What passes for excitement hereabouts

We had a pleasant Sunday lunch and afternoon with Sandra: Martyn had found a lamb casserole recipe which looked worth a try, so we got some local neck fillet from our usual butcher.  It’s nice in these days of plastic-wrapped everything to see the butcher return from the back shop with part of a carcass and carve out a neck fillet.  Lamb from Penshurst, less than five miles from here.  Three fillets came to just over a kilo.  Trimmed and browned, then veggies sweated, spices and home made passata added and a long slow cook - and we had a good meal for two left over after we’d served three decent portions.  Pudding used up a lot of this year’s apple crop, so two ingredients from the garden, which is always a comfort.  (I’ll pass rapidly over the fact that the blackberries in the crumble came from Guatemala.)  We had some houmous and tapenade for starters, and although we didn’t grow the chickpeas and olives ourselves, we can at least take the credit for their transformation.

As we sat and digested with a cup of tea, we could hear pneumatic drills going nearby.  Martyn had noticed some neighbours stopping outside Mary and Charles’s, then going and ringing the bell.  They had presumably spotted a water leak, so as it turned out the water company’s contractors beavered away for hours into the night, the water pressure dwindling away meanwhile.  I’d calls during the evening from two elderly neighbours seeking reassurance that it wasn’t just they whose water supply had dried up, so I was able to reassure them on that point, and advise them to fill their kettles from the tap in the cloakroom rather than the mains tap in the kitchen.  Before bedtime the water came on again, and it didn’t take long before it was running clear again.

This morning Charles and a friend were standing contemplating the huge hole outside N°4, so I accused the former of getting bored and deciding to drill for oil.  Remains to be seen what happens next: I guess they’ll have done a lash-up pending a definitive repair.

Modest amounts of gardening: we’ve taken down the hanging baskets, since they were starting to look tired.  They’re in the mini greenhouse pro tem while I summon the energy to replant them.  There’s still a bit of colour in the garden, though I have started to haul out the verbena bonariensis in the hope that it hasn’t seeded too much already.  The little beech is turning into that wonderful palette of colours that comes each autumn, and the cornus are showing the coloured stems that will bring much of our winter colours.  When I was planting one of the Midwinter Fire cornus last week, I could see plenty of bulbs coming back to life.  We just have to get through the dark months now.