Today I have read the fantastic news that Martha’s Rule will be put in place across all hospitals in the National Health Service (NHS) in England. I am so delighted.
Thank you Merope Mills. It is awful that you had to lose your beautiful daughter to bring this change to pass, but your telling of her story, and of your story, during that dreadful time in hospital, have sounded like a bell in the noise of life. Now, thanks to your urgent insistence, Martha’s Rule will be there for us when we are in hospital and at our most vulnerable – a reminder, strengthening us for times where challenge is necessary.
This strange summer is my first attempt at growing tomatoes from a packet of seeds. The plants are trying, but not in a very uniform way.
The one in the photograph above began as a seed, indoors, in late May. Then, together with all siblings from the same packet, was placed into covered sunshine for about ten days, and then transferred with the others out into pots along a wall in full sun. Since then each plant has had the same amount of love and neglect, and been exposed to the same bouts of weird weather.
Their first week out was one of brisk winds and cold nights which turned them all pale and wibbly, and their leaves yellow, but slowly the wind died, and the sunshine switched from feeble, to full beam brilliance. That weather lasted for a few weeks, so hot that on some days the plants were actually put into the shade for protection, before being moved back into the full sun. Then we come to this week, where temperatures have dropped again, and rain is either drowning the plants, or drifting over them in teasing waves.
The question is, how will this crop do? The strange thing is how different each plant’s progress is, compared to its neighbour. Right now it seems that some of them might do okay, and others of them probably won’t, and I’m not sure any will produce tomatoes. The one in the photograph above is the runt of the litter, embarrassed by a few of its bolder siblings who are now twice as tall, and already flowering.
So will 2023 be a good vintage? I have no idea. Just getting a tomato will be amazing … if it happens.
Well, January is the month to be glum, and thanks to the train strikes, we’re all being glum from home.
Nothing works. And to prove it, some of us are stopping work. So while the rain rains – and it is – and the wind howls – and it was – we’re moaning. We do pause occasionally. Recently it’s been to fret about the brotherly I-said-you-said, soundbites-at-dawn storm, that’s swirled our way. We’re still writing the chorus for that, and it’s proving darkly occupying.
This morning I was wondering whether any whales passing these islands can hear our song? And if so, what it sounds like? I imagine it sounds like a miserable humming, with crescendos here and there as we add the woes of others to our own. Perhaps that’s why there aren’t many whales around here – too glum. Although maybe not for walruses.
Thor, a fine young male, turned up in Scarborough at New Year. He didn’t stay long though, which leaves me thinking perhaps he’d been sent by the whales on some sort of reconnaisance mission to find out what’s going on.
The Phraser 