Patch, peach, and fool's gold...

It’s turning out to be a bit of a slow week in my world.

I’ve been mainly caught up in travelling and meetings, even the weekend was a little flat – it rained and then rained some more, and by the time Sunday came and it had stopped raining it was time for me to get back in the car and drive away again. Life is like that sometimes – unsatisfactory.

My Aquilegias have all finished flowering and we’re rapidly moving towards that time of year when the plants grow too big, too quickly, burn themselves out, and start their collapse into autumn and then the disappearance of winter.

That’s the thing about blogging so regularly, sometimes when your cat has stopped doing tricks, and your rubber ducks are content to simply bob in the bath, you are left with unsatisfactory space to fill. I was hoping for something in the sky this morning, a rainbow, a cloud in the shape of a kangaroo, lightening – but the sky was that flat, hazy blue that you get on pleasant mornings when there’s not much weather around.

I suppose that I could write something about Harry Patch, the last survivor of the trenches of the First World War who died aged 111 a few days ago - but what could I say that hasn’t been said already? Besides, my experience of the Great War is a few war poems read at school and a grandfather who was gassed in the trenches and died long before I was even born - and I’m saving that tale for another day.

Perhaps I should write about the two gifts I was given by a friend yesterday. She had a much more interesting weekend than mine, a stunningly good weekend by the tweet of things. She gave me one of the outdoor grown peaches that she’d harvested and a small piece of fool’s gold that she’d picked up from a beach on the cold east coast where she lives.

Fantastic! English peaches and fool’s gold, I’ve never had either before.

It’s practically impossible to grow free-standing peach trees anywhere in the UK, at least it is if you want them to fruit - it’s doomed to failure but you will take years to fail - you can grow a peach tree fan-trained against a south-facing wall and they’ll sometimes produce a large crop of fruit. My friend’s tree did - dozens of peaches - so there’s jam, crumble, syrup, and pie to come – lucky, lucky her.

Home-grown peaches are meant to be far better than those available from the shops because commercially grown peaches are harvested before they are ripe and never develop the full taste of a tree-ripened fruit. I shall be eating mine tonight at midnight (midnight is the best time to eat fruit) so I’ll let you know.

Fool’s gold is actually the mineral pyrite, an iron sulfide - FeS2. It does look a bit like gold - it has the same metallic luster but is generally a little paler, it’s heavy, but not as heavy as real gold. One way to test for true gold is to place the ‘gold’ on a hard surface and whack it with a hammer. If it disintegrates it’s iron pyrite and if it simply changes shape and flattens a little, then it’s gold.

Shall I, just in case? No I think I’ll keep it as it is.

It must be easy to mistake fool’s gold for real gold and a South African peach for an English one – there’s no mistaking Harry Patch though and with his death we all lose something of our pasts. He was in the trenches in the same war as my long dead grandfather, perhaps even the same trench who knows.

Yes, the Aquilegias are over for another year and autumn will soon be with us.

Harry Patch on Facebook

Click to see my beautiful Aquilegias including my first blue in frame 3