Mud

Well, I took a (not really) momentous step yesterday. I shredded all my blank checks. How long has it been since I've written a check? At least five years, I think, and the ones I had were so old that they had our East Brunswick, N.J. address on them and came from a bank that no longer exists. The account still exists, because that bank was absorbed by another bank, and in theory the checks were still negotiable. But honestly, they needed to go. If I need more checks (doubtful) I'll order fresh ones.

This was part of a larger cleaning-up effort that I'm making around the house. I took all our bedding to the laundry for a spring cleaning, to get rid of the stray Olga paw-prints that inevitably wind up on the bedspread during muddy February and March. (Alas, the mud season isn't over, as you can see above -- I'll get to that in a minute!)

I also helped Dave go through his clothes and set aside some stuff for charity. His closet and shelves get so haphazardly jammed with clothing that every once in a while we have to take everything out and put it back in a more orderly fashion, and it makes sense for him to simultaneously discard the things he knows he'll never wear again. He doesn't have a lot of clothes and doesn't buy a lot of clothes, so I don't really know how his closet gets so crazy, except that he is not a -- shall we say -- organized person when it comes to putting things away. (I'm being kind.) Anyway, we've got two big stacks for charity now, some mine and some his.

In the afternoon, I took Olga to the cemetery. The photo above is supposed to show you how muddy she got -- her paws, her chest, both sides of her face. That cherry tree (in the top photo) fell sometime in the last month or so, but it still managed to bloom this year (and miraculously doesn't seem to have taken out any headstones). I wonder if the cemetery managers will remove it or just leave it alone. It's in a far back corner and wouldn't be in anyone's way if it just stayed there.

Olga moved pretty slowly on her walk but she gamely chased her tennis ball and barked with annoyance when I took her picture -- so, life as usual.

On the way back we passed an apartment building where this '70s-looking pottery pitcher was sitting out with the rubbish in the back. I saw it from the street and thought I'd made a great find until I picked it up and realized it had no bottom! Oh well.

I did find this -- a segment of someone's rubber bracelet (I think). Not really useful but mildly amusing.

Finally, I stopped at our neighborhood bookstore and ordered Barbra Streisand's new memoir as well as Rachel Maddow's book "Prequel," which blogger Jeanie recently reviewed. I picked up a couple of British mysteries too. I now have a ridiculous stack of reading to see me up to and through summer vacation. (Not to mention several things I plan to check out from our library!)

Dollis Valley Greenwalk

After spending all of Tuesday and Wednesday at home, I felt yesterday like I just could not sit around the house one minute more. I had to get out and go for a walk.

I decided to revisit Golders Green and Brent River Park, where I've walked before -- but it's been several years. I took the bus up to Golders Green and was surprised to see the bank on the corner has been turned into a café.

Golders Green is a very Jewish area, and I wasn't surprised to see posters reminding us of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. Many of these people are still missing. I realize that Israel's retaliation against Gaza has far surpassed the initial Hamas attack in scope, but I think it's absolutely imperative to remember these hostages are still out there. According to this article, of 240 people originally taken by Hamas, more than 100 have been released, with most of the rest believed to be still alive and in captivity. I can't imagine that Israel's relentless bombardment of Gaza hasn't inadvertently killed some of them, but who knows.

This is an unusual poster display because of that central element -- "Imagine it was you," with a piece of reflective foil in which you can sort of make out me and my camera lens, beneath my blue hat.

I got to Brent River Park, where the two pavilions overlooking the waterfall near the North Circular highway are still looking pretty bedraggled. (You can see the second pavilion, in the background, through the windows of the first. Here's a 30-second video of the whole area.) This one has lost quite a bit of its roof since I first saw it in August 2020. I like how someone gave it a doormat, though. Must keep things tidy!

I walked along muddy Dollis Brook, which runs through North London and eventually joins the River Brent, which flows into the Thames near Kew Gardens. The forests along the river were thickly carpeted with wild garlic, blooming white in the sunshine.

I got warm enough at this point to remove not only my jacket but also my sweatshirt. I love that moment after a long winter when walking in just a t-shirt is once again possible. It feels so freeing!

I realized I was on a path called the Dollis Valley Greenwalk, and when I looked on the map, I saw that it follows the brook about ten miles, up to High Barnet and then over to Mill Hill. I decided to stick to that path.

I eventually passed under the Dollis Brook Viaduct, a railway bridge that carries the Northern Line of the London tube system to Mill Hill. It's the highest point above ground on the entire system, apparently. I don't think I've ever taken the tube to Mill Hill, but I should do it just to pass over this bridge!

I saw a couple of herons on my walk, wading in or near the brook. This one was standing on the footpath and flew off when I and another walker approached. I snapped some quick pictures as it passed overhead.

There's been a LOT of rain, so the paths were muddy. Traversing this spot was especially challenging -- I had to balance on the wooden path edge and the branch at the left of the puddle. And then I realized I'd inadvertently taken a wrong turn and was no longer on the Greenwalk, so I had to backtrack and cross this same spot AGAIN! Argh!

I eventually got back on the right path and continued toward Whetstone Stray, a park-like area of forests and fields.

By this time I was running out of steam, so I caught the tube in Totteridge and Whetstone, and then a bus from Finchley to get home. Altogether I walked about five miles (16,000 steps, according to my iPhone), which felt AMAZING. I'll complete the Greenwalk another day soon!

Plaza Suite

I've been keeping the birds steadily supplied with suet this week, while we're off work. I said to Dave the other day, "Is it possible for a parakeet to be overweight?" Because if it is, these birds are in trouble. They eat their weight in suet balls, although they drop about a third of it on the ground, I think. The pigeons and smaller birds get it there.

As you can see, the parakeets are in competition with the woodpecker, who seems to rule the roost. I imagine it has a sharp, painfully strong bill.

Dave and I went on an outing yesterday. We went to lunch down by Covent Garden -- a French brasserie that was passable but nothing to write home about -- followed by a play. We went to a matinee of Neil Simon's "Plaza Suite," which is being re-staged with Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker in the principle roles. We enjoyed it a lot, and of course it was great to see the two of them acting together. Some of the comedy is very physical and requires a lot of slip-sliding across the floor and that kind of thing, and they did it very well.

I wish I'd thought to take a picture during the curtain call -- apparently that's a thing now, because everyone else was doing it -- but oh well. Here's the show's Instagram page, which will show you what it looks like!

I think it's the first time I've seen Sarah Jessica Parker onstage. I saw Matthew Broderick way back in 2004 in a Broadway show called "The Foreigner," which I don't remember much about now.

We had some time to kill before our lunch and walked around Covent Garden, where we spied these very gay phone boxes. I didn't look to see whether they still have phones in them.

We've also watched some interesting stuff at home. On Wednesday night we rented "Dogman," Luc Besson's new movie about a drag performer and dog lover who lives off the grid and gets tangled up in some criminal shenanigans. It was a strange film but very watchable.

Then, last night, I watched "Last Stop Larrimah," a two-part documentary about a tiny town in the Northern Territory of Australia. Back in 2017 there were only 11 residents of this town, and one of them vanished, apparently the victim of a criminal act. It was a fascinating documentary and it showed how even a tiny group of people in the middle of nowhere can manage to nurture toxic grievances and resentments. Doesn't say much for our humanity, does it?

Locksmith

I had ambitious plans for taking a walk yesterday, but it was rainy so that didn't happen.

Instead, I was sucked into the final 200 pages of Martin MacInnes's book "In Ascension," which I had to finish because it was so good! Very ambitious in its grasp and description of science, both on a cellular level and in the environments of deep ocean and outer space -- and yet not dry. In fact, quite suspenseful. And the plot does go to Ascension Island toward the end. It reminded me a lot of David Mitchell's book "Cloud Atlas," which was also wildly ambitious and widely cast across space and time.

Also, we got our front door lock fixed. Have I mentioned this problem? The lock has been loose for months and months -- here's a video I made last summer for the management company. We'd already tried to tighten the visible screws and that didn't work. It took the property managers a while to fix it but they finally sent a (sexy young bearded) locksmith yesterday, who removed the lock and found that the backplate had never been properly attached to the door. He attached it, put the lock back together and voila! It's fine now.

Here are a few garden photos, in case the tiny snail on our hellebores up top didn't satisfy you. Above, another view of our luscious yellow tulip, which comes from a bulb one of our neighbors discarded years ago. It blooms every spring to thank me for rescuing it from their garden waste bag.

The honesty plants are beginning to bloom. We have four or five of them that came up from seed, children and grandchildren of plants I grew from seed several years ago. This one looks a bit spindly -- the others are much more lush and green but they're not in flower yet.

My squirrel cage is working! It's keeping the squirrels out of our lilies. In fact the lilies are going to outgrow it soon, at which point they will hopefully be large enough to resist the rodents.

Finally, I think I gave the impression in yesterday's post that I'm not an adventurous eater. I wouldn't say that's true. I tend toward the vegetarian so I never like a particularly meaty meal, but I'm not strict about it and I have, in fact, eaten a fish head before. I even ate the eye, which is an experience I'd rather not replicate. It tasted like a plastic bead full of briny Jell-O. This was way back in the late '90s and I guess I didn't feel the need to do it again on Tuesday!

Ramadan and Foxgloves

Dave and I went down to Piccadilly Circus yesterday for dinner at a restaurant called Fallow, which apparently specializes in using ingredients from the food chain that would otherwise be discarded -- cod heads, for example, or beef from older dairy cows. Dave is fascinated by innovative cooking like this and he's been looking forward to it for a while. The place was hopping and we were not disappointed. Dave got the beef and he enjoyed it -- we even brought some back to share with Olga. I got a fairly pedestrian mushroom burger, because I wasn't quite ready to tackle a fish head, but maybe I should have been more daring.

Anyway, on the way out I noticed these lights above the street wishing everyone a Happy Ramadan. I didn't realize we had Ramadan lights up in Westminster; turns out this is the second year they've been lit. I think they're quite beautiful, but predictably they've provoked outrage in the right-wing media, especially because they're seen to be overshadowing Easter. It does seem reasonable to expect some recognition for Easter and Lent too, but I wish everyone would set aside the holiday one-upmanship and just enjoy the lights. (Christmas certainly gets its due in this part of town -- though admittedly there's a commercial component to that.)

Otherwise, I stayed indoors most of the day. It was more cloudy than sunny and thus somewhat chilly and damp outside. I read "In Ascension," a very interesting and challenging novel set in the near future, about the discovery of a deep-water trench in the Atlantic Ocean and its impact on a scientist and her participation in a program of interplanetary space travel. It was long-listed for the Booker Prize, which is what first brought it to my attention. I thought from the title it would take place on Ascension Island, a tiny speck in the central Atlantic that I've always been a bit curious about -- given my fascination with remote places -- but so far, no.

Above you can see a couple of our foxgloves out in the garden. Some of them, like these two (in the pot and on the ground by the stake) seem healthy.

But we've also got several that look like this -- just barely hanging on. Every year when I grow foxgloves I get a couple of plants that do this -- basically dwindle away and sometimes die. I don't know why. I'd suspect bad soil but this plant is right next to two that grew naturally and are flourishing. Foxgloves love moisture so I wouldn't think the rain would be a problem. Maybe it's because I grew them from the seeds of a hybrid variety, and they're not as strong as native foxgloves? But as I said, many of those plants are doing fine. It's a mystery.

As long as we get some flowers this spring I'll be happy.

Birds and Sunshine in the Garden

Another sunny day yesterday, for the most part. I sat out in the garden reading in the morning, with Olga snoozing on her bed beside me. I became aware of a very vocal bird singing from the direction of Mrs. Kravitz's roof, and eventually I spotted it -- a blackbird, sitting up by the chimney pots. That thing sang and sang with wild abandon.

Steve Reed · Blackbirds and Others

According to my Merlin bird app, with which I made this recording, there were also European robins, great tits and a Eurasian wren in the vicinity. (I think the wren is the very loud bird that pipes up around the 22 second mark. The tits have a two-note song that's readily identifiable too.) The blackbird goes quiet around the 1:15 mark, only emitting a single high tone over and over -- at least, I think that was the blackbird -- but he/she eventually starts up again.

And here's a little dunnock that came flitting around the base of the hydrangeas. It was hard to get a clear shot, that bird was so nervous!

And here's Olga, enjoying the sun. I could take a picture of that dog lying in the sun every day of my life and not get bored. It's such a calming image of pure satisfaction.

You might be wondering (I'm sure you're not) whether I've set up our new garden cam yet, to capture images of the foxes and whatever else might wander past. I have, but so far it's only recorded squirrels and someone's itinerant house cat. I've been pulling the data card every morning to check. Someday I'll have a video to show you.

One of my library colleagues came over last night so we could compare notes on our jobs and the school and basically catch up on gossip. It was fun but we polished off a bottle of wine, so between that and our Easter dinner the day before, I feel like I need a couple of days of detox. My poor liver.

Easter Report

Dave and I don't celebrate Easter in a Christian sense, though it's hard not to feel a sense of rebirth, reawakening, at this time of year. If Easter is an outgrowth of earlier Pagan rituals, as is commonly said, I suppose we do celebrate it. We're certainly paying attention to all the signs of life around us.

I grew up in the Presbyterian church and sometimes I feel a sense of guilt that I left it behind. I don't miss the sermons and the religiosity -- I always struggled with questions of faith and belief. But I do think attending church and regularly hearing messages that focused on goodness, kindness, and forgiveness was a net positive for me as a child. In retrospect, I appreciate the sense of community that the church gave my family.

I often worry that as people of my generation matured, and many of us abandoned moderate Christianity, we left it to be defined by the right-wingers -- the loud voices we all hear today. Perhaps we moderates and liberals did a huge disservice to society by not supporting more mainstream churches that were more about love and less about hellfire and brimstone. Or maybe the church would have turned rightward anyway in response to external pressures. Maybe I'm overestimating my own importance in the scheme of things.

I do wish I'd developed a greater sense of awareness about the positive social aspects of church when I was younger. I wish someone had said, "It's OK that you don't believe in the virgin birth and Jesus as the son of God. The church is still valuable because it helps people connect and focus on a positive, hopeful message, and it helps us care for the vulnerable, and it creates healthier communities." (Assuming all of that is true!)

Anyway, I'm not planning on going to church anytime soon, though I might have persevered if I'd had children of my own. These are just the idle thoughts rolling around in my head on Easter Monday, which is a holiday here in the UK.

We moved our clocks ahead yesterday morning, so now we're on British Summer Time, the equivalent of Daylight Saving Time in the USA. I didn't even realize it when I woke yesterday morning -- I think I only tumbled while I was blogging and looked at the time on my computer.

I took Olga out for a walk, as you can see, and she met up with her old pal the mustachioed cat on the housing estate. She wanted that cat in the worst way. The cat was only mildly apprehensive. You can see it basically saying, "Go ahead. Make my day."

Then Dave and I met his co-worker Carolyn and her two daughters at a restaurant in Marylebone. We had a good Easter meal (crab salad and chicken for me, Beef Wellington for Dave), and then while they took the tube home, I walked. It's about four miles from Marylebone back to West Hampstead, at least via the route I took, and it felt good to get some exercise and some air.

I walked through Regent's Park, where I found the ladybug (or ladybird, if you're British) in the top photo, sitting on some bright green euphorbia blossoms. I also found this fun graffiti (above) on a bridge in Camden...

...and a handmade fiber-arts sign for the Belsize Library. I love that!

Back home again we took it easy in the evening. We didn't even eat dinner. We watched the second half of a Netflix movie we'd started the night before, "The Accountant" with Ben Affleck. It was OK. I give it a C+.

Then we watched "Northern Exposure." Several weeks ago I bought the first season on Amazon -- it's not free to stream here in the UK -- and we only have one more episode to go. I wasn't a huge fan of that show when it first came out, even though my friends loved it -- and I gotta say, I'm still not. I thought my impression might have changed with the passage of time, but even now I think the acting is wooden and some of the scenarios are just bizarre. Doesn't anyone think it's weird (and creepy) that an 18-year-old girl would marry a forty- or fiftysomething man? Or that another fiftysomething guy would try to adopt a twentysomething guy as his son? It doesn't give me the warm & fuzzy feels that it seems to give a lot of other people. I know the quirkiness is supposed to be part of its charm, but I find it painful.