Gardening again at last.

We have had some decent weather lately, as we so often do in late February, though last night’s sharp frost was a suitable reminder that it is indeed still February.  Yesterday I did a spot of pruning, clearing of dead bedding plants, and hacking down the hypericum which was violating next door’s air space.  I also sowed leeks and rudbeckias.  Today I’ve been out the front, pulling weeds out of the slate chippings: a bit too much getting down and up again for comfort, but at least I've had some fresh air.  

I’d to have a routine blood test today, so legged it down to the practice, where I was seen promptly and painlessly by the cheerful Evie, whom I’ve learned to thank in an approximation of her native Polish.  In reverence to the RAF salute (though in reverse order) I went shortest way down and longest way up, so have walked a km more than usual, and did rather feel it.  Roll on the spring and a boost in motivation.

Ben and Duncan have been excavating like mad next door today, enlarging the terrace across the back of the house by hacking back a bit of garden.  Par conséquent, there’s a big pile of masonry on their drive, to which our clayberg will be added next week.  Earlier this week, barrow loads of muck were being schlepped round from ours to other neighbours’ garden, so we seem to have a sort of collective Ben chantier in operation.  They had a couple of bags of materials craned in today next door, so it’s as well I’d hacked down the hypericum, eh?

We plough the fields and scatter....

At 07:30 this morning, a delivery arrived of vast amounts of well-rotted horsh and a bag or so of decent topsoil.  Duncan has spent much of the day valiantly shovelling and spreading, so we have great hopes for the future of the new bits of garden.  There’s still quite a lot of terrible clay to be disposed of, but we’re close to the end of the work now.  I have meanwhile been plying the chaps with tea and home baking, and have promised them fish and chips for lunch tomorrow.  Judging by the results so far, Napoleon’s dictum is more than borne out.

We’re getting fed up with incoming calls on the land line presenting as ‘international’ but showing spoof CLIs, such as our local area code, Brighton and London.  Unless the phone shows the name of someone we’ve programmed in, we let it run to the answering machine, and they generally give up.  A few automated calls come through, telling us that our phone and broadband connexions are about to be cut off, or that our Amazon prime subscriptions have been renewed at some exorbitant price.  We weren’t born yesterday, but the fact that these fraudsters persist suggests that they get enough hits to make their crimes pay.  

Quite a fun U3A zoom coffee morning today.  Nobody I knew bar a few committee members, but it was nice to find things in common with a load of new acquaintances.  It’ll be nice to be able to communicate again in full duplex, and by mid-May we should have as much immunity as we can expect.  Meanwhile, the zoom thing at least gets us talking to other people now and then.

Variously jabbed

I had my first jab yesterday.  The Masonic Hall would not have been my first choice of venue, but the operation was slick and well organised, with sundry Freemasons marshalling the parking very capably.  I was screened by a (rather cute) army doctor in uniform, and then vaccinated (none too comfortably: unusually for me, I flinched!) by another military medic.  Martyn has been for his first (painless) jab today, and we both have dates for the next one towards the end of April.  Oddly enough, we each had different vaccines.  An ex-colleague is due in tomorrow, and is expecting a dose from the same supplier as mine, so I imagine they’re just using whatever they can get their hands on on any given day.  Today I’m a touch sore, achy and shaky, but very grateful to be on the way to some degree of immunity.

It has been a fine day here, though very cold.  Tree-fettlers arrived next door this morning to trim the jungle adjoining the recently shored-up fence.  They have cut it down a lot more than I’d hoped, so the neighbours’ upstairs windows now look straight into ours.  Not pleased, and I’m wondering why the landlord’s agent bothered going through the motions of consulting me.  Anyway, when debris started falling into our garden, I went and told the chaps not to worry about it, and that I’d leave the gate unlocked so they could get in and clear up, for which they said they were grateful.  Needless to say they buggered off, leaving me to cut up and bin a load of debris.  This has not been a good episode.  It took ages to get the owners’ agents to organise the shoring up of the rotten fence, which delayed the removal of our leylandii - the main means of support thereof - for some years.  We have been very co-operative about allowing access, making tea and coffee for the workers, etc, and can’t help feeling the landlords, tenants and agent are taking the piss.  But maybe my temper is slightly provoked by post-vaccination side effects.  And it wouldn’t be a blog entry without a good grizzle, would it?

More progress

The chaps haven’t been able to progress with the garden, which is now under a blanket of snow.  The prospect of travelling to Hastings on Friday for Jab N°1 was beginning to weigh on me a little, so a phone call from the local practice this morning was more than welcome.  It’ll be done tomorrow here in town, and Jab N°2 at the same place in late April, a week earlier than my original appointment.  So that’s a couple of slots freed up for the good people of ‘astings.  It does seem a little inefficient that two booking systems are running in parallel, but at least that’ll get me jabbed sooner than expected, and after all there’s a finite amount of vaccine.  (The German for which, you’ll be glad to know, is Impfstoff.  Five consonants in a row.)  I’ll still have to drive, including a slither down the hill to get to treated roads, but at least I’m spared ordeal by A21.

Quite a good gate at today’s German conversation Zoom, which majored on the decision of the Ghent toon cooncil to cease all its twinning arrangements save for one city in Japan.  Its twin town Wiesbaden (also ours) is pretty upset, so there was some good German to work on from press releases and newspapers.  Our twinning arrangement doesn’t seem to have done much of late (far less with any input from me), which is a shame.  The Dundee twinnings with Orléans and Würzburg were well supported when I was at school.  But as we discussed today, modern languages are not fashionable at schools these days.  Shame, at several levels, eh?

Progress

The chaps have been working like Trojans on the new bed where the leylandii used to be, and appear to have done an excellent job.  No more grassy slopes to mow: yippee!  There’s a bit to do yet, notably pointing the new path (though I have reminded Ben that it’s rude to point...).  There’s a fair bit of horrible clay subsoil to be removed, but Ben will see to that when he has finished another job next door.  I have been plying them with home-baked lemon buns, ginger nuts and chocolate cookies, and have promised fish and chips next time they’re here.  The weather is set to take a turn for the worse, however, so it’s not clear when that’ll be.  A further distinction of Forges-l’Evêque, I should add, is that it has the nastiest, claggiest soil the chaps have ever encountered.  We concur.

I had a welcome letter on Thursday with NHS writ large on the envelope.  Booking the jabs is less easy: my first attempts on the iPad were total failures, though the process had suggested availability 25 minutes’ drive away.  Knowing that some web sites don’t like iPads, I FINALLY got steam up on the laptop after a good hour of ‘configuring updates’ and suchlike Gatesballs.  By then, the nearest available jabodromes were in Chatham or Hastings.  Well, I don’t want to delay matters so, weather permitting, I’m off to Hastings on Friday, and have booked jab 2 in May at the same place.  OK, I moan a bit about it, but I’ m full of admiration for the vaccine developers and the NHS’s logistics.

On-Line shopping

Last week, in our separate insomniac ways, we each booked a grocery delivery for today.  On my announcing triumphantly that I’d booked a slot, the reaction was ‘ah: so have I’.  I went back in and emptied my shopping trolley, hoping that would do the trick.  Wrong!  I only found out when an email crashed in in the small hours announcing a substitution.  My delivery arrived first, and I was politely grateful, hoping against hope that Martyn’s would be brought by a different driver, to spare my blushes.  No such luck, so I had to confess.  Well, he uncomplainingly unloaded the second batch, and departed with a cheerful ‘see you in twenty minutes!’.  The garage freezer is coming into its own.

That’s not all: I succeeded in ordering one single carrot rather than a bag of the same.  And Martyn seems to have got two bags of whole, unblanched almonds, rather than the ground variety he ordered.  We plainly Must Try Harder.