Priorities

Splendid veggie lunch yesterday with our friends in Faversham - now there's a handsome oasis in a sometimes depressing North Kent.  Mérite un détour.  Our route takes us along Seven Mile Lane, and as we come down to the junction with the Tonbridge-Maidstone road, the outlook is depressing.  The attractive rolling countryside is liberally coated with polytunnels, no doubt a means of producing uniform fruit and veg for the 2:2* Management Trainee twats in supermarket chains who think their customers want such produce.  Welcome to the plastic County of Kent, Garden of the Land of Mediocre Consumerism.  We were afflicted by other forms of lurid plastic en route: a gang of bikers came hurtling past us at various points, taking awful risks.  Sunday in the spring.  Hope they made it to supper.

I sat at the machine a week or two back to try to set priorities for the necessary projects here at Forges-l'Evêque.  It is seven years and a day since we moved in, and we're still living with many of those 'well, that's the first thing to go!' items that we identified back then (though the pelmet and the front door curtain were easy early targets).  With the passing of the years priorities vary, and we're now looking at the terrace out the back, since uneven paving slabs are not a great idea at this point in the curriculum vitae.  Some years ago, Martyn slapped down some leftover slabs at the top of the garden, where we enjoy sitting in the dappled shade of some young trees (though too many of them, planted far too close together by the Previous Administration).  Time, we think to get it paved properly.  In the course of a stroll round the block the other day, we nabbed a landscaper who was doing a bit of work in the next street, and he came for a look today.  He has nice ideas for the top terrace, and we'll await the estimate...  As a dear friend says, what's the point of saving for a rainy day?  It's drizzling now.

In Another Place, my spy tells me that Mr Builder and his friend have been there today, bearing vast lengths of rope.  They used to work on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and hence are experienced cordistes, which saves them having to put up scaffolding.  This approach is likely to be somewhat demanding on the roof tiles, but those are two-a-penny.  We'll be there three weeks today to see how it has all gone.

We're at last able to get out to do some gardening, even though the unusually mild and wet winter brought its own problems.  The grass is fed and weeded (at great expense), and cut.  Between us, following application of shears and the half-moon cutter, we've defined its edges better than of late.  We've hauled out a bin's worth of edgings, weedings and clippings (including, at a conservative estimate, a mile and a half of brambles), and are starting to look at cuttings, sowings and prunings.  Some of last year's cuttings have already moved on to friends' gardens, and those with vacancies for penstemons and cistus purpurea should address themselves to yr. obed. servt., who will report in due course on the fortunes of the fuchsia cuttings.  Next target for cuttings: Pieris.

*Desmonds ain't wot they used to be, and my degree was of course nowhere near such a level.