We had rain yesterday and last night, and today everywhere is green and glorious.
Our seeds are beginning to stir. We have got dozens of them planted in peat pots in the garden, most of which we will transfer to the allotment, and the first little green shoots are just starting to poke through. This is disproportionately exciting.
We will keep things like parsley and coriander and rocket and spinach here, because those are things that it is nice to have handy. The rest will go the the allotment. The flower seeds are up there as well, tidy rows of green shoots in the freshly watered soil.
Mark, who is a lot more competitive than he pretends to be, has barrowed an enormous pile of muck up to the allotment in readiness for the pumpkin and marrow plants. We do not eat either pumpkin or marrows. Mark explained that when you are a man it is important to have the biggest of everything, and then laughed. I am staying out of the allotment. Clearly there are undertones to gardening which are beyond my comprehension.
We walked around the Library Gardens with the dogs after we finished work, and whilst the dogs capered about we stood quietly and breathed in the utter silence and the scents of blossom and damp earth. This is balm for the soul after spending an evening trying to extract money from intoxicated stag parties.
Oliver was still up when we got home, because of not wishing to waste any of his exeat weekend with anything so prosaic as sleeping. He revised this opinion when we reminded him that the last time he elected to stay up all night he had spent the rest of the next day feeling grumpy and miserable, and in the end had fallen asleep at teatime, still wearing his clothes.
Saturday is an unexciting day to put into prose, because most of it is occupied with getting ready for work.
I made picnics whilst Mark and Oliver went to the barber, Mark likes to get his money’s worth from haircuts, and has had some mystic style choice called a Number Two Cut, which means that you can hardly tell which bit of his head is his bald patch any more. Oliver is beginning to have some interest in style, because next term he will be a senior boy, and will be allowed to attend the social evenings with the neighbouring girls’ schools.
Lucy is very amused at this idea, her school being one of the ones which supplies girls for this activity. The girls are not of Lucy’s age, obviously, they are the little girls in the first two years. Nevertheless Lucy has promised him that she will extract the maximum possible entertainment value from Oliver arriving at her school for an evening of Scottish dancing with the first formers. I shall await these events next term with some interest.
After that they went to the farm. This was because Oliver wanted to go and charge about on the fellside with his cousin and the dogs. Mark did not want to charge about the fellside, and after some token tinkering with the camper van, for which our longing has become almost palpable with the new season, he abandoned Oliver and came home for a sleep before work.
I had already sloped off for a sleep, but even so did not welcome the alarm going off when the terrible hour arrived.
Lucy starts her GCSEs next week. She is sanguine about these, pointing out that even if she completely messes them up she can always have a marvellous career in transport, just like mine.
I rather hope not.
The picture is Oliver examining my efforts at the camper van.
You can see how pleased he is.
