Probably a bigger woodchipper

Would be needed to dispose of a body. The one we rented this weekend, while too large to be transported in the back of the van (without laying it down, which would spill fuel) was only suitable for blackberry vines and rose cuttings.
I can't say much for the design of the woodchipper. It's not the sort you see in films, where you could pretty much shovel in whatever you like. That sort has to be hitched to a vehicle. Ours was a little beastie, hardly above waist-height, with a rectangular opening at the top and a funnel at the side. At first I took the funnel for the outlet, but it's the feeder for larger things. The outlet is a vent at the base, which chokes up after a while so that the heavy & unwieldy chipper must be awkwardly wheeled a few feet away from the chip-pile it's made.
The design is almost anti-ergonomic. Unless it's meant to be operated by prepubescent children, the feeder height requires bending over constantly.
In the two hours before it ran out of fuel, we did greatly reduce the slash-piles stacked around the back yard, and produce a few buckets of sawdust mulch for the roses. But most of that was done through the side-funnel, rather than the top opening, which proved nearly useless, even for the small cuttings, twigs and leaves.
The side funnel is a lot of fun to use. You feed one end of a vine into it, and once it catches, the whole vine whips in, waving about like a retracting Triffid. But any projecting stub of vine (you know, the natural way that both blackberries and roses grow) can catch on the funnel edge and leave it vibrating blurrily instead of entering the grinder.
After an hour, I was vibrating somewhat blurrily myself, especially about the hands, and my gloves were speckled with those blackberry thorns that hadn't managed to reach my skin. So I wasn't terribly regretful when the fuel ran out. Our neighbours may have been relieved as well. It's not a sleek purring machine.
I suppose anyone who reads mysteries (or watches trashy movies) would think of body disposal while using a woodchipper. I'd recommend the bigger size.
It occurs to me that the development of dna tech has made forensics less interesting rather than more. I was impressed by the detective who spotted a kidney stone (gallstone?) mixed in with the gravel of a garden path, and with the story of a murderer who woodchipped his victim and aimed the vent out over a river, but was defeated by the discover of a single tooth.

Rhubarb and roses
The rhubarb has leapt up in the last weeks. Whee, she said feebly, I like rhubarb. Maybe I'll make more pies.
And transplant the volunteer sweet rocket into the front yard, under the bay window where it's hard to grow things.
And prune the roses over the front gate, the part that needs a stepladder. The Adelaide d'Orleans is healthy enough, but the one on the other side of the arch may be dead (I'm still cutting back) and I can't find its nametag or remember what its blooms looked like when last seen. I'm wondering if the blooms I vaguely remember were the Adelaide spilling over to the other side?
I've cut back the garage-swallowing alba in the backyard (hmm, maybe I should take a cutting of the alba and see if it would grow where the unknown arch-rose is giving up?), and in the front made some inroads on the sprawling Dortmund, the Bourbon Queen, and the Rosearie de la Haye.
I've barely touched the Wenlock, which remains healthy despite the shadow of the boulevard trees. The Jacques Cartier and Alain Blanchard are holding up, but another three are pretty feeble. Stupid shade. Okay, not to be ungrateful for Victoria's urban forest, but I'd rather have an ornamental cherry or something else that dropped pink petals than dusty catkins and aphid juice.

The frame of the old cable-ride is beside the Dortmund, and I've thought about hanging a basket-chair from it (I have a hanging chair lying in the attic, waiting for a frame strong enough) but I don't know whether I could keep the vines away from the chair. One doesn't want to swing idly into thorns. The other end of the cable-ride has a lilac tree growing into it, but at least it wouldn't be thorns. I've cut back some of the lilac, but tentatively.
While my thumbs are far from green, I rather like pruning. It's like editing. Ooh, that bit doesn't need to be there ... LOP! Just as when I'm editing, it's far easier for me to trim out a clearly dead bit than it is to remove something vigorous but in the wrong place, even with the promise of a more satisfying shape to come.
Editing, like body disposal, is in my thoughts just now because I'm reading some work that needs pruning. I've colour-coded my high-lighters: blue for hackneyed language, green for confusing, pink for punctuation and typos, and yellow for superfluous. It's not quite Fanthorpian levels of repetition, but enough that I'm covering 1/2 to 2/3 of each page with yellow.
I need to buy another yellow highlighter. This one's dying, and the woodchipper isn't fine-tuned enough.

tea and painted walls

UK 08, the never-ending ....

And on we pedalled, as mentioned, to South Elmham Hall. To be accurate, we walked the bicycles through fields until we found a paved road, muddled about with the OS maps, then pedalled on.
Circuitously, we found the entrance, with a little wooden sign saying OPEN. This was a relief, as we'd not managed to make contact with the Hall by phone or email, but were chancing it since we were close by.
Hm, no vehicles in the gravelled parking lot. Hm, no bustling staff. There was Bateman's Barn, though, and the door open. We poked our heads in. A fellow with a short haircut and squared-off build that suggested ex-military was mopping out the hallway.
"We're closed," he said.
We explained that the gate and sign said otherwise. He took pity on our windblown state and offered tea and sweets, which we accepted gratefully. I had a brownie, which was very good, even discounting for exercise & hunger.
You can see more about Bateman's Barn here, where it's ready to receive guests, but I couldn't resist a few pictures of the beams OMG the BEAMS! they are huuge. Even if it is 16th century, and therefore late by my standards.
My cunning husband explained that we'd hoped to see the wall-paintings, because I was an enthusiast of wall-paintings, and mentioned our visits to Hoxne and Thornham Parva for the sake of their wall-paintings, all said in the best-buttered 'no pressure, mind' way.
And because the owners of South Elmham Hall are terribly kind people, and have their own enthusiasm for their home (and no wonder!) by the time I'd finished the brownie, we had an invitation to see inside.

John gave us a brief background as we walked across. The Hall is a 13th century hunting lodge for the Bishops of Norwich, and the surrounding land was a deer park, set in a moated enclosure that's older still. Ruins of a gatehouse remain, and parts of the chapel and cloister were incorporated into later farm buildings. The 13th century hall was swallowed by a 16th century farmhouse, which is itself a listed building.
The remaining wall paintings are foliate and floriate repeat patterns, nothing figural, but done with some skill and grace, considerably pricier-looking than those at Thornham Parva. John was concerned that they were fading slowly, exposed to the daylight, and indeed the section painted in (what was now) the loo did seem deeper in colour.
Mark took many more pictures--he has a steadier hand--and John mentioned that he didn't have that many photos, so we promised to email ours when we got back home.

Less impressive to the eye, perhaps, but hugely interesting to me, were rows of what looked very much like the sinoper (the sketch or underdrawing usually done in charcoal or lead and fixed with a mix of red & yellow ochres) left unpainted. Because process is more interesting to me than product, especially in medieval painting, where there's often no description of process, and it must be guessed at.
I didn't want to go sticking my face into the wall to check for pinpricks that might be compass marks, though. It seemed more polite to stick my face into the enlarged photos, afterwards.
After many thanks, we bicycled away, and turned the OPEN sign around to CLOSED as we left, just in time to forestall a small tourist party.

So, past the Church Farm moat, past where St. Nicholas used to be, on through St. Margaret Green, up Wash Lane and to St. Peter's Hall, an extensively moated site with a 13th century building (renovated extensively in the 16th century, using bits probably looted from the nearby priory and church).

You can see a bit of the moat here. There's a good deal more of it, though some has been filled or lost over the years.
Presently St. Peter's is a brewery (you can buy the ale at our local liquor store) and restaurant. A good thing, since however impressive the moat complex (and it is) one needs sustenance. The day was clear, bright, and windy, and we'd been cycling rather a lot. Also my rear tire was deflating slowly, and the pump didn't seem to affect it one way or the other.
Here's the front entrance. Nice porch, isn't it?
Some very thorough restoration work has gone on here, and given the hodgepodgey nature of many older English houses, restored and reworked and gutted and recovered over generations and wildly variant theories of architectural style, the looted ecclesiastical bits don't look out of place. It's a good idea to have done your looting a few centuries ago, and let the mellow aging settle things down in the meantime.


This is not the part we ate in, because we weren't there for dinner. We ate in the bar, which has booths and comfier benchs, having what my notes describe as a 'sumptuous lunch'. Mark had steak & ale pie, and in the interests of research I had smoked eel salad & potatoes. Smoked eel tastes like a mild white fish. The flesh is white and flakes apart easily. The skin was very slightly scaly, a little shiny. It was tasty, but not really distinctive.


Despite the sun, no one was eating outside. I found out why when I went to take photos. The Saints being on a sort of plateau (to strain the word a bit, since East Anglia isn't all that tall to start with) there isn't anything more to stop the wind than there is on Salisbury Plain.
I had my jacket tied around my waist, and very nearly lost it into the moat, tugged off by the wind.
Standing by the wall overlooking the moat was rather like standing abovedecks on the BC Ferry, the wind banging at you from all around and the sun slapping off the water. So I stayed out for a while, because I like that sensation.
Afterwards we had a walk around the brewery and the shop. Unfortunately what we'd really have liked to buy would have been difficult to bring home safely on the plane. But it was still interesting. Not often one sees a brewery with a thatched roof, after all.

Because of the troublesome rear tire, we decided against continuing on to St. Andrew's Ilketshall, even though it has wall-paintings. One mustn't be greedy.

Yes, we did see more churches, about half of the Saints that day, but this post is long enough already, so I'll leave that for another. Because I know you want to read more about moats.

ruins amid the Saints

Simon's entry on South Elmham Minster is here, for supplementary reading.


Leaping ahead in chronology, because this site deserves its own post. We visited it on the day we meant to see as many of 'the Saints' as we could. The weather was bright and windy. With the help of our OS maps (#230 Diss & Harleston, and #231 Southwold & Bungay) we reached the plateau (relatively speaking) and found Mundy's Farm, the first landmark.
A signposted right-of-way led across the ploughed field, straight into the woods. We briefly considered finding somewhere to lock the bikes, but the only structure was the signpost, so we set out walking the bikes across the flinty field. The woods, as you can see, are open and sunny. It is very quiet, easy to believe yourself alone for miles.
Side note: I can lift a bike over a fence more easily than I can lift a bike over a stile. I have no good explanation for this.

Then, past hedges and a stream, we came to South Elmham Minster, as it's called. Flint-core ruins, roofless, with trees growing around and among them.
It's probably impossible to describe the place or the atmosphere of it without invoking Tolkien. Twisty trees. Inexplicable ruins. Deep in the English countryside. It only needs someone in a cloak, to tell you by what names this place is known to the elves and the ents.



In the first picture (up top), you can see the edge of a bench. That and a sign giving the probable history of the site are (thankfully!) the only overt modern additions. Mostly you can wander without speaking, imagining almost any sort of past use and purpose: castle, chapel, temple, manor, even cathedral. The name 'South Elmham Minster' comes from the belief that it was a cathedral, for all the small South Elmham churches. But apparently that Elmham Minster was in Norfolk.


Another theory is that it was a pagan temple, and it is surrounded by earthworks, which might be the remains of a Roman encampment.
Presently, though, it's believed to be a private chapel for a Bishop's residence, dating to about 1000 AD, built for the first Bishop of Norwich, Herbert de Losinga. (If anyone knows what name the Elves knew him by, I'll add that here).
It's easy to believe that the site had a religious purpose; even now (even more so now?) one wants to be still, whether to pray or meditate.

The trees (beeches, I think) are very nearly as striking as the ruins. Several are intertwined in this loving yet Laocoonish fashion. Perhaps it was the influence of the Minster, but I saw them as more intriguing than disturbing.
As many times before, I wished I were a better sketch artist, with much more time. But that's where photographs are useful.
We leant our bikes against a huge fallen tree that had begun to sprout upwards. I almost took a picture of it, and discovered later that the same view was for sale as a postcard--also that most of the pictures I'd taken were from the same angles & places that the postcards were taken from.
I'm not sure what this says about my eye for photos, whether good or just predictable. Or simply that it isn't possible to take really bad photos of some place this beautiful and mysterious.


Our next stop was to be South Elmham Hall, but I'll save that for another post. Since I neglected to take any pictures of the right-of-way across the fields, entering, here's a pic of the way out (to South Elmham Hall) which shows, maybe, how miles-from-anywhere the Minster seems to be.

I could have stayed longer, just sitting and being quiet amid the trees and stones, but South Elmham Hall has secular medieval wall-paintings, not to mention a caff, and biking does make for an appetite. So through the fields we trundled, following the footpaths from the eleventh century to the fourteenth century.

wheeling around Suffolk

Suffolk and Norfolk (well, East Anglia generally) used to be fenland. Marsh, swamp, wetlands, or whatever term you prefer. Eye means 'island', and Diss may have meant 'lake', so you can tell that water defined the landscape. While the fens were drained over the course of centuries, and made over into farmland, water is still easy to reach--dig a hole and you have a moat or a fishpond.
The roddens (lost rivers) can still be seen in aerial photos, and there's a terrific picture here. That photo is from Cambridgeshire, probably the flattest of the former fens. Suffolk and Norfolk have some hills, and as Mark and I cycled back and forth across the Waveney (the little river that marks the boundary between Suffolk and Norfolk) I did have some work to keep up with him.

We'd done a bit of online research into hiring bicycles, without much success, but luckily Mike and Sue, our wonderful hosts at Gables Farm, had bikes they weren't using and were willing to lend to us, no charge. Even better, Michael was close to Mark's height and Sue to mine, so no fiddly adjustments were needed.
Here's my faithful blue steed, resting in a typical bit of local landscape. You'll notice that it's overcast, and this pic was taken on one of the very few overcast days we had. Mostly we had astonishingly pleasant weather, sun and occasional cloud. I even got a bit of sunburn, the day we went out to the Saints.

I should mention that for most of this trip I had a cold. It stopped at all the stations: dry cough, catarrh, losing voice, streaming nose, hacking cough, and so on. Also palindromic rheumatism bouncing about the body; one day my ankle stiffened up so that I couldn't walk without limping, but fortunately could still pedal.
But it didn't touch my mood; I was still pretty close to blissful. I kept thinking how fortunate it was that we could do this now, that we had the time and the funds to be here and that I was able, physically, to bicycle around and really see. Having to stop and blow my nose every couple of klicks wasn't much of a price to pay for that.

I mentioned before the necessity of OS maps, didn't I? Here you see one of the perils of navigating in the English countryside: the shortage of distinctive names.
The road signs, met at every tangle of lanes, are fairly helpful, except for two little quirks.
1) the default distance for any locality is 5. Once we went from 5 to 6 to 5 again for the distance to Syleham, while aiming (as) straight (as possible) for it.
2) when you get within a certain distance from a locality, it disappears from the signs. So you know you're almost at Syleham when you lose it. This is why you need the OS maps.

I'm not really sure why East Anglia appeals to me. Perhaps my childhood reading of the Green Knowe books, with Tolly's arrival in the midst of a flood at night, and Green Knowe seeming as much ship as house. Perhaps three childhood years in Richmond (aka Ditchmond) before it was completely subdivisioned, when there were flat fields behind the houses, and deep ditches scoring the fields and roads, ditches easily as deep as a Suffolk river--deeper than some.
I'm fairly sure I have no ancestral ties to this part of the UK, so it can't be the deep call of the ancient blood or whatever overwrought phrase is wanted.

This last pic is my view for most of this part of the trip. I do find it an attractive view.
And look - visible shadow! The sun is shining.

armed with a rake

that seems to strike at me.
Or, the Duchess of Malfi does yardwork, and Spring is here in all sorts of ways.

Today was the Times-Colonist 10k Run. My participation was limited to getting up at 6, with the added entertainment of watching Mark get up at 6--he is firmly in the camp of Lady Astor, reputed to have said "Do you mean to say there are two seven o'clocks in the day?"--and driving Mark, Paul, and Shona to the start. Then I found a parking spot near the finish line and went for tea.
Next year we will arrange a meeting place beforehand. The Legislature lawn has many landmarks and prominences, but with 10,000 participants and their associates wandering about, standing on a high spot only gets you so far.

It does seem somewhat unreasonable that I who did not run am having more aches & stiffness than those who did run. Arthritis--like being an athlete, in a way.

The fruit trees are blossoming and the remaining blackberry vines are leafing. I spent part of today standing on top of a stepladder waving a rake over my head to knock dead bits out of the pear tree. I spent part climbing on the rock and raking dead blackberry bits out of the St. John's wort.
Both cats came to watch: the cat that lives here (Priscilla), and the cat that doesn't live here, which proves to have a local habitation and a name (next door, Katina). The cat that doesn't live here has remarkable confidence that it does live here, and will meow at the door and walk in when the door is opened. If it weren't such a young cat, and we hadn't been living here over 20 years, I'd be persuaded it was the previous owner's cat.
The cats like to watch me work in the backyard. Priss usually stays fairly close, at ground level, and Katina perches.


At UVic the rabbits have been breeding, and there are tiny cute rabbits everywhere. A proposal to deal with them by blowing them out of their burrows with a device called a "Rodenator" (I can only assume that Verminator was taken) is doomed, doomed, doomed, because teh bunnehs r so kewwwt!!!
I have the perfect solution, though. See, the black-footed ferret is being reintroduced in Saskatchewan. And the black-footed ferret is insanely cute, with its little masky face. Bring the black-footed ferret to UVic, and let the cute predator take care of the cute pest. If rabbits run low, there's always the gray squirrels.


In other news of cute fluffy things... Priss writhes when she's petted, in a rather disturbing way. Sometimes you can pet her into such a frenzy that she rolls off the chair. We have ladderback chairs in the kitchen, and she likes to thrust her head into the gap between the seat of the chair and the ladderback slats. I worry that she'll get stuck, but so far she's always managed to pull her head back out.
You can see this coming?
Yes, I discovered that my cat could kill herself while being petted. She jammed her head under the bar, and while I skritched her back, she rolled wildly, to and fro, and ... body rolled off the seat, head remained trapped in chairback.
Fortunately I looked down as she did this, and caught her, rolled her back onto the chair, and watched her panic for a moment or two until she found the angle that would extract her head.
Has this stopped her from jamming her head through the chair? What do you think?

The ultimate spring critter, which I forgot to mention, is a lamb, and visiting Anna a couple of weeks ago I got to feed a rejected lamb. Just a little one, (though I expect bigger by now) with tightly curled white fleece, a little black crescent of a nose, and a most demanding cry. Like babies, lambs need to be fed every couple of hours, but unlike babies, lambs can follow you around and find you at need. His name is Vinnie, which should be short for vindaloo.
Anna mentioned the difficulty non-farming people have with the idea that a hand-reared animal is destined to be food, the 'how can you treat it so kindly and then kill it?' complaint. As if it would be more understandable to beat the animal every day and then kill it.
I know, I know, it's to do with the mental categories of 'companion animal' and 'food animal', but it still requires not thinking about the life of the food animal before it becomes food.

a little Diss and mostly Eye

UK 08, continued.
Already I've fallen somewhat out of chronological order, and into rough subject categories. But there you go.
After our Wingfield visit, Lucia, Mark and I visited Diss, specifically the Tourist Info Centre, which you should always visit first in any English town, because with few exceptions (Cambridge) they are marvellously helpful places, stuffed with maps and bus schedules and postcards and walking tour maps and lists of B&Bs and booklets of local history... Really you could just visit the tourist info ctr and be done.
We bought Ordnance Survey maps. Because OS Maps are vital in the countryside. Doing without them would be like doing without a London A to Z in London. Mark and I also bought oil for the bicycles and a lock. Diss has a bicycle shop and repair, and we took note of this for later.

This is the only picture I took in Diss (more later) and it is just crying out for a lolcats caption:


A few days later Mark and I had to bicycle to Diss to have a puncture fixed, and more pictures were taken of St. Mary Diss and so on. But I was still fumbling about with the camera at this point, and missed taking any pics of the ducks crossing the street. They did use the zebra crossing.

To file under things that make you realise you're not in North America: while shopping, finding a chub of rabbit-meat dogfood. I wanted to bring one home, but there were logistics issues. I did bring back a foil packet of beef 'n' rabbit flavoured cat treats, from London.

Here we are in Eye, picture taken looking at St. Peter & St. Paul, Eye. This being after Thornhams Parva et Magna, we were a bit tired and hungry, and asked an older fellow who was leaning on his garden wall, about places to eat. He turned out to be an amateur historian of Eye, and as well as giving us a potted history of the town's growth, suggested a fish & chip shop in a 14th century building, or Beard's teashop, in a 15th century building.

But first, a look around St. Peter & Paul. The building just beside it is the Guildhall, fifteenth century timber-frame, nicely restored. The timbers are filled in with wattle & daub (something like lath & plaster, only muckier) and plastered over. Sometimes there's decorative patterns of bricks between the timbers, and that's called brick-nogging (I'll try to post a pic sometime). Suffolk and Norfolk are short of building stone--flint and chalk don't make for strong walls--so you'll see a lot of half-timbering, brick, and thatch.
The plaster is decorated in a couple of ways (it's vernacular architecture, it will be decorated). One is by colour, the Suffolk pink or yellow, originally ochre (earth pigments) mixed with size distemper and painted over the whitewash. Supposedly ox-blood was mixed in the wash, but no one's proven this, so it may be one of those stories you tell the gullible cityfolk. Nowadays you can apparently buy Dulux 'Suffolk pink' in tins.
The other decoration is pargetting, building up designs in the plaster. Ancient House in Ipswich went mad with this technique. The Eye Guildhall has a more subdued variant, 'pinking', which in this case means impressing or scratching designs into the plaster. You can see it next to the cornerpost here, a slantways row of quatrefoils between two incised lines.
Also nicely visible here is the difference between the restored and unrestored sides of the cornerpost. The ornate pinnacles and tracery between the dogs are what you'll see above arches and niches from the 14th and 15th century, carved in wood, painted in glass, cast in bronze, embroidered in gold thread.
This restored side of the post gives you an idea how it would have looked new, though it might have been painted, too.
Down the street you can see a Dutch gable (that curly brick house-end) another characteristic of East Anglian architecture. I've seen some different explanations for its adoption, but all related to the ties between East Anglia and Flanders. Introduced by homesick Flemish weavers or builders, or by East Anglian merchants impressed by the style in Flanders, at any rate it stayed.

There's a brief history of the wool towns and the links between Flemish and East Anglian merchants and weavers here.

Diss and Eye aren't very large now, but they were important in the middle ages, and the size of Eye's church is a good indicator of status. The De la Poles seem to have had a hand in the building here as well as in their own little church in Wingfield.
My main interest was in the painted dado screen, done by a local craftsman about 1500, and somehow surviving the time in between without the saints' faces being scratched off or any other pious damage. It's pure folk-art, and I've stuck my sample picture of two of the saints (John and Catherine) next to two of the saints (Dominic and Catherine) from the Thornham Parva retable. You can see the difference between court art of 1330 and folk art of 1500 (as well as how the arcading over the saints has become more elaborate) even though the basic design is the same.





















And yes, food! We'd been meaning to have something to eat. The fish and chip shop was pretty greasy-smelling (as the old gent had warned) so we went on to Beard's, rather more upscale. I had leek soup, tea, and chocolate-nut pie with clotted cream. Clotted creeeeaaaammm.

Sorry, back now.
Beard's is a bed & breakfast as well as tea-shop, but doesn't have a website. On the other hand, we had such a lovely berth at Gables that I didn't mind missing out on yet another choice. (And in the heart of Eye--the nightlife might have kept us awake half the night).
Still, the beams are awesome. I took several pictures of the interior, with its beams and plasterwork, but I'll only push one on you here.

Through that door is the back garden, with an outdoor privy that looks as if it might have been a WWII air-raid shelter, which would make the privy historic as well. History is thick on the ground in the UK.

This was our last day with Lucia, and I don't think one could ask for a better travelling companion. We discussed climbing up the Castle Mound, but it was late in the day and there wasn't much medieval on the top, only a 19th century folly and a few stones of the former tower.
Back to Gables to say our goodbyes.

around and around

Out today pruning the apple trees. The Transparent is already budding, and probably I shouldn't have pruned it, but the weather's been so chancy of late that I seized the opportunity. Also hacked out a great deal of the blackberries that have been encroaching on it for some years.
I believe I've found a system of sorts for cutting the blackberry vines back. In previous years I cut the stems, but then the dead bits form an impenetrable net, worse than than the live ones in that they have all the thorns but none of the fruit. The system is to take the shears (which I broke, last week, doing this, but they are mended now) and proceed along a stem, snipping off the offshoots as far as I can reach. Then take another stem and do the same. After a few of these attacks, the net starts to fall apart, and the stems can be cut into shorter pieces for dismantling. So now we have a growing pile of dead blackberry bits, eventually to be carted off to the garden waste disposal.
Also a stack of springy young suckers from the Transparent, with pink buds swelling at the tips. I've snipped a few pieces and stuck them in a glass jug, pretending that I am a Country Lady with an Eye For Natural Beauty.
The Transparent is now looking all light and airy. I enlisted Mark to prune off the suckers I couldn't reach, and had to stop him after a while, because the lure of the sharp tools is a powerful lure, and the book says no more than 1/3 should be pruned in a year.

Then I hacked away at the grapevine on the other side of the yard, behind the garden bench, and cleared out under the Spartan tree, where infant hollies were sneaking about under the bluebells. I had no idea that holly grew along vines, but these were.
The Spartan needs pruning, but first I have to remove most of the grapevine that's twining into it, so I can tell how much is the Spartan. This is how I ended up cutting back blackberries last weekend, in order to uncover the true Transparent.
I think I will gather up the grapevine and try making vine charcoal, just to be annoying. I wonder if I should try to find a Dutch oven at the thrift shops, or whether it would be simpler to cobble something up to roast the grapevine?
I'd dig a hole in the backyard, but backyard burning's been outbylawed for ages now, and charcoal burning is still burning. And you can only dig down about a foot here, before you hit rock.

The amusing/terrifying thing about the budding of the apple trees is that I still have apples left from last year. I don't mean the dried apples, of which there are 3 bags full, yes sir. I don't mean the apple pies, of which there are a half-dozen in the freezer. I don't mean the apple crumbles, of which there are at least a dozen in the freezer.
No, I mean apples, gathered in November, wrapped in newspaper and stored in orange crates in the pantry, which I have been taking for my lunches for two months (February and March--January I took mandarin oranges). Even with one crate of Spartans turning to mush, suggesting that Golden Delicious are a more reliable 'keeping' apple, the apple season stretched from August to April.
Now the trees are budding afresh. Isn't Nature wonderful?
You should hear that in the voice from a Monty Python skit, suggestive of someone slamming his hand in the desk drawer while saying it.

Likewise in the endless cycle of renewal, my stories fly out and fly back to me, with little notes attached that are not cheques. The two most recent rejections:

Thanks for allowing us to consider "Climbing Boys," but regretfully, I'm going to pass on this one.

I have to say, however, that I absolutely loved this story in many ways; it's such a morbid yet fitting way to portray the climbing boys, and the writing is very well done. Unfortunately, I felt the dialogue was too heavy with dialect; it kept stopping me, and I wished it was pared a bit to aid the flow of the story. Also, I wasn't altogether positive that the POV switch at the end worked.

In any case, it's a lovely story, and I hope you find a great home for it! Please do send us more of your work soon.

And for the same story:

Thank you for submitting "Climbing Boys" to Strange Horizons, but we've decided not to accept it for publication. There's some very neat stuff in here; I particularly liked the portrayal of Ned and how he catches ghosts. But the story and exposition came across as a bit too heavy-handed to fully work for us.

We appreciate your interest in our magazine.

But I will not complain, because these are positive, personal, rejections, and thus better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

The agent hunt has so far netted me 12 form rejections and 1 request for a partial.

Look, this is me not getting my hopes up.

Want to see me do it again?

On the arthritis front, I am achey today, which may be due to
a) gardening
b) warm sunny weather
c) ancestral curse
d) arthritis

With the hydroxyquin added to the methotrexate, it looks as if the swelling on my second knuckle, left hand, is going down, though still present. The left foot is pretty much the same, though it's difficult to judge when I'm having what would probably be a flare-up if I weren't medicated. Yay drugs!