Autumn

Some welcome autumn colour in the garden, notably the colchicums and cyclamens.  The annual rudbeckias have been less enthusiastic this year, but most are in their fourth years.  A few of the old ones have given up the ghost.  The heat and drought of the summer can’t have helped.  The perennial one, however (readers will remember that it arrived a couple of years ago labelled ‘aubergine’) has really excelled itself.

The tomatoes are now chopped down and binned, and the roots and compost dumped at the top of the garden.  The kitchen wall pots went on the morning of our lunch party, and the row of pots beside the sitooterie followed today, between the showers.  They’ve done very well, and we have a few left in the fridge for a final lunch of bruschette in the coming days.

We are both grizzling our way through a rather nasty dose of man flu, and I’m finding that energy levels are low, even by my usual modest standards.  By the time I’d shuffled round Fortnums this morning and schlepped stuff home, I was more than ready to flop into my armchair.  But I’m certainly on the mend, and just need to summon up some rare patience.  We were due to have our Covid boosters tomorrow, but decided to postpone rather than spread the colds.

As for car repairs, our local tin bashers came in with an estimate that Mr Red BMW didn’t quibble at, so it’s booked in for the work a couple of weeks hence.  It’ll have had its MoT (I hope) and a fresh pan of oil by then.  Martyn is steeling himself to getting the timing belt replaced on the Egg.  After fourteen years it’s a bit of a time bomb, so although the replacement and the annual service will cost somewhere like the current value of the car, the damage a broken belt would cause would certainly lead to our scrapping the car, which still has some years’ life left in it.

I wish I were surprised at the state of the economy.  As it is, it looks as if the Bank of England will act to protect the pound, whatever our so-called government says.  The latter cannot have long, it seems to me: its policies are doctrinaire and illogical, and I wonder sometimes if its aim is to leave Labour with an impossible recovery task.