Monthly Archives: September 2018

The Only Way is Up (in Smoke)

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“What shall I do with you when you’re dead?” I asked Chris when we were still in bed earlier today.

Luckily, we think alike about most things so he didn’t misunderstand me; he knew I didn’t mean “What am I going to do without you?” (of course, I would be bereft and mortified). Also, he was well aware that at present I’m in the process of writing a story about a dying man, hence the topic of death was not particularly peculiar… although you might think that six-thirty in the morning is an odd time to have such a conversation. Chris didn’t appear to think so, in fact he turned around and, although we were in semi-darkness, I could see his face light up as warmed to the subject.

“I’m glad you asked,” he said excitedly, “because recently I’ve been thinking about your idea of us being buried together.” (Hopefully at different times, seeing as my “other half” is nearly twelve years older than me!)

We snuggled closer and Chris continued:

“Darling, do you really want to moulder in the ground?”

“Yeah but what if I’m murdered – no body to exhume – they’ll never find my murderer,” my heart sank as my dreams of resting eternally in the earth went up in flames.

“After a while they bury someone else on top of you and, anyway, when did you last visit  a graveside?” he said like an enthusiastic representative for crematoriums.

“Yeah but someone may like to visit me for a talk and a few tears,” I argued feebly.

“Wouldn’t you rather have your ashes mixed with mine and be thrown to the winds? Or be in a  place we both love?” Chris wheedled.

“Our garden. I’d love to be here forever,” I succumbed.

“No, this place will be sold. Why not a rocket? People do that you know,” he suggested.

“Not a rocket,” I said, thinking of the people on land. “I guess I wouldn’t mind the sea. Throw me into the sea then. By the way, how much is a cremation compared to a burial?”

“Burials cost thousands nowadays and a simple cremation – no service or memorial – can cost as little as £1,008,” my husband exclaimed joyously. “You don’t want a service – do you? We could have a party to remember you… but I’ll probably go first and you can throw a party.”

“Let’s find out how much it costs to turn our bodies into diamonds,” my mind turned to other options. “I think I’d rather become a diamond, if it’s not too expensive – if it’s say… £2,000.”

Half an hour later we were at the breakfast table and Chris opened the mail. He laughed and showed me the letter from SunLife insurers. There was a photograph of evergreen Alan Titchmarsh looking rather happy in spite of the window above his head informing that the “Average cost of a basic funeral in the South West of England £4,685”.

“I must be getting older,” Chris mused, “I never used to get mail asking ‘who’s paying for your funeral?’. I could get stony-faced about it!”

“If you become a ‘real diamond geezer’,” I added.

So we looked up “Ashes to Diamonds” on the Internet and it looks like we can afford only to become orange-yellow stones like topazes, not lovely blue cut diamonds. Chris found another site and was aglow with the notion of having my ashes set in coloured glass shaped as hearts or bubbles. 

“But they probably put any old bits of ash in the glass,” Chris said, bursting my bubble.

So now our plans for the distant future are on the back-burner.

Martin is Monsieur Hulot

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Just for a change I’d like to introduce you to Martin Levinson, our great friend, great wit, great writer and funny guy (funny ha ha, not funny peculiar; at least, I don’t think so but I may be a little odd myself!). Martin’s work as a university professor occasionally takes him to unusual places; last year Norway and recently to Italy. What’s so funny about that? You may well ask. The uno uno quattro is Martin’s own account of leaving his hotel early in the morning in order to reach the railway station in Bolzano (somewhere else in Italy).

I wasn’t familiar with Monsieur Hulot so I checked him out on Youtube and I’ve pasted a link at the end to Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday – brilliantly funny!

 

The uno uno quattro  by Martin Levinson

If one is to be the main actor in the centre of a play, it would be nice to get to glimpse the script at some stage, and, perhaps, see who is directing the action. I remain bemused, a Monsieur Hulot figure bumping through existence.

This morning the script entails me getting from my hotel in Leifers to the railway station in Bolzano, a simple enough operation one, might assume, even if it does entail getting up at 5.00 in the morning. Settling the bill the previous night at the hotel, I had been told that there was the option to call a taxi. The woman on the desk had given me an apologetic smile. It seemed that there was an element of act of God in the appearance of the said taxi; you could never be quite sure on the matter. Best to call in the morning, she advised. Things are a little clearer then. But, anyway, she added, there was no problem as there were three early morning buses that would arrive at the station in time, the 110, the 111 and the 112.

In the morning I decide to order the taxi, only there is no-one on the 24 hour desk to call. I go to the bus-stop. None of the three promised buses appear. Finally, as I am about to try hitching, one arrives and I jump on. An ominous red light flashes on the screen when I insert my ticket.

You cannot travel on this bus, the driver tells me. The ticket is valid only for other buses – namely the three that didn’t turn up. This was a 114 – uno uno quattro, he enunciates slowly, not uno uno zero, uno uno uno or uno uno due.

No Roman emperor ever gestured so dismissively for someone to depart.

The people on the bus are getting restless. I stand my ground.

But you are Italian; you do not have to follow the rules, I tell him in my pidgin Italian. Would Garibaldi have thrown me off this bus? I ask. Only, unable to recall the past conditional, the present tense has to suffice. He looks unimpressed. As so many people in Bolzano prefer to call it by its German name, Bolzen, invoking an Italian nationalist might not be so persuasive, and somehow, it seems altogether less convincing to argue that the Germans have a proud tradition of not following orders. However flimsy, I stick with my original line.

Dante, Galileo, Michelangelo, Leonardo – do they want me thrown off this bus?

(I guess where they are now, they don’t give a fanculo volante.)

Again he gestures in that bored emperor manner.

Maybe the guy likes music.

Rossini, Verdi, Puccini, I suggest.

He shakes his head.

Gianni Rivera, Sandro Mazzola, Franco Baresi, Paulo Maldini, Gigi Buffon….

Everyone likes football.

Roberto Baggio, Il Divino… I cannot recall the Italian word for ponytail. (It’s coda di cavallo, I discover when I check later – just in case such a situation ever recurs in the future.)

He shifts in his seat, as if about to stand up to push me off. I shake my head. I am not moving anywhere. There are some murmurs from other people in the bus.

He pauses, theatrically, in some imperious posture between seatedness and standingness. He throws his arms into the air. A reprieve? He gesticulates, angrily, towards the back of the bus.

Somebody pats my back as I walk down the bus. Shared acknowledgement of a victory over an oppressive, inhuman bureaucracy that grinds down the common man? I have no idea. Someone else smiles at me, fleetingly, as if afraid to be spotted.

I look around the bus. I am the only white person there. The rest are going to work, mopping, sweeping, cleaning this place up, setting up offices, while their Germanic Italian neighbours grab a few more hours of sleep.

A woman on the seat behind taps me on the shoulder, holding out a bag of pastries to offer me one.

She smiles, and for a sweet interlude in my existence I no longer feel like Monsieur Hulot. This is how Spartacus must have felt when he broke out with his comrades and caught the early morning omnibus out of Capua.

Beehave Yourself!

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One of my greatest pleasures whilst tending the flowers out on our terrace is when a passing bumblebee bumps against my arm and I can feel his wings, and he doesn’t get nasty or upset because he perhaps senses that I’m not going to hurt him, or maybe even he knows that I’m his friend (we gardeners are rather fanciful!). Even the ordinary honey bees don’t seem to mind my presence and they often fly close enough for me to feel the movement of their wings in the air. They never sting me, not like wasps – I’m allergic to them (and they seem to know it for they harass me regardless of my pretence at nonchalance); luckily, I haven’t seen many wasps this year.

However, I’ve seen thousands of bees this year, quite recently in fact, and not one by one… Chris discovered them last Friday when he was hanging out the washing in the garden on the sea-side of our house; obviously looking for a new home in which to hibernate for the winter, the bees were buzzing in and around the loose soil all over the steep bank leading down to the railway line. Much as we love bees we weren’t too sure that we wanted our garden to be overrun by them so Chris called Graham, a bee-keeping acquaintance of ours who might have been interested in housing a homeless hive of honey bees.

“They aren’t honey bees,” Graham began, “they’re too small and they are already making homes in the soil. Also it would be too difficult to gather them, and they won’t be honey producers.

“Oh dear,” Chris and I were thinking together, having not yet come to terms with the idea of sharing our garden with so many hobos.

“But they are good pollinators,” smiled the bee enthusiast.

“How many do you think there are?” Chris inquired.

“Oh, it’s only a very small swarm – about four and a half thousand bees,” replied Graham.

Chris was hanging out the washing again this morning (I do help sometimes – really!) and he came back upstairs with something of a triumphant smile on his face.

“They are still there,” he announced proudly.

“And they didn’t sting you or get annoyed?”

“No, most of them don’t even have stings. I was looking them up on Google,” my husband admitted. “I think they are either digger bees or miner bees – not to be confused with a mynah bird.”

I went upstairs and returned with my phone camera, made a bee-line to the hive of activity and took a few photos for my blog readers. While taking shots of our bee-loved new residents I noticed our neighbours’ pampas grass, tall and beautiful against a background of blue sky and sea, and I laughed to myself. 

“Why are you laughing?” Chris asked.

“The pampas grass,” I giggled, “I was wondering if Adrian and Sonia know what it means… Maybe I should tell them… But…”

“Bee-have yourself!” said Chris.

So I’m not going to tell them. They’ll have to read my blog to find out. I’ll copy and paste an article on the subject just in case you’re in the dark.

Ah, what beautiful pampas grass!

Embarrassed dog-walkers pass by with eyes fixed ahead!

Exclusive: Pampas grass sales are falling because it is a secret signal for swingers

For decades it was a common feature of suburban front gardens throughout Britain, adding a touch of exoticism to more everyday native planting.

But an unfortunate association with liberal sexual practices appears to have heralded the end of pampas grass as a gardener’s favourite.

Plant sellers says sales have plummeted – in no small part due to the plant being regarded as a secret signal to passersby that its owners are happy to indulge in swinging.

Many nurseries have stopped stocking it entirely, and even large suppliers have seen numbers plummet, as buyers shun the plant for fear of what it means.

Palmstead Nurseries, which sells plants to garden designers for households, commercial gardens and public spaces, says the plant has fallen out of favour.

A decade ago the firm, based in Ashford, Kent, was selling an average of 550 of the plants every year. Annual sales fell to less than 500 five years ago and are now as low as 250.

The plant is one of the least popular of the company’s grass varieties, some of which are so in demand that it sells thousands of plants every year.

Nick Coslett, the company’s marketing manager, said it had fallen out of fashion in part because it was seen as a signal that swingers lived in a house.

He said: “It’s just not in fashion at the moment.

“I’ve got no evidence that it was ever actually used for that – I think it goes back to the fact that it was planted in people’s front gardens.

“But there is that connotation, unfortunately. It’s all part of that 1970s, kitsch feel.”

The plant’s association with swinging has been dismissed as a myth by pampas enthusiasts, but broadcaster Mariella Frostrup said she had inadvertently identified herself as a swinger by planting the grasses outside her Notting Hill home a few years ago.

Since the arrival of her two Cortaderia selloana plants, the presenter said she had been inundated with unwanted inquiries.

Writing on Twitter she said at the time: “Bought two and put them on my balcony. Neighbours have been swarming!”

Steve Dawson, a buyer for Crocus, the largest gardening website in the UK, said it now sold around 300 pampas grass plants a year – a fraction of the amount it sold of other grass varieties.

“A lot of people used to put it in their front gardens – I think people are probably a bit embarrassed about doing that now,” he said.

Another plant nursery, Worcester-based Bransford Webbs, said it had stopped selling pampas grass altogether over a decade ago, because sales figures were so poor.

The plant comes in several different varieties, some of which can grow to up to eight feet (2.4m) tall.  

Most nurseries which still sold them said they tended to sell the Pumila variety, which is a, smaller, “dwarf” version of the larger plant. It grows to around five feet (1.5m).

Pampas grass is native to south America and is named for the Pampas region, fertile lowlands covering Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, where they originally grew.

It is very hardy and can produce a significant number of seeds. This has led to the plant being seen as a weed in some countries.

In California, it is classed as an “invasive to avoid” plant, and people are discouraged from planting it in their gardens.

George Hillier, of the Hillier garden centre chain, which has 12 branches, said they had almost completely stopped stocking the plants due to low demand.

He said that embarrassment over the plant’s connotations could be a factor, but that its size and the difficulty of removing it was one of the main things putting gardeners off.

“They are very sharp and they’re very thick,” he said. “Once it’s in and really established, getting rid of it is a couple of days worth of work.”