Of Holm Oak and White Barked Birch

Would-be musician, Brian, tries to impress his Dad with his
latest 'number' in the Dress Rehearsal of Cupid Wore Skirts

When I last posted we were still awaiting the arrival of our latest group of guests, I was on the verge of a significant birthday and our most recent 'project' (The Village Play) was about to hit the Dress Rehearsal milestone. It has been a busy few days. We are now relaxing, recovering and sorting the house out between that and the next visitor's arrival. It is all going really well and we have been enjoying ourselves immensely.

Miss Stanfield puts her "purity" at risk by getting "flootered".
It is an old Roscommon expression which means "you fainted"
allegedly. 

The guests, whom friends of the blog will have met (some of) before were Dan and Dan(ielle) plus Danielle's brother Jake. We tend to refer to them as "the children" because Danielle and Jake are the children of Liz's closest cousin when they were growing up (Cathy) but what ever way it is they were, as always, pure joy to 'host'. They love this place and the way they can relax here and they adore Liz's cooking. Liz, of course, gets a lift out of this and always goes the extra mile to lay on special, spectacular menus which we know the guests will enjoy - Dan loves his pies and his desserts for example, Danielle her 'dippy' goose egg breakfasts and Jake anything which isn't the 'student food' he gets back at his shared flat.

A 10" diameter Jaffa Cake

I will not bore you with a full menu list but I will note some high points which definitely hit the spot. There was a haggis and sausage pie. There was a meltingly tender lamb roast. There was a superb, 10" diameter 'Jaffa Cake', Madeira sponge on the bottom, the obligatory layer of double-strength orange jelly and a covering of chocolate mousse. There was a superb fish pie.

Left to right, Dan, Dan and Jake.

There was a top-rate trifle which included REAL custard made with eggs, dried fruit soaked in brandy and 'proper' trifle sponges. There were dippy goose eggs and Liz's unbeatable scrambled (duck) eggs. Drinking was restrained and sensible but included some Irish craft-beers and tasters of my birthday present 'Teelings' whiskey. There was, inevitably plenty of sleeping it off after meals.

Breakfast for the sheep. Danielle serves. 

Danielle's main reason for coming though, I suspect, is the chance to wrangle some livestock which she loves and dreams of owning herself one day. She is now at the stage where she can do morning rounds and lock up unsupervised but we like to lay on something new each time and for this one she was determined that 'baby brother' also get involved.

Shepherding the 5 ducks from night-quarters
to day-time pen.  Morning rounds.

Between us we rounded up the sheep into a hurdle-pen in the cattle race, I gave the three 'grown-ups' their annual (Clostridium) jabs and we trimmed feet and dagged the worst of the 'lady garden' bits while copping a quick feel of some udders to see if there was any bagging up happening. There isn't. We are beginning to be convinced that we will have no lambs this year; we may have to go out and buy some like the old days.

At one stage we were out admiring the night sky (as we do) and we discovered that this star-gazing thing is also a passion of Jake's. He was as excited at the clear, pollution-free and LIGHT-pollution free clear sky as we were and still are. I showed him the book (2017 Guide to the Night Sky) to which I have referred in previous posts and he showed us the modern electronic equivalent. This is an 'app' on his smart phone which detects where you are 'pointing' the phone in 3 dimensions, re-creates the stars and planets you are therefore looking at, draws in the constellations with more fancy graphics and names all the significant bits. Very clever. It even "sees" down through the earth to show you what celestial bodies are about to clear the horizon or have just fallen below it.

A good time was definitely had by all.

The perfect gift - new trees!

The Birthday was also a highlight and thank you very much to all those blog-readers, Facebook and Twitter friends and 'real people' who contributed to that. At risk of upsetting everyone else I will just select one present which was a real highlight to the day, a gift of such genius and appropriateness that we are both (giver Liz and Birthday boy) still amazed and delighted at it. This was, quite simply, 2 trees, a holm oak and a white-barked birch. If you know me, you will have some idea why this was such a good choice, but I suspect that Liz would be the only person in my entire orbit who would have known that and known why.

Trees do it for me anyway - I love the gardening side of them, lending your plot some vertical element, all that digging holes and then staking them safely against the wind-rock. I love the sustainability of them - the idea that you are planting something which you are unlikely to see mature in your life time, in the hope that anyone owning or using the garden way after you're dead will appreciate them.

An allowable mistake. I never could write
14-4 on a cheque without making it 14-4-57
instead of the real year. 

The choice of species was also spot on. We had a lovely white-bark birch in our Faversham garden which was 20' tall and just starting to look the part as we left. When I go back now to visit the former neighbours and peer over the fence I am delighted that the new owners may have "bulldozed" most of our garden but they have kept the birch and it looks splendid. A birch, then, is part of Liz's and my joint story and harks back to the Kentish chapters.

So too (even more so?) does the holm oak. There is a fine example growing near the main church in Faversham but we also know this species from our trip to USA and the Deep South. In Mississippi, the holm oak or evergreen oak is known as the 'Live' Oak (say it Lahhhhve Oak) presumably because it keeps its leaves. They were everywhere in New Orleans, growing like the Plane Trees of London. There. The perfect gift. Thank you so, so much, the Lady of the House.

Finally, that Dress Rehearsal. It went very well. Not perfect; there were a few gaps where the prompter had to chip in, but these theatrical types have a saying "Good Dress (rehearsal), bad First Night" (and v.v.). Nobody is panicking, all are still confident that it will be alright on the night. If there's any justice then just by the sheer force of the amount of man hours and work that has gone into it, it should go well. First night is this coming Wednesday so more on this subject in a post after that.

Ground Rush

Director Tom C and Lizzie fine-tune the set furniture prior to
a rehearsal. 

With the big Dress Rehearsal only a week away now, the village play team are starting to experience that parachutist's scary moment when you seem to have been drifting down to land very slowly but suddenly, in the last few feet, the landing moment starts to rush at you with terrifying acceleration. The actors and supporters have had this play (Cupid Wore Skirts) in the cross wires since the end of last year but suddenly there are only 7 nights till Dress Rehearsal and just over the week to First Night.

The action takes place in the home of an
antique dealer. All manner of weird 'pieces'
owned locally have been volunteered as
stage furniture. 

The tension is mounting, the set has now been beautifully constructed by the 'lads' who work at Liz's place, props and furniture are accumulating and the Players are racing to finish learning lines and stage directions. Director Tom C is hanging in there, convinced that the show will go on - they will be ready on the opening night. He has, though slotted some extra rehearsals into what was once a Tuesday and Thursdays schedule; there is one tonight for example. I went yesterday to see one such, and I am very excited about the real thing - they have a lovely piece there and I am sure they will deliver it really well.

Damson blossom

If you saw last year's "A Wake in the West" you will not be disappointed. This is slightly different - in the 'Wake' humour came in great, hilarious bursts, with more serious sections in between, 'Cupid' is funny in a lighter way but throughout. I am really looking forward to it. I got involved today helping shift the set and all the furniture and props from the back-hall of the centre (where the pictures above were taken) into the main hall and onto the newly built proper stage, where it could now be rebuilt once the Montessori pre-school had broken up for Easter.

Tulips in hotter colours. 

Also accelerating (more comfortably!) is Spring, which seems to have leapt forward in the warm weather while I was in UK for just 4 nights. Quite by accident, we have selected daffs and tulips so that all the early risers are in quite bland colours - yellow daffs, maybe, but also pale yellow and white daffs and tulips. Just as I was beginning to get frustrated by the lack of 'fire' in the spring garden, 2 huge tubs of tulips by the front door prove to be yellow streaked with bright red. When I went away, only one plum was in blossom in the orchard - I have come back to damson, pear (both white) and the start of pink apple buds showing colour.

A nice enough hellebore but I yearn for darker reds and purples

Elsewhere we have anenomes, hellebores and pulmonaria in flower as well as bud break in most shrubs and trees promising more to come. I love the horse chestnut buds which we used to call "sticky buds" as kids - they have gone from just starting to elongate last Friday, to 3 inch shoots with visible leaves and stems now.

With the snowdrops finished (foreground)
a pass of the mower tidies up our front bank

The grass is starting to 'motor' and I have been out with the mower, picking my way between the leafy left-overs of snow drop and crocus - gardeners know that you need to leave the leaves for at least 6 weeks to produce food for next year's bulbs. On the local farms this translates into it being time to scatter fertilizer on the grass prior to letting the cattle out.

Anenome

This is normally an NPK formulation in tiny round pellets - a friend down the road chooses, for some reason, to have his delivered in 50 kg sacks which he can't lift and his contractor/tractor driver struggles with due to a bad back. I get called in each time to help him '2-hand' the sacks up into the hopper on the back of the tractor - it is quite high so if we are lucky, the delivery pallet is set down on a stack of 5-6 empty pallets so that we can pass at least the first few bags DOWN into the spreader.

No ground rush for the wooly lawn mowers. They are taking
their own sweet time about giving us a clue to their in-lamb,
or not, status.

I will leave it at that for this post - a nice gentle one after the rather hectic pace of recent epistles. I have a rather nice whiskey here, bought in case of the visitors last week needing a dram but not actually touched at the time. It is sliding down rather well.

Pear blossom.

Sticky buds (Horse Chestnut) explode
into action.

Sláinte !

Star Gazing

The '3rd Quarter' moon passes within 3º of Jupiter on the
night of the 18th/19th Jan

One of the nicest surprise 'bonus' gifts we received on moving here were the crystal clear night skies and the chance to look at the gazillion stars we had never seen from Kent. No air pollution and no light pollution mean we can regularly see the Milky Way and ever since we were building this place and living in the caravan in 2012 we have been coming back indoors and breathlessly telling each other that "Wow! It is a night of a million stars out there!"

A '365' pic of the church looking fine in the slanting morning
sunshine

I have always been a bit interested in star gazing. Regular readers might recall that I fried the mother board of my last camera while trying to take repeated long-exposure shots of the Perseid meteor shower. A good friend of mine in Kent, John W, may have known this when he advised Santa to send me a brilliant book, the Collins/Royal Observatory Greenwich 2017 Guide to the Night Sky.

Clearing the local river

This is a lovely little paperback in full colour packed with maps, 'artist's impressions', charts and other graphics but is specific to the sky as seen from London. That is close enough; they all work. I have had some fun with it just knowing what the moon will be doing and what events are due. The moon was very closely aligned to Jupiter, for example, on the morning of 19th and on the 24th passes very close to Saturn. Next item on the shopping list is a half decent telescope.

We have muscari coming into flower.

Meanwhile, closer to home and working with a different group of 'stars', Liz has another project under way. This is this year's village play, due to hit the stage on Easter week. The play, 'Cupid Wore Skirts' was written by Sam Cree (who also wrote some 'Carry On' stuff) in the 60's  and was originally set in Northern Ireland in the 50s. The gang here have tweaked it into the 80s and moved it South to the Republic but with very few changes.

Director Tom C advises the actors how to deliver a problem
line

Last year, Liz got involved in theory as "prompt", sitting in the side backstage and watching progress of the dialogue like a hawk, whispering in reminders when ever anybody faltered or got lost. They described the role as "Continuity"  but she ended up doing all manner of other support tasks involving admin, tickets, costume adjustments, props and so on. The whole team thoroughly enjoyed themselves, the play was a huge, sell-out success and the Lisacul Players were back up and running after a gap of a few years.

Pussy Willow

This year, Liz is 'hired' as Assistant Director, so she will probably being doing exactly the same list of tasks as before, this being Amateur Dramatics where everybody does everything anyway. I went along last night just to watch them rehearsing and to take a few pics. I am the (unofficial) photographer. It is early doors at present, so the actors are all 'walking the boards' armed with scripts and Director (Tom C) dives in occasionally to get them to move in different directions or change their hand gestures or expressions. It is going to be quite a ride. Good luck to the whole team.

Rhubarb emerging.

Other than that, we continue to chug gently into Spring with some lovely, calm, blue sky days and some lovely sunsets.

Some lovely sunsets

Snow drops just starting

And here

Your basic tortilla.