Kew. Vacation update 2

So here we are at Kew Gardens and the ViL is a little grumpy. First it was the 10 pound admission (each -he is cheap). Then he got mad at me because when asked if wanted to do Gift Aid (a scheme that means the charity gets the price of admission plus a kickback from your income tax it costs you nothing) he said no but I filled out the form anyway.

I reminded him that it cost him nothing and that it was taking money away from the Chancellor Gordon Brown. He said that he didn’t care and that he’d rather his tax money went to nuclear weapons.

I reminded him that it probably wouldn’t, but he said a man can dream.

Peace shattered

Ergggh… The sun, after weeks of hiding away, is finally out. But instead of being able to enjoy my garden in peace my head is throbbing with the thumpa thumpa of my neighbours’ do it yourself nightclub. Mind you its been going on since 9 am and this isn’t my first diisturbed Sunday morning.

These neighbours are relatively recent arrivals from Poland.(The UK is the only country allowing new EU citizens like Poles and Czechs access to its labor markets so we’ve got loads of new Eastern European immigrants) I reckon there’s little to do in Poland and maybe they’re from some tiny little village. At first they were well behaved youth, but I think a new housemate and the freedoms of London has led them down the wrong path. They seem to be having more fun than they used to, but the thumpa thumpa is driving me insane. They listen to an eclectic range of music: hip hop, house, and Baltic pop (as bad as it sounds) and all of it is headache inducing.

Thing is, you don’t party at 9am without the aid of pharmaceuticals so there’s not much hope of them tiring out soon. The Vol-in-Law tries to counter them by playing some of his favorite music. But I gotta tell you as much as I love the Man in Black, Johnny Cash don’t drown out thumpa thumpa.

Vacation update 1: veg and walks

I’m sitting in my lovely garden, which needs some tidying, enjoying a brief glimmer of English sunshine. I spent a lot of time yesterday tidying my blog site too so do take a look.

Me and the Vol in Law also spent some time walking in Richmond Deer Park yesterday. The park is huge and if you wander around a bit you can get quite a decent walk in. We saw lots of deer (they don’t call it the deer park for nothin’) and we also saw some magpies on the deer grazing for insects.

I’d never heard of this kind of behaviour and I’d never seen it either. Magpies are beautiful black and white birds with blue dashes on their wings but they’re seen here as some kind of suburban rubbish bird that are large and brash and will hog the bird feeder frightening off more desirable birds. Many British people find it hard to believe that I like magpies, but they also can’t credit that mockingbirds can be a real pain if they take to dive bombing you. They only know that Gregory Peck and Harper Lee say that it’s a sin to kill one.

We had planned to finish our walk in time to get to the swanky butchers in Wimbledon, but we discovered at 4:15 that they close at 4 on Saturday not 5. So no meat for us.

That’s ok, we said. We’ll have a vegetarian dinner. We had plenty of vegetables because we received on Friday the first of a weekly delivery of organic fruit and vegetables. Organic vegetable box schemes are all the rage here. Basically some company (staffed entirely, I imagine, by grungy, weedy Green Party voters) picks out a selection of vegetables for you and delivers them to your door. The idea is that it will force you to eat more vegetables because you have so many to hand and that you’ll try new and different stuff.. Of course the other idea is that it’s all organic and tastier and healthier, an idea I don’t totally buy into, but there don’t seem to be any non organic schemes.

We’ve already cancelled our order after one week. I suppose I imagined heaps of home grown vegetables fresh from the garden, sort of like the sackloads of yellow squash, corn and tomatoes shoved at you by overenthusiastic gardeners in the church parking lot after services on any given Sunday in the summer in Tennessee. But instead it was a paltry collection of limp broccoli withered green beans and peaches that went to rot in less than 24 hours. What we ate quickly was good and I’m still planning to make some coleslaw out of the cabbage and carrots we got, but I just didn’t think it was good value for money.