Falldog

This weekend’s mini-outbreak of foot and mouth disease brings with it mention in the news of our chief veterinary officer, whom I haven’t heard a peep out of since the bird flu panic over over a year ago.

Debbie Reynolds is the UK’s chief veterinary officer, and it’s so much more satisfying that she’s waaay more often talked about than actually interviewed. That way, my imagination can do all the work.

And, with the sun in the sky for a change (plus the finest caption ever to be seen on a TV news programme – “TRACY CHAPMAN: Mosquito victim” – on Breakfast this morning), it was all going so well.

I’ve just misspelt ‘CSI’.

I want to get out of this flat, go and sit in a cafe or something, and do some work (I’m sick of sitting in this little flat!). Unfortunately, I’m waiting in for delivery of a new bank card, which could be any time between now (3pm) and 6pm, by which time I’ll be winding down for the day. Am annoyed. How’s your day, anyway?

I was intending to blog much more this week, about exciting developments round here, but the developments haven’t developed. More will follow as soon as they do, promise.

Yesterday, in an effort to brighten the gloom of the UK’s undeserved Eurovision failure, we repaired to Kew Gardens with a couple of my oldest and loveliest friends (plus the Mrs, and one friend’s Mr) to celebrate another year without falling down a manhole.

Our birthdays fall within a couple of weeks of each other – this happens every year, much to our considerable surprise – and we more often than not meet up to commiserate. Over the years, I think Kew has been the venue used more than any other for these meetings and, while it’s always been a bloody trek to get over there, it’s worth it. Luckily, the crappy weather yesterday kept the hordes away, and we were rewarded by a cessation in the rain long enough to have a very slow walk around the gardens.

Very slow, because we were trailed by two tardy hangers-on, who insisted on either posing for pictures…

Or dicking about in puddles…

Or just basically walking very slowly indeed. What’s up with that?

Then we had to stop because they wanted to go to the cafe – and all for this shocking mess:

These two lovelies are my godson Raphael (pictured with his mum) and Joshua (not pictured with his mum, as his mum did an exceptional job of offloading him to the Mrs the minute she arrived – good work). The children are both aged around two now – Josh is slightly older – so they are getting to that point where they’re an interesting mix of fun and exhausting. Josh has a slightly better grasp of grammar, and Raph could do well to pay more attention to him and try to follow his example, cutting out the nonsensical gibberish he currently tries to pass off as conversation.

Kew Gardens, you may have heard, has a few plants in it. By coincidence, we’d managed to time our day out to hit the annual open day of their tropical nursery, the hidden nerve centre of all the fantastic, enormous greenhouses on the site. I’m not quite green-fingered enough to appreciate the wonder of the lengths the staff go to to maintain the temperature and humidity inside the different glass sections of the nursery, but there were vast chunks of thundering machinery around every corner, the constantly hissing of sprays of moisture above every roof, and a liberal smattering of hi-tech control panels down the glass corridors – it all looked like something out of Blake’s 7, so I was happy.

The one thing I think anyone could appreciate about the nursery was the abundance of totally pristine flowers on the various plants inside. Obviously, in the wild, any passing creepy-crawly is going to nibble as it pleases, so any plants you find there are often a little battered – and the plants in Kew’s own greenhouses, brushed past by huge lines of tourists, don’t fare much better. But the specimens in the nurseries, handled carefully only by highly trained gardeners – using a touch so light, lovers might have cause for jealousy – were astounding.

Orchids made up most of the plants they had specially brought out for display, and their delicate nature was belied by fat, smooth blooms in every hue from black to white. These were crowded round by amateurs who, I presume, could never hope to equal such delights on their own windowsills. The orchids were fiercely guarded by the staff, whose pride in the results of their work was matched only by a desire to not let you get too close to them. The only table I could get near enough to photograph was chock-full of cacti – I suppose snobby gardeners look down on the cactus, especially in the presence of the infinitely less hardy, and more flashy, orchid. They were missing out, though: these were fabulous examples of prickly perfection, each one crowned with flowers bigger and brighter than you’d ever see down a garden centre.

It was a quiet spot – if you ignored the two staff members hovering at the side, convinced I would either drop my camera on to their precious charges or plain make off with them – so the Mrs posed for a photo. The Lensbabied blur behind him gives some sense of the scale of the nursery’s operation. And a fern.

More days out like that, please.

(All the photos are from my Flickr page.)

At least there’s one person in this house who could have a shot at a modelling contract. The lazy tart.

This has happened before, and they just mysteriously disappeared after a little while. But I’ve got about a dozen white hairs right in the middle of my head. Not a dignified dusting at the temples, not an overall fade to grey – just a dispersed bunch of pure white strands in the messy bit at the front. Blink and you’d miss ‘em, but still they’re there.

This revelation comes a day after someone did the classic, “Are you all right? You’ve not been yourself recently…”, when in fact I’ve been feeling chipper for weeks. Until that point, anyway, at which depressing self-examination took over.

So, follicular deterioration and being ‘not myself’. It’s all go here.

There’s a French and Saunders sketch set in a magazine office that is fondly remembered by my friends – probably because lots of us work in publishing and/or are word-perfect F&S databanks. In the sketch, Dawn and Jennifer are busily compiling the contents of an issue of a typical Hello-style mag: Jean Boht’s hats, Timothy Dalton’s home decor, cakes by Jane Asher… Halfway through their work, Dawn has a funny turn and starts to doubt the seriousness of what they’re doing.

“It’s all so pointless,” she whimpers.

Jen soon snaps her out of it. They’ve got their Bride of the Year coming up, and that means something to someone. That’s someone’s special day.

I was just in a lift when someone barged in carrying a box of opened bottles of lots of different tomato ketchups. She had a face like thunder, ultra-serious, and very determined to get her ketchup to wherever it needed to be with the least amount of delay. She even tutted when other people had the temerity to get out at floors which weren’t her intended destination. Eventually, she barged her way back out, huffing and sighing, and practically sprinted down the corridor with her oh-so-urgent delivery.

This place is full of the kind of magazines spoofed in the F&S sketch, and it was clear that this woman’s urgent concern was… God help us… some sort of ketchup taste test. I shall repeat that: a tomato ketchup taste test. It couldn’t have been anything else! And here she was, wound up by it, struggling under its gravitas, behaving as if her cargo was the most important thing in the world.

I wanted to scream and scream and scream. Instead, I just moved on and went off for my peppermint tea.

The sooner this freelance stint ends, the better.

I’m sure there’s something special about it that makes it the perfect ingredient in an explosive, but did they have to say it was chapatti flour? That’s the comedy stylings of thousands of lagered-up louts in Indian restaurants sorted for months.

There’s one more holiday video to come, but I haven’t cobbled it together yet. Soon, soon – at which point, I’ll write more fully about what we agreed was one of the very best holidays we’ve ever had.

We were back in Blighty yesterday morning, and said goodbye to the whole of the day in a haze of jet lag. And today, I am back at the Longest Stint In Freelance History, grinding my teeth away, waiting for the next five weeks to whoosh by. Please.

Looking back at February, I had quite a busy month, none of which I wrote about here, though I fully intended to. There were concerts by Eddi Reader and Rufus Wainwright, there’s the Mika album’s slow takeover of my brain, there was a film… I think… though I can’t quite remember now if there was after all. Me and cinema: not the best of friends. Anyway, it will all return to me, and I shall spend the rest of this month writing about it, while jamming in quite a few other, new things.

It feels like spring is quietly springing, too, which is always a lovely feeling.

EDIT: It was Hot Fuzz.