A crisis in Space

Lately, backstage at the Erudite Space has turned into something of an obstacle course. Our crates of donations perch even higher and more precariously than usual, with bags more sitting in corners, under desks and even lurking in the dumb waiter. And still donated wares come. I start recalling the pictures in Dr Seuss books. No matter how rapidly we sort them, label them, sneak a quick peak at some of them (yes we've all been tempted...well, mostly me, actually), and then put them out on display...and indeed, no matter how enthusiastically our punters buy them, the piles still grow and the room for manoevre becomes ever more thin, divided and frankly triangular.

And then the lad who brings donations from the city's various drop-off points turns up with an entire carload of books. As I help unload, I notice what interesting tomes they are, and in what excellent condition compared with the usual fare from that quarter. It transpires they come, not from the drop-off points, but from a Canadian family, who are quitting Blighty and returning to the Great White Space.

"I can't blame them, with the weather we've been having..." and therein lies, apparently, the cause of the Erudite Space's predicament. Our sister shop on the coast, who usually take our surplus if we think it'll appeal to the Holiday Reader, are presently flooded out. There is no alternative route for excess donations that will still sell, and so here they all sit with us, patiently waiting 'til the coast is clear.

Instant Political Slogan Generator

We thought we'd get this one in first, here at Space, because it's best to get the campaign launched in good time. All that's needed to use it is a Birthday and a Surname, then simply look up the words in the table below.

Street corner gang

This may (or may not) be the World's Smallest Forest Garden. It measures about 2 metres by 2 metres and, to cap it all, the high wall to the left is shielding most of it from the sun, most of the time. So it is effectively North-facing.

The cast of characters, in order of altitude, includes:

1 Bramley apple tree (producer of prizewinning apples)
3 Redcurrant bushes (producers, with the help of some local strawbs, of prizewinning wine)
1 Blackcurrant bush
1 Gooseberry bush
Lemon-balm
Lavender
Sorrel
Alpine strawberry ground-cover
1 Bramble (rather drastically cut-back, so not really visible)
3 Garlics (subterranean, ditto)

In five years I think I have had to pull up a total of 1 (one) weed.

The wall behind it protects it from the road and its many users. Including a Tesco van which recently (and very audibly) reversed into it.

Spring and Autumn Annals

The trouble with Spring is, it's becoming too unreliable.

It has always been the case that it will lure you out under false pretences, whether you're a tree that blossoms in early sunshine only to have your finest artwork destroyed by late frost, or a Lunchista who steps out into the bright new day in a teeshirt only to have her limbs bitten by a cold wind.

But now there's a new dimension to the unreliable-ness of spring: will it be drought or flood? Or, like last year in these parts, both?

And that is why I have taken to planting seeds in the autumn instead. Put it this way: most seeds appear in the autumn. Where, then, does Mother Nature in her wisdom suppose that they should spend the winter? Should they nip over to the Southern hemisphere and reproduce twice as fast? Dematerialise altogether for six months? Lay up in a friendly kitchen drawer somehow, in the billions of years before kitchen drawers were invented?

There's a Kale plant in our front garden that's been there for so many years it has practically turned into a tree. Including the winter two years back when the front garden got down to 8 below zero. Just this year it decided it had had enough of producing lots of lovely green leaves, and went to seed: perhaps because some Celebrity has declared Kale to be a Superfood, and got it running scared.

And so the seeds find themselves planted on the Plot, next to the bed where the broad beans have just come up, and just down from the purple sprouting broccoli (which has also just come up), because it was a ludicrously lukewarm 11 degrees today and I could dig the bed in my shirtsleeves.

The one concession I have made to the fact that winter can be tough (and birds can get hungry), is to cover them with black netting.

Economic Growth

Apparently some Economic Growth has been spotted. But since it was the Chancellor of the Exchequer who allegedly spotted it, and his job depends on producing it, I think we can discount that as pure fabrication.

Unless, of course, they have been looking into the kitchen of Chateau Lunchista, wherein stand cases of newly-bottled Rosé wine from the kit I bought all those months ago. 

They can't tax it, but the quid pro quo is, I'm not allowed to sell it. Welcome to the Gift Economy.

Unsportsmanlike behaviour

Here is a model of an ideal, competitive market in, for example, the banking sector. The "winners" are those who make lots of money from sensible business decisions, and whose assets are deemed, by a referee, to be sound.

Note that the field is level, and that all players are starting from the same position, are unarmed, and none is attempting to bribe the referee. Like I said: "ideal".

Shortly after this picture was taken, however, things started to go awry. The three pigs on the right obtained an AK-47 and used it to extort extra money to compensate for terrible business decisions they had made in the past. There is also a distinct possibility that one or more of them passed the referee a backhander with a polite request to declare a rival's assets unsound (the brown envelope is just outside the picture).

Bacon buttie, anyone?

Where has all the Weather gone?

There exists the phenomenon of "whiskers" in electronic circuits. This doesn't mean that the cat will spill food all over them, but rather that the solder joints and other tiny metal bits will, for reasons best known to themselves, grow microscopic spindles in the same way that crystals do. Over time these spindles change the way a circuit performs, and eventually a pair may touch, causing a short-circuit and the end of life as we know it for the device. By a horrible irony, the more complex and compact the device, the smaller are the gaps between circuit components and the sooner this breakdown is likely to happen.

This may, or may not, have been the fate that overtook our little weather station after a decade of faithful service. And so when somebody asked that usually unanswerable question "Is there anything in particular you'd like for Christmas?", for once I had an answer.

Meteorologically speaking, Space has gone up in the world. Besides temperature, humidity and pressure trend, the new device also measures wind speed and direction, and rainfall. The last two months, though, had been so full of all these things that we didn't have a chance to install the various pieces until last weekend.

But since then there's been no rain, no wind and no change in pressure.

It was exactly the same when I bought the newest water-barrel: its delivery and subsequent installation ushered in a drought of legendary proportions, meaning that it was several weeks before I learned whether it worked at all. Since then it has spent some of its time frozen solid (to its credit, it survived intact) and most of the rest of the time full but surplus to requirements.

The solar panels, when first put up, were privileged to meet an historically sunless August. The Plot, likewise, has just seen two of the worst years out of the past generation for actually growing any food.

There are times when I feel I ought to install or acquire some appliance which can only work in the event of something dreadful happening. It would be a sort of three-dimensional equivalent of Insurance.

All ideas wecome.