Battle Abbey

Posted on August 24, 2021 by nicdempsey

Much to the amusement of my Irish neighbour, the day before my birthday I went to Battle. Yes, it’s an actual place, in East Sussex, quite near Hastings, and the site of the Battle of Hastings and Battle Abbey

In 1070, Pope Alexander II ordered the Normans to do penance for killing so many English people while conquering the country. So William I vowed to build an abbey on the site of the Battle of Hastings. The Benedictine Abbey was begun and the church was finally consecrated in 1094 and called the Church of St Martin of Battle (the Martin in question was also known as the ‘apostle of the Gauls’). It was a pretty significant Abbey in it’s time due to being outside of episcopal jurisdiction (so on a level with Canterbury!). It stopped being an abbey in 1538 with the Dissolution of the Monasteries and eventually fell into ruin.

The site is run by English Heritage nowadays and anyone who been reading this a while will know about my love of old and ruined things and my love of my English Heritage membership. Look I’m middle aged now and it’s in the job description, I’m embracing it! So Ma and I took a day trip during my week off work to look around and be frankly terrified by the stone spiral staircases.

I didn’t bring a proper camera with me but it was very ruined and picturesque, well worth a visit especially if you have small children that are doing 1066 at school. There’s a great and small exhibition about the lead up to the invasion and you can walk around the battlefield.

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Monday Miscellany: Unseasonal

Posted on August 23, 2021 by nicdempsey

Happy Monday!

There has been a whole lot of not very much happening this week. Two days in the office, another sodding migraine (apparently a rash of them at work – a couple of us have been suffering this week), maybe it was the weather which was pretty grey and cold for this time of year. Apparently we’ve had 30% less sunshine in August than is usual for this time of year, as I write this, it’s raining.

For the rest of this week, I finally got to catch up with Jo and Sarah, which was great. I also got to experience parsnip burn in real life, I thought I might be coming down with measles until I realised it was just on my forearms and the spots started to blister, so I currently look like I’ve had mild chicken pox on my forearms. Which is quite the look.

I’m currently working on my annual get everything back under control because winter is coming plan, I know that I can’t be as relaxed about anything in autumn/winter as I am in summer because I’m usually so miserable. The extreme dull and cold-ish weather last week felt autumnal and kicked me into thinking about this earlier than usual.

The way I survive the winter is to be fairly rigid about things like chores and bedtimes, otherwise I would just live in chaos and hate myself while refusing to leave my bed. Last year was pretty easy because I was working from home, being able to spend the week days not getting up at 6am and having to commute was much better for my SAD. However, this winter I’ll have to be in the office a couple of days a week, so I need to crack on and make sure that by the time the clocks go back I have a routine embedded.

Plans for this week are pretty much all about that, setting a routine for chores, exercise and bedtimes around being in the office for two days and I have a bunch of work I want to crack on with for work too. So it’s pretty dull.

Next Monday is the last Bank Holiday until Christmas, I have very excitingly arranged to be on the plot for Saturday and Sunday (I’m middle aged, I like to garden) but other than that, I have no plans and that feels rather marvellous.

Have a good week!

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Sunday Music: On and On – Curtis Harding

Posted on August 22, 2021 by nicdempsey

This is on the soundtrack from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. It’s one of those songs you feel like you’ve heard before, it feels old even though it’s not.

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Recommended: ProWorks Water Bottle

Posted on August 21, 2021 by nicdempsey

I’ve been going into the office at least twice a week since July. It’s been a bit of a shock to the system but I did take the opportunity to get some new commuting equipment. The first thing being a new water bottle. I’ve had a variety of water bottles in the last 10 years, all plastic and they’ve worked ok. One was 750ml and lived at my office because it the lid leaked and one was 500ml and didn’t leak but was a bit small (I do drink a lot of water in a day!). Aside from those flaws, the cold water didn’t stay cold and the bottles sweated so everything in my bag ended up a bit damp.

Water Bottle in the wild (my office)

So it was time to upgrade to one that wouldn’t need replacing for a long time and had none of these flaws. I went with a ProWorks 750ml bottle. It’s a basic double walled bottle, keeps things cold for up to 24 hours (I haven’t tried it for hot drinks) and so far has survived being bounced around my bag or the allotment without any major scratchest

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Friday Links: The Prime Minister is Lazy

Posted on August 20, 2021 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday!

It’s not a great Friday for the people of Afghanistan or the south of Haiti or lots of other places. I wrote a little about Afghanistan on Monday and since then the picture has just gotten worse. There is plenty of blame to go around but I can’t do anything about the actions of the US or now ex Afghan President’s. What I can do (and what I expect the MP’s, journalists and electorate of the United Kingdom) to do is hold Boris Johnson and his Cabinet of lazy, workshy shysters to account for their complete and utter failure to plan or just listen to their officials while they decided to swan off on holiday as our citizens and the Afghans that helped us at considerable risk to their lives and the lives of their families were stranded in Kabul. It’s not good enough, to just announce things you actually have to make things happen. I saw something this week that said that what brought David Cameron down was his sense of entitlement, for May it was her rigidity and for Johnson it’ll be that he just can’t be bothered. I don’t think it’s wrong.

Anyway, here are this week’s links:

Can someone fill in Dominic Raab about the news? He only watches it on catchup. 

The Afghanistan debate showed that Boris Johnson’s flaws lead directly to tragedy

Once you understand the terrible cost of doing nothing, climate action is a bargain

The incel movement is a form of extremism and it cannot be ignored any longer

The pandemic property boom is pricing locals out of the British countryside. This makes me die, in the 90’s when people like me, urban working class, were being pushed out of where we grew up due to the sky high rents and lack of social housing, there were crickets. No-one was lamenting the way that inner city children were being pushed out of their communities or couldn’t get on the property ladder. Ok yeah I moved all the way out to Ealing and I can (just) pay my rent but I couldn’t in a million years afford to buy there. And the only people I know from school who still live there are in social housing. This has been a problem in London for over 20 years and honestly I’m sick of articles blaming Londoners for having to move out and upsetting property markets elsewhere because most of those Londoners weren’t from London in the first place. This is was capitalism does, they’re doing to the regions what they did to us.

A community in the heart of Tottenham has shown how to fight the developers – and win

‘My bosses were happy to destroy me’ – the women forced out of work by menopause. I’m not quiet about it but it can be really difficult to approach my male boss about this. I’m very lucky that work/life balance is important to my company and that the company are so flexible about working from home especially post pandemic. My issue has been getting my GP to take me seriously, I still can’t get HRT and given the difficulties of getting an appointment, it’ll probably be 2022 before I can get that sorted.

Spanish village tells tourists to suck up roosters and braying donkeys

Meat-rich diet of 14th-century monks caused digestive issues, research finds

Three, two, win? How to adapt to hybrid home and office working

The Polo Lounge at the Dorchester Hotcel: ‘Dismal food at inexplicable prices’ – restaurant review. Jay Rayner has been only publishing positive reviews recently, but he’s clearly built up a head of steam for this one

Changing Rooms review – design so dreadful you’ll be scarred for life. Apparently, it’s a week of great reviews of terrible things.

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Allotment Adventures: Alas poor tomatoes, we knew you well

Posted on August 18, 2021 by nicdempsey

We’re at that weird point in the year when we should be overloaded with summer product and the autumn leaves are starting to come in. We still haven’t had a summer squash and I fear that I’m hoping in vain for the tomatoes but the greens have started and the plums decided to have a great year.

yes that’s a full 15 litre bucket of chard thinnings

We were at the plot at about 8:30 and home at just gone 1pm, by 5pm, we had sorted cleaned and bagged most stuff. On Sunday, I made a batch of pesto and green tomato chutney.

All that’s left to do now is eat it!

We also did quite a bit of weeding. I try as much as I can to be no dig, and it’s pretty successful, it does cut down on the weeding but it doesn’t eliminate all weeds. The new beds we built this year were cardboarded, woodchipped, carboarded again and then filled with compost, some beds like the current squash bed, were cardboarded and mulched last year and then cardboarded, woodchipped, carboarded and mulched this year. We are still seeing bindweed pop up in them. Also despite the mesh nets, there is still whitefly. I don’t mind a bit of whitefly but last year it was a nightmare on the brassicas and I’m not anxious for a repeat performance.

So Ma and I tackled the beds, I dusted the plants with diatomaceous earth and Ma weeded the beds. We did all of the brassica beds, I figure that it’s best to tackle it early as I found some aphids on one of my carrots and as I said a little bit is fine but I don’t want the plague we had last year.

Dusted with DT

Then Ma got on with weeding the back, and I attended to my tomatoes. The blight has been really bad this year and all of the plants are sick to some degree. I grow outdoors and it’s always a risk (next year, I will grow one of each type in the polytunnel and think about spraying with asprin) but I’ve only ever had blight my first year. That year Joe and Dennis my lovely old school plot neighbours advised me to cut back everything I could and hope for the best. That’s what I did this year. I pulled up all the plants with fruit that didn’t look like they would ripen or only had a couple of tomatoes on. I removed all of the leaves and chopped the top of the plant off, in the hope that the plant will put some effort into ripening the fruit before the blight gets them. My tomatoes look massacred but if it can stay warm and not rain (I won’t be watering them this week either), we might get a ripe tomato.

My poor massacred babies

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Monday Miscellany:

Posted on August 16, 2021 by nicdempsey

Happy Monday!

The pink rose

I’m sitting down on Sunday morning to write this post about my week. Usually, I try to keep this one about my life and Friday Links is where I talk more about the world. However, the news at 7am this morning, reported that the Taliban had taken Jalalabad and the 11am news reported that they have entered Kabul. Last night mum was predicting the end of the month, I said the end of the week and we were both wrong. I have no words for what a complete failure the West’s intervention in Afghanistan has been, I was against it 20 years ago, this is a disaster and we did this. It was wrong then, but having done it, we shouldn’t be able to walk like this. We should be ashamed.

So back to the mundane everyday. I’m delighted to tell you that I’m still a qualified first aider but the first couple of days back at work were rocky. 600 emails in 7 and a half working days, obviously I manage diaries for a couple of people so a lot of it was appointments, but they need to be read so I can ascertain if they can be deleted and you have to manage the requests coming in because you’re back at work. It’s a first world problem, I still enjoy my job and it’s not a life and death thing!

Other news this week, I’ll talk on Wednesday about the sheer amount of produce we got from the plot at the weekend. I spent a lot of time sorting it out on Sunday.

I also got a birthday presents from Jo. Who says that she has to keep me off the gin so she bought me a plant and a trowel to help me plant it. Jo’s mother is a fantastic gardener, I wish I could garden like she does, so Jo has practice at buying for gardeners!

Jasmine ‘clotted cream’

Plans for this week are simple, I’m in the office Monday and Thursday, there will possibly be watering as currently there is no rain predicted until Saturday. I have no other plans. So no real change there.

Have a good week..

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Allotment Adventures: Didn’t it Rain?

Posted on August 11, 2021 by nicdempsey

The weekend at the plot was so weird because of the rain. It was warm and wet, like someone turning on the tap when it rained.

View from the back

Which is another way of saying we didn’t get as much as we hoped done, we waited until the rain stopped, went out, worked through the first time we got rained on but went home on the second, which is fair enough, I think.

So what did we do?

Sorted out all the netting, so the autumn crops are as protected as they are going to be. Every bed on the plot is growing something, some things are growing better than others (alas my poor tomatoes!).

Harvested some things – french beans and plums, we decided to leave the carrots, potatoes and blueberries for next weekend.

Weeded, strimmed and deadheaded, obviously this is a moving target, it’ll need more work but we got some areas clear.

Hang on little tomato, you’re so close

This weekend, we have a bunch to do

Harvest – plums, potatoes, carrots, blueberries, raspberries and french beans. Hopefully we’ll have some cukes or summer squash but who knows!

Weed and Strim – I need to finish strimming the edges and back. The front and back of the plot needs weeding and so do the beds and flower beds – we’ll get to what we can.

Plant or sow – Did I just say that we have no more empty beds, yes I did but I want to take some of the potatoes and replant them in a pot for later new potatoes. I also have some beds with gaps that I want to plant up with salad and maybe fennel.

It’s bizarre that in August thoughts turn to planning for next season, especially this year when I’ve not seen a courgette, crookneck or cucumber. We never totally close down for winter though, right from my first year, I’ve tried to over winter veg and that won’t change this year.

Rudbeckia and borage

The brassicas and leeks are planted out for autumn/winter harvesting (I expect we’ll go through broccoli, cauliflowers and cabbages this year and hope to have leeks and kale to harvest into February/March.) We’ll also attempt to overwinter garlic, onions, shallots and broad beans for the spring too, in the hope that the broad beans do better next year and the alliums do as well as they did this year!

And although we really hoped that we were done with construction, we have to build a polytunnel and after a year of sorting out the back half of the plot, some of the more rough and ready beds (the ones I build with lawn edging need sorting. Ma thinks we should use the same beds that we bought for the ‘uncultivated’ area on the plot. I reckon we need about 6 so from December, I think we’ll be ordering one or two a month until spring! Then we’ll be starting again on the whirlygig of fun that is compost, woodchip spreading and planting….

My hope is that this is the last year, of moving and building stuff, we’ll have had the plot seven years in May, and that the only decisions we have to make for year seven is where to grow things.

I can always hope!

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Monday Miscellany: This is 48

Posted on August 9, 2021 by nicdempsey

Happy Monday!

Obligatory Birthday Selfie

There was a week off and a birthday and I feel quite old and very tired, although that may have been all the weeding I did on the plot at the weekend! It rained quite a bit on my actual birthday (it always rains on my birthday – you would have thought that an August birthday would guarantee sunny weather but for the last 10 years not so much – climate change is real)

So recap of last week, I had a migraine on Monday and Tuesday. Not sure if it was the same migraine or two but it wasn’t optimal. On Wednesday, Ma and I went to Pitzhanger Manor to see the Julian Opie exhibit and to have a look at the house since it’s been restored.

Stairs

Then lunch at Soane’s Kitchen.

I like old buildings and so on Thursday we went to Battle Abbey, which was fascinating and we managed not to get rained on until we got back to London.

For Friday, I didn’t get a 7am wake up happy birthday call from my brother (they’re on holiday!) instead I got a 9am wake up call! I was honestly a bit jealous, the Spanish weather was much nicer than the London weather! I know it was my birthday because Ma did my ironing.

We went to lunch and then the plan was drinks on the plot but the weather was not in agreement. We got extremely wet, so drinks at my house, instead.

Plans for this week, are work. I have a First Aid requalification course on Monday and Tuesday. I’m in the office later in the week but will work from home more this week as I think I’m going to have loads to catch up on!

Have a good week!

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Allotment Adventures: All in

Posted on August 4, 2021 by nicdempsey

We’ve finally got every bed on the plot planted up!

View from where the polytunnel will be in autumn

Kale, cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli, leeks are all in. We’ve also added trailing rosemary, ruby glow thyme, hot and spicy oregano and a mushroom plant to the new herb bed. We’ve got chocolate mint, morrocan mint, corsican mint and ginger mint planted in pots and three new lavenders (all edelwiess which is a white lavender) planted up. Why yes, I did have an early birthday spree at Urban Herbs last week, what of it?

New herb bed

We may not be doing very well on summer veg, the salad has bolted, the tomatoes have blight and I’ve still not had a summer squash, but I think we’ll be ok for autumn/winter veg, we have chard and turnips in already and all the autumn veg we’ve finally planted in, and we may get some sweet potatoes and winter squash, we’ll see.

We spent loads of time on the plot on Saturday and while we didn’t get to all the weeding and Ma needs to be watched because she was very proud of the bleeding heart plant (Lamprocapnos spectabilis) that she pulled up thinking it was a weed! I didn’t get to dead heading all the roses either but with all the plants in, there is now time in August to really get to grips with tidying and enjoying the space.

Where the poly will be

The next big project is the polytunnel and because of the hoo ha with whether or not we’ve cultivated enough of the plot we want to get it done this autumn. At the weekend we measured the space and had a bit of a tidy up. So over August, I want to get the trees trimmed and intensively weed the area where the apple tree is. Having measured, I will not be putting patio fruit trees in that space. I will be cutting down the apple tree, and our current two options are to move some of the gooseberries currently being threatened by the rhubarb or to finally plant the asparagus crowns, I’ve been threatening to plant for five years. We’ll see, plans change…

New lavender, corsican mint, turnips, spare compost and the storage pallets…

One of the weird things was that the cabbage bed grew something since last week. I removed it.

Mystery growth

We’re about a week away from french beans and hopefully a couple of weeks from cucumbers and summer squash.

French beans

There is still work to do, but we can take a slight break from building and filling beds and do some gardening for a month or two…

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