It’s been a busy week, with more than its fair share of workmen – and it’s only Wednesday! My regular, non-emergency, and reasonably-priced plumber is back. He came round on Monday morning to try to fix a dripping cistern in the bathroom. The toilet has been getting tricky to flush, and the cistern doesn’t seem […]
It’s been an extremely wet winter, but a very mild one. My lawn (or rather, area of moss and daisies) is absolutely sodden, but at least the mole has kept away. With a bit of luck, it’s drowned! I’ve not been snowed in, nor had to dig myself out, all winter. There’s time yet of […]
I mentioned a while back how disappointed I was with my aubretia – it was looking very sad and underwhelming compared to the purple spreads on the walls I pass regularly on my way to customer sites. But I think I wasn’t sufficiently taking into consideration the fact that I live on the top of […]
I’ve been doing a considerable amount of travelling recently for work, which has involved passing through a number of rather chocolate-box villages in Wiltshire. There are lots of thatched cottages built with honey-coloured stone, rather like in the Cotswolds. But what has really caught my attention is the gardens of a number of the cottages. […]
The last of the snow finally melted overnight on Wednesday, when some heavy rain washed away the last of the piles around the garage. I can now see my garden properly for the first time in several weeks, and it’s not a pretty sight! My herb garden seems to have been particularly badly hit by […]
There’s another major cold snap ongoing. No snow, thankfully, but a hard frost every morning meaning I have to de-ice and scrape the car before I go into work. But, although most of my garden is either dormant or sulking in the cold, there is one welcome sign that Spring is on its way. The […]
For those of my colleagues who were wondering why I was logged on and working from home today, the above photo should give a clue! There was another 9cm of snow overnight, and it snowed lightly on and off all day. Some of the mounds where I’m piling up the shovelled snow are now nearly […]
Well, it snowed pretty much all day yesterday. I spent about two hours in the afternoon wielding a snow shovel, trying to clear the drive of about 4″ of snow. But more came down in the later afternoon and overnight, so I was back out again this morning, shifting a further inch. Fortunately, my neighbours […]
Our friends Carol and Mark visited me for the day today, to implement the next tranche of Carol’s plan for a GroundForce-style makeover of my garden, though thankfully without the “water feature” which always seemed to be a compulsory feature of that programme! Chris and I had the water feature (a waterfall into a shallow […]
It was particularly annoying that the water main burst on Saturday, because I had my sister and her boyfriend visiting for the weekend. They had been to Stratford to see a play for P’s birthday, and were going home via an overnight stop with me. It was my birthday towards the end of May, so […]
