I'm Late with my Earlies but “Short summers lightly have a forward spring.”

I'm talking of course about a potato plant not a Plantagenet, though hardly a Duke of York (pictured, the slimier Prince) with low resistance to late blight on foliage and tubers not to mention common scab and potato leafroll virus. My GM selected variety bought from some bloke under a car park were Richard the Thirds. (That's why the Princes are legging it in the picture)

The Former despite the taunt of being labelled scabs were tempting because of their high iron content and electromagnetic properties feared by copper hating slugs. They were summarily dismissed on a seasonal basis because of their tendency of climbing up to the top of the trench mid-March and coming back down to earth up again. For the uninitiated, planting potatoes in shallow trenches will ensure that the potatoes, shielded from bright sunlight, will be tender, sweet and white, just like the non-Shakespearean Richard.

For the initiated, no need to relay my Richard the Thirds unlike my second earlies as being blemish free within my soil as the trench was topped with the previous year's organic sunny and cherlocked compost used only for my record breaking eggs Benedict cucumber batch, rhubarb crowns and gooseberry April fool.

If you wish to view my In-laws' film of hot potato growing techniques go to MeTube 'The Out-law Jersey Royals'. I say this of course at an election approaching time of big talk worth much less than 'diddlysquat laced with feather moss and mustard root', which we have learned to take with a pinch of salt or 10lb of beef jerky.

For the inebriated reading this content on a need to forget basis in the wake of the lost March hour I need to reiterate that the only reason that I have not as yet owned up to my recent discovery in my Gravesend garden is that I had to wait until Richard III was safely reinterred with a fitting, dignified and memorable ceremony before I could announce, as they say at election time that I have found Princess Pocahontas.

Pocahontas then will be next in line to the right royal succession of copycat finds anticipated. One hundred years behind Richard III in real time, will the two years of deathly hallows time be enough for the great British public to cope with another BBC repeat of graves not really ending?

It was bad enough for their reporter we heard doing a Jeremy Clarkson without the physical to his producer on the phone when he was stuck in the Three Daws public house having not eaten only to be rescued by the dying whale, ironically a Bottlenose not a Humpback, who gave up the ghost at Gravesend to put him in the limelight in 2006.

Pocahontas reappeared adjacent to the plot, now a raised bed where I have exhumed my legumes over the years. Like the Old Dartfordians who kept their eyes peeled for subsequent sightings of Whale pods I expected her, being from Virginia, to emerge from the potato patch. But of course like The Princess and the Pea she too had not lain undisturbed in the raised bed.

I have a qualification in Science and lots of plasticine left over from when the kids were small. Using the average contents of a box of matches it was easy to reconstruct her face. It was like two peas in a pod. The face was staring me in the face. Like one of the matches it was striking. It was uncanny - it didn't look like what it said on the tin.

The memories came flooding back. Sort of. I could see it now from the set of cigarette cards I once owned viz. ' Famous Beauties of 1937'. I didn't buy them, I found them on a bus. There she was in blue, purple and grey transfixed in my two mucky hands. I stuck a magpie feather in the back of her head. It was her, definitely - an exact match - Pocahontas!

Or was it Helen of Troy, The Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra, Messalina, Queen Guinevere, Dantes Beatrice, Joan of Arc, Lucrezia Borgia, Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots, Isabella de Bourbon, Lady Castlemaine, Louise de la Valliere, Nell Gwyn, Diana Vernon, Madame la Marquise de Pompadour, Catherine the Great, Madame du Barry, Marie Antoinette, Mrs Fitzherbert or Georgina Duchess of Devonshire?

Tess has passed away

Sadness reigns in our house though memories help mask the grief. She was born at, and all but died at our house with twelve short years in between.

It wasn't sudden. All that know a little knew she was on borrowed time. She kept going - right up to the last few days. Only last weekend she walked her usual couple of miles walk without complaint up and down Happy Valley with me and her two much loved midwives as companions. How I'll miss that little glance back every few yards to make sure we were keeping up. It was as if she didn't want us to know.

She knew; and so did we. We still went to the veterinary as anyone would do, as we couldn't know for sure, even though we did. They knew. We gave her a day's grace. She deserved more but compassion wouldn't - couldn't allow.

A last car trip with us to Canterbury, not a pilgrimage - more a treat down memory lane. She loved car journeys. So expectant, pleased even with the dullest of destinations. She loved our three year old granddaughter, and not just as a source of scraps. Our granddaughter loved her back just as much. A last rite for all of us. Her final save for a few minutes were spent in that car rather than in the waiting room, relaxed but dying in the familiar, warm and blanketed passenger side foot-well with the missus's right foot as a head rest.

So trusting to the last even in that veterinary's car park. She was too weak to show her usual reluctance to enter the place. She knew. We were reluctant too. She was resolved to it. We had to be too. So was the veterinary who was empathetic and considerate. We thank him for that.

Our other granddaughter will notice her absence as she crawls about in our house on her mission impossible looking for a Tess. How sad no.3 granddaughter due in June won't find Tess returning the looks in her direction.

What she gave us was immeasurable. I hope we gave her something besides her low protein food in return. She is lying now near her mother under the apple tree in our garden, not far from Ginger the cat who she used to love but far enough away in deference to Ginge who didn't always appreciate the attention.

Cliff walks and Cliffe walks will be different. Pubs won't clear as we arrive with the missus having forgotten about a pocketed pooh bag. Don't be harsh. That's the same lady who rearranged Tess' diet and hidden pill to appear as a treat and to keep her on good form just like it says on that tin with the marrowbone jelly.

Enough already. Just a final thank you Tess. You were much appreciated.

For Two Jays I could steam open the Big Birdwatch envelope

I mean how accurate is the survey anyway? What about its integrity? What about my integrity? Would my misinformation skew the results for DA11? Or just 0SP?

It's not as if I'm proposing to include the heron (pictured) in my results. It is plain to see that it comes close enough to the definition of a near neighbour to be mentioned in my dispatches, though admittedly not in the year let alone the hour of my discontent.

Two long tailed tits did grace us with their presence within the chosen hour but the Jays which are in fact a more common sight turned up a day late. The wonderful missus who has more integrity in her little finger than I do in my what until a recent collar bone break was a bowling arm refuses to put out peanuts as bird food arguing that they are an important source of protein for the poor in Southern India.

I cannot check the veracity of the peanut source as we do not have any packets in the house for reference. I might have to ask Simon Barnes or the RSPB as to the voracity of the birds in question for peanuts.

The RSPB asked whether we see other animals such as badgers or grass snakes etc. in our gardens (though foxes are not included in the etcetera). Only the grey squirrel like our rather elderly dog who's just crapped on the Sky+ box got a tick from our garden.

So besides, not in descending order, the half dozen house sparrows, four pigeons, four blue tits, three starlings, two blackbirds, two collared doves, and two magpies in our pear tree (honest), there would be no mention of the reliable robin. Another victim of the collar bone break as I could have been out winter digging fetching up a feast of worms and frightening off the other species, the like of which possibly distorted last year's data.

Eagle eyed twitchers would have sussed me out if I'd included the waxwings (pictured) as they appeared in a previous blog around March 2013.

I would have been far from wise to have included the owl (pictured) which I use as a bird scarer to further skew the 0SP figures. Furthermore I was not outside tucking in to one of my turn her hand to anything wife's homemade Cornish pasties to include the dozen seagulls that flew overhead during the hour long survey which according to Natures Boldest Thieves on BBC One last night would have descended in order to relieve me of my treat. Thank goodness the programme didn't include starry gazy pie for bait as St Ives Harbour would have been a sight for sore eyes at low tide looking like one of those landfill sites.

Notice how calm I was when I mentioned the dog's mess which usually gets a bad press when it is stepped on. Actually it was the omnipresent missus who found it. It wasn't just because I thought she had stated the obvious in saying 'There's crap on the telly' that I didn't react.

I’ve seen naturalists orgasm as they pulled apart badger crap. I’ve been on field trips where the guide has tried to persuade us of the significance to the universe of cow pats. My mum used to go out on the main road with a spade to collect the ‘manure’ that the milkman’s horse used to leave on the road while it was still steaming. Even modern day TV gardeners wax lyrical about it.

I own a T-shirt with all the various bird droppings emblazoned across it. I’ve heard people celebrate their good fortune when a seagull crapped all over them. In contrast, people of the same persuasion go bonkers if they step on some dog shit while walking on a coastal path in Cornwall even though they are guana white with bird shit. They threaten all sorts, though they always claim their bile is directed towards the owners rather than the dogs themselves. I’m not so sure.

At a wildlife centre near Tonbridge they had badgers. People used to moan about the pungent smell of their shit but to my knowledge the owner never got a single letter about their droppings. Their smell could be a sort of defence mechanism. Crows and magpies usually don’t go near dead badgers that have been knocked over by fast drivers. It’s not the best sort of defence mechanism I agree, as it seems the badger needs to be dead before it comes into play.

Because of the desperate smell of their crap, the owner of the wildlife centre used to study the stomach contents of the badgers to investigate their feeding habits. He would set up a tape recorder by their sets at night to play Des O’Connor tapes, returning in the morning to pick through what the badgers had thrown up.


My mate’s grandfather was a Cornish miner. The seagulls used to drive them crazy when they came up to the surface at dinner time to eat their pasties. So my mate says, his granddad used to alternate throwing a bit of pasty up to the most annoying seagull with a piece of carbide which was used to fuel his miners’ lamp.

Water drips onto the lump of calcium carbide which then gives off the inflammable gas acetylene for the lamp to function. If water did that, you could imagine the effect of the stomach contents of the gull on the stuff. According to my mate the unfortunate seagull got about 20 yards away before it exploded. The other gulls got the message drekkly and went off to annoy the emmets.

As Lucy Cooke's equally rigorous experiments have shown, over the years the gulls have developed a taste for cream teas, Cornish ice cream and pretend home made pasties. I hear that they are plaguing the coronary unit of Treliske Hospital at Truro these days. That's the price of ignoring flotsam and jetsam me ansome.

It's no mystery that it is a mystery.

Where is this? Who is it by? This picture is one of My grey mysteries. It's not signed but on the back of the framing is written not Roger Rabbit but Lemeunier. My initial research has caused confusion as I thought the initial written there was an A not an H. Somebody out there knows, but it is getting to the right person and at the moment it and a few other puzzles are getting to me.

Why for instance has the ECB not taken up my suggestion of offering the same deal to all Cricket Clubs as the British Heart Foundation has for communities about part funding defibrillators? Have they not said that they have the wellbeing of grassroot cricketers at heart?

Why for instance has Warburtons not snapped up the idea of sponsoring the idea with a campaign about encouraging healthy as well as tasty cricket teas from their side of the Pennines? I'm sure Michael Vaughan and Yorkshire tea would cooperate from their side. Between them they must have the resources to meet up over an egg or cheese sandwich and a village cup of tea.

Talking about Blow Egg. Why hasn't BBC Snooker taken up my suggestion of organising a Celebrity Blow Egg as part of Snooker's contribution to the next Sports Relief?

The final mystery comes to mind from last Sunday's walk starting at Cobham Churchyard where Ivo Bligh of Lord Darnley of Ashes fame resides in his rededicated grave thanks to The Cricket Society. At nearby's Trotiscliffe equivalent yard is the grave of the artist Graham Sutherland. Why have people in the art world ignored my attempts to get them to investigate the ins and outs of following in the Cricket Society's footsteps?

The mystery is not beyond a solution if you read French and Spanish Cricket for Beginners .It's ten years since that Boxing Day Tsunami when my appeals to Cricket to ask for help on that day went unheard. I am just as ineffective now as I was then, though in the end Cricket came good and was indeed generous.

I know that it is who you know not what you know and as Manuel I know nothing so it's up to you if you know somebody who is somebody perhaps they know somebody who can help.

Fleet of Foot, the Caterpillar has legged it with Arthropologies

It turns out that the caterpillar is a sort of velocipedes (Pictured). I should have seen through my bifocals that there were two sides to the story. The bespoke caterpillar true to its predetermined life cycle has got on the bike and legged it.

The process as I'm sure you know is termed 'Imprinting'. What you may not know as is the case with me is where the green velodrone is now. I have done my research and I have consulted my three year old granddaughter to ask about the journey of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

She suggested that I went up the Apple and Pairs (She can't spell yet) and to be careful that I didn't knock over the three wise men on their way to the crib in the breakfast room. I was really pleased as when I put them in the front porch on Christmas Day she said 'They are only statues Grandpa'. Having heard that, it may be difficult for you to work out who is the Magi and who is the Minor.

Just like the three star travellers that I stepped over respectfully I looked for a sign. Latin was a language around at the time and the only answer I got right from today's Radio 4's Brain of Britain was 'Agent Orange'. I forget the question. There staring me and you now (Study the picture)in the face was the word 'feria' which is the Latin for Wednesday.

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Epiphany so by Wednesday the gold, frankincense and myrrh should be well out of the way. The chances are then that I'll find it in the dreadful clementine box. Sorry!

Digesting News of a Happy Chrysalis

Clearing out the old seed packets, pods and catalogues amongst the conservatory plants this lucky caterpillar (see imago)was itself cleared of all charges of tucking into the aforementioned plants. It was about to take its chances amongst the local bird population (see picture)when I noticed that it had holed the paper viking boat in which it had become embedded in route to being encased.

As with most newspapers you can see the spin if you look closely. Shame it hadn't wrapped itself up in the editorial forked tongue section - it could have turned it into a silk purse.

Time to go to get The Sun with the holidays coming up. The last two European camp sites that we have been to no longer appear on their listings. I know we left an impression but I didn't think we overstepped the Plimsoll Line.