pumpkinstrokemarrow

The acorns on the adolescent oak tree in our back garden appears to be afflicted with some sort of growth, which makes the acorn look like a green version of pop-corn. Or a strange green shelled walnut. Or a very small brussels sprout, just opening up (well past being eatable that is), over which someone has poured a thick sugar solution. Sticky with some black bits. Although it is not like pop-corn in the sense that as far as one can make out, the growth is on the surface of a small acorn, rather than being the acorn turned inside out. The growth ends up by more or less completely covering the acorn, although one can still see the base of the acorn where the stalk enters the sticky bundle. Presumably the acorn no longer works, so a badly afflicted tree will not reproduce. On the common, later the same day, we found that most of the oaks there have the same problem.

Back at the ranch, try asking the Internet what it is. The obvious horticultural sites - that is RHS and Kew - don't help - but do seem rather keen that you sign up for some paying advisory service. The MAFF site (I forget what they are called these days) is full of some unpleasant oak disease recently arrived from the US and causing sudden death (in tree terms that is), but is silent on the subject of exploding acorns. So we remain puzzled. Is it a fungus? Is it some kind of vegetable cancer? Do plants get cancer? Is it dangerous to plant or animal? The animal bit arising from the fact that one oak disease makes touching the oak unpleasant it not dangerous. A matter of the disease producing some noxious substance.

Wikipedia helpfully provided a long list of butterflies and moths the larvae of which feed on various parts of oak trees, but the list not being much more than a list, I was not much further ahead.

Yesterday was the day of the skate, the man from Hastings having run out of cod by the time I got to him. Simmered in water by the BH in our fish kettle, then touched up with some flavoured, melted butter. Served with potatoes and courgettes, both cooked entire. Good gear and very filling. I managed my entire wing, BH only managed about half of hers. So I had the balance of the potatoes and skate chopped up and fried in a little butter for breakfast. More good gear, if not exactly chlorestorol reducing.

The day before off to an exhibition of paintings by one Wilhelm Hammershoi (with a crossed 'O'), a Dane who was active about a hundred years ago and of whom I had not heard before he appeared in the TLS. The upstairs gallery at the Royal Academy a little crowded, but the pictures, like the skate, were good gear. A painter with private means who restricted himself to interiors of his own flat to which he added a few street scenes and landscapes for variety. About the only person appearing in any of this was his wife, usually from the back. He used a restricted palette, with a lot of white, grey, blue and black. A sort of monochrome, and rather mannered, version of Vermeer. But both restful and rewarding to see a lot of paintings by one painter in one style at one time. One does not get quite so punch-drunk as one can get, wandering from room to room, in the National Gallery.

And by an odd chance, it seems that one of his principal patrons and supporters was a Copenhagen dentist.