Changeable ...

A sunny afternoon and the realisation that we spend far too much time walking and not enough taming the garden had us settling for an afternoon of horticultural salvage today. I was on a garden chair pulling out strands of ivy from a small fence we had constructed above our boundary wall to support that plant that some day may reward us with purple trailing blooms but right now just grows tendrils and gets tangled with the ivy I was attempting to remove. It's so powerful, this ivy, that it had begun to force one of the planks in the fence off the support - and getting it out has left me with an agonising left thumb but the satisfaction of knowing that soon there will be tell-tale dead bits after I've hacked the main stem on which they depend. This had me contemplating both today's gospel and my pal's sermon on it - if you're a pisky you'll be well into the merits of pruning today.

Anyway, I pottered off down the lane to see how far a friend had pruned back her trailing whatsit with the purple blooms (hers flowers, beautifully) and clocked that all was not as tranquil as I was thinking. I'd been so sheltered in my small corner, lulled into thinking I might take a little seat in the sun as a reward for my labours, that I'd not noticed the sky to the north, looming purple over the hills.

It rained for a bit out of that gloom, before the evening cleared and was sunny again. But it felt like winter again. Perishing. And us with the summer duvet on the bed ...