June-ish!

I'm feeling all timeline-y today.

I allowed myself to read for an hour this morning. (I felt really guilty and lazy and like 'this is the sort of thing one is only allowed to do on holiday' and then remembered that we haven't had a holiday for 8 years so prayed that no strange people with weird ideas about what time of day one should be allowed an hour of reading would ever find out and send me to not-the-done-thing prison )

I then did some punishing yoga stretches to hurt the lazy, reading bitch

Then I played the flute because equilibrium had been reached.

Then, whilst showering, etc, I got totally sucked into a Radio 4 programme called Sniffing Out Danger all about the sense of smell. It was totally fascinating. You wouldn't think so, would you? It's so much better not knowing what's on and just being pleasantly surprised.

Whilst doing the washing and getting ready to go to the garden centre (everyone gets ready to go to the garden centre, yes?) I got sucked into another radio 4 programme about mental illness. ( I hate the blanket term "mental illness" being used for an enormous, complicated, varied plethora of conditions, and individual states of being. It's something I've been thinking about a lot recently.)

Rich and I went for lunch at the garden centre, and to buy wild bird food and veggie plot frames (or whatever they are called). We're finally getting to grips with the garden we inherited with the house (that sounds wrong - we didn't inherit a house and garden! ) and making it our own. I thought it was too late to start a veg garden this year but I've done a bit of research this afternoon and there's loads we can still sow. LOADS I tell 'ee! We got our composting sorted out a couple of weeks ago and are virtually ready to host Gardener's World.

I gave the hedge I'm trying to grow at the front of our house a haircut and then gave myself backache doing my slow, sympathetic, nature-friendly weeding in the back garden whilst Tess played schools (after school), made up a dance-routine on the trampoline (for me to keep stopping to watch), and we had slightly disturbing conversations about electric shocks, the electric chair and the danger of being a woodlouse.

After making a cracking omelette (Comedy Roadshow here I come!). I helped Tess plant out her young sunflower plant that she'd brought home from school - and we added some other "hot" smiley plants to keep it company.

Then Tess swept up. For 1 minute.

Then I swept up. For 15 minutes. Nice new dustpan and wooden brush though (see photo). I think I enjoyed the thrill of my new dustpan a little too much. I'm finding being in my early forties and getting excited about gardening and having a decent brush to sweep up with a lot more thrilling than being young and thinking I have to get excited about shoes. Shoes don't DO anything.

I finally came in at 8pm to read with Tess and turn yesterday's roast chicken into a thai curry for me and Rich.

Richard and most of the rest of the country have been watching the football tonight (if the Internet's anything to go by). I am incapable of watching it. It seems to fill me with too many questions and frustrations about human behaviour.

Throughout all this outdoors, garden excitement I picked up my camera regularly and enjoyed the June-ish Juneness and buzzing bee-ness of an English garden in June. You can't beat it. You really can't.



As an ex-neighbour of ours once said: as you get older you get into God, or golf, or gardening.


Did I go on a bit...?