Saskatoon

We have long-lost relations from Canada staying with us, a mother and son. Brenda is my third cousin: my grandfather never spoke about his emigré uncle (Brenda's great-grandfather), and indeed the two branches of the family only came into contact through the internet.

On a sunny evening, we drove our guests up to the top of Leckhampton Hill to show them the lie of the land - hillier with us than with them, it seems: they come from a town twice our size which I'd never heard of.

Saskatoon sounds a nice place, but a little chilly for my purposes: the average low in January is -22 degrees C. And they take rather more words to say things than we do: "You know what, I totally agree," translates as "Yes."

Corduroy etc.

An email came in overnight from Canadian cousins, who go to great lengths, it seems, to commemorate Armistice Day. Good for them. It's easy to forget. Today's picture combines the red and black of my poppy - in verticals, to mark, in addition, the moment of the day that most resembles corduroy, as the clock moves from 11:11:11:11:00:00 to 11:11:11:11:11.11.

It was three years ago that the Guardian offered readers the chance to download an original Keith Tyson History Picture. This is "mine". Each work consists of a unique randomly-generated sequence of vertical stripes in red, black and green - the roulette colours. Every image has its own title, based on the geographical location of the user: hence "Cheltenham" at the bottom left.

Ahead of the offer, Keith wrote that his computer "will generate a sequence of the numbers one to 32 which relates to the roulette wheel. Each number has an assigned colour. If you hit the jackpot, you'll come away with an entirely green work. But the chances of that happening are 1 in 37 x 37 x 37, 49 times." Even I, who am red/green colour-blind, can see this is not a jackpot that I've won. But the consolations are that Caroline remembered it's St Martin's Day, and I've been asked out to lunch by an old friend!

Garden news - 2

Reverting to what I was saying yesterday, if the minutest fraction of the money that is being injected into the banks were somehow directed towards encouraging people to make gardens more genuinely productive - instead of turning them over to tarmac and decking - wouldn't life be vastly healthier? Morrisons' "Let's Grow" scheme has the right idea.

Of course, I wouldn't in any way exclude flowers: they do so much for our mental wellbeing. Apologies in advance for some more horticultural hubris: you expect geraniums to stick around for a long season, but I've never had such luck before with sweet peas. It was nearly four months ago that I reported that ours were flowering - and they are still. You see a lot of extremely realistic artificial flowers around these days, including sweet peas, but despite their short life, there is nothing to compare with having fresh ones in a vase on the table.

It's been a good year too for raspberries, a few of which seem to be there for the picking each morning. And though we've exhausted the fig tree at last, it's hard to keep up with falling apples.

For anyone without the opportunity to grow their own, there is of course a wide variety of vegetable box schemes, some more organic and local than others. Following a recent post, it was good to hear from my Canadian cousin, Bruce Coates that his son and daughter-in-law Kent and Ruth are heavily committed in this field: one of the ways a blog seems to be able to bring together diverse people with similar ideas.