I have invented something amazing!

After much tinkering, I reckon this is the ideal mix for a Baileys Malt:

Into a blender add

• 1/3 of a tub of ice cream, 
• 1/2 a bottle of baileys, 
• 4dsp ovaltine, 
• 2dsp cocoa powder, 
• 1tsp vanilla bean paste, 
• milk up to the max line.  

Whiz it up until smooth and serve ice cold.  The genius thing is that it lines your stomach and gets you pissed at the same time!  I've had two and a half mugs today.  Big mugs.  I should probably sit down now :)

Mayday

Today is the first of May, and it's a bit of a crossroads on the calendar.

May Day is a spring festival.

International Workers' Day is a celebration of the working class, who generate all wealth and build all things.

Beltane is a Celtic festival that marks the halfway point between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice.

Today has been a good day for a party for thousands of years.  Today also marks me being out for ten years now.  I wouldn't normally mark the day, but ten years is a hell of a thing.  So at the bar last night I spent time with old friends and new, ate my fill of pork and drank my fill of cider, and everybody had caterpillar cake.  We shared tales of good times, epic nights and acts of sheer lunacy.  It was a great night, one of the best this year.

I love my mates, they're amazing :)

Untitled

Did my shift tonight, got drunk, realised I really love what I do and wrote this.  I'm still drunk so it may well prove to be shite.  

In closed venues before gigs,
the profound silences are broken only by my bootfalls
behind centuries-old brickwork,
fired from clay that predates all religion.

There shafts of light in all hues
catch in dust formed of sweat shed before I was born,
remaining ancient and musty long after I am dead.

The smells of last night's gig -
the sweat, the beer, the arousal -
mingle with cleaning fluids, paint,
and the occasional waft from the optics.

My boots echo in the stillness,
muffled by acoustic tiles.
Every subtlety of music can be heard in this room,
audited, refined, perfected, all over the static buzz
and metalloplastic scent of enough copper wiring
to touch the edge of space.

I live and breathe the calm before the maelstrom,
the tipping point and beyond,
to a hell of a night
in these cathedrals of sound and light.
This is my London.


I'll give it a look over in the morning.  In the meantime I leave you with Faithless.  

Grass, tools and evolution

I planted the lawn today.

  George now has no back garden for at least a week, maybe a fortnight.  I used aerator shoes to drive the seed in deep, like two inches deep.  Some's only an inch deep, having been raked in.  Some's at the surface, squashed in with my boots.  With any luck, a storm coming out of nowhere won't be as devastating a thing this year as it was last year.  We may end up with a half-decent lawn this Summer!  

  As thanks for putting the lawn in, I got given a lovely new edger.  I've never owned an edger before.  This one's a thing of beauty: dark hardwood handle, sturdy, quality lathework, and with a bright stainless steel blade.  I think I'm in love.  Can't wait to put in a proper border with it.  

Lastly then, the strawberries I planted last year are greening up and back on the grow.  More specifically: half of them are.  The other half are either dead or dormant.  Thankfully the surviving half are from all four cultivars planted.  This is a good thing because the weird second Winter we just had is not great for plants.  The limey London soil is definitely not great for fruiting plants (my strawbs are in compost, but there's soil beneath and the alkali is capable of creeping up).  

Those which survived are hardier to frost and more tolerant of the edaphic conditions than those which died.  

This is the basis of evolution.  Evolution depends upon life in the midst of death.  Those which survive go on to pass on those very genes which helped them survive.  This adapts the species to the prevailing conditions.  The surviving strawberries will propagate new plants - both vegetatively and sexually - until the Strawbrary is full.  Those new plants will be adapted to fit the prevailing conditions of my garden.  After a few more generations they'll have thoroughly evolved to fit the niche of "strawberry plant in Joey's Strawbrary", after which they'll need to evolve again before they'll be able to thrive half as well in any garden but mine.

Life plods on, as ever it has.

Little treats

Got the Hobbit today.  I've been sat watching that with cured meat, strong cheese, a lovely ale chutney that I traded Ruth some homemade raspberry jam for the last time I was in Leamington, and the last quarter pint of that matured mead that Neil brought back from Denmark.

Life is good.

It's a tad warm in here, even though the heating claims to be off.  I think that mead might've matured further in the months it's stood on my shelf.  It certainly tastes stronger, and the honey flavour is deeper, sharper, and more complex than a freshly opened bottle of mjød tends to be; in fact it's knocking on for a honey brandy at this point.  I shall have to import a box of bottles and store them in the attic until they're thoroughly dusty.

If you haven't tasted mead yet I implore you to try it.  Once you've fallen in love with it you can move on to sample braggot and metheglin.  Pear, clove, and elderflower metheglin brewed from citrus-fed honey and mountain water, matured until it's strong enough to wake the dead.  I haven't had a drink like that in ten years nearly but I'd walk to John O' Groats for a bottle.

Summer project, methinks.  Anybody got any elderflower they aren't using...?

Good times!

So Julia took me to Kew Gardens today.  I can tell you now, as a gardener and a scientist, to be taken around Kew by someone far more experienced both as a gardener and as a scientist is a hell of a thing!  I probably picked up as much in an afternoon as I might in a month of books!  I'm tremendously grateful for the experience, and if someone ever offers you a similar afternoon I suggest you take them up on it.

I has a happy :)

Bliss!

It's half past seven on a Saturday morning and nobody else in the house is up and about yet, nobody's bothering me, and I'm sitting under a quilt with a mug of coffee, watching last night's Gardener's World that I set to tape (because White Supremacy World got cancelled).

Nothing beats it.  A quiet half hour to yourself in the morning, a chance to ease yourself into the day pleasantly, it's better than chocolate, sex, ice cream...   Alright, it might be drawing with ice cream.

My Botanical Adventure

Went to Kew Gardens for the first time today.  I really should've gone sooner.  The guide thingy suggests you leave yourself two to three hours to get around the place - aye, sure, if you're an anorexic on a souped-up granny scooter being piloted by the Stig!  I was there for five hours and I reckon I'm lucky if I got to experience half of it.  I'm going to include the bulk of the photos on a separate page because I took 103, but I'll post a choice few here.  I went in the Winter, so I presume you've got to see it again in the Spring, Summer and Autumn to really get a sense of the lifecycles of the specimens there.

 Me amidst an amazing collection of palms and ferns

The Coffin Tree can grow to be among the tallest trees in the world!

This fish was watching me.  

This Cycad is older than Kew Gardens.  Cycads as a bunch are older than the dinosaurs!

And for reference, here's a cycad being munched on by a Triceratops

This is a Banksia, named for a local boy...

There's a gallery of botanical art there, it has its own building, The Marianne North Gallery.  It features a load of paintings by Marianne North plus the Shirley Sherwood Collection, a collection of paintings by various artists.  There's a whole section on fungus for any myco geeks.  Sadly, no photos allowed.

I stopped for a burger halfway through.  It was a hell of a burger!  Venison.  You heard me; a venison burger!  Venison, in a burger.  I'll stop now.  

There were piranhas

The turtles were nothing like the ones you see on the telly though.  They weren't even armed!  Bit naff really.  

Now the Kew Pagoda is a bit of a local landmark.  You can see it from over the Thames in Brentford, from half of Richmond and Sheen, and of course from the top of a 65 bus.  So I decided to see where in the Gardens I could grab the best long shot of the Pagoda.  

Here's it up close

The Treetop Walkway is the highest publicly-climbable structure in the Gardens.  The Pagoda is taller but you aren't allowed up it.  Here's the walkway:

I expected the views from there to be amazing, and they are!  You need to get that high and see Brentford, see Sheen, to remind yourself that you're still in London.  

But the view of the Pagoda was obscured by tree branches.  

Still, at least in the Winter you can see it at all.  In the Summer that'll be a wall of green.  The view from the top of the Temperate Greenhouse (the biggest greenhouse) is significantly clearer, albeit with a big tree blocking part of it

Best view however was straight down the Cedar Vista from the corner of that wee lake in the North of the Gardens:

These parakeets live all over Richmond Borough.  A shitload escaped from some private collection back in like Victorian times or something and the rest is history.  Their ubiquity in Strawberry Hill has seen them nicknamed "green pigeons".  

I saw a Japanese Minka house.  These were made of wood and ridiculously versatile and durable.  

I saved the Evolution exhibition for last.  It was cool, though some prat had vandalised part of it.  It was full of fossils, ancient living species and models of ancient extinct species.  These Liverwort have been around for 400 million years - twice as long as the mighty Cycads!

A fossil

Aaand I'll put the rest on a side page, because there's bloody loads of them!  Suffice it to say that a great day was had and I'll be back there in the Spring.  

Testing the cider

I've made the cider, I've racked the cider, and today I've tested the cider.  To do this I arranged some time in a lab, but you can do this at home if you have the parts:

• Hotplate,
• Pyrex beaker,
• Mercury thermometer,
• 100cc cylinder, graduated by 1cc increments,
• Clamp stand

Measure out 100cc of the cider using the cylinder, transfer it into the beaker, pop that onto the hotplate.  Stand the thermometer in the cider, using the clamp stand to ensure that the bulb of the thermometer is near to the bottom of the beaker but not quite touching it.  Heat it to 72ºC for a couple minutes until it's steaming nicely then take it off the heat and wait for the steam to stop.  You wait for the steam to stop in order to get an accurate measurement.  Once it isn't steaming any more, put it back into the measuring cylinder and read the volume.  We will call this new measurement X.  

  100 minus X = your percent ABV

100 - 92 (my X value) = 8% ABV

I also tested it at a lower temperature to gauge the methanol content and judged it to be less than half a percent.  I used Benedict's solution to test for aldehydes (formed when ethanol goes off) and found none of the characteristic orange sludge which appears in a positive test.  

It tasted largely of rhubarb.  Very sharp, but not too sharp.  I think next week we'll be good to go!

In other news: that arum has grown since it moved to its new home.  It seems to have settled in quite nicely :)

The first frost

Today was the first frost of the new Winter, at least in London anyhow.  Willing to bet my mate Lyndsey up in Tayside has been freezing her arse off for a month already.  Comment that it's been two months in 3... 2...

So it touched the lawn but not the beans.  It also bejewelled those bloody weeds that keep invading my lawn, so presumably this is the time to make a serious dent in their numbers.

Sparkly lawn!  Alas for the hole in the bottom corner there.  

The beans are coming along nicely.

Scarcely kissed by the frost.  

Take THAT ya bastards!

That's all good, but today I also found that I had something to be really proud of.  The roof of the arbour was covered in a thick layer of frost but not a drop touched the seat.  That must mean that a) I got the roof seals spot on, and b) that I've successfully sited it for maximum shelter from the worst of the cold.  Happy with that!

Frost

No frost!

Really chuffed with that.  Right, I've got a day off tomorrow so I'll be racking the cider.  Wish me luck!

xx