Crack-racas, City of Sin and SUVs, Present day

I sits at me computer, thinking of you and that, from my hotel room window at least, it looks quite lovely. Appearances can be deceiving. LUV U X

Jabillal, Portuguesa, Venezuela 20 – 25 June

Mesa del Portero is basically flat, has cold beer, electricity, concrete houses and a tarmac road within about 2k. In Jablillal the houses are built of mud and thatch, every angle is about 45% up or down, and the dirt road all but disappeared in a raging torrent after about 5 inches of rain on the second night. It has the most beautiful views, with mist wrapped forested mountains descending down into a vast flat plain. As the crow flies it is little more than 10 k from the capital of the province. As the jeep revs and screams it is a good few hours. Luckily we had discarded Maikell’s 4-wheel-hair-dryer by this point in favour of a 1984 jeep with a roaring v6, no windows, and the petrol consumption per day of a Central African Republic.

We didn’t have so much success here with the mammals. Although what we did catch was a little little more varied. Some opossums and a little forest caviomorph rodent. Also a smaller and less manky ‘possum called Metachirus nudicaudatus with a beautiful high clicking alarm call. Particularly amazing was a baby porcupine Coendu prehensilis, captured when it fell from its mother’s back as she fled hunters, and now kept as a pet. No needles or donkey tranqs for this one. Just a pot of hungry lab reared triatomines placed on it belly while it was fed a bit of sugar cane. These are examined in a month’s time for the presence of parasite in their gut.



Most horrifying in Jabillal was my first experience of real domestic infestation. Most of the houses we examined were teeming with bugs, mud walls streaked with the black, half digested blood of the occupants. We pulled about 60 of the things from one bedroom alone, lord knows how many of them sat hidden deep in the cracks in the walls. Perhaps unsurprisingly the locals seemed fairly ambivalent to the menace in their bed clothes. Being told you might contract heart disease in the next 25 years seems less important than whether any lunch is forthcoming in the next 24 hours.

Our lovely tobacco spitting host was Mauricio, a big friendly coffee farmer who seemed to have over 1000 jokes up his sleeve, each with a punch-line including an increasingly bizarre variation of homosexual sex. On cross-examination he seemed to actually have a fairly open minded attitude to gay people, a stark contrast to Maikell’s belief that they should all be burnt at the stake.

He sent be back with a little bag of green coffee beans my lover, which we can toast on a saturday morning and sip at delicately in Clifden Road kitchen while the birds go ‘cheep’ in the jardin.

Bum-worm tally: 10 Mammals, 100+ triatomine bugs, Rhodnius species, 4 humans samples, 1 bag green coffee beans, strange itchy rash on left buttock.

Bumworm post - Mesa Del Potrero, Portuguesa, Venezuela 15-19 June

Well well. Not sure that the land of bum worms lends itself to frequent blog updates unless you have a very long aerial and a friend who works in the telecommunications industry. I have spent the last few weeks in Portuguesa province where cowboys still roam deserted motorways on horseback and the bum worms grow big and long. First stop Mesa Del Potrero, which means ‘Table of the stable boy’. No sweaty jodhpurs here, though, they ride bareback and use them like motorbikes.

Arrived on a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Maikell’s shiny camionetta with its air conditioning, cruise control and automatic eyebrow curlers. Immediately became clear that walking everywhere was likely to be sole means of transport because my dirty boots and occasionally dusty bottom were not in keeping with his vision of a pristine interior. A blessed relief really - anything to avoid blasting electro cumbia. As you can see in the piccy, there are far cooler ways getting around. Off we rambled to the house of Eduardo (the guy in the stripey top) and his lovely wife, where we peppered the surrounding woods with cage traps dripping with sardine and pineapple juice. The following day brought a rich harvest of forest rats and hissing ‘possums. These poor little brutes had to wait until thursday because the horse tranquiliser we had bought owing to the lack of ketamine seemed to be ineffective at elephant stunning doses. Same goes from Maikell, who managed to stick himself with a good half ml of the stuff by accident, clumsy bastard.

The ketamine finally arrived by the gallon and for the following days we pursued the local wild life, anesthetising and blooding anything that moved. Evenings were greatly assisted by the local presence of an indigenous intoxicant called ‘cerveza fria’. Also by Jose ‘Bracho’ Bracho and Leomar ‘Leo’ Hernandez, functionaries of the loc

al epidemiology unit who could strum a llanero tune like gooduns on the in-house guitar. Bracho is pictured flexing his enormous muscles after an unsuccessful hunt for bugs in armadillo burrows. What you can’t see is that he has busted up hi

s leg after jumping of a 10 foot ledge to avoid a snake (pictured) which turned out to be a harmless python. Amusingly there was a venomous snake involved but all you could see was its tail poking out of the larger snake’s mouth. Nature red in tooth and slither.

Bum-worm tally: 20 mammals, 40+ triatomine bugs of various species, and 20 seropositive humans sampled.

The Lovely Rose and the Rude Tomato

Ooh and i thought i'd send you this too. The rose is in our jardin and is very lovely and i tend to bend down and sniff it once in a while.

The tomato is something else altogether. I bought it in the big fruit and veg shoppe with a huge grinne on my face - it is rather marvellous don't you agree? (the turkish man who weighed it found it a rather embarassing experience and went a delightful shade of red - much like the tomato).

Luv u
X X X X
S

Beans, beans, beans and a rather hungover ramble

Saturday. Weekend yay. Hangover boo. I woke to the drone of John Humphreys who was attacking an MP of some description on the imminent emergency budget and realised i needed to escape from bedroom. It dawned on me that a spot of horticultural activity was possibly the only thing that might quell what is defintely the Lamest World Cup Match ever hangover, so i fell out of bed, rolled down the stairs and flopped into the garden.

And what a fine looking array of vegerables we dost have dere boy. The beans are doing excellently. I'm afraid i dont really know how else to describe it other than that. If i was a teacher writing a mid-term report on how one of the bean plants is doing, i'd write as follows: Phaseolus had a slow start to the term, possibly due to a less than beneficial friendship made with members of St Sluggians, the college for less desirable garden creatures, down the road. A great releief, then, when he showed signs of having learnt the first module: Roots of Common Senese, with a respectable 78% achieved in the most recent exam. It's been uphill from there - he's made dramatic advances in Beanistry, and is now looking like a good contender for end of year prizegiving. Overall he particpates well and is quite lively in the playground - full of beans in fact. Good work.

My only concern is these French Beans, what look very impressive from a distance but when you get up close you see that they is all smothered in black aphids. CRIPES darlinge, what should i do? Get the hoover and suck them up one by one? Spray a noxious potion over leaves and floweres? Do an anti aphid dance and sacrifice a sossidge to the great God of French Beans? The plants themselves dont seem to be suffering much but i gues sit oculd be Early Stage Aphiditis and that the road to ruin is yet to be traversed. Please adviseee Herr DOktor.

Cherries are still falling from the tree in great abundance. I'm loath to say i'm sick of eating them because i'm not - well, not yet. I can certainly say that they are less appreciated than they were hwich is ridiculous because they're DELICIOUS. They really are - first class texture, delicate but not insipid flavour and a delightful neon pink in colour. A raver's delight. A morrello's obsession. Even Prudence, Peggy and Elvis are clucking with pleasure as i chuck them their daily dose of cherries into the pen. (names of chickens are trying to stick but i have trouble using them very often). Peggy and Prue are pretty def and I like elvis but i actually like Elvis for something MORE than a chicken. But then again, Elvis i'm sure would be pleased that a dumb bird was named after him.

There are TWO pieces of most exicting news for the Clifden Rd Garden Gazzette - one concerns raspberries, the other the special Seeds That I Lost plants. Both doing well - I did my first whizz around the raspberry canes this morning, lifting their languid heads that are heavy with fruit and plucking the first few pink ones with delight. Pluck! Pluck! So yummy. I've tried the chickens on raspberries. One of them - let's say Prue for sake of argument although i really can't tell you - did a kind of chicken double take, had a furtive peck at it and then left it for someone else to try. I think cherries win in the popularity stakes.

Ooh i had a great discovery on Sunday night lsat week and that is the WHOLE Of chatsworth road becomes filled with boxes of rotting fruit and veg wot them Turks don't want no more. I had been worried that PP&E weren't getting their 5 a day fruit and veg coz you're not around and, my darling, the quantity of food being consumed in this house seems to have more than halved. But the Sunday night scrounge provided bundles of wilted greens which i put in a bucket of water over night and fed to the birds the next day - they were devoured in record 4 minutes 39 seconds. No joke - or no yoke. They brids have good taste. As for the special seeds that I'm not sure i should name on a blog, they too are doing well - their rotten leaves are being left down the plant and new leaves showing no sign of disease. Big plant is bigger. It hasn't decided on its sex yet. This will have to wait for another blogge posting methinks.

I am going to have to go because i sense a strange hangover ramble which i fear may not stoppe for a LONG Time and i've got to getin the carre and drive to Richmondo for a Great CuRRY extravaganza this evening. I'm also going to pick up this mega machine which chazbo has finished. Tres exciting. perhaps the next time i write a missive, i will be writing from an altogether superior set up.

Love you more than there are raspberry pips in the world.

X X X X S

Exciting adventures involving elderflower

Rest assured, weeding wasn't the only activity that we did over the weekend - our elderflower mission was incredibly successful thanks to the lending of a ladder from our friendly neighbours (thankfully, Hussein knew what a ladder was) and the roof of their shed.

The tree at the end of the garden is blooming with little elderflower heads but they're all rather out of our reach. Even with a ladder it was hard to get beyond the few pollen heavy blooms that hang from the bottomest branches. That was until we realised that the tree stretches right up over Hussein and Ahmed's tool shed - with what looked like hundreds of little elderflowers quivering with spring excitement.

Our ascent onto the roof was a rewarding experience. Not only did we manage to get over 80 elderflowers, we had a fine view of our jardin - and all those beyond it. We decided the new found was certainly the ideal spot for teenagers and a large bag of weed. I'm thinking that our Georgian friend who tried to feed us black liquorice hashish oil would have thoroughly approved.

The elderflower cordial is currently brewing in a box in the kitchen. We will try and save you some dere boye.

Weekend weeding and a thickening plot

Wednesday morning and i realise that i've got to put in some updates before the weeekend! So here is my report on our epic weekend of weeding, cleaning and growing. I say 'our' weekend but I must confess that i contributed a fraction of the time that Charlie and Shon did.
Shon deserves special credit. He weeded the veggie patch into a state that i've never seen it before. Mart, did you know that the soil is BLACK in the veggie patch? I alwasy thought it were green like the grass. My shock at discovering it was a different colour was palpable.

I understand Shon had fun trying to get a hoe from Hussein. The story goes like this: Shon asked Hussen if he had a hoe. Hussein looks at Shon blankly then runs into his shed and produces... A TROWEL! Shon says nope, so Hussein ducks back into his collection of tools and produces... A SPADE! Wrong again said Shon, making a kind of horseshoe shape with his hands. A hoe - for weeding?! Hussein enters his shed for a third time and produces HIS ENTIRE TOOL COLLECTION for Shon to examine. No hoe there. Amazingly a neighbour four gardens down had one (I'm not sure how Shon managed to establish this) but one was secured in the end. Hurrah. Or perhaps I should say Hoe-ray. After all this drama (plus a stubbed toe of the bloke who lends his hoe to us) it turns out that our soil is too wet for such gardening tools. Apparently the weeds will just reseed themselves unless the topsoil is v. dry. So the excellent results of Shon's weeding session were a lot of work on hands and knees, ripping the little weedy blighters out of our precious veggie patch.

The picture doesn't actually do it justice but i assure you it looks good...

The question remains - how does Hussein keep his own garden so impossibly weed-free?! Could he be more of a garden chemist than we originally thought? The plot thickens....

Cherries

Our cherry tree is definitely having a good year - hundreds of the little pink fruits are hanging off its leafy green branches. They look like oversized, slightly pink chickpeas, swaying gently in the wind. We've all been picking them - Charie and me especially. I took a bag over to Ruth's yesterday and we ate them (after a supper of sossidge and potatoes) out in their garden in a slightly chilly June evening breeze whilst Francie sat inside glued to the laptop, watching a world cup game. It's not just certain memebers of our house who are adicted to the blooming TV at this time of year. It was pretty funny actually, you could hear a slightly muffled northern grunt coming from the window where francie sat, as he ate his sossidges and watched the match. Ruth tells me that he's structured his entire revision plan around world cup matches - meaning that he often has to get up at 5am so that he can make up for lost revision time. That, my darling, is fanaticism at its zenith.

I'm actually just trying out this blog post thing so will stop writing now - but will update on more garden activiites soon.

X S