Sweet Cherry Pie

It’s cherry time and this year my boyfriend has been determined to get the cherries before the blackbirds and pigeons do. To this end, he has decorated the tree with mobiles in the form of old cds, the flashes off which are enough to blind a cherry-spotting starling at 500 feet up. He even cut a scaredy-cat scarecrow out of an old piece of MDF (see photo). This guy should be on TV, I tell you.

Despite all these precautions, the feathered fiends launched a dawn raid today and by the time the first human patrol checked the tree, their greedy beaks had stripped every fruit above cd level. Now we have done our own picking and the result is my boyfriend’s cherry pie with egg custard. An odd-sounding mix, but it works. If I can prise the recipe out of him, I’ll publish it on a future blog piece.

It’s shaping up for a thunderstorm now. We’ll see how many cherries are left after the wind has whipped through them like a smoothie-maker and hailstones have pulverised the pits.

Ant Phobia

I have an ant phobia. No, not an AUNT phobia – I haven’t any of those left. My phobia is about those tiny black things that live in seething nests, and their larger relatives that march in purposeful columns through the woods. And their vicious red cousins that grab your with their miniscule fangs and won’t let go, whilst pumping you full of poison. (The day following my 21^st birthday party, held in a boathouse in Wales, was spent at Bangor hospital where my jeans were cut off my swollen kegs and my veins injected with antihistamine after I had fallen into a drunken stupor on the river bank, with my ankles dangling in a red ants’ nest.)

Last week I bought ant powder and prepared to wipe out some bold bugs that had invaded my house and were gaily trolling past the wooden lintel, carrying eggs and disappeared beneath the skirting board. But this minor skirmish was nothing compared to some of the epic Ant Wars of the past.

The worst encounter occurred in a wood near the village of Graffham on the Sussex Downs. My (now ex) husband and I had gone for a post-lunch walk during a visit to his parents. We were strolling down a woodland path when a young girl on a pony came cantering towards us. I stepped off the path to let them pass, then suddenly, without warning, my husband threw himself across the path of the speeding pony, grabbed me and pulled me to the other side of the path.

“What the hell did you do that for? You could have got us all killed!” I shouted, when the sound of the girl’s swear-words and pounding hooves had faded and I’d stopped shaking.

“Look what you nearly stepped in,” he said, pointing. "You'd have died if you'd trodden in that." I followed his eyes to the other side of the path. It was moving. Everything was moving for yards around. It was one vast nest of large black wood ants. That’s when I realised that the rustlings I had thought were simply leaves fluttering delicately in the breeze had, in fact, been the purposeful movements of this vast ant army.

At once, I went cold and crawly all over. I felt sick. Terror swept over me. I looked down and noticed columns of ants criss-crossing the path and I said something I hadn’t said since I was two years old. “C-c-c-carry me.” The poor sod had to throw me over his shoulder and lug me back to civilisation, and when he needed a rest he had to hang me from a tree branch, from which I dangled from fingers crooked and frozen in a grip of pure panic. I truly think my ex was right and I would have had a heart attack and died if I'd gone off the wrong side of the path. Each nest can hold up to 10,000 ants and this was no mere colony, it was a continent!

On holidays in Scotland as a kid, I would stay snivelling unhappily in the car rather than trek through the forest with the rest of the family, treading between columns of ants. Scottish wood ants seem bigger than any other member of the UK ant family. They can swallow a Highland cow whole. They would certainly have made mincemeat of eight-year-old me. The torments of being locked in the old Ford Anglia on a boiling August day were nothing compared to my mindless terror of The Ant.

Eventually, at the age of 30-something, I had the bright idea of asking my mother if there was any reason why I should be so scared of ants. “Oh yes,” she said brightly. “It probably dates back to our holiday in Weston-Super-Mare when you were a baby. We strapped you in your pram and left you out on the verandah while we had lunch and you screamed the place down. In those days it was the thing to let your baby scream, rather than spoil it by running to it every time it made a sound. But you screamed so loudly for so long that in the end I thought I’d better go and see if anything was wrong, and I found all these ants had got into the pram and were crawling all over you.”

So there I was, strapped in and subjected to one of the worst tortures known to Man, the equivalent of being buried up to the neck in an antheap. No wonder I go to pieces every time I see more than one or two together. No wonder I hate bondage! And to compound it, I can recall being three years old and thinking I was helping Mother by bringing her tea cup and saucer in from the garden. As I toddled in with them, I noticed ants crawling on the saucer. I remember screaming, dropping the lot and getting bawled out for breaking them. So my fear of ants was compounded by being punished for being scared of them. How’s what for therapy in reverse?

A few years ago, I was recovering from a gynae op in Hammersmith Hospital. I opened my locker, got my bag out and found it was full of red ants. Then I noticed some IN MY BED! They had an infestation of pharoah ants in the hospital and the bastards had found the Kit-Kat bar which I had been keeping as a special treat.

I have decided that when I snuff it, I am going to be cremated. Anything, rather than be trapped in my coffin (maybe not even dead, but waking from a coma and finding I’d been buried prematurely) and having the thing fill up with ants. I saw an episode of CSI in which one of the agents was trapped in a box and ants were let in. I left the room and felt sick for the rest of the evening. Whatever you do, never, EVER, buy me a Formicarium. Or bring me back chocolate-covered ants from your holiday in some bug-infested country. A bar of good, plain Lindt will do. Though… typical, it always happens to me… I once bought a choc bar from a shop in Spain, unwrapped it at the airport, bit into it and found that it wasn’t an Aero at all, but the holes had been caused by some nasty grubs that had bored into it and the inside of the bar was full of caterpillar threads.

Excuse me, I’m just going away to be sick. Hey, I’ve realised what a good way this would be for me to lose weight. One look at an ants’ nest and I go right off food. Think I’ve changed my mind about that Formicarium.

For another amusing ant story, read Zoe’s blog on www.myboyfriendisatwat.com Her ants beat her up!

Good news all round!

HEALTH NEWS. Well, I told my cold to bugger off, using my best, stern Barbara Woodhouse dog-training tones. It didn’t like it. Last night, it got its own back by punctuating my sleep with nasty, tickly, chesty coughing fits, but today I am BETTER! I’ve been out for the first time in three days and, apart from a few sinusy sniffs, I feel fine. So it’s 1 – 0 to Mind Over Matter.

FOX NEWS. Every night I have been putting out jam sandwiches laced with the homeopathic treatment that the National Fox Welfare Society sent me for free (natfox@ntlworld.com). I hadn’t seen the little fox for several days and had started to fear the worst, but it trotted past the window this morning and I am thrilled to report that its fur has started growing back. Its body and brush have sprouted half an inch of fine ginger hair like baby fluff. It has only been on the treatment for ten days and NFWS recommend continuing the treatment for three weeks. At this rate of growth, it will look like a Lhasa Apso by then, with fur down to the floor. Perhaps I could enter it for Crufts

Summer colds

Why are they always worse than winter ones? Why do they seem to hang around longer? Or it is that when it’s cold and wintry, you expect to get one, and when it’s warm and sunny you feel aggrieved at this rotten, unfair twist of fate?

When I went down with this two days ago, someone asked, “Why didn’t you use your own tip and tell yourself you hadn’t got a cold?” Answer: because it clobbered me IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT! I awoke in the early hours, streaming and coughing, and felt too tired and miserable to try anything, be it echinacea or mind control.

Yesterday I took a Lysine capsule and 1000mg of Vit C. Today I have had 20 drops of echinacea and told the cold quite firmly that I have had enough of it and it is going. The Boyfriend has taken nothing at all for his. We’ll see who recovers first.

Clutching at (cheese) straws...

Something happened yesterday that made me take stock of myself. I have been trying to sell a house since January. (See pic of garden and conservatory and make me an offer, please! It's in sought-after East Finchley, just up the road from Highgate.) This poor house has been empty for most of the 18 months I have owned it. This is because I snapped it up quickly as it was cheap, and realised – too late – what its problems where. That it’s a fifteen minute slog back from Budgens with the grocery bags (I don’t drive - if you do, you can whizz to a Tesco in no time at all); that it’s on a very small council estate which, though very quiet with a resident caretaker, still carries that blight, the emblem of potential dodginess and trouble even though the caretaker informes me it's the safest estate in North London; and finally, most important of all for me, that is has no storage bar one cupboard and a loft which is crawling room only. Nowhere for all my boxes of books, stuff from my late parents’ place, still to be gone through if only I can find the time. Nowhere for the paintings and pottery I have collected over the years. Nowhere for a piano and my guitars. And above all, nowhere for an office, which is why I am still working at The Boyfriend's.

It has its virtues – lovely garden, big kitchen, nice neighbours but, as a full-time freelance writer and editor, office space is all-important. I need room for four two-drawer filing cabinets, desktop and laptop computers, two printers, one old but fast, for all the books I have to print out, and one slower, good for photos, and skype phone, headphones, various usb attachments, the multitude of stuff that makes the 'paperless office' require even more room than its paper-filled forerunner. And I like to overlook something pleasant while a work, a tree perhaps, something on which to rest the eye and calm the mind while trying to give some hapless beginner writer essential tips on grammar, punctuation and plot construction.

This house has two bedrooms, both of which are full of bed. The view is of a block of council flats. There is no fireplace with niches either side in which to fit shelves to house my books. In vain do my friends say, "Give them to a charity shop.” What? You must be joking. These books have been with me for years. They have comforted me in times of misery, made me laugh, sympathised with me, provided answers. They have been counsellors, therapists and gurus; their paper has blotted my tears; they have helped me travel the world (in my head), helped me time-travel back to days of Ancient Rome; made my erogenous zones throb in times when my sex life has resembled an oasis-less desert. They have probably saved my life. They are good old friends. Would you sell your best friend at a car boot sale, or give him or her away to charity? No way!

So – I have found out the hard way that modern boxes are not for me. I need spidery cupboards, groaning library shelves, mysterious but useful nooks and crannies. But first, I must sell my house and yesterday I thought I’d done it. Having dined on nothing but red wine and cheese straws the previous night, I was just on my way out to a morning coffee date when two pleasant middle-aged Irishmen appeared, one hippy-looking, with long hair tied back, the other with short grey hair and smart-casual, yet slightly old-fashioned looking clothes, the clothes of a man who kept a spartan wardrobe and prized cleanliness and comfort over trendiness.

They looked as if they’d just stepped off the set of Father Ted; the eponymous priest and his guitar-twanging brother. I liked their vibe. They seemed enthusiastic. I had high hopes that before the day was out, I would get an offer. And when I got back from an ammo-buying trip, moth murdering and ant assassination in mind, what should be waiting to greet me by the step but a lovely, friendly, purring black cat that obligingly crossed the path, then came back and rolled over to be stroked. “Are you my lucky black cat? Yes, you are, aren’t you?” I crooned, immediately deciding that if he were to adopt me, I would call him Omen.

But in the cold light of today I realise how easily I was led up the path of superstition, like so many millions of other poor mortals. What a stupid bimbo I was to believe that seeing a black cat meant I’d sold the house. Someone sneezed and coughed on me on the bus and now I have a cold. That wasn’t an omen, that was a virus reproducing itself, the dirty, filthy, amoral bastard.

But hang on… tonight there is a lottery draw. Now, about that black cat….

Death by Lycra

I’m typing this with streaming eyes, stuffy nose and a throat that makes me feel like an apprentice to one of those crazy performers who swallows broken glass. In my case, it didn’t go down but lodged in my larynx and all I can get out is a croak, and a barking cough like the ghastly dog from three doors down.

I am not putting up with it. I had to cancel an appointment with the personal trainer at the gym for the third time running as I haven’t the energy to walk to the bus stop, let alone show off my prowess on a dozen machines when my eyes are streaming too much to see whether I’m on wimpish Level 4 or big-bog-macho-hairy-chested Level 40.

Talking of the latter, the basement gym where all the muscle tends to congregate must have been closed the other day for suddenly the upstairs gym, that gentle space where those recovering from heart attacks, or those who, like me, haven’t exercised for years and are tentatively flexing flaccid flab, proceed at a staid pace on the treadmill and hang gasping onto the rotating arms of the cross-trainer, was invaded. Huge, sweating bears with biceps the size of Tube trains pumped weights with great grunts and loud exhalations. A swarthy Latin poseur in tight gym shorts and carefully gelled hair paused between the lat machine and the triceps push to parade in front of the mirror, slyly eyeing up the reflections of the females to see who was admiring him. It was not good. Perhaps this lurgy came to save me from death by lycra.

Staggering Slowly...

STAGGERING SLOWLY…

Every year I take part in a Stag Beetle watch. The species is on the decline in the UK due to loss of habitat. A few years ago it wasn’t unusual to see as many as 40 flying around on a warm evening in late May and mating on the grass, on the shed roof, in the bushes… The last couple of Mays have been disappointingly damp for the crucial days of the stags’ mating season but this year it warmed up in early June and we did see a few. The largest (see photos) was 7cms, a big beast with magnificent horns. If you see any, to contact enquiries@ptes.org and tell them the date and the location.

Last night I was invited to a barbecue in the garden of a fellow Stag Watch enthusiast. “There’ll be lots of them,” he assured me. I had my camera ready and my eyes glued to the skies. He lives near a cemetery which provides an ideal breeding ground. But we didn’t see a single one. Several glasses of wine and a large brandy later, I staggered home stag-less.