False Serpent and Real Fox

Like the petunias in yesterday's post, our dahlias are at the end of their season. Some are still bravely plugging away, putting out smaller and less vibrant blossoms, despite their seasonal plague of powdery mildew (which you can see on the leaves above). Some have pretty much given up the ghost entirely and a few looked so terrible I've already cut them down to the ground.

I got a call yesterday from someone purporting to be from our property manager's office. The first thing she did was ask for my address. "If you're calling from the leasing office, you already know my address," I told her. I gave her the house number but she said that wasn't sufficient -- she needed the entire address to verify my identity, and I refused to give it. She said she'd send me an e-mail.

Turns out I shorted our rent payment by £100 this month, because our rent went up and I forgot to change the bank transfer. So I promptly corrected that -- but still, it's a very weird thing to call someone up and demand information from them. It's enough to make anyone immediately suspicious, don't you think?

As long as I was logged into online banking, I got tucked into a project I've been meaning to do for a while -- listing our monthly and annual expenses to better keep track of our subscriptions and that kind of thing. Dave and I went over them last night and identified a couple of things to cut, if not immediately then soon. For example, we each had our own Amazon Prime account, which costs something like £95 a year apiece. There's no reason we couldn't share one, so Dave cancelled his.

In the afternoon I walked Bailey down to the Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate near St. John's Wood. I've featured this place many times on my blog over the years but I hadn't visited in a while, since I no longer pass by walking to and from work. It looks like the drought hit the plantings hard -- there were lots of dry, dead bushes and shrubs. The housing estate near our flat also lost landscaping to the dry weather, even some mature trees. I'm tempted to criticize people for not watering, but then again, we watered our garden and we still lost some bushes.

On the way back I found this curious object lying on the pavement near a bus stop. What the heck is that thing?!

Well, according to Google, it's an Armenian cucumber (also known as a snake melon or painted serpent cucumber). An odd thing to find lying on the street, and weirdly serpentine. I used to have a cat that would leap back from anything that looked even vaguely snake-like, and that cucumber would definitely have given her a turn.

This morning I took out the garden waste, and this was in the street:

It was gnawing on a bone, or something, and afterwards it waited for me to go get my camera and fire off a few pictures. It was a very obliging fox.

Today I'm off on a little adventure. I'm going to Nottingham to hear columnist Owen Jones talk about his new book, "The Fall of the West." According to his publisher, it's meant to "show how the West went from scoring what it believed was its final victory, to being engulfed in an existential crisis of its own making. And how, along the way, it fashioned an ugly new story: that this was the fault of the most vulnerable groups in society, rather than a power-hungry, venal ruling class."

I've long admired Jones and his writing, so I'm looking forward to this event. He also spoke in London, but those appearances were sold out by the time I heard of them. Oh well -- this gives me an excuse to see Nottingham, where I've never been. I'll stay the night and come back to London tomorrow afternoon. Dave will be on Bailey duty!