Various updates

Here's where we're at:


The front garden has a new fence.  It's five foot high with the trellis topper and provides nice screening.  I'll be planting a row of dwarf trees behind it in the Autumn, in-between the fence and the ramp.

My peas are ready.  

George has squashed my maincrop potatoes in his paranoid bids to bark madly at the big Maple.  I'm not convinced I can save the spuds.  He's already trampled my Thyme to death.  

The Jasmine has now grown to the top of the arbour, and will soon be trained across the front.  

The lawn survived the heatwave mostly intact.  I'll give it a reseed in March ready for next Summer.  

And almost all the books I ordered have come.  I'm still waiting on Wheater's Functional Histology.  The Gray's Anatomy and the Stryer's Biochemistry I already had from donkeys' back.  The rest, including the Histology book, came to £28 on ebay.  Kerching!

One of those hot days...

  It's a glorious Saturday morning, the sun is shining, no chance of rain, so you think right, I'm gonna go out and strim the lawn.  You throw on your DIY trousers (the ones covered in fifty shades of vinyl matt), plug in the strimmer, whack on Springsteen's greatest hits and set to work.

  First verse of Born To Run is barely done and already your armpits and boxer shorts are sodden with sweat, I'm a Celt, we do pissing rain, we do permanently overcast, what the hell am I doing out here?  You get to the end of the track, you're getting those V-shapes down your chest and back, and the bloke five doors down who spends his weekends on the xbox in his bedroom has turned off his techno and is looking out his window, raising a cider at you for working on so hot a day as this.  Shit.  You give him a wave and get back to strimming.  Shit, he's even turned the techno off, you can't go indoors now! 

  You're halfway through Hungry Heart before the lawn's done, you've had to put on boots after you strimmed your toe and now the boots are full of sweat, but no, come on, he turned the techno off.  You've gotta at least prune some shit!  So you train the Jasmine and get out the hose to water the lawn.

Damnit, I swear I've been microwaved today!