Here comes another one

As has become our custom, we saw the New Year in with kind, hospitable friends in Gillingham, returning home by 01:30 on reasonably quiet, dry roads.  Annie returned from a short trip to Venice on Saturday, full of good stories and photographs.  We met friends from Faversham at the half-way point (West Malling) for Sunday lunch in great company.  (Memo to self: if the special is chicken curry, forget it.  Leftover cooked chicken in a sauce is NOT chicken curry, chaps.  Tuition available on appropriate terms.  Oh, and parboiled rice is not a suitable basis for respectable catering.  The wine was OK....)
Annie spent a couple of nights with us before heading back North.  The M25 experience (she flew in to Heathrow...) in steady rain and stop-start traffic was somewhat unlovely.  Hull Trains were playing up, and it looked at one point as if she'd have to go to Sheffield and change, but they eventually produced a through train after much conflicting information on the web site.  (Must Try Harder.) 

Our new tumble dryer arrived yesterday at a marginally decent hour (about 08:15), and it works.  The old one worked too, but it's on the way to  the scrap yard because of a design fault that poses a fire risk.  Interesting chat with the people who delivered it: evidently the innards of one of the machines they collected was largely melted: the owner had never cleaned the filter!  At the moment, their depot is filling about five skips with duff dryers every day, and they expect to be busy delivering replacement machines until July!  If you have shares in the manufacturer (details on request), you might care to review the situation!  The approach to the laundry end of the garage will improve in due course: the softwood and ply door and window are now pretty shabby, so boring plastic replacements are on order.  While we're at it, we're having new front and back doors that will let in a bit more light.  We're dispensing with a letter box, since the one we have bangs when the north wind blows. 

Today's post brought sad news: the husband of a former bench colleague has died after several months in hospital: he fell and broke his neck last year in the superb garden he had created.  Their garden opened each summer for a couple of days under the National Gardens Scheme, and ours sports a few splittings from it.  I remember so well his going to the shed to fetch a spade to split a hosta for us: the spade was that of a keen gardener: spotlessly clean and shiny.

Well, the Christmas cards and decorations are down.  The tree is still in the sitooterie, and might move outside until it becomes unsightly.  A friend remarks that the way to fill the bling gap left when the decorations come down is with spring flowers.  Ever susceptible to good ideas, I picked up a couple of bunches of tulips yesterday at Fortnums, and they are opening up nicely in a vase in the bay window.  Kind lunch/supper guests had already given us a cyclamen and a bromeliad, so we have a bit of colour on show.  The bromeliad, meanwhile, has started to put up another spike, and I seem yet again to have failed to kill the phalaenopsis (another gift from supper guests years ago), which is putting up a new leaf, though not so far another flower spike.

Ever the gardener, I have ordered the charlotte seed potatoes and a few more growing bags, together with a batch of onion sets.  Rather a lot of last year's onion crop has rotted, so I need to swot up on harvesting and storage.  Meanwhile, our perennial seedlings, bought as 'pluglets' are doing well in the sitooterie, though they already need potting on. 

I suppose it's only to be expected as the years pile on: this year looks like being somewhat hospital-intensive.  I'm down for a trip to the eye clinic in February, and am waiting for a date with the knee fixers at Benenden.  First meeting with a physiotherapist tomorrow, though I've been doing exercises (to little avail) for three months on the basis of telephone consultations.  Watch this space.