Prudence

I took this photo last summer during a walk through the Brent Cross area, north of where we live. I'm posting it now because this building made news yesterday -- it was consumed by a huge fire. Apparently one person died. The fire closed the North Circular, which is a major highway running right in front of the structure. Quite a bit of excitement, and when I saw it on the news, I thought, "Hey, I know that place!"

My stepmother came over for dinner again last night. She doesn't fly out of London until this morning, and I didn't want her hanging around in some hotel on her last night here, so Dave cooked for her and we spent another evening together. I went down to Mayfair to collect her after work, and rather than ride the tube back right away (in the middle of rush hour) we had a drink in the bar at the Intercontinental Hotel -- a gin creation called a "Prudence" involving basil and something else. It was pretty good, but the name is a bit odd for a cocktail, since it seems most prudent not to drink booze!

The tube was perhaps slightly less crowded by the time we got on, and we had a nice time hanging around here and talking about home and family -- particularly my late father's complicated, mathematical mind. June's house is full of mysterious little wall niches and unusual pipe fittings and other things that he created, and sometimes we can only guess at their original purpose.

We're at that time of year again when the sun rises ridiculously early and sets fairly late. I woke up about 4:30 this morning and it was already getting light out. It's hard to get back to sleep when the sun is telling you otherwise! (And I suppose we should be living our lives by daylight rather than artificial clocks anyway, right?)

June in May

Well, yesterday was a busy day, although I feel like all I did is eat! I worked the first half of the day, until about noon, and then I took the tube down to Mayfair, where my stepmother, June, was checking into a fancy hotel for a few days after a cruise around Spain and Portugal. We met up and had lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe, purely because it was next door and we were both starving.

Visiting the Hard Rock was a bit nostalgic for me, because I last went there one night in April 2000 with my friend Arthur on my first trip to London. Here's what I wrote in my journal at the time:

We wound up at the Hard Rock Cafe, where the waiters performed an amusing trick -- one sprayed whipped cream onto the shaved head of the other, topping it off with a swizzle stick. They did that trick twice, and I was there for only two beers!

June and I did not see that trick yesterday afternoon. I guess the lunch vibe isn't as wild.

This is the nearby Hotel Athenaeum, with its lush living wall, towering over Piccadilly like a green mountain.

Anyway, our hunger satiated by very messy pulled pork sandwiches -- I wound up wearing some of mine -- we took the tube up to St. John's Wood and I gave June a brief tour of the school where Dave and I work.

Then we continued to West Hampstead, where we had coffee at Cafe Nero and watched the parade of people on the High Street before coming to our house for gin & tonics in the garden with Dave. We sat out until it got too chilly. (And what is up with this weather -- we had lots of sunshine yesterday but it had to be in the low 40s F last night!) June said it was nice to see the garden in real life after reading so much about it on the blog. It would have been even nicer if the squirrels hadn't completely destroyed our sage plant yesterday, breaking off all three flower stalks -- but never mind.

We went to dinner at The Petite Corée for Korean/European fusion food. It seemed more Korean and less European than the last time Dave and I went, but it was still yummy.

Someone wrote this amusing message on the sidewalk near Green Park. Apparently it's the name of a country music song.

Anyway, after dinner June took an Uber back to her hotel, and Dave and I watched an episode of "Six Feet Under" before collapsing into bed. Today, back to our normal schedule!

Jackdaws and Inventory

I saw lots of these black-capped, gray crow-like birds when I was in Richmond Park last week. I had to Google them to figure out what they were -- I'm not great at identifying corvids -- but I believe they're jackdaws.

This one was hopping around on the ground pulling grubs out of the grass. It found two during the short time I watched -- an effective hunter!

Speaking of grubs, I've been wrestling with what to do -- if anything -- about the moth pupa I pictured yesterday. I considered bringing it inside and pupating it in a container, both to see what kind of moth it is and to protect it. (I suspect it's an angle shades moth, and I'm still convinced it's not supposed to be lying on the surface of the ground like that.) But in the warmth of the house, I suspect it would emerge too early -- earlier than its food sources or the other moths it needs to mate. So I'm leaning toward leaving it where it is. Nature can handle the job, right? And if something eats it, well, that something needs its food too.

I finished the library inventory, and remember how I said I thought we'd be down about 30 books? Well, that's exactly where we ended up, with 30 missing books. Most of them are fiction, and most of them aren't anything that needs to be replaced, at least not immediately. (When's the last time anyone read "The Hunt for Red October"?)

Some of you suggested we get an "amnesty bin" where late or missing books can be returned no-questions-asked. We already have a return bin where people can leave things anonymously, so that serves the purpose, I think.

I did comb some 5th-grade classrooms for missing or overdue items, and found a small stack. Several years ago one of the teachers checked out a big art book on Vermeer and months later professed not to have it -- and not to even remember it. (This is not an uncommon situation!) So we marked it lost and left it at that. Well, what do you think I found behind a cabinet in her classroom, where it had obviously fallen ages ago? Four years overdue, but better late than never.

Moth and Greenfly

I spent all day yesterday at home, mostly working outside. I potted the rest of my seedlings, so they're all out of the seed trays now. I also re-potted a couple of plants that Dave bought -- another lupine and a delphinium -- and one of my dahlias.

Dave's azaleas are blooming away, as you can see. It wasn't until after I took the picture that I noticed that little greenfly on the left side of the flower. See him?

Oh well. We're a pesticide-free zone, so these critters are ubiquitous!

And here's the natural solution to greenflies and aphids. I assume they're mating...?

A few years ago I found a little twig of a tree in a pot with some bluebells and other plants, all being discarded in someone's trash. I brought the pot home and planted everything next to the birdbath. Now the tree is almost as tall as I am, and we have no idea what kind it is. I've tried to look it up online and my two best guesses are some kind of fruit tree (but it's never bloomed) or a copper beech. The latter would eventually be a problem because they get HUGE. Any ideas?

Our roses are about to bloom. Lots of buds but no flowers yet. This one didn't bloom at all last year so I'm glad it's apparently happier this season.

As I worked nearby, Olga lolled on the back steps. I don't know if you can tell, but she's lying half in the flower bed, right on top of our love-in-a-mist. I didn't even try to move her. Fortunately love-in-a-mist are tough plants, and ours do tend to grow in inconvenient places!

I found this lying on the ground in one of the back garden beds. I looked it up and I believe it's a pupating moth. I'm not sure why it's above ground, because I think they usually pupate below the soil surface, but I didn't try to move it. I covered it with some leaves so it wouldn't be easy pickings for birds.

And finally, our potato plants have come up. (You may remember I'm growing them in bags.) We have three little sprouts, all looking like this. Everyone tells me potatoes are incredibly vigorous, so we'll see how this experiment goes!

Otherwise, it was a quiet day. I finished "An American Marriage," which was a pretty good read, and I called my mom in Florida for Mother's Day. I also sent her some flowers, but I had them delivered last Thursday because the florist wanted $15 extra to deliver them yesterday. (And $5 extra on Saturday or Friday.) I told Mom that's why her flowers arrived early and she thought that was pretty funny. She's frugal herself so she gets it!

A Sidewalk Encounter

Olga and I were walking in Cricklewood yesterday morning when I spied a woman coming toward us on the sidewalk. She appeared to be singing and swinging a handbag and even doing a little dance or skip. She was in a very good mood.

As she got closer I realized she was part singing, and part talking to herself. Brown hair, mid-40s, long gray sweater, a little rough around the edges. When she came close to us, she looked me in the eye, put her hand on my arm, and said:

"I used to ride horses. I'm a transsexual kind of bitch."

And then she kept going. Some workmen were nearby on a road project, and they all laughed. Every once in a while I'd glance down the sidewalk and she danced all the way to the corner, and even turned and did a little finger-in-the-air Travolta pose before turning onto the next street.

OK, I know it's mean to make light of someone's mental illness or drug abuse or whatever, but still. I admit it. I was amused. When I came home and told Dave about it, he said, "Well, you've got your blog post for tomorrow."

I spent the rest of the morning weeding the garden and planting more seedlings. We have a terrible weed here called dock that is a nightmare to control. It grows everywhere from seeds that can remain viable in soil for years, and it develops a long taproot like a carrot. You've got to remove the root or the weed will just grow back, and it's very hard, if not impossible, to pull up. You've got to dig it out.

So that's what I was doing. I think we had about a thousand dock plants out there. Now we have approximately 978. (You can appreciate the enormity of the task.)

That leaf in the photos, by the way, is not dock. It's just a cool leaf I found on the street.

I also planted a bunch more seedlings, and I have still more to go, although I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I think we're going to give some of the hollyhocks to a co-worker of Dave's who just got a new place with a garden, and I may give some to my friend Sally too.

I thought Olga would be happy after our long morning walk, but she began getting squirrelly in the afternoon so I took her to the Heath. I felt like hell after working in the garden but we managed to get through OK -- we were both dragging by the end. She's been asleep pretty much ever since. As I always say -- my objective is to exhaust the dog!

The Lord's Prayer

Yesterday morning I wound up going down an Internet rabbit hole regarding bubblegum pop music from the early '70s. This happened because here on the blog we were talking about Archie, the new royal baby, and Archie comics, and that got me thinking about The Archies, the band that produced the ridiculously simple and annoying hit song "Sugar, Sugar" in 1969. That, somehow, led me to reading about various songs, bands and record labels of the time, which brought me to the song "Put Your Hand in the Hand," which was a No. 2 hit for a band called Ocean in 1971.

I vaguely remember "Put Your Hand in the Hand." Along with "Sweet Caroline" and "American Pie," it's one of my earliest radio memories. I'm sure we later sang it in Sunday School or at church youth group meetings or summer camp. And as a Jesus-themed hit song, it made me wonder about another song from my childhood, a musical version of "The Lord's Prayer."

Do any of you remember this? Whenever I mentioned it to friends later in life, no one seemed to know what I was talking about. I began to think I'd made the whole thing up. But I distinctly recall being over at a friend's house in the early '70s, listening to the radio, and hearing this "Lord's Prayer" song. I even vaguely remembered the tune.

I'd Googled it years ago and come up with nothing. But when I tried again yesterday it appeared right away. (Is Google search better than it used to be, or is there just vastly more stuff on the Internet nowadays? Probably both.) It turns out there was, indeed, a musical version of the Lord's Prayer recorded by a nun named Sister Janet Mead, which became a gold record and a top-ten hit in the spring of 1974. And it sounds exactly how I remember it.

Well, I'm glad I'm not crazy.

I found lots of images of the record label and even one truly bizarre mashup from Thailand -- a record that combined Sister Janet's "Lord's Prayer" with Andy Williams, Carly Simon, James Taylor and Looking Glass, with cover art from Fleetwood Mac!

And I found another blogger who included "The Lord's Prayer" on his amusing list of the Ten Worst Songs from 1974. (Along with "Seasons in the Sun" -- ugh.) Wikipedia points out that it's the only top-ten record with lyrics creditable to Jesus Christ!

Doesn't it seem wildly improbable that such overtly Christian songs -- with relatively amateurish production values -- would be mainstream musical hits? I guess this was before the days of specialized Christian rock, and no doubt religious people appreciated hearing those songs on pop-music radio. But clearly they appealed to mass-market listeners too. They were catchy and easily singable. I had "The Lord's Prayer" stuck in my head all day yesterday, after hearing it just once!

(Photo: A cafe in Penge, South London, a few weeks ago.)

Misty Morning and Inventory

There's a fine mist in the air this morning. I've been scrambling to get the recycling and garden waste put out for collection, but that's all done now and I'm back in bed with coffee and Olga. (Dave is already getting ready for work.)

Everything seems remarkably quiet -- maybe because of the way mist muffles sound. I don't hear any traffic or street noise. The garden seems very lush and damp and fertile.

I finished the fiction inventory in the library yesterday -- we're missing about 25 fiction books, which is about twice as many as usual after a year of school. We used to have security gates at the entrances to the library, and they would beep (when they worked) if a student tried to leave with a book that hadn't been checked out. Last fall we removed the gates, because they were old and mostly didn't work right, and putting security tape in all the books was very expensive. We decided to experiment with having no security system at all.

That may be why a few more titles have gone missing. Fortunately most of them are not books we need to buy again. Even if they were, the question is -- is it cheaper to replace the books than to run that security apparatus? Probably.

I've still got some more inventory to go, but it's in specialist areas like reference, foreign language and professional development, and I don't expect anything to be missing from those categories. My best estimate is that overall, we'll be down about 30 books. That sounds like a lot, but not when you consider that we've got 27,000 in the collection. Plus, I suspect some of them went walking during the summer, when the library is technically closed but the space is still used for meetings and other functions.

It's also likely some of the missing titles were merely borrowed, rather than stolen, and will come back or turn up in classrooms and student lockers before the end of school. I haven't yet started my annual tradition of prowling through empty classrooms in the afternoons to retrieve books left lying around. Stay tuned!