Gardener's Question Time..........

Preparations continue apace for my birthday party next week.

Today we made a start on the garden, which has been looking very sorry for itself after the long, wet winter.

I am not gifted with green fingers.

Yes, I can appreciate a garden with well-manicured, lush, green lawn, perfect shrubberies and colourful flower borders.
Unfortunately I can neither create or maintain one.

However, needs must, and with the recent flush of warmer weather, the grass had gone into overdrive and grown 6 inches in the past week, complete with thistles almost a foot tall and dozens of dandelions and other assorted pernicious weeds.
To make matters worse, our garden slopes up towards the back hedge, and pushing a heavy petrol driven (but not, unfortunately, self propelled) is beyond me. So Perfectionist Partner drew the short straw with the lawn mowing, while small dog and I busied ourselves with some basic weeding.

I say 'basic' because my grasp of what actually constitutes a weed is a little vague. I can recognise thistles and dandelions, but some of the stuff growing in the shingle looked quite pretty so I wasn't completely sure if it should be hauled out or not. After a long ponder, I decided that as it was growing in the shingle, it was where it shouldn't be, so I had it out. Or most of it. Some of the growth must have tap roots a mile long.

Meanwhile small dog was 'helping' by carrying old leaves and prunings carefully down the steps and into the house, where she dropped them randomly on the kitchen floor. Her grasp of 'helpful' is about as good as mine is of weeds. In between bouts of this arduous activity she stretched herself out on top of the brick wall, the better to soak up the warm sunshine and indulge in a few naps.

Still, unlike housework, with lawn mowing and weeding you can actually see where you've been so although we're tired out and aching all over, the garden does at least look a lot tidier.

Anyway, here's one of small dog getting into the birthday spirit..............

To bee, or not to bee..............

.....that is the question.

I have a bee trapped in my head.

It is definitely a bee.

Not a wasp.
No. A wasp has an altogether more tinny, nasal, high-pitched buzz. Wasps have no class.

However, neither is it one of those sleek busy, buzzing honey bees, rushing here and there, waggling its tail to show its workmates the way to the nearest nectar rush.

Hopefully its not one of those African killer bees, so beloved of B-movie horror films.

It is a fairly benign bee. One of those big, fat, spherical bees which defy the laws of physics in being able to fly at all.
And it doesn't really buzz.
It has a low-level drone.
Almost soothing after a while.
And it's been in there a while......... since yesterday morning.
Just buzzing around.
In my head.

Just in case you're thinking that this post should come with a 'Sanity Disclaimer' perhaps I should explain that yesterday morning I started on a short, sharp shock, high-dose medication, which is supposed to deal with some disturbing new MS symptoms.

I'm always just a bit wary of starting any new medication, just in case it sends me doo lally, as they are wont to do. The bee is not as bad a reaction as I'd feared.

Especially when taken in context against the very long list of potential side effects which run to several pages.

So all in all I'm happy with just having a bee in my head.

For the time beeing..........*feeble pun*
Ok I'll buzz off now.
Yes I know......you wouldn't get puns this toe-curling in a bad 'B' movie.

But this is truly unbeelievable..................and strangely compelling. It appeals to my inner bee on any number of levels.

www.beedogs.com

Odd too that so many of them appear to be Yorkies. Is this a sign...........?

.

Little Red Riding Hoolf............

We had a long overdue visit from two very close friends on Saturday. Due to mitigating circumstances we haven't been able to see them for ages and ages.

So cue an afternoon of laughing, crying, indulging in a group howl and generally behaving like our shoe sizes rather than our ages, aided and abetted by a bottle or two of wine.

At some point (and Perfectionist Partner denies any involvement or knowledge in this, despite the fact she was in the kitchen at the time) it seemed like a good idea to put Small Dog into their basket, which they had brought filled with goodies to share.

I must have had a glass of wine too many, for I remember dissolving into fits of giggles, and rushing to find my camera, declaring that she looked just like 'Little Red Riding Hoolf'

Sometimes wine make my speaking English good.

Of course I meant to say that she looked like Little Red Riding Hood.
Or the Wolf from Little Red Riding Hood.

But it got lost in translation.

Still......... quite good I think.

Small dog seems less than impressed, which is her default position these days. Normally she would enter into the spirit of the thing and ham it up for all her worth.

However the position of her ears leads me to believe that she was contemplating leaping out of the basket and going for one of us.

Probably me.

They say animals don't like to be laughed at and she had four of us, all in various stages of inebriation, laughing like loons.

Well it seemed funny at the time.

I'll get me coat..............

The Full Scottish...........

I finally got round to reading Saturday's Guardian in bed last night, which included a pull out section on The Great British Breakfast, or to be more specific, the Great British Fry-Up.

Pages and pages of recommendations for the best places up and down the length and breadth of the country, which can serve up a Full English at the drop of a fiver.

Now I'm sure that all fry-up aficionados have very specific ideas about what should constitute the perfect specimen. I have just discussed this briefly, in the interests of investigative blogging, with Perfectionist Partner, who was aghast at my suggestion that chips might be an essential ingredient. But she would definitely include beans, and there we are at odds.

I won't go into the pros and cons here, but suffice to say the author of the piece made a cogent case for the inclusion of chips, as they are excellent for soaking up the bean juice.

Fair point, well made.

Passing mention was made to breakfasts other than the ubiquitous Full English, but I feel I have to take issue with the description of the Full Scottish.

This institution is probably partly responsible for the plague of morbid obesity currently rampaging north of the border, but I feel that I should attempt a defence of this artery-clogging, cholesterol-raising, waistline-bulging behemoth of a meal.

I have fond memories of Sunday mornings as a child, waking to the mouth-watering sizzlings coming from the kitchen.

We wouldn't have this EVERY Sunday. Even my mother, in those days of fried food nirvana, when anything fried was considered healthy, balked at the notion of feeding us a Full Scottish more than say, once a month.

Actually, I used to think, as I waddled away from the breakfast table, that I probably wouldn't need another meal for a month, let alone breakfast, but that is by the by.

In the interests of truth, I therefore submit our family's version of the Full Scottish,

• Bacon - preferably unsmoked, thick cut and fried till crispy
  
• Lorne sausage - this is a square cut sausage which is hard to find outside Scotland but well worth the search.
• Fried egg
• Slice of fried bread - this has to be white bread, thick cut and fried in dripping or lard.
• OR Slice of French Toast - this is bread dipped in beaten egg, milk, salt and pepper then fried, naturally
• Drop scone - small, round, sweet pancake, fried
• Potato scone - triangle of floury potato cake, fried
• Black pudding - cut from a long sausage shape, fried
• Dumpling - also hard to find south of the border but basically a fruit pudding in a sausage shape, fried
  
• Half a tomato - fried
• Button mushrooms - fried

Yes. Really.

And yes, it was quite filling.


As a health concession we usually didn't have chips or beans, unless this feast was served at tea-time (or as you say down south - dinner time) in which case they would be served as an accompaniment.

Actually, looking at the list it has just occurred to me that just about the only non-sausage shaped ingredient is the sausage, which is square. Strange that.

Of course you didn't have to have it all, there were options, but we usually all had a fairly good stab at it. Oh and I forgot to mention that it was offered with a range of condiments, notably, brown sauce, tomato ketchup and/or mustard.

And washed down with huge mugs of sweet tea. Or if we were feeling especially sophisticated, orange juice.

Hand on heart (yes it is still beating, just) ALL of those ingredients made up one of my mum's all day breakfasts, so called, not because they were available all day, but because they filled you up all day.

Literally.

Usually we would regain the use of our legs by around midday, and could trot outside to work off some of the zillion calories ingested in that one meal.

Of course if any readers of this blog have any more extravagant versions of breakfast, I'd be glad to hear from you.

I tried to find a photo to set your taste buds tingling but this is the best I could come up with. It's frankly Lilliputian compared to my mum's towering platters. And it includes beans, which as I said, we didn't include. Possibly because of their vegetable origins but more likely because the bean juice ran everywhere and got mixed up with everything and we were a family who liked strictly segregated ingredients, especially in breakfasts. However it's the nearest I could find.

Enjoy.

Moment of truth............

You know a couple of posts back, I was musing along philosophical lines and saying how much I enjoy what I do.

Well I stand by that.

Mostly.

There is one element of porcelain production which is just mind-numbingly tedious and boring. And frustrating.
And sometimes infuriating.

Soft-cleaning.

Sounds innocuous doesn't it?

Don't be fooled. It entails having your hands in tepid water for hours on end, painstakingly removing seam lines and imperfections left on the castings after they've been released from their moulds. The greenware is soft-fired first, to create impermeable castings which won't revert to sludge when soaked in water. This makes them stronger than in their original state, but they are still very fragile and fingers especially are liable to ping off at the slightest pressure.
However, it must be done.
It's only saving grace is that I get to listen to Radio4, uninterrupted for hours at a stretch while my hands shrivel to prunes.

Anyway, after sometimes several days of this tedium, there comes the relative excitement of loading the kiln with shelf after shelf of tiny bodies, arms and legs and setting it to fire.

The bisque firing takes a long time. Up to 8 hours if the kiln is very full. At the height of the firing the temperature reaches 1215 degrees Celcius which is very , very hot.
Small dog loves firing days and I can gauge the temperature in the kiln without resorting to looking at the LDC display, just by seeing how close she can lie to the kiln.
Heat shimmers above it, which on cold days is lovely as it can heat the whole of the ground floor of the house. Peeking at the slight gap between the lid and the body of kiln revels a line of bright, white heat.
During this infernothe extremely fragile greenware is vitrified into slightly less fragile porcelain. Magically the colour changes from a chalky white to glowing flesh tones, depending on the colour of porcelain slip used for the castings. Each piece also shrinks by up to 1/3.

Over my almost 20 years as a porcelain dollmaker, the anticipation of opening the kiln after a bisque firing has never diminished. The kiln stays very hot for hours after it reaches the end of its programme so it is usually next day before it is cool enough to open.

Lifting the lid is the moment of truth.

If the firing has gone well, there will be serried ranks of little flesh coloured heads, bodies and limbs and sighs of relief all round.

If the firing has gone badly, there will be wails of anguish and sometimes even tears of disappointment and frustration.

An underfire is the least bad 'bad firing'. As the kiln elements age, they struggle to reach the highest temperatures and keep them there for the required 'soaking' period. This produces an underfire. The porcelain is not fully vitrified and has a dull, chalky appearance. The colour does not fully develop and the pieces do not shrink to the correct size, which of course is vital in a scale piece.
This, though frustrating, is at least capable of being put right. Underfired pieces can be refired to the correct temperature, although of course it is wise to replace the ageing elements first. A costly and tricky procedure which most kiln owners put off till the last possible minute. The minute after an underfire.

Overfirings are a complete disaster. I have only ever once experience an overfire, and every single piece in the kiln......the result of many weeks work, was lost.
On that occasion I was using my old, manual kiln, and a prop fell against the kiln sitter (a low-tech, mechanical way of switching off the kiln at the required temperature) and jammed it so that it didn't shut down the kiln.

So the temperature rose, and rose, until the smell of the floor melting under the kiln alerted me the fact that something was badly wrong.

Overfires turn the porcelain pieces into glassy objects, completely white, or completely black, depending upon the porcelain slip. I had hopes of using some of the less glassy ones as ghosts but china paint wouldn't adhere to the surface of the faces, and anyway, most of them were blistered on one side where the extremes of temperature had blasted them.

I now have a computer controlled kiln, in which overfires should never happen.

Theoretically.

There is always a first time for everything.

However, when I opened the kiln this morning, I was relieved to find that it had gone well.

Which I never, ever take for granted...........

Resentment simmers..........

Small dog is very distressed.

Apparently I posted a photo which shows her at less than her best.

Half cut.

I apologise unreservedly.

And to make amends I have printed a copy of her favourite pinup.

Laminated and everything.

And blu-tacked above her basket.

A tentative truce has been reached....................

Spring cleaning.............

Small dog has had her spring trim.

Under duress mark you, but after 60 minutes of shearing, she is now like a new dog.

I'll let the photos speak for themselves................

Firstly, a 'before' shot, where there is a slight air of suspicion on her face...........




Halfway through..............

Stares in disbelief at the amount of fur she's lost...........

Ordeal almost over.......only the shampooing still to do.

Clean and shorn and exhausted. At least we can see her face now.