Cordyline Australis

 I've been calling them palms, but that's wrong; they're not even related. What they are is New Zealand Cabbage Trees- or, to give them their pretty Latin name, Cordyline Australis. They're dotted about all over Eastbourne. They like our climate. We have one in our front garden and another- baby one- at the back. They're in flower at the moment and a cabbage tree in flower looks like a mortar bomb exploding

We value them as ornamental, but the Maori used to go to them for the the raw materials to make clothes, footwear, shoes and medicines. They're hardy and prolific and the fallen leaves rot down to a rich black mulch. 

The picture is of a little clump of them that I can see from my study window.  

Mr Johnson Retires

 Mr Johnson has stepped down as an M.P.

It seems pointless, this late in the day, to write disobliging things about him.

He dominated an era in British politics- and was that rare thing, a colourful politician. 

Most go-getting politicians are amoral and mendacious but most of them try to hide it. Johnson didn't hardly bother- and that was curiously refreshing.

That said, it's about time he went.

His retirement home- a moated Manor House in South Oxfordshire- once belonged to Dean Inge, a controversial churchman with loud opinions- who was thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature and- to the credit of the Academy- never got it. Inge isn't exactly forgotten but can't be said to matter any more- which is also now true of Mr Johnson (we hope).

Inge was known as the "gloomy Dean". Google his portrait and you'll see why. Inge and Johnson are an ill-assorted pair: the man who believed in all sorts of things and the man who believes in nothing. On could write an amusing, satirical- even philosophical- sketch (not my style so I make a free gift of it to anyone who can use it) in which Mr Johnson, in his cups, late at night, sees a certain grim-faced person sitting across from him, on the other side of the study fire...