Start of the growing year

My seeds have arrived! Some years I buy in a gardening shop; this year, like most, though, I ordered them online from the Organic Gardening Catalogue. These will supplement what's left from last year & the year before. One evening in early January, I sat down with my allotment notebook, a bag full of half-empty seed packets from last year, and the catalogue, to list what I already have and decide what I want to grow this year. It's the time you can plan to try new things, or rely on old trusted favourites. 

Last year I dreadfully neglected the allotment - too busy doing other nice things, as the inexhaustible progress of couch grass and horsetail proved. Although it was also not a brilliant year for growing things, with lots of seeds germinating but then mysteriously not growing (my French beans...), and so wet that half my strawberries rotted on the plants, and the slugs were rampant so early they ate all the brassica seedlings before I got round to protecting them. There were successes, though: most of the fruit did brilliantly (I've still got bags of damsons and gooseberries in the freezer...), and all the flowers I was trying out for the first time were fantastic. 

So that sets the tone for this year. I'm going to be sticking with things that are easy to grow and don't need much attention, because I'm pretty sure that once again I won't be spending as much time as I'd like at the plot. I'll be growing flowers again - they're pretty self sufficient, and I'll get continual bunches to bring home: cosmos, cornflowers, candytuft, larkspur, poppies, sunflowers and chrysanthemums. I'm rotating Charlotte potatoes onto the brassica bed; the Tuscan kale and Spike broccoli will move to the bean bed - and I'll get their slug protection in early; I have reliable runner beans again instead of the trickier French; and lots and lots of onions (red and white) and shallots. Apart from chitting the potatoes, nothing much is going to happen now for the next couple of months, but come March I'll be out there with renewed enthusiasm. One of the best things about growing your own is that every year is a fresh start.  

Capturing inspiration and achievement on film

An overly grandiose title for what I actually did today, which was go out with my little plastic Lomo  Diana camera, inspired by this month's Guardian camera club assignment, to try and take some film photos that met the assignment's brief - capturing inspiration and achievement. I loosely interpreted the brief as me being inspired both by the architectural & engineering splendours of Edinburgh, and by experimenting with multiple exposures. I had an fun, absorbing couple of hours wandering around the city centre in the sunshine looking for photographs. Finished the film, took them along to Jessops and got them developed and scanned to CD. These are some of my favourites:

A day spent wearing wellies in the sunshine is a good day

Even in the winter. And especially if you're being paid for it. Yesterday I spent all the daylight hours in a field in the Borders, lugging heavy rucksacks and bags of equipment around, climbing over fences, paddling across rivers, pumping lots of boreholes and taking lots of water samples. The temperature didn't get above freezing all day. And the sun shone on us from dawn till dusk. Sometimes my job is great.

 

Icebreaking

It finally turned more wintry a couple of days ago. Well, wintry enough so that for the first time this season I wished I’d put on my long running tights when I went for a jog along the canal this morning. It was lovely to be out though: frosty, sunny, blue skies, no wind. Lots of others out enjoying it too, running and biking and dog walking and pushing prams. The canal’s finally started to freeze over, which the ducks and swans don’t like as it stops them finding dinner and they do look so undignified slipping and sliding around on the ice. This year though, they've got it sorted. Here are some determined swans dealing with the winter conditions. I've no idea where they were heading for, but they’d already broken a channel a few hundred metres long and showed no sign of stopping. I hope they were taking it in turns to go in front, though...

City neighbours

I live in a tenement flat, in a stair with 10 other flats. Very typical for Edinburgh; and also probably typical is that despite living only a few metres away from them, I hardly ever see my neighbours. I don't go out of my way to avoid them, but we just rarely happen to be arriving or leaving at the same time. Sometimes I'll bump into my Polish upstairs neighbour when she's having a cigarette outside the front door, and stop for a quick chat about how her daughter's doing in school, or how her English lessons are going. But that's about it. We're all just too busy leading our own lives; and most of the other flats are rented out to tenants, from all over the world, who change every year or so, so I guess there's not much impetus to get to know neighbours who'll probably change pretty soon.

It's not always like this. As a student I lived in a tenement flat for 3 years, and we knew all our neighbours. We babysat for the couple downstairs' toddler (she's a student at St Andrew's now); had tea with the refined Edinburgh batchelor opposite them and admired his pet canaries; commiserated with the 1st floor family whose husband and dad had emphysema and could barely climb the steps to his flat; banged on the door of the PhD student opposite at 3am to ask him to please stop playing his trumpet; and bitched about the boyfriend of the ground floor's daughter, who was apparently the perpetrator of most of the bike thefts in the neighbourhood.

If you get to know your neighbours, they become real people, with good traits and bad ones, but very human. If you rarely see them, it's all too easy for them to become caricatures. If all I experience of my next door neighbour is his persistent loud music late at night; well, instead of being a happy-go-lucky indie band fan, he's a selfish, annoying toe-rag. Until today, mostly what I knew of the smokers in the building, who tend to congregate just outside the front door, is that they constantly throw their flipping cigarette butts on our doorstep, and no-one does anything about it. So this morning I did something about it. I felt like a busybody, but I stuck up a note on the front door asking the smokers if they could please clean up after themselves. I wondered whether they'd be annoyed and ignore it; whether my other non-smoker neighbours just weren't bothered about the mess; whether I was the only one who cared about it. I didn't really expect anything to happen. But when I came home only a few hours later, not only were the butts all cleared up and thrown away, but someone else had added to my note 'Thanks! Much nicer now'. Suddenly my opinion of my neighbours had changed, just a bit, but for the better. It might not seem like much if you live in an old fashioned friendly village or a suburban cul de sac, where you & your neighbours are constantly popping in and out of each other's kitchens bearing gifts. But in modern, urban, reserved Edinburgh, it's a start!

Cinema nostalgia

Long ago, my favourite cinema came up with a perfect way to spend a dreich Sunday afternoon in Edinburgh: the legendary Cameo Sunday double bill, curled up away from the weather in the cosy velveteen armchairs of Screen 1, with a coffee/cake/glass of wine as desired. I confess that the last few years I haven't frequented the place as much as I would have liked, but all that has changed as I've been renewing my Cameo love affair in the last few weeks.

This is the cinema I first went to 20 years ago, sneaking away from university lectures to take advantage of the 99p-in-the-afternoon student tickets; those were the days. This is the cinema my flatmates and I rolled up to after the pub for the now long-gone late-night double bills, although I never managed to stay awake for both films (thanks to those comfy Screen 1 armchairs, not just the beer). This is the cinema that used to have the worst ladies' toilets of any cinema in the country, but which were finally and impressively upgraded last year. This is the cinema that still must have one of the best membership schemes in the land, which I belatedly signed back up to today: £30 gets you 3 free tickets, money off every bought ticket and everything in the bar (which is already excellent value), AND free entry to every Sunday afternoon double bill. I celebrated with a couple of friends and a couple of hours of entirely appropriate film nostalgia heaven: Raiders of the Lost Arc, terrifyingly more than 30 years old, gloriously un-digitally remastered, and with the fabulously youthful Harrison Ford. Bliss.

Weathering storms

Feeling a bit battered by the weather today. It seems to be happening more and more often. Last winter it was snow; this year we get wind: gale after gale, and each one worse than the last. Yesterday's was the most dramatic yet. When the gusts slammed into my solid stone Victorian tenement I could feel the building move. Trees blown over; chimney pots and church crosses crashing off roofs; flying bins; power lines down; roads and railways blocked; bridges closed.

This was my car yesterday after being hit by a mysterious storm-related object (a falling slate? a flying bin?). But I'm feeling lucky: it could have looked a whole lot worse. And these are some of the sights I saw walking into work today: