Psalm in Kensington Gardens

Of BJ, when she had visited Kensington Palace and was walking back to Lancaster Gate. To the accompaniment of distant traffic and playing children.

Praise the Lord from the Royal Parks,
give praise to him in Kensington Gardens!

Praise him sun and shade, praise him grass and trees!
You flowerbeds and all plantings, you tulip trees and spreading oaks,
Sweet chestnuts and beeches together;
Lawns and footpaths, woodland walks and rides
Let them praise the name of the Lord!

Praise him Round Pond and Serpentine
Praise him Italianate fountains and waters gushing forth from the fountains.
Praise him swans and coots, tufted ducks and grebes
Praise him with dabbling and quacking.

Praise him ice cream sellers and foreign tourists,
Praise him students and shoppers,
And workers let out in their lunch-hour.

Praise him with sunbathing and deck chairs,
Praise him with picnics,
Praise him with playing of ball games and feeding of ducks;
Praise him children and happy dogs
and dogs chasing squirrels.
Grandfathers and grandsons; au pairs and nannies,
Young mums and toddlers together: Praise him!
Praise him all boyfriends and girlfriends; all lovers entwined and blind to the crowds.
Kings of the earth, and of Kensington palace, all princes and consorts, and numerous minor royalty since William III, praise him!

Praise him riders in Rotten Row
Praise him policemen and rangers
Praise him joggers and runners
Londoners and strangers
Let everything out on this sunny day
Praise him!

maths groaners

Oh well if we're doing quizzes......Here's one I gave my end of term maths class.

Thanks! 1000000
Fo 1p ur Fo £1 ur
Bejing 10-7
0.0000000000 well, alright!
24TPO1 = B1G1F
(Them + 1") + (They'll - 1 mile)
10GBAAOAW (best said in a Lundun accent)
1 blessing, 2 blessings, 3 blessings....
The ................12" ................Grave
H2OUR212F

longest day

I get definite pagan feelings at the solstices - long to be out there at dawn watching for sunrise at stonehenge, or lighting a fire in midwinter to last the night through and make sure the sun returns. Usually of course I'm too busy to organise anything of the sort but the feelings are there.
At uni we used to have a beach party on this Saturday, combining end of term frolics with solstice celebration. There was a place called simply the cottage, right down on the Lune estuary, owned by a christian family in Lancaster who rented it out to students through the CU. It was a strange magical place, windswept, exposed, lacking in all kinds of basic facilities and almost impossible to get to, yet there was never a shortage of takers. The summer parties were officially fancy dress though not everyone dressed up. Four of us girls dressed up as vestal virgins one year and drove through Lancaster in Chris' ancient Anglia getting some very funny looks.
But what I liked best was simply staying up. Watching the fire burn down slowly, the tide creeping up over the mudflats, the sky slowly darkening to that deep midsummer northern blue, never totally dark. How I loved the incredible long evenings, still light at nearly 11 and the sun up again before three. It was part of the whole experience to sit the night through after the party, either on the beach or back on campus over drinks or best of all to get in the car and head for Clougha Pike to watch the sunrise. We watched the sun go down and the faint half circle of twilight moving slowly east, never quite fading till it brightened again.
I can't believe it's thirty years since we all met on the beach, for most of us it was the last time we were all together. Solstice comes round after solstice, June, December, June, December more quickly than ever. In HG Wells the Time machine, the traveller sees the years eventually flashing like days into a blur as he speeds up. Our days pass faster than a weavers shuttle the bible says, scarcely even a breath of the turning earth.

I've got an Ag Lab!

For those not in the genealogy know this is short for Agricultural Labourer. Before the great move to the towns in the late 1800's a huge proportion of the population was employed doing ag labbing hence the abbreviation - you see it all the time on the census documents, the enumerator's simply couldn't face writing it umpteen times a page. Once you get back to about the 1850's most people's family trees are awash with them. Apart that is from mine. I have 10 generations of townies, following an amazing range of trades. Searching back for 400 years I couldn't find a single ag lab - until now!

I finally organised myself enough to go to the Kent Record Office in Maidstone. I was following up the trail of my gt grandfather Frederick Dalton Denness who was born in the Eastry Workhouse in 1850 (strange how that phrase has acquired glamour - a bit like the Australians who all want to find themselves convict ancestors - there's even a website where you can get a 'virtual' convict ancestor). Because he was illegitimate all I have on his birth certificate was his mother's name Rebecca - nowhere else to go beyond, a genealogical cul de sac. I had always hoped that there might be something in the workhouse records to show who the father was or something to connect Rebecca to her parents so I could carry the trail back.

Going to a record office is very exciting. You have to produce piles of identity and two of the traditionally awful photos and they give you your CARN ticket. Then you negotiate a dimly lit room full of very silent serious people and whirring microfilm machines. Then you have to work out the index system, then try and understand the machine instruction, then you load the film wrongly and it whizzes off the end, then you fiddle about with the zoom control and the focus and finally ----- you get to see the records.

And there he was. I whizzed right past him at first, down simply as ' admitted male' 'Rebecca Dennis' April 21st 1850 BORN... Then I saw it was him: 'baptised 9th May Fredk Dalton 15th May discharged.' and a final nugget of information - 'charged to Parish of Ash ' . Finally I'd got a place to look up in the census. By now I've used up an hour and a half of my two hours. Was it worth ploughing through reels of illegible census? You bet!
Back to the indexes and the microfilms looking for the 1841 census for Ash. Aargh, there is a whole reel with about 10 subdividisions just for the village of Ash. I've no actual address -it's a needle in a haystack! The writing of the first division is almost invisible - and by now I've only 15 minutes left!
4 divisions in. to my astonishment, I found her. Rebecca Dennis, age 20 living with her parents William Dennis aged 70 and Mary aged 60. And what was William? An Ag Lab! Finally I have a connection with the soil! I have a rural past! My dreams of living in the country are not doomed by genetics!!
At that point the bell went, metaphorically speaking, and I had to rush to gather all my papers, return my red box, hand in my microfilm key and go.
And now I can't wait to go back. I've got another whole generation and a parish and an aproximate date of birth. I've jumped over the gap in the tracks and I'm off again. Maybe I can even track down Frederick's father...... any Daltons in Ash?? Are there more Ag Labs waiting to be discovered down in Kent. Or is William just a blip? The Victorian equivalent of a hippy dropout? I'll probably discover HIS father was the village blacksmith. Certainly rural ties didn't hold young Fred. I've followed him through the census. It appears he hoofed it out of Kent as soon as he had a trade under his belt and is next discovered living in Tottenham Court Road set up as a venetian blind maker. He married the girl next door, the daughter of a line of Gloucestershire builders and stone masons.
I'm London born and bred. As I go back in time my family tree radiates out from London like the spider web of roads that brought my ancestors in. Scotland, Ireland, Norfolk, Kent, Gloucestershire. Townies - drawn to the biggest Town of all. Artisans and tradesmen, moving from trade to trade and from town to town as circumstances and technology changed. And one lone Ag Lab.
Cheers, William!

Thoughts on Eden

'And the Lord God planted a garden in the East in Eden....' Presumably he could have just spoken it into existence like the rest of creation but he chooses to plant it instead. 6 days work is done, this garden is a leisure activity. A different kind of creation, a work of art complete with water features and trees. A place apart where he likes to walk in the cool of the day and talk with his friends. It's a wildlife friendly garden too, plenty of food plants for animals!

But you can't keep a garden static, plants grow rampant and flowers need nourishing. Working under God, man supplies the balance by tilling and keeping it. Tilling implies keeping weeds down and breaking up the soil - so is the threat of 'thistles and briars' always there? Though a weed is just a wildflower in the wrong place, perhaps it's just so vigourous it needs keeping under control - a bit like my wisteria.

Of course it all goes wrong. Mankind has to leave the garden - maybe us gardeners are just trying to get back. I don't think the leaving was part of the punishment I think it's protection. They have to leave 'lest they eat the fruit of the tree of life and live for ever' , with sin and sickness and evil loose in the world immortality could be a terrible fate, like the Greek myth of Tithonus who got immortality but forgot to ask for eternal youth as well. Death provides a last escape from suffering.

What's happened to Eden? Well by the end of the bible it looks like a city has grown up around it. The Tree of life was in the midst of the garden and here it is in the midst of the city growing on either side of the river now, and freely available. With sin and evil finally conquered eternal life is a blessing not a curse.

Saturday - monthly volunteer work party at RSPB Rainham. Every time I go it looks different which is a bit disconcerting for someone as geographically challenged as me. "I'm sure there was a car park here last time....." sort of thing. Since last month an entire classroom complex, toilets and work canteen have been relocated 1/2 mile north, the boardwalk that used to come to an abrupt end in a muddy pond now extends right across and the whole site is now enclosed in a boundary moat. All this work is done by the Wednesday volunteers. They are a cut above us pleb Saturday types. They are allowed power tools and have cool day glo jackets and hard hats. They also get to ride the diggers! Us Saturday types get to do vital skilled hands on conservation work eg foreshore litter clearing ....oh well.

Litter picking on the Thames foreshore was quite a revelation. We left the wood (tons of ) but collected about 3 skip loads of junk including 4 dustbins, 20 flower pots, 3 plastic chairs, 4 tyres, plastic bottles by the thousand, about a dozen coconuts (def not a loverley bunch), 2 milk crates, 3 bread crates, seven hard hats and a chemical toilet. 2 of the hard hats had flowers growing in them like hanging baskets.

It became something of a competition to see who could drag in the biggest/most disgusting/most unlikely piece of junk, as well as could we get the hard hats into double figures? Maybe there's a market in 2nd hand hard hats like lake golf balls. You could paint them up with A Present from the Thames Foreshore, or plant them up with flowers..... actually maybe that's an idea! I also think there's a goldmine there for an imaginative wood carver or bespoke furniture maker - there was so much gorgeous wood there, all washed silky smooth. I could hardly bear to leave it.

No birds to speak of though unless you count the half dozen little egrets on the lagoon. But little egrets are quite passe in Essex now.....

And no matter what the results, your friends love you 

Times like this you need a friend or two

Don't jump Teddy - it will be alright! 

help! Let me in! 

oh no! Ted's been waylaid by ruffians - will he get there in time? 

Teddy's on his way to his exams - oozing with confidence - or is it too much champagne?

garden bird list

12 Everyday birds
Blackbird, Blue Tit, Great Tit, Robin, Collared Dove, Dunnock, Starling, Woodpigeon, Wren, Magpie ( magpies sometimes attack nestlings but I forgive them because they also act as guards against the local cats and one day saw off the heron that was after the fish) ,
Greenfinch, Crow

9 Birds I get excited about
House Sparrow (because unbelievably they are getting rare in London)
Long-tailed Tit (they're a kind of bonus because they come by the dozen - we had a party through today)
Chaffinch (not rare but we only got them in the garden for the first time this winter)
Blackcap (mysterious unseen opera singers in the bushes next door)
Great Spotted Woodpecker (3 times - loves the peanuts)
Jay (cos they're so beautiful)
Goldcrest (tiny bird, tiny voice - sips from the pond)
Sparrowhawk (wow factor 10!)
heron (although this is negative excitement and usually entails me rushing out to see if the fish are alright)

11 Birds that fly over but don't stop
kestrel
ducks, canada geese, cormorants (heading for the lea valley)
swifts, house martins
black headed gulls, lesser black backed gulls, herring gulls (great V line skeins in the sunset)
a parakeet

It set me wondering about how garden birds have over 40+ years. House sparrows and song thrushes are the big losers - more or less vanished. Blackbirds, wood pigeons, robins, blue tits and great tits, wrens and dunnocks pretty much the same. The rarest bird we had in the garden as a child was a green woodpecker that made a brief visit to an ant nest one year. The memory has that sureal quality where you're not 100% sure it isn't a dream.
Gainers- Collared doves were a mega rarity in the uk (a pair blew in from the continent in the 1950s and the rest as they say is history). Magpies, crows, sparrowhawks and kestrels etc were still being shot. Herons - no. cormorants were seaside birds, blackcaps, chaffinches, greenfinches were country birds, goldcrests and great spots and long tailed tits were rare anywhere (now they're all over the park).
So more winners than losers all told. But the losers are big ones - how can house sparrows vanish from London?? And every spring I miss hearing the song thrush.

Kew Bridge Steam museum

This is a great place - originally a water pumping station and now full of working steam engines of all shapes and sizes. I just love steam engines working, big shiny works of art.
There was a whole commune of little engines all linked up with belt drives -helping each other along as it were; a couple of big rotative engines (like the big red one in the science museum) going round and round and some twins and triples.
But it was the beam engines (or Cornish engines we discovered they're called) that really blew my mind. Two giant engines side by side in a hall going up three floors, one was in steam and you could climb up the stairs and catwalk to be level with the beam. It was quite scary watching it go up and down just a few inches from your face. I always expect them to thump or vibrate but everything just smooth and strong, up and down, massive.
Then we followed a sign saying 'to the 90" ' . 90"? That doesn't sound very big - that's less than 3m. We found ourselves in a brick building the size and height (and style) of an average anglican church, aisles and support pillars rising into the ceiling 3 floors up, some sort of large round tank.....but no sign of the engine...where was the 90"?
Then I looked up. This engine was so big we hadn't even noticed it. We were standing right under it. Like standing under a dinosaur - oh what interesting tree trunks....why are they moving?.....oh! - The 90" isn't the length of the beam - it's the diameter of the cylinder, the beam is so big it would just about fit in the length of our garden.
In the next aisle of the church was an even bigger one (the 100"). The 90" was due to come into steam at 3pm (virtually everything else has to shut off for it to get enough steam and also it takes all day to build up pressure!) but the 100" is still being restored. I'd have loved to stay and see this giant beast in action but it would have meant waiting around and we had to go onto granma's. Really want to go back one day though.
www.kbsm.org

frog blog

Frogs are hip hop
Frogs are cool
Frogs like to sit in the sun
Round the pool

Frogs use solar energy
Frogs are green
Frogs are righteous
Squeaky non stick clean

Frogs eat whole food
Original livestyle diet and Sushi slugs,
Multi macro biotics
And low carb bugs

Frogs do yoga
Frogs do sauna
Frogs like to skinny dip together
And eye up local fauna.

Find your lotus position, frog
Empty out worldly care
Sit back and wait for the food, frog
And stare
And stare.

Frogs rock, get stoned,
do group sex,
Have too many kids
And don’t look after them properly.

I’m a big eyed friendly fella
Ain’t gonna croak yet!
Flying over?
Touch down
Come to my pad
I’m easy
No flies on me
See?
Snap!

Our 12 year old wisteria now goes right up the back wall and takes a whole day to prune in the summer. Last year during a heat wave we kept the curtains closed and it climbed in the loft window. When we pulled the curtains back there was about 5 feet of wisteria - scary triffid type moment.  

teddy's ready for his finals! 

one bit of the small garden