Sunday morning.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

I edited this afterwards because I thought it was rubbish. I was carried away on a full-of-dinner-and-wine sort of rosy glow, and thought I would tell everybody about it straight away. However I should not write when I am drunk. It comes out as dull drivel, which is a shame because it was a lovely time, all grey and silent and frosty and still: and the excitement of things starting to grow again, which you just don’t get when you are much younger than fifty, and the niceness of doing something together. I managed to make it sound like a sales pitch for a Natural Therapies Are Us Hippy Garden Centre: which made me feel embarrassed when I re-read it later. It’s still fairly dull, so do feel free to skip this one. Some stuff just doesn’t tell on well.

A morning in the garden: misty and damp and still after the sunshine yesterday. Mark sawed up logs whilst I cleared away dead sticks and debris, and layered all the flower beds with muck. Mark brought me some sacks of it back from the farm a couple of weeks ago, and it is one of my favourite jobs: absolutely bursting with healthy pink worms. The garden looks as if it has been covered over with a dark blanket afterwards, really pleasing.

Lots of little shoots starting to come up now,  the ones for the peonies are deep pink: and of course the daffodils are well on the way. It is all doing really well because I chucked the soot on it from last month’s boiler disaster: and the slugs have all sloped off somewhere else because they don’t like soot, so every cloud etc. Everything that looks dry and brown and stick-like at a distance, which is most of it, is just starting to consider poking out some buds.

Mark stacked firewood for the week for me: and once he stopped making a horrible racket with the chainsaw the blackbird who begs shamelessly on the doorstep came and perched on the wall next to us. It is boot-polish black and amazingly unafraid. Once it had had enough Morrisons Sliced Wholemeal it stayed on the wall for ages. We stood really quietly and listened: because it was starting to practice singing ready for spring. It was completely gorgeous: the softest, liquid bubbling sound, almost too quiet to hear, little whispering patterns of notes and calls: the first fluid promises of the maestro he will eventually become. It was a brilliant thing to hear, so quiet that if you weren’t actually listening for it you just wouldn’t know it was happening, a perfect blackbird song with the volume turned right down.

We chatted to our neighbours walking their dogs, and then realised we were frozen and starving,  so we rushed off in our muddy gardening jumpers for lunch at the bistro: salads and garlic bread and huge burgers made of local sheep like the ones we saw on our walk yesterday, and olives and feta: and a lovely mellow Merlot. I turned out to be not as hungry as I would have liked to be, so Mark had to finish mine in the end. There was a huge cheerful family at the next table and we stared at them rudely until the father noticed, and explained that he looked familiar because actually he was the chap who had fitted our double glazing years ago, so we had a reunion, which was rather nice; he has stopped fitting double glazing and has got a coffee shop in Grasmere now.  We were warm and full at the end, and sleepy because of the Merlot and working all night: so Mark has gone back to bed, and I am on my way to join him.