The Flickery Lamp

I mentioned yesterday that with all the recent rain, our garden is a quagmire. The cemetery is even worse, as you can see. Anyplace that gets frequent or even modest foot traffic has become a shoe-sucking slurry of clay and water.

I was reading the other day that the managers of Hampstead Heath are worried about the heavy use the Heath paths are getting because of the lockdown. With no one able to travel far from home, the Heath is being loved to death, they say, and they expect the land to take a while to recover.

I suspect the same is true of the cemetery, although if I remember correctly, it looks like this pretty much every year. In previous years I've been impressed at how resilient the land is. A path that looks entirely muddy and free of plant life in winter will, in summer, be more or less grassed over. We'll see if the same is true this summer.

Anyway, Olga didn't mind the mud, as you can see. I took this photo at the very beginning of our walk, when she'd made one run for her tennis ball. As you can imagine, by the end of our outing, she was much dirtier!

On the way home, she stopped to drink some water pooled in the bricks of this low garden wall. They're odd looking bricks, with a sort of well in the middle and the words "LBC Phorpres" pressed into them.

LBC, it turns out, stands for "London Brick Company," the outfit that apparently produced a huge number of the bricks used to build the city's housing. "Phorpres" is a trade name that, according to this web site, comes from the brick's manufacturing method -- they are pressed twice in each direction, so, "four-pressed." (I love the fact that there is such a detailed and extensive web site devoted to old bricks! The wonders of the Internet.)

Aside from walking (and bathing) the dog, I ran errands yesterday -- picked up our clean sheets from the laundromat, bought some tulips at Tesco, and bought light bulbs for our new living room floor lamp. Since we're spending all our time at home these days, I've embarked on a small program of home improvements, and replacing our flickering, light-bulb-ravenous floor lamp was one of the items on our list. We got the old lamp free from the parents of one of Dave's students, so God only knows how old it is. The new one is a retro pole lamp with three swiveling hoods, and it's more reliable, less flickery and uses fewer bulbs.

Now we have to get rid of the old lamp. I considered putting it on Freecycle, but because of the lockdown, Freecycle isn't taking any listings that aren't related to coronavirus emergency relief. And besides, it is flickery, and I wouldn't want to give away something that's electrically unreliable. (I think it just needs a new dimmer switch, but I'm not an expert in these things.) We can't just put it out with the trash -- it's too big. So I guess, for now, it will stand in a corner of the foyer, like a student being punished in an old-fashioned classroom. Anybody want a flickery lamp?