pumpkinstrokemarrow

Hawthorne now duly pruned, with a slightly altered configuration. Not quite a pudding tree yet, but we are getting there. Prunings rather sticky - presumably the waste products of micro bugs. Macro bugs represented by a number of small snails - with black and white stripey shells about a centimetre across.

Space for prunings in back garden now rather occupied with the several cubic metres of minced willow tree we acquired last week. May be forced into brown wheely bin land yet. But must take care: the DT reports a scuffle developing between an old gentleman who wanted to put cabbage stalks in his brown wheely bin and the Polish environmental bin service agent who claimed that cabbage stalks were not garden waste and were therefore not allowed in the brown bin. All this does have the good side of giving the service agent something to be bossy about. We all like our day in the sun.

The DT has also been reporting a variety of rather officious official interventions. There was the disabled person who was ticketted because their disabled person sticker was indeed displayed under their windscreen, but upsidedown so it did not count. There was the dad in Ohio who was sent to jail because his son (who was living with his mother rather than his father at the time) failed some maths test. And then we have the do-gooders spending lots of our charitable donations putting up ugly posters all over the place. The world is quite ugly enough without adding to the ugliness gratuitously. The ones I find particularly irritating are those from the heart people telling us to dial 999 if we have chest pains. And the DT tells us that we are about to have a rash of posters teaching us how to count units in a pint of beer. Attacking us is easy (if not very effective). Attacking the supply side would be far too tricky: that might upset the all powerful supermarket chains. It is their divine right to sell vast quantities of cheap booze to all comers at all times of day and night.

All this hawthorne appears to have prompted an allotment dream, which seemed to take place at the allotment I had thirty years ago. At the start of the dream it seems that I had murdered someone - an unknown middle aged man - who was now lying on the allotment covered in a cloth or sheet of some sort. The problem was how to bury the chap having turned up with an inch bar rather than a spade - and with various allotment trusties hanging around, likely to take an interest in the proceedings. What brought this one on? Don't usually have murders. Perhaps an overdose of Inspector Morse? And don't see where wish fullfilment comes into it.

Going off on another tack, the TLS claimed last week that a sculptor called Antony Gormley is the most admired sculptor in the land - which must be another one that passed me by. So the man (responsible for the angel of the north) has a gift for self promotion and likes to stick up casts of himself all over London and this makes him a renowned sculptor? But I suppose I just have to accept that what used to be called the visual arts have been reduced to stunts and self-promotion. Self-promotion has, of course, always been a part of the game. But it used to be understood that one ought to be promoting something in addition to and separate from oneself.

I assume some other gent. of the same cut (or perhaps ilk) is responsible for the two large and ugly graffiti now decorating the front of the Tate Modern. I wonder how much Arts Council money was spent on paint and cherry-pickers and whathaveyou? Not to mention the essential event party, my invitation to which mysteriously went astray. £20,000? One could have harrassed at least 100 old gentlemen about the contents of their brown wheely bins for that sort of money. Or killed maybe 23,617 MRSA bugs in St Helier hospital.