Wulf's Webden

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11 March 2025
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To Cover Again?

As a gardener, I try to keep my eye on the weather. At this time of year, the question of whether we are going to have a hard enough frost to do damage to young and tender plants is at the front of my mind. With several days at the end of this week where temperatures will probably drop to or below freezing, I think I might make time tomorrow or Thursday to pop up to the allotment to cover a few things up again.

While I’m there, I might need to think about watering too. Although it has felt more wintry for the past couple of days, it still hasn’t rained and the upper levels of the soil are getting quite dry. Some rain is possible, even overnight or tomorrow afternoon but I’m not sure we are going to get a really good drenching so some of my less well rooted plants might want some moisture too.

10 March 2025
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Summer Is Icumen In

Summer Is Icumen In is the title of a piece of music I have arranged which got handed out to the choir this evening and, I expect, will get a try out in the next couple of weeks. As you might have guessed, the core is the old folk song Sumer Is Icumen In, which celebrates signs of the coming summer, like cuckoos singing, plants springing up and animals giving birth to and nursing their young. It is a fairly simple melody and often sung in a round.

My twist is the idea of starting with a modern translation of the words and then, gradually, switching the different voices to sing in the original Middle English. The thought is that this will create a time travelling effect and bring the audience into enjoying the original words with greater understanding than they might just hearing it immediately in a ‘foreign’ tongue. After all, “the past is a foreign country” but this should smooth the journey there!

I’m looking forward to hearing it with actual voices rather than just my mock up in MuseScore.

9 March 2025
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Prayer for Burma

Jane and I led prayers at church today for Burma, joining in the Global Day of Prayer for that nation. Officially it has been known as Republic of the Union of Myanmar since 1989 but that name was given by the military junta which has exercised power in the nation for many years and is still under dispute.

One of the complications of the nation is that it contains a number of distinct ethnic groups. It came under British colonial rule in the 19th century and, after becoming independent in 1948, has suffered with various levels of civil war since the early 1950s. There was a brief period of ‘democratic rule’ from about 2010 but the military seized control again in 2021 and have been brutal in repressing the various ethnic enclaves. However, that is having the effect of uniting the minorities along with a proportion of the main Bamar group. Maybe the junta’s days are numbered?

We prayed for peace but also for reconciliation and for the work of those, like the Free Burma Rangers, who sow compassion and love in the midst of hate.

8 March 2025
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Sing Around Songs – 8 March 2024

Numbers were down a bit at today’s sing around session, for which I’d largely blame the sun and warmth outside! That meant I got to lead on more songs than usual, all using the double bass.

Mo was busy looking after the refreshments counter at the start so she asked me to welcome people and kick things off, so I picked a familiar song to begin with: Folsom Prison Blues. That is familiar to me but also well known by many of the others there and easy to follow along with. When it came round again, my next choice met neither of those criteria. Black Hole Sun, originally released by Soundgarden (1994!) is a gorgeous but complex song that I’ve heard many versions of but never tried. It went okay but I will need to do some more refinement.

On my next turn, I continued to walk on the wild side with Black Betty. That was made famous by Ramjam in the 1970s but had previously been recorded by Lead Belly and other blues artists and that was the approach I went for. The original song is probably much older and nobody really knows whether it is referring to a nasty prison whip, a rifle or just a lady called Betty. My final contribution was back to a familiar tune for me: Down in the Hole. That is relatively easy to join in with but, as a 16 bar blues, takes a little more listening that the more common 12 bar form.

6 March 2025
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Mild Bee Bottled

My Mild Bee brew is now bottled. When I tested it yesterday, it had already reached 1.007 so I went ahead and bottled, using my recent “easy” method. It was a slightly smaller batch but I still got 12 500ml bottles and a fairly full 330ml one (which will be the first to sample from).

The next job is to get on with a label design and then I need to decide whether I’m going to get another brew going or press the heat pad into use for kicking off some seedlings that like a bit of extra heat.

5 March 2025
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Greek Chicken

We had friends round for dinner this evening, one of whom is following a keto diet. That means many of my favourite foods, like bread and potatoes (both high in carbohydrates) were off the menu and I had to find something else. What I settled on was “Greek Chicken” – chicken thighs marinated in olive oil with salt, garlic, lemon and dried herbs, fried off and then cooked with a variety of vegetables (courgettes, bell peppers and asparagus in this case).

The result was tasty although a bit thinner than it would have turned out if I’d followed my regular, non-keto instincts. Read the recipe I riffed from here.

4 March 2025
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Dusty Triangles

At school, I used to enjoy trigonometry. Given a right angled triangle and a couple of measurements, such as the length of a side and one of the other angles, you can work out other information about it using functions like sin, cos and tan. In the intervening years, I’ve sometimes drawn on Pythagoras’s theorem (the square of the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle is the sum of the square of the other two sides) but rarely had to do more with such triangles and my trigonometry knowledge has gathered dust.

It turns out I need to give it a polish for 3D printing. Since OpenSCAD doesn’t give an easy way to say “take this shape and put the corner there”, you have to do a certain amount of calculation and, as soon as you move away from everything being a cube, trigonometry starts to become involved. Time to start enjoying it again!

3 March 2025
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A Quick Vase

My latest Lidl voucher gave me a free item from their veg range. I fancied some lettuce and decided to pick their ‘living lettuce’ pack. I’m sure they used to come in plastic pots but now you just get the plants with an uncovered rootball. As soon as I got home, I potted it up to give it a decent chance of surviving a bit longer. However, I didn’t have any particularly clean pots. What I needed was a suitable container to put the vase in… which is where the 3D printing part comes in.

The Makerworld.com website has a MakerLab section with tools to generate various items, including vases. I took a few quick measurements and created one to fit. I had to pop out but, by the time I got back it had finished printing. I think the decorative pattern compromised the measurements a bit so the bot sits a bit high in it but it still does the job of giving a clean and attractive sleeve to hide the slightly grubby pot and, if I search round a bit more, I’ve probably got one or two that would fit it better for future reuse.

2 March 2025
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Death of an Expert

Driving home from band rehearsals on a Sunday night often affords me a chance to dip into Radio 4’s obituary programme, Last Word. One of the names mentioned tonight was Dr D G Hessayon, author of a number of very popular books on gardening. Wikipedia suggests he actually passed away in January this year, making the item a little belated, but I was still surprised to find that he had been alive up until this year.

I probably first came across his books in the late 1970s and they were well established with multiple previous editions by then. I can’t quite remember the figures which were quoted but it was something like a third of British households having at least one of his books and a fair number having three or more. I’m not entirely sure that I’ve still got them all but I have certainly been in that category. That isn’t a bad legacy of influence to leave behind.

1 March 2025
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Hubris

The other day I read Psalm 130, sometimes referred to by the Latin of the first couple of words, “de profundis” (out of the depths). I have always found vv. 3-4 particularly resonant: “If you, Lord, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, so that we can, with reverence, serve you.” It doesn’t use the word ‘mercy’ but it captures the mercy of God. If you aren’t merciful, you not only fail to reflect what God is like but you stand in opposition to him.

I was disgusted to see how Trump and Vance treated their guest, Zelenskyy, on his visit to the White House yesterday. I know Trump has had a career as a negotiator and, possibly, the way he spoke to his Ukrainian counterpart is something which could have been said in private. To speak in public like that to man who was fairly elected and afterwards thrown into a war that was not of his choosing was utterly disgraceful. There is no mercy with Trump but a relentless desire to steal from others for his own betterment.

Those who stand around Trump as ‘Christian advisors’ need to speak to him. Self-aggrandising golden statues are the mark of a person who is likely to be humbled and who will burn in the presence of the holy, wise and merciful God. As I publish this, may I, too, be aware of my own failings. From an earlier Psalm (19:12) “But who can discern their own errors? Forgive my hidden faults.”