Eastbourne

Yesterday I really needed to get out of the house and get some exercise. We've rented this cabin in Pevensey Bay three times, and yet I had never walked all the way to Eastbourne, our closest city. So that was my goal.

I set out soon after breakfast, walking the pebbly beach. It was low tide and a surprising number of people were out walking, paddleboarding and frolicking with their dogs on the sandy flats that at higher tides are all underwater. I walked and walked, and let me tell you, walking on pebbles for extended distances is a workout! They shift beneath you and your legs are constantly compensating for that shift, so muscles and tendons are working in minute ways to keep you steady and level.

I walked past the Martello Towers that I wrote about a couple of years ago, and then past two more -- No. 64 (above) and beyond it on the point to the left, No. 66. These were coastal fortifications built in the Napoleonic era to protect Britain's shores from invasion. Some of them are unused now, like these two, and some have been turned into very unusual private homes!

Closer to Eastbourne I passed through an area called Sovereign Harbour with a big boat basin and lots of (relatively) new apartments. I finally got onto a paved coastal path soon after that, which made my feet happy.

Have you ever seen a boat named Steve? I sure haven't. Or maybe it's Steve's boat.

Finally, after trudging about six miles I was in Eastbourne proper. I walked out on the ornate city pier, with its spires and golden domes and various amusements, and went up in a beachfront ferris wheel called the Sky Club that gave me good views in every direction -- eastward in the direction I'd walked, northward into town and westward toward the towering cliffs of Beachy Head.

To give you the true Eastbourne experience, I made a video of the ferris wheel, paired with a song by Cool Company that happened to be playing on the wheel when I took the ride. (It took some doing to figure out the title and then download it -- fortunately the artists allow it to be used on YouTube.) The ferris wheel footage, which includes a good view of an adjacent old military fort called the Eastbourne Redoubt, is followed by some shots of Eastbourne that I haven't posted here and a short video of busy Pevensey Bay beach. On that portion of the clip, beneath the music, you can faintly hear the general beach hubbub and the barking dogs.

On the Eastbourne waterfront I passed this interesting plaque about Beachy Head Lady. (How do we know she was a "lady"?) It makes a good story, but it turns out the reality isn't quite what's depicted here. Beachy Head Lady was thought to be African and was even celebrated as perhaps the first black person to reach the shores of the UK, on public monuments and in books and articles. More recent DNA testing, though, shows that she was actually born in the UK and was of Cypriot or Mediterranean descent -- which makes sense, as this would have been during the Roman occupation of Britain.

Guess they haven't gotten around to updating the plaque.

I had lunch in this chic little seaside restaurant called the Glasshouse -- a glass of rosé, three oysters on the half-shell and a lobster sandwich. Delicious!

From there I thought I'd catch the bus home, but the bus I wanted doesn't run on Sundays (ugh). So I made my way to the Eastbourne train station, which gave me a chance to see downtown. (Not all that scenic.) There were no other good bus options even from there, so I took a taxi home. I think I walked about seven miles in all.

Dave said Olga was nervous all day about my absence, which is both adorable and suffocating. She's calmed down now and she snored like a walrus all night, so apparently she slept well. She's getting more adventurous about walking out on the beach -- in fact I had to chase her down last night when she spontaneously decided to go walkabout. (Visions of Shannon again!) I was barefoot at the time and walking on those pebbles barefoot is painful! From now on I put my shoes on no matter what.

In the evening I sat out on the deck in perfect weather beneath a clear blue sky, had a martini and listened to my iTunes. I've never been happier. I'm even getting a tan.

I Got a Potato

There's a little neighborhood just across the street from us called Beachlands. It's a good place to walk Olga, with sidewalks and grass. That phone booth behind the boat above has been turned into a little free library, and I picked up a paperback by Ian Rankin there yesterday. It's my insurance policy in case I get through the two books and multiple New Yorkers I brought with me. God forbid I should run out of reading!

This is one of the streets in Beachlands, where many of the houses have a sort of Art Deco design, at least on the outside. I think they're pretty cute. Kind of Miami Beach, right down to the paint jobs. Dave and I fantasized yesterday about local real estate and I got online to look at recent sales, and found that these little houses sell for about £300K. (The ones across the street, on the ocean -- like where we're staying -- are double that, at least.)

I'm not sure we'd want to live out here year-round -- it's a bit remote -- but who knows? It's good to think about options.

This is how we spent the morning after our walk. Well, one of us, anyway. I sat nearby and read "The Frozen River," which I got about halfway through. I'm enjoying it so far. I've questioned some of the language use -- the book takes place in Maine in the late 1700s, and the speech patterns seem very modern. One of the characters used the word "puked" or "puking," for example, and I wondered, "Did people really say that then?" But it shows up in Shakespeare, so I guess they did.

I tried to take Olga for a walk on the beach in the afternoon but she turned around in short order. I don't think she likes the pebbles.

Speaking of which, some kids seem to have had fun with some of the rocks around our place.

A mermaid? Someone swimming? Not sure.

We bathed Olga in the afternoon. She hadn't had a bath in ages and if she's going to stay here in this house, she can't have a not-so-fresh smell. She dried pretty quickly lying out in the sun.

I got the bright idea yesterday from a review in The New Yorker to watch some of Tom Cruise's "Mission: Impossible" movies, which seem like they'd be good, lightweight, beachy fare. So last night we cranked up "Mission: Impossible II" which I got about two-thirds of the way through before realizing a) it's not that good, and b) we'd seen it before. In fact, I read on my blog that the last time we watched it (five years ago) I realized I'd already seen it and didn't like it. Sheesh! I do not learn my lesson, do I?

This morning it's foggy. We were up at an insanely early hour -- 4:30 a.m., because it's daylight then -- and I let Olga go out to the deck. She promptly rounded the corner and saw a fox, and took off after it. She ran all the way down the steps leading to the street. Of course the fox was long gone by then, but it's good to see the old girl still has some fire in her belly!

Transport

I'm going to start this post off with a shot of my dahlias, which are just starting to really pop. Who knows what they'll look like by the time we get back to London in a week! We watered them well yesterday and I put them in a shadier spot, in hopes that they won't dry out too much.

In fact, all of yesterday morning was taken up by preparations for our trip -- mostly plant watering and cleaning up the flat. With that all out of the way, we hit the road at 12:45. Rather than deal with the tube we decided to take a taxi straight from our door to Victoria Station for our 1:54 train, which worked fine despite horrendous traffic and the fact that I accidentally had the driver drop us a block away from the station entrance.

We got inside, bought our tickets from the truly bewildering array of options on the ticketing machines, and gave Olga some water before making our way to the train. Dave carried her partway through the station because she was moving so slowly. (Dave is giving grumpy face in that photo because he hates having his picture taken.)

On the train, Olga slept under our seats or in the aisle. It brought us to Pevensey Bay with no changes, which was fabulously easy, but once here our plans fell apart. I'd intended to catch the bus to our cottage, but we happened to arrive during a 1.5-hour gap in the No. 8 bus's schedule. We weren't about to stand at this absurd bus stop for an hour and a half:

I think one person might fit on that little concrete pad beside a very busy road, but not two people, a dog and a bunch of luggage.

So we called an Uber, and voila, problem solved!

Olga seems happy to be here, lying in the sun beneath the gaze of Poseidon. She was exhausted last night, though, and after eating fell into a deep sleep.

We ordered pizza and I made a rather strange, accidentally vermouth-heavy martini. I could have sworn there were martini glasses here, but I couldn't find any, so I had to serve it in a wine glass (NO, I didn't fill it up!) and because my gin was lukewarm I put it over rocks. It wasn't ideal but it did the job.

This morning when I opened the sliding door to the deck, a very scruffy-looking fox darted off along one of the walls between our neighbors' patios. Even here, on this pebbly beach, we have critters!

Lots of Mysterious People and a Comma

This was my find while walking the dog yesterday morning. As you know, I can't resist a found strip of film negatives, and when I saw this lying in the gutter I had to pick it up. Unfortunately, just as I did so, Olga stooped to pee on it. I grabbed it but not before she got a few drops on it.

It's Kodak GT800-5 film, which I believe is the type generally used in Kodak FunSaver disposable cameras. I think those cameras are still available, so these may not be old negatives. They could be from last week, or from ten years ago. It's all part of the mystery!

Back home, I put the film in my negative scanner to see what's what.

Ah, someone's trip to Brighton! That's definitely the Pavilion in the background.

(See that ghostly patch to the right? Thanks, Olga.)

A picnic on the grass. I love it when photographers manage to get their shadows into the shot.

Are we still in Brighton? Who knows. A few of these may be the same people, like that guy in the navy blue shirt in the foreground of the middle picture, who also seems to be at the rear of the last one.

Speaking of cameras, I've decided to not take my big camera to Pevensey Bay when we go today. I'm just taking my phone. We're already going to be juggling luggage and the dog, so one less bag is better for everyone.

When I told Dave, he said, "You don't want your long lens, to focus on Olga as she's swimming out into the English channel?"

"Like Shannon!" I exclaimed. Dave looked perplexed. "You know, Shannon. That '70s song about the dog who swims out to sea and dies."

"That is not something I was listening to when I was four," he replied.

(For the record, he would have been eight, but whatever.)

Speaking of getting one's shadow into a picture, I took this very haphazard video yesterday when I saw the first comma butterfly of the season. (My long lens would have come in handy!) You can see how weedy our patio is at this time of year -- but hey, I am all about embracing our weediness.

Kids' Mural Update

Well, yesterday morning was not very fun. I had a dental appointment to replace an old filling and get another cleaning. My dentist's office is near where I work, so I found myself walking that same old stretch of Abbey Road -- with the "Kids Painting Summer 1978" mural on the bridge over the railroad tracks.

The mural has seen better days. Since I first blogged it ten years ago, the images on the eastern side of the bridge have been overpainted and graffitied, so there's very little still intact. On the western side, though, there's only been some minor tagging, so images like this lion (?) above are still visible.

Here's the weightlifter (R), flanked by diaper pins or punk safety pins or whatever they are. I've blogged him before. I'm not sure what that character on the left is supposed to be. Martial arts, maybe? He seems to be flexing a muscular arm.

Here's a pano shot of the same wall. There's a third figure on the right, as you can see.

A little farther along, there's this winter skiing scene -- a cross-country skier at left, a downhill skier at right.

There's more to it, but you get the idea. Pretty amazing that all of this has survived 47 years.

Anyway, the dentist went smoothly and even the filling replacement was easy enough. I walked home and spent the afternoon in the garden, reading and waiting for my novocaine (or whatever they use nowadays) to wear off. It took all day. I wasn't back to feeling normal until about 5 p.m. In the meantime, I listened to Mrs. K berating her gardener again. She was really giving it with both barrels yesterday and dropped the F bomb a few times. If I were that gardener I'd walk away singing "Take this job and shove it."

I carefully trimmed our own hedges, which I think are finally past the point where they might be housing birds' nests. I haven't seen any sign of baby birds in a while.

Oh, and the Russians' moving van showed up, with a couple of Russian movers who loaded up a lot of very bland blond-wood furniture, and they departed in late afternoon. Mr. Russia stayed behind, though, painting his front door and part of the front wall of the house -- doing home improvements right up to the last minute! Unfortunately, he pulled up the little snapdragon I blogged yesterday. Honestly, just GO AWAY.

They've left all their balcony plants behind, which I assume they'll come back for. They have some very expensive shrubbery out there and I can't imagine they'd abandon it.

They also threw a stack of virtually brand-new philosophy books in the recycling bin -- stuff by Bertrand Russell, Freud, Wittgenstein and others. Was Mrs. Russia taking a philosophy and ethics course in her spare time? I grabbed the books for the school library. I'm not sure how much our students would use them but I'm sure whatever Freud books we have are much older and yellower than these. Or I can save them for our annual book swap.

Frank

This is Frank. No, he does not belong to us. Olga would never tolerate a cat in her presence! Frank belongs to Dave's friend and co-worker Lisa, whose house we went to yesterday for lunch. Lisa and her husband and kids just moved within the past year to a house they bought in Camberwell, South London, and the lunch was meant to give us a chance to see it.

Lisa's garden is still a work in progress -- in fact it reminds me a bit of the garden at her previous place in Bethnal Green, which Dave and I helped her improve many years ago. This one, too, seems very sun-blasted and a bit parched. But she's planted some stuff and she has a thick stand of bamboo at the far end, which clearly serves as Frank's shady retreat. It will slowly look better as the plants grow and after a little more TLC.

We took tube and bus down there and I brought my camera thinking I might take a walk afterwards, but we didn't leave her house until 3:30 p.m. and I'd had wine and the sun felt intense and I was ready to come home. So I'll save the photowalk for another day.

The Russians are still packing and purging. I've seen many more bags of refuse leaving their flat. I shudder to think what they're throwing out but I draw the line at combing through people's trash bags! I can't indulge my crazy that much.

This little snapdragon (above) has grown in a crack on the front porch. It's a descendant of some yellow snapdragons I planted in a pot back in 2021. Every year they pop up in these cracks, and I guess enough of them re-seed that they manage to come up again the following year.

A Noisy Monday

We had a noisy Monday around here, with the Russians purging stuff from their flat and Mrs. Kravitz next door berating her lawn crew. She had two guys trimming, mowing and power-washing all day, and she gives orders at top volume (admittedly necessary with all that machinery running). If she believes they have not been followed, we hear the fallout. I'm glad I don't work for her.

In the afternoon, Mrs. Russia put a beautiful blooming orchid in a pot on the front porch next to a black bag full of trash. I thought, "She's going to throw that out." I waited until it disappeared from the porch, and I looked in the rubbish bins -- and sure enough, the orchid was there, its flowers cut off. I retrieved it from the trash and brought it inside. I'm tempted to put it in the front window so she can see I salvaged it, which would piss her off. But that's just me being small.

I finished "All the President's Men," which I'm so glad I read. And while walking Olga on the high street Sunday morning, I passed a closed charity shop with a stack of vintage paperbacks in the window, for sale at £1 each. One of them was gay author John Rechy's "City of Night," which I've never read -- it's a scandalous novel from 1963 about the "tawdry, deviate world of Times Square (and) Hollywood Boulevard," a "perceptive, compelling journey through the sordid limbo of hidden sex between men" (according to the back cover). Whoa! It was touted by James Baldwin as "a most humbling and liberating achievement." So I went back to the shop after it opened and bought it. Maybe I'll read it for Pride month.

It's one of those old-fashioned paperbacks from the '60s with red-edged pages and tiny, tiny print -- the first paperback edition, dated 1964, from Grove Press. It doesn't look like it's ever been read. Kind of an unexpected book to find in a West Hampstead charity shop.

In the afternoon I also sorted out a banking question that's too boring to go into here. It took an hour or two but I'm so relieved I figured it out and it should give us a financial boost.

To celebrate, I made myself an evening martini and sat out in the garden as Olga snoozed on the grass nearby. By this time the trimming and purging had ceased and all was peaceful. I watered all our plants thoroughly because they were looking so parched, and I see now that we got rain overnight -- so they've been doubly blessed.

I'm a Birthday Failure

Yesterday was Dave's birthday. I had a restaurant dinner planned but I wanted to get him a gift or two as well, and yet I seemed completely incapable of making that happen. I have no idea why I just couldn't get it done.

I was going to get him some cooking gear -- he's mentioned wanting to replace some of our pans and our baking sheets -- but I felt overwhelmed by the options and the task of trying to source the right things. I went to some shops and didn't see what I wanted, and I really didn't want to order online because I don't know brands and wasn't sure what I was going to get. At the end of the day I just bought him a gift card at our local kitchen supply store and I gave that to him. It feels silly since it's just me spending our money on something that he has to go choose anyway. Why couldn't he just walk into the store and buy it without my involvement? Know what I mean?

It feels like kind of a non-gift, in other words. But that's what he got.

For dinner I chose a restaurant in Mayfair that has a Michelin star and promised contemporary British cuisine. Unfortunately, when I made the reservation, I neglected to notice that Sunday was "jazz night." So we went in, sat down, and within half an hour a jazz trio gathered right behind Dave and began to play.

"You brought me to a jazz club for my birthday?" Dave asked.

Now, Dave hates jazz. I know this. So I explained that I didn't know about the jazz and we just rolled with it and laughed it off. The musicians were not intrusive and played softer pieces by the likes of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Miles Davis, so the music -- to me anyway -- was enjoyable. The dinner turned out OK -- Dave was happier with it than I was. But overall, I feel I didn't do a great job managing this birthday.

Here's an evening portrait of Olga in the garden -- the picture of happiness.

And here she is yesterday morning in front of one of the more unusual homes on our street, with its garden wall decorated with playful gargoyles and statuettes. This is the domain of the bathing beauty, who you can barely see in the background above Olga. (Her tub is obscured by all the shrubbery but trust me, it's still there.)

I had an unsettling dream last night. Dave and I were sitting on the couch in my childhood home in Land O' Lakes. We're talking and suddenly I hear what sounds like distant gunshots. We decide to close the sliding glass doors, which were standing open facing the lake, but I cannot pull them closed -- when I try some unseen force pulls them open again. I'm getting frantic at being unable to lock the house as the gunfire comes closer. That's when I woke up.

It doesn't take a degree in Freudian or Jungian psychology to interpret this as a reaction to what's going on in Iran, and the fear that the conflict will eventually threaten us. I saw yesterday that Keir Starmer came out in support of the Iran operation, though the UK did not participate. I can't see anything good coming of this but I trust Starmer more than I do Trump, so maybe there was some sound reasoning behind it. Then again, even if Starmer opposed it, would he say that after the fact? All that would do is antagonize Trump. So maybe his support doesn't really show agreement.

I am going to try to be very Zen and calmly exist amid uncertainty.

(Top photo: A shopping arcade across the street from last night's restaurant.)

Nixon and Trump

Yesterday was our hottest day yet -- about 90º F or 32º C. It was too hot to do much. I know many of you in North America are experiencing temperatures hotter than that, but here in England most people (including us) don't have air conditioning. So when it's 90º F, we're feeling it all day. It's draining. My only escape is taking a shower, which I happily did last evening once things began to cool off.

I kept reading "All the President's Men," which I am still enjoying a lot. The parallels between Nixon's time and now are so stark. Like the current president of the USA, Nixon was considered a somewhat coarse individual, and he was full of resentment against a power structure he felt had long mistreated him. He and his administration spent a lot of time sowing seeds of doubt about the media. They depicted reporters as representatives of a coastal elite who didn't understand "real Americans." It's exactly the messaging we hear from Trump now.

And despite all the evidence about the dirty tricks being employed by the Nixon White House against its adversaries, voters overwhelmingly re-elected Nixon in 1972. Again, parallels with Trump and our last election -- Nixon ran against a weak Democratic candidate and voters went with what they knew. Somehow it makes me feel better about Trump's re-election. We've done this before and survived, though admittedly not without a huge governmental crisis.

Anyway, I read about Watergate until I couldn't anymore, and then in the evening I watched the movie version again. It was very interesting to see how the movie condensed all of the detail in the book into a coherent script that was by and large very accurate. As far as I can tell, the only scene in the movie that's not in the book is the one in which Woodward and Bernstein knock on the door of a woman who supposedly works at the Committee to Reelect the President, and she welcomes them in (unlike all the other people they've approached), only for them to find that she doesn't work at CRP at all but at the Garfinkel's department store. I don't know whether the script writers made that up, or it really happened and "Woodstein" left it out of the book.

Oh, and Deep Throat's famous advice to "follow the money" is never uttered in the book, either. Not in those words, anyway.

I made a tomato sandwich for lunch with an heirloom tomato I bought at our local produce market. It was good but not as good as I thought it might be. I love a tomato sandwich in summer but tomatoes in England are just not like tomatoes in Florida. Dave would say it doesn't get hot enough here (except yesterday!), and maybe he's right.

Through all of this, I was hearing the sounds of packing tape being ripped upstairs, as the Russians prepare for their move. It filled my heart with joy.

(Re. the graffiti above: Funny, because I have the exact opposite reaction.)

Although it's cooler this morning, I'm seeing that we're not going to have any rain for the next few weeks, which includes our week away in Pevensey Bay. I feel like we're going to have to figure out some way to get the plants watered during that time. If only we had reasonable neighbors I could ask!

Apple Tree Yard and a Pavilion

As you may remember, I just read a novel by Louise Doughty called "Apple Tree Yard." She named it for a street near St. James Palace in London that really exists. I was curious what Apple Tree Yard looked like, so I began a walk there yesterday morning, taking the tube down to Green Park.

There is no apple tree in Apple Tree Yard, or even a sign that there ever was an apple tree. There's no tree at all, in fact. It's a dead-end street surrounded by big buildings. In the book, a fateful assignation occurs between two characters in one of the doorways. (Way too many people around for that to happen in real life, it seems to me.)

But there is an interesting monument to Sir Edwin Lutyens, the designer of New Delhi, who apparently presented his plans for the new city in Apple Tree Yard. Why this would be true I'm not sure -- perhaps there was a colonial government office or architecture firm there back in the days of the Raj.

From there I got a coffee and walked to St. James Square. If I've ever been in this park before, I don't remember it. It was exciting to find a little corner of London that I'd never seen. I sat on one of the benches with my coffee and wondered who on earth Gulielmus III could be. I thought maybe he was some obscure Saxon king from antiquity, but no -- turns out that's a Latin rendering of the English name William III. I had no idea!

From there I walked through Green Park to the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner, and then on into Hyde Park itself.

Near the Serpentine I and a group of other people had to pause for this gaggle of geese to cross the path and get in the water. None of us were sure what to do until the woman in front of me blazed a trail right through them, and I followed suit. By the time I got to the other side they were mostly all in the pond.

I wanted to check out this year's Serpentine Pavilion, an annual construction associated with the adjacent Serpentine Gallery. This year's pavilion is called "A Capsule in Time" by the Bangladeshi firm of Marina Tabassum Architects. According to a nearby plaque, it's inspired by architecture in the Bengal Delta, where structures are ephemeral in an ever-shifting landscape of land and water. The pavilion itself only exists for five months in the summer, and apparently part of it can move.

Here's an interior view. There's a cafe and bookstore at one end, so visitors can get a drink and relax beneath the shady canopy.

I kept walking across the park and decided (ambitiously) that I would walk all the way back home. I wound through the part of the park where I used to walk a very puppyish Olga when we lived in Notting Hill, long ago, and then up along Queensway and through Maida Vale and Kilburn.

Here's a pub I passed on the way. I blogged this place before, many years ago, when it was being refurbished. I've still never been there, and it was closed when I passed late yesterday morning. (Too early for a beer anyway!)

I also passed the vast housing estates in South Kilburn that are being redeveloped by Brent council. The project seems to be moving at a snail's pace. A year and a half ago I visited a couple of vacant structures there, Exeter Court and Hereford House, and photographed the graffiti. Those structures are still standing and look exactly the same, except now there's a more secure perimeter fence around them so you can't get as close. At the time I wrote that new homes were supposed to be developed on the site by 2026. Clearly that's not happening -- the current plan, if I'm reading it right, says they'll be finished in 2029.

Anyway, from there I walked up to West Hampstead. By this time I was super-thirsty -- temperatures were in the mid-80s (F) again yesterday. I stopped at a grocery and bought a cherry Coke, which is not something I would ever normally drink, but I was craving both sugar and liquid and let me tell you, those chemicals were good.

Just before I got home I bought a hunk of watermelon at our local produce shop, and Dave and I enjoyed it in the garden last night. All told I walked about seven miles, according to Google maps.

Olgapalooza

Several Olga photos today. She and I have been taking short neighborhood walks and yesterday she even went on the loop through the nearby housing estate, which she hasn't done in months. As expected, she seems to have more energy than she did when she was going out daily with her dog walker.

Not that yesterday was a particularly energetic day. It got up to 87º F (31º C) and we mostly sat in the garden and tried to stay comfortable.

Olga found a bag of discarded bagels among the trash stacked on the corner. I let her have one. She was very excited. She's a freegan!

As usual when we walk through the housing estate, she looked for the cats. Her main nemesis has been gone for ages but there's still at least one other cat at this address, and she never passes the door without checking.

We walked up a street parallel to our own with this beautiful blooming rose arching over the pavement.

As usual in summer, when the sun comes up early, Olga is our alarm clock. She's been getting me up right at 5 a.m. pretty much daily. The sun is up even before that but I try to draw a pretty strict line at getting up before 5 a.m.! I love these long days right around the solstice but there is a drawback to an early sunrise -- an early dogrise.

Yesterday I used the cool early-morning hours to do some gardening. I dug up a kniphofia, or red-hot poker, that had become buried in overgrowth from surrounding plants. It's been struggling for a couple of years, not getting enough sun, and I finally decided to put it in a big pot and move it to a sunnier location.

This is what it looked like ten years ago, and here it is now:

Hopefully we can get it thriving again.

During the heat of the day I sat out in the garden and read "All the President's Men." As you may remember, Alan Pakula's screen adaptation with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman is one of my favorite movies, and it even helped inspire me to pursue a journalism career. But believe it or not, I've never read the book, which obviously goes into much more detail about Watergate and the investigative processes of The Washington Post. It's pretty easy reading and quite compelling.

It's also interesting to read it now, in the Trump era, because it shows that many aspects of Republican politics just haven't changed that much. (Not surprising, considering Nixon's "dirty trickster" Roger Stone is still around advising the Trump camp.) For example, did you know that in the early '70s some Republicans insisted the 1960 election had been stolen by the Democrats? Sound familiar?

It goes back to that certain strain of paranoia that permeates American politics -- a fundamental distrust of government, of "tyranny," which many Republicans in particular feel. I think Democrats, by and large, don't think that way. We have more trust in the system and in our fellow human beings. We see government as beneficial, not oppressive. Even when the Supreme Court ruled against Al Gore in the knife's-edge election of 2000, changing the course of the country forever, the Democrats went along with it. We were skeptical, but we relied on the system and we didn't storm the Capitol.

Anyway, it's making for interesting reading!

Lilies and More

The garden suddenly seems to be entering a new phase. Gone are the peonies and many of the roses. Yesterday I deadheaded the Martha Washington geranium, whose flowers had mostly gone brown, and the brook thistles. And in their place we have a whole new crop of flowers coming on.

The pink Asiatic lilies were just starting to open yesterday morning.

The bear's breeches, or Acanthus, have sent up towering spikes of flowers. We have at least six spikes on this single plant -- more than ever before. The flowers always remind me of mussels.

The Senecio, or Dusty Miller, has produced large, flat clusters of yellow blossoms...

...and one of the "Bishop's Children" dahlias has bloomed. (First dahlia of the year!)

Here's one of the hogweeds (native, not giant) that I put in the ground last March. This one sent up a big flower spike, but the other one is hanging back. It will no doubt bloom next year. Insects love these flowers.

Here's Nicole Nicotiana, producing her white trumpet-shaped blossoms. Nicole has had a rough year. The drainage holes in her planter somehow got blocked up and she became waterlogged. We didn't notice until she began wilting, and although I cleared the holes and got her drained she's not looking too good. This is a bonus year for her anyway -- we didn't expect her to live through the winter -- but I hope she perks up. At least she's blooming.

And here's the Asiatic lily this morning -- all six of those flowers opened yesterday! Funny how they pop at the same time. In the background is a Peruvian lily (Alstroemeria) and a single purple geranium -- the "Rozanne" variety.

I had a very quiet day yesterday, hanging around the house. I finished my Louise Doughty mystery, "Apple Tree Yard," which was ultimately very good. It took a little while to get going -- the first part mused ad nauseam about marital infidelity -- but ultimately I liked it.

Today I have the hazardous waste people coming to pick up a box of old pesticides. When we first moved in here, ten years ago, we bought some bug spray and slug pellets, which we used occasionally in the garden. Our thinking on that evolved pretty quickly, though, and within a few years we stopped using any of it. I would occasionally still use the spray on houseplants -- never outside -- but even that seemed risky and largely ineffective, so we're discarding it all. (The slug pellets aren't even legal anymore.) 

I much prefer a pesticide-free approach. Most pests won't really harm plants. They might make them slightly less productive or attractive, but really, who cares? They're all part of the ecosystem. And in the rare instance that a plant dies, c'est la vie. We have room for a new one!