April 2011 Archives

TILTH AND LOAM

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clematis

I wish I were Camilla Parker Bowles. She is really lucky, because she can have as much Highgrove Biodegradable Garden Twine as she likes......and I don't know about her (spoiled hussy) but I like Highgrove Biodegradable Garden Twine A LOT.

My sister (the elder) visited Highgrove  last year  and brought me back this tangle free, no. 3 thickness wonder.....in fact she must have bought bales of the stuff, because she later gave me another skein, but I said nothing, because I was so delighted to get more of the fleur de lis emblazoned fully compostable delight of the clematis tepees.

From April 4 to 9 last - or something - we were in Cannes.   The boys (husband P, mentor, and a young friend, a technology whizz) were working the Bunker (the marketplace of the Palais,) I was unfolding my little velo pliable in the hotel and merrily cycling down the hill to the town and the sea. At night we would meet up, the boys and I, and having made prior representations on my behalf, we would saunter the Croisette to the parties on the beach and in the gilded, marble pillared rooms or modern terraces of posh hotels. They talked communications - and more importantly connectivity - entertainment, television and technology, I drank champagne and ate doonshie amuse-bouche in tiny transparent cups, scoffed macaroons in a million colours, picked at chocolate coated strawberries and chatted up Ukranians. I wore high heels, make-up, silk or Issey Miyake's polyester pleats.  Then we came home and I gratefully put way the gloop, the folds and drapes and pleats and instantly reverted to my alter ego - Johnboy Walton. Hurrah for battered straw, bare feet and denim dungarees ! I am back in my métier; the garden.

I have long considered hell as a force 8 gale when travelling steerage for all eternity, not across the Styx, but back and forth across the Irish Sea on the S.S. Innisfallen III (1948-69) with Alain Stivel playing over the Tannoy, spiders and motorcycles. I now add to this my assigned labour: not scrubbing nor tarring the decks, but digging out mares' tales and bindweed. 

I love trees, but I hate bindweed.  Since coming here a decade ago, I have been plagued with a garden full of silently creeping roots, but have been heartened by stealing from ditches (mea culpa, mea culpa) and receiving with alacrity and gratefully nurturing the gifts of birds; little seedlings in purple droppings and the forgotten fruits of winter hoards, nuts nestled in bark mulch.  As a result, my 1,700m2 garden is an obstacle course - nay a maze- of cherry, hazel, walnut and beech, laurel bay and lilac, oak, willow the ubiquitous ash - not to mention apple, pear, reine claude and mirabelles, white peach and fig.

The nuts and seedlings, shoots and saplings all grew merrily, but in the past few years, as they shot upwards, we began to notice that we could no longer see the mountains and soon the very sky, the sun itself would be obscured.  With a heavy heart, this year I lifted a three metre high Mayflower which had originally been the droppings of an accommodating Cork bird, and came over to France with us as a stripling. It was guarding the raspberries with such jealous loyalty that the latter ran amok as I couldn't get near them through the tangle of the old brown thorn tree. So we broke it in two (and threw the branches in the dump for all that Maeve could say.)  We can't even compost it because of the length and strength of its thorns. I would love to have used it in a gap in the hedge against marauding cats, but something's gotta give. Anybody want any of five healthy 5-10 year old walnut trees, reared with tough love to be straight and tall and strong?  I have been kinda keeping them for my neurosurgeon friend Charlie Marks in celebration of his trade, as each individual walnut is scarily representative of the human brain, but each time he travels to the Alps, he only brings climbing boots in a backpack, so couldn't transport trees home....and I durst not ask Michael O'Leary.  We cut down an apple tree but I couldn't bear to lose it, so we replanted it (sans roots) outside the dining room window and it now serves as a rather salubrious, multi-storey bird feeder, known as "Charlie Bird's diner" (a different Charles - there are a lot of them about; ask Camilla Of The Twine.)   

Diner

This reference, reader, begs explanation. There is a broadcast journalist who by virtue of his something-or-other-which-I-never-quite-understood, is a household name in Ireland. So anyway, Charlie Bird went to Washington, the plum job, but when he got there, nobody knew him, nobody wanted to know - or even more importantly, to tell - so he made a television programme about how sad and lonely he was, packed up and came home to Ireland. But because our feeder is multi-storey, no bird would EVER be sad and lonely, there, so hence the title).....phew, that was longwinded.......

If hell be mare's tails and bindweed, surely heaven is downy birch, crack and hoary willow, osier, fluttering elm, cornelian cherry, balsam poplar, Phoenician juniper, hemlock, stone pine, elder and alder, balm of Gilead, snowy mespil, medlar.......and if not heaven, then at least a poem. A poem incorporating the works of Pacha Mama, Mother Nature and J.C. For poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.

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In March 2006 we were invited to a St Patrick's Day party by Anglo Irish Bank in Geneva.   The guest speaker was Tim Pat Coogan, former Editor of the Irish Press.  It was a swell affair in a swanky venue.  Tim Pat Coogan's speech, delivered without humour, without inflection, was probably the worst I have ever heard on the state of the Irish nation.   Coogan seemed overtired, but he was not emotional....in fact, he appeared so vacant as to be without any emotion at all.    He could not recall my mother, the journalist Jean Sheridan, who had written for the Irish Press during his entire tenure as Editor.  He could not remember me, though I came to the Press group on her coat tails and was on his contributing staff.   But then he was very busy at the time, writing books about the IRA as the Irish Press began its sad slide towards its doom, the death of three titles and the loss of 600 jobs.

Anyway, we had a grand time at the Anglo Irish Bank party. To mark the occasion I wore my special St Patrick's Day tights - black, with green shamrocks - and remember doing an Irish pole dance (that would be from the waist down) to show them off to best advantage.  The food, in abundance, was gorgeous, there was more champagne than one could possibly drink and the party favour was a bottle of Connemara Peated Single Irish Malt Whiskey.   There  were a lot of Anglo-Irish guests in attendance and everyone was well behaved, but lively. (Everyone in Geneva is always well-behaved, except for Hannibal Gadaffi who, with his wife, was arrested for "allegedly" beating two domestic staff at a Geneva hotel in 2008. The couple were released two days later, the charges dropped and the staff compensated, but Hannibal's father Muammar, has since held a grudge against Switzerland, shutting subsidiaries of Swiss firms in Libya, arresting two businessmen, cancelling flights between Tripoli and Geneva, withdrawing $5bn from his Swiss bank accounts and last year declaring holy war against, and a total economic boycott of, Switzerland.)



Some time later, when my husband and myself were discussing where to invest a precious few bob, we thought of Anglo Irish Bank and what a friendly bunch they were and what a nice bottle of whiskey they had given us, and that it would be a fine thing to have a share in their enterprise. So we invested €25,000.

Expensive old party that.  Expensive expenses and liquidities we paid Tim Pat Coogan.   Expensive bottle of whiskey.  

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