Moan, moan, moan----get it off your chest or have a chat

[Maggi Young]

Here you are, a page for having a grumpy moan or a consoling chat!
Started off  by this from Lesley Cox:

The power went out yesterday at 9am in the course of dreadful winds to 160 kph. 70 is apparently counted as gale force. Back on again just half an hour ago. Landline down, 2 cellphones with rapidly flattening batteries, no water because an elec pump sends water from tank to house and Roger took the only car away for a couple of days, just before the power went down. Also took the small gas stove we have for power emergencies. In the middle of all this I'm doing a major re-arrange of stroppy vendors at the Market because local council won't let us have vendor vehicles on the rail platform as we have always had. As yet, said vendors don't even know about it. We have 3 days notice!!! No email etc etc etc. What's left of my original blonde is visibly turning grey.

I think we should have an ongoing thread where Forumists can have a right old gurn. For those that don't want to know, it can be ignored altogether but the rest of us could let off steam without actually throwing something at the dog. 
 
 

[Maggi Young]

Followed by this from Sue Gill:

Hi Lesley
Like the idea of a rant page - Chris B and I went to a talk on Monday night on New Zealand gardens around Auckland and ended up seeing lots of pics of David Austin roses, border phlox and penstemmons but NO new zealand plants - we could have gone into our own gardens and seen those plants, we didn't need someone to have flown all round the planet just to bring them back!! What a waste of an evening.
Sue

[Kristl Walek]

oh what fun to be able to groan publicly........I have already done this on Alpine-L earlier this year, but a double-groan is even better....

There was a virtual explosion of rodents in eastern North American this year---and in one fell swoop one day this summer, every single planting of Fitillaria, species Tulips, hardy Gladiolus and some Liliums disappeared from the garden before I even had time to set the traps.

The culprits were chipmunks---hundreds of them on these 8 acres--I will not tell you what the numbers were after that eventful day!!!!

The worst part of course is that all the plants in question were seed grown (so you know how many years were invested in this), and they not only took mature plantings, but also dug through the hundreds of seedling pots still in the sand plunge bed.

Do I have the energy or the time to start over with these?

Kristl

[Maggi Young]

Do I have the energy or the time to start over with these?

Well, of course, you HAVE to, Kristl... you can't allow yourself to be beaten by a bunch of hungry rodents, after all! Embrace the motto, "don't let the furry little b******s get you down"
And perhaps you should get yourself a raccoon hound or two to keep numbers down?

[Kristl Walek]

I don't suppose we could moan and groan about our ex-spouses here 

Kristl

[Maggi Young]

We could moan about our present ones, as well, if we wanted to!
I never complain about the Bulb Despot, of course: it is easily seen by his nickname that he is the sweetest of souls 
Now, on the other hand... his mother........

[Lesley Cox]

Thanks Maggi, just what I (frequently) need. As to mothers-in-law, I got on just fine with mine and she was occasionally heard to remark that she didn't know how I could bear to live with her son! In the finish I couldn't but as it happens, he died soon after the separation but not through lack of me in his life, far from it.

You have my sympathies Kristl. My animal problems are miniscule compared to yours. If only the d.... dog were less active. The lastest loss is a nice little bush of the lovely silver Halimium atriplicifolium, snapped right off at ground level as he tore through it after some spider out the other side.

I do agree with you Sue, about the talk. Surely this person didn't come from NZ to the UK specifically to talk about such gardens? How stupid. But you won't see NZ native alpines around Auckland, only the bush plants, trees shrubs and climbers which to my mind are comparatively boring. There are the Auckland Islands of course, with a sub antarctic flora of great interest and beauty and having read about these, we had a Dutch gentleman arrive in the country expecting to see antarctic species growing in Queen Street, Auckland. (The local equivilent of Princes St. if you live in Edinburgh.) He wasn't a happy man, saying he'd been misled by his travel agent.

[David Nicholson]

Not a single male of the species so far! Just shows what an amenable part of the species we are!!

[Maggi Young]

OK-I know I can do nothing about it but a good moan does me the world of good. My better half thinks I could moan for England in any case.

Remember, David, an elephant never forgets, and neither do women 

[David Nicholson]

 

[Martin Baxendale]

Okay, here's a male moan. Though actually, in a way, it's a bit of a feminist moan too.

I'm fed up that most bookshops won't stock one of my books 'cos it's too "rude".  The Wicked Willy books weren't too rude for the shops in the 1980s (although they were rather sexist!) The shops seem to have got more prudish these days!

What really bugs me is that according to the feedback I've been getting since the book was published last year, a lot of people in the booktrade object to it not because of the willy characters but because of a certain female character in the book who is (how to put it?) the feminine equivalent. Now I think that's really sexist.

Waterstones, to their credit, took it for a while (and might do again this Christmas) but hardly any other book shops have done. Yet most people don't find the book offensive, and that includes most women who've seen it. In fact they usually really like Clarissa. But not sure if I should post a cartoon showing her here in case I offend anyone. Don't think I would, as you all seem pretty open-minded and not lacking in the sense of humour department. But you never know.

Here's the cover anyway. Maybe I'll post a quick cartoon with Clarissa from the book later and some-one can edit it out if it causes offence. 

[Maggi Young]

I remember the Wicked Willy books,and they were everywhere in the 80s, so can't believe yours is really so filthy, Martin, as not to be saleable in Waterstones.... I'm sure they've sold plenty of Jeffrey Archer's stuff??!!

[Paul T]

Martin,

We who post may all be nice and fluffy types, but there are a LOT of people who lurk here and never post.  I'm reminded when people on other gardening lists mention to me something I've posted here on the SRGC, when I never even knew they came up here.  I often wonder just how many lurkers there actually ARE on this site, but I'm guessing definitely in the hundreds, possibly thousands.  Sort of daunting at times!! 

[Martin Baxendale]

Maggi, no I don't think the cartoons are filthy at all, and I certainly don't think Clarissa is filthy - actually quite a cute and sassy character. Everyone I know who's seen the book (male and female) thinks it's funny. The shops just seem much more nervous these days about what they have on their shelves compared to the '80s. In some ways we seem to have gone backwards a bit from the anything-goes, Spitting Image, Wicked Willy, Not The Nine-O-Clock News hard-hitting humour of the 80s.

Having said that, I'm very aware that this is at heart a gardening forum and not a chat room, so I think all in all probably best not to post any of the cartoons, inoffensive and funny as I think they are. They may well offend someone amongst the many posters and lurkers (as has been pointed out to me offline).

[Lesley Cox]

Come on Martin. Please post at least one. You know me well enough to be sure that I WILL tell you, if it's offensive.