Judith Johnson
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Unidentified Growing Object!

28/6/2020

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One of our lockdown activities over the last few months has been lifting turf to make three 6 foot wide borders, a long-held ambition -  one for vegetables, and two herbaceous.We visited the nearby Walled Garden Treberfydd Nursery last year soon after we moved to Brecon and, having much admired the borders there, were able, in mid-May this year, to have a selection of lovely healthy hardy perennials delivered. Having planted out one modest border, we had some left over to plant the remainder in our second flower border, some 78 foot long! 

We’re happy to let the borders mature over the next few years, dividing perennials once big enough, and adding in the odd acquisition from time to time. In the meantime, for an enjoyable display for this season, we bought some great value shake and rake seed boxes from ALDI - at £1.49 a pop. The Season Long Flower and Cottage Garden mixtures between them contained 30,000 seeds, in over 35 varieties, all the old favourites like cornflowers, calendula, nigella etc plus things we’d never heard of before, like Hare’s Ear, Nodding Catchfly and Siberian Wallfower.

Every morning we take a look at the borders, and it’s a huge pleasure to see what’s popping up, unfurling, and, this last week or so, starting to flower.  The packet does say that varieties may differ from the front image and can be replaced due to crop and seasonal circumstances, and among the plants not mentioned there which have appeared are coriander and fennel, both very welcome.

One seedling however, featuring two semicircles with a flat edge, was very unfamiliar. We were fascinated to see about six examples in the border, and watched to see what would unfold. After a couple of weeks, alarming thoughts came to mind. The seedling was beginning to look distinctly like it might be that most feared garden escape of all - the dreaded Japanese knotweed! 

Action stations!

We went through all the plants named on the packet and looked at images of each one on the internet to see if we could identify it.

We looked at blogs, images, you-tubes etc of knotweed - and googled for images of seedlings with similar characteristics.

We went painstakingly through our gardening and botanical reference books.

We still weren’t sure whether this was the culprit, but in the meantime the anxiety was growing faster than the plant: if it was JK, it would very likely take drastic measures to eradicate it, and what’s more it might even have a sizeable effect on the value of our property.

Hell, what to do? We couldn’t ask the neighbours.

I belong to a Facebook gardening group and asked what the best plant identifying app was (I’m fairly app-averse so have very few on my phone). 

“Why not post a picture on here?” several people suggested, “With over 600 members, someone will know any plant, no need for an app.”

Yeah, but they might report us to the Knotweed Police!!!

We were losing sleep by now. Time to grasp the nettle and download an app.

I snapped one of our merrily burgeoning offenders and uploaded it. 

We could have sobbed on each other’s shoulders...

It’s bloody buckwheat! 

No ambiguity about it! Buckwheat without a shadow of a doubt! Thank you, modern technology!

Ironically enough, had we leafed through our trusty Organic Gardening Catalogue, we would have found easily identifiable photographs of it in the Green Manure Section ...

Anyway, panic over, it’s growing nicely in the border. We like buckwheat.
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My Fantastic Five - Books I Love #8 - Gail Sequeira

14/6/2020

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When my favourite item in the Waitrose Weekend paper (My Best Books) was chopped to just one book a week from five, I really missed it - I love to hear what other people rate their cherished reads, so I decided to start my own guest-blog along the same lines. Thanks to Gail Sequeira for No 8 in the series. She writes:

I was born in Bombay and grew up primarily in Bombay and Delhi. Both cities have had a profound impact on my life, my reading and my cooking. My first menu for the Comfort Kitchen, the small scale cantina which I opened recently with my husband Kevin in Brecon, Wales,  was inspired by both cities: kababs and rajma from Delhi, and to finish off,  a delicate sweet coconut dessert inspired by tender coconut ice cream made famous by Natural's of Bombay.


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​The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

This book is no easy read in a sense, even though it flows like water running downhill. The subject matter is very personal for me, being an Indian woman, and it ripped my carefully sheltered life apart at the seams. This is the moment in my own history I began to question the status quo.


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​The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
 
This one is a beautiful tapestry of intertwining lives. It’s hard to describe, the main characters are so very diverse! There’s an illegal immigrant in America, the remainder of old colonials in the Himalayas. A fascinating and heart wrenching read.

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Five Point Someone by Chetan Bharat
 
This is a coming of age story set in one of the most prestigious campuses in India. It’s nostalgic and sweet and it captures Indian childhood and young adulthood in a way that hasn’t been done before.

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Bombay Rains Bombay Girls by Anirban Bose
 
There is no city in the world like Bombay! This one tells the story of a small town boy who moved to Bombay for medical school. It’s like opening a window into an aspect of Bombay life the rest of the world doesn’t get to experience and a very nostalgic read for someone who grew up there.

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Those Pricey Thakur Girls by Anuja Chauhan
 
This is the first of three books about the five Thakur sisters, growing up in a lovely old neighbourhood in Delhi. The word ’pricey’ is slang for high maintenance. And besides a strong storyline, this book speaks in the language of the people and of the times. It captures the change in Indian society as the economy opened up. It’s just a beautiful read.

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My Fantastic Five - Books I Love #7 - Owen Williams

8/6/2020

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PicturePhoto by Hilary Williams
When my favourite item in the Waitrose Weekend paper (My Best Books) was chopped to just one book a week from five, I really missed it - I love to hear what other people rate their cherished reads, so I decided to start my own guest-blog along the same lines. Thanks to Owen Williams for No 7 in the series:  

Owen grew up as an only child in Talbot Green (Llantrisant ) where his father worked as an  electrician. The family background was in farming in the Vale of Glamorgan. He studied Creative Design at Loughborough University, specialising in Furniture Design, and after a  post graduate diploma in Technology (now an MA/MSc) at Swansea Met, he taught Design and Technology. He also worked professionally in theatre lighting, and for many years has also provided both lighting, and a huge variety of props, to local amateur theatre and dance companies in and around Brecon.

Owen's interests also include motorcycling, amateur radio (he holds an advanced licence) and poetry, and he has recently been included in Onward/Ymlaen, an anthology of radical poetry from contemporary Wales. 


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​The Boy Electrician by Armac


This is the first book I ever bought and about the only book I read for pleasure when at secondary school (having dyslexia didn't help).

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Dylan Thomas: ​The Poems

This is the first book I bought when I arrived in Brecon. I fell in love with Thomas's writing after helping my dad stage-light a production of Under Milk Wood for a community project in the village of Gilfach Goch.

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​Reminiscences of Motorcycling
by 'Ixion'


I bought my first motorcycle at the age of sixteen and have loved them ever since. I studied engineering history for A level so was naturally interested in the history of motorcycle development. This book is about riding very early machines around the turn of the last century. Ixion (Canon Basil H Davies) was a motorcycling vicar and author. He started riding motorcycles in 1898 and wrote for The Motor Cycle magazine from 1903 to his death in 1961. This book was originally published in 1920. Interesting stuff for a geek!

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T S Eliot's Four Quartets


I'm not sure how I discovered Eliot but I do love the Quartets. I do have them published all together in a book however they were published first in pamphlet form in the early 1940s. My copies are early, though not first editions. Love the deckled edge paper.

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Kilvert’s Diary
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A glimpse into a forgotten Victorian world around Hay-on-Wye.

​Great fun to visit the locations of his entries. A world without cars, so lots of walking.


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My Fantastic Five - Books I Love #6 - J E L Lehnsherr

3/6/2020

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When my favourite item in the Waitrose Weekend paper (My Best Books) was chopped to just one book a week from five, I really missed it - I just love to hear what other people rate their cherished reads, so I decided to start my own guest-blog along the same lines. Here is No 6, with thanks to Jack Endeavour Leto Lehnsherr, who writes:
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​​I'm a 22 year old aspiring author, published poet, bokar and future mad scientist, on the spectrum of neurodiversity. As the child of a Scot and a Hungarian immigrant in Germany, I spent most of my life moving around .Just like my ancestors, a restless traveller with an endless hunger for knowledge and stories. Libraries, especially the one in Brecon, have ever since I was a child been the only place to rest and to call home. Just another kid in love with Keats, Housman and Morse.

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The Road to Grantchester by James Runcie 

If it weren't for a story on AO3 called Heart's at Peace (Grantchester TV), I would never have known of this book, let aside have contributed four more stories on said page.

Robert Kendall, no offence to Morse, had captured my heart with his wit within a tick.

The book isn't about him though.

​It's about young Sidney Chambers'  journey to become the brilliant, cheeky vicar and part time detective he's known and loved for in the Grantchester mysteries. They are alright too, just not as marvellous as Road to Grantchester.


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The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter
(The Inspector Morse mysteries #13)

It's one of those slow Thursday afternoons in 2019; it's raining cats and dogs as I wait for my friend Alex in the shadow of the library. She has just returned from London with this treasure in her bag. Judging from the preserves poppy and bus ticket it must have been May.

It is the last case for my beloved Inspector Morse, the last hurrah in a long life as a terrific detective. Why choose this book knowing the ending from afar? Cause it's so light... Like Lewis' kiss in Chapter 77. It is not one of your average quick solved murder cases, in fact a rather haunting tale, filled with lots of obstacles, that lingers on.

My favourite chapter (73) begins with a quote from Keats. The last time we get to experience everything we love about Morse before his light fades.Morse resonates to me on a deeper level. Two souls alike divided by ink and paper. In the aftermath of finishing this book I wrote a requiem poem on the steps of the Bodleian library. "A remorseful day" appeared  about two months after that rainy Thursday afternoon in the Brecon Beacons.


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Post Captain by Patrick O'Brian
(The Aubrey-Maturin saga #2) 

Nothing beats a good cup of tea and an Age of Sail story on a rainy afternoon. The Aubrey Maturin books have just the right amount of wit, action, in combination of history. 

Lucky Jack Aubrey , my name patron, isn't yet the Captain of his beloved HMS Surprise but just a mere Commander. Alongside his companion, the faithful Irish-Catalan Doctor Stephen Maturin, Jack spends the brief period of the Peace of Amiens (1802-1803) in the countryside, hunting and courting. My favourite quote: "Anyone would think you were married to that man", captures their unique bond perfectly. Hornblower's Indefatigable makes a cameo appearance too.

Unlike the rest of the series, they spend a lot of their time on shore. Here we get to see a different Jack Aubrey. Courageous in battle, embracing every storm like it's a soft breeze, but here he is oh so awkward on shore. The follow up book HMS Surprise has its prime moments too, with a drunk sloth, so I highly recommend reading this one after.


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Good Omens
by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett 

An angel and a demon, knowing each other for the better half of some centuries, have to save the world only to realise they are each other's world. Armageddon was trying to happen (or well, trying to be prevented) at the wrong place with the wrong anti-Christ as the result of a lot of funny misunderstandings.

When Tilly, one of those magic ethereal beings called librarians, introduced me to the wonderfulness that is Good Omens and handed me their copy, I would never have guessed that I would end up travelling one day as Aziraphale across countries to conventions.


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Interview with the Vampire
by Anne Rice 

"I'm going to give you a chance I never had..."

When Lestat spoke those words for the first time, I was 10 and had sneaked into the living room past my bed time where my siblings were watching the movie. Several days later I held the copy of the book in my hands and was dragged into the world of the glorious Lestat de Lioncourt and his melancholy companion Louis.

Claudia was my favourite character back then. She had lost her mother to the plague, which was wiping out whole families in New Orleans at that time, and got turned into a vampire by Lestat as a gift for Louis.
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The New Orleans chapter with Lestat and Louis being fathers to their own love child is still my favourite part of the novel, although Claudia isn't my favourite character anymore. Loss and years of experience changes people and I guess that's why nowadays I prefer Louis. The book isn't everyone's cup of tea. Yet whoever is into real, not sparkling, vampires might actually enjoy this piece of Eden.


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    Lifelong bookworm, love writing too. Have been a theatrical agent and reflexologist among other things, attitude to life summed up by Walt Whitman's MIRACLES.

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