Sunday 30th November - who's been eating this car?

Spotted a car with these patterns in the dirt on the bonnet (hood) when out and about today:

The surface of the car seemed to be covered with sort of lichen, or maybe algae, as though the car spends a lot of time parked under a tree or in a shady, damp place. The little triangular marks were so unexpected. I have never seen tracks like these before.

So I started googling when I got home. Lo and behold, a grazing pattern for a snail:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/coshipi/8728080092/

Now read this and be afraid. 

Most land snails eat plants and other vegetation.
Snails also eat algae and decaying matter and are an important part of the food web. 
A garden snail has thousands of tiny teeth.
These thousands of tiny teeth are located on a ribbon like tongue and work like a file and rip the food to bits. 
Snails can gnaw through limestone.They eat the little bits of chalk in the rock which they need for their shells.
Some varieties of snails can destroy whole orchards and gardens when there are large groups of them.  http://www.zephyrus.co.uk/howsnailsfeed.html

I stopped the copy and paste here; it was bad enough reading how snails can destroy whole gardens. I hadn't ever considered the idea of CANIVEROUS snails.

This youtube video perfectly explains the side-to-side meanderings of the "tooth" marks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jD-qldrUiI

I have increased the sum of my knowledge by another small increment.

And maybe yours, too.

Saturday 29th November - Flowering Cactus

I've been keeping an eye on my flowering cactus on the kitchen windowsill.

It had two or three flowers last November, and then - nothing. Until now.

This year is very different;

The first of the buds actually burst into bloom on my birthday;

Since then another couple of flowers have appeared. Such a delight - they are so bright and cheerful. I'm always amazed at how much flower seems to be folded up into such a tight bud. Why don't the petals all stick together in there? How do they to come out so smooth and shiny and uncreased? Seems miraculous.

Friday 28th November - Another birthday card

This link was sent to me in an email from my uncle, as a birthday card.

I LOVED it...

you will too.

http://www.procreo.jp/labo/flower_garden.swf

It's well worth having a look at the rest of the website

http://www.procreo.jp

Thursday 26th November - Cake and Doughnuts Day!

For reasons lost in the mists of time, today is the right day for cake.

And custard doughnuts.

And surprise pots of flowers outside the front door when I come home.

Happy Days.....

Tuesday 25th November - This way and That way

I set off at 6:50 am this morning - ten minutes earlier than usual, but I was allowing for frost and ice (there wasn't any).

My first school is 20 miles away, and I'm due to start at 8:30, but it's the sort of place you can't get to reasonably in rush hour. You can leave early, and arrive early after 40 minutes, or you can leave later, and arrive hassled and stressed after queuing on the motorway to get onto the slip road (very unsettling), and then crawling along in stop-start traffic for about 5 miles (very annoying).

Today, as I was so early, I tried the alternative route through the B roads.

It was pitch black as I left home; after ten minutes the sky was beginning to make a contrast to the dark hedgerows. A few minutes more, and the bright bronze beech leaves began to glow from the trees on either side of the road.

By the time I reached my destination (just after 7:30!) there was a pale, grey, cloudy sky. Just what the weather forecast said; a dull, grey, cloudy day.

I won't do that route again, though. There was just SO MUCH STEERING to be done - I know it sounds ridiculous, but the lanes are narrow, and the early morning commuters are cut throat, and it felt like some weird and scary fairground ride, bend after bend in the road, on and on and on without respite.

Back to the ring road and motorway and A roads it is.

Monday 24th November - Festival Week

My own personal festival has started!

Yesterday, this (and other delights);

 






Today, these (and other delicious dishes);

    

who knows what tomorrow will bring?????

Sunday 23rd November - Playing the Church Organ.

I was the organist at the early (9am) service today.

I'd love to say that this is a picture of me, but our church organ
has just 2 manuals each with about 6 stops,
This picture comes from  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_organ

This isn't our organ either! We just have two rows of pipes.
There were plans to install another row, but somehow it never happened.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Willis_%26_Sons

I don't really like playing the organ - it all feels a bit slippery and I miss the tactile feedback and resonsiveness of a piano. And my legs are a bit short to reach the pedals (that's my excuse for not using them). We usually have a couple of hymns on the organ, and a song or two which I prefer to play on the piano.


I've had some fairly un-nerving experiences as an organist.

• Playing the tune that no-one knows except me
• Playing a 4-tune for a hymn that has 8-line verses. That means I should have played the tune twice through for each of the three verses, instead of just three times through. There is a special kind of quality to the silence from the congregation when you stop in the wrong place that makes it abundantly clear that Something has gone wrong.
• Being joined. halfway through a complicated hymn like "O Jesus I have promised" by an escaped toddler who lets rip on the other end of the organ keyboard. It didn't take too long for the church to know that I had company at the keyboard.
• Playing "O Jesus I have promised". Any version. There was a vicar who loved that hymn so much he chose it most months; none of the five organists at our church were happy about this.
• Playing four verses instead of five is very nearly as bad as playing five verses instead of four.
• Starting the hymn in the wrong key and discovering that you transposition skills are not up to continuing to transpose at sight past the first line. I had a total blank about E major and E flat major.
• Sitting at the piano ready to play a "song", when the vicar announces the next "hymn". That leaves me racing from the piano at the front of the church to the organ at the back, choosing a wild and random selection of stops and hoping for the best.
• Sitting at the organ ready for the next hymn, and, well, you've guessed it.
• Probably the worst one - forgetting that it was my Sunday to be the organist and not turning up at all. We are SOOO lucky to have four other organists who are all capable of plunging in at short notice, and it is highly probable that at least one will be at the service!    

Maybe the second worst service was at an Ash Wednesday, where I was finally convinced that I needed glasses. The problem was that I needed to sit so far away to be able to read the music that I couldn't reach the keyboard. There was a lot of guess work that evening.

This morning wasn't too bad, in that none of the above happened. I'm on again next Sunday... 

 Luckily we have a very kind congregation.

Saturday 22nd November - Erasable Pens

I reckon most people who read this blog will still be asleep at 8am on a Sunday morning. So if I get this post up before they wake, will it count as yesterday's post?

Saturday's new toy was a set of erasable pens, which I wanted for marking music theory. (I confess now to having a  problem with stationery and stationery shops. I l u r v e  pens and notebooks and accessories and folders and everything like that - haven't fathomed out why yet.)



I insist that the students work in pencil, so they can rub out mistakes. But I'm always making mistakes in my marking, so I need to be able to rub out as I go along too. If I mark in pencil, then it doesn't stand out from their work and they don't bother with my comments or do their corrections.

Erasable pens look to be the perfect solution. Weirdly, that isn't an eraser on the end of the pen. The ink is removed by heat and friction.

At the front of their books, I have pasted in an index sheet of all the exercises, so that I can see at a glance how they are doing.

When they have done their corrections, I will be able to rub out the red ink, and replace it with the word "complete" and a star in blue ink. I think the system will work excellently well until the children suss out that rubbing anything smooth over the red writing will erase it, and then they can forge my handwriting in blue ink. Well, that's also a sign of intelligence. Of a sort.

Friday 21st November 2014 - The Prophet Bird

One of my piano students wants to learn "Vogel als Prophet" by Robert Schumman. Here is Artur Rubenstein playing it on youtube; so delicate, so fragile, so light, so balanced;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEQ_YExRo5g

Listen. Breathe. Relax.

I wonder if it is this bird:

Gamayun is a prophetic bird of Russian folklore. It is a symbol of wisdom and knowledge and lives on an island in the east, close to paradise. (Wikipedia)

Gamayun, in a painting by Viktor Vasnetsov

  

Thursday 20th November - Biography

We went to a talk on Thursday night; Montmatre 1900 - 1910. It was a surprising sort of thing for us to go to, in a surprising sort a venue; a local pub has a Culture Club that meets once a month.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montmartre

I have no particular interest in Monmatre, or Picasso, or Braque, and wouldn't have chosen to go, but it was interesting for all sorts of reasons. Like how rural it was.

The Moulin de la Galette, painted byVincent Van Gogh in 1887. (Carnegie Museum of Art).

 And how it became a shanty town like the slums in many a modern South American or Asian city.

Add chttp://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/236x/db/93/82/db9382241fc540687129e4166f635ebf.jpgaption

A little detail about writing biographies caught my attention; how hard it is to write about people who are close friends and see each other every day, because their interactions are all verbal, face-to-face, and there is no written record (unless they write it all down in a diary, I suppose).

Wednesday 19th November 2014 - Whacky Wednesday

So, what shall I post today?

Shall I wax all rhapsodical about driving along country roads through showers of autumnal leaves fluttering down from the sky like giant moths, landing wetly on my windscreen before slipstreaming to the side of the road? This is one of my favouurite times of year for driving from school to school. When it isn't raining, of course.

Or comment on how the leaves have all finally come off a great oak tree, revealing the deserted nests of the rookery that last spring were each home to a rook, all bobbing up and down, incubating eggs and feeding nestlings?

Or whinge about singing "Jingle Bells" about thirty times this afternoon at the top of my voice while teaching three back-to-back classes of ukuleles to switch between C, G and F chords?

Oh, here, why don't you have a go? The chords are
CCCC CCC;
FFCC GGG; (hey!)
CCCC CCC;
FFCC GGC: (hey!)

Tuesday 18th November - One thing after another

It needed to be done, but straight after a demanding afternoon's teaching, and just before the first of four piano pupils was not the optimal time to start washing the kitchen floor.

However, plastic plumbing connectors have a limited life, and so things will just happen.

I filled the kettle from the kitchen tap, and simultaneously there was a tremendous whooshing, starting up, sort of noise. "Weird," I thought. "The boiler isn't usually that noisy." and I wandered into the sitting room to cope with another everyday crisis while the kettle boiled (the hairy cat had been sick on the sitting room floor which obviously had to be dealt with before the first pupil, due in ten minutes).

Back to the kitchen to make a cup of tea; odd, I appear to be sploshing through water...

http://www.floodproofkitchens.co.uk/

Ok, so this image is a serious over-exaggeration!

It wasn't the boiler making all that racket, but the mains water pressure surging through the broken connector for the outside tap. I reached into the cupboard under the sing and turned everything I could find to off.

We store a good number of the cleaning supplies in a large plastic crate, which happened to be right under the fountain of water. That considerably limited the flood of water out onto the floor.

Just at that moment, the cavalry - or my husband - arrived. I was able to leave the situation entirely to him, while I changed out of my wet clothes and started teaching piano lessons.

By the time I had finished, 2 hours later, the kitchen was all sorted, the floor immaculate, and the cupboard under the sink had received an unscheduled but necessary cleaning.

Monday 17th November - Mad Monday

Drive 0.5 mile, teach an infant school music club between 8 and 8:50. All was going well until I got the boomwhackers out. They discovered they could make trumpety noises by blowing raspberries through them. Memo to self; buy some sterilizing tablets and disinfect them (the boomwhackers, not the children) before infecting the next class.

http://www.knockonwood.co.uk/search.asp?q=boomwhacker&Search=Search

Drive 20 miles, (40 minutes) teach samba to a year 4 class. They are coming along brilliantly. Adding guitars and beginner violins to the mix might not be my best ever idea but it certainly livens things up.

http://www.knockonwood.co.uk/search.asp?q=samba&Search=Search

Drive 30 miles, (50 minutes) teach a 20 minute piano lesson. Yes, that really can't be economic, but sometimes crazy scheduling happens. The lesson is quite close to the school I will be teaching in on Monday afternoons next term, so wont last for ever.

Drive 4 miles to recommended village shop/cafe for lunch. Worth the detour. Spent fast paced hour catching up on a week's paperwork, writing two reports, drinking two cappuchinos, eating a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich and two chocolate chip biscuits.

Drive 8 miles to next school. Djembe lesson for year 3. After despairing over this class all term, they have suddenly brought it all together. Or else I have discovered the secret of teaching this particular class. Some classes are like that. Anyway, a great lesson.

http://www.knockonwood.co.uk/search.asp?q=djembe&Search=Search

Drive 6 miles home. Catch up on work emails and relax for an hour.

Two more lessons to go; rehearsing with a violinist for forthcoming exam, and a theory lesson.

68 miles, over 2 hours of driving, 6 lessons varying in length from 20 to 50 minutes.

All done!

Sunday 16th November - Who's been sitting in MY chair

Back in the Summer, it became clear that our old (and cheap) settee had reached the end of its life.

He chose this lovely leather armchair which is the most comfortable chair we've ever owned, for him.

I chose this small 2-seater settee to be MY place.

However, someone has recently discovered it, and I haven't the heart to turf her off. Yet.

Oh well. There is one chair left for me.

Saturday15th November - One Day Late

Well, it was always going to happen that I missed a day.

A day of what? You might have guessed by now that I'm doing the NaBloProMo or whatever it is called, where people try and update their blogs every day in November. It is a partner to the "Write a whole novel in a month" challenge that runs at the same time (I'm NOT doing that one!)

I spent yesterday morning accompanying 4 beginner violins, 2 beginner clarinets, 2 mini-bassoons, taking over from colleagues who were accompanying their own cello and flute students. For my part, it was punishingly hard work; in and out of the waiting room, rehearsal room and exam room. Each exam lasts exactly 12 minutes. By the time I got there there were running about 10 minutes late, through no fault of the examiner. By a combination of swift footwork on my part (and I promise I didn't resort to playing the pieces faster at any stage!) and careful time management on the examiner's part (did she just ask for one less scale? who knows!) we managed to claw back the time so that the examiner and I both managed to get a whole hour for a much needed lunch break.

Then I returned for a final exam - an advanced violin student. The beginners are a nightmare to accompany - so unpredictable, many of them unable to keep in time, liable to skip a note or repeat themselves if a note didn't come out the first time. The advanced students are hard for different reasons; I have my hands full (literally!) with complicated piano parts, and their performances are far more nuanced. I have my ears on stalks, listening for changes in tempo and dynamics, as well as the occasional slip or mishap, which needs to be effectively covered up without putting them off or disturbing the flow. She played well, with total commitment, so I'm crossing my fingers for a good result.

Home, and somehow, I got Friday, when I did post the blog entry earlier than usual, mixed up with Saturday, when I thought I had posted a blog entry early. So I didn't post at all.

Friday November 14th - Time is Flying....

Hang on, how did it get to be Friday already? Where did the first half of November go?

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2012/11/a-calendar-page-for-november-2012.html

Seems like only yesterday that it was Monday and the beginning of another week. before I know it, November will have vanished in a haze of one-thing-after-anothers and it will December and Advent calendars and writing Christmas Cards to beat the post deadlines and buying presents.... no no no  no!

Let's hang on to November for a bit longer. Apart from making The Cake and The Pudding and The Mincemeat. Christmas does has to be started early (unless we just buy it all in from a favourite supermarket?)

Thursday 13th November - A Full Day

I've been keeping a diary all year, for the first time ever, and so far, I've written up every day. Every so often I get a day or so behind, and it's then I realize how much gets packed into the time.

Every day is different, and that's if the normal schedule is running to plan. But then there are the add-ons, exceptions, and mad moments that enliven every week

http://www.lewesoperatic.co.uk/remember/images/title.gif

By the time I'm tucked up in bed, reaching for the diary and pen, I need to think hard to remember what has happened that day. Quite often, I may have noticed something that I want to make a note of; the colour of the skies, something that I heard, or saw, a train of thought, an idea to follow up. Unless I make a real effort to retain it, I will have forgotten what it was I wanted to remember by bedtime.

But I reckon a full and packed life, with plenty to look back on, is no bad thing.

Wednesday 12th November - Landing on a Comet

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30026398

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30026398
One of the cameras on Philae sent this image of the comet during the descent

I'm not that interested in astronomy.

What fascinated me was watching the young (in my eyes!) scientists as they watched the landing...

The launch was ten years ago, so presumably the planning and the development stages were even longer than that ago, when these scientists were undergraduates, or maybe even still at school.

I guess many of the original team will have moved on, moved away, retired, without seeing the end of their project. A bit like planting trees for a future landscape, planning for eternity; thinking for the long-term. A bit different to how so many people think about life.

 

Tuesday 11th November - Spring?

I was walking back home  from a local school this afternoon after a tough afternoon's teaching.

Progress along the road was slow; I was weighed down by paperwork, work books, teaching files, ukulele, and all the clutter and impedimenta that a teacher lugs around. samba whistle, three identity badges, diary, phone, notebook, water bottle, pens, blu-tac, memory stick, head phones. The only bit of weight saved was my mp3 player - where did I leave that, I wonder?

Anyway, this slow progress was why I noticed the beech hedge beside part of the footway;

this picture is a bit fuzzy, but among the golden brown autumnal leaves were all these tiny pale green new, spring leaves. I've never seen that before.

Monday 10th November - Shift Work

Oh, the evils and perils of shift work.

Not that I work shifts, no. But somewhere nearby we have a neighbour who does.

I've no idea who he/she is, or where they work, but they are back on "Earlies", as in setting off for work around 2 am.

http://www.forestwind-siberian-cats.com/cat%20wake%20u%20up.jpg

Usually I manage to go back to sleep fairly quickly, but at the moment I have got six school concerts, and a whole slew of music examination candidates to accompany, and a particularly tricky set of samba classes to keep me awake once I am awake.

Plus mulling over how I am going to go about teaching recorders to Very Young Children next term (my personal opinion is DON'T GO THERE but - hey, it's a fait accompli) and also teaching samba to Fairly Young Children. Another fait accompli.

And thinking through how I am going to teach semitones and tones to children who don't play keyboards - that's my steadily growing Grade 1 theory class which started last week with 11 on the register, 13 turning up, and has now reached 16...

Looks like I shall have plenty of time to work through all these knotty problems over the next couple of weeks.

Sunday 9th November - More about housework

He says he does do dusting.

Ah. Sorry. I just happened to notice the shelves of knick-knacks above the tv, which don't get dusted very often.

Mrs Degas polishes the goldfish

(we don't have any goldfish)

And at the moment, ironing isn't necessary, as he doesn't wear "smart-shirts-for-work" any more, and I make a point of wearing clothes that don't need ironing. So the question of "who will do the ironing" doesn't arise.

His view is that, if he were living on his own, he would have to do all these house-worky sorts of things anyway. I hadn't thought of it that way round.
   

Saturday 8th November - Housework

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Housewives-Art-Sally-Swain/dp/0586205306

If you haven't seen this book, add it to your Christmas List. Well, I enjoyed it!

I don't think I have done much housework since, maybe, the beginning of October.

That isn't to say it isn't getting done.

It's just that now my husband has retired, he has taken on the day-to-day running of the home; the laundry, grocery shopping, bins, hoovering, cooking, and most of the clearing up.

I feel like a stereo-typical fifties husband - I come home from work, the house is tidy, the kitchen cleared, supper all organised, laundry done...

By the time I have finished teaching and catching up on paperwork, everything is all organised.

He is even baking - we have had several weeks of flake-meal shortbread while he tweaks his recipe - and the perfect home-made ginger nut biscuit isn't far away now.

There are a few jobs that will probably stay forever mine - like dusting, and ironing. Meanwhile I am thoroughly enjoying it while it lasts.

Friday 7th November - Watching the evening skies

It was two years and a week ago that my mother had a major stroke.

She was in a hospital about twenty miles away, and we used to visit her most evenings after work.
I'd finish teaching at about 7pm and we'd leap in the car and fight our way through endless roadworks and rush hour traffic to spend an hour with her.

My husband would drive, and I would watch the skies a deep blue-black, watch the moon appearing through torn gaps in the clouds, watch the india-ink lines of the bare branches of the tree.

Coming home, enduring the same road works, we might talk, or we might just travel in silence, wrapped in our own thoughts.

There would be time to eat a hasty supper, and then fall into bed, exhausted, by about 10 pm.

I'd sort of forgotten about those days, until today, driving home through the dusk, watching the sky change through paler and darker shades of blue, the clouds from shade from grey to pink to purple to black...

It was a kind of mercy, that those darkest days were at the darkest time of the year, and that improvements in my mother's state were heralded by the approach of Spring.

Apparently today, 7th November, was considered to be the first day of Winter in medieval times, ending on 7th February, so that 21st December was truly Midwinter.

Thursday 6th November - A "Good" Lesson

I have quite a low boredom threshold. Is this a good thing for a teacher? I don't know - it makes for more work, because I'm not prepared to regurgitate the same-old, same-old lessons over and over again. That's not to say that I won't re-use games and activities that work well. It's just that I can't bring myself to teach the same thing in the same way at the same time of year every time.

Of course you've got to have some kind of objective, time kind of purpose in mind for the lesson. But for me, one of the main "Bottom Lines" is that I'VE had a good time.

That's why, contrary to most people's idea of maintaining sanity, I am really enjoying teaching country dancing to my class of 6- and 7-year-olds.

We've done "four steps forward, clap, four steps back, clap" and moved on to "circle to the right for eight steps and circle to the left for eight steps". I'm blessed by having several Teaching Assistants who seem happy to join in and guide the children around while I call instructions and watch from the sidelines.

Today's lesson involved the intricacies of "dos-y-dos". Many of the children have become quite competent at this manoeuvre but I have to say that the bewildered, but willing, look on some children's faces was absolutely priceless. I haven't given up -  six weeks of term left....

By the way, this activity dove-tails neatly with the new IT curriculum; learning to create and  follow instructions in order to reach a predetermined outcome is pretty much what computer programming is all about. I'm just using real children and music to do the same thing.

Wednesday 5th November - The Power of The Voice

I remember that there was some pseudo-religious society called something like the Bene Gessirat in the "Dune" books by Frank Herbert. They were a sinister lot, with special powers and some horrible habits. One of the things they did was control people by the power of their voice.



Much as I do as a teacher.

Much as I did as a parent.

I remember that once, in a furious rage, I shouted at my infuriating toddler so loudly that she fell over backwards. "Not Good", I thought, and decided that it would be better if I changed tactics. So, for a while, I made myself speak softer and softer, the crosser and crosser I felt. Then my children started saying "Mummy, please don't whisper at us".

I use silence as a tactic quite often as a class control mechanism when teaching a chatty, fidgety, inattentive crowd. Like today's samba class. I stopped explaining something in mid sentence (mid-word, even?) and just sat down on the floor next to my drum and waited. Silence happened quite soon, and then I finished the explanation in a whisper. The rest of the lesson went much better - I won't say the children were quiet - samba really isn't that kind of an activity - but I had their attention.

Tuesday 4th November - Car Spotting

This morning, first thing, I was teaching in a school in a town twenty miles away from home.

This morning, a bit later on, my husband was driving my father to drop him off at the hospital in the same town for the second of his cataract operations (this first was last month, and went very well).

So, all the way home, until I reached the motorway, I found myself scanning the oncoming traffic to see if I would spot my husband's car. Except, of course, when I was otherwise occupied by roundabouts, cyclists, roadworks and other random hazards along the way.

Anyway, turns out that they arrived at the hospital in good time (driving gently) and my husband made the return journey rather more briskly, so he arrived home barely ten minutes behind me.

Heigh ho - car spotting livened up a rather dull commute.

Monday 3rd November - Getting back into the swing of things

So, am I back into the groove after half term?

Not really.

Best beloved delivered my mobile phone to me at the first school which is luckily only round the corner from where we live. I was so pleased at having remembered my mp3 player that I left my equally vital phone behind.

Monday and Tuesday are brutally early starts as far as I am concerned, but things improve as the week goes on.

And a really silly route, travelling 20 miles east, and then 30 miles west, and then home, another 15 miles because of a detour to yet another school along the way.

Tomorrow is another really early start, but not as much driving as I will only visit two schools.

Sunday 2nd November - BIG books

Some books are very much bigger on the inside than the outside.

I've been reading "Cultural Amnesia" by Clive James for a couple of years now. I started reading it because of a recommendation from someone that I follow on Twitter.

It takes a long time to get through each chapter, because as you go along you end up making a great long list of books to read, ideas to follow up, things to think about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Amnesia_(book)

It is a book that is so big, that it has a wikipedia entry all to itself.

I have a feeling I am going to have to go back to the beginning. Again. As far as I can remember, I think I've only got as far as Miles Davies.

It is also a very expensive book to read; along the way I started reading Dante's "Inferno" in an interlinear Italian/English edition, acquired a book of poems by Lorca, just for starters.

A Kindle is a dangerous thing. Just 1-click is all it takes... Go on, I dare you...

Saturday 1st November - Spring? Summer?

Walking home in a bit of a hurry this lunchtime, I spotted a rhododendron in flower

and also a hydrangea.

In November.

Earlier this morning I noticed that there were still flowers on a neighbour's lavender hedge.

In November.


Weird or what?