Another quick book update

No, I haven't been splurging again, and no, I'm not going to blog every book I buy or read from now on.

But since you asked:
Children of God is very good indeed: complicated, rich, satisfying, bittersweet. At the start I was worried that it was heading towards a too easy "solution"; it doesn't, although there are a few touches I'm not quite convinced of. Still, if you've read The Sparrow, you should definitely read the sequel - it's that rare thing, a sequel that actually enriches and completes your understanding of the original - and if you haven't read The Sparrow, well, what are you waiting for?

And when you're done with those two, if you liked them, try Sheri Tepper's Grass.

Also, I have finally gotten Beloved to start The Beauty Myth, so yay me. (It helps that he's trapped in bed, "at death's door", i.e. with a slight cough.)

Right, then, enough of books for a while.

Possessed

When I said "the heavens have opened", I meant: "Formerly blue skies have rapidly morphed into something bulging, weighty and slatey like the roof of a giant grey marquee in a storm - and the roof has ripped." I meant: "There is hail, there is lightning, there is astonishing wetness." I meant: "I have seen weather like this in the Highveld, but never in England, where the wetness usually comes in fine drizzle over the course of weeks."*

And I meant: "Ooh, great news for the garden."**

I've formulated a theory over the past month and a half - stop me if I've said this before - that the Burbs are like weddings. There is some kind of sinister spirit that possesses those trapped in the situation, leading them to behave in utterly uncharacteristic ways. Thus, weddings will involve drama, possibly tears, last-minute panics, and familial tension; and if you move to the suburbs, well...

You start hearing yourself say things like, "Those petunias are coming up nicely."
"Lovely garden across the road, maybe we can ask them for some cuttings."
"Oh dear, the place next door is for sale. I hope we get decent neighbours."
And:
"If you're free on Monday, we should go to Homebase."

Maybe I am my mother's daughter after all***.
_____
* I've heard that Cape Town, Johannesburg and London have approximately equal annual rainfall. But in London it lands, as described above, in slow, fine drizzle; in Cape Town, in long rainy winters; and in Johannesburg, in dramatic thundery bursts every summer afternoon, when it falls onto parched, sun-hardened earth, and promptly runs right off. More fun, but less useful.
** Apart from the hail, that is.
*** DEAR LORD NO.

We're all going on a - no, hang on

Apparently we're not very good at organising this thing called a "holiday", Beloved and I.

He had some leave to use up in the first half of the year, so booked off the last week of June. (Yup, that would be this week.) I decided on a whim to do the same. We arranged to borrow Esteemed Father's car for this (upcoming) weekend.

The weather was looking good. I got all giddy with anticipation and considered the multitude of possibilities open to us: road trip to... Peak District? Bath? Durham? All these delightful and unknown places! And that was just the weekend. We still had a whole week to fill in. A little net surfing and I was thinking that since I still have my Schengen visa* a quick sojourn in Dublin, say, or Amsterdam, was definitely appealing. Mm, Amsterdam. Get in touch with my Dutch roots**. Look at pretty pictures and, er, tulips. Eat cheese. All that.

Then I looked at my diary. And realised that slap bang in the middle of this week were:
1) A lunch meeting to discuss a potential freelance project***; and
2) An actual freelance project, to a very tight deadline, agreed to months ago.

So much for Amsterdam. But the weekend road trip was still looking good. Weather continued fine. We even received a rash catsitting offer.

But you know what the rule is, right? When you've been working too hard, for too long, what happens the instant your leave rolls around?

Bingo.

Beloved is down with the lurgi.

And the skies have opened.

And that urgent freelance project, well, the timing has shifted a little - to right over the weekend.

_____
* A trophy of high value: costing little in money but much in bureaucratic frustration, and allowing free travel throughout Europe for six months. Therefore, once one has been granted, the desire to exploit it with weekly city breaks can rapidly overwhelm common sense and financial prudence.
** Dutch. Not Afrikaans. No one in my family is Afrikaans. My maternal grandparents, however, were Dutch immigrants. I'd just like to make this clear. Not all South Africans are Afrikaans. Thank you.
*** Which I'd probably be insane to take on anyway, but I almost certainly will. Because I'm stupid like that.

It's T-shirt day at Chez Scroobious!

Proud contest winner
Originally uploaded by Scroobious.

I considered, and rejected, the idea of taking a wet T-shirt photo. That would be tacky. And we don't do tacky, here at the Scrivenings. We're classy, we are.

So I just stuck my tits out instead.

Oh, if you want to know *why* it's T-shirt day - thanks, Cate!

So much for wireless so-called technology

Don't believe the hype, kids. That's all I'm saying.

That, and: this time I truly believe I am connected*, will remain so, and can stop whining, once and for all.

And: that means pictures will soon be returning to Chez Scroobious.

And: I'll be trying to write actual posts again, not just links and memes. Not that there's anything wrong with that, nosir. We like links and memes. At least I do. Still and all... there's a snobbish voice in my head that say that's not really what you started this thing for, is it, dear? And that's not really what The Readers (all three of them) are coming here for, is it? No?

Actually who knows, it might be, I have no idea why you come here. You're very welcome, though. Have a strawberry.

I'll be back soon.

____
* Three cheers for good oldfashioned cables!

And the "value" we're getting is...?

From a Financial Times report on the Queen's acccounts:

"Alan Reid, keeper of the privy purse, said the accounts showed a 'value-for-money monarchy. We're not looking to provide the cheapest monarchy. We're looking at one of good value and good quality.' "

That's what I like to hear. None of your cheap, flimsy royalty for us, no sir. This monarchy won't wear out, but you don't have to blow the budget on it either. The Marks & Sparks monarchy, as it were.

The binge continues

In the interests of full disclosure, I feel compelled to update the post below. As of lunchtime, thanks to a trip to my favourite hole-in-the-wall secondhand bookshop, the books I most recently bought are:

Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty
Mansfield Park
...both in elegant hardback editions;

Heidi
Heidi's Children
Good Wives
...all in lovely midcentury hardback editions;

a rather lovely illustrated book of the Old Mother Hubbard rhyme;

and a first edition of the first Lemony Snicket.

You will by now gather that I have a particular penchant for children's literature, especially in lovely midcentury hardback editions.

And I realise that I missed out a whole bundle of books from my previous report - also on Friday, from another secondhand shop, I bought: a gardening encyclopaedia (first gardening book I have ever so much as looked in!); a Bill Bryson, a lovely midcentury etc Little Men; and, er, something else I can't even remember. How embarrassing.

No wonder there's no money in my bank account.

It's all meme meme meme

Dear Reader, you have Glo to blame for this.

The Number Of Books I Own
On my personal three-part counting scale*, Some. Used to be Lots, but in the course of manymany moves**, I got a bit tired of the inevitable “stick ‘em in storage” routine, and decided that henceforth I would always have all my books with me. So I got rid of most of them. I’ve been working on rebuilding the collection, of course, but I tend to do a cull with every move. I’m more picky about what I actually buy these days though – they have to look good and I have to really believe I will read them, more than once, and want to lend them out – so there’s not a lot I can bear to get rid of. I do sometimes miss my glorious collection of Old and Beautiful (but unreadable) books. But not too much.

The Last Books I Bought
Had a bit of a binge lately, actually. Since Friday I have bought: Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion and The System of the World (because I’ve just been racing through Quicksilver – I’ve been hauling its 900-page hardback ass around in my handbag, it’s that good); Sheri Tepper’s The Companions (because I am devoted to the woman and insist on owning all her titles, despite rather patchy writing); Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and Children of God (because see below; I haven’t actually read CoG yet); and one of Beloved’s birthday presents***, title unrevealable because he might be reading this, who knows.

Last Book I Read
Just finishing up Quicksilver, and have started John Barth’s Coming Soon!!!, but it’s irritating the crap out of me and I may not bother with the rest. Last book completed: um… James Thurber’s Life and Hard Times. In a single train journey, so I’m not sure it quite counts, somehow.

Five Books That Mean A Lot
Just five?

Hm.

Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth – Glo is quite right, despite (ahem) deliberately rewriting the title. Because I read it at the tender age of 17 and it cast blinding white light deep into my psyche – so obvious, so necessary. I still can’t believe Beloved hasn’t got round to it. I really want the whole world to read this book****.

Mervyn Peake’s Book of Nonsense. Because it’s the most perfect distillation of nonsense ever written – whimsical, dark, surreal and simple.

Sheri Tepper’s Raising the Stones. Okay, it’s the middle book of a trilogy, and Grass is more widely admired, but this is the one I love. A god that actually works*****. It’s beautiful.

Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. Because this is religious SF that is intelligent, beautifully written, uncompromising, and can be read equally well by non-SF fans and, for that matter, non-religion fans.

[Just one spot left, folks, who’s gonna make the cut… Terry Pratchett? Jane Austen? Tolkien?]

Tom Spanbauer’s The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon. I can’t explain why. It just is. Every time I see it in a store, I am overcome with the desire to buy it for *someone*.

And since I have no self-discipline, I can’t possibly stop without mentioning two more absolutely vital reads: Gore Vidal’s Kalki (the ultimate mindfuck) and Moris Farhi’s Journey Through the Wilderness. I know you’ve never heard of it. But it is one of the very few books I can honestly describe as “a transformative vision”.

One Book I Wish I Could Burn
The entire works of Stephen Donaldson.

No, I’m not going to defend my desire to do this, as offensive as it is to the pure spirit of bibliophilia, nor my interesting twist on "one book". Nor my blatant stealing of this category from Glo, who surely invented it (but with added realism).

You’ve been pinged
Extemporanea. Go on, show us.
Gersh. You’re not writing nearly enough to keep me happy, greedy as I am; maybe something non-merger-related would be a restorative.
Anonymous. Stop rolling your eyes and just stick it in the comment box. Please.

PS: It occurs to me that, for a remedial SF fan******, there's a lot of genre in this list. And for a non-religious person, there's a lot of religion. What can I say. I'm an enigma.
___
* A Bit; Some; Lots. This is as far as measuring goes in my kitchen. You really don’t need a more refined scale for cooking, surely?
** Not eight. Just manymany. I don’t do troll maths.
*** There are some books that I will never buy for myself, only for Beloved, but we both know I’m as excited about them as he is. There’s a logic to it but to explain more would be to leave Clues for himself.
**** But I still love my lipstick. As does Naomi herself, so there.
***** Though I’ve gotten a little tired of her liberal use of the deus ex machina in later novels. Especially the aliens that turn up to sort everything out with miraculous nanotechnology, a la The Visitor. Sure. Whatever.
****** Though I somehow found myself captaining the sinking ship that was the University of Cape Town Tolkien Society, I never actually finished reading Lord of the Rings until three years later. I gravitate to the SF shelves in any library or store, but have read remarkably little of the genre. I recently completed a questionnaire about early reading habits of SF fans and realised I couldn't remember a single one of the SF books I read as a kid, other than some Ray Bradbury. That's why I say I'm a remedial SF fan.

The knees, the horrible knees!

It’s been hot this weekend. How hot? Really hot. So hot, the cats have been sleeping in the fridge. So hot, rail tracks warped, bringing train travel to a grinding halt across the South East*.

So hot, I’ve been wearing shorts. In public.

Under these conditions, of course, things go wrong. Little-known fact: this is why Hell is commonly depicted as a blazing furnace. It’s nothing to do with the agonies of burning flesh – physical pain is a mere shadow of the psychic pain that comes from Things Going Wrong, consistently but unpredictably, in ways that resist contingency planning. Temperatures rise, tempers fray, and implacable cosmic laws come into play: there will be engineering works on the line, there will be meetings missed and deliveries cancelled, and of course there will be airconditioning breakdowns, furthering the cycle of decay.

This was my weekend.

Friday. The plan: movies with a friend. The screw-up: babysitter cancelled.

Saturday. The plan: exploring Richmond by bike. The screw-up: newly delivered bikes, once assembled, proved to be leprechaun-sized.

Sunday. The plan: a long walk out in the countryside. The multipart screw-up: missed the once-an-hour train by one minute; missed the Plan B train by a bit more; concocted Plan C, only to find that due to engineering works on the line (obviously), we would need to take a succession of trains to our destination, none of which could be guaranteed to arrive in anything like reasonable time – so we could expect to be at least three hours late. We chose to graciously give up instead.

However, this being the mortal plane and not Hades, these various screw-ups all had a happy ending. Instead of movies, we had a chat in the baby-bound friend’s garden. Instead of cycling, we had a surprise delivery of plants and a mellow afternoon in our own garden. Instead of a country walk, we had a wander in Battersea Park and (eventually, after further public transport-related screw-ups) yet another mellow garden afternoon. All of which were very pleasant, and even productive, since we got to stick plants in the ground, and can now justifiably call our patch a “garden”, rather than “that weedridden bit of scrub out back”.

I think the Universe may be trying to teach me flexibility. Or possibly practical ecology.

_____
* The authorities actually feared this might happen back in 2003, as I recall, and imposed a speed limit on trains, thus adding “the wrong kind of sun” to the list of problems faced by British Rail. UK readers will already know this; non-UK readers unfortunately won’t get the joke. Trust me, though, it’s funny.

Auto-ditzstruction

Two-part story.

Part the first - Dream: I had travelled to Namibia and somehow managed to forget all my packing, including passport. Luckily border control was fairly relaxed, and when I got there I was able to pick up a dress for the costume ball I was going to. The dress had to be cooked first, though, and the cook made a bit of a hash of it. I was really very annoyed with myself for being so incredibly, forehead-smackingly Stoopid as to forget to pack*.

Part the second - Reality: Beloved woke me up, on his return from night shift, with the information that I had left the gas hob on. All night.

I love that my subconscious tried to warn me that I was Really World-Class Dumb and it had something to do with the cooker, but couldn't it have been just a little more specific?

_____
* Though strangely, I didn't seem to mind having a dress made of breaded chicken fillet.

Contrary to the tagline, I'M making you read it

I know it's terribly boring of me to always be pointing you at the same site.

But.

How excited are we about the Viking Heist Movie?

Now if only one of us were a high-powered Hollywood exec who could actually make it happen...

Suddenly I really want to read about midair broomstick crashes

From Making Light, discussing the Darwin Award efforts of a pair of would-be Jedis armed with fuel, glass tubes and matches:

"You want proof that magic doesn’t actually work? If it did, there’s no way that ignorant practitioners wouldn’t be committing equivalent screwups, and sooner or later there’d be an incident that was too obvious to explain away."

Depressing on so many levels.

Ahem.

Geek hierarchy.

Funny.

Hat tip to James and the Blue Cat, as always a prime source of geeky comedy.

I'm doing this for you, you know

Personally, I'm not the photoshop whiz. Also I don't have time for this. Being at work and all. But you might want a go.

Put a hat on a horse.

Mares and millinery? Marvellous.

And don't forget to put a link to your handiwork in the comments box.

Continuing my pathetic efforts to keep my place in your blogrolls even as I have no online time to actually write anything, like, interesting

Funniest Star Wars parody ever! (And she actually liked the movie, so whatever camp you fall in, you can't not be amused.) [Edit: hat tip to extemporanea. Sorry bout that.]

Aside: am I the only straight woman on the planet who is utterly unmoved by either Hayden or Ewan? (Or, for that matter, Harrison. Or Orlando. The list goes on...)

Unbesoddinglievable

I have lied to you all. When I said I was connected and would stay connected and would not abandon you all.

Mendacious in the extreme. Albeit inadvertently so*.

I was connected. Then I wasn't. One second to the next. And since I foolishly used the brief time when I was connected for frivolous purposes like, say, adjusting my Gmail settings - rather than my more serious duties like blogging; oh yes, and work - here I am, at 7.45pm on Sunday, in the office. Doing my work from home from work. Who'd be a part-time telecommuter when the technology ups and bites you on the ass?

I don't think it's my fault. Beloved accuses me of offending the gods of cyberspace with overfamiliar terminology (that old "interweb" thing again). But that's not it. Surely. Is it?

I cannot tell you how annoyed I am. Or how many Very Important Things I need to be online to achieve; things that I hoped to be busy with a month ago. I want somebody to yell at. Can I yell at you?

Probably not very helpful, all things considered.
____
* Extraneous polysyllabism and portentous syntax: a sure sign of distress. I get histrionic when annoyed.

This just in!

A message from my Beloved:

"YOUR COMPUTER... IT, IT... IT IS A-L-I-V-E!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

You know what this means? It means the doojigger has been delivered, the cables have been converted, and We Have Interweb Liftoff.

Let joy be unconfined!

Not 100 things

I’m saving my 100 things for a special occasion*. But some things demand a response. And comments boxes just aren’t long enough. (Well, they are. But this would be a bit above and beyond. And lateral.)

So here are just some random things that I thought of while reading other people’s lists. Some of these probably deserve their own special posts. Maybe they’ll have them, one day.

The not-a-list starts here:

The shortest time I’ve ever held a job was two days. Same two days as the shortest time I ever lived in one place. I’m still ashamed of how poorly I did on that particular challenge. I blame the sunburn.

Twice, as a student, I ditched a job without informing the boss. One of those times I’m very ashamed of. The other I’m not.

Secretarial skills are seriously underrated. I’m not talking about typing.

I always wanted to wear glasses. I now own a pair. They’re not much use.

I blush very, very, very easily, frequently for literally no reason. This generally prompts interested looks from those around me, and questions like “does it just go all the way down?” (Answer: I have no idea. I’ve never looked to see. If I weren’t in public at the time, I would, though.)

At some time in my life I mysteriously acquired the tag – used admiringly or scathingly, depending on the source and context – “Robynn’s Always Right”. I hate that. I believe it to be completely unfair. But am completely unable to change it.

My sister was a total cow to me when we were growing up**. She was also an incredible drama queen. She once fled to the phone in the middle of an argument and whispered to her then boyfriend, in tones of mortal dread: “Michael, I’m scared! She – she – she threw a deodorant can at me!”***

Long after I had decided I really didn’t need to have her in my life, she decided she’d quite like me in hers, and made a sincere, tactful and very generous effort to mend fences. It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen anybody do, and I love her for it.

I have a tear quota theory. It goes like this: every individual has a set volume of tears they need to use over a period of time – say, a month. Of course, this quota varies widely according to the individual. I have a fairly large quota. Ahem. Anyway, if you don’t use these tears up in one way, they will come out in another. So, if you’re going through a hard time, lots of stress and drama, you cry a lot in real life but not at the movies. If life is all sweetness and light and daisies, you will bawl at the cheesiest TV commercial. If you aren’t watching tearjerkers, or even TV, and you don’t have any real reason to cry either, you may find the tears rolling for literally no reason, which can be useful for getting attention but will more likely just piss people off. (It’s possible this theory applies only to me. I hope not. That would suggest I’m simply bonkers.)

I’m also very fond of the word quota theory, which I have heard propounded as the result of Scientific Research. Conveniently sourceless, but appealingly plausible, it goes like this: everyone has a number of words they need to use over the course of a day. For men, this quota is around 10,000-20,000 words per day; for women, it’s 20,000-40,000. The beauty of it is, going either under or over this quota causes stress. Now, don’t you know that feeling? After a particularly busy day, lots of meetings, lots of talk, you get to a point where you can’t quite string a sentence together. Or you find yourself chatting to your partner and being answered with “uh” and “hm”. Isn’t it comforting to have a cod scientific explanation for the frustration?

I started doing an accounting degree for fun. After the first six months I realised we were going to lose the cool putting numbers in columns part, and get into the more meaningful (but tedious) analysis part. So I ditched that and focused on economics. Which I loved. Until third year. Then it got kinda bleh.

Throughout my academic career – high school and two degrees – I developed a pattern of getting outrageously good marks, right up until the very final exams, when it actually counted. Then I managed to just miss a first, every time. Really annoying. This might be part of my motivation for wanting to do another degree: to force myself to actually finish it well, for once.

I used to live with two opera students. Before then, I believed I had a good singing voice. Since then, I truly believe I have lost whatever ability I ever had to sing in tune. I’ve mentioned this before.

My hair, too, is naturally curly. At age 12, I did the whole blowdry and hairspray thing. Since then, I’ve been thrilled to not have to bother. But in just the last six months, I’ve started experimenting with the blow drying again. I think of it as a challenge: if my hairdresser can do it, dammit, so can I. It’s not going so well.

Similarly, as a teenager, I developed a high degree of skill with the make-up brush. As a student, I gave up entirely, and once working, I decided that lipstick was really all it took to make me feel “done”. But now I’m hankering for a little more glamour. Can’t honestly be bothered, though. (It’s not the putting on so much as the taking off. Mascara smudges are just too Courtney Love circa 1993.)

My mother has the filthiest mind I know. It’s truly disgusting.

I learned to drive late and have only owned one car in my life. She was an immaculate 10-year-old red Toyota Conquest, called Valentine, and I loved her to bits for the two months I owned her. I bought her from a lovely man who put a rose in the ashtray when I picked her up. There was just nothing less than lovely about that car.

The Mona Lisa really is not all that.

I always hated spiders. No matter how my mom tried to convince me they were beautiful creatures of god, I loathed the nasty critters. Somehow, now, I’m mostly over that. Not sure what happened there.

I flirt far too much, and while that sometimes gets me into trouble****, it’s never gotten me any free stuff. I take this as evidence that I need to further develop my flirting skills. This means practice. Beloved may not be best impressed.

Throughout school, I managed to completely ignore the rule that every kid was supposed to do a sport. In PE one day, we were playing netball; someone threw the ball to me and I ducked. Also, in action cricket, my partner and I managed to get a negative score. In recent years, I started wondering whether it might not have been possible to find a sport I actually enjoyed, and am now seeing the point of that damn rule.

My closest brush with celebrity was having Charles Dance flirt with me. When I tried to brag about this, I realised nobody knows who Charles Dance is, and hence it really doesn’t count. Still pisses me off.

I once found something incredibly peculiar in the ocean. Fish Hoek beach, to be precise. It was squishy and probably alive. When you squeezed it, it squirted sea water out of one end. It really was completely unidentifiable. I insisted on taking it home, in the knitting bag I was carrying (having somehow removed the knitting); first, though, we went for a rather nice lunch. You’d think the maritime odour emitting from my bag would have gotten us kicked out, but no. Back at my flat, I put it on the windowsill for a few days, until it was obviously dead and stank too badly. Then I dropped it in the downstairs neighbour’s garden*****. (One reader of this blog is laughing at the memory of this experience. The rest are probably thinking there must be a good explanation for it. Trust me, there isn’t.)

Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth is the one book I want everyone on the planet to read. Beloved keeps saying he means to.

Of all the things I learnt at university, my favourite was the brief round-up of ancient Roman medicine******.

____
* Not a lie. I actually am. Isn’t that the most pathetic blogging related thing you ever heard? Can I claim my most-addicted, taking-all-this-far-too-seriously crown now, please?
** She might claim that I was a cow to her. Of course, we know better. Right? …Right?
*** True, I did. I was unpacking. It was the nearest thing to hand. You better believe she deserved it.
**** This weekend I found myself receiving a stream of very flirtatious text messages from a total stranger. I was utterly unable to explain this to Beloved.
***** It’s stories like this that make me realise what an incredibly badly behaved person I sometimes am. I apologise.
****** But of course my favourite class was Victorian Fairytale. *phew* Almost got into trouble with extemporanea, there.

Marketing: work of the devil*

I have a shiny new radio. I've been using it to listen to, among others: Xfm; Radio 4; Smooth FM; and Radio Jackie, "the sounds of south-west London", which - like Smooth FM - seem to consist mostly of 70s and 80s cheese. I'm nothing if not eclectic**.

Anyway. It's Radio Jackie that's the problem here. There's this one radio spot, see, for speedway racing. "The world's most exciting - and dangerous - sport!" it claims. Followed rapidly by: "Bring the kids!"

It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the urge to purge the world of anklebiters. I can see how a campaign to get them enthused about a life-threatening pastime might be deserving of my support. I'm just not quite sure that that is in fact the intention.
_____
* Sorry, Gersh
** Or perhaps we should just accept that my taste in music is even worse than my taste in TV. Ah well. At least Beloved shares the music problem. We probably shouldn't reproduce.

Whisper it

Rumour has it, we could be back online by the weekend.

Huzzah!

Of course, we'll be so busy preparing for this damn party (final unpackings as we assemble newly arrived furniture, last-minute house and garden titivations, shopping etc), I'm not sure I'll have time to blog before Monday. But then, with any luck, I'll have something to blog about.

Maybe.

Right now, I just have one question: what is WITH this bizarre country that garden taps are such a scarcity? How am I supposed to water the garden? How am I supposed to nurse that poor bit of scrub back into garden status without liberal watering? It's all very well mumbling about "damp climate" and "haven't watered these roses since 1976"*, but honestly. I can't do this with a watering can you know.

_____
* True story. There was a drought that year, apparently.