pumpkinstrokemarrow

Today was the second part of the biennial clearing of the compost bin. Probably at least one part to go.

Now completed the second lift of the concrete buttress for the compost bin at the bottom of the garden, having decided not to implant a garden gnome by way of a gargoyle. He or she might have got in the way of composting operations. Will leave the shutter on for a bit, after which we will see how the join between first and second lift looks.

Interested to read over the breakfast sardine sarnies of a group called 'Curved Air', quite big in the 70's - when one might have thought I might of heard of them - but hadn't - and who are performing shortly in Sutton with 4 of the original line-up, including the lady lead singer. Intrigued that a serious group from that era was still up and running, trolled off to Wikipedia which tells me that there was a bit of the gap through most of the 80's and 90's, but that the group have now been reformed. Look like an interesting bunch with a fair bit of classical training in their background, including places like the Yehudi Menuhin School, not that far from us in Epsom. But why do they keep going? Are they any good? Do they have devoted groupies of retiring age who trundle after them? Would they have been anything like 'Jethro Tull'? Even went so far as to investigate buying tickets - but then worked out that actually we shall be at the Wigmore Hall on the day in question. Might otherwise have been my first concert of popular music at least two decades.

Bath smelt of swimming pools this morning. Must be one of those times when the water people shove a dose of chlorine through the (drinking) water to clear out a few bugs. Maybe they had a dirty leak somewhere.

While down the garden we have vermin. Readers may recall that the compost heap at the bottom of the garden has a lid on it. Not something we ever bothered with in Cambridge where the garden might almost have been in the country but we never had foxes digging into the compost, so there was no need to cover it with anything more grand than a bit of old carpet to stop the dry stuff at the top blowing about. Here in the suburbs however we have lots of foxes, not yet seen off by the shiny new beagle puppy next door.

And I like to put all our food waste on the compost on the grounds that one gets better compost that way. With the catch being that foxes like items like beef ribs, which they dig up, scattering bits and pieces far and wide in the process. So BH said no. It has to stop. So I put a lid on the compost heap, a lid which was last refurbished October 14th or so, 2010. And the lid did indeed keep the foxes out but it also created a haven for rats. It proved impossible to make the compost bin rat proof, so being fox proof, relatively warm, and full of food, from time to time one got rats. The evidence was mainly in the form of all the minced compost thrown onto the top of the heap from their tunnellings.

Last time this happened I got some rat poison, stuff that came in blue pellets and put it in a tray on the top of the compost. After a while we had one dead rat and no live rats. Problem went away for a bit. But I did get ticked off for using rat poison in the vicinity of cats, even though the cats could not get directly at the stuff.

And now we have rat or rats again. Much evidence of tunnelling and one morning there was even a sighting. First line of attack was to disrupt the tunnels by poking them out with a suitable pole, and quite big some of them seemed to be too. The thought was that rats are relatively clever animals and if I kept smashing up their tunnels, they would move on. But no luck. They seemed to keep going. Furthermore, they were probably eating all the red worms which make the compost tick, indeed, that might have been what they were tunnelling for.

Then I had another brain wave. Given that we are probably going to have foxes anyway, compost for them to poke around in or not, why not just take the lid off. The compost is quite soft and the foxes might dig the rats out in short order. And if not the foxes maybe the cats, cats not being too hot at digging but pretty good at sitting and waiting. So that is where the matter rests at the moment. Lid off.

I am also conscious that the council are now collecting food waste from the little green plastic buckets (with fox & rat secure lids) with which they have supplied us, although I have so far declined to play. But given that they are going to collect whether I play or not and that I understand that the food waste is put into some huge fermenter out of which they get some useful energy, rather than just blowing it into the air in the way of a compost heap, I suspect that it would actually be more eco overall if I were to play. This suspicion has yet to be translated into action but that day may soon dawn.

Finished phase 1a of pond refurbishment today, just before hands gave out. Dug out about six barrow loads of yellow clay flavoured with black gunk from the bottom of the old pond. Sticky gear which I had to cut off the fork, making it a slow job. I can see how it might have been made into bricks down the road, down Kiln Road in fact, presently the site for our local Mr S.. Easily lost the six barrow loads on top of the chippings from the willow tree that was chopped down next door last year. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for lumps (say irregular five inch cubes) of yellow clay to start to break down and harbour some plant life. Not visible from house and not obtrusive from the path to the compost bin at the bottom of the garden, so not a problem.

During this proceeding, three newts made into the new tubs. Not sure where they came from or whether getting into the tubs was really a very bright idea. Fished one out. Sat on the edge a bit comatose for a bit, then got lost in the rocks somewhere. Then what looked like the pupae of some large fly or beetle made it to the bottom of a tub. No idea how it got there. Dropped by a bird? And last but not least a frog, liberally painted with liquid yellow clay, hopped across the clay and hunkered down under the rim of the centre tub. Maybe he will survive if the warm weather continues.

Planted tasteful line of limestone rocks along the northern perimeter of the new pond area, separating it from the existing beds containing heather, ornamental grasses and bulbs. Then dug out the front of the compost bin and used the resulting four barrowloads of well rotted, dark brown compost to cover the yellow clay, bringing the compost to the edge of the old pond area. Should look well when FIL has planted it up. Now we leave it for a few weeks to see how much it sinks. If necessary, get a bit of topsoil from a garden centre to top it up. The idea is that the soil comes up to just underneath the rims of the three tubs, but not to re-use the stones which used to encircle the old pond. Apart from the bother, I think it would look a bit fussy around three black tubs. But we will see. There may, it is just possible, be other views.

Franklin had a good nose around the new tubs. Let's hope he doesn't fall in one dark night. He would probably be able to get out but he might be a bit cold until next door woke up and let him in to dry out.

We learn on the way that pyramidal white candles do not rot down. Some signs of rodent gnawing but none of rotting. Chopped the thing up and chucked it back into the compost for a second go.

And we learn from the DT that the late partner of a leading Blair Babe has been caught with his nose in the trough and has been sentenced to a spell in an Italian jail. A spell, it seems, he will be able to wriggle out of. The Italians must be really chuffed to have a close relative of the BBB (Blair-Brown bunch. Vide supra) on the block, having had it up to their oxters with the BBB droning on and on at international gatherings about how good law and order is in the good old UK and how awful it is in wopland. Nice to have the boot on the other foot for once.

Also that good old Stella R, late custodian of a very private part of government, no doubt with a very fat pension, continues to bang on. And of all people, she, according to the DT, is warning the great British public that their establishment is turning the country into a police state. She might be right, but a bit rum coming from her. I would be a bit cheesed off if I was the Home Secretary. On the other hand, a bit of fresh air in private parts of government might be no bad thing, and who better than the former custodian to knock a few holes in the levee (aka dyke)?

But the most interesting snippet from yesterday was from the rather engaging autobiography of a Duke of Bedford, snapped up in a charity shop somewhere. Apart from the standard of care in his family when he was a child being well up to today's standard of child abuse, well worth a visit from the social services, I learn that an ancestor of his pioneered the cultivation of colza, in or around the New Bedford river. This, as is well known, being a relative of the cauliflower, the seeds of which were pressed to yeild a popular lamp oil in the 17th century. No doubt, one of the foundations of the family fortune. And the word might come in very handy in Scrabble. Wow the inmates of your local day centre with it on the triple word!

Must write to the National Trust about the disgraceful state of the exceptional signal box at Dawlish Warren railway station. Shut up, as far as one can see, just rotting away, propped up by two props the terminal concrete blocks of which take up about three car spaces in the not very large car park. Given that the signal box may date all the way back to that illustrious engineer Brunel, I think someone should do something about it. Another peice of national treasure in danger of sliding down the pan.

Must also write to Mr Google about the dreadful state of his clocks (maybe also mentioning the fact that Exeter Library does not seem to care for some of his security certificates. Rejects them a fair proportion of the time). The time stamps on my posts give the unfortunate impression that I blog in the small hours of the morning - which I presume to be the time in the Mountain View (a guess. But I have a soft spot for the name having once met a Finn who was going there) bunker which houses the relevant server farm. I wonder if they do tours of what must be a very impressive bit of kit. I think the Amazon do tours of their very impressive warehouse, somewhere in the South of England, provided you can drum up some interest beyond the casual and don't try around Christmas when they have a lock down or something. So maybe Google with their very public service ethos do something of the sort too.

Yesterday I became more closely acquainted with the workings of plastic bell compost makers - the big black plastic things, roughly the shape of a bell, but with a lid on the top and sometimes with a hatch at the bottom. I dare say one can get them from the council these days. Getting more closely acquainted involved emptying two of them and digging the compost into FIL's potato patch - this year's that is, not next year's. The compost had been made from a mixture of garden and kitchen waste, was very dry (despite there being a reasonable supply of the little red worms which do the business) and was not as good as the stuff I get out of our rather larger brick compost bin. So the considered view is: whereas 1) despite being four feet or so high and taking up a lot of space, they do not hold a great deal; 2) they are reasonable awkward to load and empty; and, 3) they do keep the rats and mice out, I conclude that they are not as good a deal as the brick compost bin. I can live with putting out the traps.

Underside of the compost bin lid very damp yesterday morning and not a worm in sight on the compost. Is the dampness due to the better fitting lid keeping all the heat and steam in? Or is it due to the underside being untreated and hairy rather than smooth? Why have the worms gone back down under?

Yesterday to Epsom Common, late afternoon when it was nothing like the 30 degrees threatened by the man in the box. Passed the small pond where there was a good deal of fishing going on, plenty of buzzer and other boys. For once, someone actually caught quite a large fish as we were passing, a bream maybe a foot or more long. Didn't struggle much but I do not suppose being a fish in the bright sun is all that much fun; rather put me off the whole business. OK to do it to eat but not for fun. Suitably solemnised, then observed the large amount of litter around the fishing area, which might or might not be moved when the boys move. (There was the odd girl but only in accompaniment mode. No fishing girls). So, observing a large, reasonably clean bread bag, decided to become a litter bore for the afternoon. Bag about half full by the time we left the common, having seen one heron and one deer on the large pond. Thought about arranging the litter when we got home, a la enim, and photographing it for the blog but decided not to. Thought about writing an essay about the various detritus that one finds in this way, declaiming ponderously therein on the waste of the world, but decided not to do that either. Between the common and home found more litter than we had found on the common, but this including an empty compost bag from a garden centre, so I did not run out of space. The worst stretch, as one might expect, was around Stamford Green School. But this did include at least one house which had given up clearing it's front verge every morning, which is I think what we would do if we lived nearer the school. Got to set a standard. Got to do it visibly so that the little darlings gradually get the idea that littering the streets is not cool. Full compost bad ended up in our green dustbin. Thorough hand washing, the thoughts of Weil's disease having sprung to life. (Took me a little while to extract the name out of Mr. G., having thought that it was spelt Vial's disease. But I did learn that the posh name was leptospirosis).

In this case computers and capitalism. Generally thought to be a good thing but the combination of which can sometimes have unfortunate consequences. The beef this morning being the elaborate fare structures that some industries go in for - my electicity utility and mobile phones being the two in mind. On Saturday I got a letter from EDF offering me a fixed price tariff for next year - which appeared to be some 15% more than the current tariff. But the whole thing came with an elaborate package of premium rates, seasonal rates and nectar points, the overall effect of which was that I couldn't be bothered to wade through it all. Not too mention elaborate provision for notification of tariff changes and cancellation of contract being explained in small print somewhere. Now in the days before computers, a utility could not bother with all this stuff. Its antiquated billing systems would collapse under the weight of tariffs.

So bring back the days when there was just one electricity company which was, no doubt, a bit dossy, but it had one rate for selling electricity and which one could trust not to rip one off too much. At least not by making large profits or paying their senior managers a lot more than I ever got paid. And even if they did make a large profit they were a nationalised industry so that was just a form of tax and so that was OK too.

But a mild counter stroke comes to mind, in the form of a short piece, I think from the Evening Standard, from the days when there was an Evening Standard and an Evening News, about how the divisional directors of London Buses did themselves OK, in a very discrete way, with elaborate panelled dining rooms and chauffer driven rollers. I guess this is all swept away now in the days of SouthWest trains the bosses of which no doubt go in for buying small Carribean Islands and hob-nobbing with P&B's. Maybe a bit of discrete self-indulgence was the lesser sin. I suppose the rich have a bit of a quandary here. A main point of being rich is to be richer than the next chap. And this does not have nearly so much savour if you don't know that the next chap knows it. But this also excites envy which might have untoward consequences. So do you enjoy your riches in private and bask in the dim glow of public approval or do you go for celeb-ration?

Yesterday, force majeure, we went in for a slighly novel recipe for the sage and onion stuffing with which to stuff our virgin reared organic vegetarian chicken from darkest Wales. Possibly from a subsidiary of the Duchy Grocers, definately via Cheam. The problem being that we had no sage - at least no more than a teaspoon of dried and no fresh - and no hazel nuts. We were reduced to using dried marjoram (which did not seem to smell of anything much at all) and Brazil nuts. Quite eatable but not, I think, quite up to snuff. Chicken went down OK though and the bones having been boiled for soup are now en-route to the compost bin. This last being a two stage process: into the bucket under the sink. From there to the dustbin on the patio. From there to the compost bin. The trick being to remember to empty the dustbin before it gets too heavy.

Yesterday our back lawn was more or less water-logged, although short of standing water. Very squishy to walk on, as I discovered when I went looking for the aforementioned sage. So this morning, when I finally have a slot to get back onto the allotment, is the ground going to be good for anything? Still, at the very least, I can take the cabbage cages to peices.

And I am now ready for the slugs. Decided not to spend £50 with Geo. Kelly on copper strips, rather to recycle the reel of 5 amp cable that had found its way into my garage roof. Maybe 50 meters of the stuff. I discovered that you could rip the white outer cover off: a good pull and one did about 60cm. Given that I had taken on some alcohol during the day, quite sweaty by the time I finished this first phase. Then left with a red plastic strand, a black plastic strand and a copper. Neither red plastic nor black plastic seemed to rip off so I had to take it of with a knife. Slightly faster - per strand - than the white stuff. Peel off a segment of the red (or black) cover, rather like peeling a potato, and the cover pulls off as easy as pie. Maybe 120cm at a time. All done by 2000.

I think I shall use the cable twisted into three, as it has been put back on the reel. Then make the twists up into L-shaped lengths. Maybe a metre long with 10cm returns. These can then be assembled into thin rectangles guarding the rows of seeds, pegged down at two of the four corners.

50m metres of three strands gets into what looks like quite a tangle on the extension floor. But resisted the temptation to meddle and it all pulled out OK. Remembering the Boy Scouts' adage that the worst way to deal with a tangle is to try to untangle it. (There is a proper word for this sort of thing but I can't remember what it is. Something of classical flavour. Aphorism perhaps? Maybe it will come to me by the time I next post). Learning, by the end, that the earth strand was, over the 50m, about 30cm longer than the shorter of the live and nuetral strands. With the longer being about 15cm longer than the shorter. Was this some quirk of the way that the stuff is made or was it some quirk of the way that I wound the three coppers back onto the reel?

Gas board visited the other day and pleased to record that they did not announce that our boiler was on the way out or sell us a sulphur trioxide or any other sort of detector. We hav'n't even got a letter from HQ pointing out that the ventilation of our boiler is not up to enlarged euro standard. So not a bad visit at all.

On the other hand, had another brush with the congestion charge yesterday. Bearing in mind my previous complaint (30/4/2009) that one cannot find out whether or not one has been in the congestion charge area, I find that you can indeed enter the zone without knowing, first, somewhere in the southern hinterland of Waterloo station and, second, somewhere in the northern hinterland of Kings Cross Station. The only clue was one post near St Thomas's hospital carrying a red 'C' which I correctly took to mean that I was in the congestion charge area and another near Vauxhall station with a struck through 'C' telling me that I was leaving it. Remain unimpressed with this job creation scheme for starving IT service companies.

Yesterday a mission to refill my compost bin, the level of which has been dangerously low since the winter clear out. Dangerously low in the sense that it might have been below the critical level needed to sustain arthropod life. So off to north London - hence the brush with the congestion charge - to collect no less than 13 dustbin bags of soft green garden waste, mostly lawn clippings. Compost bin now two thirds full although I fully expect it to revert to less than one third full once the waste has settled down. But it should be quite hot; the dustbin bags were quite warm to the touch after just four hours.

In course of all this, pushed by some police attended event out of Clapham High Street into Kings Road, which runs through an area known as Clapham Park. Very leafy with some rather handsome - if rather tired - houses of the order of 200 years old. Presumably a rather posh area at some point. Managed to get slightly lost coming through Streatham, winding up back on the Dorking Road at Tooting Bec rather than at Morden Hall Park as I had intended, at the cost of one hoot from some impatient youth in a banger. But perhaps just as well as there would have been plenty of scope, reading my ancient skip sourced A to Z while I drove, of getting even more lost around Mitcham. Must get onto A to Z replacement, the skip sourced one starting to look very tired. Unfortunately, last time I looked, Geograhers' don't seem to make this posh blue hard backed one any more. Might have to switch to the AA version which will take a bit of getting used to. Much prefer the Geographers' layout of twenty years ago. No date in the thing but a female hand has inscribed it February 2009.

Clapham High Street itself was awash with bicycles and motorcycles. They more or less filled up the bus lane, were weaving in out out of the cars in their lane and were spilling over into the north bound carriageway and onto the southbound pavement as need arose. Some of them seemed to have neither manners nor road sense. How long will be it be before the worm turns, and people start to withdraw the generous road facilities they have been accorded of recent years? Perhaps they should start by getting rid of the more or less useless cycle lanes, ignoring the inevitable protests from the road marking industry, which will thus lose much good business.

Prompted by an article somewhere recent about how the expiring fashion for gene science has not done quite what the applicants for research money had claimed for it, to close with a ponderous thought, fully worth the light of day - or perhaps the time of day - in some up-market saloon bar. That is to say, to think that a genome for some large animal is a bit like the machine code for a large computer program. Yes, you have all the information in principle and some features of the computer program can be picked out from the machine code. But for practical purposes, if you have lost the source code and the documentation of the program you are stuffed. Your chances of working it all out from the machine code are about nil.

New transmission causing problems. Interesting clicking noises from somewhere, which one could hear but not feel. Seemed to correlate with the rotations of the crank rather than anything else. Rather ominous slow throbbing through the saddle telling me the new back wheel is out of true. Inspection of back wheel shows that flashy and fairly new continental tyre is falling apart and starting to bulge alarmingly in places. This last being down to me, having failed to pump the thing up to the recommended 60ppi. Off to the bicycle shop to collect flashy new bicycle pump. Upright, a bit like one of the old stirrup pumps. With a pressure guage. I am told that I ought to check the pressure once a week. Shop man waves tools at crank, does not appear to do anything much and mysteriously the clicking has yet to reappear. Fiddled with the spokes and that is not quite right yet but we will await new tyre before fussing any more about that. He does not seem to think that true is a big deal. He is much more interested in the new control cables stretching, which does not seem to be happening as fast as he would have expected.

Yesterday it carried a tear jerking piece about the dreadful fate of a fairly small number of refugees from Eritrea holed up in some frightful squat in Calais. It seems that Eritrea has got itself into a bit of a state and is now a very unpleasant country, on a par with Burma or the Sudan. I forget how it came to be that way, no doubt in some large part a legacy of the filthy colonial oppression from the filthy oppressors from western Europe. So, to that extent, we owe. However, what the Grauniad does not do, is make any positive suggestions about what we might do about the situation. It seems clear to me that no one country can afford to have an open door policy these days, even for refugees here for more complicated reasons than a simple desire to have a better life, perhaps including cookers, ice-cream and televisions, than that available at their natal homes. The technical term for those that are not, being, I believe, economic migrants. As opposed to political refugees and other dissidents who have fallen out with their powers that be. There are just too many of them and we are not going to be able to cope. So where is the discussion about what it is reasonable for us to do? Is our record comparable with that of our neighbours? How far is our charity going to reach? As far as interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state we do not much care for?

The FIL pix shows a very impressive and ancient monument, but what was it really for? If there were people about organised enough to build such a thing, there would be other people who would not find it that hard to knock a hole through it. I would have thought that a hundred undisturbed men with crowbars and such could knock a hole suitable for cavalry in a day or so. And could you really garrison the whole thing? Who gets posted out into the wilds portrayed? Punishment for borrowing one of the emperor's concubines? Does anyone know? Maybe I will be asking Wiki shortly.

A modest senior moment today when I almost brushed the breadcrumbs from the bread board into the grocery cupboard rather than that containing the compost bucket.

The compost itself is the subject of an experiment. We have acquired several pounds of dry goods - flour, sugar, rice and the like - which had been sitting in an attic for maybe twenty years. Looked OK but we were a bit too squeamish to actually eat the stuff so it has been used to feed the compost bin at the bottom of the garden. The thing is, are we going to have a generation of obese or diabetic slugs and worms as a result of this grossly enhanced diet? Are the rats going to make serious attempts to gnaw their way through the protective chipboard at the front of the bin to get at the stuff? If pushed, I'm sure they could make it, despite the hard plastic coating. With a bit of brain power they might just tunnel under rather than gnaw through.

A rather differant sort of senior moment in the book I am reading about the Armenian massacres (which, as ever, turn out to be a more complicated - although still very evil - business than one had first thought). Lots of people seem to be called Blogs Bey or Fred Pasa (s cedilla I think). It has taken me three quarters of the book to realise that Bey and Pasa are titles - like Lord or Sir - which the Turks in their wisdom place after the family name rather than before. Pasa does not appear in my dictionary but Pasha and Basha do. The dictionary comes down on the side of the view that Pasha and Basha are the same word so I can probably roll Pasa in too.

Any yet another book, this time about Burma. It seems that Burma has never been a neat and tidy country in the way that England has been for getting on for a thousand years - and like Ottoman Anatolia contains a very mixed population - although as a result of unpleasant goings on since the last war, rather less mixed that it used to be. Not a good recipe for a rapid transition to modern nation statehood. Said transition being made even harder by North Eastern Burma being invaded by a very substantial remnant from the losing side at the end of the Chinese civil war. Also that the much hated Ne Win was, as a young man, the most effective soldier around - a quality which fuelled his rise to the top - but which did not prevent his fall from grace.

Cut up on the way to or from Cheam three times in the last week. On the first occasion, a little old lady in her little old car overtakes me and turns smartly left. On the second, I am overtaken on the inside (there being less than two feet between me and the kerb) by a postman on a bicycle at traffic lights where I was hoping to turn left. On the third, I think a variant of the little old lady but I forget the detail. No doubt it will come back when I log out.

Experimented with lemon soles last week - having arrived at the baker (this being where the fish van parks) too late for the depleted summer catches of proper white fish. Not hugely impressed. BH did an excellent job of cooking and presentation (entire, dark side up with incisions), but the flesh was a bit mushy for me, especially that under the rather substantial bone. In fact, not only mushy but thin on the ground. One only got to eat maybe a third of the bought weight.

One of them an old year hangover. That is to say, where in the vegetable world can one find perfect spheres? Answer, the mistletoe plants, of which there are plenty, in the trees at Hampton Court. Some of them of impressive size, perhaps a couple of feet across.

The second concerns the nannies and their tame statisticians (of which I used to be one). It seems that for the purposes of gathering statistics, any road accident or incident in which any of those involved has had a drink, is recorded as an accident involving drink. So my running over a drunk who leaps out from behind a parked lorry counts. This is, of course, OK as far as it goes. But one then needs to be a touch careful about interpreting large increases in accidents involving drink as a reason for banning drink. One might spoil what is probably a good story - that many or most road accidents are caused by drivers who have had a drink - by overstatement.

I should also mention that I am mildy in favour of a zero alcohol rule for driving. An inconvenience for those who live in the country but most of us have reasonable access to pubs, buses and taxis, and a no alcohol rule is a much more straightforward to abide by and to enforce than a some alcohol rule.

I was reminded of this by driving behind a bus today which had one of those moving light signs that they have on railway stations - the thing that tells you where the next train is stopping, a string which is far too long to fit on the display all at once - incorporated into it's rear end in a panel perhaps two feet by one foot. At a time when the nannies are cranking up the penalties for all sort of in-car misdemeanours like using a mobile phone, talking to your partner, lighting up or having a sweet - bus companies are allowed to add in this dangerous way to the already huge amount of off-car clutter on today's roads - my point being that I find off-car clutter as distracting and thus potentially as dangerous as the on-car sort. And while we are on this vein are we sure that satnavs add to road safety? Is continually glancing at a small screen which one can only see (in my case) with difficulty, adding or subtracting to the chance of having an accident?

Having caught our fourth mouse in the series, in the garage, shortly after Christmas, the trap has now lain unsprung for several days. Maybe we have seen the mice off. On the other hand, the rat poison in the compost heap is still moving - although there are now none of the excavations that we had before. Maybe there are some more mice down there. So now, having spent £15 on rat poison, starting to think seriously about replacing our brick compost bin which is very easy to use (and also makes a very good boundary marker against encroachments by any pushy neighbours there might be in that corner) but very hard to make rodent proof, with a couple of green plastic jobs. Which might cost £100? If they have open bottoms - which I would have thought necessary for compost - are they still rat proof? Will they try to burrow in? How do you keep the compost wet enough if it is in, in effect, a plastic bag? Watch this space.

Having filled FIL's old water tank with fresh cut comphrey leaves (said by mediaevals to be good for inflammations and broken bones) it now smells rotten. Various wasp like hover flies seem to quite like it. The idea is that the green liquid which will result in due course is very good for runner beans. I hope so because the comphrey is really good at coming up good and strong everywhere except where I plant it on purpose. Maybe it likes being chopped up and replanted along with the rest of the compost.

We also have a wire thief. Had left what was left of the line wire from the deer exclosure hanging up on the pole bin. Noticed yesterday, when I wanted it, that it had gone missing (at least I don't think that I returned it to the alternative hanging place in our garage roof). Only a few pounds worth but depressing that even in a small closed community like allotment holders you get the odd thief. Presumably communes of bubble or other substance loving folk have the same problem: no way of weeding out the bad apples which is not worse than the problem.

This in the course of replacing one side of the compost bin. A neighbouring landscaping contractor was loading his skip up with the pallets from the stone he was laying and was happy for us to remove them, so we acquired five pallets plus sundry other bits and bobs making up the stone crates. On acquisition, we learn that stone pallets are made in a much heavier fashion that the regular sort and are rather smaller - maybe three feet square rather than four feet square. Maybe this means that they do not recycle in the same way. That being as it may, three of the new sturdy pallets did a good job of replacing two old ones, the new shape serving to lock the two sides adjacent - which had been wobbling a bit - properly in. The bits and bobs served to make a sort of upper palisade, compensating in a feeble way for the lack of height, but with the unintended side effect that the whole thing now has a slightly more amateurish look than it used to, despite actually being rather stronger.

Also learnt that the bashing that nails take when you extract them from pallets leaves them rather soft, and very prone to disastrous bending when trying to use them. Maybe not just the softness but also their having been hammered straight. The resultant nail is not quite true and must have slight bends at which there is a tendency to buckle under stress. All adds to the amateurish look noted above.

The Bulgarian wheat is coming up well. There are a lot of shoots, about two inches high now and looking curiously fragile. We will see how many of them survice the various horrors which lurk in the dark.

Reminded by a peice in today's DT about how much I disapprove of husband and wife teams in the workplace. The peice in question suggesting that some of Blairs heirs share their late leader's love of money - to the extent of being economical with the spirit if not the letter of the rules in such matters. Maybe it is a prejudice inherited from my mother, and I have never had to work with a husband and wife team, but I am sure that I would have found it a pain. A little clique - or perhaps boil - in the otherwise healthy body politic. Maybe the BBB will find time to make rules about it when they have first hand experience.

Ornithological feast this morning. Around 0830 the back garden was very busy with birds on the bushes, particularly the fire thorn with its red berries and the yew with its pink ones. Lots of blue tits and great tits. One regular thrush, one irregular thrush. One green woodpecker, one red, white and black job. Several chaffinches. Several unidentified small brown birds. The odd blackbird, pigeon, starling and robin. One magpie flew overhead, clearly disdaining this veggie. fare.

We conducted spot check of the bin situation in our road at 0730 Monday, Monday being bin day. Brown bin alternate day. Out of 137.5 households (the 3 suspected squats counting as 0.5 each), 27% did not appear to know that it was bin day at all. 38% did not know that it was the alternate brown day and had put out their green bin (old-style) . 41% did not appear to have any food waste - and it seems unlikely that all of them compost all their food waste. 22% did not appear to have any newspapers, glass or tins - and again it seems unlikely that this is a true reflection of the numbers not generating any such waste. So we clearly have a long way to go. Perhaps the council ought to organise a litter night at TB, with a free pint for everyone that turns up with their recycling leaflet. Alternatively, an obvious opportunity for any busy who has tired of neighbourhood watch.

The old lid collapsed as I was removing it. The interior was fairly busy. But these worms, and their cousins, have been transferred to the compost dustbin for return to the compost heap in due course. Waste not, want not.

The sausages of October 31 with the Porky White labels have now been consumed as part of a toad in the hole. Sad to report, the sausages were so full of some sickly sweet flavouring that one was unable to tell whether they had absorbed any Porky Whiteness from the label. I suspect not. Texture not right either - too finely ground - this last usually being a sign of cheap ingredients (the sort of thing not fit to put in a pork pie - or is it the other way around?) which need to be ground down fine to make them edible.

October 31st reminds me that I ought to have a pop at Halloween. The papers are full of ecotwad of one sort and another, the answer to which has to be that collectively we have to consume less of everything. Then the shops were full of all sorts of heavily advertised junk and junk food which our children will pester us to buy. Wouldn't the world be a much healthier place if the whole operation had been missed out? And if our children had done something wholesome like spending weeks making a guy... How many of them have got a clue what a guy is or means? We have to persuade them that having fun does not have to depend on spending money and conspicuous consumption of one sort or another. Or at least that there are cheaper ways of being conspicuous, if that is the objective. Which will be hard as long as we have big companies who want to be bigger companies and who have bigger advertising budgets than I do.

Halloween is an easy target, which, despite its ancient origins, in it's present form in England, is an invention of said big companies. But some of us might feel much the same about Christmas. I seem to remember some Californian called Vance Packard having a go at all this sort of thing in the revolutionary sixties (of the last century). Perhaps it is time we wheeled him out again.

The rats have returned! Having enclosed the brick compost bin at the bottom of the garden to stop the foxes getting in, the rats have now set up house. Don't quite see how I am going to make the thing rat proof and I don't want to move over to one of those little plastic barrells from the council. Don't like the idea of all that fossil fuel being locked up in heavy duty green plastic apart from anything else. As it happens we have a couple of rat traps, left over from some previous abode - vicious things which would do something very unpleasant to a finger if handled carelessly. These have now been primed with the finest bacon from Mr S and placed one at each end of the service road which the rats have built right at the back of the bin, where it is not usually opened. No luck on the first night. Maybe the foxes did something useful and grabbed them.

Have now finished the first pass of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and perhaps got a bit nearer to why to be called Uncle Tomist is insulting. While the thing is a tear jerker, written by a decent white middle class lady and so the whole thing is very much from that point of view, I do not know of a better take on what life might have been like in the slave states in the years before the civil war. One can overlook the unlikely plot given that it was much better written than I had expected, with the various white takes on slaves (and I had forgotten that a proportion of these last were also white and could pass as free) and slavery being described in a much more sensitive way than I had expected. Speaking for myself, this 400 page, four day reminder of this part of our history was salutary. A reminder, for example, that many otherwise decent white men were responsible for much evil by omission. That power does indeed corrupt children. That lack of power corrupts too (something which it has taken the Irish some years to get over). And that many Northerners who professed to abhor slavery were not so keen on black people in their own neighbourhoods, let alone their own kitchens. The South was a nice long way away.

But I can also see that a black reader might not be impressed by the implausibly Christian stoicism of the hero. They might think that taking a hatchet to a drunk and brutal planter might have been a better way forward than turning the other cheek. Although writing that, I am reminded that early Chrisitans impressed by their willingness to be gentle martyrs for the cause. Perhaps the author had them in mind (who should, whatever one might think of the book now, be given much credit for being first to reach a large public).

And on a less solemn note, I have learnt that a critter is a variant of creature, originally used in connection with the two legged sort, God's own creatures, rather than the small four legged sort.

BH spotted a monster stag beetle lurking behind the compost bin on the patio. The body of the thing was about two inches long, the largest either of us have ever seen. Indeed, not seen one at all for a while. There was also a reddish tint to the black, especially around the claws. Also something not seen before.