At last the olive trees I smuggled back from Greece in the bottom of the car, have a new home here in Wales. My friend R whizzed his tractor round the edge of the upper field that borders the churechard two weeks ago. The jury is out on the chestnut and mulberry trees I planted at the far end and bottom last year. There are signs of life but not many. That hot summer when I was away in Greece, so could not water them, may have proved fatal. If so I shall try again next year.
The bottle marked vodka contains, of course, apple juice. Producing at 6 litres a day, I am rapidly running out of glass bottles so if anyone locally has any spare I will happily swap eight empties – which you were going to bin anyway – for one full of apple juice. There is a suggestion that the next batch will be apple and damson juice. It is worth one experimental run.
For some reason, I am snowed under with apples from the orchard by the river Dee this year. This week I brought in two 25 litre buckets of apples. I could easily bring in another twenty if I had the time and energy to process them all and enough bottles to store the juice in.
Hell I voted for her, something for which I must again apologise for to everybody else in Wrexham, but surely that merits a personal visit. It seems as if Wrexham Athletic is here in the last village in Wales tonight. At the school gates M, a fellow young mum who is a true libertarian as is her husband D, greets me with the news that flyers are out saying Atherton will be “door knocking” tonight. M says that D has a few words for our MP in this red wall seat and one suspects that Ms Atherton will not enjoy that monologue.
Both harvests have been good this year. I picked all the peppers, both the soft bell shaped ones and the spicier long green ones, earlier this week. The chilli plants are still turning red so what you see below is just the first crop. There will be a stack more to come and, after last year’s bumper crop we are still working through the dried chillies from 2021. Even an Anglo Indian household like this one cannot keep up with what our gardens supply.
As it happens, four week days out of five I look after young Jaya until nursery starts at 1 PM and on the fifth day I prepare her for nusery starting at nine so the answer is likely to be me. Moreover, at the weekend when her mum dresses her she does not wear odd socks. My late dad taught me that it was a bit lower middle class to worry about matching socks and, at this point, Jaya agrees with him and with me on this matter.
I think that I have one last crop of radishes to harvest in a few weeks but the penultimate crop of the year was a big one.
What links the picture on a Scottish beer, Russ Tamblyn (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers), Back to the Future 2, Don Everly ( of the singing Brothers), Axl Rose of Guns n’ Roses, Anthony Perkins (psycho), the Sound of Music and me? The answer is Venetia Strevenson my father’s first cousin who died this week. I was with my father’s sister Aunt L on the day we learned that her cousin had passed away and while she was very sorry to hear the news, she noted that she and Venetia moved in rather different social circles.
In this podcast, I reflect on the Kwasi Kwarteng, Liz Truss mini budget. I am amazed and how badly the right wing commentariat has called it for it was mean and unjust and economically illiterate. It is not what Mrs Thatcher would have done and was a betrayal of her brand of conservatism and of the poor, working and middle classes too. It was just awful at every level and should form the basis of an electoral rout for the Tories in two years which will be fully deserved.
Record attendance at WSL game scream all the newspaper headlines after the Arsenal Spurs derby yesterday. Arsenal itself tweets out a picture of the crowd and of a big screen boasting of 53,737 tickets sold. Well all up to a point..
There is just so much to do but my target is to harvest at least one crop a day and put it away for winter storage. Tomorrow is the official start of the apple harvest and, having jumped the gun by a week on the crabapples and edibles from the new top orchard I have created, work will, start on the old orchard by the river which is dripping with reddening apples begging to be scratted and crushed into juice. Meanwhile…
Liberal US chat show host Bill Maher serves up some utter gems from time to time. Because he is essentially of the left he can challenge the new left in a way that many of us cannot without risking a new media driven firestorm and calls for mo platforming and career destruction. This is Maher a week ago on the rewriting of history, slavery and much else. He is funny and bang on the money. Enjoy.
The Autumn harvest is now underway at the Welsh Hovel. Yesterday Joshua and I picked about 90 eating apples, mostly a bright red but with a few Golden Delicious, from the top orchard I planted two years ago. All, bar a handful in the fruit bowl, are now wrapped in newspaper in the apple rack for Autumn consumption. We also picked a hefty weigh of crabapples which I shall make into jelly tonight.
When I was 16 my father arranged for me to join the Marylebone Cricket Club waiting list and a few cold winters later I found myself a member of the world’s most famous cricket club. These days the waiting list is an eternity long. As I am allergic to London, I have not been to a match in years. My in-laws are the only Indian family on earth with no interest in cricket but I keep on forking out the Country membership fee on the basis that one day I shall retire and head down to snooze in the sun watching a spot of cricket at Lords.
Uju Anya is a university professor and researcher in “applied linguistics, critical sociolinguistics, and critical discourse studies primarily examining race, gender, sexual, and social class identities in new language learning through the experiences of African American students.” If that sounds like bollocks it is. But Carnegie Mellon University likes her stuff. Yesterday she celebrated the impending death of the Queen on twitter. Twitter took dowen the tweet but you can see it below. Carnegie condemned the tweet but that was that. Had a white professor celebrated the impending death of, say, Nelson Mandela by calling him a terriorist, he would have been fired. It is a double standard. Twitter should leave the tweet up so that everyone can see it and realise what a ghastly waste of space old hag Uju is. If you believe in free speech you can’t be selective and the world is a better place for knowing how vile Uju is and what a dump Carnege must be for giving her tenure and for not firing her on the spot.
