A Pleasant Weekend. .... except......

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. 

 .

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.....

Sometimes We Just Need to Chill

I've put a new header picture at the top of the blog.  Since I am settled in London for some stay-at-home writing projects, I thought I might as well post a more local picture. It shows neighbours at the annual party in our communal garden which took place during the "hot spell" we had recently.    For several years now, the party has involved various people running stalls - cakes, books, bric-a-brac and so on - to raise money to maintain the garden.

It had been getting harder and harder to find people to run the stalls, and last year, tempers frayed and people started storming out ... so this year we chilled.  There were a couple of gazebos and a couple of tables, and people brought food and drink - plus a donations pot - and music.   And friends, pets, children and barbecues.  No stalls. No fuss. .

We had great food from all over the world, my favourites being a Middle Eastern aubergine dish and some sweets from Brazil, which were like truffles but made of mashed fresh berries, and covered in chocolate. Plus a massive bowl of lovely and deceptively alcoholic Pimms that included several pounds of chopped fruit and cucumbers.

There was company and music,  drums, guitars, and one guy had a professional jazz band which played into the evening.  The weather was good otherwise it might have been a flop, but as it was, everyone agreed it was one of the nicest parties in recent years.  Sometimes it's good to let go...

I saw this sky recently.   I don't know what weather it means.  Do you?

Just give 'em space.

Here's something I'm sorry I missed - darn, I was doing something else that day and I was so upset. It's a mini-Olympics for the local kids. I have posted before about the large private gardens in the area where I live, and these gardens, or "greens" as we call them, are fantastic community resources.

Our area was developed as middle class housing in the 1880s, but instead of giving the houses long gardens, the developers gave them tiny back gardens and used the rest of the space for a communal space - traffic free and private to the residents. It is even more useful now that the vast majority of the houses have been divided into flats.

I don't know why more planners don't create these traffic free spaces in cities. IN the countryside there is usually a field or something where people can congregate - not so in towns or suburbs.

Our area is not the only one where there are these greens. I once visited one in Brighton which really reminded me of ours. The early nineteenth century was a good time for communal spaces - squares, "circuses" (round recreational areas) and so on. Perhaps the owner of the building firm who developed our area grew up on something similar.

Anyway the greens offer a big space for all kinds of things - parties, bonfires,

(before the Health and Safety rules put an end to those) or organised games and once even a landing space for an air ambulance! When they organised the last kids' Olympics, it was amazing to see how even the toughest and most anti social local teenage boys really got into it, training like mad and very proud when they won medals.

The Olympics is supposed to be about encouraging sport, but I wonder how many other British communities were even able to hold sporting events. It makes it so much easier if there is space, and when there is, people will generally get together to find something to do.

It's not all idyllic on public spaces, of course. People are people and some of them are a real pain. There are always issues about dogs, kids playing rowdy games or bullying other kids, noise, smoky BBQs, litter and so on. But at least it gets folks talking to each other, even if they are only complaining and arguing (as it sometimes seems at the time).

And the kids are definitely more active, since most of the time they would rather be outside with their friends and have lots of space to play in, than sit inside with their computer games on their own.