Today we were determined to keep on where we left off last night so we carried on with a spate of tidying up and and de-cluttering of the house. The only trouble is that in my zeal I have ‘put’ my newly acquired Philips razor in such a safe place that I cannot now found it so I am having to fall back on a trusty old reliable which is past its best but at least it works. Then our plan was to walk down to Waitrose, treat ourselves to a coffee, pick up our newspapers and have a gentle stroll back. However the ‘best laid plans of mice and men‘ as the Scottish poet Robbie Burns would have said – by chance we bumped into two best friends who live down the hill and they had just come back from giving their grand-daughter a walk in her buggy. As we had a lot of news to catch up on, we all repaired to their delightful back garden for an impromptu ‘chin wag’. Actually, we had a lot of news to impart of one sort or another, including some medical investigations that I am going to have performed on me in about eight days time so I will issue a communiqué on that later on. We must have spent the best part of an hour and a half chatting about this and that and drinking some lovely ice-cold drinks. In this very hot weather, we are all finding that we are taking every excuse to keep ourselves well hydrated – and even the plants in the pots need a drink of water some 2-3 times a day.

After we had walked home very much in the heat of the day, we had a fairly prompt lunch as I knew that I needed to get into town to visit one of the local banks before about 3.30 in the afternoon (when branches tend to shut) Our little group of houses are formed into a Resident’s Association and we manage our own financial affairs (which is just principally maintaining the communal Klargester BioDisc system and the surrounding roadways). We have a business account with a local bank (HSBC actually) and have had reasonably good service from them for the last ten years. But now under the latest banking regulations, we have to prove who we say we are and this is proving problematic. Our treasurer has been hanging on the phone for 40 minutes with the message ‘All our operatives are busy at the moment but your call is important to us..‘etc. So having drawn a blank, he passed the torch over to me and I too had a 40 minute wait without success. We decided that I would call in at the branch to see if I could get anyone to sort us out – difficult as the local branch does not handle business accounts any more but we might be able to use their private lines to get through to the unit that wishes to check our credentials. When I got into the bank I was confronted with a row of self-service machines but absolutely no staff anywhere in evidence. But then I saw a notice to say that owing to staff shortages they would not have anyone available after 2.30 in the afternoon and please come back at 9.00 tomorrow. So that was an absolutely wasted journey but I took the opportunity to pick up our newspapers and buy some ‘good’ ice-cream from Waitrose. I say ‘good’ ice-cream because all of the shelves had been stripped bare of conventional ice-cream leaving only the specialist ice-creams to be bought.

After I got home and put my purchases away and then looked around for my mobile phone which I could not find anywhere. Trying desperately not to panic, a thorough search (including the car) did not reveal a positive result. In desperation, I telephoned Waitrose to see if my phone had been left there and handed in but this drew a blank. I thought of telephoning my own number only to receive a ringing tone (nowhere inside the house) and a message that the number was not available. At this stage, my son intervened – his solution was to stand right outside my car and call my mobile. With great delight I can say that we both heard it ring – my phone had evidently slipped out of my pocket and fallen down the gap between the two front seats where even the bright red of the case barely  revealed its existence. The feelings of despair if you have ever lost your mobile phone are hard to exaggerate. It is not just the voice calls that one receives (very few in my case) but the text messaging is vital from all kinds of agencies, particularly the medical and health related ones who use it to give appointment details. Also, to access many bank and savings accounts these days, the mobile is used to send an OTP (OneTime Password) to access a particular account so your mobile suddenly has become completely indispensable.

The heatwave continues – can one have too much of a good thing? In about 2-3 days time, the heatwave may break down in a series of thunderstorms and I think we can’t wait until this happens. We got some of our daily jobs done and then decided to take the car into town and treat ourselves to a coffee and a pastry in Waitrose. I have been looking at the display of flowers and plants stocked outside the store and eventually, I was tempted by a fuchsia which advertised itself as a hardy variety and goes by the magnificent name of Alice Hoffman. Looking at prices on the web, I think that the Waitrose price of £6.50 is quite reasonable so I have given this pride of place immediately outside our back door. We do have a large earthenware pot outside but the sunflower we had planted in there failed miserably and so I was delighted to give it a good home. I made sure that it had a good soil preparation of ‘Blood, Fish and Bone‘ (my fertiliser of choice, being completely organic) Now that Mog’s Den is all ‘gardened up’, I am now at the stage where I can do little things to tidy up the overall. Today, I found an innovative way to hang a series of miniature garden tools which I use constantly down in the den. These miniature tools were sold in the hardware section of Aldi sone years ago and I find them to be excellent. They are designed to be children’s versions of adult tools so they are generally about one third size of these and I would estimate one tenth of the weight their adult-counterpart. Why I like them so much is that as lightweight and miniature tools, they can be operated one-handed. Anyway, I have a small triangular spade, rake, lawn rake, brush and shovel and I have got them either hanging off garden fence and cunningly hidden in my little ‘wood store’ of staves and useful timber so that it is almost impossible to discern they they are there- this makes them accessible and also concealed so that the whole site appears to be much less cluttered. After we returned home after our Waitrose repast, it was already quite late so we did not allow ourselves a walk in the park so we came straight home. As it was so very hot inside the house, our appetites were well and truly depressed and we made do with a hearty bowl of soup followed by a choc-ice (Waitrose produce them in packs of eight and they are excellent)

After the completion of the external work on Mog’s Den, I now have another great project in life which might take months to achieve. That is, I want to do a radical de-cluttering and throwing away of the surplus ‘stuff’ accumulated over the years. When I recall the last four houses in which I have lived (including this one) then the following pattern emerges – 14 years, 10 years, 11 years, 13 years.  You can see that there is an evident pattern here in that I have moved house on average once every 12 years and, of course, when you move, you throw away an awful lot of stuff you have accumulated over the years and never actually used. When we moved from Bromsgrove to Hampshire, I think we filled three skip fulls and I can honestly say that I have never missed anything that got thrown away. The obvious place to start is on my collection of academic books and doing a quick count of one shelf followed by a multiply, I suspect that I have over 500 books accumulated over the course of a teaching career. I did make some enquiries as to whether I could find a ‘good home’ for some of these rather than consigning them to landfill and I did find one organisation that would have taken them all – but only after I had catalogued them and given full bibliographical details on each one. As this would take at least 40 hours of continuous work, I think you can see why I never got round to it. Apart from books, though, I am trying to reduce clutter wherever I find it (which is all over) but I probably need to spend at least one hour a day for months to get to where I want to be.

In the late afternoon, I engaged in a little horticultural experiment. I have discovered in my collection of vegetable seeds some dwarf beans and some sugar snap peas. These are beyond the stated date on the back of the manufacturer’s packet so I have filled a couple of yogurt pots with five seeds in each. With a bit of TLC and some regular watering and observation, I may strike lucky. Certainly, the beet seeds I sowed about eight days ago are now showing through, so I am just waiting for them to grow large enough to thin out to about one per inch.

Today I needed to make an early start because I needed to be at our local Health Centre for (another) routine check – eyes this time. That seems to have gone OK apart from the fact that drops are put in your eyes that expands the pupils which means that driving is not an option. I then took the opportunity to pop into Asda to collect a few things that only Asda sells, then went down the High Street In Bromsgrove to pick up some cosmetics products, called in at the newsagents to collect the daily ration of newspapers and finally popped into Waitrose to pick up some wine, beer and ‘party food’. When we saw our immediate next door neighbours the other day, we invited them round to share either a beer or a cup of tea with us in the garden at 3.00pm this afternoon. It was a question of seizing the moment, actually, because the fine weather will not go on for ever and our neighbour has a part-time employment during the week and is seeing his own family at the weekends. So it was rather a question of ‘now or never’- any way our neighbours came around and we had a really pleasant couple of hours discussing neighbourly type things such as the improvements we have made to our various gardens and our little projects for the future. As our parasol shade had been nibbled to bits by the local, hungry mice whilst stored in the garage, we had to relocate our garden table and chairs into the shade provided by the leas of the house. But we had a wonderful time, particularly as I treated our neighbours to a zero alcohol beer provided by Waitrose where the brewers have performed a magnificent job in keeping practically all of the flavour of a conventional beer whilst removing all of the alcohol. After our neighbours had left, I spent a certain amount of time in the late afternoon creating drainage holes in the last of the (plastic) oak-barrel shaped planters I had acquired recently. Making drainage holes is actually s little complicated as first I make a small pilot hole with a bradawl, then widen it with a small hand-drill, then widen it a bit further using a large heavy duty screwdriver and finally finish off by using a pair of small utilitarian scissors in which I keep the blades shut but a circular motion which actually widen my drainage holes to the desired aperture size.

Considering that this is the first day of ‘Freedom’ when all (or nearly all) of the pandemic restrictions have been removed, the images and messages have been as mixed as they come. One could expect that the TV crews would be present at night clubs where at 1 minute past midnight, everyone could in theory enjoy themselves and there were lots of shots of throngs of teenagers singing, dancing (and no doubt exhaling billions pf particles of virus) Meanwhile, the night club staff themselves were  all masked up! I heard some ‘vox pop’ from the city of Leicester where the virus has struck particularly hard and no doubt to give a sense of balance, we had one interview with a boutique owner who had thrown away her mask and hoped it would never return (‘because it made you look as though you were ill’) and another with a local barber who was going to wear a mask himself and was going to insist on it for all of his customers (because he was frightened of the potential of the virus to bounce back) The confusing messaging continues apace.Whilst nightclub owners might have been filled with joy on Day 1 of their ‘liberation’ their joy would have been short-lived as the government announced that from the end of September all entrants to nightclubs and other crowded spaces would have to show evidence of having been vaccinated twice. What are the manpower implications of policing all of this, I ask myself? Meanwhile, Boris Johnson has announced (from Chequeurs, where he is self-isolating) that all critical care workers will not to have self isolate after being ‘pinged’ try the Test and Trace App but presumably they will have to give themselves a ‘Lateral Flow’ test every day. The Americans are advising their citizens that none should consider visiting the UK as the rate of infections is now so high.It looks as though the UK infection rate is one of the highest in the world and is mainly amongst the young, unvaccinated portion of the population. The infection rates are somewhat alarming – approx 45,000-50,000 per day (which is 10x. the USA incidence) and this rate may rise to as much as 100,000 now the end of lockdown has occurred. The one saving grace is that the rate of new infections is rising extremely rapidly, the rate of admission to hospitals whllst increasing rapidly, are at a lower rate than when the pandemic was raging.

The hot weather continues today and we knew from the start that we were going to be in for a scorcher – or as the famous comedian Harry Enfield used to say when presenting a weather forecast from a generally hot country, it was a case of ‘Scorchio’ all over the place. I walked down to our  newsagents early on as I normally do on a Sunday but sometimes the newsagent is shut for 5-10 minutes and so it was this morning, Whilst waiting outside, I noticed that the newsagents had to post various messages warning schoolboys from the local school against the pilfering that had evidently taken place when a crowd of them had entered the shop. This sort of adolescent behaviour is not unknown in sweet shops particularly of the smaller variety with Asian proprietors (who are seen as fair game?) I suspect that what happens is a group of schoolboys enter the shop and whilst one is making a legitimate purchase and the shopowners attention is diverted then other members of the crowd help themselves. So now once the headmaster of the school and the police had been informed, it was just a case of reminding any would be miscreants that their faces might be recorded on CCTV. I spent a few minutes with the Asian proprietor, commiserating with him over his troubles and hoped that he had nipped the problems in the bud. Then it was a walk home and a viewing of the Andrew Marr show (who should have had Sajiv Javid as a guest but we had a substitute as the Health Minister himself is having to self isolate for at least 10 days) After this, we were prepared to walk down to the park, which we did complete with suitable head gear as the temperature must have been approaching the 30° mark by now. In the park, we were delighted to meet with our University of Birmingham friend and another mutual regular and we spent some time chewing over the immediate political situation and how the pandemic response was likely to develop. Then we were joined by another of our regular park-walking couples and we exchanged views over the best ( and the worst) of low alcohol and other forms of beer about which we are rather fantasising in the heat.  Then it was homeward bound and a case of rescuing the Sunday roast from the slow cooker and preparing the meal for our Sunday lunch -although the hot weather certainly plays its part in depressing your appetite.

After lunch, it was a question of getting some plants in position in Mog’s Den now that the construction work has been done. The first thing I wanted to plant was my ‘pussy willow’ but in its preferred location I had to abandon my plans as the roots from a neighbouring silver birch (which we planted about a decade ago) ran transversely across my preferred spot. So I put in a Hydrangea which I bought from Asda a few days ago but I intend to give this one some special treatments (which I happen to have in stock) to turn it bright blue – as they often are at the seaside. One of the special treatments is to add ‘Sulphate of Iron’ (of which I just happen to have a supply in stock) but I also think that Epsom salts and a few rusty nails might be called for, I had better consult the web to see if I can find a few gardener’s tricks to help me in this venture. Then I went ahead and planted my pussy willow in one of the tubs I had bought earlier (and ensured that it had drain holes) and I am hopeful that if all goes well, I should have a showy display of catkins at the end of next winter and in the early spring. Finally, I split the Penstemmon that I have in another part of the garden and I trust that this will grow and multiply and provide a perennial splash of colour. So basically, I had got the planting done that I needed to do and all that remained was to give several good waterings (which I did immediately, of course) and several other times in the course of a very hot evening. 

In the early evening, the rooms inside the house were so unbreakably hot (timber framed houses like ours are famed for preserving heat) that the whole family retreated to the outside to savour some of the cooler air of the evening. We regaled ourselves with some stories from the joint family holidays we have held together in various regions of Spain – for one reason or another, these have not always worked out well. For example, we spent one family holiday in Barcelona but our son had an incredibly bad episode with his back and spent most the holiday on the bedroom floor. Our daughter-in-law helped me to identify one of the plants which is growing particularly well in Mog’s Den but which we can’t identify. The phone app identified it as ‘Chinese privet’ but we think it may well be a Forsythia. A close examination of the leaves (and its probable parent) tomorrow might help to identify it.

The hot weather continues – today has clocked in at 29°-30° which is in the mid 80’s F. Knowing that the weather was going to  very hot today, I reversed my normal  routines and decided to garden in the morning and collect my newspapers afterwards. Today was the last day in which I was going to do anything approaching ‘heavy’ construction work. But the first job I had to do was to get some willow edging by the side of my curving path. I found the easiest way to accomplish this was to make a narrow and deep slit with a long bladed spade. I then inserted the willow edgings and hammered them in using a block of wood. But what started out straight finished off being a little bit wavy but I did not have the heart to pull them out and start all over again. Then I started on my major task which involved removing about 2″ of soil from a section about two yards long by one yard wide. This having been, I then deployed my last remnants of builders sand (that is one fewer sack left hanging around), seated the three flags I had managed to rescue from other parts of the garden and did some final bits of levelling up. I then filled the interstitial spaces with some blue slate clippings recently  purchased from Asda. Actually, this was quite a fine one with somewhat smaller pieces and I must say the smaller pieces made the finishing job easier as well as being aesthetically more pleasing. So overall, I was quite pleased with my morning work although you can always perceive the imperfections. The rest of the family who were busy enjoying their elevenses even descended down the tortuous series of steps and cast a judgement on the overall finished product.  From now on, it should be just a pleasant job to put my planters into position, fill them with a mixture of topsoil and compost and populate them. I am going to put the recently arrived pussy willow in a particular corner plot and tomorrow plant my hydrangea (recently purchased) in one and plant some ‘Penstemmon‘ (split from a large mother plant) in the other. 

I walked down the park on my own, hugging the shaded areas (Meg gave our walk a miss not feeling too well this morning) There I encountered our University if Birmingham friend and another of our park regulars – we had a fairly long and quite a deep discussion about how we had overcome particular problems in the course of our lives. One thing is sure and that is we are going to regard ‘Freedom Day’ next Monday with a kind of fascinated horror. None of us feel in the slightest bit ‘liberated’ and in practice the rate of infection is now 54,674 which is a 5.4% increase over the day before.  The WHO is regarding what is going in the UK as a terrible experiment as basically we are trying to achieve herd immunity by allowing  the virus to let rip amongst the younger, not yet vaccinated part of the population. Tonight, we learn that the Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, has tested positive for the virus even though he had already received both is vaccine jabs. He has reported is symptoms as ‘mild’ but the interesting question is to work how many other people, including the PM, were in his near vicinity within the last few days.  Another unintended and unanticipated consequence of letting the virus ‘rip’  is that the ‘Test and Trace‘ app is now ‘pinging’ more and more people requesting that they self isolate. This is having major effects of the staffing of some of our utilities – for example, London’s Metropolitan line has been suspended and East Yorkshire bus services have been cancelled and some private sector employers are reported to have major difficulties with staff shortages. There has been talk of making the app a little less response by tweaking the software but so far, these calls have been resisted.

I think that tomorrow’s Sunday newspapers are going to provide a fascinating read. Boris Johnson, the great libertarian and populist, is now in a position where the majority of people think that progressing with the lockdown will be unsafe, two thirds of us will still carry on wearing face mask and the infection rate is soaring. We now have a situation where much of the UK population is doing what it can to protect itself without feeling ‘liberated’ and whilst the right wing of the Tory Party may appear to show some delight, did they anticipate the way in which the ‘Test and Trace‘ app will create so many problems for employers? The question is whether the Sunday Times  is still going to support the government or whether they will throw their weight behind some reformulation of policy (otherwise knows as a ‘U’ turn)

Another day dawns but the news from the continent appears to be terrible with, as I blog, over 120 dead and 1,300 people missing across Germany and Belgium. The fine weather which we are having is due to a high pressure system over the British Isles – but this so called ‘blocking high’ makes low pressure systems bounce of it and hence there has been a huge low pressure system locked over Germany and Belgium which has resulted in huge floods. Although the local population are used to flooding periodically, the suddenness and ferocity of the rainstorms has taken everybody by surprise. Although one should not jump automatically to conclusions, this extreme weather pattern allied with what is happening in Canada, the USA, Japan does lead one to conclude that climate change is ultimately responsible. Whilst the loss of  life is terrible beyond all measure, this might be a ‘wake up’ call for Europe as a whole so suddenly we may see massive political pressure for changes at a societal level.

We were a bit slow getting going this morning, for reasons a bit difficult to explain. If Meg and I wake up between 5.30 and 6.00 we pop downstairs and make a cup of tea and in no time at all, we have slept for another two hours and suddenly we are running late. We walked down into the park this morning but one could sense the weather was getting hot, hot, hot and we were actually quite pleased to seek out the shade of the trees in the park. We did have a brief conversation with one of our park ‘regulars’  and she chatted with Meg whilst I went off to collect our newspapers – but she was keen, understandably  to seek out the shade again once I had returned form the newsagents. So Meg and I were quite keen to get back home reasonably quickly as I was going to have a telephone consultation with one of the practice nurses at 2.00pm and we needed to lunch before hand. She actually phoned up at 1.45 when I had just dished up our meal but fortunately was not on the phone for too long.

This afternoon was scheduled to be lawn-cutting day and everything ran to plan, although I was a little late starting. When this had been completed, I carried on with my mini-construction work in Mog’s Den. Today, all I had time to do was to peg a board into position to help to mitigate the effects of the sloping ground. Then I enriched the very poor soils with some spare compost I had in a bag – at least I think it was compost! Into this I sowed my mint seed and I have to say that mint seed is about the finest seed must be the finest and smallest seed it is possible to imagine. One sprinkled it into the ground rather than sowing it as otherwise it would disappear beyond trace. Tomorrow, I have in mind the last major bit of ‘heavy’ work in Mog’s Den but not incredibly heavy in the scale of things. I am going to scrape off about 2″ of soil from the last remaining ‘bare’ area. Then I have two half -size paving slabs to put in place – they are probably only about 45cm square so they should cause no particular problem. I have a little bit of builders sand left over which will help to ‘seat’ them nicely. I have decided to leave them 1-2 cm proud of the surrounding area on his occasion but I have some blue slate chippings to surround them and when all is done, the completed surface should be completely level.

The COVID-19 news this evening seems terrible to me. Yesterday, there were 51,870  new cases and 49  more deaths and all of this only three days before the so-called ‘Liberation Day’ on Monday next. The Chief Medical Officer is now saying that we are in for a ‘scary’ time. The ‘R’ number is between 1.2 and 1.3 and the latest wave is showing about a third increase over the week. Something like 57% of the population admit to feeling anxious about the end to the lockdown next Monday and 64% of the population are going to carry on wearing face masks even from Monday onwards. Travel to and from France its looking increasingly problematic – not exactly France being moved from amber to red but nonetheless people returning from France must now quarantine themselves. This may well effect tends of thousands of people and the government has done little to prepare the population for this. Of course, there is a massive trade-off going on here but put at its crudest, it is non-lockdown for some businesses (like pubs) but at the expense of an increasingly large number of infections some of them leading to death (or an unspecified number of long COVID cases) As the great social theorist R H Tawney remarked several decades ago ‘Freedom for the shark equals death for the minnow‘ and whilst not being exactly zoologically correct, the sentiment surely applies to what we see unfolding before us at the moment.

We knew that today everything would run a little later than normal. For a start, we had our Waitrose delivery which all had to be put away. Then we received a fairly long telephone call which we were not really expecting and this all conspired to delay us. So Meg and I decided to take our car down into town today. I must say that I had an ulterior motive because having picked up our newspapers, I was keen to visit a store called Broad Street DIY (formerly Broad Street Hardware) This is the kind of store to which all the local plumbers, decorators and jobbing builders will make their first port of call because it will nearly always have the specialised ‘thingamobobs‘ that they need in their day-to-day work. The particular attraction for me is that they always have a collection of wood offcuts outside the door.  In particular, they typically have several staves which are 4cm square by 80cm long and with a goodly point put on them. As such they are can be used to secure large shrubs, small trees and goodness knows what else. I can only speculate what other people use them for but apart from their gardening uses, with a notch in the side to accommodate a rope they could no doubt be used as a guy rope to tie down a tarpaulin. The next time I go to Broad Street DIY I must ask them what other people typically use them for. Whilst I was there, I bought some coriander and mint seeds (about which more later) and some of those nice hefty rubble sacks much beloved of builders – but why are they always bright blue and never green I ask myself? We then went to the park and bumped into our amazingly energetic 87-year old who regularly walks at least 7km a day at a fair old pace as well. We exchanged tips (well observations, really) how to keep on going and going into one’s advanced years. One can’t always say that exercise is the elixir of life as one of my mathematics colleagues at De Montfort University in Leicester dropped dead of a heart attack whilst jogging – and he was only in his 30’s as well.

After lunch and a customary doze, I knew that I had  to complete the project that I had set myself for the afternoon which was to finally despatch the remains of the chopped-down-but-decaying vegetation to our brown bin. Everything had to be chopped into about 8″ pieces first and the bottom of the heap was rather a slimy (and slug-infested) mess to which I was not looking forward. However, Miggles the cat came along to receive her mid-afternoon treat, have a drink of water, jump on my lap for a stroke and a fondle and finally jump pff my lap to supervise the rest of my afternoon’s activities. I had intended to start on a job to put a brick edging down the side of my curving path in Mog’s Den but time rather ran away with me and I got diverted into ‘doing something’ about a scrubby piece of sloping land. I have a sort of plan for this will come to fruition tomorrow. At the very top, I have put some of my ‘push in’ plastic fencing to stop detritus rolling down the hill after a heavy rainfall. Then I have cut a narrow trench into which I am going to ‘peg’ a piece of board purchased from the hardware store this morning and just about the length I need. Then I am going to put in a little bit of willow fencing (courtesy of ‘Poundland’) and in the reclaimed area I am going to put two vegetable troughs with basil in one and coriander in the other. Finally, I have a bit off bare earth without any evident use but I suddenly decided  to try and transplant some mint from elsewhere in the garden. But when I went to explore where I knew I had some mint growing, the mint plants have been rather overrun by a holly hedge and not helped by an absence of rain water, nutrients and sunshine. But there are some individual little mint plants so I think by the time they are rescued, transplanted and get more some light, fertiliser, watering and a bit of TLC, I may have another mint bed in operation. They say that mint spreads like wildfire but I must say I have never been so successful with it. However, what has emerged in Mog’s Den, in a type of unplanned way, is a miniature herb and veg garden and I am hopeful that in the fullness of time, I will manage to dash out of the kitchen and cut a handful of mint, basic or coriander whenever I need them. I also intend to eat the beet leaves this year as well as the globe roots themselves which are, of course, incredibly good for you.

As the day dawned, there was not a cloud in the sky and we knew that we in at the start of a period of high pressure which is going to remain stationery over the British Isles for the next few days. As we had nothing particularly pressing this morning apart from updating our Waitrose order and the weather was so fine, we allowed ourselves the luxury of lingering in the back garden (and Mog’s Den of course) to assess which flowers and plants are doing particularly well this year. After some rain but also some warm days then the garden is at its finest so we took a lot of enjoyment lingering over various plants. For example, there is a beautiful little shrub with a host of ruby-red flowers called ‘Penstemmon‘. A small plant was sold to us  by a friendly trader down in Bromsgrove some years ago. The ‘Penstemmon‘ has now spread to about a yard wide and a year deep so I may be able to detach part of it and start off a new clump elsewhere. Eventually, Meg and I started on our walk – I left Meg on one of the ‘top’ benches which overlooks the rest of the park whilst I went off to collect our newspapers. But Meg was soon joined by a mutual friend and I was pleased that Meg had that little bit of company and then we struck off for home.We had a salad type lunch which was easy to prepare – just as well as I needed to leave the house just after 2.00 for a doctor’s appointment (rare these days)

After I had been to the doctor’s for a series of checkovers (generally OK) I popped into our local Asda primarily to see if they had a gardening section and specifically if they had any seeds. I had in mind to buy some Swiss or Ruby Chard as they look colourful and grow well in the shade (of Mog’s Den) but  Asda had hardly any seeds at all. But I did pick up a couple of rectangular vegetable troughs which were being sold off at a discounted price of £2.00 and then got home and treated myself to a low alcohol lager. Then I started a major task that I had set myself for the day which was to attack the mountain of weeds (brambles, nettles and other lovelies) which I needed to chop up into 8″ size portions and then bag them. As our  brown (i.e. garden waste bins) are being emptied tomorrow morning, then today was an ideal opportunity to attempt to attack the pile of weeds and get them disposed of tomorrow morning. In the event, I managed to fill about five sacks and then these got disposed of via our own and neighbour’s bins – this has got most of the job done but there is still about one quarter of the total to be finished off in the morning. I must admit that the combination of thick and long brambles on the one hand and the slimy branches on the lower layers makes this a most unpleasant task but thankfully it will soon be over. In the middle of the afternoon, my plant arrived – a heavily discounted pussy willow which is about a metre and a half tall and which will not get any taller but should get bushier and eventually give us a display of lots of pussy willow catkins. Once the old vegetation had been removed, I shall be moving into the more pleasant phases of finishing off Mog’s Den. Basically,I need to put my planters in place (hardly an arduous task), fill them with a mixture of compost and topsoil (again, not a difficult job) and then sit back and wait for a few more of my ordered plants to arrive to populate the planters. I am of a mind to make the smallest of vegetable gardens near the beets and I thought I might transplant a bit of mint from another section of the garden and then sow some coriander seeds (or even get a complete coriander plant from a local supermarket)

Earlier today, I had called in to see how my two neighbours were doing health wise. My immediate next door neighbour is recovering from a  heart procedure undertaken last Monday and my other neighbour is recovering somewhat, from the stroke she suffered last week. The family has been given precious little information and, in truth, the MRI scan was only done yesterday – a positive sign is that our neighbour can walk with some physiotherapists’ assistance. Then it looks as though she might go to a specialist unit which helps both to rehabilitate stroke sufferers and also gives the opportunity for longer term assessments to be made.

The government’s ‘mask’ policy seems to be in some disarray tonight. Although, in theory, all legal constraints will disappear on Monday next, ins practice many organisations (Transport for London for one) are insisting on their use.Tonight, more than 1,000 scientists sign letter urging 19 July to be postponed as they accuse government of pursuing ‘herd immunity by mass infection’

Today was a ‘chewy’ kind of day but not without its compensations. I had been phoned up yesterday by our GP practice who indicated that one of their GPs needed to have a telephone consultation with me concerning some of the results from the recent array of blood tests I had taken. I sat by my phone at the appointed time but was eventually contacted some 40 minutes later and had an inconclusive consultation in which it was indicated that they wanted to see me ‘in the flesh’ either later on this morning (which I couldn’t manage) or some time tomorrow. I refuse to be worried excessively by such things but evidently some alarm bells are being rung somewhere and we shall see what transpires. The upshot of all of this was that Meg and I couldn’t get our ‘normal’ walk in down to the park so we decided to take the car into town, pick up our newspapers and then make our way to the park for a bit if a walk and our elevenses (Waitrose being out of action for about a fortnight, so we were told yesterday). When we got to the park we were dismayed that parking was incredibly difficult. Anticipating the end of lockdown, no doubt, and with the school holidays imminent, a fair-ground was setting up its machinery for its big rides and so on. Are hoop-la stalls only a distant memory, I ask myself? Evidently, we had not exposed to anything like this since the 484 days that this blog has been written and the fairground suppliers must have been chomping at the bit to get their act up and running as soon as possible. So we had roadways blocked off, other ones being resurfaced and general mayhem but we managed to locate a parking place and eventually made our way to our normal watering hole. There we met a husband-and-wife pair who are one of the park regulars but they had been on holiday to Cornwall so we had not seen them for about a fortnight or so. We had a pleasant chat and then proceeded off home, having to rely upon the good nature of another car-owner without whose assistance we would have been blocked in by fairground vehicles before making it home for a quick turnaround ready for Pilates. The Pilates went ahead with the normal four of us (one in each corner of the room) and we had our normal jolly banter before it was home for a delayed lunch.

This afternoon, I had a little border-laying project in mind to get done. I have a little curving path in Mog’s Den but it needs a border of some kind so that the forest bark does not constantly impinge. I had previously bought a log-roll (little pine staves attached to each other by wire) and this has the advantage of being able to be shaped around curves. However, it needs some ‘legs’ to get the whole thing sunk into the ground. So I prepared four ‘legs’ (which involved sawing a couple of 80cm staves so that I finished off with 4 x 40cm staves) each with a point on. I then screwed the log-roll onto the legs which fortunately went very smoothly as the pilot screws were easy to make in the fairly soft pine of the log-roll and I happened to have some very high quality 60mm ‘Spax’ screws which screwed in quite easily and then made a perfect fix. After that, it was a fairly simple job to make some guide holes (of almost exactly the same shape using another of my 80 cm staves, of which I always have some ready for use) and a progressive hammering down with a small lump hammer until all was finally in position – and looking good as well. I am not a natural wood-worker (not having had male relatives to guide me who young or the benefits of woodworking in my boy’s grammar school) but over the years I have learned the importance of both pilot holes and also the highest quality of screws (which, if they are well designed, have a thread making them easy to screw in but with excellent fixing power)

I heard in the background that every single one of the nine water and sewerage companies in the UK had failed to meet the environmental standards set for them by the regulator and discharge of sewerage into our rivers was now rife. Channel 4 news to which I had been listening in the backkgound approached representatives of the water companies, and the regulator (OfWat) and finally the Environment Agency for a comment on this situation but in every single case there was ‘no-one’ available to give a comment on this situation. One has to ask what is the point of regulators and agencies if they are so much in league with the people they are meant to be policing that they refuse to be interviewed – or to be democratically accountable. Tonight, as well, the Tories have passed the legislation allowing them to cut the overseas aid budget which will will result in a large loss of life and lack of opportunities for women. Theresa May lead the ‘rebellion’ but the rebels were outvoted.

Last night was the Euro cup finals (after yesterday’s blog was written) in which England were eventually beaten by Italy. England scored within 2 minutes which is almost a record in itself and had the better of the first half. Then the Italians came out to play and had about two=thirds of the possession (perhaps even more in the second half) and inevitably scored an equaliser after masses of sustained pressure. Then it was extra time where honours were just about even and so it came to the ‘curse of penalties’  Italy scored from three of their five penalties but the young English team missed three of theirs (cruelly, all of the young black players)  and so Italy won 3-2 on penalties. If the truth be known, Italy were probably the better team and deserved to win – if England had got through on penalties then perhaps ‘ the wrong team might have won‘ as happened in the Italy-Spain match. What is particularly disappointing is the undercurrent of vile racist abuse thrown in the direction of our younger black players via social media. Actually, what I remember of the Brexit campaign is that in last few days, Europe was hardly mentioned but there was much talk of potential immigration from Turkey which happens to be Muslim and to be a neighbour of Syria (home of Middle East terrorists). The wider point here is whether there is a deep underbelly of racism within British society which manifests itself in all kinds of ways whoever there is an opportunity. Our chiropodist called today to do our feet and she showed us some of the vile racist tweets that a friend of her’s had forwarded on to her – and I must say, I was shocked beyond all measure at the vituperative and crude messaging doing the rounds.  Can social media deal with this problem, I ask myself?

Meg and I were a little late going down into town today and we thought we would pop into Waitrose to have our normal coffee. These plans were put into disarray when some of the friendly Waitrose staff informed us that the cafe was closed and likely to remain so for about a fortnight (‘staff shortages’ was the official reason but it makes you wonder whether because the pick-up of trade was so low that it might never re-open as it used to be). We bumped into one of our park friends who often scoots around in her wheelchair and asked for her recommendation as to which coffee bar to frequent in the absence of Waitrose. We were directed to one which evidently put post-pandemic precautions in place because there were perplex screens permanently screwed into place between each table appear to be in its own carousel as it were. So we treated ourself to (expensive) coffee and cakes after which I shot off into town to get a cheque entered into the system at Santander and to pick up some plastic decorative plot dividers from Poundland (quaintly called ‘Georgian’) but a bit less naff than this description indicates.  They are actually very effective at demarcating one area of a plot from another and I have used them to stop the rhubarb from drooping over onto or lawn.

After lunch our chiropodist called and we always enjoy having a chat (mainly about football as you might imagine but also about family matters that we share with each other).  Immediately my feet were done and received their MOT, I popped into our local Asda superstore because they were still selling three bags of blue slate clippings for £9 and three bags of compost for £10. I had intended to ask Asda to supply a lusty young man to help to carry things into the boot of the car but I was fortunate enough to get one of those ‘high loading ‘ trolleys into which I could load the clippings quite easily, get them into the car and then load up with compost. I managed to do within the time allocation (umpublicised) whereby you can exit the car park without charge. I think it is about 10 minutes ‘loading time’ that is allowed but nobody seems to know what the exact limit is. When I got home, I dumped this lot outside the back gate and then after we had our tea, used a set of wheels I had to take take my purchases to the top of Mog’s Den. From here, there was a certain degree of humping to get them down the slope and ready for use.

Today Boris Johnson announced the ‘end’ of lockdown from next Monday, July 19th. All ‘optimistic’ talk of ‘Liberation day’ has been quietly forgotten and we are now being urged by the government  to use use facemasks ‘when the situation demands and at our own discretion’. All legal sanctions have been withdrawn (to the delight of the Tory right wing, I imagine), although The Observer poll published yesterday showed that over one half of the UK public feels unhappy about the threats posed to us by too rapid a loosening of the lockdown.