Rival to the aloe

Last week to Café Rouge to take a spot of their Puligny-Montrachet, on the terrace, very French, it being a warm enough evening for that sort of thing. So the same wine and the same waitress as we had on the occasion noticed at reference 4. The waitress tried quite hard to get us to take something to eat and was only slightly mollified by my rounding out the occasion with a drop of their quite decent Calvados, not listed on the online version of their menu.

Which also lacks prices, which suggests that there might be some location variation in same, which I don't think is unreasonable, but which I don't think is the case in places like McDonald's. Maybe I ought to check. I associate to the beer tent we had for a couple of years up on the hill at the Derby Meeting on the Downs. Run by a main line brewer who was proud to be selling warm beer from barrels at the same price as he charged in his pubs. Which we all thought was very reasonable. I think Marston's, but it may have been Theakston's. Somewhere up north.

So we spent an entertaining hour or so watching all the young people coming out to play. We speculated about how important all the students - University of Creation, Nescot, and Laine School of Dance & Drama - were to the commercial life of the town, thinking of places like Nottingham where they are the biggest business in town. Presumably they all go to help keep our High Street alive, now quite thickly populated with booze bars, coffee bars and restaurants.

We also wondered about the maintenance cost of this heritage window, in what is probably quite an old building. Don't see wooden glazing bars very often now - with the houses on our estate, getting on for a hundred years old now, having been built with steel casement windows in wooden beds. Sash windows out. With the steel just as hard to keep in good condition as the old-style wood would have been.

More heritage in the form of two quite old yew trees off picture to the left. I think they are part of the town plan, which makes them listed trees. And they do go some way to making up for those the council have just chopped down as part of remodelling traffic flows in the High Street. A scheme that I would have voted against, thinking that there were better things to do with the money, a small number of millions, but we shall see. Maybe they know what they are doing.

We spotted this rival to our aloe flower on the way home from Café Rouge, this one outdoors rather than indoors. But I don't think it is a relative, despite the similar format of the inflorescence, as the format of the leaves looks quite different, circular rather than alternate.

Our own inflorescence has now done its business and we are thinking about whether to cut it out, as we did last year. No sign of any more on the way.

Reference 1: https://www.uca.ac.uk/. The creation people - who once ran a small competition among some third year students to come up with some IT branding & collateral at H. M. Treasury. Part of their reward was High Tea in the very conference room from which Sir Winston Churchill announced the end of the war in Europe to the crowds below. A rather fancy conference room, with marble pillars and all that sort of thing. Now part of the HMR&C empire, the Treasury having been sent around the back.

Reference 2: http://www.nescot.ac.uk/. Yet another place of learning where the boss has awarded herself an unseemly salary.

Reference 3: http://www.laine-theatre-arts.co.uk/. Strong line in young people to go out and work the entertainment departments of cruise ships, aka floating care homes.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/04/casual-dining.html.

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Week nine

Just about done now. Time to think about whether to chop it down, as I did last time. The catch being that that plant was retired, so we have no evidence to support this bit of evidence based policy making. This plant being merely a vegetative offspring. Or perhaps sibling.

Slightly alarming how different the colours of the snaps were, depending from which side I took them. This one from the left, facing the sun behind the curtain. While most of the previous snaps have been taken from the right, much earlier in the day.

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Week eight (b)

Near two months have now slipped by since I first noticed the inflorescence peeping out. The speed of time is getting scary.

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Week eight (a)

Another week and some florets have already come and gone. At 28.5 inches so no growth at all. All its energies must be going into the florets and their pigments.

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Week seven (b)

One floret open this morning.

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Week seven (a)

Now attained 28.5 inches above the sill, slowing down and probably near its ultimate height.

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Week six

Florets starting to swell. About the stage that last year's flower had made it to by Christmas Day 2016, being in full flower about 10 days after that.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/fail-2.html.

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Week five

Inflorescence now 26.5 inches above the window sill. Eight and a half inches in the two weeks since week three. Up to runner bean standards?

I associate to a story about the rate of growth of climbers along the lines of runner beans in East Africa, said to be prodigious by our standards.

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Week four

The buds of the florets now starting to separate. No sign of a second inflorescence.

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Week three

The tip of the inflorescence is now 18 inches above the level of the sill, a better reference level than trying to poke about in the plant.

This was the first and best of a dozen or so snaps, with the old Lumia 650 not managing to focus any closer. Hopefully the new Lumia 950 will be back from the menders for week four and we will be able to see what that can do.

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Week two

Individual flower buds now starting to appear.

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Week one

The inflorescence managed an impressive couple of inches in its first week.

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The trifid returns!

After a little more than a year, the triffid has returned. That is to say the vegetative daughter of the trifid at references 1 (end) and 2 (beginning) is now in bud - more or less in the middle of the snap left - and we look forward to flowers in May.

PS: I notice in passing that the ship of the line noticed at reference 3, is now the subject of a full length book, noticed at some length in today's DT. Odd subject for a lady who is now in her early nineties (but who  had once been a lancer and after that a member of the team which bagged Everest for Colonel Hunt).

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/the-end-tip.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/both-old-triffid-and-new-triffid-aka.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/a-ship-of-line.html.

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