Nothing entertains me more than to hear our former PM, Edward Heath, being roundly abused, but I didn’t expect to have that pleasure at a meeting of the Tourist Board.  The occasion was the presentation to Hunter Davies of the Bernard Gooch award in honour of his services to tourism.  The great man (Hunter Davies that is, no-one seemed to know who Bernard Gooch was) began his speech of thanks by telling us about his stint at the Sunday Times, some 40 years ago, when he was asked to come up with some ideas for a weekly column to fill the last page of their Magazine.  ​

In the second part of John Allison’s Ayn Rand lecture he spoke about work. Now, the subject of work rarely surfaces in this Slow Life blog, which is mainly preoccupied with gardening and food, music and art. But of course, Slow Life is very much about achieving the right balance between work and leisure and in finding that balance how much weight should be given to work?  John Ellison had some interesting things to say about this.

He began with the premise that the vast majority of human beings want to make the world a better place and that it’s important to believe that your work is making the world a better place.  If your work is just work, he said, you are missing what life is about and if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing you are wasting your life. He also observed, and this is at the core of the Objectivist philosophy, that self-esteem is the foundation of happiness. The driver of self-esteem, he said, is your work, and if you don’t do your work the best you can, you will lose your self-esteem and be unhappy. On the other hand, if you can say- “That was a lot of blood sweat and tears and I’m glad I did it”, you will be happy.
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Cannas are indispensable in a subtropical garden because their foliage is so splendid. They aren’t necessarily grown for their flowers, but when they arrive, late in the season, they are a bonus. With some varieties, such as the very large canna musifolia, the flowers may never arrive at all in our climate. So it’s especially pleasing when, in a very average summer, cannas start to produce their flowers early. This photo, taken yesterday, is of a dark-leaved variety interplanted with the dark banana leaves of ensette murillii. I’ve never known a canna to come into flower so early in the season before. Why this should be, I’ve no idea.

This is the first May when the dahlias have not only been in flower, they’ve needed dead-heading. I think the reason they’ve done so well is the new regime for over-wintering introduced by Matt, our gardener. Instead of storing the tubers in trays he decided to pot them up immediately after they had been lifted and to transfer the pots to the cold frames before the end of February. 98% of the tubers survived. What’s more, there was plenty of time to take cuttings, all of which have rooted. There’s been a similar success story with the cannas- the 40 plants which we had last year have been successfully divided to create 129. They are all growing strongly and if we can get some more decent weather we should enjoy our most colourful summer ever- without buying in a single plant.