pumpkinstrokemarrow

Rose gardens past their best, but still plenty to see and smell. Long herbaceous border in good form but not in the same league as that at Hampton Court.

Good value lunch in the canteen, just over £20 for two including two mains, one pudding and one pot of tea for one. The mains included some quite decent boiled green vegetables - of which the portions were a little sparing, but perhaps reflecting the average age of midweek visitors. A plus of midweek was that the place had a tremendous stillness about it. Plenty of bird noises and agricultural noises, but no bustle of people and cars. This is not to say that the place was empty; just that there was plenty of room for everybody.

Came across a coat of arms in the garden, carved into a stone plaque. A bent and naked upper arm holding something. An arm which I cannot resolve in Google. Searches give plenty of hits about tattoos & deltoids and some about coats of arms involving arms. But nothing which answers the description. I shall have to ponder how to refine the search and report back in due course.

Came across some volunteers in the garden pruning some young trees - that is to say 10 or 20 years old rather than 100. They were making a bit of a mess of it and were generally giving a good impression of Dad's Army. I suppose you can't entrust volunteers with proper ladders and chainsaws to do a neat job. Thinking about it, we decided that while you might be allowed to have volunteers without chain saws in the garden, you were probably not allowed to have volunteers of any sort in the kitchen. This because, remembering what Parkinson (see May 16th) had to say about the need for discipline in the kitchen, it seems unlikely that volunteers would put up with it. A nice old lady (or gent.) doing her bit for charity while having a natter was not to have some young chef bawling her out for forgetting to wash her hands. Or using scissors when she should have been using a knife.

Later on, while holding forth on the burgeoning market for redundant utility (for example, water) sheds in the woods, managed to have a close encounter with a cow pat. Sun glasses fell off and had a very close encounter. Luckily there was a trough nearby and we were not minded to fuss too much about how clean the water in it was. As a result of this missed a possible tweet: a large grey brown bird flapping across the field. Big crow sized but not crow coloured. Maybe we had disturbed a snoozing owl?

Later still, while kneading the dough this morning, got to wondering about the top ten problems in the world. Rather irritated by their being so untidy: one could come up with lots of problems but they all tended to be related to each other. Not independent and orthogonal in the way of the dimensions of a vector space at all. For what it is worth, I append the list (5 too manys, 1 too much and 4 runnings out), in no particular order.

Too many people.

Too many poor people consuming too little.

Too many rich people consuming too much.

Too many people who are economically inactive or under-active.

Too many big arms falling into the hands of bad people. Not to mention small arms falling into the hands of very bad people.

Too much inequality driving too much migration.

Running out of energy (it being unwise to rely on fusion coming up with the goods any time soon).

Running out of food.

Running out of fresh water.

Running out of decent weather.