Dagenham

Well, after writing yesterday about the repetitiveness of my summertime days, I really did get the urge to get out of the house. So I took a photo walk to a part of East London I hadn't visited in years -- Dagenham.

I got off the tube in Newbury Park and wound my way south and east through Seven Kings, Goodmayes and Becontree, ending my walk at the Dagenham Heathway tube station. I walked about five and a half miles, I think, and the weather was just about perfect.

I really like these parts of London. Eastern Dagenham was built later than many of the Victorian neighborhoods closer in to the city, so there's more green space, and all along my route there were shops reflecting all sorts of nationalities, from Poland and Romania to India and Pakistan. Just outside the Seven Kings train station I popped into the coffee shop above, and had an Americano coffee and an eclair while listening to lilting Middle Eastern music. "Well, this is very multicultural!" I thought.

Flags of many nations!

As I walked farther east into the more suburban areas I saw more and more England flags. At first I thought, "My, everyone is so patriotic!" But then I realized that while that may be true, they were also rooting for the English football team in the UEFA European Football championship games, which are going on now. (As evidenced by one sign I saw saying, "Come on England!")

I followed a commercial street eastward through Goodmayes that I thought I'd never walked before, but then I spotted a Chinese restaurant that I remembered photographing ten years ago. I guess I really have been everywhere.

Still, there are always new sights!

I got back home around 2 p.m. and had lunch, then sat in the garden with Olga. I managed not to destroy our second folding chair.

Last night, Dave and I watched "Boy Erased" on Netflix, about a gay kid whose very religious parents put him through conversion therapy. It's not a new movie -- it was made about six years ago, around the time I read the book -- but somehow we'd never seen it. Russell Crowe, who plays the father, looks alarmingly like Steve Bannon. Time has not been kind to the gladiator.

The Chair Incident

I apologize if things have seemed a bit repetitive around here lately -- the dahlias, the bird feeder, sunbathing Olga. I guess that's the nature of life during summer vacation! Every day I've toyed with the idea of going to town and doing something cultural, but in the end I always stay home. I just haven't gotten enough of the garden yet.

I realize that may not be true for all of you. When I was Facetiming with my brother on Sunday, he mentioned my blog and said something like -- "The PLANTS! Enough with the PLANTS!" But what can I say? At this time of year the plants and birds, Dave and the dog are my life.

Thanks for the slug-fighting hints. I do realize that I could easily start killing them if I wanted to. I just can't bring myself to do it. As much as the slugs and the snails drive me crazy, I figure they have a right to live too. I just have to do my best to keep my tastiest plants out of their reach. (Though I have been known to throw a slug about as far as I can across the garden, so I can deceive myself that I'm allowing it to survive while probably simultaneously killing it.)

Steve Reed · SummerDay

Having said all that, allow me to foist upon you more bird calls! I recorded this with my Merlin app while sitting on the back garden bench yesterday afternoon. You'll hear the racket from the rose-ringed parakeets, some burbly little robins and a pigeon. There are supposedly also goldfinches in there, though I have no idea which calls are theirs, and there's the distant music of the neighborhood ice cream truck. Ah, summer!

Of course I sat out in the garden reading yesterday, polishing off another hundred pages of "The Running Grave." I also mowed the lawn, cleaned the bathroom and vacuumed the house. We have a friend staying here over the weekend while we're in Madrid and I don't want the place to be a pig sty.

Also, I had a bit of drama:

This is a folding chair that came with our flat. We have two of them and they're not super-sturdy. Well, yesterday as I set it up in the garden, I stepped on some uneven ground and fell on it, smashing the chair and causing me to pitch sideways into a flower bed. It was quite a spectacle, I'm sure, and it caused Olga to leap up from her bed and run away. Lassie she is not!

I was completely uninjured, as were (amazingly) the plants in the flower bed. But the chair, as you can see, is toast. I'm amazed it lasted this long, to be honest.

Speaking of honest, that's honesty, in the top photo -- the sunlight coming through its new seed pods shows off the seeds quite well. As you can see, its leaves have also been slug-munched!

Dahlia Carnage

The dusty miller in our flower bed is huge and is overgrowing the stepping stones into the back yard. I have to keep pushing it aside to even get out there. Can you see the little flower bug in the upper left part of this cluster of blossoms?

Yesterday was pretty quiet around here. I sat out in the garden most of the day reading "The Running Grave," the newest Robert Galbraith book, which tops out at 945 pages. J.K. Rowling (who writes under the Galbraith pen name) can really crank out the verbiage. Mr. Pudding might say that she has bloggorhea -- or would, if she were writing a blog. (Is there such a thing as bibliorrhea?) But I don't find her books at all flabby.

My dahlias are still looking pretty sad. At this point, I'm just hoping they keep enough leaves to nourish the tubers through the season. Expecting flowers in this snail-and-slug-crazy summer seems like a tall order. This one has had all the growth points (where flowers would normally emerge) gnawed off. I imagine more will sprout and I am moving these plants around and elevating them onto tables and chairs until I find a place where they can grow relatively unmolested.

I'm having varying degrees of success!

Some of them look pretty good. This one looks like it might give us flowers eventually.

I have nothing else for you today except this video of starlings mobbing our bird feeder and thrashing around in our bird bath, which I'm posting just to show that the Russians' bird ball does absolutely nothing to keep them away. Good!

(As you can see, Olga did not let them disturb her power nap.)

Bird Ball

The Russians have moved their bird ball out to the edge of their balcony railing, directly overlooking our bird feeder. As far as I can tell it doesn't do any good -- the birds still come. I suppose the allure of food is more powerful than an inflatable deterrent. It feels like a big yellow middle finger to us, though, doesn't it?

They have a real thing about birds perching on their railing. They've lined it with pigeon spikes in an effort to keep them away. I mean, birds are going to perch. It's what they do. You can't stop nature.

Not that I don't see the downside. Just yesterday I was sitting in the garden beneath our walnut tree, reading The New Yorker, when a pigeon shat on me from above. And it wasn't a modest little poo, either. It was like being strafed with pea soup. It was everywhere. I had to come inside and take a shower.

In addition to the magazine, I read "The Art Thief," Michael Finkel's book about a French couple who, over several years in the '90s, stole a couple hundred artworks from museums around Europe. Apparently they did it not for profit, but because they loved art and wanted to live with it in their home. It was a good book and well worth reading. What I'd forgotten about the case is that after the man was finally arrested, his mother dumped all the metalwork in a canal and set all the paintings on fire. While the art in the canal was recovered, the paintings -- including a Cranach and a Brueghel, among others -- were all destroyed.

If there's one thing I can't abide, it's the deliberate destruction of art. It's what propelled me all the way through the 900 or so pages of "The Goldfinch" -- the fear that something terrible was going to happen to the painting. (I did love that book, for what it's worth.) I can't imagine why the mother, in this case, didn't simply take her son's purloined art to the police or leave it anonymously somewhere for the authorities to find. Why burn it all? How can she have no sense of the cultural loss, of what she's taken from all of us?

In the afternoon, when Olga went out with her dog-walker, I took a walk of my own around our neighborhood. There are so many places I used to go with the dog, but can't nowadays because she simply can't go as far. So I exercised my legs and revisited some streets I haven't seen in a while, like the one near the cemetery where this somewhat dilapidated garage is located.

Olga, meanwhile, was at the Heath. She goes out daily with a group of dogs in a van. The walker says she plays a bit but I suspect she mostly lies around in the grass, and that's fine. It's good for her to have a social outing. We're keeping up her daily walks even in summer because if we postponed them she'd lose her place, and then they might not take her on again in the fall.

We are finally having some summery weather -- today it's getting up to 70º F (21º C), though still a bit cloudy. Yesterday was sunnier, so I broke out the Pimm's. My former boss gave us a bottle when she moved back to the states last year. Pimm's is a British summertime staple, a gin-based drink that's mixed with lemon-lime soda for a refreshing cocktail. Serving it with strawberries is a must. (Cucumber too, ideally, but we didn't have any.) It was a nice way to end the day!

Do Not Demolish

I had an abdominal ultrasound at the local hospital yesterday. This was a rather bewildering experience, because I went in not knowing for certain who ordered this test or why. I just got a letter in the mail saying it had been scheduled and I was to appear. So I did.

Turns out the gastroenterologists ordered it, though why they wanted it after I'd had a CT scan and an endoscopy I'm not sure. I've already been discharged from their care. I thought it was to take a look at my bumpy spleen, but as it turns out the ultrasound technician couldn't even see my hemangioma (or whatever it is) so if that was the reason it was all for naught.

But the good news is, I'm STILL not dying. At least not any more than usual.

On my walk to the hospital I found this garden wall (top) with a giant gap, a temporary fence and an admonishment NOT to tear it down. I'm not sure what the story is here, but I noticed that some of that Covid poetry is still attached to the fence. Remember, during our first lockdown, when someone posted 40 days of poems on a boarded-up restaurant around the corner from our flat? Well, this seems like the same poet, and given how weathered the poems are I wonder if they come from that same period.

Back at home, I showered off the ultrasound gel and sat out in the garden, reading. The Russians eventually got out some power tools and did whatever they do upstairs, and the neighbors had a lawn service come with blowers and mowers, so the garden was not peaceful. C'est la vie.

I made a fantastic salad out of all the vegetal odds and ends in our refrigerator, and then Dave and I took Olga to the cemetery.

She seemed very happy for the outing, especially with both of us along. She chased her ball and rolled in the long grass. (Dave is wearing my Iceland jacket. Iceland is a frozen-food grocery store here, and I found that perfectly good jacket in a skip many years ago!)

Afterwards we stopped off at Sweet Corner, that new cafe near Fortune Green, where we got a coffee and pastries while Olga lolled on the warm pavement. Dog heaven! We'd never been to Sweet Corner before and it was nice to try it out. I'll probably stop in with Olga from time to time. (The waitress told us dogs are allowed even inside!)

The bathroom had these amazing marble (I think?) walls, gray-blue with vivid white streaks and patches. Being in there was like floating in the middle of the sky.

So far the enormity of summer break hasn't hit me yet because a weekend is just a weekend. But today it's Monday and I DON'T HAVE TO GO TO WORK!

Flea Market Postcards

Mailed from Singapore Airport, Jan. 2, 1964

Caption:
"Malay Kampong, Malacca. The Malay word 'kampong' means village. Picture shows a poor Malay household doing their daily laundering around the community waterwell."

Message:
"Dear Alla: It's too hot, it's running down my back. All I want to do is sleep. It's much too hot to go shopping. We have all been down to Singapore at the week end staying with friends but I couldn't go out in the sun. So haven't done any shopping up to now. Been down the market at ten o'clock at night, the only time I've been comfortable. You ought to see George lying about in his shorts, he's lapping it up. Everybody fine here. When it rains it pours. Wendy lovely only half the size of Steven. Love from all here."

Mailed from TS/S (transport ship?) Stefan Batory, using a Polish stamp, Aug 17, 1970:

Message:
"Dear Mrs. Douglas & John, Enjoying our holiday on the ship very much, although it's not yet sunny enough for swimming or lazing on the deck. We've been dancing every day -- tonight we're going to the cinema. Food is marvellous & drinks very cheap. Hope you enjoyed your holiday. Love, Trish & Dave"

This ship was originally built in 1958 for Holland-America, which operated it for ten years as the Maasdam IV before selling it to the Polish government. It was renamed the Stefan Batory, for a 16th Century king of Poland, and continued operating as a cruise ship until 1990. It was briefly used to house asylum seekers in Sweden before being scrapped in Turkey in 2000. According to Wikipedia, Lee Harvey Oswald sailed with his wife and daughter from the Soviet Union to the USA on the Maasdam IV in 1962.

Mailed August 26, 1960 from Monte Carlo.

Caption:
"Reflets de la Cote d'Azur: Monte Carlo. Le Casino et les terrasses."

Message:
"Dear Mum: Here we are Monte Carlo. They have just changed the guard and the sun is still hot. It was a beautiful drive from Finale. See you next Saturday. Gordon"

Written July 10, 1978, and mailed from Lusaka, Zambia

Message:
"Dear Mum: Two T/chests have gone today with my Polish china etc in. They will be delivered to you, but they are very heavy so don't you try lifting them. Perhaps you could just see they don't 'throw' them through the front door! as they do contain breakable things. I hope when they do arrive John will be there to lend a hand! Will be writing a letter later. Love, Shirle"

Finis

Well, we are done. DONE. For the next two months, I don't have to think about overdue books, or mobs of boys who loudly play "Brawl Stars" together on their phones, or girls surreptitiously nibbling potato chips hidden in their bags, or any of the other elements of daily life in the library. I can just relax and read and hang out with Dave and the dog. Woo hoo!

I finished the year with a five-page list of patrons with overdue items -- eight adults and 25 kids. The adults are no big deal. They'll return their stuff after summer. Of the kids, at least one is leaving the school so I imagine we'll never see that book ("Fahrenheit 451") again, but we have another copy so we'll survive.

Yesterday I spent the morning tidying up the library and then we all went to our big end-of-year luncheon in the gym, when we recognize the teachers and staff members who are leaving and more importantly we GET TO DRINK! It's a rare day when I can have a couple of glasses of wine on school property.

Afterwards, some people from the library and technology department went on to a gathering at a local pub but I didn't go. By the time lunch was over at 2:30 p.m., I was ready for the day to be done. I think it's a tall order to expect people to come to an evening event on the last day of school. So I just walked home and sat out in the garden with Olga.

The top photo shows a crane fly that I found on one of our dahlias. That dahlia, as you can see, looks pretty good and has quite a few leaves. But some of the other dahlias are still just stubs, if even that -- they've been repeatedly gnawed to the ground by snails and slugs. I finally brought two of them inside last night, hoping I could at least get them to sprout and grow a bit before returning them to the great outdoors. Right now they're barely visible above the soil.

Some of this might be because I didn't repot them for the last two years. I know I said this last year, but this fall I really am going to lift them all and clean and store the tubers before planting them in fresh soil next spring.

Ah, summer! When all I have to think about are dahlias!