Spring and Alstroemerias

The long delayed, long promised spring, has sort of appeared: it’s been windy which takes a bit off the general balminess but the wind is south-westerly and has lost its cruel edge. The daffodils have come out at last. I have various things to plant and can now think of planting them – we have been very taken with alstroemeria as just-about deathless cutting flowers, and I have bought some nice red ones from an alstroemeria grower. There are also lilies. We are going to put the cutting dahlias in the greenhouse. Last year they flowered for about three weeks before the frost got them, so if they’re in the greenhouse, they should start earlier and go on longer. Doubtless there is something wrong with this brainy plan but we’ll find out as it goes along. I was in Edinburgh in the middle of this week, which made a change. My academic occasions took me to the Royal Observatory, somewhat out of my usual path. The actual observatorial bit is a fine Victorian structure, a cylinder with anthemions round the top painted bright blue, the whole thing reminiscent of a Brobdignagian biscuit barrel. It was all a bit surreal; they don’t seem to have a reading room as such so I was perched in the corner of a office, with Radio 2 wurbling on, trying to make sense of fifteenth and sixteenth-century books about astronomy, of surreal monetary value. On the home front, the Professor has learned how to make Aberffraw Cakes. These are a rather beguiling version of shortbread, moulded on a scallop shell and cooked rather faster than the Scots version, so they are very pretty and the variation of thickness gives them a variation of texture. He was attracted to the name because of, some time ago, coming across the name of the Prince of Aberffraw, one of these titles which pop up in various corners of the archipelago and have somehow survived the tidy instincts of the Normans.  Another, slightly more suprising recreation was upping and buying the new Bond film, which we watched last night. The only Bond film either of us ever recollects seeing is Casino Royale (1967), so it came as a bit of a shock. We rather enjoyed it. The Professor enjoyed the moments of London architecture, and I particularly liked the moment where the ‘orrible villain, having been imprisoned in a glass cube which we were doubtless intended to assume was defended by death rays and so forth, spiritedly demonstrated the falseness of his teeth by taking them out and having a good gnash (my grandma used to do this to entertain/horrify the small), after which he took up a yoga position -  camera then cut to something else and returned to find the cubicle empty. I have to say that a director who, about 100 years after the term was coined, actually implements ‘with one bound, he was free’, has my sincere admiration.