News from Nowhere

There were hot cross buns for breakfast. I baked them yesterday, to my mashup of Felicity Cloake's recipe. I hesitated over including the saffron, because surely it isn't traditional? But commercial hot cross buns seem to be getting more and more random: at first it was just apple and cinnamon; then there were chocolate buns, and citrus ('Saint Clements'); yesterday I saw a Sainsbury's ad for cheddar cheese and onion marmalade hot cross buns. Compared to that, saffron is mainstream - and I really like saffron.

I hope this doesn't jinx it, but the sourdough is going really well at the moment. What am I doing that's different? Nothing in particular, but I think I'm more confident abot handling a wetter dough.

Also, I have earwormed myself with The Week Before Easter - though I usually think of that tune as Dancing at Whitsun. (And the lyrics lurk behind Dylan's Ballad in Plain D...)

When they start naming the storms in Elvish, you know you're in trouble... The Daily Record explains that this year they let the British public help name the storms, and says "The name Arwen is believed to be of Welsh origin and was popularised by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series of books.quot; Believed, eh? Believed by whom? Also on the list, Logan, which the Record explains is Scottish; they don't mention Wolverine. Still, we're just lucky we didn't get Stormy McStormface.

Then again, Stormy McStormface is pretty much what we got this morning. After a noisy night, people have been swapping pictures of the damage. Trees on roads all over the place, and brick walls tumbled into heaps. The back wall of a student house at the bottom of the street has collapsed into the roadway. And fat white feathers of snow drifting down over it all. Snow, in November.

We're watching the weather - and the train tmetables - all the more anxiously because we are due to travel to Bristol tomorrow, for a family funeral. I won't say I'm looking foward to it, exactly, but I do want to get there.

... same as the old year, as the Who didn't quite say.

Like everyone else, I am hoping that 2021 will be better than 2020 in any number of ways, but maintaining any sort of belief in that hope depends on not expecting too much too soon. These are not the bright sunlit uplands Boris promised us, and insisting they are makes me expect the worst. (Except, of course, in the sense that we have reclaimed sovereignty and cast off the shackles of the EU, and I don't want to talk about that.)

I didn't sit up to see the New Year in. Most years D. and valydiarosada are with us for New Year, and we stay awake until midnight - or wake up, saying Are we nealy there yet?, but no chance of that this year. A neighbour proposed, a few weeks ago, that we could go out into the street to toast the New Year and each other each in our own choice of festive cup, and at the time I thought it sounded like a pleasant thing to do, but that I would have preferred not to doit oi at midnight... And then the new variant virus came along, and the new régime (it's not a national lockdown, it's just a new tier which covers most of the country, but in separate local rulings), and the suggestion was withdrawn.

So the calendar flipped over while I was asleep, and today has slipped past: I spent all morning watching Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin and sewing a button onto one of durham_rambler's shirts. A silly movie and a small but long overdue task, not a bad beginning.

I don't make New Year resolutions: but here are Woody Guthrie's New Year's Rulin's for 1943: Read lots good books... Wake up and fight.

Autumn is here; the evenings are dark, and often so are the days, overcast and rainy. The mornings are still light, thank goodness, we still wake up to daylight, just about. Enjoy it while it lasts.

The new university year has started, a little later in Durham than elsewhere, and we have not (yet, thankfully) seen the sort of outbreaks of infection among the students that our neighbours in Newcastle have had. But durham_rambler has been digging into the local figures, and thinks that infections in the city are many times higher than those in the rest of the county. A friend who lives in Barnard Castle asks, subtly "Are you being very good about observing the regulations?" and I would love to respond Would you like to meet up? Instead I replied "It's not that we are being good, but we are being cautious..."

New term or no, the Botanic Gardens are still closed, and the head gardener continues to mail out a daily picture. Last week we passed Day 200 (ouch!). Day 203's picture is a view of the car park.

With the new series of Only Connect, Monday is once again quiz night on television - and yes, life is quiet enough that this is a real pleasure. University Challenge sails blithely on with a series which must have been recorded in its entirety before March's lockdown, which I suppose allows the competition to be completed before the contestants are distracted by exaams - but meant that on Mondays Jeremy Paxman told potential entrants for the next series that their Students' Union has details of how to enter. Only Connect was delayed until they had worked out how to slide perspex screens between the three members of each team. Countdown has simply increased the space between Susie Dent and the Dictionary Corner guest. Is either of these precautions sufficient? I don't know, but I hope so, because I am really pleased to see them back.

I have posted before - because life is very repetitive around here - about the pros and cons of lockdown television, with specific reference to Staged, and what I said about that is what I am saying now about the return of the quizzes: "What I am disproportionately grateful for is the recognition that we don't have to wait for the promised new dawn, the 'on the other side' to be creative, that we can still make entertainment, drama or comedy with what resources lockdown allows us. Hey kids, why don't we so the show right here in the barn?"

Not just television: GirlBear sent me this slideshow from the weekend school she and boybear had attended. Look! Live music! Irritatingly short snatches of live music, but all the same, music (including wind instruments):

There's a foxglove in my garden, under the elder tree. It is - they are both - self-seeded, because that's how my garden is. I've been watching it grow since it was just a rosette of leaves, and now it is as tall as I am. There's no picture of how tall it is, because it's a tall, linear thing and it just vanishes into the background. So instead, here's a picture of how foxglovey it is:



Those bells start at three feet off the ground, so the fox would have to be jumping quite high to get its paws into them - and foxes probably can do that, but this would have to be quite a small fox, or they wouldn't fit.

( More foxgloves - no, actually, more pictures of the same foxglove, )

Climbing the stairs to the attic this afternoon, as I do several times every day, I looked out of the window down onto the elder trees hn the back garden. They are laden with disks of white flowers. That can't have happened overnight, surely, as spring gave way to summer (by the calendar, at least)? But if not, how have I not noticed it until now?

Later I went out for a walk, up to the top of the hill and along the main road, and it is true that suddenly there are dog roses in the hedgerows and summer flowers everywhere: but our garden is shaded, and usually lags behind.

Anyway, summer now. This long strange spring is over. We have no plans to rush out and socialise in groups of six.

( Also lilac... )

Also a surprising amount of patriotic bunting. I wasn't expecting that. I look on all the VE Day celebration as a bit of a government publicity stunt, I suppose, and it comes as a surprise that there are people prepared to take it seriously, even if only as a much-needed entertainment.

Life is not, I admit, skittles and beer. But yesterday we ate the strawberries that the greengrocer had brought us, and this evening we ate their asparagus (with a roast chicken and a bottle of French sauvignon blanc which H. had given us).

In between those two seasonal firsts, this afternoon we went out for a walk: yes, both of us. durham_rambler, being over 70, is cautious about leaving the house, but he accompanied me on a stroll as far as the allotments:



where a number of people were hard at work, each in their own allotment.

The doorbell rang late this afternoon, as I was doing some frantic gift-wrapping - because tomorrow we catch the train to London for our anual seasonal visit. I was sufficiently in the mode to wonder whether it was carol singers, but no, it was a canvasser, our first of the entire campaign, very wet, wanting to know if we had voted yet. We had: after much hestiation we had filled in our postal votes and durham_rambler had delivered them to the polling station, avoiding the hazards of the Christmas post (and those of County Hall, too).

In the end, I voted Green. The seat is not as safe Labour as it once was, and the news at the pub quiz last night was that Labour are now seriously worried: they have been putting their efforts into canvassing the surrounding villages, which were strongly for Leave. It's very hard to imagine them voting Tory, though. Nonetheless, I wavered. But, taking a parochial view, the Labour candidate shows no sign of interest in the local concerns of the City; and to take a digher viewpoint, I do think that Green issues are the most important thing at the moment.

So the die is cast, the polls are about to close, it's time to move the half-packed suitcase from the bed, round up some whisky and go and watch the news - or as much of it as I can bear...