Beanhenge

What is it about runner beans that compels the English gardener to grow them?

They have little flavour, and what there is of it is pretty uninteresting. Their rough and hairy texture is not generally sought after in foodstuff, unless you're an owl or suchlike with a penchant for mice. No matter how carefully you prepare beans for cooking, they still smuggle stringy bits into your mouth that must be bravely swallowed or brashly extracted, depending on the company you're in.

Yet, like a lemming to the cliff-edge, (that gruesome Disney fabrication - Google "Disney" and "lemming" if you don't know what I'm talking about), I find myself yet again this spring wrestling with bamboo canes and wiggly bean seedlings. How to arrange them this year to net the best yield without losing the lot to strong winds - or an eye to the cane tips?

I've had it with wigwams, where you arrange the canes in a circle, binding them together at the top, Indian fashion. All is well when you blow the whistle for the beans to start growing. They race straight up the sticks happily enough. But as soon as they converge at the top, there's chaos. The result: a tangled mess, with far too much bean plant to airspace.

Compared to this, the bean tent offers obvious advantages: two parallel rows of poles, inclined to meet at the top. Here you secure a single cane with string to form the ridge. Each plant enjoys more airspace and the whole makes for easier picking. But by the time the early autumn winds pick up, there's enough plant matter to catch the wind like a sail. Before you know it, the tent is travelling about the garden and felling any other plants in its way.

But this year, I think I've cracked it. With a fine collection of weathered bean poles of many different lengths, I have insufficient matching ones to tackle either classic structure, and my hand is forced. Without a clear plan of action, I just shove what sticks I have in the ground, upright in a circle, and plant a seedling at the foot of each. I slip a plant tie around each one and secure it to the nearest stick: a hint as to where it should pledge its allegiance. Standing back to admire my handiwork, and wondering what to do next, it occurs to me that I've created a whole new concept: the runner bean's answer to Stonehenge. It has a cretain timelessness and dignity about it, and it looks pretty well unshiftable. All I need to do now to complete the effect is to find a few shorter sticks and place them across the top of random pairs of canes.

There is ample space for every plant to flourish and for the would-be picker to find the beans. No matted canopy of green to catch the wind. Beanhenge is the perfect solution. All I need do now is await the summer solstice and see which bean lines up with the sunrise. I'm half expecting a posse of druids to turn up. Now, where did I put my woad?

Under the Apple Tree

Driving to Chalford this morning, listening to Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, I am intrigued by a concept in a book of short stories neuroscientist David Eagleman. In Sum, one of forty possibilities that he suggests for the afterlife is that when you die, you may choose your favourite experience from your life, and this becomes your experience in perpetuity – a kind of Groundhog Day of your choosing.


What would mine be? It’s a case of being careful what you wish for. The day my daughter was born might seem an obvious candidate, but it involved major surgery, and once was more than enough. The following night might be a contender: I lay awake all night long, gazing with wonder through the clear plastic sides of her hospital cot, transfixed by the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. But the perpetual crying of other babies dotted about the ward might get me down after the first decade or two.


Other achievements that gave me great pleasure, though in a different league, include producing the village youth group’s fashion show, years ago, and later their talent show, including what I thought was a sublime sketch, penned by me, called “The Simpsons Go to the Hawkesbury Show”. The children’s acting was fabulous and the costumes priceless – who’d have thought a blue plastic carrier bag could be so cleverly transformed into Marge Simpson’s big hair? Being on stage myself, in amateur dramatic shows, was great too – but even the best shows would pall after endless repeats.


But for an experience that could be perpetually rerun , I’d be tempted to go for the “happy place” that I go to in my head whenever I can’t sleep at night: lying under the apple tree in my back garden, with early summer sunshine filtering through the blossom. It’s my favourite place in the world (and I’m pretty well travelled). Birds always sing in the surrounding mass of trees; there’s the occasional gentle buzz of light aircraft, sometimes doing aerobatics; floral scents waft by on the warm breeze - musky lavender, sweet lilac, rosy apple blossom, heady crab apple, and later in the season, intoxicating nicotiana and night-scented stock. It’s a spot I’d never tire of.


Later, on the way home, I plan how best to use the brief window of time between arriving home and collecting my daughter from After-School Club. I need to make the most of it. Actually, there is no decision to be made. I head for my apple tree. The hammock is still in place from my daughter’s birthday party yesterday afternoon, as are the old curtains that we’d suspended from strategic branches to shield us from the intense sun of the current heatwave. I arm myself with a few books and magazines, but soon I am dozing in the afternoon sunshine, swinging very gently in the hammock. Occasionally a petal or two drifts down from the apple tree and lands on my face. I pick one up to examine in, and discover it is already tinged with brown at the edge. Eternity this isn’t. Better seize the day.

How To Get Things Done

On Sunday afternoon, after months of feeble excuses, I decide to tackle what appears to be an enormous task. I undertake to tidy my dressing table. It is inches deep in the detritus of dressing and undressing: discarded jewellery, price labels and hanging tags from new clothes, odd coins and pens and business cards that have been turned out of jacket or trouser pockets. The Victorian honey-coloured pine surface is completely hidden from view.

Tidying my dressing table is not my favourite task, which is why I have ignored it for so long. In the half light of early mornings and the dimmed lamps of late nights, I never really scrutinise it, so the muddle bothers me far less than if it were on the kitchen table. The only reason I am bothering to tackle it now is that otherwise I will have no moral high ground from which to make my daughter clear up her dressing table, now competing with mine in the untidiness stakes.

I grit my teeth, put on my Ipod (that invaluable mental anaesthetic) and wonder how many podcasts it will take before I’ve completed my task. I click on my favourite, The News Quiz , and swiftly fall into the meditative, methodical rhythm of tidying.

I locate lost necklaces, reunite long parted pairs of earrings, and accumulate quite a stash of beribboned clothing tags for my cardboard recycling box. (Can I really have bought so many new clothes lately? Erm, no – it’s just an awfully long time since I last culled the discarded labels.)

I restore to centre stage a favourite antique lace mat and a colourful binca mat that my daughter cross-stitched for me last Mother’s Day under her Grandma’s artistic direction by Grandma. I rearrange the chipped but beautiful mulberry Bavarian glass dishes that once belonged to my own Grandma. With a neatness bordering on OCD, I align the numerous necklaces draped over the corners of the hinged mirror. My dressing table is starting to resemble an exotic shrine – and all before The News Quiz is half way through. Stepping back to admire the new order, I feel a sense of calm creeping osmotically from this harmonious little scene into the depths of my soul.

This tidying business really is therapeutic. I continue to feel a little glow of satisfaction every time I walk past the dressing table, even now, two days on. So why did I wait so long to do it? I really must not procrastinate like this again. Now that I can see the mirror again, perhaps I ought to write across it a note in lipstick to remind myself: The best way to get something done is to do it.

Why Pay A Grand for A Handbag?

Leafing through the Sunday supplements, I wonder how many readers actually buy the extortionately expensive items featured in the fashion pages. £100 for a moisturiser? No thank you! I expect change from a tenner when I buy a facecream. And how can any handbag be worth £1,000? I would never pay that much for an item I couldn’t drive away or spend a family holiday in.
The most I’ve ever spent on a handbag is just £35, and that was extravagant by my standards. Admittedly my standards are very low. My handbag collection features far too many bags that started life as free gifts attached to women’s magazines.

But I can certainly justify this relatively lavish purchase. It brought to a satisfactory conclusion my lifelong quest for the perfect handbag. Pillar box red, with a scattering of cheery retro flowers over practical dirt-repellent oilcloth, it has soft leather-trimmed khaki handles that make for comfortable carrying, even when it’s stuffed full with all that my daughter and I need for a day out. Its depths are positively Tardis-like.

Strangely, it also appears to spread joy to those about me. Walking around with this bag on my arm is like going out with a celebrity. People stop me to admire it, ask me where I got it, tell me they’re planning to put it on their Christmas list. I even had a shy-looking teenager call after me in a superstore toilet yesterday, just as I was leaving, as if unable to help herself: “I like your handbag!”

So if you’ve been tempted by the Sunday supplements to splash out, think again. Nip into Cath Kidston instead and buy a handbag like mine for £35. Then invest in a notebook to make a list of how you’re going to spend the £965 you’ve just saved.

I Wear My Vote on my Sleeve

Having cast my vote a week ago via postal ballot, I can now relax and ignore the rest of the campaign. Indeed, I don’t intend to give the election much further thought until Thursday night, when the excitement of the old swingometer will certainly have our household glued to the telly till dawn.

This early decision doesn’t mean I’m not taking the election seriously. I knew long ago who I would vote for and that my decision would be completely unaffected by the antics of the big three slugging it out on the TV debates. My vote is my own decision rather than an echo of my parents’ political views. And there has never been any danger of my failing to vote at all. I truly value my democratic right, and for this I have my grandmother to thank.

I first became politically aware – or at least aware of the voting system – when I was still at primary school. What child could fail to be won over by the principle of democracy if it meant their school would be closed for the day to be used as a polling station?

From the ages of 5 to 11, I spent every school dinner time with my grandmother. I am perpetually grateful to her for rescuing me from the horrors of school dinners, substituting her proper home-cooked Lancashire hot pot and gooseberry pie for their compulsory beetroot and glutinous rice pudding. Grandma was a huge influence on me, shaping many of my characteristics such as a life-long love of BBC Radio 4 panel games and a killer skill at Scrabble. She was also a patient fielder of my incessant questions.

“So who are you going to vote for, Grandma?” I asked her when the election was brewing.

I was taken aback when my ever generous, indulgent Grandma refused to tell me. Instead she gave me an impassioned lecture about it being a woman’s right to make her own decision and keep it secret. She wasn’t even going to tell Grandpa.

It wasn’t until much later, when studying early 20th century history at school, that I realised why Grandma so treasured her vote and the privacy of the polling booth. Born in 1900, she was old enough to be aware of the Edwardian Suffragette movement. Grandma was an impressionable 13 when Emily Davison was trampled by the King’s horse during her infamous pro-suffragette protest at the Epsom Derby. For Grandma, turning 18 didn’t entitle her to vote: in 1918, only women aged 30 or over were entitled to vote. She had to wait until she was 28 for women to gain the right to vote on the same terms as men. No wonder she guarded her democratic right so carefully.

I’m pleased to say my six-year-old daughter is also taking her political rights seriously.

“Can we have a ‘Win with Webb’ sign for our garden too, Mummy?” she asked, as the orange diamonds started to appear in gardens around the village. (The rather wonderful Steve Webb is our local MP - and long may he remain so.)

Though I have a feeling that if there’d been a party with pink as its colour, she might have changed her allegiance. Now there’s a way to secure the women’s vote. (Not.)