“Sometimes it strikes me as an intricate form of torture. In his book the triathlete Dave Scott wrote that of all the sports man has invented cycling has got to be the most unpleasant of all. I totally agree.”

- Haruki Murakami “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”

I needed to cross the busy A6 and slightly misjudged the timing, causing a van driver to toot as I shot in front of him. But he wasn’t satisfied with a toot and chased me down a lane and deliberately rammed me from behind, throwing me into a hedge and breaking my arm. I had to walk half a mile with my broken bike and arm to the nearest house, where I called an ambulance. Haruki Murakami, in his brilliant book “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”, which is mainly about running, but also about cycling, says that his dominant feeling when he’s on his bike is fear. He tells of the time when he hit a metal post and was only saved from serious injury by his helmet. It took me a while to get over my run in with Mr Angry, but now I’m on the road whenever I can, and I manage to do a forty minute ride four times a week on average. What do I think about when I’m cycling? Nothing at all. There’s no time to think because my mind is totally focussed on what’s happening around me. The fear is always there and that feeling of fear adds to the adrenalin, which may explain why I always feel absolutely great at the end of the ride and can’t wait for for the next round of torture.

I would have completely forgotten about Daphne Phelps’ book, “A House in Sicily” if it wasn’t for the mouse. We were doing some spring cleaning (a tip- don’t leave it for five years, things can get out of hand) when I found that a mouse had whiled away an afternoon by chewing away at the edges of a newspaper cutting which I’d roughly inserted into the book. Fortunately, the book itself was unharmed.

“A House in Sicily” is about Casa Cuseni, the Arts and Crafts house and garden created by Robert Kitson in Taormina, Sicily, which Daphne Phelps had inherited and looked after for 50 years. The garden is one of several outstanding gardens in Italy created by English men (and women) and is worthy to be mentioned alongside Thomas Hanbury’s ‘La Mortola’, Lady Walton’s ‘La Mortella’ and Ellen Willmott’s ‘La Boccanegra’, but stands out amongst them in that its name isn’t redolent of death or darkness.

My plans to look at the garden when I visited Taormina a few years ago were unfortunately thwarted by the girl at the Tourist Information Centre, where I’d gone to ask for directions. She looked positively alarmed when I mentioned Casa Cuseni. “You won’t get in”, she said, “And if you try to the owner will shout abuse at you”. The owner in question was Daphne Phelps, the author of the book. She was now elderly, and retired, but for most of her life had run Casa Cuseni as an upmarket guest house. Her instructions to the TiC to deter any potential visitors with threats of abuse was no doubt the result of a lifetime spent in hospitality. I know how she feels. She died the following year, and it was her obituary which I had carelessly inserted into her book and which the mice had chewed at.

“Well, the girls can’t stand her
‘Cause she walks, looks, and drives like an ace, now

And she’ll have fun, fun, fun
‘Til her daddy takes the T-bird away”

- The Beach Boys, “Fun, Fun, Fun”

One of these days I’ll get behind the wheel of my newly restored Ford Thunderbird and drive along with the hood down listening to the Beach Boys singing Fun Fun Fun. I’ve got the record- all I need to do is get the T-Bird restored. Vickram Seth chose Fun, Fun, Fun, as his first record on Desert Island Discs, when he related how his friend (or was it himself?) couldn’t understand why Daddy would take their Teapot away.

This surreal image reminded me of Bertrand Russell’s wonderful story of the Teapot in the Sky, which I’ve found to be quite useful as a diversionary tactic if any of my children ask an awkward question about religion. This is how Bertrand Russell put it, but he could just as well have been talking about a T-Bird in the sky:

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”

To show that truth is stranger than fiction, the picture is of a teapot worshipped by a Malaysian cult. Unfortunately it has been demolished at the behest of the Islamic ruling party. The spoilsports. Where’s their sense of Fun, Fun, Fun?

Gardener’s Question Time does me a power of good. It comes on just after Sunday lunch and as soon as Eric Robson has introduced the panel I’m away. The weather forecast wakes me up in time for the last question and I’m then ready for whatever the world has to throw at me, such as my tea.

I should add that my tendency to drop off is my fault not theirs, and if anyone has any doubts about whether this is an entertaining programme, I’d recommend that they go to see one of the shows being recorded. The panel move about the country; a year or two back I saw a show being recorded in Windermere and tonight it was our turn, in Grange-over-Sands. The strength of the programme is that it’s not scripted; in fact the panellists don’t get to see the questions in advance, so everyone has to live on their wits. Which they do, splendidly. Tonight Eric Robson was in the chair and Anne Swithinbank, Matthew Biggs and Bob Flowerdew were there to answer the questions. Anne Swithinbank has a way of illustrating what she’s saying with flamboyant gestures and took no notice of Eric Robson’s pleading eyes which said “We’re on the radio dear”. She’s also a mind reader as she recommended Tithonia (quite an unusual choice) on the very day that I’d marked it to buy in my seed catalogue. Bob Flowerdew is very close to being batty, but he gives his answers with such wit and panache that nobody minds. Eric Robson and Matt Biggs are as sharp as newly honed secateurs and in fact there’s more humour in one edition of this radio show than in a whole series of Gardener’s World under the lugubrious charge of Monty Don. The audience tonight was too busy laughing for anyone to snatch 40 winks, even me.

“Tell me, gentle flowers, teardrops of the stars, standing in the garden, nodding your head to the bees as they sing of the dews and the sunbeams, are you aware of the fearful doom that awaits you?”

Okakura Kakuso “The Book of Tea”

When Alex Kerr wrote, in “Lost Japan” (link to – http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2012/01/11/the-slow-life-in-japan/) about the changes which had taken place during the 20 years he had lived in his adopted country he told the story with love and affection. Ten years later, in “Dogs and Demons”, his love has turned to hatred, his affection to scorn. His book contains as much bile and bitterness as the angriest divorce petition. His anger is directed at a corrupt bureaucracy which wastes countless millions on absurd construction projects; on a supine population who take no interest in the environment and allow these projects to take place; on an innate conservatism which won’t allow other nationalities to immigrate or integrate; and an educational system which brainwashes its youth into never questioning authority.

Alex Kerr’s analysis is accurate, but his conclusions are wrong. When he says that the bureaucracy is powerful and intent on extending its power he’s describing bureaucrats everywhere; whether in Japan or elsewhere they’ll get pleasure from standing at a drain and pouring other people’s money down it. In Japan the money is wasted on construction projects, in England on sink estates.

And his pleas for Japan to become more like the United States, with all sorts of bossy pressure groups, open borders and an educational system where anything goes would result in Japan losing that specialness which appealed to him in the first place. Perhaps he just grew tired of being in a place where things got done and you never had to worry about your wallet being stolen.

Now that Midwives has taken over from Downton Abbey as everyone’s favourite, the usual questions are being asked about how authentic these tales of childbirth in the old days really are. They should ask my mother, whose story of the day she had me proves that life then is about as far removed from how things are today as you could imagine. There was no pain relief and no attentive Dad, but she did have a bottle of Champagne on hand. Her confinement took place at home, where a nurse was on hand, who came equipped with a gas and air machine, but didn’t find out, until it was too late, that she didn’t know how to work it. The doctor had been called, but he arrived when it was all over, as did my father. This is how my mother described things in a letter to her parents the following day:

“After Charlie (my father) and the doctor arrived they made a hammock of a sheet and carried me through into my own bedroom and we straightaway celebrated Jonathan’s arrival with a bottle of Champagne. And never has wine tasted so wonderful to me! The doctor, whose only part in the whole procedure had been to take my pulse, then retired to the lounge with Charlie and between them they drank all but the dregs of that bottle of whisky you brought us from Scotland. Nurse and I were disgusted with him, but actually I was too happy to be mad about anything. Jonathan is Charlie’s choice of name – he cabled it to you before I could decide whether I wanted it or not. An hour after Jonathan was born we were all discussing how soon it would be wise to start with the next!”

The “next” didn’t arrive for 15 months and the doctor drove home merrily at half past ten, happy with a job well done. Yes, Midwives is spot on.

I hadn’t given the film a thought for years and the only reason it came to mind is that the soundtrack is used as a motif for the passing of the years by Julian Barnes in “The  Sense of an Ending”. The record, Un Homme et Une Femme, was the sexiest song of the Sixties; its composer, Frances Lai, went on to write Love Story, which was the sickliest song of the Seventies.

In “The Sense of an Ending” the protagonist kicks over the traces of his past and bitterly regrets doing so.  Reading the book rekindled my memories of the film but I wondered whether it would be wise to watch it again and risk shattering those memories.  I needn’t have worried.  It’s funny and happy and sad and everything I’d remembered.  And, as this video clip shows, it also stars the most joyous dog.

“Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

As I arrived home last night an owl flew in front of my headlights, which pleased me mightily, not simply because owls are magnificent creatures but because the presence of an owl means the absence of mice.

Mice are insidious pests in the garden, the more annoying because the damage they do is below the surface of the soil, so you aren’t aware of it until it’s too late.  They like to nibble at roots and bulbs.  Two or three generations ago every gardener kept enough strychnine and arsenic in the potting shed to keep mice at bay and Poirot busy for a lifetime, but poisons wouldn’t do in the kitchen garden.  What would?  One idea was to use the device pictured above, which shows a brick being suspended by a piece a string, which the mouse nibbles through, whereupon the brick falls and squashes it.  This was described in Gardening Illustrated as “the most simple, inexpensive, and surest mouse-catcher ever invented”*.  On the same page in the magazine is a letter from a reader in which he tells of the fun to be had hunting slugs, which are baited with piles of bran:  ”My sporting time is early morning (before breakfast) and evening, and I cut the slugs in two with a knife.  I can safely say that with twopennyworth of bran, dotted down on my rockery, I have killed considerably over 1,000 in a few days, and still they come, only much smaller in size”.

*Gardening Illustrated October 11th, 1879

On 15th March 1879, William Robinson shook up the gardening press by launching a new weekly paper, priced at 1 penny and aimed fairly and squarely at the amateur gardener.  He called the paper “Gardening Illustrated” and seven months later he was boasting: “Our weekly issue is now larger than that of the whole of the horticultural press of the United Kingdom combined”. Of course, in the days before circulation figures were published, there was no evidence for this assertion and it was hotly contested by his rivals.

Gardening Illustrated was launched during the craze for subtropical gardening, which Robinson himself had done so much to promote with his book, “The Subtropical Garden.”  But the public were beginning to realise that exotic plants don’t always survive in our climate and one of the early articles dealt with the problem of what to do with the trunks of dead tree ferns.  Nowadays most people would throw them away but the Victorians had more imaginative ideas.  Robinson recommended using the trunks to display ferns, with a large fern such as a Nephrolepsis or a Lomaria gibba (now known as a Blechnum gibbum) placed in a hole scooped out of the top, with smaller ferns stuck into the trunk along the side.

This is a problem very close to my heart, and I suspect, thousands of others, after last winter.  The photo above shows my tree ferns looking splendid after the first snowfall of winter, but the prolonged cold finished them off, so I was left with 6 lifeless stems. My solution, suggested to me by Mike Tullis of Inglefield Plants (himself the latest in a long line of Victorians), was to decorate the stem with Fascicularia bicolor.   I think it looks good.  All I need to do now is scoop out the top and insert a large fern for that William Robinson look.

]]> http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2012/01/18/dead-tree-ferns/feed/ 0 http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2012/01/16/why-i-love-japan-part-7-the-slow-life/ http://www.slow-life.co.uk/2012/01/16/why-i-love-japan-part-7-the-slow-life/#comments Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:08:21 +0000 jonathandenby http://www.slow-life.co.uk/?p=2522
My home town of Grange-over-Sands is the archetypal slow town.  Its citizens, most of them being elderly, move slowly; for them the 30 mph sign isn’t a speed limit it’s an unattainable dream.  Grange is almost unique in the modern world in having an abundance of independent food shops so that you can do your weekly shop without visiting a supermarket – which is handy as there isn’t one.  It’s an ideal candidate for becoming a “Slow Town” under a scheme promoted by the Slow Food movement and last year, with the backing of Slow Food, I proposed this to the Town Council. Unfortunately my proposal was rejected, not on the grounds of cost (because I’d anticipated that by agreeing to underwrite the costs) but with the unassailable logic of their inherent slowness, or to put it another way, they were so slow witted and lethargic that they couldn’t be bothered.

If the idea had been proposed in Japan, I’ve no doubt it would have been welcomed enthusiastically.  The barrenness of being busy, as Carla Carlisle puts it, is something well known to the Japanese,  whose working hours are punishingly long. “Slow” is big in Japan, so much so that whole cities have become “Slow Cities”*, and the Slow Food movement has more members in Japan than any country except Italy.

The extraordinary thing is that whilst most Japanese opt for the city life with no access to a garden or an allotment, the possibility of living the good life is greater there than in any other developed country.  This video tells the story of a young couple, Sean and Misa, who were given a farm in Shikoku rent-free on the sole condition that they cultivated the land to prevent it from being reclaimed by the forest.  There are dozens of abandoned farmhouses in the same community and all over Japan, and so the opportunity taken up by Sean and Misa is available to many more.

*Here’s the ‘Slow Life’ Declaration of the Japanese city of Kakegawa, which I think is rather lovely and should be read, ever so slowly, to the Town Councillors of Grange:

The practice of the “Slow Life” involves the following eight themes:

SLOW PACE: We value the culture of walking, to be fit and to reduce traffic accidents.

SLOW WEAR: We respect and cherish our beautiful traditional costumes, including woven and dyed fabrics, Japanese kimonos and Japanese night robes (yukata).

SLOW FOOD: We enjoy Japanese food culture, such as Japanese dishes and tea ceremony, and safe local ingredients.

SLOW HOUSE: We respect houses built with wood, bamboo, and paper, lasting over one hundred or two hundred years, and are careful to make things durably and ultimately, to conserve our environment.

SLOW INDUSTRY: We take care of our forests, through our agriculture and forestry, conduct sustainable farming with human labor, and ultimately spread urban farms and green tourism.

SLOW EDUCATION: We pay less attention to academic achievement, and create a society in which people can enjoy arts, hobbies, and sports throughout our lifetimes, and where all generations can communicate well with each other.

SLOW AGING: We aim to age with grace and be self-reliant throughout our lifetimes.

SLOW LIFE: Based on the philosophy of life stated above, we live our lives with nature and the seasons, saving our resources and energy.