Uninsured GMOs

These Lidl supermarket Muscari did very
well on the Dining Room windowsill

At last we enjoy a bit of a thaw. The temperatures outside zoom up to a heady 10-11ºC, all the snow melts away, the drizzle has a familiar non-crunchy wetness about it and we even have some bees out flying, evicting the latest dead colleagues and doing their hive hygiene thing. The pond looks odd this morning, still covered in a wet, thick, pond-sized sheet of ice but one which is now freed up all around from the banks and covered in wet, thawed rain so that the ice is part submerged. I have been out digging or cutting red cabbage, turnips, sprouts, parsnips and red beetroot without having to scrape away the snow first.

Popcorn and old Doctor Who episodes
for a quiet night in.

Last night I was able to fill the goose baths using the garden hose, though for the first few minutes the hose was pushing out 'sausages' of ice which plinked onto the old ice sheet landing like a small dropped heap of cocktail sticks till the new water eventually evicted them all and the hose could run at normal pressure. The 'little' lamb thrives and is now big enough to be safely out of doors through the night. In reality he probably has been for a good week but we are nervous and over-careful beginners, so the chap will have been enjoying not having to expend calories on keeping warm in the frost. Tonight, his first night out (other than his date of birth, of course, when he took us by surprise and  was welcomed to the world by rain, wind and a wet tuft of grass on which to lay his head) he will only have to worry about keeping dry.  They have a good field-shelter out there with straw-bale walls and a scattered straw floor. They should be grand, but I will be anxiously checking first thing to make sure everybody coped with the night.

On a completely different note, our house insurance is with the mainly farming based company FBD. I believe these people used to be called 'Farm Buyers Direct' but like many such outfits, they now go with the initials and logo and have left the old name well-buried behind, but anyway, they are an insurance company who specialise in insuring farms and farm buildings. We were pretty much obliged to go with FBD when we were building because no-one else we could find, would agree to insure a house over 150 years old but this is not a bother, they have proved to be a perfectly good, professional and reliable company, helpful and pleasant to deal with (all be it we have never had to try to make a claim!).

A welcome gift of a dozen duck eggs from the Mum of one
 of Liz's 'students'.

As you'd expect, we get our renewal reminders sent out annually and we pay up and it all goes away again for another twelve-month. Generally I don't read the small print in any kind of detail but this year I happened to have the papers in front of me having just sat down with a coffee. I was surprised, amazed and, I guess a little delighted, to spot that FBD have now added a specific claims exclusion to the rules - the policy now

The new dish washer chugs through another load.

"excludes loss, damage, cost or expense of whatsoever nature or any legal liability for personal injury to third parties or damage to property belonging to third parties directly or indirectly caused by, resulting from or in connection with a) the research into, testing of production or supply of any genetically modified crop or genetically modified organism, where liability may be attributed directly or indirectly to the genetic characteristics of such crop or organism (and) b) the presence of such crop or organism other than where contained in feed products purchased for use as animal feed on the farm"

Duck egg Spanish Tortilla with our local 'red' coleslaw
(our own red onions and red cabbage plus carrot)

I am curious as to why this should now be so (and I am expecting Mentor Anne to possibly comment - she watches these issues like a hawk and will not have missed this one). I cannot imagine that FBD are taking a principled stand against GMO; many of these big insurance companies have funds which invest in exactly those kind of 'Gen-tech' and bio-tech start ups. I suspect it is more about fear of the unknown which many of us have at the core of our objection to the use of GMOs. We just do not know what will be the effect on natural populations or even on populations of traditionally improved and bred crops of these new man-made genome tweaks. For an insurance company, that may well translate into "what will be the insured risk of those effects" so they are dropping these issues like hot potatoes till there have been some effects and test cases and know whether they can risk their shirts. They presumably have to include the "other than where contained in feed products" bit because the vast majority of commercial feeds already contain GM soya or maize meal, so they would end up with no customers.

Shot gun shell.

Meanwhile, RIP Fox #3, a younger female this time, 36 inches nose to tail.

Nearly There

Our final weekend at this current address and the pressure is on, despite the stupifying heat to clear the debris of the house move from the premises so that new owners, Bev and Craig, can move in to a nice, tidy, cleaned house. Mum attacks the kitchen, clearing all the cupboards and sorting the food and old ingredients into keep-and-take-with-her-to-Diamond's, give away to the neighbours, feed to the birds, and chuck. We don't like to waste food but there are, inevitably, bags of Iranian raisins at the back of that cupboard, or packets of semolina in the bottom of the tub labelled Chinese Ingredients, which have gone past sell by.

Dad's job is the loft, with its load of old University books and its boxes of pre-digital 'Truprint' photograph packets (remember those?). Dad has been as trigger happy for at least 40 years as he is now and, pre-digital this involved reels of 36-picture films which you'd send off to Truprint and get back with the glossy postcard sized pictures and the strips of negatives cut into fours. If you were lucky, says Dad, maybe half a dozen of your 36 would be use-able in photo albums. The rest, left in their packets, accumulated in shoe boxes, hopefully clearly labelled as "Bovington Tank Museum 1981, film 2 of 3" or some such, and found their way into the loft.

You were always going to do something with them and never did. Well, Mum and Dad have finally decided that what they're going to do with them is landfill, so they joined the old bread makers, lost shoes, Open University Law books, transparent push-chair covers, ancient PCs and Billy Joel LPs in the back of Dad's car on the way to the tip. Normally, Dad would stand at the loft hatch, Mum at the bottom of the ladder and everything would get passed down, potentially spilling out of dusty boxes and landing on Mum's head but not this time.

They found, fortuitously that at some point in the last years, they'd bought a wad of tough, transparent plastic sacks. Each lot, box or what ever, could be neck-tied into one of these bags and dropped through the hatch onto the landing where it would not burst, especially if it was landing on the stuff already dropped, and this way everything was 'got down' and 'brought down the stairs' to the car without anyone getting damaged. Dad is then (shock! horror!) able to hoover the completely cleared loft floor, a feat not possible for the intervening 17 years!

Also on the Saturday, the new owners wanted to move some of their stuff into the house, it being the weekend and them not being available to hire vans etc on the real day, which is Monday. We had three visits from them through the day (one in the middle of Doctor Who, which is never going to work as a method of making frineds with Mum and Dad!), each with the same hire van but each with different accompanying helpers. First up is Craig's mate in a big Shogun, and his Dad in an ordinary car, 2nd comes Bev's parents who are happy to sit in the garden talking to Mum and we dogs while Dad introduces Bev and Craig to the neighbours either side.

So by the end of Saturday, as the troops eat their fish and chips and drink Prosecco (the latter kept cool by leaving it dunked in the pond) sitting on the borrowed folding chairs or a 'blanket on the ground', watching Doctor Who, steamed through the internet, the screen propped up on an upturned wicker basket, a pedal-bin and a baguette cutting board, they are both knackered from the day's efforts but feeling like they are getting there. Loft and kitchen are cleared, rubbish is got rid of, most of Bev and Craig's stuff is in the living room. Only really the shed to go and some titivating. Then we're outta here.

Movin' on
Deefs

Timey Wimey

No, don't worry - we're not getting all Doctor Who on you. Remember, though that we used to have the Denis N Memorial bay tree in the garden, but it was blocking out the light, so Diamond's John and his trusty chain-saw reduced it to the Denis N Memorial Stump (pictured), onto the top of which will be attached the Denis N Memorial Sundial (picture soon). Well, that's now arrived and Mum and Dad, not satisfied with any old sundial, went for a "proper" one.

They had no idea what this would entail, but chose a shiny brass one and filled in all the details on the form, this just for the design proofs. They had to give latitude and longitude and there is a place for some bigger-script words (we chose "For Denis") and another for a suitable quote or, for example, biblical text. Mum chose "The garden is a lovesome thing, God wot" from a favourite poem.

The dial has now arrived and the setting up is quite a pallaver, especially as John's chain saw cut was not... um.... how shall we put it..... exactly horizontal. The disc of the dial has to sit exactly horizontal (spirit level job) so that meant a bed of putty with suitable sized stones embedded. It then has to be exactly aligned to the meridian.

Amazingly (we learned), the sun's movements relative to earth are not exactly regular - the 24 hours is only an average - in fact the apparent position of the sun at each hour varies by +15 to -15 minutes depending on month (14.20 minutes "slow" by a sundial on 12th Feb, 16.23 mins fast on 3rd November, almost correct on 16th April, 14th June, 2nd Sept and 25th Dec) I kid you not - it's called the "Equation of Time". Neither the sundial nor the clock are "wrong", they are just measuring different versions of time.

The need for latitude (we are 51 degrees, 20 minutes North) is so that the "finger" of the dial (called a "gnomon) can point exactly at the North Star.

And then, of course, there's the fact that the dial is calculated and configured to GMT, so for all the Summer it's an hour wrong.

And then Mum decided she didn't like it just perched on the stump, but would prefer it to have some kind of "table" on which to sit, so a suitable flagstone was bought, the thing dismantled, and the re-assembled with the flag twixt stump and brass.

That's all human stuff - I'm only interested in Breakfast Time, Dinner Time, walk time and bed time

Deefer

Donna Noble has been Saved

Ah, the humans here love their Doctor Who. Mum is now all stressed out because the latest episode had the books on the library shelves as the place where the "bad guys' " microspores resided. Mum has lots of books, and you could see her visibly shift to leaning on the left arm of the armchair (the book shelf is on the right) when the Doctor sussed that the books were the problem

As I said, we were down at the Pud Lady's house today for lunch (proper steak and kidney pud - Dad thinks she's been cooking that every Saturday since he was born (1957) with the one exception that when Christmas Day falls on a Saturday we have the turkey on the Saturday and the pud happens on Sunday 26th). Gotta love that generation and their routines of cooking.

Pud Lady is a cause of some amusement. Very church-ified and "proper", she takes a mischievous delight in sneaking a glass of wine or sherry when Mum chooses to lead her astray. Today, we'd all spotted a very unusual spider in her garden - bright white (like A4 paper) but with bright orange Nike "swooshes" down the sides of her abdomen (we kid you not). Mum decided to take Pud Lady out to see it, and off they trotted.

When they got to the garden and the spider, Mum was still clutching her glass of wine, but Pud Lady had left hers behind. "I've not brought my wine" said Pud Lady, all concerned. "Ahhh" says Mum.... "You'll learn".....

Meanwhile, Dad harvests a shopping bag full of broad bean pods from the allotment. This, to Megan, is a sign of Summer. Megan loves her raw broad beans and sits attentively at the humans' feet while they pod them up, mopping up any that fall on the ground and scrounging the odd big one when none are falling. I tried. I really tried. I kept taking them but spitting them out, till Mum suspected that I was accumulating a pile of half chewed beans. It was always possible that the flavour would improve with each new bean. It never did.

Haggis, of couse, was no where to be seen. He doesn't do "plants"

Deefer