Falldog

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.)

It seems nothing will shake this headache. I’ve been feeling a bit ropey all day, to be honest. (I got travel sick on a 10-minute bus ride to Lewisham this morning. Really. To the almost-puking stage. I sweated through the last two stops, desperately praying that I could keep it together. How mortifying would it have been, if I’d been sick?)

I’ve had a good day and a half rattling words out for the novel, and it’s been beyond fun. I always kind of cringe when writers say, “The characters really surprised me when they suddenly…” Well, it’s been a little like that, and a little more far-reaching than that. The two main characters (Lily and Bernadotte, since you ask) have sprung to life, one in particular seeming wonderfully mentally unbalanced. The story has changed immensely, and both expanded and contracted (Big Human Ideas in/naff aliens out… mostly), and it’s currently sitting there, staring at me, beguiling me with its possibilities. I’m so pleased to say that I’m finally excited about it, and finally feel like I’m on some sort of track with it – which, combined, is a feeling I’ve not had about this project before now. There will be more word-rattling next week, when I have a full five days (ish… the Mrs and I are off for a weekend away on Friday afternoon) to play.

But, for today, this headache/ill-feeling has made me shudder to a halt, and now I find myself thinking dark thoughts about Linux. I’m a terrible one for wanting to know what all the fuss is about; I hate to feel I might be missing out on something. I can almost hear my poor little Macbook whimpering at the thought of what I might do to it.