Grey days

for the annual ramblings, please scroll down to the 1 December entry

Dreich, for sure, but when it has been mild I’ve got out and done a spot of gardening and garden-related labour.  We still have no garden waste collection because of the shortage of lorry drivers, so I have been filling black bags and booking the occasional slot at the tip.  Killing two birds with one stone, I filled four bags last week and dumped them in the steaming municipal compost heap.  The other half of the journey was to collect Martyn from where he had left the Egg for a service and MoT, conveniently close to the tip.

Said Egg (a glance at the shape of the Seat Altea explains the sobriquet) sailed through its eleventh MoT with flying colours yet again.  It had perhaps burned a tank and a quarter of diesel since its last visit.

Back in the garden, I’ve got most of the dead-heading and hacking down of annuals finished.  I’ll need to get up on the new bed across the back to haul out more grass and buttercups: the muck Ben organised last January when he built the bed was nothing like well-enough rotted, and the horses responsible for it had certainly not fully digested the grass seeds!  A side effect of the richness of the soil is that a lot of our leeks have bolted, so are candidates for the next set of black bags.  But we have plenty of good leeks left, and shall work our way through them over the winter.

It’s that nice time of year when the Christmas cards start coming in.  Since we’ve hardly seen any of our friends for the best part of two years, it’s a comfort to know they’re around and thinking of us.  Martyn has set up and decorated the Christmas tree, so the place is looking quite cheerful.  Since we now have another downstairs window, both the electric candlesticks are in place.  

We got our cards printed, written and on their way last week.  One of the problems of age is that one can remember the brown tuppeny stamp that used to go on the Christmas cards. Today’s 66p stamp is eighty times that sum.  Granted, my pensions today are about fifty times my Dad's salary back then.  So this observation is about as useful as the endless discussion of house prices!