Mark thinks that pink dungarees might be a good thing on which to spend some money.
In fact we do have some money at the moment, because to our great joy my parents, ever benevolent, have once again rescued us from poverty, and given us some.
We agonised, briefly, about whether we should blow it all on school fees and the electricity bill, but we think perhaps we might save some of it, for nice things.
I am not exactly sure about pink dungarees, although I would like to own some very much. However, I am currently wearing a pair of grey trousers, which have, during my day’s activities, become liberally covered with smears.
Mostly these are dog paw-prints and well-rotted sheep poo. I do not suppose this looks any better on grey trousers than it would on pink dungarees, but somehow it feels less sacrilegious.
The sheep poo is because I have been filling plant pots and planting squashes. These are like pumpkins but supposedly taste nicer. I hope this is true. I like to grow pumpkins because of their magnificently sinister spiralling upwards, their relentless consumption of everything around them, and because they make me feel ever so slightly uneasy. Growing pumpkins feels like a competition about which of us will get the opportunity to eat the other one first.
The answer to that is not going to be me, because I don’t like them, and hence am trying a new sort of pumpkin, called a Hokkaido Squash.
Today I have dug the little seedlings, which are actually not very little, out of their seed bed and put them in the biggest plant pots that we have, the huge ones that are too heavy for me to move by myself.
They will still not be big enough. I will need to feed them endlessly.
I have reserved plenty of sheep poo to shovel on the top. We will see how we get on.
I watered the conservatory whilst I was at it. This is a mildly tiresome job at the moment, because of needing to faff about with the hose and the taps.
It has rained, and so I thought that I would skip this part of the exercise and reconnect the pump to the garden rainwater tanks, but this endeavour did not go well, and concluded with some swearing and a puddle. I have left it for Mark. The pipe connectors are his invention. He can sort it out.
I added some more smears and a wet patch to my trousers in the process. These smears are made up of whatever was on the floor, where I was obliged to lie in order to access the pump.
I do not know exactly what they might be.
I am hoping that they are not dog sick.
In between such horticultural occupations, I made a large pan of soup to feed us over the weekend, I am hoping that we will be kept so busy working over the next few days that there will hardly be time to snatch a mouthful in between customers, but I think this is unlikely. I am on the taxi rank now, and have not earned any money yet.
The soup is pleasingly substantial. It is made of vegetables, mostly sweet potatoes and tomatoes. Obviously I know that tomatoes are not a vegetable, thank you, you do not need to be pedantic, it is artistic licence.
I added some left over mango curry to it, for added interest and because I could not think of anything else to do with it, there was not enough for another dinner.
Mark will never notice anything unusual.
It bubbled and plopped cheerfully on the stove for ages, and then when I chucked it in the liquidiser to turn it into soup, somehow quite a bit of it seemed to adhere to my trousers.
Tomatoes mixed with yoghurt and sweet potatoes and mango curry add up to another interesting smear.
Really I am not at all sure that beautiful smart trousers are going to be a good idea.
I might like some anyway.
Have a picture of the conservatory.
