Wot, no beer?

A response from Rowan re things you can do with lavender:

“You can make lavender sugar, mmmm same as vanilla sugar. You can flavour delicate fairy cakes with it.... You can put in with garlic instead of rosemary with lamb. Nice with chicken too. Better to use too little than too much in savoury cooking. Lavender jelly (as in strained jam not jello) is nice too.

”Lavender tea to help you relax and unwind, and yes, potpourri too. It also helps keep moths away so make a sachet and bung it with the woollens. Also make a sachet and tie to the bath tap so that the water runs over it when running a bath.”

So, it turns out you can drink lavender, though not as beer or wine. Lavender tea, sugar, fairy cakes and jelly are almost certainly never going to happen, but I do like the sound of using it instead of rosemary with lamb. And I’d already thought of using some for sachets in my drawers. (A sudden recollection of both my mother and grandmother doing the same, makes me wonder how this, like so much other traditional knowledge, has been wiped from memory by the Machiavellian chemical industry. Oh, lord, don’t get me started.)

After weeks of doing little more than producing one bud which I begin to think will never open, my scrappy survivor rose bush has produced one lovely bloom, so heavy on its poor, anorexic branches that it’s practically dragging on the ground. Would provide photographic evidence of this semi-miracle, but alas the batteries are dead on my camera and I don’t have any spares.

It’s not quite the mile Jane says is required, but I’ve started releasing the captured mice up the road when I check on the post. There are at least 15 houses between there and here. Am hoping they will start colonising somewhere else.

Off to Vancouver today with Mike – various appointments (including the birthday of his younger granddaughter) book marked around the delivery next Tuesday of my belongings from the UK. Am not looking forward to putting the futon base back together. Even if I can find the instructions (which I hastily packed after realising the shippers had taken it apart), they will be of limited use. It took me hours to put the bloody thing together the first time in Stoke Newington because, as I discovered after much cursing, a key instruction was actually wrong. Am hoping I will remember which bit that was.

The place will look fab when everything is unpacked and in place, but I’m dreading the process, complicated by the need to keep the halls clear for Mike to get around. Where am I going to put it all until it’s unpacked?

Pat will be watering the garden while I’m away. Hope all the tomatoes don’t ripen and get eaten by him while I’m away.