Almost there

Carpet man Duncan was here by 08:00, and has fitted a carpet to the ex-garage, which looks quite welcoming, though we haven’t all got the sticks downstairs yet.  I spent a while trying to organise the wiring for the phone, the router and all the rest, so now the technology is lurking in a corner where it’ll be largely hidden when the sofa bed comes down.  By some miracle, it works.  Duncan is going to nag his removal man brother-in-law to deploy a couple of heavies for an hour to do the necessary.  The bed for the new guest room (my old study) is ordered, but won’t be here for best part of a month.  Meanwhile, we’re solvent, but by a much eroded margin!

Delicious though the charlottes are, the crop is not huge this year.  We’ve turned out a few bags, so the spent compost is now distributed round the garden to improve the soil texture a bit.  The climbing beans are already feeding us generously, though we’ve had to do a jury rig on one of the wigwams: the poles I used were far too slight, as I feared.  The leeks are filling out nicely, but the weeds are the year’s real success story.  As for the flowering subjects, the rudbeckias are resplendent, as are Chrissie’s tagetes.  We grow the latter from harvested seed each year, but the supposedly annual rudbeckias come back year after year.  Penstemons grown from seed last year have responded well to being cut down to the ground in the spring, and are giving us a fine range of colours.

After we’d finished painting the hall last week we decided we’d have Friday off, and headed out to another of our usual coastal favourites, Birling Gap.  Unfortunately, the wind was distinctly brisk (and the car park ticket machine didn’t recognise my NT Life Membership card).  We motored on, and had fine views from Beachy Head, and enjoyed a profusion of wild flowers by the roadside.  We parked in Eastbourne, and legged it (a bit painfully, alas) to Harry Ramsden’s for lunch - we’re such creatures of habit!  We hadn’t eaten indoors in a restaurant since pre-pandemic days, and I have to say I found the noise level quite distressing.  Perhaps I’m cut out to be a troglodyte.