Snow (Almost) Gone . . . And A Drive Out

We woke this morning to find out that the snow had almost all gone, apart from a few stray bits. What do they say? If there's a bit of snow left, then there'll be more soon to join it, so there is the possibility that we will get more before the winter is over. It is a good deal milder, so I turned the central heating down. The lounge does get warm, particularly if the sun comes out, which makes a real saving on the gas bill. These houses were designed to be warmed by natural means, with larger windows facing the sun and the windows on the opposite side of the house much smaller.

At 8.30 a.m. there was a weak sun shining. Which meats the remaining snow would soon dissolve. Carol was still asleep and I heard Alfie coming downstairs and wanting no doubt to be let out into the garden.

I'm still reading 'Keeping On, Keeping On', Alan Bennett's latest book. It's mostly his diary entries, covering 2005-12. He mentions Miss Shepherd, the elderly lady who lived in a clapped-out van parked in his driveway for 15 years, and who provided the inspiration for his play 'The Lady In The Van' and the film version of the same. There's nothing particularly interesting about his ramblings, mostly about his visits to various churches, National Trust properties and so on, but I love his sense of humour, very dry, and his mentions of the people he's met in various roles, for example, writers and actors. You can't read these books of his as if they're a novel. You can read several pages, all bits and pieces covering several days, none really connected in any way. There's no narrative thread, so it's the type of thing you can pick up on occasion, although some bits are more interesting than others.

We've been trying out the new Tassimo machine. It's a good deal more sophisticated than the Dulce Gusto machine. There is a wider range of drinks. It will make teas, and branded drinks, Cadbury's chocolate, Twining's and Costa. It has taken a while to fathom out how to work the machine, which Carol has christened Hannibal because it sounds a bit like the sounds the character, Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins, makes in 'The Silence of The Lambs.'

We drove down the A5 towards Stockgrove Country Park. It's been such a sunny and warm morning, after about a week of snow and ice, it was great to be able to get out of the house. We saw some patches of snow, but not enough to make things difficult to drive. We parked in the carpark and saw that the main path down to the lake was still covered in ice and snow, so we gave it a miss. We walked around and saw people sitting outside the café with their dogs. We didn't have Alfie with us. If we had, he'd have got heavily covered in mud and most likely would have ingratiated himself with the dogs as he has a habit of doing. It was surprising to see so many people about on a Monday morning. We didn't remain at Stockgrove, and left, which was annoying as we had to pay £3 for the privilege, even though we were there for such a short time. Carol wanted to take photos with her iPhone of the drifting snow along the road going back to the roundabout on the A5. Some really weird and wonderful shapes carved out of the snow at the side of the road. Drove over the roundabout towards Woburn. The centre of Woburn was like a ghost town, compared with a weekend., when it's usually heaving with tourists. A pretty village, but it's been over-commercialised. Drove through the park, although we didn't see much of the deer. Drivers not over-appreciative of me driving slowly to take  in the scenery. Why should they? Why bother to keep your speed to a decent level, particularly if it means avoiding any deer who happen to be in the middle of the road, as they have a habit of doing? No point obeying the rules, as usual. I drove straight through and out the other side and theynround towards Steppingley and Ampthill and then round towards Ridgmont and they made a detour back towards Woburn Sands as we wanted somewhere to have a bight for lunch. We went into Frost's at first. Parked well away from any other vehicles, as I don't want a repetition of what happened the last time we were in Frost's carpark. We went into the main body of the garden centre, which, as usual is beautifully organised, new displays of items to buy for Mothering Sunday. (I hate that we have to Americanise it to 'Mother's Day.) Why do they seem to think mothers want everything to be a hideous pink in colour? Flowers as well as boxes of chocolates and other gifts?

The restaurant is heaving with those of a 'certain age.' You can hardly find room to sit, if you were proposing eating. We go into another area as Carol wants to sit down. I go and have a look for a simple sandwich or baguette, but I can find nothing that fits the bill. Plenty of other options, but it's been made so up-market with rockett rather than plain old lettuce, or posh food on a platter rather than a plate, over-priced and certainly putting off a certain section of the population. As we can find nothing suitable, we decide to leave and drive over the road to Wyevale Garden Centre. Frost's have lost our custom.

This amuses me; a garden centre, making every available type of plant for sale. We walk into Wyevale and one of the first stalls (if that's what they call them) we come across is made up to look like a vegetable patch, but with obvious artificial veg appearing to grow in some earth and then, further in, a huge display of artificial flowers of every shape and variety, looking amazingly realistic. It just seems crazy that a garden centre, of all places, should sell such things as plastic flowers. Though, thinking about it, some of these would have been useful to me when I was working in stage management and I needed to find such things as flowers to be used as props in some of the plays I worked on, particularly as real flowers were considered to be bad luck by some actors. Just that a lot of theatrical folks are superstitious. No mention of a play by Shakespeare, better known as 'The Scottish Play' (Macbeth.) as it's considered to be bad luck.

In Wyevale we go into the restaurant. We order tomato and cheese toasties and have to wait some considerable length of time for them to arrive at our table because we're told they only have one operative griddle. When they arrive, they are very tasty. Also, we share a portion of chips. The place is busy, mostly mothers and toddlers and babies, who seem very well behaved, apart from one child who seems to like to make a noise about everything. It's good that these places do cater for children and babies. Also, I notice that Wyevale as well as Dobbie's are now dog-friendly. I see no reason whey they shouldn't, provided all dogs are well behaved.

Left Wyevale and drove back towards Milton Keynes. We had intended driving back up towards Chaffron Way, but when we got to the traffic lights to turn left towards Kingston where Tesco is, the road was blocked off. So, where we to go? No advance warning of this,  or for what reason, so diverted inside the housing estate. It was like driving in some sort of maze of roads, not clear where I was to go exactly, but eventually got on to main road back towards Chaffron Way.  So we'd had quite a pleasant morning, quite a circuitous drive, but well worth it in the end.

Later. It's as well we went out when we did. It's late afternoon as I write this, 4.50 or thereabouts. The weather has changed. It's now raining and there's water running down the road outside. The snow is more or less gone, although there is a small amount left in the back garden.

This 'n' That

Well, for a start-off I can't think of a title for this post. I usually attempt to find something alliterative. Well, if you don't know what it means (and shame on you.) it's words with the same initial letter that sound similar. 

The Police have packed up and left the 'crime scene' in Osprey Close. Although they left the peculiar blue box, shades of Doctor Who's 'Tardis' time machine. It's obvious what it is. A portable toilet. They had to make sure the Boys In Blue had somewhere to go, didn't they? Every possible 'convenience' at hand. We'll know sooner or later the outcome of this incident, although someone has been charged and was before the Magistrate's Court last week. I forget the person's name but it's bound to be in the local media.

The grass at the rear of the house has been growing steadily over the past couple of weeks. It's had plenty of sun and more recently rain, which might explain why it's got so long. I have been putting off mowing it, and this morning I got the mower out and attempted around half. The rest can be done tomorrow. It's mild weather-wise and I was hot when I finished. 

We have a good crop of blackberries on the brambles that overhang the fence at the end of the garden and there are quite a few along the Redway. I will get out tomorrow and pick some. 

I have been watching the film of "The Lady In The Van." This is a film based on Alan Bennet's stage play of the same name and starring the brilliant actress Maggie Smith. She who was the Dowager Duchess in "Downton Abbey." A very different character to the character she portrays in "The Lady In The Van." I have been an admirer of hers since I was around 16. I think I must have first seen her in the film "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." I studied "Othello" by William Shakespeare as part of my 'A' Level English course and saw her opposite Laurence Olivier in the film of "Othello" when she played Desdemona. And then in a very amusing film with another actor, I always liked, Peter Ustinov, called "Hot Millions." He plays her boss in an office and she is the cleaning lady who comes in to clean his office and they set up a scam to trick money out of the company when she bangs down her mop bucket near the company computer. She couldn't have been much more than in her late twenties or early thirties when she made that. As for Peter Ustinov. What a talented man he was. Not only a great actor but also a playwright of some renown. He wrote "Romanov and Juliet" and I saw him in  a wonderful play called "Beethoven's Tenth" where he plays Ludwig Van Beethoven, who is made to appear as (possibly) a ghost by a music critic played by Robin  Bailey. (best known probably for playing Uncle Mort in the Peter Tinniswood sit-com called "I Didn't Know You Cared.") I might be right in thinking that Beethoven is given a hearing aid and is able to hear recordings of his symphonies for the first time. Ustinov stole the show, and it was extremely clever and funny.

I saw Maggie Smith in the Noel Coward play "Private Lives" when she played Amanda to her then-husband Robert Stephens, who played Eliot (originally played by Noel Coward himself and Gertrude Lawrence in the 1930's original production.)  This production was at the Phoenix Theatre in London, and, I believe, was directed by Sir John Gielgud. When I was an A.S.M. in Colchester in the early 1970's we did our own production of this play and I have been a Coward fan ever since. His plays never seem to be out of fashion, unlike a lot of other playwrights of that period. Just as amusing as when they were written and in some cases more relevant today than when  they were first produced. Such plays of his, as "Hay Fever" and "Blithe Spirit" are constantly being revived.

As for Alan Bennet, I have also enjoyed his work. He did a lot of plays for the BBC and a number with Dame Thora Hurd. He wrote a series of monologues for the likes of Thora Hird, Maggie Smith, and Patricia Routledge and called "Talking Heads." The first play of his I remember was a black-and-white television film about a gang of Edwardian cyclists. Very little plot and, being set in that idyllic realm immediately before the First World War, had a very poignant ending. A definite 'must see' if you get a chance. He's since done most of his writing work for the National Theatre, such as 'The History Boys' which was made into a film in the early 2000's.

Warmer Weather

A real increase in the temperature as the weather improves. I can't believe I'm going out without a jacket on. I've managed to cut the grass. It seems to grow a good deal faster once it's mown. I still refuse to term it a 'lawn.' It has absolutely no attributes for a lawn, such as very short grass, with those distinctive stripes and ironing-board flat. It's more like a meadow, but without the cattle chewing the cud. Or sheep, roaming about. It's got so many undulations, it's more like a scale model of the Pennines. 

We've begun to fill the collection of pots we have scattered around the place. Several had been sitting on the front bit of paving for I don't know how many years. We were given some by someone who worked with Carol at the Academy as well as a rather nice planter which originally had a Christmas tree in it but then the tree died and the remains of the tree were still in it. We never seem to have any success with Christmas trees. I suspect it's because, once Christmas is over, being the middle of winter, any chance of the poor little fir tree surviving is so remote because the weather is so cold. When I lived in Cardington we always had a real Christmas tree, and once the festive season was over the tree was planted out in the garden and lasted for many years until it grew far too big to be brought indoors. Ours always seem to die and I'm not sure what we can do to prevent it happening again. Anyway, we have had quite a few plants from various garden centres we've visited over the past few weeks, including strawberry plants and bedding plants which were free from Homebase with an offer which was in last weekend's Daily Telegraph. 

I have also been clearing all weeds and moss off the front drive, in between the paving slabs and the block paving where the car stands. It's beginning to look really clean and tidy. Quite a hard job, but now I've started it I want to complete the job. I don't think this has been done in a long time. Certainly not in all the time we've lived in the house.

We have a bird feeder in the garden. We had one a few years ago, but I'm not sure what happened to it. This thing is described on the box it came in as a 'dining station.' We got it from Amazon. I always thought of Amazon as being the place on-line to buy books, and nothing more, but it seems you can buy virtually anything on there. I got a case for my Canon digital camera. To keep it safe when I carry it about. I used to own a traditional film S.L.R. Camera, a very good Olympus, and it had it's own case which it lived in, which was fixed to the body of the camera by the screw underneath which you used to fix it to a tripod. Nothing, unfortunately, like this for a digital camera. The Olympus case was made of a fairly rigid material which kept the camera within safe from knocks and folded down when in use. Unfortunately, you have to remove the camera completely from the Canon case and won't fold out of the way like the Olympus case.

As I was mentioning, the bird 'dining station' came with a central metal pole which you stick in the ground and then attach the feeders onto the hooks at the top and then fill each of these wire feeders with nuts or other food. It has proven very popular with the small birds which live in and around the garden. We had a group of starlings who seemed to enjoy the coconut we had hanging on the dining station.' So much so that they have completely devoured the coconut and as I write I can look out and see the completely empty shell of the coconut. I will have to go out and buy some more. The content of the feeders needs replenishing.

I got a knock at the front door earlier this morning. A man dressed in bright orange work gear, the sort of  colour used for people who work in possibly dangerous situations. I can't think as I write what the term is, but I'm sure it will come to me once I've finished this.  I have now remembered what the term is, and it's 'High Vis' a shortened version of 'High Visability'. I can see why they wear it as it's very bright and they are certainly 'Highly Visable.' It turned out he was an employee of Anglia Water. He said he was working with a gang further along the road and, as their van was blocking our exit, if I wanted to move our car, to just let him know. I'm not entirely sure what they're doing. I thought it might have been something to do with water meters or something unless someone further along the street has a water leak. Never mind. At least he had the decency to let me know, as a lot of people never bother to tell you, and then when you want to drive out, you can't, because their vehicle or other equipment is in the way.

I'm currently reading 'The Lady In The Van' by Alan Bennett. I bought the DVD of the film which was based on the book and play which he wrote and about Miss Shepherd, the old lady who lived in a van in his garden. She is played by the amazing Maggie Smith. I've always been a admirer of this actress. The part is light years away from the character she plays in 'Downton Abbey.' I also love anything Alan Bennett writes. I'm really surprised he had the patience to put up with such an eccentric old woman living in such strange accomodation in his garden, and for fifteen years.