Blood, gore and gardening

There’s a few things Nicktor and I have in common. Two of them are beer and Tarantino films. Tonight we had both. But before Nicktor arrived with his bounty of entertainment, I started work weeding and tidying up the ex-Nettle bed.

I say ‘started’, because I was rained off a few times. That annoying sort of rain that just turns up, unannounced and manages to drench everything. Still, I did manage half of the bed.

All of the tulips have long since stopped being beautiful, leaving just their gradually dying stems and leaves. Mirinda told me we have to leave the leaves but can cut down the stems. She’d already started doing it so I just finished it off. Apparently the remains continue to feed the bulb, turning yellow when they’ve completed their task. It seems that when this happens, the remains can just be plucked from the ground and they come away as easy as rain off a duck. I know because it happened to me a few times. I love the way nature does things like that.

During the showers, I started scanning some black and white photographs Mirinda brought back from Oz of my early productions with Gallery Rep. Looking back on photos of me as Norman is a bit sobering. How young and talented I look. The past certainly is a foreign country.

And so, the day drew to a close and Nicktor turned up. He had dropped into the Itchen Valley brewery on the way home. Here’s his blip of today showing some of the equipment there.

He’d bought eight pints of different beer (actually, he bought two pints of four different beers), having been a bit undecided. We drank them in, what we thought was, a logical order. This left the rather dark and menacing blackberry mild for last. We didn’t like it. It’s not often we can’t finish a pint but this one was not particularly pleasant. So we didn’t. We had to have a whisky to rid our mouths of the taste.

However, the other three beers were terrific as was our Chinese dinner. (The delivery guy was admiring our wisteria. When I said it was so dense it made finding the house difficult, he laughed and said he knew the house very well having been delivering here for ages.) And we watched Django Unchained.

Now, I wouldn’t recommend watching Django Unchained unless you are a Tarantino fan. There is a lot of violence, blood and swearing. There is also a bit of really awful acting by Tarantino, playing an Australian near the end of the film. Because of these things, we thoroughly loved it.

We particularly liked the performances of Christoph Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio. Both were superb. I’ve seen Christolph Waltz in a couple of films. Most notably Carnage along with Kate Winslet and Jodie Foster. He was also in the Tarantino WW2 film Inglourious Basterds, in which he was particularly evil.

We finished off the evening with a few episodes from two (old) British sitcoms (as we do). Watching and The Upper Hand. They are both gentle and a perfect finish to a night of bloody violence.

One question which was firmly answered was when Nicktor asked if he could have a vote on the colour for the spare room. Mirinda said he could always have a vote but it would never count. But, just to make a note of it, he doesn’t like the pink and was disappointed with Lulworth blue.