Goings-On in the Garden

I spent all day yesterday at home, so -- time for another garden update! The geraniums have appeared, looking great as usual.

Our first rose has also appeared -- a bright orange one. (Unfortunately, our first touches of black spot have also appeared, as you can see on that leaf to the right of the flower. It won't hurt the plants but it makes them look somewhat grim by the end of the summer. I could fight it with anti-fungal spray but I don't want to spray that stuff if I can help it.)

The Solomon's seal looks AMAZING this year!

Our lily-of-the-vally is also blooming. These plants have never done as well as Dave predicted -- I don't know why. They hold their own, but they're not spreading as he thought they would.

Although not strictly in the garden, our amaryllis finally, finally are blooming -- later than ever this year. The plants and flowers look really good. I did use the anti-fungal on them last year, as I've mentioned before, to eliminate red blotch, and I think it helped. (Since they're indoor potted plants and not out in the environment, it wasn't a danger to critters.)

That sage that was gnawed nearly to death by slugs has re-emerged, now that it's in a pot on the patio table.

My seedlings. See how floppy some of them are? I think I left them too long in seed trays where they weren't getting enough sun, and they got too leggy. I don't know whether they're going to self-correct or not. I've tried propping them up on toothpicks until they can strengthen but it's such fiddly work that I'm tempted to let nature take its course.

That pot on the right contains poppy seedlings, I think -- I should thin them out, but so far I've let nature take its course there too. I am just not good with seeds.

Our horseradish is a shadow of its former self. I weeded the violets from the pot to give it more light, and soon the daffodils will die back too. Maybe it will recover, or maybe it's time to pull all that stuff out of that pot and start fresh with something new. Ask again in October!

Eurovision and Rental Bureaucracy

We had a lively day yesterday. Olga's leg seems better, for one thing, and we took a walk in the morning that didn't seem to bother her. We admired the blooming trees like the hawthorn above and the California lilac below. (Well, OK, I admired the trees while Olga tried unsuccessfully to get to a soccer ball behind that gate on the left...) On Monday we're going to resume her daily dog-walker outings and we'll see how it goes.

Then Dave and I had to go to Camden Town to visit our property manager's office and show our passports and documentation. Apparently this is required every time we renew our lease. (We made the same trip last year.) We can't send scans and we both have to go so they can see our faces and be certain the documents are ours. Brother!

So that took a chunk out of the morning, but at least it's done. We had lunch while we were in Camden and then we came home and went shopping to prepare for....

...EUROVISION!

Yes, it's that time of year again, when the countries of Europe (and a few others) gather to compete against each other by singing bouncy pop music. We had some friends over and Dave made chili, and we watched the show from Lisbon. It was a bizarre year. Not only did a man storm the stage and grab the UK singer's microphone -- which happened so smoothly that I didn't even notice, but then, I'd had a martini -- but the contest was all over the place in terms of favorites. There were lots of decent performances and no obvious stinkers. I voted for Norway and Sweden, but with little conviction, and Israel was the eventual winner. Cyprus was expected to do well and indeed, they came second, but I felt like the performance was too much about their hair. (I couldn't have voted for the UK even if I wanted to -- Eurovision rules prevent viewers from voting for their own country.)

I got a wonderful present in the mail yesterday from blogger Linda Sue -- a piece of '50s barkcloth that will make a terrific tablecloth. (Linda Sue and I went to a midcentury furnishings show last fall, so she knows that's my style!) She also included a bag of Tom of Finland coffee, which gave me a good laugh. Who knew there was such a thing?! (Basically a bag of coffee with some of Tom's tamer artwork on the outside.)

I lost another pot of flower seedlings to the squirrels. They rooted through a hanging basket of cosmos and there isn't a single survivor. Sigh.

Every Store Has a Story

You will have noticed from this blog that I often photograph shopfronts. I've always found them really intriguing, whether the shops are open or closed, vacant or occupied. It's not just a London thing. I used to shoot them in the states, too.

I like the graphics on the signs, and the way shops embody the characteristics of the surrounding neighborhoods. They don't have to be fancy -- in fact it's better if they're not. The shops I like most don't try to be fashionable showpieces.

Having said that, I often think about some of the shops and businesses I used to patronize as a kid. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to photograph them.

There was the local market in Land O' Lakes, my hometown, run by an older married couple named Wells. (An independent small-town grocery is a rarity, if not an impossibility, in the United States these days.) I remember what the store looked like, with its old-fashioned checkout counter, and I remember when it closed -- around the time we got our first large local supermarket in the mid-'70s.

I wish I'd photographed other hometown businesses too, like Chuck's barber shop, or the adjacent beauty salon, or the drug store where we bought my grandmother a butterfly pin for her birthday.

There was the Sunny Market down the street from my grandmother's house in Hyattsville, Md. We called it simply the "corner store." When we visited Grandmother (and she was always Grandmother to us, never Grandma or Granny or Meemaw), my brother and I used to go there with our pocket change and stock up on sugary sodas and candy bars. I remember buying a head of lettuce there once and Grandmother wasn't thrilled with the quality -- in fact, she made me take it back. But for candy, that place rocked.

There was also a High's dairy store not too far from my grandmother's. Again, I don't have a picture, but I found this one (right) on the Interwebs. That's more or less how I remember the High's graphics.

Also in my hometown in Florida was a great old place called the Florida Bar. It was relatively nondescript and definitely just a local roadhouse watering hole. It was eventually torn down -- all except, weirdly, the front door and its surrounding door frame, which stood by itself for a few more years. It's entirely gone now, but I wish I had a picture.

Likewise the Roundtable Bar, which burned down sometime in the late '70s or early '80s.

And finally, when I lived in Winter Haven, Fla., in the late '80s, there was a motel on U.S. 17 just north of town. I don't remember the name -- but it had a groovy neon sign with a palm tree. I always meant to shoot that sign. And one day, while driving past, I saw that the sign had disappeared, replaced with something modern and plastic and far less interesting.

Nowadays, when I see something I want to shoot, I do it ASAP. Time waits for no man!

(Top photo: A shop on Cricklewood Broadway.)

Westminster Lunch

I had an errand to run at Westminster Abbey yesterday, so I took a slightly long lunch break and caught the tube down to Westminster. While I was there, I crossed the bridge (rather hurriedly) to have a picnic in the park across the river. In the photo above, you can see parliament in the background, with the Queen Elizabeth Tower holding Big Ben covered in scaffolding. (The building is undergoing an extensive renovation.) Westminster Bridge is on the right.

Here's a closeup of the tower:

Not quite the photogenic structure everyone expects!

I had to go to the Abbey to exchange a souvenir cross that Dave's mom bought. She collects crosses but she didn't have a chance to visit the Abbey on her short stay last week, so we ordered it online and had it mailed to our house. When it got here, though, it was broken -- and not just slightly broken, but really broken, like the postman jumped up and down on the envelope. The Abbey exchanged it without question, and now Dave can take it to his mom in June, when he goes to the states for a conference. (He plans to visit his family too.)

As you can see, there are now railings between the sidewalks and the roadway along Westminster Bridge. These were installed after a terrorist attacker plowed his vehicle into pedestrians on the bridge in March 2017. To be honest, it seems like a good idea to have some kind of barrier between drivers and pedestrians anyway, doesn't it?

It was nice to get out and about on a workday, rather than sitting in the school cafeteria!

Sigh of Relief!

I got an e-mail from Match.com yesterday warning me that my profile was about to be deleted. Since I haven't logged on to Match in at least a decade, and I'm sure I deleted my profile (or at least removed it from public view) long, long ago, I suppose that's fine. Or has it been public all this time and no one has tried to date me?! There's a sobering thought.

We had great news on the apartment yesterday -- the landlord is renewing our lease. Whew! I can't tell you how relieved that makes me. I had visions of putting all this work into the flat only to be kicked out. And the rent's staying the same.

I had a gin & tonic in the garden last night to celebrate. Dave, who is abstaining from alcohol these days because of his Crohn's, sat with me and absorbed it vicariously.

I took this photo on Sunday in Trent Country Park. My initial impulse was to make it black and white, because that seems to emphasize the shape of the bush more -- but on second thought I think it works in color, too.

Dave and I have started watching a fascinating Netflix show called "Dirty Money," on the recommendation of some coworkers. It's basically a series of hour-long documentaries about people and corporations whose ill-gotten gains have landed them in trouble. If I'm not mistaken, one of the episodes is about Trump. We're only two episodes in, but we like it a lot!

A Squirrel Raid, and Iran

This is Hillside Court, an apartment building on Finchley Road that Olga and I often pass on our walks. It's very deco, isn't it? The morning light was really nice on this particular day.

Remember all those seedlings I painstakingly transferred from the seed trays to pots over the weekend? Well, we had our first "squirrel raid" on the pots yesterday. It wasn't too devastating, but I did lose maybe ten plants. Oh well. They're not all going to make it to maturity, and I knew that from the start. I moved the pots from the patio table to a less squirrel-prone area, but nothing is guaranteed!

I'm sick to death about Trump withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. Frankly I think it has less to do with national security than with undoing a key piece of diplomacy from Obama's tenure. The Republicans just will not rest until they've destroyed everything Obama accomplished. Withdrawing from the deal is a historic mistake, with possibly world-changing implications -- and not for the better. It certainly helps convince the Iranians (and the rest of the globe) that America is not to be trusted.

Olga's leg seems a bit better, but she's still limping when she runs around in the garden in the evenings. I have a feeling we're moving toward surgery.

Oh, and I had to pop back into the dentist last night to get my temporary filling replaced on my root canal tooth. It fell out a few days ago, when I was eating something not particularly crunchy that suddenly became very crunchy.  So the count is up to nine appointments so far to work on this tooth, counting the two I'll have in June to get the crown. Fortunately he didn't charge me for this one!

Cockfosters to Enfield Lock

I walked another segment of the LOOP yesterday, the 9.5 miles from Cockfosters to the Enfield Lock train station. The first part of the walk took me through Trent Country Park, which I'd visited a few times before. But I'd never seen some of the park's features, like Camlet Moat (above), a medieval moated island where people once lived. Excavations at the site have uncovered stone foundations, shoes and daggers and oak bridge timbers dating back to the mid-1300s.

I also passed the 20-meter-tall obelisk erected in the early 1700s.

And suddenly, just weeks after our cold, wet spring and our snowfalls, we're practically in summer mode! The path was bordered by masses of Queen Anne's lace and there were insects everywhere -- craneflies, bees, cabbage whites, flies and other buzzy things.

I watched this brave crow harass a hawk in mid-flight -- defending a nest, no doubt.

I was way, way north of the city. This is what the skyline looked like.

The path continued along Turkey Brook to Forty Hall Park. I took a little side trip to visit Forty Hall, built between 1629-1632 for Nicholas Rainton, a textile importer. Then it was back to Turkey Brook -- which, incidentally, apparently isn't named for the bird but instead is a corruption of some local resident's family name.

The path passed a small bridge, and according to "local legend" relayed via my trusty LOOP map, this was the spot where Sir Walter Raleigh gallantly spread his cloak on the muddy ground for Queen Elizabeth I to step across a puddle. Fortunately, it was a dry day, so no such dramatics were required for me to pass. (I'd have had to spread my own cloak!)

There are good-sized fish in the brook -- I believe they're dace? Also lots of little minnows, no doubt the daces' dinner.

Turkey Brook eventually became a bit more urban-looking, and although the somewhat romantic LOOP map emphasized the possibility of seeing kingfishers and mute swans, I saw mostly beer cans, shopping carts and stray footballs. This overhanging clump of lilacs and vines helped soften the brook's appearance.

By this time I was feeling a twinge of sunburn, and I was happy that the train station was right around the corner!