Why we love a bit of Africa in our parkland by Matt Ridley

This was in The Times and it was a piece about Capability Brown (Lancelot to his mum) who was born nearly 300 years ago, and was commissioned by 280 landowners to design the aesthetically perfect landscape. He tore out walls, canals, avenues, topiary and terraces to bring open parkland, with grassy tree-topped hills and glimpses of sinuous, serpentine lakes, right up to the ha-has of country houses.

He was not the first, before him were Bridgeman (great name for a landscape designer) and William Kent, in copying pictures of Arcadia by Claude, using ideas of a perfect landscape before the Fall.

What is the landscape we find most attractive and why? Appleton, a geographer, in The Experience of Landscape (1975), suggested that humans have an "atavistic sensitivity" to landscapes which offer the best chances of survival in the wild. "Habitat theory simply suggests that human beings experience pleasure in and satisfaction with landscapes insofar as these landscapes are perceived to be conducive to the realization of their biological needs." (Environmental Aesthetics: Ideas, Politics and Planning  By J. Douglas Porteous)

Apparently we need to see without being seen, or find hiding places from any animal trying to hunt us. and we need to hide from the animals we are trying to hunt. So we like wide vistas, and clumps of leafy trees. We like crags, towers and viewpoints too, to get a good "prospect".

We also like to see water, green grass and a good supply of healthy animals (the larder).

Other experiments have established that of all landscapes, humans seems to prefer to look at the African Savannah, and that this is because we evolved and survived in this landscape first (although I'm not sure this is still believed as at this time the savannah was jungle I have been told).

So the English landscape garden is typically designed to be similar to the African savannah, and this style became popular in Europe and north American too, not only in garden/ parks but also public parks and golf courses and even cemeteries. (Mara Miller 1993; the Garden as an Art)

Emmet's Garden and Chiddingstone

Chiddingstone is a tiny village but medieval and owned by the National Trust.

A well-carved porch.

Yew tree, all awry

This is the original chiding stone, where (perhaps) folks went to be chided - it is an outcrop of sandstone.

 Emmet's Garden : this is not a good time of year for gardens. This garden did have an interesting system for redistributing water with a self-powered pump - a pump operated by the weight of the water in the pond. This is the pond, and the walk was very muddy.

Knole and Sissinghurst

At Knole we walked around the park, which is basically a mausoleum for trees. I can't begin to tell you haw annoyed I get with the National Trust's absurd determination to keep every scrap of dead tree in situ. It's just horrible. But it was a lovely bright day and not too muddy.

There are 800 deer at Knole, very tame. There are fallow deer and sika. The deer have to be culled every year.

At Sissinghurst I completely forgot to take any photos. There was not much open but we could go up the tower and were also able to do a circular walk, which took in the vegetable garden. The rhubarb is already growing!! and the posts supporting the raspberry canes are even more enormous than at Chartwell, like six foot tall telegraph poles, with wires under tension. There were some very decorative sprouts, purple, but not looking good enough to eat.

We went to Kent for some muddy walks

at this time we usually go to the Lake District but ha! we cannot so easily be predicted. The poor Lakes District is flooded and will be so boggy.  Better to go for 2 days to Kent - about 2 hours drive away to walk in the mud there and watch TV from the comfort of an enormous hotel bed. But I hated the hotel bed. It was very large and very hard and made me feel as though I was lying on a table for some kind of inspection.

So we went to Chartwell and there was not much to see but we looked at the vegetable garden, which is new, to see how they do their raspberries. In our allotment we planted 15 canes just before Christmas. We planted them in 2 lines. Clearly they are meant to be supported because a kind person had gone to the 2 original canes we planted (to make the plot look less empty) and hammered in a small log behind each. At Chartwell the supports were like fence posts and the wires were heavy gauge but not under tension.

We also saw Churchill's paintings in the studio, on a gloomy day with inadequate lighting, and I was slightly cross that the National Trust don't feel as though it would be in keeping to light the pictures properly. You can see there are pictures on shelves, but that's about all. But perhaps Churchill was right about them, perhaps they are not, most of them, very good? But they are very much to my taste.

Here is a tree at Chartwell, quite near the house, which was a really good unusual tree. I am afraid my pictures are blurred.

Cryptomeria Japonica

Cryptomeria

Genus

Cryptomeria is a monotypic genus of conifer in the cypress family Cupressaceae, formerly belonging to the family Taxodiaceae. It includes only one species, Cryptomeria japonica. It is endemic to Japan, where it is known as sugi. The tree is often called Japanese cedar in English, though the tree is not related to the true cedars.

Happy Boxing Day!

Boxing Day may be much nicer than Christmas Day as you don't need to eat so much food, and you can go out and do the things you like doing. There are fewer family games and quizzes. And yesterday we went for a short bedraggled walk in the rain, rather muddy and I had forgotten to take waterproof boots with me, but today looks gusty and bracing.

I got a great number of books for Christmas which is lovely. I received from F: Weeds, by R Mabey, which I will read with recourse to the internet because it doesn't have illustrations of all the weeds. I have Plants from Roots to Riches by K Willis and C Fry: which does have illustrations and (some of them I saw quite recently in a programme about the history of gardens with Monty Don which was very informative) and this book I can't wait to get to grips with. But first I must read The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim (1922) for the book group. I thought this would be awfully drippy because I saw a film of it recently in which the women were all equally gorgeous in their long, floppy dresses and the whole mood was very slushy. But the book is a better experience as it is quite slyly acerbic and as frank as it can be about sex without actually mentioning sex and women's attitudes to it. I think Elizabeth von Arnim is quite an amazing person. I am not surprised she had an affair with H.G. Wells; although he was appalling to his wives (bad point) he could cope with women who wanted to be open, honest and experimental with sex, which shows the courage of his convictions about feminism.

 The next Book Club book is called Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. A man called Tom suggested this as I said I would like to read a serious book. Tom is one of two men at the book club and he seems extremely well-read and well-informed.

The book that's driving me mad at the moment is Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name. I have read it all out of order because I kept skipping ahead because it's so long and wordy, but I must read it  again properly to make sure I haven't missed anything so I can't really say I have finished it, but I sort of hate it because the protagonist is making such dangerous decisions and one feels menaced. I have part three of this series to read as well. Italian torture!

I have also had an interesting understanding about Virginia Woolf. I read all her pieces of memoir writing in a book called Moments of Being, and I loved her style and her calm air of understanding what went on about her, then the tragedies, and how she felt about them, her judgements and her love for those she lost. I read it all twice. And in tandem with this, I read Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, which I am nowhere near the end of. It gives you quite a shock to realised that Mrs W. was an unreliable narrator, because she left out the fact that she herself was often very ill physically, in pain and unable to eat, and that during periods of her life she was insane, psychotic or otherwise mentally ill - was violent to Leonard, who had huge strength of character in taking her on (quite the reverse of his tiny physicality). Mrs W doesn't mention what a pain in the neck she had been to Vanessa during their adolescence, and to her sister Stella who had charge of her during her first madness, and how people said: "It's very bad for Stella to have Ginny with her all the time." I imagine she had a doleful intensity that could make anyone feel depressed. From the standpoint of her own memoir, Virginia is a rock of sense! I imagine when she read this out to the Memoir club*, Vanessa was sitting in a corner either laughing quietly to herself or shaking her head and rolling her eyes, sketching or designing something all the while: Vanessa went to listen but always kept her hands busy. Vanessa was a remarkable person in herself, and Virginia could have done nothing, I think, if Vanessa had not been so staunchly determined to be an artist and to be a Bohemian, because Virginia was too weak to do all that without her.

We gave the daughter a pair of Clarks stout leather boots for Xmas, (although she was faintly tempted by Doc Martens), also party clothes and ridiculous shoes (for nightclubs), a jumper, a purse, a scarf - oh, many things, it was fun to get her so many things!

*A Bloomsbury thing: Lytton, Morgan, Maynard, Leonard, Duncan, Clive, Virginia and Vanessa, maybe some others.

Post Paris: The Greens are disappointed by the government's Energy Bill

Caroline Lucas, M.P. for the Greens, says:

 

"It’s difficult to think of a piece of legislation that is less fit-for-purpose, if the Government were serious about turning warm words in the Paris climate agreement into action.

Perhaps it’s little wonder that the Government decided to delay the Bill’s second reading in the Commons until after the Paris climate talks were over. 

 

Yes, the UK’s coal fired power stations must be phased out – but they must be replaced with renewable energy - not gas. That means rethinking the raft of mind-bogglingly backward policy decisions we’ve seen since the election – reversing solar subsidy cuts and reinstating the zero carbon homes policy for starters.

 

That should be the focus of any Energy Bill in 2016. The Paris climate agreement provides an even stronger case for MPs to refuse to give the Bill a second reading, reject it in its entirety, and demand the Government goes back to the drawing board.

 

Looking ahead to 2016, we’ve got some big fights to come. The climate movement will have a key role to play in holding politicians to account.

 

The Paris climate talks failed in part because of the influence of fossil fuel corporations over government. Those same oil and gas companies have a death grip on the UK’s democratic decision making too. Nowhere is this more obvious than the trade deals being struck, which threaten to undermine efforts to cut carbon emissions as well as our democracy.

 

But the strength and breadth of the mobilisation across civil society we are seeing is more powerful than corporations and their friends in Government realise.

 

Unusually, a similar sentiment was to be found in the Economist, with their verdict on Paris concluding:

 “Genuine concern about the climate, public opinion and international pressure produced the pledges that were made for Paris. The hope is that similar bottom-up processes, rather than unenforceable UN mandates, will drive up the level of action in decades to come.”

Green World Edition 90: letter about staying in the European Union

Asking why the Greens support staying in Europe - a good point by Harold Immanuel

"The punishment of both Greece and Syriza demonstrates that solidarity - social, economic or political - is not what the EU is fundamentally about. Rather, it is about the three pillars of free movement of capital, goods and labour. Supporting free movement of capital is not a sustainable position for a radical party. Nor do arguments about keeping the peace, free movement of people, social policy, taxation, subsidiarity and solidarity stand up to serious scrutiny. Within the EU, it's difficult to see how many of our policies could be implemented."

I like the idea of being in a group with other Europeans because of our shared history and values and actually, practical intelligence! (I mean, common sense not spying). I feel that with so many groups and leaders, one or two of them must have some good ideas. I mean, put into practice,  good for the people of Europe, and indeed, the rest of the world. But I am absolutely repelled by the idea of TTIP and how it is being discussed in secret. What is going on in the EU?? Some failure of basic democratic principles.

Sorry about re-sharing previous posts:

This may go on for some time. This is because, having changed the names attached to my blog, I have broken all the links to it, and I will have to start again with those - some of the posts became quite popular (in a minor way.)

 

I changed the name of my blog so that I could write more freely about more subjects, and so random people I meet can't look me up on the internet. Previously, I was quite careful about what I wrote and that was fine, but now I feel too constricted. However, I wouldn't have done it if I had known I was about to stop all the traffic!

Cornus at the Savill Garden

 

Cornus in the Valley Garden

 

Daffodils last week!

 

Acer conspicuous - a name easy to remember

 

 

 

Green World, Edition 90: Letter about Thomas Piketty

From Chris Heywood:

"... review of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (GW89) was very useful, and I would like to add that Piketty is saying something much more radical than perhaps comes over in the review.

"The new-liberal consensus would have us believe that market systems must in the long term lead to equilibrium and that most of the economic problems that arise can be solved by perfecting the operation of market and reducing the power of the state to intervene in market mechanisms.

"But Piketty, on the contrary, deploys extensive evidence to demonstrate that over a long timescale the market will by its very nature produce great inequality, when r, the rate of return on capital, is greater than g, the annual percentage rate of growth of the economy - that is, when r>g.

"Piketty shows that in the last 200 years of capitalism, with the notable exception of the period between the wars and from 1945 to 1980, r has been greater than g. The rate of economic growth has been close to one percent, and the rate of return on capital has been close to five per cent. The result has been the greatest levels of inequality ever experienced.

"This by no means exhausts the full extent of Piketty's contribution to our understanding of global capitalism ... 

I haven't read this book but I am already convinced by the argument. I can just sense it, not here in the suburbs, but in London ...

The Conference season, October 2015

Owen Jones attended the Tory conference to report on it for the Guardian. He gets a good reaction from everyone who knows who he is, which must be quite pleasing for him. (he is very baby-faced and disarming: Have a look at his interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg)

"On Tuesday, Theresa May incurs the wrath even of the Telegraph because of her inflammatory inti-immigration keynote speech, a tirade somewhat oddly entitled "a beacon of hope". Many of the delegates are happy with it, but there are exceptions. When I ask 25-year-old Rory White-Andrews - a corporate finance lawyer in the City - how he feels about it, his response is instant and brutal. "Disgusting. I think immigrants contribute a huge amount to this country and frankly we need more people coming in. I thought it was horrible."

"The atmosphere is peculiar. "It's remarkably flat, complacent", says White-Andrews. Nearly everyone I speak to admits to having been deeply surprised when the Tories pulled off an absolute majority in May. Conor Allcock, 17, says he felt "smug" about it.

"Liam Fox, an ex-minister and a flagbearer for the Tory right... [said] "The task in the second half of the parliament will be holding the party together in the referendum, and that very much depends on how we treat each other. People who want to stay in the EU are not traitors to the country, and people who want to leave are not idiots."

Owen found many Tories who were intensely opposed to Osborne's stance on Tax Credits - (and when finally the Lords did the huge favour to us all of throwing that policy out, Osborne wisely decided to drop it).

"Truth is, protests aside, there isn't much buzz at conference."

Frankie Boyle attended all the conferences in order to be witty or at least humorous about them. He is an unlikeable man but his comments were very perceptive:

"After the second world war, Melanesian islanders formed cargo cults near abandoned airfields. They thought that if they carried out the rituals they had observed the troops performing at the American air force bases, planes would land. So they would march up and down in improvised uniforms performing parade ground drills with wooden rifles, believing that if the rites were performed correctly the planes would return and bring them cargo. I only mention this as a useful point of comparison for the Liberal Democrat conference. An isolated tribe going through the formal motions of something they think will bring votes, failing to understand that their actions are meaningless and vestigial. ....

"Labour's conference featured quite an impressive run-up by Jeremy Corbyn, tackling TV interviewers like a soothing GP talking to a hypochondriac. There was remarkably little infighting at the conference, as happens when a party realises it needs to put divisions aside and show solidarity to become electable, or, indeed, when two separate halves of a party loathe each other so much that they have to go to different sets of meetings.

Listening leadership

"Corbyn took to the stage with his head like a haunted tennis ball, and the general air of a pigeon that had inherited a suit. ... The new Labour leader insisted, "Leadership is about listening." If leadership were about listening, the great political speeches would have been a little different. Churchill saying "Can you tell me what you'd like to do on the beaches?"...

"Corbyn has had trouble persuading his MPs that nuclear weapons are bad. Then again, he hasn't had much success persuading his MP's that Tories are bad. There seems to be a real split on Trident in the party between extreme elements who don't think we should recommission it, and more moderate voices who want to retain the ability to heat hundreds of thousands of people's skeletons to the surface temperature of the planet Mercury, in case 1970s Russia tries to attack us through some kind of Stargate.

Jobs - or nuclear holocaust?

"Len McCluskey announced that the union Unite would block plans to scrap Trident in an attempt to protect jobs. It's a tough call, jobs over a potential nuclear holocaust. But perhaps McCluskey is right: if there is an accident, there will be jobs aplenty. Full employment for the six people left in the UK. And they'll be happy to pay their Unite dues when they find out they have got a job for life (which may only be for less than a week) as they become their own farmer, cook, builder, doctor....

"There are obviously huge differences between Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, and it's refreshing to see a leader mess up some of his speech not because he's a freakshow, but because he simply doesn't care. As I watched the standard conference procedure of people applauding things they would fast forward on YouTube, it occurred to me that this conference may have accidentally stumbled upon the one message that might reassure British voters: that you can have enormous change without puncturing the boredom.

The conservatives

There was a ring of steel around the conference. Ironically, it's the last steel the north will be seeing for a very long time. Tory conference seemed to be all about saying how much you believe in British values, then immediately contradicting yourself: "This country has always welcomed migrants ... but we're full up."

The first big hitter to take the stage was George Osborne, a man who is not afraid to bark at his hairdresser "Demented syphilitic emperor!" and his tailor: "Prom night at Slytherin!"

The hair

The suit

"Osborne insisted that the Conservatives are the "party of labour" to a television audience largely consisting of the unemployed. ...

"Of course, it's absurd that we trust the Tories with our day-to-day reality, as so many of them don't really inhabit it. Why elect people to run our schools and hospitals who choose not to go to those schools and hospitals?..."

"Admittedly, the Conservatives are generally more persuasive orators than their Labour counterparts, perhaps a skill developed by spending school holidays trying to lure father out from behind his Daily Telegraph. Jeremy Hunt said that he wants Britain's workers to work harder, like the Chinese. Hunt's wife is Chinese and is often heard muttering, "Christ, this is hard work."

"Then came Theresa May, a woman who exudes all the compassion of stage 4 bone cancer, talking of her party's "proud history" of helping vulnerable people...

"The whole sorry season finished with David Cameron, of all people, giving a speech about equality. A speech blatantly at right angles to everything he has every said or done...

"It was a speech he could give because he knows it simply doesn't matter. TTIP be will coming in soon and all of this will be rendered symbolic. Our new rulers will be corporations. Looking down at Britain from business class, all the party conferences - and the protesters marching up and down outside them - will look like little cargo cults. We will be allowed to keep our political rituals because they have an entertainment value, and because somebody needs to give speeches and answer questions. That's not something our new rulers will be doing. They will be glimpsed only occasionally, stepping briskly into waiting cars. Our elected officials will soon fill a function much like the one the media fills now, as mere agents of a greater power. With no other role to play, our politicians will continue doing what they know: waving to the cameras, forcing a smile, hoping to keep us paying attention to their strange, dull ceremonies."

By Tim Lott in the Guardian some time ago: Home improvements

I am having a big chucking out session in my study, and when I come upon papers I have saved I am taking action by writing them up or binning them.

Here are words of wisdom by Tim Lott:

"What are you doing with your home right now: Some fresh carpets, a lick of paint, double glazing: A new kitchen, perhaps? A loft conversion? Got to be worth the investment.

...

"Is any other country so obsessed with home improvements? Much of Europe simply rents, so there isn't a great need or potential to knock down walls, or even freshen the paintwork. ...

"If I totted up the amount we have spent on our place and converted it instead into experiences - say spending time in five-star hotels in the tropics - we could have lived a life of opulent leisure.

"House improvement are like any other consumer durable - they are only briefly satisfying. The designer kitchen is very quickly just a place to cook and eat, the taps that you agonised over choosing are just devices for the delivery of water. Eventually, you begin to realise that all the money you have invested in "self-expression" and "individuality" leaves you with a house that looks pretty much like everybody else's house in the area. It is a race to see who can conform best, most quickly.

"Perhaps we spend all this money because the house stands in for meaning. If you are working on your house, you don't have to work on your relationship, and you don't have to think about the purpose of getting up in the morning to go to work, because the purpose is clear - to buy an Eames chair for the lounge.

"Of course, the logic is impeccable - you end up with a beautiful home you can be at ease in, which you have increased the value of by your "investment". The only trouble is, I don't remember being any happier than when I first moved into our house......

"In the meantime, I have spent many sleepless nights wondering how I am going to pay for it all...

"Home improvement is really a branch of shopping with the added bonus that, though it costs money, it also (theoretically) produces money. But if I had my time all over again, I would doubt that it was worth it. A wise man would be free of worry, and work on their relationship instead. If only I were that man."

There, I just thought that was interesting. It is not a problem we have had as there are many things we are not allowed to do with our house because of the residents' committee. We are not allowed to extend at the front or change the appearance of the front of the house in any way, which means we can't make the improvements we would like to make. In the meantime, one of us does a lot of sport and the other does less strenuous hobbies: I am sorry to say that working on our relationship is something that happens only when we are decorating or gardening ... in short: doing home improvements!

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

The words piled like particles

a termite mound of child-world, a nest

of loves and fears, no choices,

the hands of those who might be

friends. The dark stairs,

the cellar gratings, the railings,

the women washing the steps.

The story of the climb, one

step and a halt, wait, the

friend has strayed, is stuck;

oh, she has gone ahead, hurry,

catch her, move that foot,

Get up!

The story was anger and anxiety,

the thwarted desire to be loved.

The story was slapping and punching,

an attack with a metal bar, a car,

A dangerous white car, and a red car

taking a slow route to the cage.

 ***

  

The author writes in Italian. The Italians use a lot more words than the British. They can use a vast number of words to say the same thing, seemingly without repeating themselves exactly. So I liken the words to the particles in a termite mound. The writer seems to feel a great desire to narrate the whole "truth" and leave out no detail that might be germane to the story.

This book tells the story of a girl who is the most gifted of her family, and because it's the 20th century, post 2nd world war, it is not impossible for her to make progress, through education, away from her humble neighbourhood in Naples. But she has a friend who is like a mirror - equally intelligent, perhaps even more gifted, whose story is entwined with hers, but is very different. Their lives are enmeshed in a neighbourhood of other families and these people come in and out of their stories.

At this time, a girl might sense that her mother is more ignorant than herself and have very clear ambitions to use her talents to go further. The parents have to be prevailed upon to be selfless, and who does the prevailing? The teacher. The local teacher was given extraordinary respect and influence, which seems to have gone now. But for this girl, the interference of the local primary teacher changed her life. But in her extraordinary progress she makes many mistakes which she might not have made if she had respected her mother enough to confide in her, or trusted another woman. But she comes from a neighbourhood where trust is uncommon.

(Now I think, as a child I wanted to know more than my mother. These days the children don't want to know as much as their parents, which is terribly sad. They seem to prefer to skate along the surface of life rather than know how to analyse and question, or how to mend things that are broken. They do not like to be self-critical. )

One of the interesting motivations for the narrator's progress is her capacity to compare her own efforts with those of others - even the chatty letter she writes from her teenage holiday is compared with shame to the well-written reply that her friend writes. In short, she is self-critical and at times feels ashamed and discouraged, but always she learns from her friends and makes every effort to come up to their level.

Even while the girls are very young there is a murder in the neighbourhood. The man whom their fathers hate is killed. They know details of the killing almost as though they had been witnesses. As the girls grown up they learn the way the neighbourhood works: that some of their social circle have money and power and some have neither, that there is a pecking order as vigorously - and viciously - maintained as that of a wolf pack, and they have to decide whether they want to remain within the pack - the pack being all the men they know - or take their chances elsewhere. We discover that Italians don't pay their taxes because they don't worry about the government - they have enough to worry about in the form of  a local organisation called the Camorra.

What is wonderful is that this series of books is being taken seriously by most critics, while formerly traditional male critics would have dismissed it out of hand as being interesting only to "women's studies".

Lack of Democracy

Recently I have been very lazy, politically. I was going to go to London to campaign last weekend for Green issues, I had it in my diary for weeks, but then my husband got us invited to a friend's house for Sunday lunch, so we did a walk in the Surrey hills, Sunday lunch, film with our friends; and I never went to London.

I emailed my MP about the new deal for Junior Doctors and I got a lengthy and really irrelevant cut-and -paste reply. this is because my MP is Philip Hammond. Yes, the Foreign Secretary is my M.P. and before he went to the Foreign Office he was the Minister of Defence. You can imagine how excited he is every day now that we are bombing Syria and Iraq! what can make a man/woman feel more important than having people kill people because you say so! He is, in effect, the King!

(He felt pretty important for the years before his rise to power, as he always got around in a chauffeur-driven posh car even if he was just visiting the Girl Guides summer fete.)

So although I would like to tell my M.P. my strong feelings about the war and TTIP, there is really no point. He is not representing my views, no way. He is representing the diametrical opposite of my views. Caroline Lucas is representing my views, and I am always glad to hear her doing so. But democracy - don't make me laugh. Boo hoo.

Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership - as it says in The Week, Boring but Important

The Members of the European Parliament have held up this trade deal, much to the annoyance of the capitalists of two continents. But they can only do so much because it is being negotiated IN SECRET -why??? by the European Commission and ???some body from the USA.

The idea is that Europe will be tied in to a free trade area with the United States. As far as I can see it makes Europe part of the United States, as far as business is concerned, and the Tory government is all in favour of this. But let's look at the downside.

Yes, it would reduce trade tariffs. But trade tariffs are there to protect local economies. For example, US orange juice may be cheaper to produce than Spanish orange juice, (let's say). So to protect Spanish orange growers, there may be a tariff on US orange juice. Is this such a bad thing? Isn't it good to see a traditional fruit being grown in the place it's always been grown? Better than seeing nothing at all being grown.

The treaty also bans state monopolies. Yes, it is completely against state-run enterprise such as the NHS, or any state-owned utilities - gas and water, for example, which always seem to me to be in need of state ownership to be efficiently and fairly distributed. So the current operation of the NHS would become illegal under this treaty.

there will also be, under this treaty, an Investor-State dispute settlement, which founds a SECRET COURT to allow businesses to sue states that "hinder potential profits". this sounds to me like selling the population down the river to be slaves to the profiteers.

That sounds potentially worrying. What else is in the treaty?

Environmental campaigners have raised concerns: TTIP would bring the EU's food and environmental safety regulations in line with the US's less strict laws.

In order to align the EU and laxer US rules, the agreement could weaken European and UK regulation in areas including genetically modified crops, chemicals in cosmetics and meat treated with growth hormones. There is widespread opposition to this environmental aspect of the treaty, especially in Germany and France which are major opponents of genetically modified products.

For example, the EU bans 1,200 chemicals from cosmetics, whereas the US bans just 12

The above paragraph comes from the Telegraph

So, then. To all intents and purposes the EU becomes part of the US, because all our carefully thought -out protections against this and that chemical are thrown out at a stroke. I can't understand why the EU wants to do this to us??

Of course, the Conservative government can't wait to ratify this treaty because it loves the USA and  enslavement to the capitalist market place. Labour would re-negotiate I think.

Poncirus Trifoliata (Hardy Orange) (Chinese Orange)

This is a very ordinary looking shrub. You can walk past it without noticing it at all, but at this time of year it is losing its fruit - which are like mandarins but the skin isn't waxy, but downy. If you bring them inside they smell wonderful, like jasmine. The stems have thorns on but these are large and green and again, not very noticeable, but they are a bit like fingernails in the way they grow out of the stem.

.

Not bored of Virginia Water yet

Walking there on dull days and bright days and still finding new trees and views. There are a number of different paths. I am really looking forward to seeing this garden all the year round. Gardening with trees has been done here very well; this is an old established landscape garden. I also enjoy seeing people enjoying the place in different ways.

the heather garden - old-fashioned, of course, but really well done.

Branches weighed down by red berries

This is from the winter garden which I discovered on Friday.

Hampton Court

A good radio programme, and other entertainments

Michael Frayn's Matchbox theatre  LISTEN NOW!!

Very funny - and beautiful - dialogue between Joanna Lumley and Roger Allam. Also enjoyed David Attenborough as himself.

The Lady in the Van

Miss Shepherd was very unreasonable.

Maggie Smith is actually still very soignee

Alan Bennett makes London look like a village.

Took my mother to see this yesterday - she is a long-time admirer of Alan Bennett. She really likes his Northern accent, his modest demeanour, his down-homeliness. Maggie Smith was amazingly good. She is an old lady playing an old lady - but there is a lot of physicality involved - and a lot of mixed and confused emotion for her to convey - and she is brilliant. I like the post-modern Alan Bennetts talking to each other, and the street of arty people (including the afore-mentioned Roger Allam. I'm afraid I thought it went on too long.

Spectre

this is an excellent Bond with all the usual elements: a car chase, a shoot out, a fist fight, a torture scene, a woman (who is far too young for him; Daniel Craig seems to be embarrassed by his own un-avuncular intentions), an aerial chase, a race against the clock, a life-saving gadget, some humour and a tense visit to the secret headquarters of an evil empire. It takes place in some wonderful locations and, of course, London. It has one unusual element: that is:  Q, M, another scrabble letter and Miss Moneypenny all come out and help Bond when the chips are down. There is something a bit political about it but it is quite subtle: something about not trusting the new just because it's new. A new technology may look slick but have a sly purpose we do not want - very post Edward Snowden.

Suffragettes

This was another script by the amazing Abi Morgan. It showed that women were powerless when they fought for the vote. They had no rights over their own children, they were subject to abuse and couldn't fight back. The vote didn't do everything for them but it gave them a start in winning equal rights. And hoorah for Meryl Streep who came on and showed what a bit of (actually a lot of) charisma can do for a cause.

HBC doesn't often play intelligent and earnest - it suits her.

There are too many people without hats in this film. At this time, everyone wore a hat.

I miss Nicola Walker

In "River"she was friendly and funny and always made River smile. In "Unforgotten" she was thorough, thoughtful and kind. Twice a week for 5 weeks she was unmissable.

I wrote about "River" before - in the end it turned out to be about motherhood as much as anything - a mother's dilemma about working/ not working. Probably Abi Morgan would say she wasn't commenting, just observing what goes on in the world of working mothers with highly demanding careers. But the whole thing - looking at what his mother's desertion had done to River, what it had done to another character - did add up to a comment on this. If you want a healthy society, you need mothers (or fathers) who will commit a fair amount of themselves - their time AND their attention and their intelligence - to parenting. This means part-time working and lousy pay and probably ruining your career. I did it, and what's more I think it was worth it, but I'm not a greedy person. I don't expect much.

I have got a fab new computer

Although I am, of course, pleased with my new computer, which has fast processing and good sound, for example, which my last one (an HP) didn't have (the old Toshiba was better), there are so many teething troubles with it.

1. I can't authorise it for iTunes - this is a real pest. There is no option on iTunes accounts to do this. It's greyed out.

2. It has put all my photos on my phone!! All of them!! I never wanted that!

3. I put Google Chrome on and immediately it got a nuisance file attached to it - Mysearchdial - and the only way to get rid of it was to get rid of Google Chrome.  I am supposed to be using Edge, the new MS browser which is apparently very good, but a little message came up that this wasn't working at the moment and I would have to go back to IE. So I spent quite a bit of time adapting IE to suit me. I'm still doing it. I just adapted the zoom size.

These are some troubles but there have been far more. The main problem is that it wants to work with my phone and that seems like a good idea but it just ends up confusing me. I hate my phone.

How to be both by Ali Smith

This book is a like a fugue; with patterns to it popping up here and there and you don't notice how the themes work together until you've finished it and flick back.... I thought I would try to finish it this morning and then write something about it but I discover it's more complicated than I thought so I will have to read it again. And what could be better than that?

No, it's not so much a fugue as a crossword puzzle, where the across clues and the down clues are both part of the whole making something that interlocks. It's the interlocking that is fun.

I thought I liked the part with the modern girls best - I love Georgia - but then I started to love the Renaissance Italy part too : the monologue of a self-taught painter who is expert at being both male and female.

A taste:

"In the making of pictures and love -both - time itself changes its shape : the hours pass without being hours, they become their own opposite, they become timelessness, they become no time at all. "

A larger taste:

"cause nobody knows us : except our mothers, and they hardly do (and also tend disappointingly to die before they ought).

Or our fathers, whose failings while they're alive (and absences after they're dead) infuriate.

Or our siblings, who want us dead too cause what they know about us is that somehow we got away with not having to carry the bricks and stones like they did all those years.

Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves

- except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends.

Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineering of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark."

All that is so good!

and another bit:

"but in all honesty, when I looked at my own pictures they surprised even me with their knowledge : ....cause the life of painting and making is a matter of double knowledge so that your own hands will reveal a world to you to which your mind's eye, your conscious eye, is often blind."

 What I didn't know until I finished it and explored online is that the painter is based on a real painter in that the paintings which are described are real, and gosh, they are gorgeous. I'm afraid Ali Smith may have started a flood of tourism to the place, Ferrara, which is described in the book. And while the girls in one story need to write something about the difference between empathy and sympathy, Ali Smith shows us the great writerly quality of empathy in her ability to look at the pictures and find/create a personality for the painter behind them - an extraordinary person, a person, in a way, rather like Ali Smith!! I guess that's what empathy does, it only can go as far as the imagination can go.

I hoped at one point that we were going to get a spy story, a story where a mysterious death is explained, but that didn't happen.

But here is art passing itself on: one artist inspiring another to imagine places, people, conversations, a way of life; in all its brightness, vigour, meannesses and horror.  And when that inspiration has had its day, it goes underground, down into the earth.

But it hasn't quite gone.

The girl, Georgia, in How to be Both, does something profoundly weird, out of grief and a sense of loss.  She patiently spends time in tracking down her mother's mysterious (but beautiful) friend, follows her to her house, and then sits outside her house day after day. This is very strange. I can see she does it out of a longing to be connected with her mother. And I can see that this is demented behaviour but I now realise that I have done almost exactly the same thing, in a way. Georgia seems OK. She goes to counselling but this seems to have very limited effect. Georgia is NOT letting go. She is thinking "I will hold on to my thoughts of my mother at all costs because my mother was my most precious thing." Whilst reading I didn't even notice that I have been just as crazy, given the situation.