We were tidying out the garage in September and I came across a couple of bags of daffodils which we hadn’t got round to planting out last year. They felt rather soft, but we put them in the ground anyway, just in case. And guess what, they’re not only alive, they’re already producing shoots – it’s been so warm they think it’s spring!
In fact it’s been so mild this November that the hellebores have come into flower and the wall flowers haven’t stopped flowering. The echiums have been doing well and they’ve continued to grow during the long warm autumn, so that, after four years of failure, I’ve got some hope that they’ll have enough strength to come through the winter. And because there’s been so much more colour and life around than is usual at this time of year I’ve made a slideshow of the garden in November. Still bleak on the whole, so the music, appropriately, is Jacque Brel singing “Ne me quitte pas”.
I think I’m in love with Anne Wareham. It’s true that I’ve never met her and the one photo I’ve seen of her has her wearing goggles and driving a tractor. She also appears to be spoken for, as she’s dedicated her book to “Charles with love. Without you, nothing” and writes about making love to him by their “reflecting pool”. So it looks as though my love will be unrequited, but love it is, nevertheless.
When A A Gill, the restaurant critic, was finishing his meal at a restaurant in Wales the chef asked him what he thought of the food. “Disgusting” replied Gill. In fact he thought the food was good, as he confirmed in his review in the Sunday Times, but it gave him pleasure to torment the chef. This would have remained his private little joke if the chef hadn’t gone back to the kitchen and beaten up his assistant, after which the chef was done for assault and all the grisly facts came out in court.
Until very recently Paris was the undisputed capital of gastronomy. Then the Michelin inspectors turned up in Tokyo and found, to everyone’s amazement, that the standards in Tokyo were higher. Tokyo now has 14 3 Star restaurant’s compared to Paris’s 10 – and, to put things in perspective, London’s 1.