A blog from the garden

It has been a busy week, extra days at work, hospital visit for a check up and the wonderful news that I have lost 15lbs:3ozs and kept it down; major high. All in all I was glad to see the end of the week and looked forward to Friday immensely. Friends came for supper, and my great plan to dine al fresco came to naught - the mist rolled in from the sea, and you couldn't even see the garden gate! The upside and the downside of a heat wave. Brilliant temperatures, and rolling sea-fog. So, windows opened to the sound of the fog horns from the Bay, we dined indoors and had a hoot. Good company is a blessing from God and before we knew it the hours from eight to three in the morning had flown by and we never felt their passing.

I was up bright and early, despite the lateness of the hour when we retired, and after watching Edward Petherbridge as Lord Peter Wimsey in "Gaudy Night" [Dorothy L Sayers}, I was busy catching up on laundry and other household chores. There is something very satisfying about seeing a clothesline blowing in the breeze full of fresh clean linen. I brought the laptop into the garden in the afternoon, and after a refreshing cuppa decided to blog from the garden...however, the best laid plans of mice, men and this blogger are always a floating issue. Not one but two daughters decided to arrive - just in case you were lonely Mam. Mentally I wailed that I wanted to grab this rare opportunity to sit in brilliant sunshine, shaded by an umbrella advertising a nation's favourite drink (!) and blog about the collar doves racing each other around the leylandii in next doors garden, the enormous bumble-bee that had a face off with a dunnock on a cherry tree branch...and yet I was delighted that they had come to see me. Who knows, this time next year we might all be leading different lives, so grab your graces when they come as my paternal Grandmother used to exclaim - and rightly so.

The ladies stayed to dinner, OH headed off to work and I cleaned up...God bless the dishwasher, a mother's greatest asset. We did manage to dine al fresco this time and it was heavenly. The Collar doves cooed, the Dunnocks sang their cheery song and a nosey Robin decided that this al fresco lark was wonderful, all those crumbs, and look, some generous human has decided to throw me tid-bits. All quiet at eight o'clock I rambled down the garden and sat under an elderberry tree. We have recently reclaimed this area from the gorse and general scrub and I love it. As a child we used to have picnic tea's out here. We had the idea, my childhood friends and I, that we were the Secret Seven, The Famous Five, and we would head off with bottles of cold tea, apples, cold sausage sandwiches and a slice of gur cake each. An old blanket thrown down and we would idle the hours planning what we would do, when we grew up; we solved mysteries. Big mysteries such as Why Did Beatrix Potter write about rabbits in her garden when we didn't have any in ours. I wonder did we ever think that a preponderance of foxes might have had something to do with this lack of bunny habitation? We trawled through Bunty, Judy, The Beano, The Dandy, The Hotspur and other publications, "swappies" was the order of the day, and we swapped for all we were worth. The Wolf of Kabul was my particular favourite. Oh yes, you guess correctly, I was a tomboy. Happier hanging out of a tree than playing with tea sets. If Mum could see me now, afternoon tea on the lawn with the pals during the week. She did say it would happen, I laughed...I can hear a ghostly chuckle even now. You haven't lived until you have bitten into a batch loaf bread sausage sandwich and a green apple and washed it down with cold tea from a Fanta bottle. Sheer heaven.

I digress, typical me, I sat under the elderberry until the sun sank in the west. One thing to be said for the Eya...whatsit volcano, the sunsets are pure Turner and breath-taking. I sat on in the dusk until every last bird had gone to sleep. The song Thrush had entertained me with his "Dia Dhuit" [deeya-gwit] obviously an Irish singing bird, the layering started after that with the blackbird up in the Douglas Fir seranading the sunset and the robins, dunnocks and indeed the bullfinches adding their chorus to it. The Sunset Opera, fabulous!

This morning back out at nine, papers in hand, breakfast on the back patio, tempramental sunshine, fog horns in the distance, birdsong aplenty and the smells of lilac, apple blossom wafting past, enhanced by gillyflowers [wallflowers]. The tulips I planted last autumn are eyecatching and the front lawn is showered like a bride with the confetti of cherry blossom. I have lilac all around the house in vases, even an old tea-pot. There is something very gentle about lilac, relaxing. The phone rings and I am too lazy to answer it; who would want to break the magic spell a springtime garden binds us with. I am far more interested in watching a ladybird explore a leaf!