naked with a belt

Tollund Man, for instance, was found with a belt but no clothes. "It doesn't make sense to be naked and have a belt," Frei pointed out.

True... The rest of the article is here and talks about the possibility that they were tossing foreigners into the bog, not in some sort of religious ritual, but as an alternative to burying them with everyone else. But basically no one actually knows. 

And this is an overview of the allotment... 

We have lots of little green tomatoes. Something keeps taking one bite out of each one and then leaving the rest, but there are so many that surely some will ripen...eventually. We have beans and lettuce and a surprisingly small amount of chard, which got a late start. The enormous Thai purple beans show no sign of flowering yet, let alone doing anything else, but fingers crossed. Sherlock is very excited about them (so am I). 

A woman named Mary has a plot a little way down from ours. She has a silverbell tree (currently about four feet tall, but she says they're meant to grow up to thirty feet and that she'll keep it trimmed and good luck to her with that...), a border of cockle shells, and marigolds all in a row. This led to a discussion of nursery rhymes with Sherlock and the implication from L that Little Boy Blue blowing his horn was about...well, you can guess. And also, bizarrely, to Sherlock wanting to read The Secret Garden, once he was assured it didn't have any talking animals or other such nonsense. Not sure how that one's going to go, since it's also distinctly lacking in pirates, booty, and mysterious corpses. 

not too spotty

Sherlock continues tired, not too spotty and intermittently cranky, which is to be expected. He has consumed his entire body weight in homemade ice lollies several times over. I hope L keeps making them all summer. The lemon-basil ones were not a hit with Sherlock, but I love them.

Speaking of basil, it exists in the allotment. Our little non-producing blueberry bush looks happier this year, so perhaps we'll get some actual berries out of it (although Sherlock informs me that most things we call berries are technically droops drupes, but he doesn't know if that includes blueberries or not, and Johnnnnnn stop typing so I can look it upppppp why can't I use your phoneeeeeeee [answer: because of the 38 texts he sent L in a two hour period before I took it away from him]).

We will also have these enormously long Thai red beans:

They stay that color when you cook them, which Sherlock is very pleased about. Most of them that aren't green to start with turn green when you cook them. They also apparently get about as long as your arm, which should be something to see.

I'm going to let Sherlock look up droops now. Talk to you all later.

spring

Well, I think it's safe to say that it's spring now. L took these today...

Things are blooming, the sky is blue, the sun was out... We got very dirty at the allotment... Well. Very dirty is relative. I have no doubt it will be much worse later on, but there was mud in abundance. And I strained the top of my foot somehow getting my boot off later. That's unrelated to the allotment. Probably.

Reg suggested to Sherlock that he make a scarecrow to keep the birds away from the new plants. He doesn't know what's he's wrought. I remember one of you being worried you'd started something here a few nights ago -- never worry about that. Honestly, it is impossible not to start something with Sherlock. His enthusiasms are enormous and often overwhelming, and always entertaining. We will have the most terrifying scarecrow of all time.

The running is...going. Well, the running itself is fine. Finding time for it is going to become increasingly difficult as the runs get longer, I think. And of course one has to schedule in all that time lying pathetically on the floor afterward...

snail races

I keep meaning to collect all the Greg the Florist posts and put them on a page so I don't have to look up the last post every time I try to do more...but that's not going to happen today.

We've just been to the allotment. Do snails hibernate in winter? I think they do. At least, you never see them, so I presume they're doing the snail equivalent of staying home with a hot cup of tea. It must not be cold enough yet, because Sherlock found two of them that were lively enough for a snail race.

You can't count of snails to follow a race track, of course, so he raced them consecutively and measured the distance each one went...in five minutes. Which is more patience for watching a snail crawl than I would've had. Or in fact than I did have. I think I wandered off to pull carrots halfway into the second heat. He wants you to know that the second one won, and that he thinks the viscosity of their mucous may be related to their speed.

We now have carrots (and chard), tomatoes (and chard), and some more small pumpkins (and...chard). The tomatoes are stubborn, hanging on in the greenhouse and ripening while their vines die off. The chard is just unnatural, and I expect to see a news report on it any day now. 

home again

We have beans! We had a few before. Now we have...a lot. These beans may end up on the evening news by the end of the summer. Two children crushed by massive falling bean pod, film at eleven. 

Here's a site that Mycroft showed me. He says it helps him concentrate at school. And at home when Sherlock's not in the flat. It's called Coffitivity and it plays the sounds of a coffee shop at you. I'm not quite sure whether I like it or not yet. 

I had a long and ridiculous argument with Murray this morning about whether it was rude of me to ask him to be my best man via text. He maintains it was. I maintain if we went around pointing out every time we were rude to each other we'd literally never do anything else. I also said I'd ask you lot - rude or no? He said yes anyway. 

lettuce yesterday and lettuce tomorrow

Someone asked if anything was ready to eat in the allotment and I think I said no, but there is lettuce, sort of. Lettuce thinnings anyway. And cress and various other things.

Lettuces

That's the entire harvest though - not really enough for a salad even for one person, let along three. I'm sure L will find something delicious to do with it though. Just not tonight. I gather it was worse than usually busy at work, and Mrs Hudson made us chicken and potatoes, which was very nice (and nice of her). 

Tomorrow...my first shift. 7pm - 7am. I'm looking forward to it. 

i don't have a good title for this

Yesterday was nice and quiet after the unfortunate excitement of L's bike accident. Quiet anyway - not so nice for him, obviously. The bruises are pretty spectacular, and the muscle strains don't show, but they're just as bad. 

Sherlock asked him about seven times yesterday when he was getting a new bike. We thought it was just excitement at the idea of something new and shiny, but he seemed more worried about it than anything. L talked it over with him while they looked at new ones online. Turns out Sherlock was worried about it because last time L didn't have his bike was when he got kidnapped. So. There was that. We talked to him about it - mostly L talked to him about it - and I hope he feels better now. 

(Lestrade, you know you can borrow mine until you can get a new one, right? Not that I think you're going to put off buying one...)

And the allotment is proceeding:

small growing things

Here are some tiny things coming up in the allotment that may or may not be sorrel. We didn't label things as well as we could have. 

And bleeding heart, which we put in Saturday with Mycroft before we had to give him back to the school. It seems happy so far. 

Mycroft also told me I shouldn't keep abusing my phone's camera apps like this, but I'm  not listening. When I was about nine, our neighbour gave me his old camera, which was cheap and plastic and broke almost immediately (probably didn't help that I dropped it in a pond...a few times...) and it took pictures like this. Which is why the apps sell so well, I imagine. Nostalgia? Of course, fifty percent of mine were of Harry making a face because she'd got between the camera and whatever I was taking a picture of. 

On the job front, I have an interview coming up. Wish me luck. I feel like I might need a better suit. 

Oh, and Muray says to tell you that he's started the process of leaving the Army and should get his 'soul and free will back in roughly seventeen years'. By which he means a few months. 

a post of pictures

First off, here's the one Nicky sent to L, asking if Greg-the-Florist had expanded his business... 

Sherlock's new shoes with exciting skulls and two colours of laces! 

Picture of a pond that Mycroft took. (I think it's really nice, I'm sending it to his mum too.) 

And a slightly blurry picture that I took with his phone of our blueberry bush in bloom... 

And when we got home, we made flapjacks, because...that's what you do after you have pizza for dinner?

 I swear we do eat quite a lot of vegetables. They just don't get discussed on here as often. And I never think to take pictures of peas or asparagus. Although they are quite nice looking when you think about it so perhaps I should. Well, maybe not peas. They're basically just small, green (sometimes wrinkled) balls. (I am now waiting to see what L will say about balls...)

Tomorrow...in theory at least...we're going rock climbing. There's a place that has all the gear and gives lessons for beginners. When I say 'we' I might mean Sherlock and Mycroft. L is remembering climbing a tree at Nicky's and the regret that followed, and I'm not sure how my shoulder will feel about it, but we'll certainly try, and I think the boys will love it. (Wish us luck.) 

pretty much just pictures

I'm sure I had things to say, but then it got late and I should be in bed already... Here are some pictures of the blueberry bush and its pot:

The rocks at the bottom are to help drainage. 

And here's the actual blueberry bush. It's a kind that grows pink blueberries. Sherlock was entranced by the idea, and it sounds like it'll look nice in winter - yellow stems. 

And...I've been thinking about this for quite a while and I suppose I'll just say it and hope it comes out right. I never really understood before why people whose partners or spouses were hurting them wouldn't just...leave. I mean, I understood intellectually that there could be practical or financial reasons, but I never understood emotionally why someone would choose to stay if they didn't have to. 

Maybe that's a failure of imagination on my part, because it took having my life and heart so thoroughly entwined with L's to realise exactly how horribly wrenching it could be leave someone you love, or even used to love, or still want to love. And that sounds like I'm...comparing him to Bryan or something, which is awful and not what I mean at all and why I hesitated to try to say this. I suppose I just mean...you can't stop loving someone like flipping a switch, and the visceral realisation of that has made me see things differently. I suspect it's fairly obvious to people who aren't me, but I've led quite a solitary life up to now, emotionally speaking. Anyway. That's all. Good night. 

roses and invisible fish

Transparent fish:

No reason. Just because I liked them. More about them here.

Beautiful day. Chilly, but sunny. L had to work, unfortunately, but Sherlock and I had breakfast with him before he left (both of us, perhaps cruelly, still in our pyjamas...). Got the flat tidied (because if this isn't done on a daily basis, it devolves into complete chaos almost immediately) and then we went to get some plants. Not, as Sherlock would've preferred, all the plants they had, but possibly still too many.

Highlights include a blueberry bush in a pot (which I'm told we should get a few berries from late this year but which should do much better next year), tomato seeds, two roses, delphiniums, and sweet peas. And nasturtium seeds. And some other things. Also extremely small gardening gloves for Sherlock with bugs printed all over them. He showed them to everyone at the allotment...and then took them off and put them aside so they wouldn't get dirty.

We planted things and positioned and repositioned the blueberry bush and dug enormous holes for the roses to fill with compost and things roses like. Late in the afternoon, an amazingly handsome man pulled up on a motorbike and became the talk of the allotments by kissing me and then shortly afterwards taking his top off... All in all, quite a good day.