year I lose control of it about now. Things have gone to seed and self-seeded poppies, lychnis, aquilegia and borage come up all over the place. As a vegetable plot it's a bit of a disaster, but I quite like the chaos. The seed heads of poppies, leeks and florence fennel are all attractive and dramatic. It's all in the way of seeing; is it chaos, or a kind of order of its own?

This is my zucchini plant among the poppies. At the supermarket yesterday they were selling zucchini for $4 a kilo. And this is a 'zucchini factory', growing at home. 

Further on the subject of chaos, no two cherries are alike. I painted these before Christmas; each one has its own personality, I think. (Without anthropomorphising too much).

Here's the fabulous cat, very much in his prime now, nothing left of the cute little kitten I had. I nearly had two more kittens at new Year; two kittens showed up at a friend's house and I said I would take them if they proved to be homeless, but the owner was found, fortunately for them and me. Had to take Thomas to the vet because he had a sore throat that didn't seem to be getting better. The vet thinks it's because he eats too many birds and has got his throat scratched as he scarfed one down. Hasn't stopped him eating though. What I like about going to the vets is seeing how many people really care about their animals; you read of terrible cruelties inflicted by humans, but those people are in the minority, thank Goddess. One little dog being reunited with his owner went mad with delight, then leaped up and clung to his 'dad' just like a toddler would. Nice.