She Played KerPlunk With The Bones Of Her Rivals

 

After all that glamorous air kissing, award receiving and general spiffiness last week things have returned more or less to a precarious normality. Even though the loos at the  Royal Lancaster are not a patch on the Savoy, there is not even an uniformed attendant hovering with towels and clothes brush. If it was a better hotel then I would be campaigning for it to be renamed the Roy Lancaster. The main problem is that it is on the wrong side of Hyde Park: where, according to my Grandfather, people used to keep their mistresses.

My office is freezing cold and the windows are being sporadically whipped by flurries of sleet and icy rain. I sit here wearing a number of layers and with a gas fire pointed strategically at my extremities. The main problem is that when we built this house we ran out of readies and had to economise on various aspects. One of which was to cut out about a third of the radiators. As a result we have a delightfully warm kitchen and an electric blanket and in the winter we scurry from one to the other through icy halls and frosty corridors. 

I have been confined to the office most of the week as I find myself behind in both writing and drawing. I really should rustling around with sharpened pencils and sheets of paper rather than writing this. My only excursions were to set out plants in a small but charming garden in Oxford and a trip to a shoulder specialist – one of the by-products of the onrush of decrepitude. The shoulder chap stuck cortisone into my rotator cuffs (or close, anyway) which was not nearly as horrific as I expected. I had visions of long needles and the sickening crunch of grazed tendon but was pleasantly surprised.

Apart from that I have done a lot of rushing back and forth to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford where my Dad has just had a brain tumour removed and is feeling a bit rough. The offending object was about the size of a satsuma: seems very weird that there should be enough room in one’s head for such a thing: especially his head which, like Jeeves’, positively bulges with braininess.

For those of you with time on their hands you could always watch Gardeners World this Friday which is a collation of a whole lot of garden visits re-edited into one cheap and easy programme. It will include snoops around Alys Fowler’s garden, a fumble through Toby Buckland’s passages, a wander around the palatial premises of Cleve West and a bumble through Blackpitts in June. so, if bored at 8:30 on Friday then BBC2 is the place to be: thank goodness we don’t have to compete with Strictly.

Last year I was doing Green With Envy in Clacton, details here.

I am listening to Mercedes Benz by Janis Joplin. The picture is the petal of an Hemerocallis Golden Chimes.

Happy Thanksgiving to all you lot over there: may your turkeys be pleasantly basted and your various pies heave with pumpkins. 

Dull Technical note: I noticed when tralumphing around my Statistic counter the other day  that many of you still link here via the old .mac address which, for some reason, does weird things to the comment layer. The deal is that Apple (whom I love dearly and will forgive almost anything: sad but true) had a shake up a few months ago and shifted all their stuff to a new entity called .me (bloody silly name).  As a result everything went a bit tits up. That seems to be behind us now and you will find that all problems can be avoided by entering this website as http://web.me.com/blackpittsgarden/Site_2/Blog/Blog.html on all your RSS feeds, links or whatever method you might use to come here. My only concern is the convenience of you, the dear public. (Well, maybe not my only concern but it is undoubtedly scribbled somewhere on the back of the same fag packet). Suffice to say that if you wish to comment on this blog and find yourself unable so to do, them check you have .me not .mac. End of technical note.