I’ve sometimes, indeed often, felt like my life over the past year since Chris died has been like wading through thigh-high treacle – extremely hard work, and achieving seemingly infinitesimal forward momentum. But now, if I feel like that, I can simply look out of my kitchen or bedroom windows and see something tangible that […]
The builders had pretty much finished by the time I got home yesterday afternoon. They came back this morning to return the garage key and re-seed a few patches of the lawn that had got the worse for wear. I’m surprised that the lawn isn’t in worse shape actually, when you consider how many tens […]
Does anyone else remember the Carla Lane sitcom, Butterflies, starring Wendy Craig and a very young Nicholas Lyndhurst? It must have been on around 1980 +/- a few years. There was one set-piece in it which always made me laugh. It was a four-car family (father, mother, both teenage sons each had a car – […]
I got home from work this afternoon to find four very tired builders – 103 sleepers had been delivered just after I left this morning, and they’d been working through those, as well as finishing off the first level of fencing. All the preparatory work they did yesterday has really paid off, and they’ve made […]
Sorry, no photos of the garden tonight – it was raining when I got home from work and I was in no mood to stand around getting wet. Besides, there wasn’t a great deal new to see. I’m impatient to get a better view of what the terraces will look like, and am really keen […]
Next door’s cat has been spending a lot of time over the past few afternoons and evenings sitting on the path between the lower and upper terraces, looking at the steel I-beams, membrane and sleepers with what looks like a puzzled expression on its face. I think it’s bothered about where all the mice have […]
A colleague asked me today how I was getting on with building the Ledbury Bypass! I can see what he means – the amount of material the garden is swallowing is absolutely massive. Ten tons of pea gravel were delivered this morning while I was having my breakfast, and it’s all been used up already […]
The 300 new oak sleepers that I need for the garden have been cut to order by a saw-mill in the South of France. They were meant to arrive last week, but have been delayed. They have apparently been stuck on a lorry on the other side of the Channel, due to high winds disrupting […]
The builders have been hard at work on the garden. All of the steel I-beams (all 29 of them!) have been positioned and concreted in place. Since each beam weighs about 1/3 of a ton, and it all had to be done by hand as there is no space for heavy machinery, this was a […]
The combination of having a large number of deep holes in my garden, and a jar full of Christopher’s ashes was too great an opportunity to ignore. So I have deposited some of his ashes in the garden, where they have subsequently been concreted in place and become part of the foundations of the new […]
