Garden

A weekend for being in the garden, enjoying the lovely weather.

Gardening continued on Saturday. After Nicky had been doing some fine work over in the 'bank', attention was turned to the 'raised bed' with some significant weeding and pruning on the right-had side of the big round bush, followed by some new planting (tough going in the dry, hard ground).

I was wandering around taking some photos the other day whilst Nicky was at work on the bank (slacking off - hence the 'Growth' photos from the other day), so do have a more general 'before' shot of the raised bed, followed by an 'after' of the right hand side.

  As for Sunday, a day for lazing around in the garden and relaxing. Barley certainly thought so.

X

A milestone day for the USA today, and we were able to watch it live on TV, thanks again to YouTube (see yesterday's post). For the first time ever, a privately funded rocket sent astronauts into orbit, soon to be docking with the International Space Station.

A couple of hours later at about 10:10pm we went outside as instructed, and sure enough we saw a bright light moving rapidly across the night sky, underneath the moon. We'd been told that we might see both the ISS and the Space X capsule, but we only saw one moving object, so can't be sure which one this was!

As for the significance of the event, it was the first manned US flight since the Shuttle programme had been shut down almost a decade ago, and so a pretty big moment, and hopefully no more having to (rather embarrassingly for a 'superpower') as for a lift on other people's rockets.

Meerkat

Another opportunity for a virtual experience today. This time a concert of sorts, presented live on YouTube. Bizarrely thanks to 'Meerkat Music' (who would have thought we'd end up here when some advertising sprog tried out the funny idea that 'market' sounded a little bit like 'meerkat').

So, we were able to join Gary, Mark, Howard and even Robbie (not the long forgotten Jason) in what appeared to be variously their home studios / garages for a mini concert, and entertaining it was too.

However, it has to be said that it's still not a patch on the real thing.

Reopening

A day of mixed news. Boris tries to get us excited about the fact that up to six people can now meet up, albeit outdoors and at a distance, and we hear that Premier League football will be back, without crowds, from 17 June. Baby steps.

This is to be offset against the grim milestone that now over 100,000 people have died in the USA, whilst we are told that South America may be the new epicentre. Things seem pretty bad in Brazil, with the official death toll past 25,000 and rising rapidly.

I restarted blogging 11 days ago, and in that post commented that the total position was 4.5 million confirmed cases and just over 300,000 deaths. Since then, those figures have increased by 1.1 million and 50,000. Whilst certain countries, ours included, may hopefully be over the worst, on a global scale, this thing isn't slowing down yet.

In amongst all of this, Disney have decided that now is a good time to get the ball rolling with reopening their Florida parks, as reported on the Disney Parks Blog. So far no indication of when the non DVC hotels will open, but DVC resorts to open from 22 June, followed by park openings on 11 July and 15 July. A pretty restricted restart, with reservations required for access, and a number of things missing, including parades and fireworks. Again, baby steps.

Maitlis

I read Emily Maitlis' book, Airhead, at the end of last year, and thought that it was an excellent read. Now it seems like rather than presenting the news, she's in danger of becoming the story herself. Right now she's trending on Twitter, although there was a distinct lack of any mention on the BBC ten o'clock news, and as I sit here and compose this, I'm watching the start of Newsnight. Again, no mention of the missing presenter.

Speculation in the Twitter-sphere is rife:

• Was the BBC lent on to sanction Maitlis after her opening remarks to yesterday's programme (comments that started with "Dominic Cummings broke the rules - the country can see that, and it's shocked that the government cannot" and went on to "he made those who struggled to keep the rules look like fools")?
• Has she refused to present tonight's show in protest at her treatment (it certainly looks like she was originally due to be back today, having signed off last night's show with "that's it from us, but I'll be back tomorrow")?
• Has Maitlis been 'suspended' in some way from her job? If so, does it not seem a little ironic that reporting on a story about whether someone should apologise / resign / be fired could put your own job in peril.

Stories within stories, and from the government's point of view, this just won't go away.

Razor

Whilst we were in Key West in February, I still managed to track down a few bookshops just off Duval Street. Typical of me, I know, but that's just who I am. Anyway, in one of them (Key West Island Books) I found some signed firsts of Carl Hiaasen's, which were a must, so I bought a copy of the oldest one there, Skin Tight, his third (single author) book from the late 1980s.


Fast forward to this bank holiday weekend, and I finally get round to reading his most recent novel, Razor Girl (2016), which has been on the shelves since publication, and I am delighted to find that it is set on Key West, and so a whole load of references (Duval, Mallory, Southernmost, and so on) mean more to me now than if I'd read it straight away.

As expected, it's typical Hiaasen stuff, and huge amounts of fun.

One of the reasons for reading it now is that a look on his website reveals that Carl has a new book coming out in the summer, and to quote from the site: "Squeeze Me captures the Trump era with Carl's inimitable savage humor and wonderful, eccentric characters. A surefire best seller."

Growth

Out in the garden for some of the sunny bank holiday today. Partly a little bit of gardening, and partly some badminton with Jake. Entertaining to marvel at the tree growth. Here's a photo which happens to be from almost exactly four years ago, and then a couple from today.