I once asked one of my Spanish students what was the worst time he had ever spent in England and he replied ‘4 pm on a Sunday afternoon!‘ I suspect that is because when he was studying at the Complutense University in Madrid, many of the students used to go to a really atmospheric bar in central Madrid where they could drink coffee and meet up with friends – and hence the contrast with England. Today we watched the Andrew Marr show and noticed how adeptly Grant Shaps managed to evade or wriggle out of tighter corners than Houdini. For example, when confronted with the statement from the Durham police about the contact with Dominic Cummings’ father, we were offered the following (i) ‘You haven’t gone on to give the whole quote and particularly the portion that follows‘ (tending to imply that this would somehow negate the damning quote that had just been read out to him) And how about this for circumlocution ‘The police did not speak to Mr. Cummings père but he spoke with them‘. This was a downright falsification anyway but it only serves to potentially confuse the listener.

Just after we first moved into this house, nearly thirteen years ago, I planted some golden privet hedging (Ligustrum ovalifolium ‘Aureum’) to shield the BioDisc(= mini sewage treatment plant) we have outside the house. At the time, I got 30 plants in the boot of my car. Now it has grown to the extent that it is at least 1.5 metres tall and equally as wide and so, consequently, it was in need of pruning twice a year. My daughter in law had invested in battery-operated hedge clippers but even standing on some home=made platforms it was still too wide to get a completely even cut. Nonetheless, the job was done and cutting is the easy part – the more tedious part being clearing up all of the clippings into plastic sacks (two huge ones) Anyway, we managed to get the contents of these plus a sackful of cardboard shreddings into our compost bin (the right combination of both ‘green’ and ‘brown’ i.e. nitrogen/carbon as the aficionados of this blog will recognise) and all I need know is copious quantities of home-made compost accelerant (aka human urine) to let the microbes get to work. The people next door are having a party (I counted some 8-9 adults+children besporting themselves around a recently constructed garden bar – I am reliably informed these are increasingly popular but I had no idea they existed, until very recently…) I think it is several conjoined families so that is all right then – the distinction between a household’ and a ‘family’ is rather a subtle one anyway!

It is quite possible that this forthcoming week is ‘the calm before the storm’.  Our daughter-in-law will be returning to school a week on Monday (June 1st) and it remains an interesting question of how many children actually turn up. But it is quite possible that she will be exposed to many more children than hitherto and, of course, there are several adults running a school as well as the teachers and parents who will be both leaving and collecting children from school – whether they will properly police themselves to be at 2-metre intervals is an interesting question ( I suspect not) We feel that we might have to take extra precautions in our household cleaning and domestic routines from June 1st as there may be a very small, but nonetheless increased risk that the Coronavirus may still pose a potent threat.

Politically, it looks as though the Daily Mail is turning against Dominic Cummings. The Daily Mail always thought of itself (particularly under the editorship of Paul Dacre) as having its finger on the pulse of Middle England and if they pursue an anti-Cummings agenda for any period of time, then the future does not look bright for the most senior adviser to the Prime Minister.

For whatever reason, I had a wakeful period in the middle of the night last night so I decided to deploy my time productively my updating the Waitrose order I have scheduled for eight days’ time. This all went smoothly and it is always reassuring to be emailed an up-to-date copy of your order which helps to ensure that the extras you have ordered are actually included. The park today was not quite so busy as it has been in recent days – perhaps a function of the fact that the temperature has dropped down several degrees, it was very windy and the sunbathing tendency has abated. Whilst in the park, we met with our friend Julie who now seems fully restored to health after her recent little health episode. She told us though of one of the Waitrose staff who we know well who seemed to have similar symptoms to Julie’s (gall-bladder?) – however, our Waitrose friend had not had a happy time in A&E at our local hospital and was left for several hours with no prospect of a scan or similar investigations. She felt that she had been badly treated and we were speculating whether she got worse treatment by having her husband drive her directly to the hospital rather than calling an ambulance. It might just be the luck of the draw whether you get good treatment or not – Meg and I were hoping that no implicit racism was involved. Whilst in the park, we also ran into our good friends who had bought us an excellent bottle of wine on the occasion of Mike’s recent birthday.  This wine turned out to be absolutely excellent so we soaked the label off the bottle to give to our friends in case we saw them – which of course we did. It sometimes happens when you give a bottle of wine as a present, then apart from the price and the label and the vintage, you might have few clues whether it was a good or an indifferent wine so we were glad to pass the label onto our friends so that they could enjoy a bottle for themselves.

I promised not to keep mentioning, ad infinitum, my gardening activities so I will keep this particular entry short and sweet. I finished off the major construction work that I have needed to do once our fallen tree had been removed and now include a little video clip so you can get a mental picture of what is going on. I must mention that the iPhone first records the journey down the steep little slope (a height of 6ft) into what we call ‘Mog’s Den’ and you can then get an idea of the shoring up that has been necessary in what is quite a steep slope. Whether or not my beech trees survive is another matter but they can always be replaced. After a little ‘pan around’ the journey is reversed and you traverse up the path towards ground i.e. normal lawn level. Here is the URL :    https://mch-net.info/videos/mogs-den.mov

The Dominic Cummings story continues to dominate the news agenda, as you might imagine. On tonight’s ‘Review of the Papers‘ (Sky News Channel, 11.30-12.00), I have never seen a journalist so incandescent with rage as was Christina Patterson in her comments. She even used a phrase that I myself had used last night (‘contempt for the little people‘) but, of course, will the rest of the press join in the hue-and-cry?  What makes the story particularly juicy was the revelation that, if true, Cummings had transgressed on at least two if not three occasions! There are now calls for Boris Johnson to sack Cummings forthwith – if he does not, then Boris Johnson himself seems to be condoning the moral, if not downright illegal, transgressions that have taken place. Watch this space!

It comes to something when you look forward to the Iceland delivery of shopping as the highlight of one’s day! But this is not quite as ridiculous as it might sound as I got delivery of a pack of 10 eggs which my spies tell me are hard to find as everybody is going crazy baking goodness-knows-what in which eggs are a vital ingredient. Anyway, the order came as expected and I suspect that the quality is going to turn out OK (although I did change one item when the reviewers said it was the most disgusting rubbish they had ever eaten). Today proved to be a different kind of day as our regular cleaner/domestic help was now allowed to come along (she can come into our house because that’s for money but not into her mother’s house because… the difficulty in applying the lock-down rules) However, we managed fine by agreeing never to be in the same room together at the same time. On our walk down into the hill, we encountered one of our regular husband-and-wife friends who we were glad to see again because their grandson is about to enter higher education and having given advice to countless youngsters over the years at a similar stage in their lives, we were quite happy to make the offer again when these strange times are over (or have at least, moved on).

Friday is grass-mowing day and again this went without a hitch – I say this, because there is always the slightest scintilla of doubt in my mind whether my petrol driven mower will actually start – it is a Swedish ‘Stiga’ model and it always does. I only mention it because I once had a Mounfield which was an absolute ‘beast’ ( polite word!) to start and eventually, I got so fed up with it that I gave it away. I suspect it had never been set up properly form its manufacture but it leaves a horrid memory. Right at the end of the afternoon, I did finish off my gardening ‘opus’ with a swift strategic use of forest bark and the construction of a bed with the slope removed (or at least ameliorated) in which I can plant my California poppy seeds tomorrow. There happen to be one or two poppy plants that have ‘escaped ‘ onto the public highway (footpath) so I will attempt to ‘liberate’ one tomorrow, all being well.

The breaking political news this evening is the ‘revelation’ that Dominic Cummings, the Svengali-like special adviser to the Prime Minister has been caught apparently breaking the ‘lock-down’ laws following a period of self-isolation (definition of Svengali: a person who manipulates or exerts excessive control over another) Other senior figures who have engaged in such hypocritical behaviour have been forced to resign (e.g. Professor Neil Ferguson, the scientist whose modelling led to the lockdown, the Scottish health minister) and it remains to be seen whether the same will prove true of Dominic Cummings or not. It is a sad reflection of the operation of political influence that the nearer one is to the centres of political power, the greater the feeling that ‘rules are only meant for the little people, not for people like us‘ It all depends on whether the press, which is generally Tory-supporting, decides collectively that they are going to ‘go’ for a political figure or not. I think it was Alastair Campbell, the last press secretary in the Labour administration who argued as a rule of thumb that if a negative story ran for more than about three days, then the individual in question was probably ‘toast’ – so we shall watch ‘What the Papers Say’ with particular interest over the next few days…

Believe it or not, today has been an immensely ‘gardening’ type day – probably just as well before the weather breaks. On our way down the hill this morning, we had a long chat with two of our friends and were invited around the garden of one of them. We exchanged notes about what was what in the garden and indicated what plans we had – this is always the same with gardens and gardeners as one is always looking forward to what is to come and delighted by the unexpected successes as well as prepared for the inevitable failures. Once we actually made it into the park, it was not quite as busy as normal but there were lots of picnics in evidence – blankets spread out on the ground and comestibles being consumed. We had to hunt to find a seat, all our favourite ones being occupied. Once we eventually returned home, we had a salad type lunch based around a quiche – I am always amazed by what you can rustle up without the aid of lettuce or other salad-like greens.

On our way home, we passed the house of an acquaintance who I happened to know had a series of external wall tiles (there was a particular short-lived fashion from about 1965-1969 to build houses with a kind of external tile cladding on the upper storeys – we lived in a house like that in Thurnby in Leicestershire and it was built in 1968, as I remember) To cut a long story short, I asked our friend if he still had his wall-tiles as I had previously discussed him that I thought that they make an excellent edging to a lawn or a flower-bed – and whether he still had any to spare. Very generously, he offered me as many as I wanted and when I tentatively asked for half-a-dozen and tentatively upped it to a dozen, I went down in the car after lunch and picked up a consignment which turned out to be 20! And so to my latest construction. In the slope below the detente, I made a cut with an edging tool and then excavated an area about 18″ in width and I then lined the back of this area with my recently acquired, wall tiles. The idea was to put two large (40cm diameter) black plastic pots into position and fill them with some spare trees that I had growing adjacent to our communal grassed area. The first of these beech trees proved to be extremely problematic to extract as I suspect it had taken root by itself on the top of a buried pile of stones – consequently, every time I put in a spade to get it under the root-ball, I encountered stone after stone. Eventually, though, my efforts were crowned with success and I extracted the tree only to discover it was actually about six feet tall, However, in the plant tub it went with some previously excavated soil, some of my own compost, bone-meal fertiliser as a long-lasting fertiliser around the roots and blood, fish and bone as a top dressing. The second tree was almost the same height but a lot easier to extract. Since transplanting (at not the best time of year) they have both drooped a little but I am fairly confident that with some good compost, watering night and day and a little TLC, they will thrive – if not, I haven’t lost anything. I then finished off by transplanting a little oak tree in the middle (this was only about 8″ tall) and finally dressed the whole area with some large slate chippings that I happened to have spare. All in all, I am pleased with the overall result but the rest of my family have yet to see it an cast an opinion on it. To finish it all off, I have a packet of 150 California poppy seeds on order which I shall nurture and germinate and put in the few remaining triangles of the ‘slope’ remaining. I promise you not to bore you with any more gardening from now on!

We held our usual ‘Clap for Carers‘ tonight – don’t the weeks roll by!  We are waiting with great anticipation to see what the Iceland delivery van brings us in the morning…

Well, it’s been one of those days today when I seem to have been chasing my own tail all day long. I had got onto the Iceland website yesterday and it indicated that no slots were available but new slots would be available at 11.00 am each morning, from Monday to Friday. So I got onto the website and made up an order of things that I knew I needed as well as doubling up on other items and managed to secure a slot from 8.00-10.00 on Friday i.e. just over a day’s time. This was handy because I am running out of certain things which are in short supply (according to one of our friends, eggs are hard to find because everyone is at home baking away and using up eggs as a consequence) Nice to get this done but it delayed all of our normal routines by about an hour. The park was absolutely teeming and when we first entered, every single bench was occupied although some were vacated just as we approached. There seemed to be a lot of sunbathing, yappy dogs, scootering children (but a bit too warm for serious jogging) On our way home, we saw two sets of friends and had pleasant chats with each of them, helping to set the world to rights.

After our lunch of chicken fricassee, I embarked on my path construction. Before I could really get going, though, I had to supply myself with a set of retaining pegs that involved a certain amount of sawing, putting points on the pegs and finally creosoting. The actual path construction turned out to be just about what I had anticipated with no real problems. I cut a shape around each wooden ‘step’ with an edging tool and extracted about an inch of baked topsoil (which I can use subsequently) before putting down a couple of shovel fulls of builder’s sand and then setting each step in place, preventing subsequent movement by driving in a wooden peg about 7″-8″ long fore and aft to prevent any slippage or drift. The end result was just about what I had expected/intended – any fine-tuning can be dome tomorrow!  After I had finished, we FaceTimed our good Waitrose-era friends as we do every 3-4 days and had a good old natter, mainly centering around our differing experiences with online shopping with the local food supermarkets. I am starting to warm a little to Iceland as their delivery slots – only a day or so to wait – seem quite useful if you know you are running short of things although their range is necessarily limited. As you may have guessed, I am missing the regular supply of ‘Unicorn hoof oil essence’ available only in Waitrose stores which is absolutely  de rigeur in the modern kitchen.

In the early evening, I received an email from Clive’s son who very much appreciated the rendition of Clive playing ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s desiring‘ ( a J.S. Bach Chorale) on the occasion of our 50th wedding anniversary celebrations. I had an iPhone video clip of this as part of the wedding website so it was quite easy to extract this and send it on. I mentioned in my email that the whole ‘funeral service’ was very ‘Clive-like’ and he would have approved heartily – as it turned out, this was no surprise as Clive had largely organised this before his demise. It is wonderful in these days of modern and easily accessible technology to have little movie clips of old friends like this. Meg and I miss him a lot as we used to see him nearly every day or every other day-for once, I was absolutely struck by the finality of cremation where, of course, nothing remains.

Well, the day has arrived that we were sort of looking forward to and not looking forward to, as it was the day of Clive’s funeral. Instead of walking down to the park, Meg and I made a detour so that we could arrive outside Clive’s house to see his funeral cortege depart. A crowd of some forty people had assembled in total – rather than a clap which I had rather anticipated, the crowd watched in a respectful silence as the funeral cars departed. The poignant moment in all of this was when one of Clive’s relatives held up the two Jack Russell dogs that he had exercised every day for years now so that they could have a final look at Clive before the cars moved off. Not that this would be at all meaningful to the two dogs, of course, but it was still a rather poignant moment nonetheless. Afterwards, we all repaired to our own houses where there was a webcast direct from the local crematorium and a wonderful service that reflected some of Clive’s preferences such as a Shakespeare sonnet, a poem written by one of his granddaughters and a piece of jazz trumpet by Stan Kenton that Clive no doubt knew very well. [In fact, I recall an amusing story that Clive had told me when he and his brother had been engaged to play at a 50th birthday party. As it happened, the household had a little dog called ‘Delilah’ so when Clive and his brother played ‘No, no. no, Delilah” and got the rest of the birthday celebrants to join in the chorus, the little dog went spare with excitement!]

I had set myself a little project in the afternoon to lay a little path from wooden squares along one of my recently cleared slopes in Mog’s Den but I reasoned I had better try to get the slope moderated by inserting a little timber detente (I suppose you might call it) but I spent some time painting everything I was going to use with a creosote substitute (creosote is now banned on Health and Safety grounds!).  I then made a narrow little trench which I lined with builder’s sand and then inserted my timber and held it in place with specially prepared long ‘pegs’ that I had previously prepared (creosoted, put a point on) and which I then hammered in with my 12lb sledgehammer – fortunately, I have done this sort of thing before so I knew what to do and the results were as expected. However, as I somehow thought might happen, although the timber is mathematically in the right place (to the nearest half-inch) the result doesn’t look quite right – it’s one of those cases to which I have alluded before when the human eye can be a better judge than exact mathematical precision might indicate. I think I can ‘soften’ the line by transplanting a few evergreens in front of it so that people won’t notice, so I am looking at my little batch of cuttings to see what I can utilise.

It seems that the government is now coming sustained attack over the COVID-19 deaths in care homes – Matt Hancock the Health Secretary was forced back into the House of Commons today to provide some sort of explanation. It seems fairly clear that in a desperate bid to clear the hospital wards of elderly patients in order to make room for the anticipated influx of COVID-19 patients, many were practically forced into care homes, untested, and the virus spread like wildfire. There was also a semi-admission from one of the scientific advisers that the advice to cease testing came about largely because it was known that testing facilities on the scale required were clearly inadequate. Let us all wait for the official enquiry (which might take years to complete) Another bit of ‘juicy’ political news is that the Brexiteer element of the Tory party are practically salivating at the prospect of a ‘No Deal’ Brexit (where we depart from the EU on minimal World Trade Organisation terms) because the undoubted costs to the British economy will be impossible to disentangle from the economic effects of the Coronavirus and will thus effectively be  hidden or lost for all time!

Fortunately, we seem to be in the middle of a warm spell and the weather seems set fair for a few days. As it looked as though it might be a good ‘drying day’ we whipped the sheets off the bed and had them into the washing machine the minute we got up. When the washing machine had done its job, we got them out onto the clothes line and in no time they were billowing out as though they were a TV commercial. Speaking of which, there used to be a clothes washing product called ‘Omo’ (which stands for ‘Old Mother Owl’ i.e. wise enough to use this brand of washing powder) A search on the web revealed that it was still being made and available in 4.9kg cartons (although it was ‘unavailable’ when I checked on the web just now). According to the Unilever Website, it was introduced to the market in 1954 and is still available in Brazil, Turkey and Germany, Australia and Romania and has just been re-launched in Kenya where it was first available in 1953 (but it was discontinued in the UK in 1960’s – I wonder why?)

When we got the park, we were greeted by our friend Julie who looked hale and hearty but told us her tale of woe. Apparently, she had been taken ill on Friday night and had to have an emergency admission to hospital by ambulance with symptoms that sounded as though they could have been a heart attack. It turned out that it was a gall-bladder that had been playing up and after diagnosis ( and presumably some treatment) she was back home the following day. It sounds as though it must have been a really frightening experience when living on your own but fortunately a good and long-standing neighbour (who we now know) stepped in and gave a helping hand. After lunch, we resumed our house cleaning duties and completed them for another week until they start again. I was itching to get outside and do one or two little gardening jobs which I eventually did. One of these involved hammering a stake into the ground and then pulling an errant branch of an apple tree in a more vertical orientation and this seemed to work out OK. Fortunately, I had in stock an appropriate length of polypropylene rope (thank you Poundland!) which served the purpose well although I generally persuade the ladies of the household to donate to me their discarded tights as this makes for a light, strong rope-like fixing agent which is not harsh on the bark of a tree but has just the right amount of ‘give’ in it when under tension. My second job was to re-purpose a plastic gardening bag so that it would provide a cover for my now denuded mini greenhouse (again, thank God for Poundland) This worked pretty well and I seem to have been just in time because I noticed that later on in the evening the ground was wet. so we must have had a passing shower.

Mid-way through the evening we had the ‘Order of Service‘ for Clive’s funeral service delivered by hand to our front door. This is scheduled to take place tomorrow at 11.45 and we have been supplied with a web reference so that we can follow the proceedings  ‘on-line’.  Earlier in the day, we had a long discussion with our daughter-in-law regarding the exact preparations that need to take place before some children are allowed back into school on 1st June (or not, as the case might be) It is also interesting that the government has finally added ‘loss of taste’  as a symptom to be added to help diagnose COVD-19 (but won’t even attempt to answer how many more people there are ‘out there’ who may have had the virus and not known it and unknowingly infected many more in the. meantime).

As it is Sunday, Meg and I get our day organised so that we can watch The Andrew Marr politics show at 9.00 on BBC1. However, as the weeks roll by I really wonder why we bother because the politicians never get subjected to detailed scrutiny or (successfully) evade every question. Today, it was Michael Gove who succeeded in his glib way of saying absolutely nothing so that at the end of the interview you think ‘What did he actually say?’ The walk down to the park was uneventful but we did have quite an interesting chat with a lady who indicated that she had been an Ofsted inspector but her comments about teachers seemed to bely this. However, once we got off the vexed subject of whether teachers were right in being pressurised by the government to resume a limited return to school on 1st June and onto the subject of the best local garden centres in which to buy trees, the conversation took on a more fruitful turn. My own (not very educated) guess is that only 50% of parents may allow their children to go to school – in a conflict like this, the Government will claim success whilst teachers will be able to point to the low attendance rates across the country as a vindication of their stance.  In the North East, around Gateshead, where  the R factor is said locally to be above the trigger figure of 1.0 it seems that the local authorities may follow the Scots rather than London in keeping people away from school and themselves ‘safe’ in their own houses. The next week or so will be interesting to see how this plays out.

The afternoon was relatively uneventful as it was largely occupied by housework. The phrase keeps running through my head, uttered by the American comedienne Joan Rivers ‘The trouble is with housework is that you have all that dusting, polishing and hoovering – and then 9 months later you have to do it all over again!‘ However, there is a slight bonus in that the choice of music on ClassicFM is normally pretty good on a Sunday afternoon and that helps to alleviate the tedium. When this had been completed, I managed to get half-an-hour tidying up the contents of my mini plastic greenhouse, which were in a state of some disarray as the plastic cover had perished and needed to be ripped away. I have an initial search on the web to try and find a replacement cover without success so far so I must make more a more concerted effort in the morning.

I think the country is in an interesting state, politically. Initially, the government had a fairly strong approval rating for its actions on lock-down and this trend can be observed amongst all governments dealing with the COVID-19 crisis, whatever their political hue and degree of competence – the American political scientists have called this the ‘rally round the flag‘ syndrome, However, there seem to have been an abrupt change in political mood in the last week since the lockdown is starting to be released. The government’s approval rating has gone negative i.e. more people think it is doing a bad job than think it is doing a good job, according to a poll published in the Observer today. In particular, the vagueness and lack of precision behind the phrase ‘Stay alert‘ is a huge problem and the population is now confused by the ambiguity of the message compared with the simplicity of the ‘Stay at home‘ message it was replacing. Also, a certain psychological angst is being created by some evident anomalies e.g. (i) you can now accept a cleaner into your house (because of the ‘cash nexus’) but not see your own parents (ii) everybody should stay 2 metres apart from each other but it is quite  OK for this rule to be transgressed when getting on a Tube train or catching a bus (iii) as a teacher and a grandparent you will not be allowed to see your own grandchildren but you are being ‘encouraged’ by the government to see other parents’ children en masse if and when the schools resume. No wonder patience with the government is wearing exceedingly thin (and this is putting it mildly!)

Today has been rather an unusual day, probably relating to the fact that it is the weekend. For a start, we saw none of our usual friends to have a chat with on the way up and down the hill – this is probably a function of the fact that everyone has a somewhat different routine at the weekend and there were certainly a lot more children evident in the park and faces that we didn’t recognise. In the afternoon, I had two little ‘projects’ to carry out. The first of these involved planting a whole variety of seeds with my daughter-in-law We have a large seed-planting tray that helps to confine the mess on our outside table. As we didn’t have any specialised seed compost, we used ordinary compost leavened with a dose of vermiculite which we happened to have in stock. The seeds are some years old now and we have had them in stock for some time so we have not lost anything if they fail to germinate. But if they do, we ought to have a supply of foxglove, sweet peas, hollyhocks and others whose name I have forgotten. We happened to have in stock some lightweight seed trays with attendant plastic covers ( a little like a mini-cloche) and we now have 3-4 stored away safely in our airing room (to assist germination) before we will bring them downstairs and outsides to encourage them to ‘harden off’ (if any germinate, that is).

In the late afternoon, I turned my attention to tidying up the neglected corner of ‘Mog’s Den‘ in the garden. But a word of explanation is in order to understand what is going on. Right at the edge of our formal garden there is a sharply sloping bank of hitherto neglected land (I think it was neglected because in formal terms it lay between our formal boundary and a stock fence erected by the owner of the field which used to adjoin our garden) When we moved into the house 12 years ago, this area was full of 5-6 ft high nettles, brambles, holly, ivy and goodness knows what else. I have gradually reclaimed this space (now legally ours) and converted some of it into a woodland garden, complete with a slate path, forest bark to cover the slopes and shade-loving ever-green plants like Skimmia and a couple of fruit trees. But I did have an area upon which I had constructed a knee-high work area with some paving slabs- in the past, I had used to organise some cuttings but it was full of a great deal of clutter which included bags of compost, topsoil, my own sieved soil, spare sand, slate, buckets and containers of every description not to mention a mini-greenhouse with creosote, gardening implements, gloves, knives, string, scissors, plant ties. With a certain amount of neglect and the combined effects of wind and rain playing havoc, then the whole area had become a right mess and needed a good tidying up (to put it mildly) However after an hour and a half of sorting out, throwing away and relocation I had restored a degree of order to the whole so it is now looking a bit more shape-shape. I have set myself a mini-project of constructing a little curving path up a slope to my storage area beyond the fence. Some time ago in Poundland, I had invested in some little lattice arrangements of wood being sold off for £1 (I think to put plant pots and the like) but I think I can utilise them for a somewhat different purpose and use them to construct the steps for my path. I suspect I will going to do some sawing to construct a series of little pegs in order to construct a curve. Mind you, I often think that instead of opting for a mathematical precision, it is better to judge things by eye as it is the overall impression that counts in the end (and one doesn’t have to be too perfectionist about it after all!)

Another bright day with the weather set fair for a few days more. Actually, I wouldn’t mind if we had one or two really intense rain showers as the gardens are looking pretty dry at the moment. Having just ordered a Hornbeam tree for myself, I know that smaller varieties of this tree are often used as a hedging plant, the reason being that although it is fairly similar to beech, it keeps its leaves right throughout the winter, even though they have turned brown. Therefore the hedge functions as a hedge i.e. as a barrier either in the summer or the winter, even though it is not an evergreen. Having read about this characteristic, I am pretty sure I have seen one or two examples of it in neighbours’ gardens as I walk down the hill so I am making a mental note of the houses and their numbers so that I can confirm my hunches when I next see the occupants. Today, I have succeeded in doing something which has eluded me for the last 60 days of lockdown and daily walk – i.e. I have spilled an entire cup of coffee into my rucksack, as I sat juggling diverse flasks, cups, biscuit containers on my knees. Fortunately, I had plenty of kitchen paper to help to mop up the contents – maybe, I should try a different way of drinking my coffee tomorrow and in the future. There seemed to be a lot of children in the park today, mainly on their scooters, bikes (but no hobby horses). When we returned home, we had a ‘free’ lunch, courtesy of Waitrose – I had ordered some cod fillets in my ‘Click and Collect‘ but as these were within one day of their sell-by date, Waitrose supplied them to us gratis which was very ethical of them. I supplemented the parsley sauce that I had with some fresh parley which we just happen to have growing in an odd corner of the garden.

Just before I went out to do my weekly ‘mowing’. I received a phone call from the son of my deceased friend, Clive. He was phoning to ensure that I had all of the details for the funeral on Tuesday next. Having got a relevant email address, I can now forward the link to the video clip of Clive playing his trumpet at our 50th wedding anniversary celebrations so the family will have another clip to add to their collection. As we suspected, Clive had gone downhill extremely rapidly in the last few days so I am delighted that we managed to make a farewell wave to him whilst he could still recognise us before the very end. My mowing was extended a little as I ran the petrol mower over my neighbour’s front lawn as she has not been feeling too well recently and I thought this might give her a bit of a helping help before our gardeners return. I couldn’t bear to watch the Downing Street briefing this evening as the evasion displayed by the politicians is starting to get to me a bit – interesting how the graph showing international comparisons has suddenly disappeared now that it is evident that we have fared the worst of all the European nations in coping with the crisis.

Two or three little snippets of COVID-19 news that came into prominence today. Firstly, it appears that the rate of infection amongst children is just about the same as the rest of the population. Secondly, obesity and associated diabetes is now an extremely influential factor,  being displayed in a quarter of all deaths. And thirdly, the ‘R’ factor (rate of infection) seems to be getting closer to 1.0 as one approaches the deprived areas of the North East of England – which gives one food for thought.