I'VE BECOME A TWIT

Aeonium tabuliforme - my 'splat plant' in winter, sheltered in the greenhouse.

Sorry if this NASTY NEW TEMPLATE has come as rather a shock.

No, I don't like it either, but I've got myself into rather a mess.  The old system of editing and fiddling with templates seemed far easier than, when I did it, than now with this new set up. I've just spent a frustrating couple of hours trying to make my Twitter thing fit in to the the old template, which it wouldn't.  So I went on to make some serious bishes, trying to change everything and have ended up with this frightful mess and no time to put it right.  PLEASE REGARD THIS AS A TEMPORARY, OR AS YOU MIGHT SAY A COALITION TEMPLATE.

The idea was to revive my neglected Twitter thingy so that I could post messages to everyone about blog posts and so on.  But now it's all messed up and I need a six year-old to come and help me sort out the mess and somebody nerdier than me to develop a more artistic layout.

If anyone wants to Tweet me I - the details are somewhere to your right - I will be flattered, tickled pink, delighted, amazed and elated.


MEANWHILE:

I had tea with John Major, yesterday. We discussed cricket.

I've seen one legitimate snowdrop, in someone else's front garden.  

Dubiously hardy shrubs which I expected to succumb to this winter, have.  Others, which I thought would survive have perished as well.  But am I downhearted?  Of course I bloody well am.  I loved them and wanted to help them have babies.  And now they're gone.

Survivors include Euphorbia mellifera, left, which I planned to destroy because it's in the wrong place.  Isn't life grand?!  However, I've got some excellently raised seedlings in Wendy. I have about a dozen but will need one plant.  Perhaps it's time to think of starting a small nursery, again.

Euphorbia mellifera - bloody but unbowed

You may recall, on my last post, that I had an embarrassment of fallen Bramley apples and a welter of wet but unrotted leaves.  Well in the past four days, a massive flock of fieldfares raided the garden and have made short work of them.  And now, the dozy blackbirds which have lived in the garden all the time, have driven off the fieldfares and are finishing them off.  And the leaves are beginning to rot in record time.  Hurrah!

Apple remains, after the fieldfares have been.

I'm listening my son, Tom, playing the guitar superbly in the next door room.  He's a Delta Blues man but can turn his hand to almost anything.  We've just had a delightful improvised spell based on the tune Greensleeves, and now were back to an 'I woke up this mornin' ' type thing.

This time yesterday, I had a nicer blog template.  Ah me!

This week's film was  The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, a curious British thriller set in Holland and Paris starring Claude Rains, Herbert Lom and Marius Goring.  Not a major classic, but it had its moments.  Marius G as a smoothie sleuth was worth a guinea a minute - and he managed it with a fag dangling from his mouth throughout.  (For Transatlantic friends, 'fag' means cigarette, not the other thing.)

Sorry about this hateful layout - but give us a tweet.  Go on, you know you want to!