Bricky

I have remembered why we get thinner in the springtime.

I have had an exceedingly busy day.

It is springtime. The sun is beaming with benevolent jollity, and of course this changes everything. Suddenly the days, despite being longer and longer, are suddenly far too short.

I have now got a functional washing line, and so I pegged the laundry in the yard. This is lovely, because it comes in smelling of sunshine, and only a bit of woodsmoke and bird poo, but of course it is very early in March, and the sun is not really high enough in the sky to do more than the barest peep over the back-yard wall.

This means that things do not quite become dry, and I have to hang everything up all over again when I bring it into the house later.

I do not mind this. Every drop of water that does not finish up evaporating in the air in our house is one less picnic for the ravening black mould to feed on.

It takes twice as long, though.

Once the washing was hung and the floors were swept and Oliver’s bed had been made up with fresh sheets, I went belting off to the farm.

Today it was not for firewood, with which we have now filled every corner and crevice of the yard, but for more bricks for building the new flower beds.

I can tell you that it is not for nothing that bricks are used for practically every metaphor about heavy things.

It is a commonly-used amusing sort of joke to pick up somebody else’s bursting suitcase and wonder if they might be carrying bricks in it. The same humourist might also remark that something large and weighty, possibly a portly dancer at a wedding, landed like a ton of bricks.

The reason for this is that bricks are as heavy as, well, bricks.

It is not the first time this week that I have been involved in the transportation of bricks, although last time there were two of us and today there was only me.

I hauled them into Mark’s home-made wheelbarrow and shoved them across the wood-yard, this time to inflict them on my poor taxi’s suspension.

I carried lots and lots of them. You can see them in the taxi. There were two rows.

Poor taxi.

I stacked them in, being brave about spiders and woodlice and earwigs, and hoping that none of them would choose to abandon their bricky homes and take up residence in the taxi.

After that I left the bricks alone, not without some relief, and went to do some weeding.

Mark is determined that we are going to have our own kitchen garden at the farm. I like this idea whilst it is floating around in the ether. Imagine a summer day, with sheep and little lambs skipping in the distance, and our garden on its sunny hillock. Neatly trimmed paths weave between wigwams of broad beans and peas climbing up rows of hazel twigs. Leafy rhubarb is at the back, tidily mulched with straw, and feathery rows of carrots, thoughtfully alternated with onions to confuse pests, stretch to the fence at the end, beyond which is the orchard.

It is nothing like that at all.

At the moment it is a half-turned-over patch of ground which is just beginning to sprout its annual crop of stinging nettles. There are the sorry remnants of a fence, which the sheep bashed down last year in order to eat the sweetcorn, which was the only thing we planted.

I am going to grow mint, for sauce.

Mark dug loads of the nettles out last year, but this year obviously he is too busy.

He has got a roll of sheep netting and has promised that this year he will fence properly, and so in exchange I have volunteered to make yet another start on the garden project.

It is very good soil indeed, and despite the nettles, is loose and black and crumbly.

I do not know if we will get round to digging and planting it properly, but every year we get a bit closer. By the time we are ready for our nursing homes we will probably be self-sufficient at least in dock leaves, and have the fattest sheep in Cumbria.

I spent an hour uprooting stinging nettles before rushing home to unload the bricks.

I stacked them in the conservatory.

After that I made biscuits, and a lemon syrup cake, and a shepherd’s pie, and some bolognaise for dinner.

Oliver came downstairs for assistance with his science prep, which was to construct a model of a brain cell using household items.

Readers, you will not be astonished to learn that I did not have the first idea what a brain cell looks like, thank goodness for Google.

We used pecan nuts and cardamom pods and lettuce and a cherry.

I have got several things saved up to say to his science teacher on Parents’ Day.

Mark has just arrived home. It is half past eight in the evening.

We think that we might do a bit more flowerbed-building before dinner.