Spending the estate

The shed base and new path were finished last week, and they're paid for.  The shed/summerhouse/studio arrived at an indecent hour this morning on the back of a flatbed truck, and is stacked at the top of the garden ready for the guys who are coming to assemble it on Thursday.  The chap who delivered it told me he'd left Nottingham with it at 03:30 this morning, and had delivered two or three other sheds before coming to us at around 08:30!   The shed appears to be of quite decent quality - time will tell.  It too is sort of paid for c/o the Co-op VISA card.

We've done a bit of planting in the space we gain on the border side of the path - gazanias, pansies and some primulas that had been in a box on the steps.  The slugs were very interested in the gazanias, and slithered straight into the ambush I'd laid for them, to slither no further.  I spent much of the morning in the garden, dead-heading and weeding, and taking electric shears to an excessively exuberant spiraea.

The path makes cutting the grass a little easier - hurrah.  This was part of the plan, I admit.  I've adapted my mowing technique a little to avoid hurting the knee more than necessary: self-drive engaged uphill, and released for downhill cuts, so that I can take them at my pace rather than that of gravity-assisted Briggs and Stratton.  

As for the knee, I'm still no closer to surgery, since my blood pressure is now consistently high, and needs drugging down.  I loathe taking medicine, but if it'll get me closer to an ability to walk for pleasure again, it'll be more than worth it.  

The prescription was the least welcome of my birthday presents.  Martyn has bought me a very natty (and very necessary) new case for the iPad, and a pair of CDs of Janet Baker doing Schubert Lieder.  My Amazon account is nicely reinforced, so I shall stock up the kindle.  An M&S voucher has bought me a leg and a half of long cargo trousers, and today's post brought a parcel containing a nice little DAB radio, which now graces the bedside table.

The next chapter of estate reduction comes a little closer on Monday, when I'm hoping to take a look at a SEAT Ateca.  I've ordered one subject to satisfactory inspection and test drive, but doubt if they'll let me loose on the left-hand drive demonstrator that they are getting for just one day.  The model I've chosen won't start being built until October, so the earliest delivery will be in January.  Meanwhile, VW seems to be in no hurry to correct the fraudulent electronics.  The Tiguan did, however, sail through its MoT this week.  

Given the good results we got by sanding and oiling the outdoor table (we repatriated it from Lagrasse a fortnight ago), we tackled the conservatory table this morning.  I've given it a first thinned coat of Danish oil, and it looks far better.  When we bought it, it was coated with dull shed paint, which turned out to conceal an attractive grain, so the oil treatment should bring it up nicely.  At which point in the narrative, yr obed servt bears down on table wielding brush.

Home again

The piano festival was once again of high quality.  The Bartok piano and percussion piece was great fun - and James and Janneke, the pianists, were quite pleased to be opening the festival, rather than doing the grand finale as they had in previous years.  The cabaret evening was particularly enjoyable, with Yshani at the piano - but we are unashamedly partisan, of course.  A nice innovation was a session - piano à volonté - competent amateurs could book a short slot at the Steinway, including a number of young students from the conservatoires of Carcassonne and Narbonne.

I get a little fed up by the chronic disorganistion of the event, but fortunately the musicians managed to put up with it.  The highlight for us was the chance to host Yshani again: she is such good company.  We held hats for most of the concerts, but as there was nothing in the programme to say donations were invited, far less notices to that effect, we looked rather like random beggars as we stood at the exits from the square.  Once again I had to do a spot of policing of people who chattered away during performances, including one of the musicians.  All in all, I think that the programme was just a bit too long, running over six days, and including some events at 11:30 pm (we didn't go).

We spent a night at Puylaroque with Jan and Mark, and discovered that we haven't forgotten how to swim.  The pool was a rather pleasant 32 degrees!  Mark, retired builder is still building away like mad.  He has enlarged the terrace, and is building a porch and dining room where the original terrace used to be.  Next project: double garage, but he has decided to GSI to do the ground works.

Talking of which, we've got the builders in here at Forges-l'Evêque this week, putting down a base for a garden studio (OK: posh shed...) and a paved path up to it.  The shed itself is ordered and due to be put up before the end of the month.  We are using the landscapers who did such a good job of relaying the terrace and building the raised bed, and are impressed with their work so far.

As for the raised bed, onions, herbs and leeks are doing pretty well.  I thinned and re-planted the leeks today, and am hoping for the best, having not succeeded this far before.  The fuchsia cuttings have made really good little root systems, so will probably edge the new path when it's set.  One of the white Royal Mail potentillas (from cuttings I helped myself to from outside the Tonbridge sorting office years ago) was a casualty of the building work.  As the other's roots are full of pencil grass, it is going to have to come up, so I've taken cuttings.  The other cuttings I've taken are from a rather pretty rose pink penstemon.  My other horticultural efforts have been in the slash and burn department (except that one doesn't burn these days).  The grass got a cut on Monday, since it is to be fed and weeded tomorrow.  The builders have taken out another two leylandii trees from the back hedge, and I've started squaring up the one nearest the shed base.  I noticed this morning that the cherry tree was overhanging the footpath at the side, so I've filled a barrow with prunings and stuffed it somehow into the now overflowing composting bin, which, mercifully, will be emptied tomorrow.  We have to hide on the days when it's emptied...

Curious week...

...but not without its pleasant episodes.  We had apéritifs at the Coopers' in Mèze on Tuesday, before heading out to lunch at a local hostelry.  Would you ever have thought of cod crumble? If not, do so, and if you can cook it with the perfection we encountered at L'Oscarine (no web site yet), you're in line for a couple of toques.  We got to meet for the first time Patricia and Martin's granddaughters Eléonore and Tessa, who are home in France after a couple of years in Djibouti, where their parents have been teaching.  Next stop: Perpignan, which is about as exotic as it gets in metropolitan France!

If it were not tragic, it would make for great farce.  The leading lights all scrambling back from their dishonest campaign rhetoric, J0hns0n showing all the signs of thinking 'Oh shit: surely they can't have voted to leave?'.  Given that his motivation for leading the campaign was to wrest the leadership from a weak, lacklustre PM, his withdrawal from the leadership contest when he realised there was a difficult job to do shows just what he is made of.  Wind and piss - at best.  As for G0v3, the most that can be said of him is that he has spared us J0hns0n.  Across the floor, the leader seems just as set on dismantling his party, which used to be mine.  Regulars will recall my musings on the philosophy essay title 'Why do we value a democracy?', to which our tutor group responded more or less unanimously: 'search me, guv!'.  Mr Freedland's article in today's Grauniad is unusually but appropriately outspoken. As I said on forwarding it to my MP, borrowing a common line used by senior judicial wingers, 'I agree, and there is nothing I can usefully add'

Well, to restore a sense of proportion, I should report that the countryside is looking wonderful at the moment.  The wild flowers by the roadside are lovely - travellers' joy, scabious, dianthus and many other beautiful subjects that I have yet to look up (where did I leave the book?).  I got us lost yesterday on the way to lunch in Leucate, hence a detour through Embres et Castelmaure, and we were rewarded with a fine display of morning glory climbing up a wall and twining across the telephone wire.

As I write, an army of volunteers is setting up the Halle for the piano festival.  Not a lot I can do given my current crippledom.  The most enormous percussion section is being set up: I thought the Bartok piece only involved two pianos and timpani!  Watch this space.  Tomorrow, we become theatrical landlords for a few nights, and shall be collecting the delightful Yshani from the airport, as well as the front of house man, Martin, from the railway station.  The next few days ought to lift the depression a bit, eh?