Oxalis

The leaves are good too - like shamrock.

Going, going, gone

Delphinium



Hollyhock



Sweet Pea

Pollination

Still plenty of pollinators about, so a few more courgettes and lots more runner beans around. More than I know what to do with. Several times, I've left little bundles of beans on the wall outside the house and they're usually gone within the hour.



Prime sunflower season too.

Bruce The Moose

Poor Ed Wardle. On his own for seven weeks in the Canadian wilderness, he didn't know whether to laugh or cry. His rations had run out, he was scared of being eaten by a bear and he couldn't find any salmon. He had to make do with berries and a porcupine. "Put that on your Channel 4," he said, as he removed the porcupine's anus with a knife.

He found the skeletal remains of a moose and naturally, as you do when you're a bit down, called it Bruce and chatted to it.

In the end, he dialled up a takeaway and someone made a food drop. Not long after, he called for a taxi and a boatplane came to rescue him.

Channel 4 - Alone In The Wild

Serendipity Abstraction

If my scanner's not going to work properly (and I can't get the focus or exposure right) then I might as well tweak the filters and crop.

Food For Thought

Scan dhal

The tenuous title refers to the hassle I've been getting with a 10 year old scanner, which has introduced strange colours and scratches to my prints, so that they resemble a curry.

This echinacea might look alright to you, but despite cropping, it's still got blue light leakage and a massive vertical scratch, two thirds of the way across.

Still, the scanner wasn't working at all last week - refused to talk SCSI to the vintage Mac Powerbook 3400.

Uploaded some amateurish cricket shots to the August post.

Two-legged Rat Part 2

The thief likes his/her puddings - after the apples the other day, now some of my rhubarb's been pinched.

Apparently, I'm not the only victim.

I should spend a night in my shed to see if I can sniff this rat out.

Two-legged Rat

I photographed them, but now I'm wishing I'd written my post code on them in invisible ink, or injected them with cyanide.

Elles sont disparu !

Nie ma !

We're not talking badger here. This is the work of what is commonly known as a two-legged rat.

They (about half a dozen Cox's Orange Pippin) were a couple of metres inside the security fence. Either it was an inside job, or someone hopped over the high fence - like I did last year when I lost my keys.

Territorial Red Army

It would be easy to think that this Robin was being friendly when it hopped up close and gave me the eye as I was feeding the leeks.



It's more likely that it was being territorial, challenging me to a ruck, which I declined.

View From The Boundary

@ Bristol West Indies Cricket Ground

Bristol Indians CC 2nd XI - 292 for 8, 40 overs

Easton Cowboys CC 2nd XI - 114 all out, 32 overs

Lycopersicon esculentum

The Latin name cropped up as a question on University Challenge last night.



I didn't get it right.

Up the Sugar Loaf

After leaving the Ministry Of Defence buildings at Filton Abbey Wood behind us, we escaped over the border into Wales. Or rather, under it, by train through the Severn Tunnel and on to Newport, from whence to Abergavenny.



Found a path up through woodland north west of the town, strangely devoid of birdsong, then descended into a valley and across a stream before wading through head-high bracken to locate one of the paths leading up the mountain.



Eventually reaching the summit of the Sugar Loaf at nearly 2000 feet / 600 metres, where the wind was wild and we were surprised to find bumble bees and amused by stone carvings by 20th-century man, and woman.



View east, to the Skirrid mountain.



Back down a different way ...



... to the station.

1066 and all that

Read an article in the New Scientist recently about climate scientists jetting off around the world, not only to attend conferences, but to go on frequent overseas holidays too.

Similar madness this week, with several thousands converging on Tate Modern in London, to sign up to the 10:10 campaign pledging to do things like switch to energy saving lightbulbs, grow veg on the balcony and turn the central heating down in an effort to reduce emissions by 10%. Fine, if you walked or cycled there, but inevitably quite a few of those attending increased their carbon footprint in getting there. Like a mother and daughter who travelled up by train from Brighton and others interviewed in The Guardian.

D'oh!



As king of the cynics, I was going to make a similar comment last week about the Blackheath Climate Camp which attracted thousands from all over the place and ran workshops on, amongst other things, using digital technologies and the internet in the campaign to reduce global warming.

Double D'oh!

Not only is the best place to learn that kind of thing online, at home, thereby negating the need to clog up the public transport system or get the car out to converge in the Big Smoke, but don't these people realise that this is the time to be attending to the harvest ?

Haven't they heard what happened in 1066 ?

"...some of Harold's army got tired of waiting and because they could not be fed, they went home. It was also the harvest season and many of Harold's men had farming commitments."

historylearningsite.co.uk



Meanwhile, windfall apples drop and raspberries rot on canes.

Without saying, "we're all doomed," like Dad's Army's Private Frazer, unless people start doing practical things instead of talking about them, like the People's Front of Judea in The Life of Brian, the action that's needed ain't gonna happen.

"Reg, For God's sake. It's perfectly simple. All you've got to do is to go out of that door now, and try to stop the Romans nailing him up. It's happening, Reg. Something's actually happening, Reg. Can't you understand? Aaawoooooo!!!!!" [She rushes out in a rage.]

corky.net/scripts/Life of Brian

Of course, on a local level, people are going out of the door and local's where it's at.

Bristol City Council Allotments

Bristol Food Links

Bristol Green Capital

Burried Treasure

East Side Roots

EcoJam (green directory)

Garden Share

GROFUN

Landshare

Share the Harvest: celebrating local food

Slow Food UK

Sustainability SW

Transition Bristol




Rhubarb appreciated the damp weather last month, even if we didn't.



The sweet potato vine has spread and developed a flower.



A gherkin, looking alarmingly like Kermit's scrotal sac.

Stamp It Out

Former England rugby player Simon Halliday, interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Today programme about 'blood-gate', the incident in which a joke shop blood capsule was used to fake an injury, suggested, "When this sort of situation arises, you have to stamp on it." Presumably, he'd prefer real blood.

Son Of The Father

Praise Be !

Just as it must be irritating for cricketer Stuart Broad to be continually compared and sometimes confused with his similarly talented father Chris, so can I imagine that Tom Ravenscroft, who's standing in for Marc Riley on BBC 6 Music, doesn't particularly welcome the continual comparisons with his dad, the late John Peel, who I was missing only the other day.



As he probably won't be reading this blog, I can confirm that the similarities in speech, musical tastes and appearance are definitely there. Apparently, he was also standing in for Tom Robinson, another idol from my youth, when he was away last month. He's presented on obscure stations before, like the short lived Channel 4 Radio and podcasts for Global Soundtracks but let's hope he gets his own BBC 6 Music show soon.

Cutis Anserina aka Goose bumps

Needing to calm down after the magnificent and slightly surprising Ashes victory at the Kennington Oval, my old stomping ground, I tuned in to Guy Garvey, off of Elbow, on BBC 6Music. I'm not that keen on his band, nor am I usually a great fan of his self-referential chat on his Sunday evening show, but his musical choices are often spot on and he goes some way, together with Stuart Maconie's Sunday afternoon Freak Zone, also on 6Music, to filling the enormous empty boots left by John Peel's departure from this earth, via Peru.

Last night was no exception, with Ella Fitzgerald's 'Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered', an AR Kane track that Mr Pink used to play to me a lot in 1988 and then a tune that I'd been humming all week - 'Is That All There Is?', sung by Peggy Lee, composed by Leiber and Stoller, but for some reason in my mind connected to Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.

Then it was goose bump time, with 'Inheritance' from Talk Talk's 'Spirit of Eden'. It got me thinking about goose bumps. Does everyone get them from listening to certain music and what's going on in the brain when they occur ? Some people get them from watching a scary movie and lots of people get them when feeling chilly, when the reaction actually serves a purpose in making the hairs on the skin stand on end, thereby trapping a layer of insulating air. But why from music ?

There's suggestion that the brain produces them to dissipate excess mental energy, when faced by something which it/you are in awe of, preferable, I suppose, to just standing there with your mouth open.

Bristol Bangladeshis v Easton Cowboys

Took the old Olympus OM10 + telephoto lens + 2x converter & tripod to a cricket match at Oldbury Court.

Once I've finished the film, sent it off to be developed, got the prints back and scanned them, I'll post some photos here.

UPDATE: 22/09/09 - The combination of camera shake and an old scratched scanner on the blink doesn't make these look very impressive and they might be the last photos I take with 35 mm film, not because I'm getting a nice new digital SLR but because Truprint are winding down their old style operation, no longer reprinting from negatives or sending fresh film with each order.



The ground is on such a slope that it makes it look as if silly mid-on has no legs.
.


It's a seagull, not a hanky.

Tomatoes

A good crop this month, having avoided the blight of previous years.

Fruitflowervegbox