Banksy and a Sunbathing Robin

We met up with my brother and his family yesterday for a Sunday pub lunch in Bloomsbury, where they're staying. We thought they should experience a traditional Sunday roast, so that's what we got -- chicken, in my case, with a Yorkshire pudding and all the trimmings. It was good but as is typical when I eat a Sunday roast, I consumed pretty much my entire day's caloric intake in one sitting. No dinner for me last night.

Anyway, after eating we took the tube down to Piccadilly Circus and walked from there through St. James Park to Buckingham Palace, to show them some of the sights in that area. One I hadn't anticipated seeing was Banksy's newest artwork, on a plinth near Pall Mall.

As we passed it, Dave exclaimed, "Hey, that's the new Banksy!"

I think we all know who inspired that artwork.

We also passed a wino clutching a bottle of rosé who slurred "I love you" to each of us as we disembarked from an elevator in the Piccadilly tube station, and a man belting out an off-key version of the Cranberries' song "Linger" while concealed behind a statue in St. James Park. He may have been hiding his body, but his voice was on full display.

After strolling past the palace and through Green Park, I sent them back to their hotel on the tube and Dave and I came back to West Hampstead to intercept a grocery delivery.

A relatively short garden cam video this week, at just four minutes, but one that features some excellent footage and answers an important question!

-- We start with Q-Tip (I think) trotting past and pausing. Near the teasel to the right of the path you can see a dark object on the ground. That's one of the fox's dog treats, which they get from an unknown source. At 0:32 the fox makes a half-hearted attempt to pick up the treat, but ultimately leaves it behind.
--  At 0:44, the following morning, I pick up the disgusting half-eaten treat and throw it out so we don't encourage rats.
-- At 1:03, a little robin hops into the lower right of the screen and then nestles itself into the ground and spreads its wings. This is what we were seeing last week when I thought the bird might be sick. It's not sick at all. Robins and other birds sunbathe to maintain their feathers. Who knew?!
-- At 1:22 you see me with a watering can. I saved this footage to show the temperature: 116º F (or 47º C), according to the camera. The next afternoon it's even hotter, at 127º F (or 53º C)! Obviously that's not the air temperature, but the temperature of the camera sitting in the sun.
-- At 1:48, Pale Cat wanders past.
-- At 2:02 we get some of the best fox footage I've ever collected. The fox, in daylight, wanders up, gets comfortable and lies down for a moment. I love seeing the fox so relaxed in our garden! (That will change when we get a dog, sadly.)
-- At 2:43, a squirrel doing a sort of funny, bow-legged old-man walk.
-- At 3:03, a fox hops out of the nighttime shrubbery.
-- At 3:11, Tabby slinks past.
-- At 3:18, some rough-housing squirrels jostle the camera.
-- At 3:38, the fox returns, and then at 3:49 it's back in color for some scratching and grooming. Someone's feeling itchy!

Grounded for Lack of Toilet Paper

Well, yesterday turned out to be wall-to-wall activity! My morning went pretty much as usual, blogging and uploading pictures to Flickr, and cleaning the house to prepare for my brother's visit. He, his wife and my niece had an eventful day of travel. The first leg of their Delta flight was grounded by a broken tissue or napkin dispenser, believe it or not, and then the ground crew couldn't find the plane's maintenance log book -- which I suspect was the real reason for the delay. All of this meant an extra 45 minutes in Jacksonville before takeoff, which meant they missed their connecting flight in Atlanta and had to board a later plane for London. This put them here six hours later than they'd anticipated.

But they did finally arrive. I journeyed out to Heathrow to meet them, and just missed getting caught up in this snafu. When I entered the tube station, a notice board said trains weren't running to Heathrow. I was trying to figure out an alternate plan but then my train did indeed go all the way, so I suppose the system was just getting back on its feet after the earlier disruption.

The tube was running back into town with no problem, so soon after I met them we were zipping back to West Hampstead. They came to our flat and we sat out in the garden in the almost-sweltering warmth. My brother does read my blog, so I imagine it was fun for him to see first-hand all the stuff I've been writing about, from the ladybird larvae in the yard waste bag to the starlings on the bird feeder.

(Incidentally, I retrieved another ten or so ladybird larvae from the bag yesterday, so I decided to dump out all the garden trimmings in the back "wildlife area" of the garden. That way whatever's living on that alkanet can crawl to nearby living plants. I don't want to be responsible for killing all those little critters.)

After a while, my brother and his family took an Uber to their hotel in Bloomsbury, and I joined them there after a couple of hours so we could go to dinner. (Dave, who has been feeling under the weather, didn't join us -- but he was happy because the recliner repairman had come earlier in the day, and his chair is now fully functional once again!)

The gigantic mural above is one of several in the neighborhood near their hotel. We walked to a nearby pub called The Swan, where we ate, and then wandered the streets surrounding Queen's Square and the Great Ormond Street children's hospital. Here's some more of what I saw during the evening:

Door in the men's loo at the pub

Today my brother and family are going to rest up and then Dave and I are meeting them for a Sunday pub roast. Maybe before that I can get caught up in blogland!

Larvae, and a Musical Neighbor

Speckled wood butterfly on our "Bowl of Beauty" peony

I pre-wrote some of this post last night, thinking that rather than blogging, I would be on my way to Heathrow airport early this morning to pick up my brother and his family. They're visiting for a week from the USA -- the first time they've come to England! A landmark occasion for all of us.

But then my brother texted in the middle of the night and said the first leg of their flight landed late and they'd missed their connecting flight to London, so they're on a later plane, coming in around 1 p.m. (They're going to be exhausted.) And I'm blogging as usual.

With that in mind, I spent yesterday getting the house ready for visitors. I mowed the lawn, for example, and dealt with simple cleaning. There's more to be done but it's presentable, which is about as good as it ever gets around here. (They're not staying with us -- they have a hotel -- but the place still needs to look decent.)

While cleaning up the garden I threw out lots of flower stalks from the green alkanet. The flowers have more or less faded and I don't want them going to seed. We already have more alkanet than we can handle.

But while throwing them in the garden waste bag, I saw several little larval ladybirds like the one above (which was on a hellebore). They're attracted to any plant with aphids, which they eat -- and alkanet has plenty of aphids. So then I had to extract the alkanet from the yard waste bag and examine the stalks to make sure I saved what larvae I could find. I retrieved about ten of them and put them on some of the remaining alkanet in the garden.

This is why I hate weeding. It not only kills the weeds, but whatever critters are living ON the weeds!

Then, in the afternoon, I went to a pub outing with some former co-workers. It was a farewell hurrah for another guy who's retiring, and for my former boss's boss, who's also leaving. It was fun catching up with everyone from work again. Have I really only been gone six weeks? It feels like a lifetime! I have one more going-away event to attend on June 12, our end-of-the-year luncheon, and then I will be well and truly finished with that job.

Here's a weird little video for you. Through all the warm weather last week, I kept hearing a woman singing operatically. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from, and in fact I still don't exactly know. It's from one of the apartments behind us. Apparently we have a neighbor who's a singer, or fancies herself one.

I thought I'd share this little urban peculiarity. In the video I think she's just singing scales, or some rudimentary vocal exercise. The sound isn't terribly clear but if you crank the volume you should hear her right at the start, and then around the 15- and 30-second marks.

We often have perplexing music coming from those apartments. Remember our flutist from years ago? I'm not complaining, though -- it's better than listening to leaf-blowers and lawn mowers!

Incidentally, it's interesting to see -- in that linked video clip of the flutist -- how healthy our mock orange (Philadelphus) looked. It's quite straggly this year, with few leaves and flowers. I'm not sure why.

New Pots, and I'm Locked Out!

Flowers on our purple heart (Tradescantia)

Yesterday was the day to take care of some long-standing issues among our plants. I got myself motivated early in the morning, while it was still relatively cool, and got to work.

First I dug up and discarded our dead tamarisk tree and our ailing broom. This is much easier said than done because the ground is as hard as iron right now, having had no rain to speak of for almost two months. (The BBC says parts of Southeast England have had their driest April on record, with just over a third of the rainfall we'd get in an average year, and May hasn't been any better. Apparently we're not technically in a drought because we had a lot of rain over the winter, but that's not helping the garden plants now!)

Then I grabbed my garden-shop gift card and headed down to Maida Vale on the bus. I went back to Clifton Nurseries and picked up some more supplies: A gigantic pot for our olive tree, two nice big pots for a couple of other plants that needed new homes, and some bags of soil. I also bought a new Brugmansia purely on a whim.

I brought everything home in an Uber and got to work on some heavy-duty repotting. The result is...

...a new home for this previously rootbound prayer plant...

...and for this ficus, which used to be a bunch of dead twigs...

...and for the new Brugmansia, now in the pot that used to hold the prayer plant.

I still have to deal with the olive, and I'm not sure how to go about that. Our passionflower vine, which grew of its own accord from a seed, is living in the same pot and growing up a wall, so it's going to be hard to maneuver the olive tree into a new pot while not damaging the vine. I just couldn't deal with it yesterday because I was already tired and sore after all that other work.

In the middle of all this, who should reappear but Mrs. Russia! You'll recall that she and her husband rented out their apartment above us, and I haven't seen her since last summer. She stopped in to trim the shrubs out on their terrace. We chatted a bit and she asked about Mrs. Kravitz's air conditioner and whether it was noisy. I said I hadn't even noticed it -- I didn't realize the Kravitzes (next door) even have an air conditioner -- but Mrs. Russia is annoyed that it's been installed within earshot of her own terrace. "Maybe we should buy one and point it at them!" she said.

Dueling air conditioners!

Then I got a bit paranoid about her wielding pruning shears, so I told her we'd planted some new bushes in the front garden so she wouldn't mistakenly cut them down. She got a bit snippy (no pun intended) about why we'd planted bushes without her approval, and I said we got our landlord's approval, and it was up to the landlord to keep her informed. And that was pretty much the end of our exchange.

But again, I got worried. We have a lot of beautiful campanula growing around our front steps, along with some pink valerian and some other wildflowers. The Russians have long chafed at my tendency to allow those plants to grow -- they like the steps pressure-washed and tidy as a hospital.

So I went out and made a video of the steps, including the bees loving the campanula. I figured if Mrs. Russia tore it out I'd at least have a record of it. I later added some music because there was a lot of street noise, including conversations from passing pedestrians, distant sirens and my own front door slamming and me exclaiming "Sh*t!" because I didn't have my house keys on me!

Yes, I was indeed locked out. I called Dave and he made plans to send a co-worker to our flat with his keys, but I knocked on the Kravitzes' door and as luck would have it someone was home and I was able to get into their back garden and, using a ladder, boost myself over the garden fence. Our own back door was open so that got me back inside our house. Criminy!

Anyway, Mrs. Russia did not trim anything in the front or weed the steps, so those worries were unfounded, at least in the immediate moment. But I'm sure she went back to wherever she's living now grousing that we're allowing the place to go to pot, not to mention fuming over Mrs. Kravitz's air conditioner. I try to be friendly with her but I hope she doesn't move back here.

Bee Scrutiny and Garden Losses

It can be surprisingly hard to get a decent photo of a bee. You'd think it would be the easiest thing in the world -- bees don't move very quickly. But they also hunch over on themselves, and their black eyes blend in with their black fur, and what you often wind up with is a dark furry blob with no distinguishing features. So I was happy with these shots, with the bee's face visible.

The bees do love that wallflower, which we've had for several years now. A co-worker gave it to me as a seedling. It seems to be losing some of its vigor so I suspect we'll have to replace it before too long. Wallflowers don't live forever.

We seem to have lost a couple of other garden plants as well. Tammy the tamarisk tree, where the goldfinches loved to perch and nibble on the buds, has apparently died. There's no green growth visible at all -- just dry brown sticks.

Likewise, our orange broom (top photo here) seems to be mostly dead. It has no flowers or leaves, and several dry brown stems. There are a few areas that are still green, but I'm thinking it's toast.

I'm not broken up about either of these losses. I'll remove the plants in the next week or so and maybe we'll put something new in there. (Though maybe not something large -- I've always thought Tammy was in a bad location, in the middle of the roses.) Fortunately I still have about £100 on the garden shop gift card my co-workers gave me for my retirement. Maybe I'll run that errand today.

Yesterday proved to be warmer than expected -- we topped out at about 87º F (or 30º C) but it felt much more tolerable than the days before.

Still Hot, But Not Humid

The magenta spreen lambsquart is back! It returned all on its own, two of them, growing in one of our planters. Not really a surprise since it's an amaranth, which is known as a tenacious weed. But I like it.

We were back up to 92º F (about 33º C) yesterday, similar to the day before. Somehow it didn't feel quite as oppressive, though. Maybe I just got used to the heat. Still, it was the UK's highest-ever May temperature for the second day in a row, and I'm relieved that today we're only getting up to 79º F (or 26º C).

Yesterday's comments about air conditioning were interesting. I think one's comfort with a/c all depends on what you're used to, don't you? In my home state of Florida, where it's not only hot but incredibly humid, a/c is a blessed relief. Walking into an air-conditioned space on a hot summer day is like a religious experience. I don't know how my ancestors ever lived there without it. (And yet they did!) At least here in England the humidity is nothing like that. I checked yesterday and it was somewhere around 32 percent, which is half what it was yesterday in Tampa -- and it can go much higher there.

Anyway, I couldn't get motivated to get on the tube and deal with the urban crush in that kind of heat, so I just stayed home. I sat out on the garden bench in the afternoon and had more watermelon, and read "The Hunting Party," which I've almost finished. It's an entertaining book but I don't think I've ever met a more distasteful cast of characters in my life. I'm kind of hoping they all get murdered.

At one point I looked up at Totoro, hanging in the tree overhead, and admired the green bead that now functions as his bell clapper. I found that bead in the cemetery more than six years ago and wired it to Totoro to replace one that was lost. It has worked out pretty well. Poor Totoro has had quite a dramatic life in our garden.

I also spent part of yesterday arranging for someone to repair Dave's recliner. The other day he pulled the lever on the side of the chair to get it to recline, and the handle broke. This is a crisis. Dave is now unable to recline the chair, which is possibly his favorite place in the entire world. So I communicated with a repair guy and sent him pictures and he said he could do it, but he has yet to schedule his visit. Hopefully it can happen soon.

In the late afternoon, I took a walk. I felt the need for some exercise so I walked up to and around the cemetery and back down through the neighborhood on the other side of the high street. I was proud of myself for getting out and about.

Dave had a concert last night so I was on my own for dinner. I had some leftover chicken, made a martini and watched an "Absolutely Fabulous" movie, "The Last Shout," which I have already seen approximately 600 times. It was a good conclusion to an extremely warm day.

Hot

Dear God, it is hot. Just a week or so ago I needed a blanket on the couch and we were running the heat for an hour in the mornings. Now, after just a few days of a happy medium, I can't stay cool. As I understand it, cooler temperatures will return, but yesterday when I checked in the afternoon it was about 92º F (or 33º C). I realize that's pretty typical for some of you in summer, but for May in the UK it's unheard of. Remember that no one in this country (including us) has air conditioning!

So I stayed pretty quiet yesterday, mostly reading "The Hunting Party," taking pictures in the garden and watering our poor parched plants. I walked down to the high street in the late morning to get some watermelon -- it seemed like a perfect day for a summery treat. Dave and I sat out on the garden bench and ate it in the afternoon.

Like everyone, we have a drawer in the kitchen that's full of random utensils like a garlic press, a pie server, a can opener, peelers and slicers and that kind of thing. You know, that drawer. Well, the other day Dave pulled it open and part of it broke -- the front panel disconnected from the drawer itself on one side. Our cabinets are very old and this drawer has always been jankety, so this wasn't exactly a surprise.

I took it out onto the patio along with the super glue and managed to repair it. Now that I write it down, it seems like a small, insignificant thing, but at the time I felt pretty darn capable. I slid it back into the cabinetry and put only the most frequently used utensils inside so it wouldn't be as heavy. We stuck the others in the pantry. We probably could get rid of them and never notice, but you know the minute we give away the melon baller Dave will need it.

I'm trying to think of some place to go today that will be cooler. The Tate, maybe. I'm not thrilled about using the tube to get there, but at least I would be comfortable while I'm indoors.

(Top photo: Fallen maple seeds on our "stinking iris.")