pumpkinstrokemarrow

It does not answer the question, but I then remembered, many years ago, reading a book about the origin of life, published in the 1930s, which had a chapter about how the patterns you get when you freeze water - from snow flakes to the ice on car roofs - are modified in an interesting way when you dirty the water, particularly with organic compounds. So, for example, you get angular patterns inside the windows of butchers while you get curvilinear, florid even, patterns inside the windows of florists - something I guess you do not see so much in these days of central heating. The same sort of things can happen with other crystals and I was prompted at the time, as a wannabe chemist, to experiment with making up slides of copper sulphate solution inoculated with the juice from various cultivars of eating apple. It was an opportunity to play with my father's rather splendid microscope - a black affair with lots of brass trimmings - and I expect that I convinced myself that the patterns in the resulting copper sulphate crystals could be predicted by variety. Fellow pupils amused themselves rather differently, growing giant single crystals, something which took a lot more care and attention than what I was doing.

And talking of eating apples, yesterday I was pleased to see that a James Grieve had been included in short row of espalier apples in the 20th century garden at Hampton Court. My favourite apple as a child, and I did start a bush tree on the late allotment, but I expect I would find the apple a touch tart now. An apple which moves very quickly from slightly tart and crisp to sweet and soggy - a characteristic of early eating apples which means that they do not do very well in supermarkets.

We also noticed that the winter aconites had come on quite a bit in the week or so since we were there last. Wonderful flowers at this time of year, with the about-to-open globes a deep but soft yellow.

PS: the scaffolding on the Horton water heritage tower is now very nearly complete. The sign at the bottom says something about demolition so perhaps the thing really is about to come down. I imagine it is rather cold at the top to be working without gloves first thing in the morning, so lets hope that demolishers can wear gloves. I don't think roofers care to.