Blog Archives - Slow Life Blog from the Lake District

Ash Trees – The Reality

29/11/2012

Our garden at Yewbarrow House has about 2 acres of woodland, in which there are one or two ash trees. They are possibly the least satisfactory trees in our garden. In the spring, they are the last to produce their leaves. In the autumn, they are the first to shed them. They are long and gangly, not in the least attractive unless you go in for that sort of thing. In fact, I would guess that they are one of our least recognised trees, even though they are so ubiquitous.

The Echium Pininana in Winter

22/11/2012

Christopher Lloyd used to claim that he never allowed the Echium pininanas at Great Dixter to flower, as he valued them most as foliage plants. This has always puzzled me, as nothing equates better with Christo’s flamboyant character than the literally over the top 14 feet flower spikes of the Echium pininana. But after four harsh winters during after which none of my Echiums were alive I think I understood that Christo had no choice – they would never flower in his part of inland Sussex as the weather wouldn’t allow them to.

Tetrapanax Rex

20/11/2012

The parent of this plant was collected by Bleddyn Wynn-Jones from the banks of a river in the Shei-Pa area of the Central Mountains in Taiwan. I collected mine from Wynn-Jones’ nursery in a mountainous region of North Wales, after a slightly less arduous journey, although it didn’t feel so at the time. It is known as Tetrapanax papyrifer Rex. Its value as an architectural plant is shown by the fact that now, on the cusp of winter, when all the deciduous trees have shed their leaves, it’s still looking in tip-top condition.

The Rolling Stones at the Granada, Rugby 1964

17/11/2012

My one chance to see the Beatles play live was cruelly dashed when my girlfriend, who was queuing in Leeds to get tickets, was knocked over in the crush and taken to hospital with a broken arm. I was heartbroken, but my devotion was total. My attempts to grow my hair Beatles-style became a battleground with my father and the school. When my father came to collect me at half term and saw that I had a Beatles fringe he fumed in a silent rage for the entire three-hour journey home.

Training Otters to Catch Salmon

13/11/2012

It’s a sign that autumn’s here that the otters are back frolicking in the river every morning outside the Riverside Hotel. Occasionally they’ve been seen munching a salmon on the riverbank, but I haven’t seen this myself, yet.

We think of these as “our” otters because they live in a holt underneath the hotel’s car park. If they are ours, why shouldn’t we put them to some use? I’ve been reading how, in the 19th century, the French, using techniques gleaned from the Chinese, would train an otter to catch salmon, and deposit it at the feet of its master, just as a retriever dog will deposit a bird. The trick is to catch an otter when it’s very young and get it accustomed to a diet of vegetables and meat, so that when it catches a fish it doesn’t immediately devour it.

Parkinson’s Law

13/11/2012

When, in 1829 John Claudius Loudon proposed a system of compulsory education for children up to the age of 14, one of the subjects which he expected every child to learn was political economy. In the same year, an industrialist donated £80,000 for the education of the poor children of Kirkaldy, Adam Smith’s birthplace. Loudon expected every educated person to know all about Adam Smith, and it was a little bit shocking, nearly two centuries later, to hear Matt Ridley, one of our generation’s most brilliant scholars, admit, at the Adam Smith Institute that he only became aware of the great man when he was 25.

Squirrels as Pets

11/11/2012

Jane Loudon was so enchanted by a black monkey which she encountered when visiting friends that she bought it for her 10 year old daughter Agnes. They kept it outside on the verandah in summer and in a cage in the library in winter. I have a suspicion that the monkey may not have been as delightful as she had hoped because when, a few years later, she wrote a book on pets* she said: “Monkeys are extremely fond of mischief, and are frequently vicious and spiteful to children”.

10 Reasons to be Cheerful

8/11/2012

Give me a land of boughs in leaf
A land of trees that stand
Where trees are fallen there is grief
I love no leafless land
- A E Housman

If you want to wrench every last ounce of misery out of a story there’s no better mood-setter than Housman. “I love no leafless land” is the message we are being given about the apparent imminent demise of our ash trees, all 67 million of them, from a virus which has been blown over from Denmark.

Adam Thomas – Brockholes’ Disaster Zone

5/11/2012

Local resident ‘Rodger M’ posted this review on the Brockhole website:

“11 minute overstay based on actual entrance and departure caught on camera. Cost £90. Big brother parking with no mercy makes this a place I will never visit again. Very unfriendly, money making and spiteful”

In reply the Brockhole manager, Adam Thomas, recommended that an appeal be lodged through [email protected] and said “if you have paid the fine and we find that you should not have been fined then we will ask Parking Eye to refund you”.

The Victorian take on Climate Change

1/11/2012

When did climate change first become a hot topic? Some might say when the British first started to obsess about the weather. There was a fierce debate about the subject as long ago as 1873 when James M’Nab, the curator of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, read a paper entitled ‘Climatal Changes’ to the Botanical Society. His argument was that winters were getting milder, and summers less warm, which was making it difficult to grow fruit crops in Scotland.

About Slow Life

The idea of Slow Life is to take the principles of Slow Food, which are “good, clean and fair”, and extend them to life in general.

Here in the Lake District, the air is clean, the pace is slow and the atmosphere is calm. If we don’t grow food ourselves, we can buy it in friendly small shops, where you know the quality is going to be the best.

This blog is a celebration of the Slow Life, with forays into the world of design, music, the arts, gardens, and my particular weakness, Japan.

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