I hope you had a pleasant Easter break – the weather was tolerably good, for once! The tree, if you look closely, is getting ready to blossom. It’s always later than most, but if its previous forty years are anything to go by, it should look good next month.

And I’m remaining with things horticultural. The other photograph is of The Cyclamen, which is how I think of it, with capital letters. Being a winter plant, it’s unusual for it to be in bloom this late. It is the only plant that has ever survived the ministrations of the McGown household, and it might surprise you to learn that it was given to us as a New Year present in January 1977, and this year was its twenty-eighth flowering.

Or it may not surprise you. I, in common with the rest of my family, know nothing at all about plants, and I have never known if we have a remarkable example or if all cyclamen go on forever. What little I have found out about them suggests that other people find it quite difficult to persuade them to bloom for a second year, never mind twenty-eight years straight!

And over the years we’ve learned a thing or two. It hates central heating, which is why it lives in the loo, being the one room with no radiator, and therefore guaranteed not to get warm. It never wanted much watering – a beaker of water once every couple of weeks during its flowering season, and – this was trial and error – about once every six weeks during the rest of the year, when it looks like a pot of earth. My father read somewhere the very first year we had it that they should be kept somewhere cool in the summer, lying on their side in the dark; he sensibly ignored that, and left it where it was, watering the earth occasionally. It doesn’t want to stand in water – if you accidentally overwater it, the water goes straight through to the bowl underneath, and must be thrown away, or it will begin to wilt.

Now it’s grown a little fickle, and doesn’t apparently want water at all; the water goes straight through the earth to the bowl, even if it’s been a month since the last time it was watered. When that began – about three years ago – I thought it was dying, but as you can see, it wasn’t. So now it doesn’t only continue to flower year after year, it seems to do it by merely sniffing some water as it rushes past its roots.

So – if anyone reading this can tell me if it’s usual for cyclamen to last for decades, or if I ought to be writing to the Guinness Book of World Records, I’d be very grateful!
Last month’s competition was a bit more difficult than usual, wasn’t it? Nothing to do with me – blame the people at Pedalo! But lots of you had a go, and the winners have been notified. Do have another go this month. I don’t know at this stage what the puzzle will be so we all find out at the same time if it’s easy or hard. But it doesn’t cost anything to enter, so even if you’re not sure, send in a few guesses. And do let me know if you’d like some other sort of competition. I aim to please.

And what have I discovered about April that you don’t already know? Not a lot. April Fool’s day begins it, of course, and the odd thing about it is that no one knows how it came about. There are lots of possible explanations, but no single one explains the fact that a day on which one has licence to play tricks on others exists in both western and eastern culture. India’s day is the day before – the 31st of March.

The grandest – and I think the best – April Fool’s joke that I know of was in 1977 when the Guardian (a serious broadsheet daily) published a seven page supplement celebrating the tenth year of independence of San Seriffe, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean consisting of two main islands. The north island is known as Caissa Superiore, or Upper Caisse and the south as Caissa Inferiore, or Lower Caisse. The map showed the two islands to resemble a large semi-colon. Its capital is Bodoni, and its major city Port Clarendon. It was an in-depth travel piece, complete with roadmaps and articles about the people, their history and culture and themed advertisements. It was wonderful, and the Guardian has revisited it a few times since. With the advent of computer technology, for instance, Arial in Lower Caisse has acquired considerable importance.

Another very famous one here was in 1957 when Panorama (a very serious in-depth news programme) had Richard Dimbleby (a godlike figure in British TV) reporting from Italy on the bumper spaghetti harvest that year. It was thought to have been brought about by ‘the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil’, according to him, and over film of women plucking the spaghetti from trees Richard pondered the effect of this bumper crop on the Italian economy.
Lots and lots of people believed that report, and the BBC got enquiries about how to go about growing spaghetti here!

What you have to understand is that the war took its toll in more ways than the obvious ones in Britain. Six years of war followed by a decade of austerity meant that British cuisine – never adventurous at the best of times – was very basic indeed. Spaghetti came in cans, courtesy of Heinz, and the British did not go abroad on holiday, so very many of them had never even seen spaghetti, and of those who had purchased it from a delicatessen (the abbreviation ‘deli’ didn’t enter the language until much later), many had no idea how it came into being.

The British approach to foreign cuisine is probably best illustrated by olive oil. Ten years after that spoof, in 1967, an Italian friend of ours wanted to cook a meal for us. ‘Where,’ he asked, his voice perplexed, ‘do you keep your olive oil?’
The answer was that we didn’t have any. ‘I will go and get some,’ he said, and was a little startled to be told he would have to go the chemist (pharmacy) for it. And that wasn’t an April Fool joke! Olive oil came in tiny bottles, marked ‘BP’ for British Pharmaceuticals, and was used exclusively for earache and associated problems. Honestly. Now, whole supermarket aisles are given over to every conceivable kind of olive oil available in all sizes from wine-bottle to flagon, but back then you applied it with an ear-dropper. The meal, incidentally, was absolutely delicious.

The 23rd of April is the date of Shakespeare’s birth and death, and of England’s patron saint, St George. Despite that, it isn’t a holiday – indeed, most people don’t even know that it has any significance whatsoever.

April is, of course, the cruellest month, according to T S Eliot, and the time to be in England according to Robert Browning. In pop music, Pat Boone gave us ‘April Love’ and the Jesus and Mary Chain ‘April Skies’.

That’s it for this month – see you in May!

Love,
Jill

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