Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Papal hearts
Interested to read in today's DT about the request of the Polish Church - presumably the Catholic one - to have the late Polish Pope's heart for display. When we were in Paris last year we came across some fancy urns containing the hearts (and maybe other internal organs - canopic jars I think the Egyptians used to call them) of the great and the good. I was not aware of organs being abstracted from the late Pope before his burial in what I remember to be a rather handsome and rather plain wooden coffin. I wonder if any were? Or if the Vatican authorities would contemplate such a thing so long after the event? And what sort of a display does the Polish Church have in mind? A travelling shrine mounted in a bullet-proof rollers? It might be, of course, no more than that the DT has got it wrong again. There was certainly at least one editing error of confusion between length and space - 'covers an area of two miles' - not being quite the right way to describe the coverage of a maze. Perhaps they meant the length of hedge making it up. Either way it sounds quite big and worth a visit (Longleat).
Got the second row of potatoes in yesterday. Which got frosted in last night, unlike the first which was snowed in. With the schools off, a quiet time doing it, apart from the first dreadful jingles of the year from an ice cream van. Which prompted the thought of what do people who sell ice cream from vans do in the winter? How many of them make enough to troll off to the Costa del Blanca for the off-season? There was a time when the business was rewarding enough for there to be battles - or at least scuffles - between rival operations. A good stand - say that on Epsom Downs - was said at the time to be worth hundreds of pounds per sunny Sunday afternoon. Worth a scuffle.
Having done the potatoes, decided to weed the South side of the short row of Jerusalem artichokes - which I had left undisturbed (and unweeded. This last being a mistake) over the winter in the hope that the crop of tubers from last year will sprout this year. We shall see. But in the course of weeding came across the most odd plant. About two feet long, a quarter of an inch thick at the green end and half an inch thick at the brown end, green end out but most of which was lying an inch or so under the ground. There were rings of buds around the stem about every inch or so, top to bottom. Those underground were sprouting vigorously, white shoots, straight out, with the longest shoots in the middle. The fat end had been hacked off something at some point, some time ago by the look of it. The fat end was also quite near the bamboo - which does send out strong shoots, but this thing did not look like one of them. Can't remember anything answering the description from last year. A mystery.
Rather a thin TLS last week - a political issue. But it did include a sorry little anecdote about how Mr Selfridge went bust at the end of his career and lost his shop - so he used to catch the bus from his modest flat in Putney or somewhere like, to come at gaze from across the road at what had been his shop. I remember Mr Lamont doing something of the sort once, from across the road from the Treasury building, but I didn't have the verve to greet him, despite having been one of his underlings (very under) once.
There was also a very vitriolic peice about the iniquities of the Audit Commission and how it had presided over the destruction of local government and the installation of of a very rampant variety of targetitis. What was puzzling was why should the executive editor of the Sunday Times (whatever that might mean) and a member of the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission (that is to say a fully paid up member of the BBB), have so much spleen to vent on this, admittedly important, subject? What has the Audit Commission done to him? Was it just that he was the bosom friend of the Dame Shirley, caught for gerrymandering of a sort that her Labour colleagues had been doing in a slightly differant way for years?
Brown bird flashed across the lawn this morning. Another of those mysterious thrush like ones? Too fast to tell what size it was, let alone what shape. Another mystery.
Got the second row of potatoes in yesterday. Which got frosted in last night, unlike the first which was snowed in. With the schools off, a quiet time doing it, apart from the first dreadful jingles of the year from an ice cream van. Which prompted the thought of what do people who sell ice cream from vans do in the winter? How many of them make enough to troll off to the Costa del Blanca for the off-season? There was a time when the business was rewarding enough for there to be battles - or at least scuffles - between rival operations. A good stand - say that on Epsom Downs - was said at the time to be worth hundreds of pounds per sunny Sunday afternoon. Worth a scuffle.
Having done the potatoes, decided to weed the South side of the short row of Jerusalem artichokes - which I had left undisturbed (and unweeded. This last being a mistake) over the winter in the hope that the crop of tubers from last year will sprout this year. We shall see. But in the course of weeding came across the most odd plant. About two feet long, a quarter of an inch thick at the green end and half an inch thick at the brown end, green end out but most of which was lying an inch or so under the ground. There were rings of buds around the stem about every inch or so, top to bottom. Those underground were sprouting vigorously, white shoots, straight out, with the longest shoots in the middle. The fat end had been hacked off something at some point, some time ago by the look of it. The fat end was also quite near the bamboo - which does send out strong shoots, but this thing did not look like one of them. Can't remember anything answering the description from last year. A mystery.
Rather a thin TLS last week - a political issue. But it did include a sorry little anecdote about how Mr Selfridge went bust at the end of his career and lost his shop - so he used to catch the bus from his modest flat in Putney or somewhere like, to come at gaze from across the road at what had been his shop. I remember Mr Lamont doing something of the sort once, from across the road from the Treasury building, but I didn't have the verve to greet him, despite having been one of his underlings (very under) once.
There was also a very vitriolic peice about the iniquities of the Audit Commission and how it had presided over the destruction of local government and the installation of of a very rampant variety of targetitis. What was puzzling was why should the executive editor of the Sunday Times (whatever that might mean) and a member of the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission (that is to say a fully paid up member of the BBB), have so much spleen to vent on this, admittedly important, subject? What has the Audit Commission done to him? Was it just that he was the bosom friend of the Dame Shirley, caught for gerrymandering of a sort that her Labour colleagues had been doing in a slightly differant way for years?
Brown bird flashed across the lawn this morning. Another of those mysterious thrush like ones? Too fast to tell what size it was, let alone what shape. Another mystery.
# posted by Jim @ 1:39 AM 
