Midlife CrisisI’m not sure if a building built in the 1500’s can be said to be having a mid life crisis in 2024, but if it can, then this one is. Like a post-divorce Michael Gove popping up in an Aberdeen nightclub, Temple Newsham is entering it’s “rave stage”.
We visited on Sunday and it was off it’s tits on something. The whole garden had been filled with mysterious lights (and hairy balls) and it had put it’s loudest attire on to have a good old boogie.
Fair play I say. Happy New Year all!
Moderately Merry ChristmasTo add a bit of festive spirit to the Beans, I’d like to share with you the Christmas decorations from the suburban shopping centre near our house.
Naturally you will be feeling envious about your own comparatively tepid decorations. All I can suggest is that you try harder next year. And if that’s not the Christmas spirit, I don’t know what is.
Dear Beans… troubling transformationsDear Beans,
I am currently undergoing a transformation and there’s nothing I can do about it. I am not the same person anymore; I am slowly morphing into something else and how it will end I do not know.
It all started earlier on this year when I bought a house. It was my first time, a life-changing event, one that was met with equal parts joy and exhaustion (I’ve got the plug!). We moves in no problems and set about doing the usual shuffling items of furniture about and redecorating.
It was slow to begin with, almost crimsonly even. Rambling about a garden centre, I noticed the garden tools and took one off the shelf. Normally I’d make a beeline for the chainsaws and start swishing one around like a child only this time I removed a reasonably-priced garden strimmer and thought to myself, “hmmm, this would make work in the back garden next summer a lot easier.” I immediately noticed what I was doing, put the strimmer back and quickly made off in the opposite direction.
Last weekend I was out with the dog for a morning walk. The sun hadn’t quite come up yet although there was enough light to make out the specific details of each house as we passes them. I saw one on the other side of the road with what seemed to be a brand-new roof that seemed to sparked in the almost dawn. “That is a fine-looking roof,” and I almost spoke out loud, the words dancing on my tongue, the thought hanging in the air with the morning frost.
What is happening to me? Why am I behaving this way? Should I seek help or am I a lost cause?
Yours vexingly
Shoutpad O’Plaxingdale
Garden centre assistanceRecently, on a visit to our local garden centre, I found a sign displaying some useful information.
Hopefully you will gain as much valuable insight from this as I did.
SeedsKate has been very much getting into gardening lately, and in particular, growing vegetables. Our back garden is on its way to becoming a vegetable garden. Last year we had home grown tomatoes, potatoes, rocket and carrots, and this year we’re being even more adventurous.
Since all this stuff is being grown from seeds, I am enjoying discovering that mundane vegetables have impossibly exciting names for their varieties.
Some tell you where it’s from, like our spring onions, which are White Lisbon, or the Brussels sprouts which are Evesham Special. Others tell you what the cultivator was hoping for, like Elegance salad leaves or Sparkler radishes or our yellow courgettes, which are called Gold Rush. I see what you did there.
We’ve got some flowers with descriptive names too; our sunflowers have been set up for greatness with the name Titan while the dahlias are Showpiece. We have high hopes for them both.
I don’t know what to expect from our aubergines now I know they are called Jewel Jet F1. But I am a big fan of the classical names. Our spinach is Apollo, and we have two varieties of parsnips, one called Palace and the other called Gladiator. I have checked the packet and Gladiator parsnips are a “vigorous hybrid” with “large, canker-resistant roots”. Just like real gladiators were.
Thrilled and exhilerated by all these names, I then turn to the packet of beetroot seeds, and see that they are Mixed. It had to end somewhere.
Mysterious debrisA few years ago I moved to a new location and reported to you on the mysterious lumps in a park not far from where I lived. Well, I now live fairly close to France, where the mysterious objects in local parks are of a different nature.
Until about 2015, if you happened to join the army and they decided you looked like the right sort of person to drive a tank, they would take you to a place called Hogmoor which was some woods with lots of muddy tracks and water traps to drive tanks around. Presumably you then did a tank driving test or something to prove you’d learned all their was to know about piloting big metal boxes around Hampshire woodland.
Anyway, after that the army decided they didn’t want to be involved in this part of Hampshire any more, so they went away, leaving behind large areas of a town that are being redeveloped into housing estates. They also left behind Hogmoor, which has been turned into the town’s equivalent of a park – except it doesn’t have big grassy lawns and flowerbeds, it’s just a big woodland with park-type things in it like an adventure playground and a cafe and stuff. I’m very happy with that because walking around in the woods is far nicer than walking around a manicured park.
The other thing Hogmoor has are all the bits of rusty debris the army didn’t take away when they left. I now walk the dog around here more or less every day, so I thought I’d share with you some of the mysterious military debris I keep finding lying around the place.
The second horror of ChristmasRound here people like to put lights on their house for Christmas. You know there’s that house near you, where the people go a bit mad, and cover the whole thing in garish flashing multicoloured lights? Every year, because it’s their “thing”? Well, we more or less live in a whole town of people like that.
On our street, the people next door and the people over the road compete for the most Christmas lights every year. As a result we are trapped in the middle of the fairy light equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Here is the view out of our bedroom window this year.
And then, if you want a bit of a break from the light shining through the blinds, you can go round to the back, where this is the view.
QuinceA long time ago, Ian had a mild obsession with the letter Q, and specifically the way that the letter Q is little used and frequently overlooked. His short-lived website in the early 2000s had an entire page celebrating it.
If you were looking for the fruit equivalent of the letter Q – something obscure, overlooked, probably not very useful – then you need look no further than the quince. It even has a name beginning with a Q.
For reasons known only to themselves, the people who renovated our house about 15 years ago decided that the back garden needed a quince tree. Now, every autumn, we receive a harvest of quinces, which are all ready all at once and so have to be either used or thrown away within a very short period.
Unfortunately there’s not much you can do with quinces. They were very popular hundreds of years ago, when modern fruits like apples, oranges and bananas had yet to arrive in England. If you were, say, Henry VIII, you would have eaten a lot of quince because there wouldn’t have been much else around. Today you probably wouldn’t bother and they are one of the most useless fruit trees you could possibly plant. (The other fairly useless old-fashioned fruit is a damson, and they planted one of those in our back garden too. This year, for the first time, we got one single damson fruit off it.)
If you’ve never encountered a quince before, here are the essentials:
The list of things you can do with a quince is not very long. You can use it as a substitute anywhere you would cook an apple – so you can use one instead of an apple in a pie or a crumble, but you have to cook it first. You can bake one into a cake if you have one of a very small number of cake recipes that call for one, but you have to cook it first. Or you can boil it down over the course of about a month to make quince jelly, which is quite nice with cheese. Failing that you can leave it in the kitchen while you try to work out what to do with it all, until a time when it goes off, at which point you can put it on the compost heap.
This is the last year that we will be cooking a small amount of quince and throwing the rest on the compost heap, since the tree has now been cut down. Farewell, tree – and thanks for all the quince.