Another, much sadder project

A year ago this week I dodged Icelandic volcanic ash (plus ça change)and flew from London, where I’d been living for a decade, back to British Columbia, where I’d lived throughout the nineties. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting, moving from a major metropolis to a small Gulf Island. Whatever it was, I certainly wasn’t expecting that less than a year later I would be a widow of sorts, living alone on Gabriola without Mike. No, I certainly wasn’t expecting that.

Nor was I expecting to start this blog again. It had done its job. I was writing again. Well, I haven’t been writing since March when a massive heart attack took Mike away. (Yes, I know I’ve said it before. We all hope that when our time comes it will be quick and we will be oblivious and so it was with Mike, but it is brutal on those left behind.)

Although originally intended to be a blog (requested by friends in England) detailing the transformation of my once upon a time garden on Gabriola, this blog has also covered the transformation of the apartment Mike and I rented in Burnaby. It doesn’t, therefore, seem inappropriate that I should start it up again with another interior transformation.

This particular transformation is tinged with sadness, because Mike isn’t here to see and enjoy it.

In 2006, when our mortgage came up for renewal, we put some more money on it so we could do the renovations we’d been dreaming about since buying the place 10 years earlier, like turning the semi-finished basement into a guest suite and finally replacing the raised-pattern, diarrhoea-coloured carpet we’d inherited with the purchase. I was living in the UK, so poor Mike got stuck living with the renovations. I did my bit when I came over for Christmas that year, painting the finished basement and the kitchen and diningroom. We jointly chose a replacement carpet and the colour for the walls in the livingroom and bedroom. I didn’t think we needed to discuss the woodwork, because it was, well, wood. How was I to know that Mike (who was an easy mark for tradesmen) would somehow be convinced that the wood had to be painted to “protect” it? (Huh? Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction when I found out.) When asked what colour he wanted it painted, he said it should be painted the same colour as the wood – a reddish, mahogany brown. He thought, bless him, that I would like that, because he knew how much I liked the wooden window frames, doors and beams.

It was bad enough with the grey in the livingroom and bedroom.

But with the blue in the diningroom and kitchen it was just vile.

I got rid of the brown woodwork there over the long, snowy winter of 2008/9.

And now it’s also gone in the livingroom.

This transformation was part of the Down With Brown project undertaken last week with my wonderful friend Irmani, who flew all the way from London to pitch in.

Although the walls were probably ready for a lick of paint, I might have put off doing them had it not been for Mike’s perplexing decision to leave the cheap chipboard archways (instead of having them dry walled with everything else) and also paint it brown. (Honestly, sweetie, what were you thinking?)

So the walls had to be painted, too.

Those of you who remember the Burnaby apartment transformation story, may recall that it was all a bit crowded in my bedroom.

Well, there’s rather more space for everything now. (One of the things that sold Mike and me on the place originally was the huge front room with windows on three sides overlooking our “forest”.)

And the white woodwork makes it so much brighter. (Now, if I could only figure out what to do with the surplus to requirement desk parked at the end of the bed. I can’t get rid of it – it was a present from Mike – but there really is nowhere else I can put it.)

After a job bloody well done, I saw Irmani off on the float plane, stopping first for a lovely lunch.

Then she boarded the floatplane for a night with friends in Vancouver.

What a star.

Yesterday I dealt with the last of the ground level brown. (Not that I couldn’t have guessed beforehand, but painting louvered doors is really a pain in the ass.)

Of course, that still leaves the beams. General agreement that this is a job for a professional.

But it already looks so much better I think I can live with it until I can afford to pay someone. (Where is Josh?)

What, do I hear you ask, about the garden?

Well, I confess I’ve been pretty slack about that. (Without sounding flip, which I certainly do not intend, I did have a funeral and an apartment pack up* to sort out.) However, some progress had been made. Thanks to Krys, another wonderful friend, who flew out from Toronto after Mike’s memorial service and came over to Gabriola for a few days, a third of the vegetable patch was weeded (oh, yes, weeds had no problem growing in my barren soil) and dug over in April. My wonderful neighbour Pat did the rest of it. And now I’m finally getting to the rest of it.

More anon.


* When I went back after the move to do a final clean and inspection of the Burnaby apartment it had gone back to being beige throughout. It was as if Josh and I had never painted it, as if Mike and I had never been there. Made it easier to walk in the door in some ways and extraordinarily sad in other ways. When I asked the very nice building manager Zeb what was going to happen about the deposit, he at first told me it would be forfeited, as Mike and I had signed a lease agreeing to be there for at least a year. When I made it clear this wasn’t, under the circumstances, going to fly, he rang head office where someone, under the circumstances, agreed. I was then presented with an itemised list of deductions which meant I wouldn’t get anything back. With the exception of a charge for repairs, which I accepted as Mike’s walker had gouged a few corners, I told him I wasn’t going to accept any other deductions and wanted the deposit back, minus the repairs. This involved a call to someone else at head office, who wasn’t there. By then I just wanted to get out of the building. So I said, “Zeb, when you talk to this woman, you need to tell her three things. One, she is trying to rob a widow. Two, I am a media savvy woman who has good contacts in the press and friends at City Hall. Three, if she doesn’t agree to refund what is owed to me, I will become this property company’s worst nightmare.” An hour later he rang me back to say I would be refunded the amount I was asking. Bit of a letdown, really, such an easy win.

Final score

A reminder from Jane that it’s been a long, long time since anything has been added to the blog.

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, a girl named Anne decided (what with one thing and another) to leave her bustling home town and return to an island (let’s call it Gabriola) off the west coast of Canada where she also had a home.



Sadly, while she had been away from her house on Gabriola, the garden, which she’d laboured (with the help of her neighbour Pat) to create, had gone to rack and ruin.



This made Anne very sad.

So she vowed that when she was back on Gabriola she would rejuvenate her poor garden. Visions of year-round home grown crops danced through her head (as did flower beds and something to sit on which wasn’t the ruins of an old bench).

But before she left her bustling home town, there were many, many people she needed to see and bid farewell. Quite a few of them also lived in her bustling home town and she was able to catch up with most of them in one go at one of her favourite places.



But then there was her friend Rory, who lived many miles away in Cornwall and couldn’t come to her favourite place.

So Anne went to visit Rory.



One morning, while she was visiting Rory, they got to talking about creative things – like dancing (which Rory used to do professionally) and writing (which Anne used to do rather a lot of). Anne told Rory how sad it was that she never seemed to have (or find) the time to do any writing. Rory raised an eyebrow – as well he might. This eloquent eyebrow of Rory’s was telling Anne that she was full of something that was good for gardens, that if she really, truly wanted to write, she would somehow find the time.

Right then and there, Anne made a promise to Rory (and to herself) that when she got back to Gabriola she would (at a minimum) write something for an hour every morning when she got out of bed. It didn’t have to be fiction. It didn’t matter what it was, as long as she was writing something. It could be a letter to a friend or a journal entry. It could be anything, including – oh, yes, this is a good idea – a blog about her garden project.

And so she returned to Gabriola. On the very first morning she started writing a garden journal. Eventually she remembered that this journal was supposed to be a blog.



Like the bench and flowerbed parts of her vision, the blog went well. (Unfortunately the year-round home grown produce part was a far from resounding success.)

Then one day a funny thing happened. She switched her computer on in the morning, but instead of writing about crap soil, she found herself writing. Honest to god, make it up as you go along fiction.

Anne was very, very excited. It had been so long since she’d been on a roll like this. She kept on writing, writing, writing, in her exhilaration all but forgetting about her blog and the many followers (well, four) who’d been left in the lurch.

After a day spent planting bulbs, she decided she really should correct that.



So, here’s the final score:

Peas 0
Beets 0
Carrots 0
Broccoli 0
Pumpkins 0
Squash 0
Cantaloupe 0
Red peppers 1 (see above)
Tomatoes tons
Blackberries tons (for which garden project can take no credit)

Resolutions 1 (next year I will build the raised beds and get some bloody topsoil)

Now that the rains have come, turns out the soil in the vegetable patch can support life – it is covered in happy weeds which will need to be dug up before I empty the bottom half of the compost box on the patch and dig it in.

And now I really must go. There are fictional characters calling my name, eager to find out what they are going to do next.

Preserving myths

In the larder I now have bottles of peach and raspberry chutney (delicious, I discover, on the pork chops Mike’s bought for dinner), pear and blueberry chutney and pickled beets. How cool is that?

Well, it would be way cooler if I’d actually made any of these delicacies. I could claim I did, but that would, not even strictly speaking, be untrue. Along with a small basketful of lovely stones collected from the beaches of Malcolm Island, the preserves are a souvenir of a recent visit to Morag (maker of said preserves) and Darryl, old friends from Greenpeace toxic days, now living in Sointula.



And, yes, it is every bit as pretty as Darryl’s poster suggests (although the mountain in the background is not on the island, but one of the coastal mountains seen on a very clear day).

Was quite looking forward to the long drive from A (Gabriola) to B (Sointula).

Glove compartment full of old favourite CDs to play at high volume and sing along to on my way up the island highway. (Singing alone in the car being the only time I can let rip musically without people clapping their hands over their ears and begging for mercy). Unfortunately, as I discovered soon after I got onto the highway at Nanaimo, the CD player in the car has died. Bugger. Oh, well, will just have to listen to the radio. Hmm. No signal of any description (let alone CBC, which I want) seems to be available anywhere on the radio soon after I clear Campbell River. And now the “highway” is two lanes, it’s pouring with rain and I keep getting stuck behind logging trucks for miles until I have a shot at overtaking them. Not quite as enjoyable as I’d anticipated.

Still, despite rain and logging trucks, I make such good time I am able to catch the 4:05 ferry from Port McNeil, rather than the 6:30 I’d been aiming to catch. (Turns out Morag’s estimate that it was a five hour drive from Nanaimo to Port McNeil had been based on people who, unlike her – and me – actually stick to the speed limit.) So, of course, when I arrive two and a half hours early, they are not home. Never mind, I get to enjoy the view from their deck, which, if I’d had any trouble figuring it out before, makes it easy to understand why they traded in a leaky condo in Vancouver for a home in this outpost.


Not bad, eh?

They arrive back soon afterwards from a trip to Sointula’s only food shop (the oldest co-operative in BC, apparently) with news that earlier that afternoon a pod of whales had spent an hour rubbing on the beach by Bere Point. Sadly for Darryl and Morag, this news came second hand from someone at the Co-op.

Hardly surprising that we spend chunks of the next two afternoons hanging out on said beach to see this.



Wish I could say we did, but all we got were some dolphins in the distance and one seal (who I swear was a scout for the whales, sent to warn them if there were any witnesses). Morag and I did, however, get hours of enjoyment out of throwing stones at a log. What a lot of fun you can have doing absolutely nothing.

PS Despite it turning out that the Sointula pub, the Rub (for whale rub, not rub a dub dub) was holding a karaoke on the Saturday night and despite my inability to sing along with old favourites in the car, I was not tempted to get up and sing.

Living off the land

Tomato salad and squash bisque with fresh baked herbed scones for dinner, followed by the long anticipated blackberry crumble (or rather, as I am reminded when I look up my old recipe, blackberry crisp). Ah, the satisfaction of it all.

Okay, so the squash was from Pat’s garden, not mine, and it’s not as if I grew the wheat for the scones, but satisfying nonetheless.

Little culture update: the Gabriola Theatre festival was a blast. Saw three plays in three days. The first, Whisky Bars was absolutely first rate. Even bought the CD. The second, St Mark’s Gospel, was another bravura turn turn by our resident theatrical genius, Anthony Holland (retired founder of Langara College’s renowned Studio 58 theatre training programme) The third was Bed Among the Lentils, one of Alan Bennett’s delightful Talking Heads series of one act plays.

There was even a free Bob Bossin concert (though, sadly, he didn’t do the Nanaimo song).

This is only the festival’s second year and apparently it’s already acquiring quite a buzz in the world of thesps, so it’s likely to be a bloody marvellous annual event. (Whisky Bars in particular was as good as most things I’ve seen on the West End stage in the past decade.)

Off today for a mini break – four days visiting old mates Darryl and Morag on Malcolm Island, way the hell up the north end of Vancouver Island and then, like Gabriola, a 20 minute ferry ride. Darryl is managing to carve out a niche for himself doing photography work. Am looking for some tips on opting out.

Call me a quitter

Well, you wouldn’t be far wrong. It’s not that I’m quitting on the garden altogether – far from it – but taking it to the next level (e.g. getting some frigging fertiliser into the veg patch soil) is a bit beyond me at the moment. In his last e-mail, garden guru Peter acknowledges that ultimately the only solution is to get him over here from England to supervise, as he has done for his various offspring in their time of horticultural need. This isn’t going to happen soon, I suspect. So, in the meantime I carry on watering what does survive and enjoy the tomatoes. As for anything more serious: next year.

Call me crazy.

And you will win you here this. Having stumbled on the veg growing lark, I need another project. I know! I think, as Mike and I are walking from the car back to the house. There is nowhere to sit at a table outside and have a meal or even a cup of tea. Given that I’ve had much more success with landscaping than I have with growing food, this seems an obvious next step.

And I spy exactly where this new feature should go.


It’s a nice spot, close to the house, so Mike can easily use it, too, under the trees, but it does get dappled sunshine in the afternoon. Perfect. Now all I need to do is excavate all the rocks which comprise 90% of the mound.

Set to it, armed with a recycling box to dump and move the rocks and the brush and pan we use for cleaning out ashes from the woodstove. Clearly not the best tools for the job (not that I have any idea what the best tools for the job are), but they are what’s at hand. After an hour, add a dairy crate to sit on, rather than kneeling on the rocks.

After three hours, some visible progress has been made.

Clearly this is going to take weeks. Bit back breaking, but also quite therapeutic. I’ll get there in the end. Mind you, at this rate, the summer – and its opportunities for enjoying sitting outside – will probably be long over. Never mind. Imagine the satisfaction when the job is done.

Go inside to get a bottle of beer and realise, coming out of the house, that I am a complete bloody idiot.


There is already a nice, flat area right outside the back door which would be perfect for a table and chairs. All I have to do is move the herbs and the flower pot. Smack myself on the head (seriously, I really do) and wonder what the hell I had been thinking.

Okay, so this is going to be a bit easier than I thought.

Watch this space.

Oh, dear

Send horticultural guru cousin Peter the link to last entry, hoping he will tell me the appearance of three tomato plants bursting forth unexpectedly suggests the soil might not be as bad as I think. The tomatoes cut no ice with him. Apparently they will grow in anything.

It is another detail which catches his eagle eye: “Sorry to tell you that your soil is as poor as you feared. The rocket is flowering because it fears for its life and is trying frantically to reproduce before it turns up its toes.” Oh, dear.

Topsoil is expensive, he points out, suggesting I investigate artificial fertilisers. Obviously I will have to do just that. (Although the idea of building a raised bed and filling it full of lovely topsoil – no matter how expensive – is attractive.) I shall have to consider my options.

Meanwhile, I am looking forward to the cultural event of the year on the island: The Gabriola Theatre Festival is this weekend. Hurrah.

And tonight I’m going to the pub for a few pints and another pool tournament with Pat. Hopefully this time Mustang Sally will survive unscathed.

What the fuck?

Back on Gabriola. Go out to inspect the garden, which Pat has been watering in my absence. What the fuck?

In the spot where the broccoli went to meet their maker there are plants. I blink, look again. Is it possible? Were the broccoli just resting before putting on a big growth spurt? Well, yes, I suppose it is possible, but if this is the case, why the hell do they look so much like tomato plants?


Go inside and do a Google image search for young broccoli plants. Who am I trying to kid? This bears no resemblance whatsoever to the plants outside. And then I remember that part of the area I’ve rototilled did have some compost – clearly including rotting tomatoes – spread on it. So, it turns out I have actually managed – albeit by accident – to grow something in this soil from seed. Well, big pat on the back for me.

A sudden reminder of the mutant tomato plant which grew from the seed of a fallen ancestor in our Walthamstow garden.

This was, I thought, a minor miracle, given that the reason we grew everything in containers was because the ‘soil’ consisted of an inch of mulch on top of an inch of sand on top of concrete. When I emailed this photo of the plant and six foot two Ben to my cousin Peter, he explained that tomatoes planted in shallow soil will simply grow up (and up and up).

Oh, well. Not sure these newcomers will actually have time to flower and bear fruit. And it’s not as if I need more tomatoes.

There are indeed hundreds of tomatoes coming out on the two well advanced Sweet 100s I planted when everything else in the so-called vegetable patch was withering and dying.


And, while Pat ended up reaping a lot of the benefit of the Tumbler tomatoes in the two weeks I was away, there are still quite a few coming out on these.


Elsewhere in the garden, the hanging-in-there rocket has not only had a bit of a growth spurt (are these leaves actually big enough to be worth harvesting for salad?), but are actually flowering. And, much to my astonishment, some of the carrots seem to be staging a comeback. I could actually get a few carrots out of my garden. Well, well. (The lettuce, on the other hand, has completely disappeared, as has the last trace of the beets. Oh, well.)

And the blackberries are ready to pick!

Not quite enough yet to make the blackberry crumble I’ve been wanting for months, but more than enough berries to have with some vanilla gelato for dessert tonight.

And there are other garden crops – even if they’re not mine. When I go over to thank Pat for watering the garden, he pulls out a large zucchini (courgette) and an acorn squash for me. (My own pumpkin and spaghetti squash plants are struggling to produce any produce, but I haven’t completely given up on them yet.) Mike turns his nose up at the squash – like I don’t remember he doesn’t like squash – until I remind him that I have a delicious squash soup recipe.

Meanwhile, indoors, the mouse war has gone ultrasonic. The absence for a fortnight of any dry cat food or a water bowl for Tri may have already discouraged them (no sign of new droppings on my return) and I’m keeping it that way.

Discovered at the Home Hardware on Commercial Drive (where they not only cut an eight foot curtain rod down to the seven foot I needed, but also fixed a lampshade the shippers had buggered up – I love those guys) that plug-in ultrasonic rodent repellers exist. This shop, as former Drive residents will attest, has everything. Where was the ultrasonic option at Canadian Tire or Home Depot? Nowhere, that’s where. So, fuck off, Mickey Mouse, and thank you, Home Hardware.

Anatomy of a room

I know this photo has already put in an appearance (and that this has nothing to do with the garden project), but it strikes me that it deserves some attention.

Anyone who’s known me during the past thirty years (blimey, how did that happen?), would probably guess instantly that this is a photo of my bedroom.

The small BOAC (from the days when long haul British Airways was still British Overseas Airways Corporation) travel trunk beside the dressing table has been with me the longest. Inside is a very glamorous doll named (by me) Aurora, for the princess in Sleeping Beauty. Hanging on the rack opposite her is a wardrobe including evening gowns, peignoir and ‘fur’ coat, most of which were hand stitched by my mother during long winter evenings after I’d been sent to bed. This trunk of delights was left unwrapped and open for me to discover with joy and astonishment on Christmas morning when I was about five years old.

On the corner of the dressing table, near the trunk are two mementos of my time in New York when I was 20: An art deco jug, which was the beginnings of my collection of 1930s blue glass and a photo of me with Dan, a man I adored (in a father-I-never-had way). On the other side of the dressing table is a photo of my mum, looking very jolly, in her RAF uniform during the war. In between the two photos is a crescent shaped piece of mirrored blue glass on which my perfume has resided in three cities on two continents.

The dressing table itself and a matching chest of drawers (corner of which can be seen in bottom right of photo) were purchased during my waitressing days in Toronto – when some days I made just mad tips – in what used to be a great antique/second hand furniture shop in the Beaches area where I lived.

Other excellent purchases from this fantastic shop included the beautiful blue glass coffee and side tables which the fuckwit house sitter from hell destroyed when Mike was in hospital, seen here in happier days in my apartment in Toronto. (The curtains in this photo, having also hung in my livingrooms in Vancouver, Stoke Newington and Walthamstow, are now hanging in the lounge in Burnaby.)



The same shop on Queen Street in Toronto provided me with the deco sideboard and table and chairs in the diningroom on Gabriola (furniture I considered, but am now glad I didn’t, move to London in 2001). So, yes, that shop did a lot of business with me.



Anyway, back to the anatomy of the bedroom in Burnaby.

The lady lamp on the desk (itself a fairly recent acquisition in Walthamstow) and another on the other side of the bed were purchased from a wonderful art deco shop in World’s End in Chelsea. Sadly, the shop is no more, but the lamps have resided beside my bed in London (twice), Toronto and Vancouver (now twice).

The Arrobus watercolour of Town & Country School in Hampstead, now hanging above the desk was also purchased whilst in Finchley Road and is also very well travelled. (Out of curiosity I’ve just gone on the internet to see if there is any information about the value of an Arrobus. Seems to be about what I paid for it 25 years ago, so no appreciation. Oh, well. I didn’t buy it as an investment.)


Not visible in the Burnaby photo, but seen here are two other pieces of art purchased whilst residing in Finchley Road. I bought the two Tito water colours because I liked them, having no idea that I had accidentally stumbled on the originals of two not entirely unknown pieces of art until I saw the one on the right reproduced as a print in a French restaurant in Toronto. I have never had them valued as I love them dearly and do not want to be tempted to ever sell them. Also not visible in the Burnaby photo is the fan, purchased many years ago when I was on holiday in Granada with my friend Angelika. Sadly, no wrought iron mantelpiece in Burnaby, so the Titos and fan reside on and above the chest of drawers.

The duvet cover also goes back to Finchley Road, ordered on impulse from an ad in the Observer colour supplement, back in the day when only the Sunday papers had magazines. (I do miss having a good Sunday paper to read. The total lack of one here has led Mike and me to actually save the Saturday Globe & Mail to read on Sunday mornings.)

The Casablanca poster above the bed was purchased in the Fremont district of Seattle when Mike and I were visiting friends many years ago. It’s been above my bed on two continents.



On the wall opposite the Casablanca poster, is another one I’ve had for years: Roses and Rue by Edward Bawden, purchased from the Tate for obvious reasons.


The cat looks like Clancy and I’ve always been a Guardian reader.

This second view of the room also includes part of the snow dome collection which began as a joke on holiday in Venus in the 1980s and somehow ballooned out of control.

And just visible on the door to the room is the poster from my dear (and tragically departed) friend Tim’s retrospective show.


The only time I’ve ever been able to hang this long, tall poster to proper advantage was in the upstairs hallway of the house in Walthamstow.

So, that’s it: my trip down memory lane.

Back to the Gabriola garden tomorrow.

Further discombobulation

Remember this bedroom in the beige Burnaby apartment I found in June?


Well, now it looks like this.


As the place in Burnaby looks and feels more and more like my home, I’m feeling increasingly discombobulated. Who am I? Where am I? Why am I here? (Actually, that’s all rather more like existentialism than discombobulation, so perhaps I’m feeling increasingly existential. Time to change my name to Simone?)

The summer Mike offered me to decompress is suddenly almost over and I really do have to start thinking about employment. As previously noted, the odds of finding a decent job are much greater in Vancouver than on Gabriola (where the odds are virtually nonexistent), so it’s good that the flat here feels like home. (Which Gabriola also will as soon as I get back there next Monday.)

While I struggle with (and spare readers from) the tortured process of figuring out what the hell I want to do with the rest of my life, I offer as a diversion, further proof that I might want to consider interior decorating as a line of work.

From this…

to this.



And from this…

to this.


Turns out, as I discovered when I unpacked my books, that I’d had a rather more severe cull before leaving London than I thought I’d had. So, one of the tall bookcases Luna and I put together last month is actually surplus to my requirements. Just as well, really, as the storage room is overflowing with boxes of books from Mike’s old office at the University of British Columbia. (He was in hospital being treated for cancer when he reached retirement age. The university informed him – like there was a lot he could do about it from his hospital bed – that they needed his office cleared out. Grad students boxed up everything and the 42 boxes were sent – for lack of any other option – to Mike’s daughter Heather’s place, where he had been paying her to store them. Years and years of books and magazines and journals and theses and papers. It’s a laborious process going through them, but at least there is somewhere to put the books he wants as they come out of the boxes. Then there’s the question of what to do with the ones he doesn’t want. I’m hot wired to never just throw a book out, but where or where can they go?)

And I also have a nice place to smoke, complete with a Provencal tablecloth and the Ricard ashtray I stole from a restaurant in Montpellier decades ago when my friend Krys was a student there. That ashtray has crossed the Atlantic almost as many times as I have.

Burnaby bliss

A night spent in my own bed, with my own pillows and duvet, reading by my own lady lamp, sitting at my own desk now, sipping a cappuccino in my own mug. The books are all in the book cases - in alphabetical order, please note. I am the unpacking queen. (The show off mention of alphabetising books, reminds me suddenly of being summoned by Jane from recovering from a root canal to help her get her new book shop ready for opening. In one afternoon and evening I stocked in alphabetical order – obviously – the entire wall of fiction. So yesterday’s book unpacking session was nothing, really.)

Yes, there are still a couple of boxes to unpack (clothes which I figure can wait a day as they’d already been in boxes for three months), plugs to change on other lamps, pictures to hang on walls, surplus boxes to be flattened, but, hey, I’m bloody impressed with how much I got done yesterday.

I am in love with the removal men (particularly the tall one with the walrus moustache and the deep, bass voice), not so much because they were lovely (which they were), but because they put my bed frame back together for me in no time flat. I’d been dreading that chore, remembering all the cursing involved in trying to assemble it originally in Stoke Newington, remembering the discovery that the instructions (packed in some box somewhere) were actually wrong, but not remembering how. Without the removal men, I suspect I would not have been sleeping on my own bed last night and I know the day would not have gone so well.

Back to the last boxes. Pics to follow.

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.

Taking the piss

I’m tidying up downstairs and pick up my running shoes to put them away. It’s been sandal weather for weeks and likely to remain so. Somewhat perplexed by one of my shoes making a noise. Look inside and find a cache of dry cat food. I know Tri didn’t put it there. And I haven’t been putting dry food out for him down here since the invasion. Bastards were stockpiling.

A comment from Jane yesterday that conventional wisdom is mice need to be released at least a mile from home. So, the theory that I may just be catching the same two stupid ones is gaining traction. If that’s the case, one of them has smartened up, as there is only one in a trap this morning. Grrr.

Am hoping that 10 days of no food or water down here while we’re in Vancouver will put them off the place.

On a brighter note, the two well advanced tomato plants I put in the dead zone which is my veg patch are actually bearing fruit. And I notice, while watering the garden that there are half a dozen blackberries ready to pluck, which I do. Yum. Looking forward to blackberry crumble later this month. (And just stuffing my face with blackberries.)

Home grown curly kale in African peanut stew for dinner. Unfortunately not home grown by me. The kale was a present from Kelly, who’s garden is overflowing with it. I will also soon be eating a lot of home grown courgettes (oops, zucchini) as Pat will never be able to get through the number coming off his giant plant.

Well, somebody’s gardens are doing okay. And mine does look pretty.

My first crops!

Included in tonight’s dinner salad, we have my first cherry tomatoes – two each. They are absolutely delicious.



Lots more coming on various bushes, although I may have to give Pat carte blanche to eat many of them, as we are off to Vancouver again this week – 10 days, during which my belongings will arrive from London and the place will be properly transformed.

Elsewhere, sadly, things do not progress as well.


Although another tiny pumpkin appears to be forming on the pumpkin plant, the first one seems to be rotting before my eyes. Sigh.



There also appear to be more red peppers sprouting, but the first one hasn’t grown in over a week and is still very much a green pepper. (But the bench looks nice, doesn’t it?)

Like the pepper, the rocket has stopped growing long before it might be harvestable and the lettuce is disappearing without ever bearing any real resemblance to salad veg.

So, to recap: I have failed, in my crap soil (actually, a bit of crap in it would have helped immeasurably) to grow carrots, peas, beets, lettuce, broccoli or cantaloupe. (Scratch the last one. The cantaloupe never even seeded in the pot, let alone made it into the crap soil.) If it weren’t for the two well advanced tomato plants I bought in desperation and planted in the grow nothing soil, I wouldn’t be able to bear looking at the so-called vegetable plot. Next year, next year…

In non-gardening related news, I’m taking prisoners two at a time in the mouse population of my downstairs room. Having failed completely to find any humane, catch-and-release mousetraps on Gabriola (the guys in Arbutus did actually laugh when I asked), I’ve been to Nanaimo to buy some. The instructions recommend peanut butter as bait, but I know what these suckers want: dry cat food. Bait works a treat and every morning I get to carry the traps (wish I’d bought more than two, ’cos I know there are more of them) across the road to dump the mice in the woods. Just hope the bastards aren’t following me straight back. They all look the same to me, so for all I know I could just be catching and releasing the two same stupid ones while the others run around all night laughing at them.