Friday Links: No good news

Posted on September 29, 2023 by nicdempsey

It’s been another really depressing news week. A 15 year old got stabbed (boys are afraid girls will reject them, girls are afraid boys will kill them), Suella Braverman thinks all refugees and immigrants liars and criminals, which given that both of her parents are immigrants says something and none of it good. Rishi Sunak is going to abolish inheritance tax and not finish HS2 and we’re opening a new oil field because apparently what the world needs now is more carbon. Modern life is indeed rubbish…

Here are some links

Are you single or in a ‘hard-working family’? Your answer counts for a lot.

Water firms in England and Wales ordered to cut £114m from bills. Thames ordered to repay £101m, as a Thames customer, I’ll believe it when I see it. My bill has never got down, it only ever increases every year.

London apartment block that deviates from plans must be torn down, says council. Nice to see a council exercising it’s authority against a developer for once!

Smirking Suella trashes 70 years of human rights in 30 minutes

Michael Gambon, star of Harry Potter and The Singing Detective, dies aged 82. I did see him on stage and he was great, he also nearly ran me over before the play!


Justice for Neanderthals! What the debate about our long-dead cousins reveals about us

 

Loose lending and inadequate auditing: central government’s role in the local council disaster

 

My first time in a float tank: ‘the only part of me I was sure still existed was my head’. I’ve done this once and I came out saying that I ‘felt like a dolphin’. It was great.

 

‘One size fits nobody’: markers of high-quality clothing are getting harder to find

 

The austerity influencers of TikTok: ‘I wanted to share the things I have given up’

 

‘He swam, hooking my arm with his penis’: inside the dolphin sex scandal that outraged a nation

 

‘I didn’t want to be Bubbly Bonnie Langford for ever’ – the star relives her career highs and lows. Everytime I see something about Bonnie Langford, it reminds me of my aunt, who used to clean her house

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A Plan for Winter – Exercise and Thankful

Posted on September 28, 2023 by nicdempsey

Ok so I missed last weekend’s exercise and thankful posts so here they are.

Exercise

The aim was:

  • Three days of yoga
  • 10,000 steps a day
  • 1 set of the following each day, 20 squats, 20 sit ups and 20 press ups.

I didn’t manage the steps but did everything else and I’m going to do the same thing this week.

Thankful – Week Three

The bounty of the allotment. It’s not just the produce, it’s the exercise, the conversations I have when I’m on the plot. It makes my world bigger, I have outdoor space and as I go into winter, the plot gives me a focus beyond that. The rest of winter is great, I know but even as my brain shuts down a bit, part of me is planning for next season. Gardening is a profoundly optimistic hobby and my brain really needs that.

My Kitchen Aid was the best birthday present ever, I love it and I use it…

Last week, marked six years since I was made redundant. I wasn’t happy or sure what was going to happen, but with the hindsight of 6 years, it was the best thing ever. I tempted for a while and then in May 2018, started at Quilter. I don’t do the job that I was initially employed to do but it is a measure of the company that they saw what I could do and kept me on. That has continued and I enjoy my work so much more that I ever thought that I would enjoy work. Turns out, it wasn’t me, it was them and I’m so thankful for all the changes that it brought and for the company I find myself working at.

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Allotment Adventures: Starting to tidy up

Posted on September 27, 2023 by nicdempsey

Ma and I have decided that allotment work is best tackled in the morning. If we get up and go straight to the plot and work to about noon, we are, or at least we feel, far more productive.

Still getting the odd strawberry

Ma picked raspberries and trimmed the winter savoury and thyme. She also fell over and managed to completely destroy a pot that had a blueberry in it. No-one believes me but even when I give her sitting down jobs, she falls over!

She must have hit it at just the right spot.

Fortunately, I had a spare and my allotment neighbour and I re-pottted it!

I picked tomatoes and took a bunch of the plants that were done or too blighted down. Which led to me, weeding the beds and tackling the sides of the beds at the front again. I wanted to get the plants that were languishing in the poly, into the ground so I combined the projects.

I cut the grass down, weeded, planted, laid cardboard around and covered in woodchip.

Tidier

Down the sides, I planted corsican mint and thyme, I had a pinnata lavender in a pot that has not been doing well, especially when compared to its twin, which I planted into the ground and is romping away, so that went in. I had a free bbq rosemary from Urban Herbs that needed a home and last year I’d planted another at the front corner of the plot and it survived but wasn’t thriving, so I took it out and put both of them in front of a bed on this run. The last space was taken by a roman camomile.

Little rosemary plants

Finally, I planted out some camomile lawn by the patio.

I have some more plants arriving this week and I have some comfrey that needs planting out. So my plan for this weekend is to tidy under the plum tree and at the front. The comfrey is going in the weedy corner that the rosemary was in (after I’ve weeded!) and I’ll add some manure to feed the rhubarbs. If there is any wood chip left, I’ll use it to mulch that area.

I think that’ll be it for this week but Ma is back the week after and I really need to sort out the strawberry runners, re-set the front poly tunnel bed for autumn/winter and clear the tomato beds. We may, if they arrive by then, plant the garlic.

the wild pond area

For October and November, I need to clear and cover beds we’re not going to use, tidy and clear the paths on the other side of the plot and do the same to all the beds on that side of the plot (gooseberries, wild area, iris garden, rose garden, pond, squash beds and the pink and white bed and boysenberry. You can really see that I don’t walk the path on this side and it’s unruly. Yes, I do love unruly but not that much, it needs work and it’s going to be my focus for the winter.

this is a couple of weeks ago and the bed is in a right state..
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Miscellany: Busy, so busy

Posted on September 18, 2023 by nicdempsey

Happy Tuesday!

Well I completely dropped the ball for the blog over the weekend. Last week was busy and I was a bit ill. I think it’s probably a combination of antibiotics and something I ate but out of nowhere on Tuesday night, I was violently sick. Which meant I didn’t sleep much that night and WFH and in the office on Friday, I had to go to Fulham for a flu jab so was halfway into work anyway! Work has been and is busy and by the weekend I was just stupid tired.

Sunday was an allotment day and the NHS fitted in Ma’s second cataract operation for yesterday. So I went back with Ma on Sunday afternoon and stayed until last night. Everyone is very happy that Ma’s eyes are done, and when her pupil stops being quite so dilated (seriously right now one of her eyes looks like she’s been on all the good drugs!) and she has some reading glasses (not being able to read or do codewords would be a tragedy for her), she’ll be golden!

All of this to explain that I’m not quite up to speed on other aspects of my life right now!

This week is you may have guessed going to be focussed on working and trying to get my home life more under control. At the moment, I need to really nail down all housework and food prep on the weekend because it’s just not going to happen Monday to Friday, I’m too tired after work and as it gets darker, I’ll just lose all motivation to do anything.

So that’s where I am, have a good week!

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Thankful: Week Two

Posted on September 17, 2023 by nicdempsey

A trip to Sipsmith from Christelle. It was fun and it’s lovely to spend the time with Christelle.

I had another period and another bout of cystitis start this week (it’s been about two weeks since the last of each, peri menopause sucks) so I called the GP and got antibiotics. I’m thankful for that because seriously, I live in a marvellous age, but it’s a difficult picture. However, on the way to pick them up, I noticed that the sign on the train was a bit confused. ‘Please mind the gap’ and ‘Cockfosters’ portmanteau-d to this….

We’ve had very unseasonal weather but on Tuesday it rained hard, the trip from the train into the station at Ealing was ‘fun’ but I’m thankful that I didn’t need to water the plot and thankful that I’d remembered my umbrella….

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Exercise: Another Autumn Plan

Posted on September 16, 2023 by nicdempsey

In my attempt to implement self care before it gets really dark, I started the Thankful posts.

However, mental well being doesn’t just happen by taking care of thoughts and feelings, it is much enhanced by some exercise.

As a naturally lazy person, I hate this but needs must and a little bit of planned exercise would not go amiss. So on Saturday’s from now until the end of November, I’ll be setting an exercise goal for Monday to Friday, weekends I can if I wish have off and I’ll write them down here to hold myself accountable.

For next week

  • Three days of yoga
  • 10,000 steps a day
  • 1 set of the following each day, 20 squats, 20 sit ups and 20 press ups.

It’s not a lot but it’s enough for next week.

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Friday Links: Government ministers outraged that they are expected to govern…

Posted on September 15, 2023 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday!

It is time to start wearing closed in shoes and we still don’t have a date for a general election…

Here are this week’s links….

Laura Kuenssberg’s Time as BBC Political Editor has been a Catastrophic, Systemic Failure. I don’t watch a lot of TV news, so most of my news comes from Radio Four, I have noticed that we get a lot less of Laura Kuenssberg on the radio than we did of Nick Robinson when he was the BBC’s Political Editor. Robinson has come under a lot of flak for his political leanings (he belonged to the young Tories when he was at Uni) but although I deplore the general middle classness of the BBC and the drift to the right, I don’t think that Robinson is an interviewer with an agenda. I do think that Chris Mason who is the current Political Editor is brilliant and considered and you can see that if you hear him talk about current affairs, I think there is generally a move in the BBC to self correct. The recent Gary Lineker nonsense has really shown up how slanted to the right the BCC news dept is.

Why do Tory MPs still turn up for the crushing disappointment of PMQs?

‘Sea is constantly dumping bodies’: fears Libya flood death toll may hit 20,000

‘I feel anger; it never needed to have happened’ – Wilko workers lament closures. I’m going to miss Wilko…

Morocco earthquake: Macron tries to soothe tensions after frosty response to offer of aid. I wonder how much help there will be now that Libya is flooded. The developed world has a bad habit of only being able to help one disaster at a time.

More than a fifth of UK shoppers’ favourite grocery items at climate breakdown risk. Bananas, avocado and tea fair enough but grapes can be grown here, but it’s hugely seasonal. Tea can also be grown here (I know it’s grown in Cornwall) but I accept not in the quantities that Britain drinks it. But peas? I grow peas, they don’t need to be grown abroad. This is about cost and availability, we can have these things but we’re not prepared to pay for them.

The perfect flush: eight essential toilet tips – from closed lids to cleaning. Things I find really difficult to understand, people who put sanitary towels down the toilet and people who put fat down sinks. Why? Who dragged you up? Even without the plumber for a parent, I wouldn’t have done that but with a plumber for a parent, those things were cardinal sins….

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Preserving the Plot: Garlic

Posted on September 14, 2023 by nicdempsey

We grow a lot of garlic, my aim is that we should be self sufficient in garlic. This year we grew an extra bed but lots of our garlic while great wasn’t in great shape for storage for the year. I’ve been saying that I need to process for the freezer but I just haven’t gotten to it.

Last weekend Ma and I did it. It took four hours to get the garlic peeled, processed and ready for the freezer.

We got seven ice cube trays and a 250ml jar of garlic and oil.

It’s not all the garlic we grew, Ma and I both have been using garlic since June and we have garlic bulbs to use first, I have seven and I think Ma has more.

So we have enough garlic to last the year (I hope). While I we we’re peeling this, we ordered the garlic to plant next month (yes I can and I have used the garlic I grew to plant, but we are going for very early garlic this year to deal with the conditions).

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Allotment Adventures: Hottest week of the Year

Posted on September 13, 2023 by nicdempsey

Last week was the hottest week of the year, in September as it’s slowly getting darker in the morning and at night.

Climate change and global warming causes weather instability and this is what we’ve had over the last couple of years. This year was a colder Spring, a hot early summer and then a rainy, miserable summer followed by a week of 30C + days in Autumn…

all spiders are called fred

However hot it is, September is also spider season, they are out in force and I keep walking through webs on my way to watering.

My goal for the allotment this week was to get food plants in the ground (I feel like I’ve been saying that for months now!). After watering, Ma started with cutting off the leaves on the summer squash at the front of the plot and clearing the french beans and I attended to planting.

I needed to look at the red cabbages as they were covered in whitefly. It’s really odd as the other cabbages are more or less ok.

poorly red cabbage

I pulled eight of them up and left the two best looking ones. I planted some of the red russian kale in the gaps and treated all the plants with diatomaceous earth (DE). I very rarely use DE, while it is organic, I know it’s not wildlife friendly. I only use it in extreme measures and on plants that are under mesh to prevent killing bees and other pollinators. But this level of infestation in September is extreme and I made a decision. I mention this because I have been told off about this before and all I am going to say about it is that I garden in an allotment in the city and we have a lot of pests, mostly I live with them. I accept that whitefly is something we have every year and I usually just live with it, it’s not generally a barrier to growing food and I wash all veg throughly, however, this whitefly has killed nine cabbages because it’s happened so early in the season and I have lots of plants that I’m intending to grow to feed me so I need to take measures…

The extra cavolo nero, swede and chard had arrived and I planted them out with the cauliflowers and brussels sprouts. All under mesh. Everything has to go under mesh in the winter. The cavolo nero went into the ex french bean bed, we left the nasturtiums in that bed as well.

widow and orphans bed

I ended up with spare plants and was thinking about where to put them. Ma suggested the widow and orphans bed. I had bunged some summer squash plants, that had spent most of the summer in pots because I had no where to put them, and a stray tomato plant, into the ex potato bed as it came free. Apparently, in Ma’s head that became the ‘widow and orphans’ bed. It’s a good concept and I’m thinking I should just have a spare bed for bunging spare plants in to see how they do, if all they do is feed the birds I can live with that.

You know it’s autumn because everything is under a net!

There is still lots of weeding to do but this was a good weekend’s work…

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Monday Miscellany: Harder with only one leg

Posted on September 11, 2023 by nicdempsey

Happy Monday!

Last week was hot and busy. And I need to explain the harder with one leg thing. This weekend we were listening to the news and they had a piece on Jonty Warneken, who swam solo from Northern Ireland to Scotland. They talked about it being one of the hardest ocean swims (it’s 21km and it’s not an easy calm sea and there are Lion’s Mane jellyfish too) and that he got stung several times. Ok fair enough, and then he said “and it’s much harder to do with only one leg”

Ma and I felt that this was burying the lede and it should have started with ‘Amputee swims the north Channel’, which this story does. All weekend, like children we have been saying ‘ah but it’s harder with only one leg’ and I keep thinking about the Tarzan sketch.

Last week was so busy, I didn’t get home from work on Tuesday until 8:45pm and had to be up the next day at 5.30am to go to the Southampton office for a training day. We have definitely come back from summer, it’s like someone has turned on a firehose of work and are spraying it all over.

It was also the hottest week of the year, so that was fun!

I also had an appointment to see the asthma nurse on Friday, and she confirmed that yes I do still have asthma, although the ‘puff test’ (I don’t know what you actually call it, but you need to blow hard into a tube) was worse than last time, it’s still better than the measure, so that’s good and I’m all ok for repeat prescriptions as we go into winter and cold season. Next week, I have a flu jab and then as my Grandad would say “God willing” no more doctors appointments for a while!

The weekend was also busy. Ma came over on Friday night and we were up and on the plot at 7.30am and again on Sunday. We also finally dealt with the garlic. I spent Sunday afternoon on a bus, I took Ma back on Sunday. We left the house at 11:45am and I was back home at 5pm. It was a hot afternoon all round.

This week is more of the same on the work front, lots to do and I’m off on Friday afternoon for a trip to Sipsmith with Christelle, she’s going to stay at mine on Friday and then Mike is going to come and meet us for lunch on Saturday. On Sunday, I’m going to see Ma and somewhere in between that I need to do some work on the plot, make jam and get the flat tidy.

It’s going to be a busy week for me, hope you have a good one!

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