Slugs and Sundries

It's my favourite day of the month! It's Total Up the Expenses and the Savings Day! I cheated and did it before the end of the working day, leaving just the Groceries tally blank. I'm not expecting us to spend money on anything except groceries. 

I enjoy tending the accounts even more than tending the garden because there are no slugs in the accounts. The horrible slugs and wicked snails have been feasting on our blackcurrant bushes and the rhubarb I lovingly grew from seed, and I'm not having it. 

There is a can of slug poison in the shed, but I did not buy it and I won't use it. The various gardening chemicals in the shed were there before we got here, and I suspect they are the reason the soil in the original raised bed is so rubbish. 

I am a 100% organic gardening true believer, and I'm becoming a permaculturist into the bargain. This is great news for B.A. for I want to sow wildflowers on our lawn, which will turn it into a wildflower meadow he will not even be allowed to mow. When the neighbours say something, we will say we are trying to attract the birds, the bees and the butterflies. Saving the birds, the bees and the butterflies is very PC, so I think we'll get away with it. 

But what to do about the slugs and snails? Tomorrow I will order a packet of slug-killing parasites and scatter them on the raised bed. These parasites hurt only molluscs, so my mind is at rest. It would be nice if birds came by day--and hedgehogs came by night--to eat the slugs and snails, but they don't. Thus it will be up to the tiny wormies, who will cost about £15, and I will record the cost under "Sundries." 

The soul of minimalism is not buying objects that you don't eat, read or really do need for your capsule wardrobe. Therefore, I don't have a lot down under "Sundries." This month's Sundries are as follows:

1. Family membership in Una Voce Scotland

2. Bicycle pump

3. Moth-stop hangers

4. Metal cannoli moulds

While that list may look a bit random, they contain worlds--or maybe just a blogpost each. But as I don't have time, I will just write short summaries.

#1 was on account of being radicalised by Traditionis Custodes. Surely someone must have warned Pope Francis about this. 

"Oh no, Holy Father! If you do this, the Trads will pray more! They'll go to Mass more often! They'll send more money to traditionalist orders! They might even take out memberships in Una Voce and subscribe to Mass of Ages!"

However, I am told that the Italian bishops were hellbent on stopping out our little base communities (base as in Liberation Theology, not as in low-minded), and PF acquiesced. Alas, cui caput dolet, omnia membra languent.

#2 was in celebration of Canada being in the Green Zone, so B.A. and I may see our Canadian parents sooner rather than later. We hope. At any rate, Aged P keeps a bicycle, a pair of hiking boots and a blue cardigan here. This morning I took the recently pumped-up bike for a spin along the river, and the ride was quite exhilarating. I haven't bicycled in years. 

#3 represents domestic life in this part of Scotland. Alas. Fortunately the moths have so far not shown any interest in my wedding dress (silk) or in our tweed suits (wool) but only in my secondhand green wool sweater, which is now living in the freezer. 

#4 is utterly frivolous, of course. But we do like cannoli and if we can't eat them in the Eternal City, we might as well eat them at home. Probably on the Feast of St. Pius X according to the Old Calendar, which is clearly more radicalisation. Take that, Enemies of Tradition! 

 

Apple Update

Last week two young men came by and pruned down our beech hedges to manageable shape. It was a great relief when they turned up, and our neighbour--whose garden had been impinged by one of the leafy monsters--was satisfied. The tough love had resulted in a dozen or so apples falling from the adjacent tree, so Benedict Ambrose gathered them up and I made the first apple pie of the season: a szarlotka, recipe from Sugared Orange by Beata Zatorska.

The thrill of eating our own fruit and vegetables never palls, so I am embarking on a Five Year Plan for the garden. 

Meanwhile, I have bought the metal tubes necessary for the manufacture of cannoli. If we can't go to the Nonna Vincenza in Rome,  we can at least summon up the spirit of Nonna Vincenza in our own kitchen. 

The Price of Sanity

I am feeling much better, and indeed felt much better by yesterday afternoon, thanks to sunshine, other people, and judicious spending. The price of sanity turns out to be £14.40, which is a fraction of the cost of a session with a good psychotherapist. 

The first stage in sanity (which was threatened by a frenzied dash around the flat looking for my cash card) was taking the bus (£1.80) to Portobello beach for a language exchange meeting. I was forced to snap out of English-language gloom to concentrate on my new friend's Polish-language account of her week. As we sat on the seawall with our legs dangling over the sand, the sun poured down, and my thoughts were filled not with far-away horrors but the everyday difficulties and dreams of Polish migrants in Edinburgh. 

After an hour-and-a-half of this bilingual tutorial in the lives of neighbours, we went together to Twelve Triangles where I hoped to make up for Friday's scream-whispering by buying pastries (£4.60). My language exchange partner listened with interest if I asked a woman staring longingly in the window at the various delights if she were part of a queue. 

This led to a short lecture on the use and spelling of "queue" as we walked to the library, so I could return my books. This duty done and my bus arriving, my new friend bicycled away back to Leith and I went home (£1.80). Benedict Ambrose greeted the pastries with joy and a cup of tea, and we scoffed them hurriedly for we had a 1 PM appointment to meet a young friend with a puppy. 

This didn't cost anything, for the young friend drove to our neighbourhood and we went for a long and scenic walk among trees. Our conversation was almost entirely about the puppy, and that was fine with me. The sun continued to pour down, and there was not a breath of wind. My arm didn't hurt, and I felt positively sane, if thirsty. 

Our young friend had parked near B.A.'s favourite pub, so after we said our good-byes, I led B.A. to the pub and we drank a pint and a half of ale (£6.20) in the partial shade of the pub garden. As I sipped my half-pint, I had a definite sense that, even if not all was well with the entire world, it was very well in our neighbourhood, which was a good place to be--just as good as Rome, when you get right down to it, at least on such a sunny, still Saturday. 

Sanity restored, the beer tipped me right into liberality, and so spying bicycle pumps in the window for £4.99, we got one so we could pump up the tyres on my mother's British bike. And somehow we ended up looking at a pretty house for sale (offers over £215,000) and then at the ice-cream shop for waffle cones (£5.20). 

We didn't make an offer on the house, but we did eat the waffle cones while actually sitting outside the shop instead of just walking to our next destination, and that was also very nice and sanity-enforcing. We bought some groceries (£17.15) and went home. B.A. pumped up the tyres and oiled the chain of Mum's bicycle and took it for an experimental ride. Canada is in the "Green Zone" at last, so the filial pressure on my parents to visit is huge. 

In the evening we watched a comedy full of pratfalls and devoid of Nazis and ideological anachronisms, and that too was very good for sanity. However, I then looked at The Kennel Club's webpage where I found a recent litter of Tibetan Spaniels in nearby Bo'Ness, and B.A. had to talk sense back into me.  The price of sanity may be only £14.40, but the price of buying and raising a puppy is too much. Sigh, sigh, sigh. 

Unhappy laughter

I don't know whether it was persevering through The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society film or  the news that a British official had escaped Afghanistan with a plane load of dogs and cats but not his Afghan staff, but I really lost it last night. Benedict Ambrose and I had a quarrel about COVID tests and why I wanted a pricey saliva test instead of the free Made-in-China stick up the nose, and I scream-whispered in several bursts.

It was past 11, and although I wanted to scream for real, I did not want to disturb the neighbours. They thoughtfully reserve their rows to Saturday nights before 10. 

I have sworn off news for the weekend, but this morning I've been reading the latest Spectator.  I found myself tittering at something, but it was not a happy sound. 

COVID restrictions + German occupation of Guernsey + Biden abandoning Afghanistan to Taliban + U.S. State Department actively preventing rescue of Afghani Christians + confusing tale about cats'n'dogs = Too Much. 

Clearly we live in terrible times, and if I had known by 1995 or so they were coming and that such a place existed, I would have fled to a certain Benedictine convent in the South of England and taken the veil. How peaceful and sane to polish already gleaming wooden floors and go out to tend the bees and the apple trees. 

On the other hand, I might have invested all my before-and-after-school earnings in Microsoft and then Apple, in which case I would be living in a gated villa on Capri, gently mocked by my friends for not having a wi-fi connection. 

Four common threads to these belated and therefore pointless ideas are gates and walls but also the South and sunshine. 

The comforting thought I had last night, when I strove for sleep, was that at least I help expose them--which theoretically should stop them from getting worse, or at least slow them down. For example, various people do not want you to know that many women experience changes to their monthly cycle after taking a COVID-19 jab. They do not want you to know to such an extent that I was thrilled when someone  wrote about it in the respectable Spectator last week. In the Letters section this week, someone who asked for his/her name not to be published and said he/she was a clinical assessor at London vaccination centres, said that "a conservative" 1 in 5 women report such a change to him. But when one 24 year old asked her pals on Instagram if they had experience this, and her post was instantly blocked.

Anyway, this is confusing work with fun-blogging with abandon, but dare I say that it is hard not to go crazy when we live in such crazy times? 

The Club

Not the Club, but near the Club.

Yesterday I had an unusual day in that I worked according to British Summer Time, not--um--Newfoundland Time. That is, I started at my own 9 AM and I knocked off at 5 PM instead of starting at British noon and stopping at 8 or 8:30 PM. Benedict Ambrose and I had been asked out to supper at our host's club, so I got permission to do this. 

For once I took a proper lunch break, the kind during which you get caught up on correspondence and go to the post office. As I walked home, I felt a frisson of novelty. Look at me on the High Street after noon on a work day! Wild!

I was rather rushed at 5 PM, though. I threw on a decent dress and the one pair of comfortable shoes that wouldn't swear too badly at it and followed B.A. out the door (in the bright sunshine!) to the bus stop. However, we arrived at the elegant Georgian address two minutes before we said we would, so all was well.  No sooner had the receptionist, sitting behind glass (or plastic) in the hallway, informed us that our host was there already than he appeared. We went through the usual members'-club warren of rooms to a staircase and climbed up to the dining-room. 

On our way, I noticed a lovely watercolour of "The Princess Royal," presumably Princess Mary, Countess of Harewood.  Up the stairs, I saw a rather glamorous photograph of the current Princess Royal, Princess Anne. In the dining room, there was a portrait of the young Princess Margaret. The prettier Royal women seems to be the Club's decorative motif. There are also cabinets full of silver trophies and the china has EIIR emblazoned on it. The floors are richly carpeted, and everything is elegance.

I think I was buttering a piece of bread when I was suddenly visited by the ghost of Magic Past, which is to say the Alice-in-Wonderland feeling I had the week I came to Edinburgh for a visit and met B.A., the Historical House, the Old Town, the New Town, the Traditional Latin Mass, Edinburgh dinner parties and all the rest of it. As the world of work and recycling bins slid away, I felt that I was back in September 2008. The feeling didn't last very long, but it did inspire me to look up the membership fees. 

Conversation was, of course, fascinating, and at one point I rushed away because something B.A. said reminded me of a story a colleague was working on, and I wanted to text him a potential lead. So that felt rather glamorous, too. When I emerged, B.A. and our host were preparing to sit by the empty grate in the Members' Lounge. In we went, to sit in large, buttoned, leather club chairs, surrounded by dark bookcases and more silver trophies. 

The party broke up after 9, I think. B.A. and I said good-bye to our host and walked through the New Town towards our bus stop. When we got there, I checked work messages and B.A. hurried on to Tesco to get a pint of milk. It had become a little chilly, so we had walked more quickly than I otherwise would have, for I love to look at New Town windows and admire any furniture or art visible. (Edinburghers should really close their curtains if they do not want the interested stares of passersby.) Unusually, the most prominent thing I saw in a New Town window last night was a clothes-drying frame, which doesn't hint at unfathomable glamour. 

This morning I am pondering how to get a little more of that Alice-in-Wonderland feeling back into my life, and I think it may involve an adjustment of my schedule so that B.A. and I can go out in the evenings more often. There is something deeply satisfying about leaving work before you are too tired to do anything but eat and then rest your head on the table. Also, the New Town is phantasmagorically wonderful in the evenings, and if we could afford to, we would move there in a shot.   

Adventures in Babysitting/B.A.'s Birthday

Rome: frequent conversation topic.

My right arm aches, and so I have been keeping typing to a minimum. I am working though--I got an email from a concerned reader whose wife had noticed I haven't written any articles for work lately. It's because I've been pulled up into the editorial team. My decision-making powers are limited to my colleagues' sentence structures and diction, though. 

Recent excitements include babysitting a four-year-old who has put his parents on the stage and thus needed to be entertained while his mother workshopped in London and his father played two performances here. Torquil, as he is not really named, informed me that his mother is not on the stage, but on the floor, and only his father is on the stage. I presume this is a reflection on their most habitual concert venues. Torquil also resisted being called a Stage Child, saying that he is too young to go on the stage. 

Torquil and I got to know each other on the bleachers (stone steps, really) at an open air venue, and our most exciting moment came when he picked up a tiny spider and was thoroughly grossed out. He asked me if I had ever picked up a spider, and I had to admit that I had never picked one up with my bare fingers and that he was very brave.  Our next exciting moment was when one of Torquil's markers went rolling down the rain-slippery steps and I chased after it. I looked back up at Torquil to see that, for the first time, he was laughing. 

Another excitement was Benedict Ambrose's birthday, and so I took the heavy chains off the coffers and sprinkled money liberally on cocktails and supper at an Italian restaurant B.A. says is "fun." In the morning he got to open his card from me (which included the promise of new trousers, which naturally I could not buy on my own) and a box from my parents, which included brand-new bedroom slippers from Barbour. We were both very impressed, and there is even a chance the slippers (being Barbour) were Made in Britain. 

My parents, frugal all their days, have begun to splash out on presents in their old age, and not only is B.A. now tromping round in Barbour slippers, we spend a good chunk of our mornings wrapped in white terrycloth robes with "ARMANI" written down the arms. This is such a contradiction to the shouts of "You'd only be paying for the label!" I heard throughout my childhood that I find it worthy of mention here. Meanwhile, the children of this neighbourhood are sometimes given designer labels as Christian names, so we are not shy about going outside in our Armani bathrobes to pick an apple from the tree or a slug off the rhubarb. 

 

The restaurant B.A. finds fun is called Bar Napoli, and I suspect its most diverting quality is its decent house red, which costs less than £17 a bottle. That said, the servers are actually Italian and speak enough tourist-aimed Italian for B.A. to understand, and we speak Italian back at them. The food is not the kind of Italian food we eat in Italy but the kind the more daring non-Italian Scots have eaten since 1965 or so. At the table next to us, a family ordered their dishes by the numbers.

We had asked our parish priest to join us, and he demurred as he thought it would be too noisy, and actually he was right. He would not have enjoyed the Aerosmith in the background, or gotten misty (as I did) at John Waite's "Missing You." 

B.A. ate everything on his plate and 2/3s of what was in the bottle, whereas I saved half of my dish and demanded a box (una scatola per domani!), just so I would have room for a cannoli. (That would be a cannolo, spellcheck.) Despite saying he couldn't and being in actual pain from overeating, B.A. helped me eat the cannoli, which came with ice-cream and whipped cream and a wafer and a small Italian paper flag. 

So yes, that was very fun. We talked about Rome, and when we are likely to go back, and about the fact that his Italian teacher there and my Italian teacher here are coincidentally from the same small town. We pondered the idea of visiting this small town, and we reminisced about our Christmas in Umbria. In Umbria, unlike in Edinburgh, we feasted on chestnuts, truffles and wild boar. 

The bill for this meal, including la mancia, came to £70. 

This morning I am contemplating renting a holiday flat in North Berwick in October, since it seems highly unlikely we would be able to go to Italy or Poland for our autumn break without a great deal of expense and unpleasantness. Another subject of B.A.'s birthday supper conversation was how grateful we are we spent the entire month of October 2021 in Rome. 

 

Planted the Rhubarb

Today I planted the rhubarb, and they must be relieved. I noticed that the one in the big pot has been doing a lot better than the one in the small pot. They were also looking a tad dry, poor things. However, this morning as I was doing dumbbell presses in the kitchen, I saw a video that inspired me to go out at once and make them a proper home. 

Here's the video:

The proper home is the raised bed beside the ivy-bound shed, between the black current bushes. One section has been covered with cardboard for several months and the other was a riot of sweet-smelling weeds. I did sow that bit with lettuce and rainbow chard, but it was really not to be. Really, that bed is useless for tender things. 

Anyway, I lifted the cardboard and pulled out the weeds,  turned over the dirt, got some leaf mould, dug it in, watered the whole, and put in my poor thirty rhubarb plants. Then I watered them again. They must think, in their plantish way, that they are in heaven--or at very least a lovely spa. 

 

Speaking of recovery, the latest rumour I heard is that Cardinal Burke is responding well to treatment, so hoorah! Keep the prayers going, as it would seem they are working (as it were). I brought up the issue of the dodgey concept of changing God's mind at theology school, and it was explained to me that by praying  we participate in God's will for the person, which is what God has invited us to do. 

To return to gardens, today I will make another apple crumble---if Benedict Ambrose goes out and picks me another lot of the six ripest. If it were a holiday I would bake a tarte tartin, but making puff pastry is too much of a challenge today. Our local Tesco doesn't have all-butter puff pastry, so perhaps it would be a good idea to pick up some the next time we are in Waitrose. (Cue angelic harps.) 

Poor Benedict Ambrose has promised to mow the lawn next week when he has finished his current diploma assignments, but this morning I was half-seriously thinking of buying a scythe. Now that's old school. Then, when I was enjoying myself making a home for the rhubarb, I gazed over the grass and pondered putting in six raised beds for more vegetables. This way, we'd have more vegetables and less lawn for B.A. to mow. We'd have to keep some lawn, for like everyone else around we dry our laundry outdoors whenever possible. 

I don't want to get carried away, however, as all the permaculture videos I've been have featured either California or Australia. Sure you can grow almost all your food in a suburban yard in Australia. Serious food gardening in Scotland involves polytunnels and horticultural fleece, and as they are made from plastic, I disapprove of them---for me, that is, not for the professional farmers.