Nuts!

Well that's how it feels sometimes. You look out the window in the morning, the radio sputters out whatever news items our masters have decided we merit hearing and then Classic FM play more Vaughan Williams - I never knew just how much that man wrote (or should I say steal as I don't think he actually created an original tune in his life) and I certainly have no idea why he gets played so much. Especially that screeching, squealing, "Lark Arising" - it's like an out of tune banshee.

Nuts, I say. Nuts.

In this case walnuts - which aren't my favourite nuts - but which are pretty fine in Kathryn's banana cake. Walnuts, of course, feature in a (probably forbidden) piece of doggerel:

The dog, the wife and the walnut tree,
The more you beat them the better they be.

I'm not about to conduct this experiment - I don't have a dog and Kathryn punches harder than I do - but the beating of nut trees is an interesting idea. And here's why:

‘The old custom of beating a walnut-tree was carried out firstly to fetch down the fruit and secondly to break the long shoots and so encourage the production of short fruiting spurs’: M. Hadfield British Trees (1957).

Fascinating stuff! And, as I said at the start of all this, nuts!!

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