As self-prescribed, a soul-restoring and quiet week for me, lots of fireside reading and dog-walking across big empty fields...
Busy looking for harbingers of spring to share with you too, but ever so slightly stymied by fraying phone cables and the unexpected arrival of Storm Jake.
We now have very intermittent broadband thanks to emergency junction boxes where the trees along the lane have worn the cables to a thread, and a very crackly phone line reminiscent of those long distance phone calls of the 1960s. We are promised new cables...dreckly.
I say unexpected Storm Jake because we hadn't heard about it on the news because we don't watch the news any more.
This is a legacy of my sojourn in New Zealand where I realised, way out in the wild lands and beyond the grip of world events and the Q.D.S. (Quater Die Sumendum) dose of bulletins, that Bookhound and I spent far too much time engaging with the news and feeling powerless to do anything about any of it, whilst letting it sap precious emotional energy and plaguing us with guilt. So I came home with the suggestion that we actually stopped watching the news four times a day for a trial period (yes, really, it had become a sort of strange compulsion for fear of missing anything) and then review. In fact the trial period soon became a definite decision...neither of us missed the doom and gloom, somehow one or other of us heard the important things, except neither of us heard the warnings about Storm Jake hitting the West Country.
The first inkling was an instant gust of wind that had the hailstones sailing along horizontally, and the next thing we knew another side of the greenhouse demolished to match the side that disappeared during Storm Imogen. I had already swaddled it ready for the frost and in the absence of panes various, but trust me it's not looking this neat in there now...
It will all need a bit of a rethink, but anyway, sweet peas sown and wrapped up on the left. This year 'Alan Titchmarsh' will do battle with 'Percy Thrower' whilst 'Singing the Blues' will have to out-smart the colour-changing 'Turquoise Lagoon'.
But meanwhile, small signs...this a Primula 'Jackanapes' that I grew from seed about three years ago...
and this a Lenten Rose, a root cutting the Tinker took from the larger one that was the only plant in the garden when we moved here twenty-two years ago, and hooray, it has taken...
I am also a heap of over-excited anticipation about these..
A carefully choreographed duet of Black Parrot and Belle Epoque, if it comes off and they flower in tandem you will be the first to know about it.
Any nice things growing over your way...
Things you are looking forward to...
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