07:00 The day is just beginning, and Lois and I are arguing in bed again, well, shall I say "debating"!
Today's going to be Day 2 of our 3-day back-garden transformation by local landscaper Adrian, and we're just wondering whether we ought to have included a few garden gnomes in our plans, although it's probably too late now - Adrian, our landscaper, doesn't really like surprises sprung on him, so perhaps we'd better not go there!
Did you see large hairy comedian Bill Bailey's celebrity travelogue round Western Australia last week? If so, you'll know why the critics have panned the series - "Bill just doesn't know what to ask the people he meets, does he!", is what the critics are saying. And that's the most important thing you ought to do, isn't it, if you're a celebrity who's filming a travelogue.
Bill Bailey - with the first celebrity travelogue where the celebrity
can't think of what to ask the people he meets - oh dear!
And on top of that, Lois and I have never seen a travelogue with so many expletives being hurled around - my goodness!
You can imagine the shock that Lois and I felt, watching this programme! After all, you would never catch an experienced celebrity traveller like Michael Portillo, saying things like, "F*** me, there are f****** gnomes everywhere here.", on arrival in Gnomesville, in the shire of Dardanup, Western Australia.
Yes, evidently Bill had arrived in Gnomesville in the shire of Dardanup in Western Australia, just south of Perth, where tens of thousands of garden gnomes live. And Bill, don't you think it would have been nice if you'd at least talked to one of the little buggers, and asked them how they liked it there - it isn't exactly rocket science is it!
What a missed opportunity! And initially we were inclined to forgive Bill for this omission, because we assumed the little fellows' wouldn't be able to speak to him anyway.
In fact Lois and I didn't know that gnomes and elves had their own little language, until today, that is, thanks to an email from Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, pointing to this article on the influential Hungarian website, Dívány.
And the existence of the little guys' little language is all thanks to the kindness of one man, celebrity author JRR Tolkien, who realised the problem when he was writing The Lord of the Rings trilogy. And that was why Tolkien was eventually moved to create a new language just for elves, which he called Quenya.
Celebrity author JRR Tolkien, who created
the elven language, Quenya
Yes, elves and gnomes and what-have-you do have a language, so Bill Bailey had absolutely no excuse not to interview them during his Western Australia travelogue, as it turns out.
What madness !!!!
And the Hungarian article points out that hundreds of millions of people around the world have already heard the
elven language, and perhaps even know a word or two of it, through the Lord of the Rings films. And there are people, particularly in Hungary, who
like the writer's work so much that they have learnt to speak Quenya. There are even language courses
related to it on the forums of die-hard Tolkien fans.
some young Hungarians studying the elven language, Quenya, invented by JRR Tolkien
What a crazy world we live in !!!!
And I get a sudden brainwave - should I make Quenya my next language project and maybe start a local U3A Intermediate Quenya group right here in Malvern? I already know some Hungarian, and this would be an advantage here, because as the Hungarian article points out, Hungarian and Quenya are distantly related:
family tree of the Finno-Ugric languages
The Hungarian article says, "Similar to Sumerian, Hungarian or other
Finno-Ugric languages,
the Quenya grammar expresses differences in meaning and grammatical
relationships with agglutinating suffixes, i.e. attached to word roots."
I wonder..... !!!!
homelands of the Finno-Ugric languages as they are today
The elven language Quenya doesn't strictly have a homeland -
its true home is anywhere where there's a gnome, which is nice!
08:00 Yikes! A ring at the doorbell, and our landscaper Adrian and his brother are here already and want to start work, so I think Lois and I had better put the "gnomes, or no gnomes" debate onto the back-burner for now!
And thank goodness for our gardens, we say - at least they bring a little sanity into this topsy-turvy world of ours, don't they! Yes, local landscaper Adrian and his brother are here already to start Day 2 of our quest to realise the yin-and-yang vision for our tiny back garden.
The left-hand-side is going to be the "yin" side - a feminine and curvaceous flower-bed, modelled on the 'cheapo' option in Adrian's "pattern book".
Yes you've guessed it - like many local couples who are feeling the pinch with family finances at the moment, it's the cheapo "The Hasnip" flower-bed option that we've selected, a design inspired by the curves of local amateur pantomime artist Charlotte Hasnip.
And soon this morning we see the shape of Charlotte's instantly identifiable curvy "silhouette" starting to emerge on the so-called east side of our garden.
in the pouring rain, Lois discusses the finer points of raised-beds
under the temporary gazebo, with Adrian (right),
as the curves of local pantomime artist Charlotte Hasnip are
beginning to emerge in the shape of the flower-bed being created on the left
Yes, the raised beds - that's the next big part of the project: the construction of the straight, no-nonsense raised beds for the "yang" side of the garden - the western side, and here we've chosen "The Sudworth" option, modelled on the svelte, straight silhouette of local amateur pantomime artist Matt Sudworth (see picture above).
the planned "raised beds" - Lois discusses "dimensions",
and multiples of 10 inches, with local landscaper Adrian
For Lois and me, Adrian is definitely "our type of landscaper" - we know he worries about his work, which is nice. And he tells us today that he had a bit of a sleepless night last night, anxious as to whether we were doing the right thing with our little garden. And today, in conversation with Lois, a succession of plans are put forward and then rejected 2 minutes later, as the two try to converge on the right answer.
In the end raised beds of a height of 3 railway sleepers (not two, as originally planned) is judged to be the way forward, and both Adrian and Lois are happy with the final solution.
Yes, poor Adrian !!!! Adrian freely admits that he suffers from a mild form of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), and that he often remakes his gardens over and over, till he arrives at what he thinks is the right outcome.
That's good in a way, but historically there have been a few disasters from this kind of attitude, like with the so-called Terra-Cotta Army in ancient China. Remember this story in Onion News?
XI’AN, CHINA—Characterizing the third-century B.C. collection as not a tomb but an artist’s
personal scrap heap, a team of historians confirmed Tuesday that the famed
Terra-Cotta Army was the result of a perfectionist sculptor "f***ing up a single soldier statue thousands of times in an attempt to get it
right.
“The more than 8,000 warrior sculptures contained within
these excavated pits may appear extraordinary to us, but to the sculptor, every
last one of them was a catastrophic failure that had to be disposed of so he
could start again from scratch,” said art historian Li Xijian of Baoji
University, who added that at the sight of the smallest imperfection in a
carved figure’s face, clothing, or stance, the artist would throw a fit and
cast it aside, demanding a fresh slab of clay to work with.
“It appears he would become so enraged, he would pick up the
life-size representations, toss them into one of the pits, and bury them deep
beneath the soil, hoping they would never be seen again. We can only assume the
artist would be horrified to know his garbage pile is now a UNESCO World
Heritage site visited by more than a million tourists each year.”
Li went on to observe that "the clay soldiers missing heads
and limbs are not the victims of natural disasters or vandalism over the past
2,200 years, but rather instances in which the artist grew so frustrated that he
physically attacked his own creations."
What utter utter utter madness !!!!
Sometimes it's necessary to draw a line under any impulses towards perfectionism, Lois and I think.
Do you remember when Father Ted and Father Dougal noticed a tiny dent, no more than 2mm wide, in the car he had borrowed from a colleague? And how the two priests had continued to hammer away at the dent, until the whole car was wrecked?
Father Ted continues to work on the tiny 2mm dent with his hammer,
long after it no longer made any sense to do so.
What a crazy world we live in !!!! [That's enough madness for today! - Ed]
21:00 We go to bed early tonight partly because "we feel like it", but also because Adrian and his brother will be coming again tomorrow, to "finish off", hopefully.
Because of today's change of plan - raised beds that are 3 sleepers (30") high instead of the two as per the original vision, the two men will need to come back tomorrow with another bag or two of topsoil loam tomorrow to finish filling the second of the two beds.
Zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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