Two Ex-Pats

Well, the two ex-pats of Lansdowne Drive celebrated Australia Day in fine style... the flag, which I had spent such pains to find for last year, was brought out with all due ceremony, and hung from the study window (the thumb I crushed between the sashes seemed a small price to pay for such a great looking declaration of 'Aussies live here!'), and, also continuing a tradition begun in 2005, Bron and I made ANZAC Biscuits. Last year they were all for us, but this year Bron decided to win over the grad students of the London School of Economics, where she was due to give a two hour lecture, with more than just witty banter...

The biscuits went down a treat, by all reports, and there were still plenty left for us, as we'd doubled the mixture. Unfortunately no photos exist of our own celebrations, which began in The Dove and moved to Buen Ayre for steak, wine and MUCH conversation and laughter, but I'm sure you can imagine how much fun we had.

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I know it's late, but still: Happy Australia Day!!

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How to have Christmas

Ingredients:
One London terrace house, Victorian era (next to a park, if possible)
One tiled fireplace (must have proper mantlepiece)
One Christmas tree (Blue Spruce is recommended)
Sundry decorations (buy some from the V&A if you can; their selection is lovely)
A garland for the fireplace (may have to be ordered off the internet as they're VERY hard to find)
Ilex or holly or other seasonal flowers, as desired, from Columbia Road
Assorted friends to come around and drink red wine and eat roast pork and admire all of the above


Method:
Purchase Christmas tree, bring it home by any means necessary. Wrestle it into the living room, release it from its net and set it up in its stand. Fill stand with water. Decorate tree with lights and baubles and lovely gold lametta.
Liberate garland from the over-large box it arrived in and unbend all the tips. Hang from brass hooks in the underside of the mantlepiece. If you should discover that the mantlepiece is actually metal, and brass hooks cannot be screwed into it, wedge the hooks into crevices and hold them there by sheer willpower and reverse gravity. Decorate garland with decorations from the V&A.
Invite friends to celebrate St Nicholas' Day. Buy pork, apples, parsnips, potatoes and other vegetables. Buy pudding, brandy sauce and double cream from the Channel Islands. Buy wine.

Serves four.

Remember, remember

the fifth of November:

gunpowder, treason and PLOT

Well, we had no Guy, but we had all the other essential ingredients... a bonfire (albeit in a drum, but in central London that's about as good as you can get), LOADS of fireworks (on which more later), roast lamb with rosemary, roast veges, wine, home-made candied apples (which Juliet's recipe referred to as 'bombs on sticks'), baked rice pudding, and a crowd of about fifteen guests to celebrate with. The night's festivities were intended as a last hurrah for the garden, before winter really sets in (and of course as an excuse for the pyromaniacs amongst us to indulge their weakness for playing with matches, wicks, candles, tapers, exploding things; anything flammable that they could get their hands on, really)...

So! a how-to in words and pictures then (and I hasten to assure any concerned mothers or grandmothers that this is not MY story; no; I was merely a bystander with a camera; this is the story of a pyro who shall remain nameless, but she doesn't live with us ;) )

1. Set up a pipe in the ground, from which to launch rockets. Carefully work out angle of trajectory so that objects launched therefrom will miss overhanging trees (most of garden), house (most of side of garden) and street lights (less important as they don't belong to us ;) ). Reinforce pipe with broken bits of masonry. Ignore worried looks from homeowners.

2. After setting off a few rockets, and watching them go spiralling perfectly into the sky with scorching whooshes, get impatient of having one at a time, and set up a second pipe. Try to light two at a time so that they both go off together.

Comfort homeowners when one hits the guttering, bounces off the bedroom window and plummets back down into the garden. Prohibit curious menfolk from approaching said rocket as it has not yet exploded.

3. Produce, like a conjuring trick, an enormous box-like affair that does not conTAIN fireworks, but is, in fact, one huge firework, which looks as if it could have been part of the original Gunpowder Plot. Set this up under the trees as 'it won't go that high'. Watch as great wads of flaming and sparking material ricochet off the branches above

and shower the cowering crowd below

with ash, cinders and sparks.

4. Laugh (after ascertaining that there were no injuries; clothes can be mended, after all).

5. Produce, from a secret hiding place, another of these which puts the first one to shame. Suggest that this may be better if let off in the open spaces of London Fields (heartfelt and unanimous agreement from crowd), and go to set up. Summon crowds with a whistle; ignite the Mother of All Fireworks (which cannot POSSibly be done justice by photos).

Oh, and the police were out in force early in the evening to prevent this taking place -

but perhaps it did anyway ;)

A misty morning

Autumn is on its way... we've had some cold days, but it's really remained quite mild so far, and all the plants in the garden are still growing - some are still flowering! But this morning we woke up to the beautiful mist enveloping everything, including the park, and it was the first time it LOOKED like autumn.

(NB The above photo is in colour ;) )

Of course, picking up seven or eight buckets of leaves out of the garden yesterday looked like autumn too... and that was after clearing it completely - about six buckets full - just on Saturday! Thankfully the council delivered our brown bin for garden waste about a month ago, so there is actually a place to put them all.

The park is always beautiful, but especially so in mist, and late afternoon sunlight.

Our garden has EVERYTHING

The Walled Garden

Unfortunately, with the demise of the first laptop back in February, I have no photos of the garden in its *ahem* natural state, ie filled with DIY rubbish and offcuts chucked at random out of upstairs windows and off the scaffolding, but here it is just after all that was cleared by our handy Rubbish Geezer (we're in the East End!! there's a geezer for EVERYTHING), and before we put all the plants in...

Here are all the plants ready to go in... a gardener friend of Bron's at her old college at Cambridge had had them all ready for ages, in pots, and Bron told me on the Friday that she was going to go and get them... I imagined a modest haul of half a dozen small cuttings, and arrived home to find Birnham Wood in the upstairs kitchen and dining room. Lots of classic English flowers; hollyhocks and roses and thistles and something he SAID were poppies but which sulked all summer long, sprawled all over the ground looking like weeds, and never putting forth anything that looked even remotely like a bud...

And here's the garden at the height of summer, when I was on holidays and able to make a daily or even twice-daily round, pulling up weeds and clover and watering everything and watching flowers grow and buds form and new growth all pink or light green and beautiful.

The transformation of the basement continued

The bedroom (door to the left as you come down the stairs) looks out onto the garden; there's a walkway right next to the wall of the house, and a retaining wall (about chest height) for the garden itself about a metre away. Means you look out right into the flowers...

The living room (door to the right as you come down the stairs) is almost a mirror image of the bedroom, with a window in almost the same place, looking out into a tiny courtyard (the only way out to it is to climb out the window), the railings, and the road, which is a junction of three ways at a small roundabout at that point.
We love the dear little purple fireplace in the living room; I have great plans for it at Christmas, especially after seeing garlands and berries and similar glorious Victoriana at the V&A shop last time I was there (and as a member - sorry, Friend - I get a 10% discount)...

Gah! Leonard Blue!!! you can see why it had to go, can't you...
The kitchen is round the corner to the left as you come down the stairs; you can see back across the hallway and a little sliver of the living room in both the shots above.

Garden next!! maybe ;)