This is about as much fun as Slow Food gets.  It’s called rice pounding, which is what you do to convert ordinary sticky rice into rice cakes.  It’s possible to use a machine to make the rice cakes (or mochi, as they are known in Japan), but what the Japanese much prefer to do is to get together in the open air and pound the rice in stone mortars with wooden mallets.  They even let me have a go – I’m the sinister figure in black. ​

When I meet my brother in town we always have lunch at our favourite fish restaurant,  La Poissonnerie on Sloane Avenue.  We like to start with a few oysters each and last month we ordered the Whitstable No 1’s, which was a big mistake as they turned out to be far too large. Each one was about the size of the palm of my hand.  I always swallow  oysters whole and, very stupidly, tried to swallow one of these monsters.  There was no way it could get down my throat and it got stuck in my gullet.  ​

One of the resolutions I made when I began on the garden at Yewbarrow House was that I wouldn’t give any winter protection to any plant which could be seen from the house.  My reasoning was that plants which are wrapped are ugly and it would be a shame to ruin the view of the garden with unsightly wrapping.  I’m afraid this resolution hasn’t held.  Before I set out for Japan I gave instructions for the tree ferns to be given some winter protection- not wanting to lose them all for the second time, if the weather turns out to be bad yet again.
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Condolences
​
Please do not ask
If I am now recovering
Or if I see the light
At the tunnel’s end.
Nor speak about relief — or burdens lifted.
And, worst of all, new starts.
Please, please don’t ask
If I am getting through --
Have come to terms
Or find my life is back on track.
Of course I live each day to each
And gladly smile
My coping, to “prepare a face
To meet the faces that you meet”.
What else is there to do?
In any case, you would not want to know
The daily loss that lasts eternally.
Just, please, don’t ask.
          - Frances Gibb – written on the death of her husband

We chose the winter flowering cherry as the place to scatter my mother’s ashes. The tree had been a present from my sister Julia shortly before she died, after a shockingly cruel illness, 21 years ago.  It was my mother’s favourite tree and in the last few months of her life, when her memory had almost entirely disappeared, she often spoke of “Julia’s Tree”.  It’s a remarkable tree because when everything else in the garden has died down it bursts into life, producing hundreds of tiny pink flowers on leafless branches.