Monthly Archives: March 2010

I seem to have let the day slip past today, so I’ll crave your indulgence and save the words for tomorrow.  Keep safe.

It’s turned a little colder, though has been sunny all day.  Cold or not it’s a joy to get out into the garden, to watch Graham finishing off the ‘big hammer’ phase of the project, and to serve tea to order.

The ground is clear now, with all the overgrown shrubs and weed trees gone.  We’ll give it a good dose of weedkiller so soon as the green starts to break through and then, apart from a beech hedge along the back, we’ll leave it fallow while our dreams and designs mature.  A shed/workshop and a small water feature are indicated, but we’re so overcome with the amount of light and space that have been revealed that we want to be sure we’ve got our thinking right.

The next outdoor project, so he says, is to be the front garden, where the rank, mossy grass and wrecked rock garden will be scraped up and relaid.  Graham wants a nice piece of grass there, for the sake of respectability and to impress the neighbours.  He wants a nice piece of grass there so much that he threatens to put Astroturf down if the proper stuff won’t grow.

I haven’t enjoyed winter very much this year, though I’m deeply thankful to have had no colds, and just the one ritual and very mild 17-hour encounter with swine ‘flu when Graham had his horrid week and a half.  Even so it’s been cold and drear, and I’ve been disinclined to go outside the door except when necessary.

So I feel no need to apologise now for wanting to go sit in the sun, close my eyes and let the light drive the shadows away.  And to let my thoughts and memories wander where they will.  There’s a time machine inside old men.  You just close your eyes, give the navigation control switch a good clout with a large spanner and see where the random principle takes you.

Today I’ve been doing a lot of that.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m complaining.  I really wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m complaining.  But it’s a fact that when there’s nothing to moan about with the weather, and very little happening in my life, finding something to write about the day as a record of its passing gets increasingly difficult.

We are experiencing a long run of lovely spring days.  Can’t remember when last it rained, not even today.  And this has been a Welsh Sunday, for heaven’s sake.  Welsh Sundays are supposed to be wet.

Hey ho.  My bones have been telling me all along that we’ll have a spell of really bad weather when this mild period finishes.  We shall have to see.

Indoor chores done, we shifted our field of operations to the garden.  Or perhaps I should say that Graham shifted operations.  I did little more than sit in the sun, make tea, and issue helpful comments as required.

And now, vegetables all prepared ready for dinner, we are about to embark on a two-episode Buffy fest.  You know.  The ones where the Mayor ascends, or doesn’t, principal Skinner gets his come-uppance, many students are wasted, and the end-of-series loose ends tidied up.  Again.  I do like to see loose ends tidied away neatly.

The road system in Swansea is something like visiting a dysfunctional family.  Every turn you make is in some awful way mysteriously wrong.  Graham said “Turn right.”  I turned left.

“Whaddya do that for?”

“Well sometimes when you say ‘right’ you actually mean ‘left’.”

“Oh.  Fair enough.  Where does this take us, then?”

“I dunno.  Some place called Llanffiddlewaddell, I expect.”

“The way you said that sounded almost like Welsh. Where are you going now?”

“Right.”

“Why?”

“Well, it feels like the right thing to do.”

We got to a stretch of road that both I and my internal autopilot recognised.

“Where are we going now?”

“Home.  I know the way home, and this is it.”

“Good.  Shopping in Swansea on a Saturday is a bad idea.”

“You said it, sugar-plum.”

And so we got home, bearing a tray of jewel-bright polyanthus, a lamp-shade deemed suitable for Graham’s mother’s newly decorated bedroom, and a small pack of goodies from the too big for its own good Swansea Morrison’s.

“That was fun,” I said.

“No it wasn’t.”

“Oh well, I’m not going to argue.  Tea?”

I’ve been dreaming of a return trip to Crete recently.  Can’t be done, and not just because I’d have to pay for two airplane seats to accommodate my girth.  A chap can dream, though.  Dreams are free.

However, I was sitting thinking about my tree on the coast at Gouves, under which I’ve snoozed many an afternoon away, pretending to read a book in the shade.  Well, perhaps I can’t visit, but I can at least have a look on Google maps.

Sad.  The hotel has been enlarged out of all proportion, and my tree is gone.

Not just that, but the big rock I used to sit on at Poughkeepsie is now a car park.

Better not look for other favourite places around the world, or even at home in the UK.  So many of the small things I’ve loved have gone, lost in the march of time.

Oh, sure, if I went back to Gouves now I’d find another tree, and no doubt there are other rocks in Poughkeepsie.  Wouldn’t be the same, though.

Anyway, back to the present time and place, and it’s been another purely lovely early spring day, with blue sky and the sun strong enough to scorch winter-whitened skin if I were inclined to burn.  I stood against the white wall in the back garden, smoking a ciggie, and Graham said I looked like an elderly Italian gentleman, darkening in the sun.  No bad thing, that.

An observation:

Old lady:  “Why have you taken to smoking again after all this time?
Me, smiling:  “Because Jesus wants me for a chimney.”

Well, you have to laugh, don’t you?