Pruning the Dude

It's funny that the very tropical Brugmansias have chosen now to bloom, because it's starting to feel downright autumnal out there. Something about the low humidity and lower temperatures, a subtle shift of the sun, is telling me that it's almost fall. It's 55º F this morning (about 13º C).

I just gave Bailey a Dentastix, which you will remember was one of Olga's favorite treats. Olga would eagerly snatch them from us and gnaw them apart immediately. Bailey, though, takes them uncertainly, and then carries them out into the garden or to a remote corner of the house and "buries" them. (Indoors this means shoving them under a radiator or houseplant.) I don't know if she doesn't like them or if she's saving them for later -- often if we retrieve the treat and give it to her again, she eats it right away. She only does this with Dentastix, not other treats. Mysterious.

Anyway, this morning she tried to bury her treat in the "wandering dude" plant, trailing across the floor and around the other plants in the living room. In the process she broke many of the stems, so the dude needed an emergency pruning job.

All this before I could even get coffee!

Yesterday we went to the cemetery, where she chased squirrels while on her extra-long lead. She gave my arm a workout.

Otherwise I mostly read. I'm almost done with Derek Jarman. We're in the last year of his life, and his medical struggles have intensified so that's become bleak. But his mind remains sharp and his social criticisms interesting. Yesterday, for example, I read this passage reflecting on people who are especially attached to the place of their birth or childhood:

"Peter worrying about his Welsh maiden. I told him to forget her. Who wants to be married to scenery? People who hail from these postcard childhoods, and won't let you forget it, seem so retarded, often the more ghastly these places are the more they are defended. People who come from 'somewhere' enter life old-fashioned and rather regressive. The cool thing is to come from nowhere and then the future can flourish...My criticism of being married to scenery comes right over into the film ["Wittgenstein"], which is set nowhere. It demonstrates that the historicizing attitude to biopic is totally irrelevant, questioning all of that in one black drape. It goes to show that Vienna is just a grand piano. Places are no longer of much interest to the sophisticated, after all they are all the same: you buy your Thai meal in Soho and your steak and chips in Bangkok."

Jarman was born in suburban London, so his own origins probably contribute to that perspective. He wasn't born anywhere unusual. I don't find places uninteresting, but I do agree that being too attached to the past, too anchored to self and identity, can hinder the future.

He is also endlessly critical of the royal family:

"We are taking off on this windy day for a holiday that has been cancelled endlessly by illness. The hovercraft is called Princess Margaret, it presumably runs on gin. A hovercraft is a lumbering sort of thing, rather like a large black beetle, which you can't quite believe flies. It seems to date from another technology, like Princess Margaret. I suspect she wears rubber skirts too."

Dave ordered some new clothes from Land's End (not rubber skirts) and they arrived yesterday. He's just been trying on a couple of the shirts and they are huge. "Is this too big?" he asked me, wearing something akin to a striped slipcover. Turns out he ordered everything XXL, which is way too big even for him. I don't know what he was thinking but I will probably wind up schlepping it all to the post office to send it back.

This is sitting in front of the house waiting for collection by the council -- our old disintegrating garden bench and the rusty wheelbarrow I used to transport Olga on her last trip to the vet. I'm glad to get rid of both items.