Toxic

I bought a new computer today. As you do - though in my case at least, not often. My current iMac is eight and a half years old, and well past its best-before date: when I typed the serial number into the Apple "can you trade in your machine with us?" page, the answer it spat back out was "your computer is ready to be recycled", which if ungracious was at least pretty unequivocal. The PC I dismantled last weekend and handed over to R for hard drive removal was even more ancient, at almost exactly fifteen years old - so I think I can reasonably claim that I'm not an extravagant purchaser of computer equipment.

Anyway, a new Mac needed to be bought, so this morning we took a trip to the Apple store in Solihull and got it done. Sadly it turned out that the exact spec I wanted wasn't available off the shelf, so the machine will have to be delivered, which robbed me of the fun of carrying one of their huge boxes out through the shopping centre to the car park (when I bought my current machine I was on my own, and the sales assistant insisted on carrying it to the car for me so I didn't get tired, or mugged, while I strolled along beside him like a Lady Who Shops), but that at least gives me time to think about which programs I want to carry forward, and formulate a migration plan. 

It had rained all through our trip to Solihull, and back at home it became clear that the afternoon wasn't going to be any better, and I wouldn't be going out birding. So I squelched down the garden to look for wet flowers, and ended up kneeling in the rose bed to photograph this hellebore. If I'd thought to look at the Tiny Tuesday theme earlier I could have saved myself a soaking and photographed a vegetable or a piece of fruit instead, because today's prompt is "a meal ingredient", but most of my available RAM was still focused on the Mac, and I didn't think of it. 

Hellebores, should you be in the slightest doubt about this, are not an appropriate meal ingredient, because every bit of the plant is poisonous - in fact it's commonly said that its name even references that toxicity, deriving from the Ancient Greek helléboros, which is constructed from heleîn ("to injure") and borá ("food"). Some web sites go so far as to suggest that you shouldn't grow hellebores if you have children or animals that might find the idea of eating them irresistible, which made me roll my eyes until I remembered that when we moved into our previous house, thirty years ago, I uprooted an entire patch of aconites from the garden lest the Offspring (then three and one) should take it into their heads to snack on the flowers. It wasn't till a couple of years later that I discovered there was enough poison in the laburnum tree that was also growing there to wipe out the entire village - after which I took a more balanced view of plant toxicity, told Offspring that nothing in the garden was to be eaten without my express permission, and trusted pets to have more wit than to consume poisonous plants. I'm happy to report that both children made it to adulthood without needing their stomachs pumped, and none of our domestic animals ever ate anything more purgative than grass.