I’m taking a quick lunch break and I thought I’d better post something in case anyone is imagining that dark things have befallen me. They haven’t, I’ve just been using my brain up to its full capacity with work and have had to give the blog a rest. However, as I was munching my sandwich a minute ago, I finally chose the name for my murder mysteries area. This is obviously inspired by people’s previous comments - thanks everyone for your input.

I liked Arsenic-upon-Tyne but the Tyne is not a river generally found in Agatha Christie land. She was much more of a River Thames kind of girl, so I have gone with the altogether more posh Arsenic-upon-Thames. (It’s pronounced ‘Temms’ for anyone wondering). Now I just have to come up with my interactive experience. I’ll be back…

I’ve been trying to think of a name for my area in Word World - alliteration seems to be the way to go but I haven’t come up with anything great. The two options at the moment are “Villainy Village” and “The Cyanide Sphere”. What do you think?

I have decided to call my signature ride for my still-as-yet-untitled murder mysteries area for Word World “Destination Unknown” after the Agatha Christie novel of the same name. I may have gone a bit over the top here, but I hope you will bear with me. I just couldn’t stop…

The ride starts at a wooden ticket office, decorated with posters advertising bus tours to the English seaside and stately homes. The carriage interiors are designed to resemble a vintage bus and there is a driver figure in shadow at the front. Visitors are greeted by a cheerful bus conductor who stamps their tickets and helps them into the carriage. The ride starts slowly, along a gentle winding track through quaint cobbled streets lined with cheery cottages whose inhabitants are gossiping over fences and trimming hedges while children play hopscotch and sing nursery rhymes (specifically “Hickory Dickory Dock”). There is birdsong playing. 

Soon the ride comes to a village green with striped tents, a Punch & Judy show, a tombola spilling with prizes and a brass band knocking out cheery tunes. The ride speeds up, getting faster and faster. A rumble of thunder is heard in the distance and then… crack! Lightning strikes and the ride comes to an abrupt halt in pitch darkness. A voice is heard shouting in the distance, “There’s a body in the library!” (only it is said in such OTT Queen’s English that it sounds like “Thah’s a bod-eh! In tha ley-bree!”). 

It starts raining. Suddenly, loud creaky windscreen wipers start screeching furiously at the front of the carriage and the ride is off again, faster than ever, careering around corners and dodging giant plastic red herrings swinging like pendulums. Plaintive voices cry out things like “Oh, Humphrey!” and “Gladys, are you there, Gladys?”, interspersed with piercing screams and running footsteps.  

With every crack of lightning a tableau is illuminated - a vicar hanging from a rope as a bell tolls, a woman slumped on the table with a knife in her back at a dinner party, an evil-looking housekeeper stirring a cake and cackling while green smoke rises from the bowl, a man in cricket whites with a cricket stump through his head, a butler lying on a staircase in a pool of blood … et cetera … et cetera … 

The rain starts to ease and the ride slows to a gentle pace as the light levels increase. The brass band pipes up again, but the music is slow and distorted. The ride passes a giant mirror cracked from side to side, a ticking clock stuck at ten to five and a large bottle of sparkling liquid labelled “Cyanide”. 

Turning a corner, the ride is at a replica of the village green. The sun is shining and the astroturf glistens from the rain, but the tents have blown over and the tombola prizes are scattered across the ground. The bus stops in front of a giant front door…

Silence…

…a lady’s voice: “Hullo? St Mary Mead 236?”…. and a man’s: “Mon Dieu! Zee leetle grey cells, ‘Astings, zee leetle grey cells!” The door flings open and the ride zooms through, coming to an abrupt halt again in a room decorated with oversized tables and chairs and a giant aspidistra. Two giant automated figures (fifteen feet tall or bigger) stand each side of a red velvet curtain - one a portly man in a pinstriped suit, chuckling and twirling his handlebar moustache and the other an old lady clickety-clack knitting while her eyes twinkle (quite literally - LEDs, perhaps?) above her half-moon spectacles. The curtains draw back to reveal the outside world and the ride ends at the entrance to Ye Olde Post Office and Gifte Shoppe. 

I think I promised pictures of doors this weekend, didn’t I? Well, here they are. The new ones aren’t painted because I have decided to put off all painting until the very end as all the painting I have done so far has got trashed in the wake of further DIY. 

This is the landing upstairs (I was standing on the stairs with my back squashed against the wall when I took these photos. It’s a very small space!)

(from left to right: my wardrobe, the study, the bathroom)

(from left to right: the bedroom, my wardrobe)

This is the new front door. It is a stable door, which should be great for letting the air and sunshine in without worrying about security. At the moment though, it is awaiting all sorts of decisions on my part about locks, bolts, cat flaps and other hardware. And also about colour. It will be white on the inside, but what colour to paint the outside? This is a decision that links in with Garden Therapy and is one decision too far for my poor little brain at the moment.

Finally, does this count as a door? 

This is a little door/hatch/thingy I made for the kitchen (it’s on the left just as you walk in) to enable access to the pipe which drains all the radiators. It is held in place by magnetic catches and is opened by inserting an allen key into the hole and yanking. I am stupidly pleased with this and hopefully it will blend in well once it is painted. The photo also shows the skirting boards I finally got around to fitting throughout the downstairs.

My next door project is to make some doors for this space at the end of the bath:

I have the wood, so I might make a start this afternoon.

Having accepted Wende’s challenge to contribute to the design of the Literature Land theme park, I now have to come up with ideas for my English Murder Mysteries area. This section will rely heavily on the works of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers and has the aim of exploring the various methods of murder that can be carried out in a civilised manner on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

I haven’t come up with a suitable title for my area, yet - suggestions are welcome - but here are my answers for the first task set by Wende, which is to define one’s audience. Aside from the obvious murder mystery buffs, the main groups are:

Dysfunctional families - The English murder mysteries section will provide an outlet for expressing repressed feelings of hatred and loathing towards family members in a safe and attractive environment. At Literature Land it will be possible to threaten to poison your mother-in-law or garrotte your offspring and be greeted by joyful laughter all round (including from said mother-in-law or offspring).

Desperate Housewives - the attraction here is two-fold: the Desperate Housewife can glean decorating tips from the quaint domesticity underlying the whole area whilst making comforting notes on alternative uses for mangles, bell ropes, knitting needles, fruit cakes, etc. 

Anglophiles* - particularly those for whom an actual visit to England would be inadvisable lest they find the village green littered with discarded syringes, the Post Office boarded up due to government cut-backs and the rectory inhabited by an openly gay progressive vicar who heads her own rock band for Sunday worship. In contrast, Literature Land will present a picture postcard vision of 1930s English village life where lawns are manicured, little old ladies spend hours making cucumber and arsenic sandwiches for cricket teas and everyone is well-dressed and extremely posh (humble and sweetly uneducated gardeners / housemaids aside).

* I am assuming Literature Land will be in the US somewhere.

First off, apologies for being more silent than usual recently. It looks like this summer is going to be very busy on the work front, which means I’ll be blogging less. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly,  when I’ve been writing all day, I just want to switch off the computer and do something mindless in the evenings (currently: watching episodes of Lost back to back). The second problem is that a lot of what I’m working on is so interesting and consuming that I’m itching to tell people about it, but I can’t because of confidentiality agreements.

So… rather than feeling guilty about not posting, I have decided to announce that I will only be posting at weekends. I will check everyone’s blogs each day and comment at random (because it’s the nicest way I know to take a break from working, you all being such fascinating ladies), but will only post here at weekends.

Having said all that, I am taking the morning off from work to hang our new bedroom door with my father-in-law (who made both doors as Christmas and birthday presents for us). We hung the bathroom door last week, and I have also bought a new front door*. But you’ll have to wait until the weekend for pictures.

* Once this is hung, I will have replaced every single door in the house, which is a Good Thing and also a Milestone, as the old ones were cheap, damaged, badly painted and generally abused by the previous owners. 

SCB is back! And she’s posted a wonderful meme - or rather, two memes. I have just spent an hour playing with both, and here are the results.

Firstly, the Garden Variety meme:

1. Name a gardener, any gardener.
2. What is your favorite vegetable?
3. What well-known garden have you visited?
4. What is your favorite flower?
5. What garden would you like to visit?
6. What water-feature would you put in your garden?
7. What country epitomizes gardens for you?
8. Is there a special type of garden you would like to incorporate in your own garden?
9. Show us something that you think would make a great pattern for a flower garden.
10. What do you love most about gardens or gardening?
11. One word to describe your garden.
12. Give your garden a name.

1. Gertrude Jekyll, 2. Parsnip, 3. Prospect Cottage, 4. Allium, 5. Sissinghurst, 6. Babbling Brook, 7. Merrie Olde England, 8. Miniature Knot Garden, 9. where the snail lives, 10. springtime, 11. Weeds, Where Someone Used to Sit, 12. The Secret Garden

Right. I’ve now caught up on all the work I didn’t do last week, so I can now get back to Garden Therapy. Catching up with Alana’s posts wasn’t as daunting as it seemed, however, as most of the boundary and shape stuff has already been decided for me by what is already there in my garden.

I have made a number of decisions, though. The biggest one is one of style, in that I have decided to go for the full-on cottage garden look. This means rambling roses and borders packed with flowers like this:

The cottage garden approach seems to have a number of advantages. Of course there is the riot of colour, which just makes my little heart sing, but it also has the advantage that, once established, the cottage garden needs very little weeding indeed. I have bought a secondhand video of the late Geoff Hamilton talking about cottage gardens, which I intend to watch this weekend. The excellent BBC Gardening site also has a useful introductory page to cottage gardening here. Those are just for starters, to give me idea of the challenge ahead.

While I watch and learn about cottage gardens, there are a few projects I can be getting on with. I have decided to lay gravel right outside the front door, which should be very simple as it’s just concrete there at the moment. I also need to build my bin store, which was proving difficult because I couldn’t find any suitable wood. However, this morning I remembered our local sawmill, which I think sells rough timber of the sort I’m after, so I’ll pop over there soon and measure up. 

I’ve also decided that instead of getting rid of the big old sink (painted blue) just inside the gate, which is full of ferns and cats, I’m going to clad it with twigs-on-a-roll. And I want two hanging baskets for either side of the front door and a little wall planter for the herb garden. Oh, and I’d like a bird-bath-with-orb thingy (as in the photo Anne found) as the focal point in my herb garden. I doubt we can afford to do all that right away, but I can make a start.

I’ve just got time for a quick post before I head out for a day’s work. My husband is now back home and doing well and able to shuffle about a bit, so everything is looking good. Thanks for all your kind comments.

I’ll be back to post about gardening and DIY later…

I have cheated on Alana’s latest task and decided not to draw a plan of my vast demesne. The idea, I think, was to determine viewing lines, but the area I am working on can only be viewed at such close range that in order to view only a slice of it, one would need to be wearing blinkers. Instead, I give you photographs.

(Also, as my thinking has progressed, I have decided to ditch Level 3 for now and concentrate on Levels 1 and 2 only, i.e. the steps / path and the herb garden).

This is the main view. I have chosen this because this is the first impression people have of our house when they pause to fumble with the gate. 

The secondary view is from inside the house. I can sit in my favourite armchair and see the herbs, which is good (although I can also see the bins, which is bad):

The tertiary view is from the seating area:

An obvious eye sore is the view of the bins, but I have plans to make a bin store. I also intend to train the honeysuckle to cover the trellis in front of our neighbour’s front door. But, other than that, where would you say the focal point was? I think it’s at about the point of the terracotta pot in the back row. The main herbs in that row (planted this weekend - sage, lavender and rosemary) should grow quite tall, but do I need something more focal-pointy? A statue of David, a plastic flamingo or a garden gnome? A piece of art attached to the fence? What do you think?

Another problem is this wall directly outside the front door:

It never gets any sun, and this is the result. Ick. I am thinking of finding some little alpines or similar to plant in the cracks to cover the slime. Another thought I had was to break up the four big slabs in the herb garden and re-lay them in crazy paving style. Then I could plant moss, creeping thymes, alpines, etc in the cracks to give a more aged feel and some of these might also cascade over this wall. 

Here is a close-up of what I planted this weekend (mixed in with some planting from last week and earlier):

Back row: sage, lavender, coriander, rosemary

Tubs at right angle (in shade): mint, thyme

Front row: oregano, (baby hosta camping out but not staying here), parsley, three little pots sown with nasturtiums

Foreground: cat

And finally, just for Anne who asked to see a picture of the seating area, this is where the table and chairs ended up. I have ideas for this area, but won’t be doing anything with it for now, other than sitting in it and drinking Pimms / tea:

If anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear them. The basic look I’m going for is “overflowing, but not overgrown”.