St. Clement Kills the Toaster

In Britain the Easter weekend is bracketed by two holidays -- Good Friday and Easter Monday -- when many businesses are typically closed. Yesterday was Easter Monday, so it's back to routines today. It was a quiet Easter Monday around here, mostly involving gardening and reading.

I was sorry to hear about the death of the pope. I am not Catholic so I have no direct personal stake in the pope or his theology, but I thought Pope Francis did an excellent job embodying the positive aspects of Christian love and trying to open the church to communities that had been marginalized and underserved. Of course he took a lot of heat for this, and the polarizing impulses that we see sweeping politics are also dividing the church.

It's interesting how this polarizing tendency is being felt all around the globe in a variety of contexts. Is it all because of the Interwebs and social media, where we find people (and algorithms) to fuel our more extreme views, stoking them like a white-hot oven? Or does it have something to do with a quintessential difference in the way progressives and conservatives think, and the way those differences are felt more strongly and loudly in our media-saturated modern society? Who knows.

Anyway, RIP Francis. You were the right Pope at the right time.

Our hideous camellia is blooming. As you can see, when the blooms are fresh they're not bad, though this one is already beginning to brown just a touch on its outer edges. The plant only becomes hideous when those old blossoms are still hanging there weeks later, brown and droopy. I think white flowers in general are uninteresting so this is not a bush I would choose to plant.

Dave fertilized the roses, the citrus and the tree fern yesterday. I have more plants that need repotting but I am out of compost, so for the time being everything is just going to have to cope.

In the afternoon I went to toast our last St. Clements hot cross bun, and when I turned on the toaster it flipped the circuit breaker. What?! I reset the breaker and tried again, and the same thing happened. I was concerned the outlet was to blame, so I moved the toaster to another outlet, and this time when I turned it on I could see an arc of electricity at the bottom of the heating elements. (And it tripped a different breaker.) Clearly it had a short of some kind, so I took it right down to the council electronics recycling bin on the high street and threw it in. So much for that. A replacement toaster is on the way, and I ate my St. Clements bun untoasted.

Here's Olga brutalizing our candytuft plant in her evening face-wiping ritual:

I cleaned out the blog list in my sidebar yesterday, shedding about ten old blogs that were mostly inactive. Either the bloggers had died or had gone silent, and a few are still blogging but for whatever reason I found myself unlikely to read them anymore. It happens. Relationships evolve (or devolve) and we go our separate ways, hopefully with best wishes all around. No harm, no foul.

(Top photo: Colorful doors on Oxford Street, last week.)