Sundays are very frustrating.
Especially Sundays like this one, where the persistent, drenching rain of the last few days has finally dried up, and the garden is beginning to look hopeful again.
It only looked a bit hopeful really. It has been very, very wet.
It is frustrating because of Saturday night dragging on and on until all the birds are not only up and chirping on Sunday morning, they are actually pegging out their washing and nagging their chicks about their homework.
We did not get to bed until after five, and when we emerged there was not very much day left, because most of the morning had been occupied by exhausted snoring. Actually all of the morning had disappeared, it is a good job we have got blackout curtains. Mark was even more exhausted than I was, because some tiresome customer became violent on Saturday night. He did not want to pay the fare and dragged open the door and punched Mark. As luck would have it Mark had under his seat the bottle of wine we had bought to give to our helpful taxi driver friend who lent us his spare wheel, so he tugged it out and hit the customer with it, who promptly ran away.
The customer’s girlfriend was suitably embarrassed and paid the fare after that, so all was well that ended well. Fortunately Mark does not have any bruises because we are off to York for some middle-class school shenanigans next week, and it never looks good to turn up with a black eye, most especially a black eye that you really have acquired during a fight. It makes it a bit awkward when people say: so what does the other bloke look like, ha ha.
Also fortunately, the wine is undamaged, so we will be able to give it to our friend later.
Apart from that it was a reasonably satisfactory night. Oliver worked on the doors, and so we all chugged home together as the dawn brightened the sky.
Of course that meant that there was nothing much left of today for doing anything interesting, but we tried anyway. We rushed out into the garden to carry on with our creative endeavours. Mark was painting the stonework and I was emptying the compost heap from the back yard into the new flower beds at the front of the house.
This was a truly happy activity, in a grubby and back-breaking sort of way. We compost absolutely all fruit and vegetable-related leftovers that we can, and the compost heap had become very full. I scraped the top bit off, the bit that hasn’t yet begun to rot down properly, and after that I loaded the wheelbarrow ten times to trundle it up the hill to the new beds at the front.
It is brilliant soil now. It is brown and crumbly and squirming with worms, congregating in enthusiastic squiggles around the remains of melon rind and mango peel, which seem to be their very favourite things. It is astonishing quite how fast vegetation rots down, we fill the compost bucket in the kitchen almost every day, but the heap never seems to get any bigger, it goes black and becomes soil in absolutely no time at all.
I dug the worms into their new forever-home in the warm soil of the newly-constructed flower beds and felt optimistic for their future. Then I shovelled the dug-out weeds from the front garden into the now empty compost heap space, and chucked the remains of the old heap back on the top of it and closed the lid with satisfaction.
The new flower beds are enormous, and they are not quite full even though I have filled them with absolutely every last scrap of compost and most of the garden that was there already. I have dug out the old patch that was once lawn, because I loathe lawns. They look very nice but they need cutting, which is basically as rewarding a job as outdoor hoovering.
We are going to have flag stones in the bit that isn’t flower beds.
That will be a perfect garden.
