Ole!

The title of this post translates from the Spanish as Hurrah!, but that's not my version. Oh no. Uh uh. If you put a letter v or a letter m before it you get GARDEN PESTS, and just to show that the wildlife of Suffolk is mocking me they've sent two of their most destructive critters to plague me. At the same time! I remember the vole tracks from the lawns at Wilby when we had a huge pond and resident water voles. But I have no water here, and there is no undergrowth for voles to hide under. Where are they coming from? And another mole! This two-pronged "ole!" attack has to be stopped, and so Sid will be calling on me next week. I'm thinking of paying my pension directly to him each month since that's where all my money is going to go. And as I drove home late this evening from seeing Imitation Game in Aldeburgh, I saw a member of the genus rattus rattus run across the lane and down beside my hedgerow. But you know what? Ratophobe though I am I didn't give him a second thought. I've got more pressing vermin on my plate.

Still on a garden theme I'm waiting for the last of the leaves to fall from the western boundary hedge and trees, but they're being very slow this year. Once they're all down Did is coming to chop several feet off their height so my summerhouse doesn't sit in shade from around 4pm in the summer. These were the trees today glowing golden in the November sunshine. It is a shame to reduce them to around half of their current height, but needs must, and they'll grow again. A summerhouse has to have sun. It's a law of nature.

Imitation Game was brilliant but heartbreaking. Alan Turing came across in the film as secretive and unfeeling, but he learned how to be such at an early age. Lonely and bullied at school for being different - he was high on the autistic spectrum - he had one close friend who transformed his life but who died about a year into their friendship. Terrified that authority suspected a homosexual liaison, he denied any closeness when told of Christopher's death, hiding his shock and pain behind a stiff upper lip. He called his enigma code-breaking machine Christopher, and loved it as he had its namesake. He killed himself at 41. Really gut-wrenching stuff.