Someone at English Heritage has played a cruel trick by giving listed status to the derelict Lido at Grange. This poor old wreck has been closed for 20 years, its entrance covered with signs saying Keep Out and Danger of Death. Now, it has been given elevated status as a listed building leading some poor souls to believe that a magic wand will bring it back to life. The Lido is essentially a lump of decaying concrete and there isn’t the remotest possibility of it being restored, not least because no-one would be daft enough to spend a fortune rebuilding something which would cost another fortune to keep running.
​
My comment that the decision to list it was “bonkers” formed the headline in our local newspaper, which so impressed the BBC that they came up to ask me to repeat it for the evening’s news. My reaction may have been a tad forceful, but I was entitled to have my say because the listing puts at risk my proposal, which has the full backing of the Town and District Council and received a majority vote in a Grange plebiscite, to turn the Lido into an attractive public area, with a garden, cafe and fitness centre. My proposals are fully funded and costed and don’t require a magic wand. The photo above shows the Lido as it is now, the photo below, an artist’s impression of how it might look.

Is there, after all, a cure for box blight? The story is that a year ago the lovely mature box hedging in our kitchen garden was struck with box blight. We were in the middle of removing it when a chance conversation with Margaret Robinson at the Mammoth Onion gave me a ray of hope. She said that one possible solution was to cut the plant right down to the ground and let it regenerate. ​

There are some very persuasive salesmen with some very glossy brochures going around trying to persuade hotels to “invest” in food waste digesters. These are very large plastic bins which plug into the mains and, with the aid of a “bio-enzymatic formula” will turn food leftovers into grey water. ​

I’ve always admired the way Victorians would build a Folly on their land, which had no other purpose than to look good and be admired. One such Victorian was Alexander Brogden, the owner of Holme Island in Grange who, when he had finished building the Furness railway, built a circular Temple of Vesta in his garden. I came across a photo of the temple while I was doing some research on Grange in the Barrow Records Office and was immediately captivated by it. You get a good view of Holme Island from the Prospect Tower in my garden, and you can see that unfortunately it’s now a ruin. It’s also completely inaccessible on private land.

When I first saw the photo of the temple I thought how wonderful it would be to create something as beautiful. The idea stayed with me, and when I had the chance to buy the land behind the Newby Bridge Hotel, I thought that would be an ideal spot for it. The land, which had at one time been part of the ornamental gardens for Newby Bridge Mansion (as the hotel was formerly), had become completely overgrown, but it was in a commanding position overlooking both the lake and the hotel.

​Badgers have such a friendly image that you’d never think of them as vicious killers. And yet twice recently I’ve been told about badgers on killing sprees; in the first case the victims were an entire hut of chickens and in the second some rare-breeed pheasants. Here, their worst crime has been to dig for worms in the lawn, so we’ve been very tolerant of the sett in our fern garden. Our family of badgers do most of their foraging in the sixty acre wood behind us and we’ve often seen them sidling over the cattle grid on their way into the wood, out of harm’s way.

In a week when the EU (the idiots) are proposing that companies should by law have a minimum quota of women on their boards, its good to see a place where women are utterly dominant on their own merits – the record charts. This week, for the first time, female solo artists have taken the top 7 places in the album charts and 10 out of the top 12. They have also topped the album chart for 25 out of the first 29 weeks of this year. ​

This is one of the best small plants in my garden, made beautiful by its snake-skin stem. Its latin name is Sauromatum Venosum and it is not to be confused with the other voodoo lily, which is known as Pseudophallus, which translates as Misshapen Penis. The other voodoo lily is a carniverous plant which attracts insects by emitting a horrible smell, which is supposed to be resemble rotting flesh, whereas ours has no obnoxious habits and just sits there looking lovely. It does however have one strange characteristic in that, in the spring, a snake-skin stem will grow but before it produces any leaves will wither away. It will then re-grow fully in July.
​
I bought one plant several years ago which has now spread to become a little family. It reproduces from little bulbs which appear at the base of the plant. ​