So we designed and constructed small cactus gardens.
The rot set in during a casual visit to a new garden centre of remarkable opulence and reassuringly vast prices. The only things that were less than one euro (and situated at the entrance to give one a woefully unrealistic view of the cost of the contents of the shop) were miniscule cactus plants. Finding a reasonably priced round plastic deep sided tray sealed our future activity.
By the time we had bought small ornamental white stones and compost the cost was beginning to rise and, as we bought larger plants to go with the cheap mini plants the cost rose further. What started as a gesture became a statement: not for the first time!
I have to admit that when we had finished our attempts at arid design I had to explain that mine would be at its best when it had grown a little. Self delusion always helps in times of aesthetic trouble!
I think that we had been encouraged to adopt an artistic mode by the excellent lunch we had in our favourite Basque restaurant: food has much to answer for.
Encouraged by an effort which made Capability Brown look like the Grim Reaper I felt empowered to try and bring some sort of order to the office on the Third Floor.
Order (of a sort) has been imposed on the chaos but only at the cost of pushing those things that I do not need at this moment (those last three words are significant) into the long cupboard under the eaves. I have put off the Great Sorting to another day; even so what is left on open view is hardly the impeccable office as seen in the frightening film I saw last week on how to clear your office. It looks better than it did and that is all I am saying!
Although Arthur Conon Doyle had had enough of his Great Detective and took great delight in killing him off in the Reichenbach falls struggling with his arch enemy, the pair of them falling to their respective deaths.
Conon Doyle was not allowed to let his creation wallow in his watery grave but was forced by public demand to resurrect him. Ever since that enforced new life his continuation in literature, film and drama he has been assured.
I read “The Last Sherlock Holmes Story” by Michael Dibdin. This is an elegant pastiche and celebration of the oeuvre with a story line which brings in Jack the Ripper and the dreaded Reichenbach Falls. The narrative purports to be papers that Doctor Watson placed in a bank vault not to be opened for fifty years.
The actual story is, I think, fairly banal though horrific in places. The real point of interest is in the playful way that Dibdin complicates the fact and fiction interplay which always surrounds the life and times of Mr Sherlock Holmes.
I can remember as a child knowing that Conon Doyle wrote the stories, but I also knew that there was a Baker Street and I was assured that 221B actually existed. It was an existential problem that hardened up young children of my generation for the more difficult appearance and reality conundrums that litter everyone’s life.
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