The weather forecast promised good weather today, and so Mark decided that he would have today at home and work on Sunday instead.
Regrettably the weather forecast turned out to be telling fibs, but we managed to get an awful lot of things done anyway.
Mark built the second flower bed in the conservatory whilst I made mayonnaise and faffed about in the kitchen. We had a brief lunchtime shirk whilst we watched Oliver’s school giving a thing called a Webinar. This is like a talk on the television, with the difference being that they can see you. I did not discover until afterwards that I had splashed mayonnaise all over my jersey, yet another middle-class failure.
School is building some new classrooms, and predictably is hoping for some more cash. They said that you could just donate one brick if you liked. We have still got a pile of bricks up at the farm, we might take them with us next time we go.
Inspired by school’s beautifully creative ideas, after that we thought we would make our own space lovely, and tidied up the yard.
The yard is Mark’s domain and it was trashed.
In order to understand my sentiments on this topic, you need to understand that my daydreams and imaginings on the subject of gardens are lavish and beautiful.
I have been reading books about wonderful gardens, and one rather magnificent tome about the way Disney manages to have immaculately splendid gardens all the year round.
They do this by digging plants up in the middle of the night when nobody is looking, and replacing them with seasonally flowering specimens from their vast greenhouses.
On reflection I am never going to emulate this, not least because I do not have a vast greenhouse carefully nurtured to provide flowering plants all the year round. Also I prefer to spend my evenings drinking wine with my feet up on the table. Gardening by torchlight has never been on my bucket list.
Nevertheless, I think that Disney’s wonderful gardens are helped along by the fact that nobody has been sawing up bricks with their angle grinder on the edge of the flower beds.
This activity has provided some colour all right, it is brick red and it is everywhere, including in footprint designs all over the conservatory floor. Also we have got a bright red blackcurrant bush, a red compost heap and a red bench.
The thing is that I had been hoping for more of a green theme. Anybody admiring the garden in its current state would quite clearly be too colour blind to be accepted into the RAF.
Also I have noticed, on my various visits to Disney, that they do not include stacks of floorboards studded with rusty nails amongst their horticultural attractions. Indeed, when I thought about it, I realised that these were unusual in any display of beautiful gardening, and explained to Mark that the time had come for them to go.
They are there because the builders across the road save all of their scrap timber for our fire. This is remarkably kind of them, and has kept our house warm and dry and safe for many winters. I am grateful every time I see a fresh stack of retired window frames or bathroom doors piled up beside our dustbin.
However, we have a very small yard. Once it has got eight or nine fire doors leaning against the shed, accompanied by some rotten scaffolding planks and some ancient roof timbers, there simply is not room to swing a dog, even a small one like ours.
It all needed to be cut into boiler-sized chunks and stacked under cover.
I cut the firewood whilst Mark, suddenly able to get into his shed for the first time in several weeks, investigated his collection of might-be-useful-one-day scavenged treasures.
We filled my taxi with things that are going to go to the tip.
The yard looks very much better, although still not very likely to be chosen as a showcase on Gardeners’ Question Time, as you can see from the picture.
It will get better.
Watch this space.
