Now I've got weed envy

Richard Mabey, author of Weeds, has clearly been taking an interest in weeds for his whole life. This is not something he has learned about just for this book. So he knows the weeds that used to grow in his garden and those that now grow. He guesses where they came from and how they got to Norfolk. It's a fascinating knowledge, enriching his life. I feel sad that my own ground produces so few weeds. Even chick-weed is a bit of a novelty in my garden. The odd dandelion appears - mainly my weeds are grass growing where it shouldn't be growing.

Of course, for this book he studies how attitudes to weeds have changed, and one of the historical books he quotes from is by John Ruskin: Proserpina - Studies of Wayside Flowers (1874). Ruskin joined the artist gang in admiring burdock: "Take a leaf of burdock - the principal business of that plant being clearly to grow leaves wherewith to adorn foregrounds."

Mabey: "These are extraordinary and baffling passages, full of intimate glimpses of the engineering of leaves, but seeming to suggest that these exist more for the beatification of the observer than the livelihood of the plant. Proserpina is like this throughout. It is a confused and at times deranged attempt to devise a new, anti-Linnaean plant taxonomy, based on aesthetic principles rather than scientific understanding.  It passes moral judgements of whole orders of plants...."   In one of Ruskin's deeper depressions he remarked with disgust that the theory of photosynthesis made us look on leaves as no more than 'gasometers'. "

Mabey: "he pours out his invective on every plant with any kind of weedy irregularity, and deplores how the "recent phrenzy for the investigations of digestive and reproductive operations in plants may by this time have furnished the microscopic malice of botanists with providentially disgusting reasons, or demonically nasty necessities, for every possible, spur, spike .... which can be detected in the construction, or distilled from the dissolution, of vegetable organism." 

 How different was the viewpoint of Henry Thoreau. "He had begun building his one-roomed shack by the side of Walden Pond in 1845. He lived there, growing his own food and living more or less self-sufficiently for more than two years, garnering the thoughts and experiences that would fill one of the greatest works of American literature." One of the chapters of Walden is a short and famous essay called "The Bean Field". In the spring of 1845 Thoreau had planted far too many beans and was hoeing them obsessively. He was not sure why - he did not even enjoy eating beans.

Thoreau: Early in the morning I worked barefoot, dabbling like a plastic artist in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub oak copse where I could rest in the shade ... Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet-grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass - this was my daily work.

By the next summer, Thoreau decided to stop growing beans. He felt that they had distracted him from "the more fundamental teachings of the field". 

Thoreau: This broad field which have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly? ....Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds?"

Then Mabey thinks about his own weed policy in his garden in Norfolk. "The weed policy my partner Polly and I follow (and don't always agree about) is whimsical and sometimes downright hypocritical." There follows an account of the property's history and its weeds, which prompts my jealous reaction.

Windsor Great Park walk: types of oak tree: there are more than I thought!

As I had planned I did venture into Windsor Great Park, and it was a bleak experience over half term - a very chilly day. Eventually I did come across something interesting - the Queen's collection of oak trees, given to her by the countries of the Commonwealth on the occasion of her Coronation or marriage - can't remember which, and I can't find any reference to this collection online. There are of course, more countries in the Commonwealth than there are types of oak tree. (- Post script - this isn't' true. There are more than 600 types of oak tree in the world! But some of them come from Mexico, China and South America and perhaps they don't grow in a temperate climate.) So you can see below that there is a variety of trees but some of them are duplicated 2 or 3 times by different donors.

 Here is a sample of the labels. In the summer and autumn it will be fun to see all the different leaves.

Surrey Walk

On Saturday we had planned a long walk, but because of the horrible drizzle and cold we cut it short. We started in Elstead, Surrey, and went to Milford, Eaching and Peper Harow (spelling odd but correct), which is a private village, very quiet. The most striking thing I saw on my walk (and I was mainly looking at the muddy path and talking to people) was this very old yew tree.


Yew tree in Peper Harow churchyard, taken by me, Saturday.

It is between 700 and 800 years old, but for a long time people claimed it was much older.

Deutschland 83

This was a very gripping programme, slow to start but gradually more absorbing. It took time to establish Martin's character - young, cheeky, fond of his mother. Then, we had to watch him in considerable jeopardy, sent by the East German secret service against his will to spy on the West German military. He brilliantly improvises his way through some terribly risky situations: It becomes more and more apparent that his spymasters care very little about the jeopardy he is in, and Martin's talents for self- survival are put to the test over and over again.

However, although I was glued this was really down to the great performance by Jonas Nay as Martin, because there were enormous holes in the plot and it was very difficult to understand why the East Germans seemed to want everything to escalate out of control. Even in the last episode I was wondering which of the characters had committed suicide  - or maybe it was murder? I really don't know. But I do rather hope that there will be more. Poor Martin.

Here is Jonas Nay in an interview with Owen Jones; who seems to have a bit of a crush on his lookalike, heehee.

Weeds by Richard Mabey - Burdock

I hope these extracts show what a beautiful book this is, and how interesting in so many ways.

"Despite the trouble they cause, weeds have always had apologists seeking to explain their existence on the earth and find some moral teaching in their lifestyle. For the eighteenth-century school of 'physic-theology' (a prototype of the modern theory of Intelligent Design), for example, they had two kinds of usefulness. First, as demonstrations of God's canniness as a botanical engineer; second, as salutary scourges of human arrogance. Painters, too, found in some weeds a kind of epitome of natural dignity. From the mid-seventeenth century, Shakespeare's despised 'hardocks', the expansive, floppy-leaved, adhesive- fruited burdock, began to feature in landscape paintings. It's never centre stage, nor obviously significant. But it lurks in the margins of a multitude of pictures - felted, foppish, sometimes hard to make out, as if it were some kind of emblem whose meaning the viewer had to decipher. It was the first weed to be credited with some kind of artistic - or architectural - beauty.

***

"It haunts woodland clearings (probably its native home, roadsides, field edges and the waste patches round gardens and derelict buildings. One later artist remarked that the leaves 'have a messy droopingness  - they seem to be crawling along the ground'.

Common burdock

"Images of burdock first crop up in seventeenth century Dutch painting, indistinct in the corners of a few landscapes by Jan Wynants and Jacob van Ruisdael. In the work of Claude Lorrain, widely regarded as the father of European landscape painting, it becomes more obvious. A modest tuft, its leaves mantling the rocks, sits in the bottom right -hand corner of Landscape with Dancing Figures (1648). Behind it, young people picnic and jig with tambourines. In the more wistfully shaded Landscape with Rustic Dance (1640 - 41) the grey -green fronds have moved to the bottom left-hand corner. In Claude's best known painting, Landscape with Narcissus and Echo, (1645), they  are still at the bottom of the painting, but more central, and the arch of the leaves echoes Narcissus's splayed legs and arms as he gazes down at his reflection in the water. In Landscape with David and the Three Heroes (1658), which features a lot of men with spears, the burdock (still perched on the bottom edge of the scene) is at last allowed to show a flowering spike.

"... there are plenty of flowers and token foliage ... but burdock is the only one that is drawn with realism, and is instantly recognisable.

"Thomas Gainsborough borrowed much from Claude, including burdock, and a token tuft occupies a typically Claudean position in the bottom right-hand corner of The Cottage Door (1780). It acts as an ornamental base for the dead and gloomy tree trunk which frames the mother and children...

Gainsborough made a number of studies of burdock:

 "The leaves, outlined with a few bold strokes in black charcoal, are set against a gnarled tree trunk. They are shown leaning towards the viewer like open hands, palms forward, left and right. Gainsborough catches perfectly their sculptural qualities, the heavy central rib, the wavy, scalloped, almost rococo edges. What burdock suggests in these pieces is that beauty can reside in the uneven and the asymmetrical - in the idea of weediness, in fact.

"Almost contemporary with Gainsborough, Joseph Wright of Derby's outdoor portrait Sir Brooke Boothby shows his reclining subject's feet resting in a shoal of burdock leaves...

This was to allude to the fact that Sir Brooke Boothby was a follower of Rousseau and  a lover of nature - he was founder of the local botanical society.

"Close inspection will reveal burdock clumps in Richard Wilson, J M W Turner, John Linnell, James Ward, John Constable and Edwin Landseer.  ... burdock has no specific symbolism, which is maybe why the Pre-Raphaelites largely ignored it.

"The true master of burdock display is George Stubbs, and in several of his pictures the plant is much more than a tonal ornament or filler of awkward spaces.  In A Lion devouring a Horse (1769) it plays such an active role in the dynamics of the picture...  The leaves aren't the blandly smooth grey-green foliage - leaf as carved stone, perhaps - of Claude and Gainsborough. They are picked out in high, mortal detail.

"They are beginning to age, wilting at the edges, showing patches of brown rust. One is already dead, a tan husk drooping towards the ground. A weed, Stubbs seems to be suggesting, experiences stress and ageing like any other living thing.

 "This is an unusual perspective on botanical beauty, that it might take the form of elegance under pressure - what you might call grace."

Seventies music part 1

One thing I remember truthfully from our childhood is the pleasure we had in pop music. We loved the charts; we took a great interest in what was going up and what coming down. When we got the technology, we recorded from the radio so that we could play our favourites over and over again.

Then when we became more sophisticated we looked back and said: "Oh - all that rubbish! Thinking of David Cassidy and Donny Osmond, the Sweet and the Bay City Rollers (none of them our scene) (but slightly forgetting how much we had loved Slade and David Bowie).

But even the bread and butter of the charts were pretty good. One staple was Elvis Presley, in the years when he was often in residence in Las Vegas. He would release a song, it would climb up the charts to the top ten, or even the top five, and then it would go down again, and no sooner had it disappeared than, regular as clockwork, the next one would appear. So we had Burning Love, Until it's time for you to go, I Just Can't Help Believin', Promised Land - and we particularly enjoyed it if he slurred his words - we all did impressions of slurring-words-Elvis - he was part of the furniture and  at the same time we enjoyed him. But recently I have re-evaluated all those songs and put them on the jolly old iPod. Elvis, and his musicians, and his song-arranger, were brilliant.

Another thing that was brilliant, and we didn't know it at the time, was the quality of the standards. The standards are songs like "Yesterday" - songs that every professional singer covered because they were popular. They were songs you get bored of because if Tony Bennett sang it so did Frank Sinatra and Matt Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald and Jack Jones and Perry Como and Harry Secombe. Honestly. They'd pop up on the telly and you'd recognise the song and go, "Oh, not that again!" and go out of the room. One of the very popular ones was "The Impossible Dream" from "Man of La Mancha" - great the first couple of times you hear it but then ridiculously grandiose and unbearably dramatic. Some singers absolutely killed it.

The funny thing is that yesterday I heard the Impossible Dream anew, a woman called Linda Eder singing it with real conviction - and I thought  - I'd like to hear a man sing that - no offence to Linda - a different kind of vibe - I looked it up on Wikipedia to see who had covered it. Well, dear old Elvis, of course, was amongst the many others - so I tried his version on iTunes. You can preview the same song by different singers - and then choose - I chose Elvis doing a workmanlike version for a Las Vegas audience - a version very disciplined by the tempo - as though he were doing it by numbers - but the tenderness in his voice was extraordinary - tears were springing into my eyes - even though this was a middle aged crooner churning out a standard in two minutes thirty - and this is the wonderful thing about the passing of time - old things become new again, and re-evaluation is possible.

I was going to put a link to it here but it's already lost its magic for me - it was so fleeting...

I read the other day: on the telly the seventies is all strikes and crappy décor - but most people who were young then will tell you - the seventies were great fun to live through! And power cuts were nothing to our parents - they had lived through a war - they just bought packets of candles and cursed the government.

In the most avant garde circles, the sixties were the time of liberation, but not until the sevenies did liberation come to the suburbs and the market towns. Which was confusing of course, because our parents threw all their old ideas and repressions out of the window and went quite crazy, but generally speaking it was a fun time.

Seed experiments (Weeds by Richard Mabey)

On 1 May 1945, Professor Edward Salisbury, the director of Kew Gardens at that time, gave a talk on weed varieties that had grown on London's bomb sites.

"... how a whole new ecosystem had taken root in the city's open wounds. It was a story coloured not just by wartime drama but by the evocative names and addresses of the vegetable phoenixes..."

"Bracken carpeted the nave of St James' in Piccadilly... Oxford ragwort - an eighteenth century immigrant from the slopes of Mount Etna - had graffitised the rubble of London's Wall.... Gallant-soldier (from Peru) ... appeared on one in eight of the bomb sites, and the purple surf of rosebay willowherb - already christened bombweed by Londoners - across almost all of them. ...creeping buttercup, chickweed, nettle, dock, groundsel, plantains, knotgrass.. . Prof Salisbury logged a total of 126 species in all. It was a weed storm, a reminder, if anybody needed one, of how thinly the veneer of civilisation lay over the wilderness."

Actual name: Guascas, or Galinsoga (not gallant soldier) Galinsoga is named after the mid-eighteenth century the Spanish botanist and physician Ignacio Mariano Martínez Galinsoga and the English name ‘Gallant Soldier’ is simply a corruption of this name. Other English names for the plant include Gallant Soldiers, Soldiers of the Queen, Littleflower quickweed, Quickweed and Potato weed. ‘Parviflora‘ simply means that the flowers are small.

More interesting info here

[Earlier in his life] Edward Salisbury had read the works of Charles Darwin, and found that the great biologist's curiosity and unconventional experimental methods chimed with this own. Darwin was fascinated by weeds ... and tested the effects of saltwater on germination. He wondered if seeds might travel in the stomachs of dead birds, and sprouted seeds he had extracted from the dung of migratory locusts. He raised more than eighty plants from the mud-ball gathered round a wounded partridge's leg. ... Darwin cleared and dug a plot three feet long by two feet wide, and simply observed what plant life spontaneously emerged: "I marked all the seedlings of our native weeds as they came up, and out of 357 no less than 295 were destroyed, chiefly by slugs and insects. "

"Salisbury's own experiments were very much in the Darwinian mould. ... he tested the airborne dispersal of plants such as thistle and dandelion... he went through animal dung and bird droppings to see what seeds were carried in them and tested to see if they were still fertile.

"He even regarded himself as a potential carrier, and famously raised 300 plants of over twenty weed species from the debris in his trouser turn-ups ... He repeated the experiment with the mud scraped from his shoes, and found that "one quite commonly conveys at least six propagules in such a manner."

Allotment part 3

Progress

Planted: 4 rhubarb crowns of different kinds (came from RHS)
Planted: 17 Raspberry canes: 2 rows, posts in place, wires to come! Pending wirecutters.
Planted: 2 rows onion seedlings - not much growth although they've been in for months - and onion sets, 2 rows.

Dug over: 3/4 of the present planting area. This was amazingly easy because we covered the ground with cardboard (which was given to us by the incredibly helpful Nick) and with the woven black fabric over winter, and found that the turfs had pretty much rotted away. Loads of worms in the soil, lovely; but sadly, many couch grass roots and ground bindweed roots.

Mulched with bought peat-free compost: the lettuce and courgette area.

Pending: a bonfire in an incinerator - maybe today?

Bought: seed potatoes - went for Charlottes and Maris Piper - very conservative.
Bought: lots of seeds, including annual flowers to encourage bees. I shall sow in some trays today.

We haven't seen Nick so much lately, which is good because his advice can be overwhelming. He is very pedagogical: a real teacher, but if you make a mistake he gets very cast down, while the other old bloke says vaguely encouraging things and takes an interest rather than getting too involved.

New views of Virginia Water - Savill Gardens - the Cow Pond

On Thursday I went to VW in the mid afternoon and walked until dusk; I walked to the Savill Gardens and it was very beautiful, there are snowdrops among the black grasses, and crocuses are in bloom, and I walked to the Cow Pond, which I had never been to before. I am planning to walk in the Great Park next week.

The sun was very bright - outside the temperate house.

What do you know? It's willow, biomass!

The Hidden gardens

 



Cow Pond, evening - I was trying to get a shot of a Mandarin Duck but it wouldn't move into the sun!

 

The Cow Pond

Virginia Water, 5 pm
 

Durer's Turf (Das Grosse Rasenstuck, 1503)

I am reading Richard Mabey's book on Weeds, and I particularly liked his commentary on this painting. I happen to have this painting on my pinboard - which is a display of art cards which I change from time to time - my art gallery - I bought this one in an art gallery in Vienna - but you could only buy it if you bought a calendar - so I bought the calendar. (Husband tutted at wife's extravagance.)

"To gaze at Albrecht Durer's extraordinary painting Large Piece of Turf is to glimpse an imagination piercing through the artistic conventions and cultural assumptions of its time and projecting itself forward three centuries. This is painting's discovery of ecology. This is any corner of any waste patch of land in the early twenty-first century, or at any time. This is a clump of weeds looked at with such reverent attention that they might have been the flowers of Elysium.
"The structure of the painting couldn't be simpler. It is the structure of vegetation itself, as if Durer had stuck a spade at random in the ground and used the slab of turf he lifted as his frame. In the foreground are three rosettes of greater plantain, a weed that has so closely dogged human trackways across the globe that it was also known as Waybread and Traveller's foot. They're surrounded by wisps of meadow-grass. Two dandelion heads, some way past flowering but still topped with yellow, lean leftwards. At the the very rear of the painting - and its only concession to the less than commonplace - a few leaflets of burnet-saxifrage are just visible through the mesh of grass leaves. You observe this community of plants not from above, or any other conventionally privileged viewpoint, but from below. The bottom quarter of the picture is almost entirely devoted to the mottled patch of earth in which the weeds are visibly rooted...[bad sentence] It is a visually exquisite and scientifically correct composition. What you are looking at is a miniature ecosystem in which every component, from the damp mud at the base to the seeds on the point of flight, is connected....
"No one was to take such an intensely grounded view of mundane vegetation again until the early nineteenth century..."

TTIP is still on the table, though German Magistrates say no

This is from a site called Techdirt:

Top German Judges Tear To Shreds EU's Proposed TAFTA/TTIP Investment Court System

from the wrong-way-forward dept

As Techdirt has repeatedly pointed out, one of the most problematic aspects of the TAFTA/TTIP deal being negotiated between the US and the EU is the inclusion of a corporate sovereignty chapter -- officially known as "investor-state dispute settlement" (ISDS). Techdirt isn't the only one worried about it: no less a person than the EU's Trade Commissioner, Cecilia Malmström, said last year that she "shares" the concerns here. Her response was to draw up the new "ICS" -- "Investor Court System -- as an alternative. US interest in ICS is conspicuous by its absence, but Malmström keeps plugging away at the idea, evidently hoping to defuse European opposition to TTIP by getting rid of old-style corporate sovereignty.

That plan has just received a huge setback in the form of an "Opinion on the establishment of an investment tribunal in TTIP". It comes from the German Magistrates Association, which Wikipedia describes as "the largest professional organization of judges and public prosecutors in Germany." So these are not a bunch of know-nothing hippie activists, but serious establishment figures with a deep knowledge of the law. Here's their basic position on Malmström's ICS, translated from the original German by TNI:

The German Magistrates Association [DRB] rejects the proposal of the European Commission to establish an investment court within the framework of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The DRB sees neither a legal basis nor a need for such a court. 

Please read more here

Would you like to sign a petition against this Trade Deal? It basically makes Europe a part of the American marketplace, and gives corporations a free hand in Europe so that the public has no recourse to open courts against them. It takes away our freedoms.

Here is the petition site: sign while you still have the freedom to do so.

Oh poor Pierre! - War and Peace

I once decided to read War and Peace, so bought a copy to take on holiday to Spain. It was a black Penguin. I also took my friend Susan. My friend Susan is the only person I know who reads faster than me. So we read all the short books first and then she had nothing to read, so she started War and Peace. She became the most awful company. She was always nose-in-book and from time to time she would shake her head sadly and sigh: "Oh, poor Pierre!" Meanwhile I had finished all the other books too and had nothing to read. I complained but she wasn't listening.

I finally got my hands on my own book on the last day of the holiday, and left it behind in the last hotel as we rushed off to the airport - it was under my pillow. I felt that God was telling me that it was not yet time to read "War and Peace". Now the book club has chosen it for the summer months, so that takes care of that.

It was beautifully done on the telly - the sets, the costumes, the acting - all wonderful. If you are a man you will probably miss seeing the lovely Lily James playing Natasha. If you are like me, you will miss Pierre, with his kind voice, and all his sadness and spirituality showing in his face. Ah, and it all ended well for him! What a relief!

The TV serial was not unalloyed pleasure as James Norton has a face like a block of wood, so we have no way of knowing what Prince Andrei was like as a man. I suspect he was supposed to be a sympathetic character but that is one reason why I need to read the book - to find out what he was thinking about - and why reading is still better than watching TV, (although Grayson Perry maintains that TV is the new literature).



The book I lost



Russians suffering: meanwhile Pierre had plenty of nice clothes back in Moscow - why wasn't his palace looted? So much to find out.

On the subject of refugees

Over 120 economists - some very important - signed an open letter to the government about the refugee crisis.

http://economists4refugees.org.uk/

It is the first time that such a large group of economists have criticised UK government immigration policy, and follows other open letters to the prime minister from the UK’s 350 top judges and lawyers, and 27 charities and NGOs including Oxfam, Amnesty International and the Refugee Council.

David Cameron’s government has agreed to take up to 20,000 Syrian refugees over five years, from the camps on the borders of the war-torn country. More than 1,000 have arrived so far.

The Guardian.

My old friend Dr Brendan Burchell may have been one of the instigators ... he was certainly a signatory. Here on the BBC  today (a show on BBC 1 called The Big Questions) he iterated the economists' case.  I feel very proud of him for doing this as at the same time he is busy being Director of this and Editor of that at Cambridge University.

http://bbc.in/1SBSUiC

Early Spring at Virginia Water

Part of my project was to walk here every week and take photos and learn by observation (and looking them up) what the plants are and what they do.



Heather garden, fine day

Heather garden, dull day

Tall white heather

Witch hazel! Also called Wych hazel. Introduced from China in 1879.

 Wych hazel was given its name by early settlers in North America. They thought that the leaves of the American species looked very like those of the common hazel in Britain, and therefore judged that their twigs would be equally suitable for water divining, which had been practised for a long time in Europe using forks of common hazel. The word wych is Old English for "pliant"; this quality had long been exploited by water-diviners, or "dowsers", who grip one fork of a hazel twig in each hand and pull them apart until they are under great pressure. As the twig is passed over underground water it will sometimes twist violently in the hands of the "dowser". There is, as yet, no scientific explanation for this phenomenon.

The bark, leaves and twigs of wych hazel, when distilled with alcohol, yield an extract which is used in medicine to prevent inflammation and control bleeding. (And is useful for soothing the eyes.)

Book Club : Austerlitz

Tom, whose choice this was, did not attend the book club, and our numbers were depleted. The Very Annoying Man was at last away on his cruise, which he had been talking about for the previous three meetings. Some of the book club could not understand the book at all, and everybody found it gloomy. But one - new - lady had read an introduction by James Wood, and this had moved her to consider the book more carefully. She asked, in a roundabout way, if Sebald was actually writing for other academics, and whether this is an example of high art, as opposed to commercial art, to which I was able to reply, Yes. The book is a challenge; it makes you work; you don't have to agree with it all; the whole purpose of it is to put the Nazi operation at Theresienstadt into some kind of context and to present those events to an audience, to deny the desire to forget.

I thought of my friend Debbie's Dad, George. He came over from Prague on the kindertransport. He was not in the least like Austerlitz - he seized the day. Right up until his final illness he shopped, cooked, played classical pieces on the piano, listened to cool jazz and played bridge. His great enjoyment was seeing his family tucking into some great casserole he had cooked up. I believe in his professional life he had been a very successful engineer. He had married and had four children, who had travelled far and wide and also been successful in creating good lives for their own children. Georg didn't spend any time being bitter about things in spite of the fact that he had no family left, apart from one cousin in America. The rest  - their names are written on the wall of the memorial synagogue in Prague.

We should really think about this in view of the fact that the UK has been asked to find places for  3,000 unaccompanied child refugees from Syria - and the government has said No!!! I can't believe it. I would take two. I wonder if there is a petition I can sign.

Oh I forgot to say: we voted on the book and gave it 5 out of 10; so much for high art! I gave it a higher score as it was, at least, interesting.