Interesting to know

It has been an oddly tranquil sort of day.

Mark has been clattering about in his shed. I am not exactly sure what he was doing. It sounded something like a mid-life crisis, because of the rock music and the muttering. When I asked him he said that he was organising his speakers ready for doing the plumbing next week.

I do not know where he is plumbing the speakers in but I am sure it will be fine, we would not be the first to have water music.

Ted is away, and Mark has decided to spend the beginning of next week addressing the hot water issue. This resolution has come about after we visited somebody recently. We helped wash up after dinner, and all of us, even Mark, who pretends he is impervious to such wonders of the modern world, were very struck by the miraculous convenience of having hot water that gushed liberally out of the taps.

Also the new dishwasher will be arriving next week, and he has got to take bits of the kitchen apart anyway. This would make it a very sensible time to poke new lengths of pipe up and down walls and around corners.

I am beginning to feel quite excited.

Hence the speakers, which will mean that he can occupy hour upon contented hour in his shed, soldering bits of pipe together and not being able to hear a single word that I am shouting at him from the back door.

It was a grey, dreary sort of day, with a misty, almost-autumn chill in the air. This was a complete nuisance, because I had washed the sheets, and eventually was obliged to light the fire to get them dry.  This meant that the house became hot, and filled with the scent of wet laundry. I opened all of the doors and windows to dry it out, which blew little gusts of rain in, and made me cross.

Eventually the skies cleared and I could rush into the garden to hurl it all on to the washing lines, where is it still dangling, limp and a touch disheartened, but probably dry enough to be returned to the beds without too much chilly discomfort later.

Oliver and I sat in the conservatory then. We do not do this nearly as often as we should, because usually we are all too busy to sit around anywhere, but today Oliver was doing his biology prep and I was sewing the labels into his new uniform.

He is trying to learn absolutely everything about biology in readiness for his GCSE examinations next year.

I was very impressed by how much he already knows, and rather uncomfortably startled by how much I do not. Oliver said reassuringly that probably most of it has been discovered since I was at school, and so I ought not to worry, had I heard of this chap Darwin?

He chatted away whilst he worked, and told me some interesting facts, not all of which were about biology, but they were interesting anyway. I discovered that the colour orange is called after the fruit, not the other way around. Until we had oranges next to the apples in our fruit bowls, the colour was just called red, which is why marauding ancient Scottish people are called red-heads, not orange-heads.

Also the two biggest purchasers of explosives in the entire world are the US military and the Disney Corporation.

What a positive treasure-house of information these pages can be.

We all learned something new about the moth yesterday, grateful thanks to Nan for knowing lots of interesting things. I looked it up and have got no idea why it might be in my garden, because apparently it eats fuchsia, willow herb and bedstraw, none of which we have grown, perhaps a bird spat it out in passing.

Have a very boring picture of the garden.