Worm holes

I am feeling more positive about the world today.

This, I think, has been helped by the sunshine. It is easier to be nice to people when the world is warm and bright.

I have to confess that even despite the sunshine, I have not exactly been universally nice to people. I have just had a misfortunate encounter with a very grumpy old boot in my taxi, who did not want to pay the fare, because she thought that it was unreasonably expensive. It might have been, but, as I explained, helpfully, I thought, if you don’t want to give your money to taxi drivers, then walking is completely free.

She was Scottish, and by the time she got out I was having to try very hard not to think unkindly anti-Scottish racist thoughts. It is not always easy to be polite to customers when you are a taxi driver, especially smelly argumentative ones.

She would have been the dopiest customer of the week had it not been for one who got in with Number Two Daughter on Monday night. That one wanted to know what time the lake closed, after which time she supposed that they would not be allowed to look at it any more. 

I took Oliver and Number Two Daughter on a family shopping trip to Kendal this morning. This was a bit tiresome, because the sun was shining and I wanted to potter about in the wreckage of the garden: but Oliver needed new rugby boots and I needed to pick up a taxi plate from the council, and Number Two Daughter needed some specially expensive shampoo which is the Only Shampoo In The World which will work, and which, fortuitously, can only be bought from our hairdresser. 

I am impressed with him about this, he must have been reading  books about creative marketing. He has never tried to persuade me to purchase expensive shampoo, perhaps my hair is not special enough. I get mine in an enormous bottle from Asda, and it seems to work splendidly, I don’t get nits or dandruff or anything. 

I don’t know how she will manage when she goes to Australia and can’t pop in to Kendal when she runs out, perhaps he will be able to post it.

In the end it was nice to be in Kendal in the sunshine, and I milled about quite happily looking at things. 

Oliver and I went to the sports shop, and he ran up and down in new rugby boots until he decided that a pair fitted comfortably. This was a relief, because school starts tomorrow. Oliver has to have all sorts of pairs of trainers for school, for playing, and for the Astro Turf, and for getting muddy, and for indoors, and boots for rugby.

I have got to the stage of pre-school confusion where I have got absolutely no idea if we have got them all or not. He has got several pairs of trainers, and some of them probably still fit. This will have to be good enough, because we have run out of cash now, if he wants some more he will have to order them out of his own massive wealth on Amazon. 

When we got home the afternoon stretched happily ahead of me for helping Mark to recreate the garden.

My job of today was to move the compost heap.

It could not stay where it had been, because eventually Mark’s new shed is going to go there, and before eventually, we are going to stack the bits of conservatory jigsaw there when they turn up.

It had to be moved, and Mark has built a very fine new space for it between flower beds. Today was the time to move it.

I stuck some posts in to aerate it all, and started digging.

It was not easy digging, because of being full of lots of sticks and long fibrous plants, the massacred fennel being one. Mark had to stop what he was doing and help me rather a lot.

I have never in my life seen so many worms.

The picture shows just one turn of the fork, not even the most wormily productive. 

It was all like that.

It completely changed my view of worms. I had always thought of them as leading tediously repetitive soil-eating lives, but it became plain that nothing so humdrum is the truth. Worms like to eat fruit. Mostly, they seem to like melon, which is where, given a chance, they seem to prefer to lay their eggs. We eat melon in our picnics, and so today we turned over hundreds of pieces of ancient melon rind, pink with worms, and quite often next to clusters of melon seeds, tangled together in their own shooting white roots, birthing pale leaves in the hot darkness. 

Baby worms are white as well. I did not know that before today.

We were very pleased indeed. I have mentioned our interest in compost before, and we felt as though we had achieved a great success. The first time we dug our garden when we moved in there was not a single worm, just gravel and grey ash: and now, ten years on, we have a gloriously fertile wormy paradise.

At least, I think it is paradise, I don’t suppose I would be able to tell if they didn’t much like it.

I have added pictures below. The new compost heap is not always going to have those planks in front of it. That is a strictly temporary measure, probably just for the next ten years until Mark gets round to building the new compost heap easy-access cover that we have designed.

We went to work afterwards because I had spent all our money on rugby boots.

It is all coming along splendidly.

The conservatory is supposed to come tomorrow.