Long Lead Adventures on the Heath

Yesterday morning was about as sedate as possible around here. I did a little bit of light gardening -- watering and deadheading, that kind of thing -- and then sat on the garden bench and read my Thom Gunn biography. I think I may actually polish this book off in a day or two. As with so many books, it was slow going at first but I eventually got into the rhythm of the writing and the drama of Gunn's life and now it breezes along. (It gets much more interesting, in my opinion, in the 1960s, when Gunn moves to San Francisco and experiences the Summer of Love, the mind-expanding possibilities of LSD and the heyday of early gay liberation.)

This was the scene as I read -- parched grass, snoozing dog. (Her limp, by the way, vanished overnight. Whatever was going on apparently wasn't a big deal.)

After lunch I decided to be brave and take Bailey to Hampstead Heath. I wasn't sure how well this would work, given that I can't let her off her leash, but I thought I'd try. So I dug out the new 10-meter lead and off we went. (This leash, by the way, is not retractable. The woman who runs the rescue kennel where I got Bailey specifically told me to avoid retractable leashes -- she says they're not strong enough. That's why I've written about the challenge of using it without getting tangled up in it!)

And it worked out fine. I learned the hard way not to let her plunge into the brush in pursuit of a squirrel, because untangling the lead from the bushes can take a long minute, but if I keep her on the paths she's fine. She loves the walk and she's super-vigilant about the critters. (And on a summer weekday afternoon there weren't many other dogs around, which is a plus with Bailey.)

My real goal was to let her swim, and she plunged into the duckweed-laden pond on Sandy Heath with gusto. Unlike Olga, who used to just wade, Bailey is a full-body swimmer and even dives under to get her head wet. (There are no predators and duckweed will not hurt dogs. Blue-green algae is toxic, but I saw no sign of that in this pond, and indeed Bailey was fine after her swim.)

Afterwards, more walking. Bailey is like Olga in that she is a self-cleaning dog. By the time we got to the Hampstead Heath Extension, she was dry and back to her normal coloring. (She still got a bath when we got home!)

Here's a video for those of you who would like some Bailey action shots. Or inaction, as the case may be, as the first clip shows her dreaming in bed. Then you see a quick shot of a red admiral butterfly on our garden Buddleia, followed by the spectacle of Bailey in the pond.

I'd say the long lead works fine, with the proviso that I keep her out of the bushes. I may also want to get some gloves, because when she sees a squirrel, the risk of rope burn is real!

Last night I watched an action movie called "Greenland 2: Migration" starring Gerard Butler. I watched the first one several years ago and thought it wasn't too bad, but this was just one action sequence after another tied together by the thinnest of plots. There was no complexity. The effects were fun, but honestly, a seventh-grader could have written this movie. (And perhaps did.)

A Cafe and a Painting

This little cafe is located not too far from us, and Dave and I have been there on a few occasions. It's a no-frills place where you can get lots of breakfast and lunch items. I took the photo above in 2018.

When I went walking with my stepmother's camera a couple of months ago, I came across a renovation project at the cafe. The entire shopfront had been removed. I didn't even know such a thing was possible, but as you can see, there's basically no front wall in that picture. I guess it's mostly window so it's not like it's load-bearing, but still -- I don't often see shops opened up entirely like that.

Finally, yesterday, while walking Bailey past this spot, I had a chance to photograph the new shopfront. It's never very easy to shoot because if there aren't a bunch of cars parked in front -- it's on a very busy street -- then there are people sitting outside. But it was closed Sunday morning, so the time was right.

I wonder how much a shopfront costs?

Anyway, as you can tell, I don't have much to say about yesterday. I spent most of the day reading on the new garden bench. I've made quite a lot of headway in my Thom Gunn book and I expect to continue with it today. I took the dog for a couple of walks and video-chatted with Dave. Bailey has developed a limp, and I have no idea why -- my guess is she hurt her right front foot in the garden, lunging through thorny undergrowth in her endless quest for a squirrel. There's no visible injury. I hope I don't need to take her to the vet to get that sorted!

Here's another flight of fancy that my brain went on this week. This painting used to hang in our dining room when I was growing up as a kid. And I mean it hung there for years -- through my early childhood when my parents were still married, through their divorce and all the way through my middle and high school years -- and my younger brother's too. It wasn't a real painting -- just a department store print. I think my mom and dad bought it at Montgomery Ward in Floriland Mall around the time they built our house in the mid-'60s. Over time it got kind of yellowed and spiders took up residence behind the frame, and my mom finally threw it out in the late '80s.

I didn't love this painting. In fact I always thought that weird log or clump of rocks or whatever -- projecting into the lake -- looked like an alligator, so it was a little creepy to me. But I got to wondering about it. What was the artist's backstory? What was it called? Where is the original these days?

I had the photo above, which I cropped from an old picture of my dad sitting at our dining room table. And I remembered that it was signed Robert Wood. So I did some Googling and came up with another person who had an identical painting, and someone rather optimistically selling one on Craigslist for $95 (!).

Robert William Wood, it turns out, was an English painter who immigrated to America as a young man. He lived all over the country and painted quite prolifically, and his paintings were then commercially printed and sold millions of copies. He was the quintessential painter of mid-century "sofa art."

The one we had is known as "Mystic Pond," and it's similar to several others that Wood painted with autumn and/or pond themes. In fact it looks like he returned to the same spot several times, but this is the only one I've seen in which that alligator-shaped promontory is so prominent. I could find no information about Wood's original painting, when he painted it or where it might be now.

Wood died in 1979 at age 90, and he was already well into his '70s by the time my parents hung this in our dining room. I wonder how much money he made from licensing his artworks to commercial publishers? Wouldn't it be strangely wonderful and fulfilling to be a painter and have your work hanging in homes all over the country? (And being talked about on blogs 50 years later!)

Devil Dogs and Garden Critters

Yesterday I was admiring the sunlight falling on the devil dogs in the kitchen, and I had to take a picture. Doesn't it seem appropriate that I bought those, and now have a real devil dog of my own? (Ignore the dust.)

Yesterday was pretty low-key. I spent most of the morning reading and doing some minor gardening. At this point gardening is pretty much limited to trying to keep everything alive.

The dahlias continue to perform, and we don't have much sign of powdery mildew, which I'm hoping means the new soil I gave them at the beginning of the summer is holding moisture better than that compost I used last year.

In the afternoon Bailey and I took a walk to the cemetery. On the way we passed this display in front of a neighbor's house. The plants look a little parched but I like the blue pots and the colorful zinnias.

Bailey's new long lead arrived yesterday, and we tried it out at the cemetery. (That's her normal lead above, but never mind.) I envisioned her being able to run around, chase tennis balls and maybe even squirrels, all while tethered to me in case I need to reel her in and away from other dogs. Well, it didn't quite work out that way.

Bailey was happy to run in a wider radius, but she showed no interest in chasing a ball. I'm sure if she'd seen a squirrel she'd have been after it like a shot, but that didn't happen either. It was mostly just aimless sniffing, while I tried my best not to get tangled up in excess leash.

More experimentation is required.

In other news, did you see that Jeanine Pirro dropped the absurd vandalism charges against the Olympic athlete who was accused of damaging Trump's newly renovated reflecting pool? We all knew the charges wouldn't stick, but what made the episode extra delicious was Pirro's assertion that the renovation was "botched" and she had been misled about the nature of the damage. Trump, of course, fired back at her and I suspect she's not long for this administration. Of course, she's a woman, so like Noem and Bondi and Gabbard, she's expendable in Trump's eyes -- unlike Hegseth and Bessent and Miller and the rest of his male co-conspirators.

Some of you were wondering how the arrival of Bailey would affect the garden wildlife, so last night I set up the camera to see what might be going on out there after dark. As you can see, the foxes are not deterred by Bailey's presence. (You'll see Bailey in the first clip, checking out the camera -- I thought her sniffing was cute.) It's remarkable that at least two, and possibly three, foxes wandered through the garden last night and as tightly wound as Bailey is, from inside the house she had no idea. She didn't react at all.

No cats appeared in the video, but honestly, I'm fine with that. I'd just as soon they do their hunting elsewhere. And with our bird feeders temporarily removed to discourage Ratthew, there were no signs of birds, squirrels or small animals. Then again, birds and squirrels aren't usually on the ground at night. Too many foxes around! (I know the squirrels are still here in daytime because Bailey chases them!)

A Possible Culprit, and Thom Gunn

This is Persicaria amplexicaulis, which we have growing in the "Ratthew zone" of our garden below the blackberries. Every time I pick blackberries I wade into this plant and reach through the leaves. Bailey, in her obsessive quest to conquer Ratthew in all his iterations, has been practically rolling around in it. (In fact she's done quite a bit of damage to it, but it's tough!)

Blogger Jennifer asked in a comment whether my itchy arms might not be due to irritation from a plant. I hadn't really thought about it before, so I did some Googling about this Persicaria, and lo and behold, what did I find? "Contact with all parts may irritate the skin," warns the Royal Horticultural Society. Who knew?!

I suppose this may in fact be the culprit when it comes to my itchy arms (and legs, to a lesser degree), not to mention Bailey's itchiness. I don't break the leaves or stems or come into contact with any visible sap, so I'm not 100 percent certain, but it seems likely. Maybe I just need to wear sleeves while picking berries. (I suppose if bugs were to blame that would help too.) I don't think I can realistically keep Bailey out of it, but hopefully her fur gives her some measure of protection.

Here's a less toxic denizen of our garden -- some zinnias, now in full flower and pretty much identical, which is purely by chance because the seeds were mixed.

This was one of my projects yesterday -- to refresh the plants on our front porch. I bought that beautiful Echinacea at Waitrose on Thursday, and the little blue balloon flower I bought yesterday at a florist. The annuals we had out there from the spring were looking sad, so this gives the front door a bit of a lift.

We had a lobelia in that gray pot for nine years (!) but it had been gradually dwindling, and it expired this summer. I think Warren missed it when he watered during our absence and it just got baked. I never liked it much anyway.

And of course I spent more bonding time with Bailey. This is her "pleeeeeeease keep rubbing my belly" face. We went for a walk to Kilburn Grange Park and up through Kilburn toward Cricklewood. She seems like a more dutiful walker than Olga, to such a degree that I worry she's not having much fun -- especially because I can't let her off lead to play with a ball or anything. Her new long lead did arrive yesterday so maybe today we'll experiment with that a bit.

Otherwise, I spent part of the day reading a biography of Thom Gunn, the poet, which I bought a couple of years ago. The subtitle is "A Cool Queer Life," and while Gunn was gay and quite edgy, the book is pretty sophisticated in its discussion of his poetry -- so much so that I'm afraid it's going over my head. I really don't know Gunn's poems, so I struggle when the author gets specific about certain works or wades into the philosophy behind his writing (Gunn was a big fan of Stendhal and Camus, neither of whom I've read or know much about). I'm more interested in his relationships and his life as a gay man in the '50s, and how he made that work in such a conservative era. Fortunately the book goes there too.

I also spent part of the day on the phone with my brother trying to sort out certain aspects of my stepmother's estate. I have to go back to the notary on Tuesday to sign more documents. Ugh!

Last night I made a martini and watched a movie called "M/M," a surreal gay German film that I've had on my list for ages, and ultimately found pretty tedious. I don't know whether the martini hurt or helped!

Drought and a Mystery Object

It's definitely summer again, because my arms are itching like crazy. This happens to me every year, and I have gone back and forth about the cause, vacillating between sun exposure and insects. I'm now back on the insect hypothesis. I seem to develop this problem when it's blackberry season and I'm reaching into the bushes to pick berries, so I think some kind of little no-see-um is biting me. Once again I suspect insidious flower bugs, aka minute pirate bugs, though I haven't seen any of the bugs themselves.

What's funny is, the area where I'm being bitten (I think) is also the area where Bailey killed Ratthew the other day:

She is now fixated on this part of the garden and is running into those bushes every few minutes to make sure there's not another Ratthew lurking there. And we've noticed that she is also itchy! I wonder if those pirate bugs are biting her?!

Even when she's lying on her bed, her eyes are locked on the Ratthew zone.

Dave departed yesterday morning for the USA, and texted me later that he arrived just fine. He thoughtfully scheduled a grocery delivery for me yesterday afternoon that I somehow missed. I'm not sure what happened, because I was home -- I was in the garden but I still should have heard the doorbell (and Bailey definitely would have heard it). I wonder if the guy came early when I was running errands.

Our water shortage is becoming increasingly dire. The other day, when France and Spain were burning, I said to Dave, "It's only a matter of time before we get similar fires here." And sure enough, a 200-acre fire sprang up on the Suffolk coast. The Environment Agency says we are in an "exceptionally serious" drought and Wales apparently had its driest July since record-keeping began, 200 years ago. Southern England has had one percent of its expected July rainfall.

Even scarier is that this may be the new normal. We've had an officially declared summer drought in three of the past five years. I've been watching an apocalyptic BBC show called "The Rapture" which takes place during a heatwave, and it's all shot in a sort of yellow-orange tone with the foliage looking dried out, and frankly it's all hitting a little close to home for me!

We are respecting the hosepipe ban -- though I did use the hose to wash the dog yesterday. Is dog-washing allowed? I have no idea. I could do it in the bathtub but why let that water go down the drain when it could benefit the garden?

A certain neighbor is running her sprinkler as usual and her lawn is as fresh as a green carpet.

Speaking of the garden, I keep finding these things when I dig, and I've never known what they are. 

I knew it wasn't very old, though, because it has a recycling symbol on it.

I took these pictures and searched Google, and turns out it's a plastic lawn-mower blade for a brand of mower called a Flymo. I think this was the plastic mower that came with the flat, and that I got rid of (with the landlord's permission) several years ago. We never used it. The blade seems so small, doesn't it? The cutting radius must have been incredibly narrow, unless there were multiple spinning blades.

Coming from Florida, I find the idea of a plastic lawn mower hilarious. A Flymo would positively explode mowing a lawn there. But I guess here in England, with our wimpy northern grass, it can do the trick under certain circumstances.

I'll stick with our metal one. And as I said, I've found several of these plastic blades lying around out there, so even on our lawn they're apparently not super-durable.

RIP Ratthew

We finally have a successful sunflower! And this is not the biggest one, which is yet to come. I grew four of them from seed, and one -- the weakest and skinniest -- bit the dust while we were in Italy. The other three are powering along, two in the garden and one in a planter at the side of the house.

I always feel like I've had success once a plant blooms and I've posted its picture to my blog.

The Bailster and I took a couple of walks yesterday, once around the neighborhood in the morning and to the cemetery in the afternoon. I'm trying to make this our routine.

She's a little harder to photograph than Olga because I have to keep ahold of her leash. But she is gradually learning her name, and I've ordered a long (10-meter) training lead from Amazon which hopefully will let her roam a bit more widely while still giving me control (and making sure she returns to me). I also ordered a label for the lead that says "No Dogs -- I Like People," which should warn away any canine owners who want to put their dogs nose-to-nose with Bailey.

We had some excitement yesterday in the garden when she killed a rat right in front of me. Dave was inside with a visiting nurse, learning how to self-administer his new Crohn's injections, and I was sitting on the garden bench reading. Bailey wandered into some bushes and suddenly I saw her pounce, and next thing I knew she had Ratthew in her mouth. I will spare you the picture. That dog is earning her keep! We buried Ratthew.

Speaking of garden benches, this was yesterday's project. Our new bench, meant to replace the deteriorating one that has become a source of wasp building materials, arrived and Dave and I put it together. (Bailey was very helpful too.) This one is made entirely of metal, so hopefully it will hold up in the weather better than the wooden one did, although it lasted ten years so I can hardly complain.

Here's the new bench in situ. It's comfortable! I set the wooden one in the far back corner of the garden for now, so the wasps can continue to chew on it, but I'll have it taken away later in the autumn.

Here was my other garden project for the day. Several months ago I planted a teasel in a big plastic pot, and I recently noticed that Nicole the Nicotiana apparently also dropped a seed in there, so then we had two plants competing for space in the single container. Yesterday I put them both in the ground, where hopefully they can coexist with room for their roots to spread. (In the process I found two more toadflax brocade moth caterpillars, which I was careful not to harm.) This is about the worst weather I could imagine for planting a plant -- the ground is as hard as a paving stone -- but I used lots of water so that helped a bit.

Our afternoon walk in the cemetery was warm, and when I turned on a spigot to give Bailey some water, she promptly rolled around in the puddle just like Olga used to do. I guess this is a staffy thing -- luxuriating in mud! Needless to say, bathing was required when we got home. Only a dog can manage to get muddy in a drought.

Paperwork and Baileywork

I found this little crab spider nestled in one of the blossoms on our "Poodle Skirt" dahlia. Can you see it in there, waiting for an unsuspecting bee or fly to come along? I wonder how it manages to find blossoms -- are these spiders just out there, migrating from flower to flower?

Yesterday was a day for getting things done. My mental inbox has been full of a bunch of stuff that I had to get cleared out.

First of all, I had to mail my ballot for the Democratic primary election in Florida. The election is August 18 and I just realized the other day that I never received an overseas ballot as requested. So I sent a message to the Supervisor of Elections in the county where I vote, and they e-mailed me a ballot. I filled it out, printed and mailed it yesterday. Done!

I don't care much about the Democratic primary but I want to stay active on the voter rolls and also get a sense of how this will work for the general election in November.

Second, I had to file the insurance claim for my camera. Dave had to sign, scan and copy some documents, which he did yesterday morning, and I pulled everything together and filed the claim electronically yesterday afternoon. I don't think I need to send paper copies as well but I'll double-check on that. I hope everything I sent will be sufficient; we shall see.

So that's two big items off my plate. In addition I caught up on some e-mails and blog-reading.

And of course I took care of this beast. She lay in the garden with me after an eventful neighborhood walk. She really does not like other dogs. She ran into Olga's black lab and spaniel pals from the nearby housing estate and I thought she was going to take their heads off. I see what the rescue place means about her needing to stay on a lead. She is a very different dog from Olga, and who knows what dark things may have damaged her psychologically in the past.

Fortunately she is very sweet to both of us, and to the other people she meets. It's only dogs she can't stand. She is happy to lie on our laps, submit her belly for rubbing and sleep with us in bed.

In the afternoon we took her to Fortune Green and the cemetery, where we walked the forested paths and she could watch the squirrels (above). She looks tiny in that photo but she's really not that small; about 22 kilos, roughly the same size as Olga. It's just a matter of perspective, I guess.

Afterwards we went to Sweet Corner, the corner cafe, and had a coffee in the air-conditioning while she lay by our feet.

And remember that alligator chew toy that we bought for Olga years ago? Olga never knew what to do with it; she much preferred her Kongs. But Bailey loves eviscerating a soft chew toy. We gave her the alligator and she made short work of it, first methodically gnawing a small hole in the tough outer covering and then pulling out all the stuffing and the squeaker. After that, she beheaded it.

Here's some of the action, in case you'd like to see the carnage first-hand.

She still has a lot of puppy in her. Fortunately she doesn't chew anything she shouldn't. (So far!) I hope I can redirect some of this chewing energy to the Kongs, because they are very sturdy and will hold up, unlike the soft toys. Remember how Olga used to gnaw Kongs apart as a young dog? We've been through all this before!

Her world is about to be shaken again, because Dave leaves tomorrow for a ten-day trip to the USA to see his parents and attend Drum Corps events in Indiana. She's very bonded to Dave so I hope this doesn't unsettle her too much. Fortunately the rest of her new routine should remain more or less the same.