Oh! Hope I'm not coming down with the bug which the babies had last week. Baby No 1 got hold of my mobile phone and had sucked it all over by the time I noticed. Ever since then it's been kind of ... sticky....and I have been feeling slightly flu-y. Not as if he did it on purpose, he is just at that age. And he is so sweet and cuddly that I nearly don't mind if I catch a cold from him!
Apart from feeling slightly rough, it was a good weekend. On Saturday we attended a meeting of our Garden Committee - as I've said before, we have a three acre shared garden out the back of our houses. Each house has only a small back garden, from which a back gate leads onto the communal space, like this, below.
There are surprising numbers of these private gardens in London - this article's about some of them (we don't open our garden, so you won't find us in the article). A firm of gardeners comes in once a week and the guy who runs it told us we are among the most easy going and unquarrelsome groups he deals with. Everyone was amazed to hear this, to be honest. One of the residents has been taking the law into their own hands and destroying some large climbing plants and there was some fire and brimstone in our meeting.
When we first moved here, the garden was more overgrown. According to a film someone made in 1969, that was the year when residents started to get together to work on our garden, planting trees and clearing rubbish. It took decades to get it into shape using voluntary labour, since of course it also had to be maintained and improved as well as cleared. Money had to be raised to buy equipment, and it was hard graft.
Many of those people are now dead, but we see the fruits of what they have done and are grateful. It is strange how people can look out at a place choked with brambles and filled with rubbish and nettles yet not consider getting together with other residents to improve it - but that is the case in some of our local big gardens, even today.
Afterwards I wandered around and admired some late blooming roses.
One of my favourite communal gardens is Park Crescent, in Brighton, which is about 70 years older than ours, consequently the houses are more elegant. Here's a Guardian article about them. Their garden party sounds all sweetness and light doesn't it? Ours is rarely so idyllic, but it is fun nevertheless.
I once looked around a house in Park Crescent which was for sale. It had been the home of of Lewis Carroll's youngest sister, Henrietta, who in the 1890s lived there with an elderly maidservant and many cats who used to climb the curtains. Henrietta sounds to have been a typical, gentle Victorian spinster who didn't really care what anyone thought of her. She and Carroll got on well, and I thought the house, with its tiny rooms and simple period details, had a happy feeling. As a biographer, I found it rather cool to think that when he came to visit Henrietta, which he often did, he looked out onto that very garden. It must have been so different then.
There aren't any pictures of Henrietta later in life, but here she is as a child, when he took a photo of her.
On Sunday, went out for a walk to Kenwood House, a wonderful mansion and art gallery now in public ownership.
Just outside the orangery, at the front, I noticed two young girls had carefully created a home made picture out of petals and things they had found. It's entitled "Sunset" and they had a collecting hat nearby in case anyone felt like giving them a tip for their work. Not sure English Heritage would like them chalking in green outside their lovingly renovated 18th century mansion which they have just spent millions of pounds on, but I gave the girls 50p for being enterprising and said I hoped they'd make lots of money.
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Kenwood's grounds were "landscaped" in 18th century style, and it overlooks a lake with an elegant little wooden bridge at one corner.
But if you go around the back you see that it is not a real bridge. It's just one layer of wood that looks like a bridge. It was actually designed that way, for appearance sake only.
Totally fake in other words! It's fitting that Kenwood is quite often seen as a location for movies, where nothing is as it seems. Its biggest claim to fame is in "Notting Hill" - remember it?
Further along I spotted a really weird old tree. It had once been a large silver birch,but the entire bark had been stripped off, except for a few ragged branches at the top.
I found it quite creepy because it was so tall and so dead, there on the edge of the hill. I wondered why I had never noticed it before. And when I went closer, I thought it even creepier. Maybe it's my imagination but does it seem to have a face? It's like some horned witch, dancing wildly on top of the trunk.
As T said, you didn't quite like to turn your back on it in case it somehow changed position while you weren't looking!
To be honest I was glad to leave it behind, and off we went to a 70th birthday party. The birthday girl lives next door to 2 chefs who had made her two matching birthday cakes, in different flavours. One had a 7 candle and one had a 0.
It was a lovely party and we knew lots of people so it brought the weekend to a happy conclusion. Until, that is, I realised I had a sore throat.....