Digging

Sounds like my son, J in Worthing is going to have to take some advice and lessons from his sister Kate on how to grow one's own food and perhaps even buy a lamb from her and keep it in the backyard.

Mr Raab was today detailing all those little things that could just be a little troublesome on 1st April 2019 when the UK leaves the EU. Only 24 of the 84 "position" papers were released today, I hope the "Dig for Britain" one will come before autumn arrives and everyone snugs up around the hearth to look through the coming year's seed catalogue and send off their orders.

In the morning, I started digging up my potatoes in the vegetable plot. I wasn't too sure what to expect as I have never grown any here and had only spontaneously sown some when I saw the last of a bag of potatoes in the house were sprouting. I think I only planted 10 and I know in retrospect that I should have been a little slower in heaping them up.

I was though delighted when the first ones appeared but then horribly dismayed to see that Mr Mole had been there first. (Evidence Extra Photo). He seems to like my carrots and potatoes. Not quite halfway through the row when we had a rain shower and digging was abandoned. Sun later came out and I could have finished the job but had moved on to other matters - repairing our emergency petrol driven electricity generator.  Going to be a hard winter...... my mullein has told me so.

After another scorching midday and afternoon, the skies turned black around 18:00 and a non-stop roaring of thunder could be heard approaching. And the heavens opened with hail and around 25 litres of rain in under an hour. Good for nature and although it will clear away the extreme heat, I'm not too keen on the temperatures staying in the teens this weekend before it warms up again.

Angie was off for a night out with family and so after all the sound of thunder was gone, I eventually took off with Luna at 19:44 to do a walk around the fields and into the village. Dressed in Wellies for the first time in months, found the fields were bone dry. In the Blip, Luna searching for mice on the field opposite the house and in the shadow cast by our trees. Lui our cat was also on the field looking for something edible to play with. Ahead the sun was coming out gradually and it turned into a very pleasant walk and one could see the distant flashes of lightning strikes all along the Alps from Switzerland to Salzburg.

It was my first longish walk in years, ever since Flash was only able to do short ones. I smiled several times but also had moments of moist eyes as part of the walk was along a section that had become his standard walk in the last year and where he had often struggled.

It tried drizzling for the last 10 minutes and although only 20:30, it was getting dark. I guess we slowly have to consider that autumn is not far away. Eventually got to think about dinner but knew there was a large portion of lasagne left-over from one I made the day before using as much as possible from the garden which was only carrots and huge courgettes. However, I fancied a starter and was avidly peeling cucumbers and blitzing (the Jamie Oliver expression, Blitz meaning Flash) them with Turkish yoghurt, garden-fresh dill and estragon, olive oil, onion, garlic and lemon juice when I heard just a snippet of the 22:00 Bavarian radio news (equivalent to BBC) and realised the item was about Brexit. German TV and radio seldom report on any Brexit issues, I doubt there is a report a month.

Only later, after I had consumed a bowl of my cool (but sadly not chilled) cucumber soup, did I get to see the 11:00 pm SkyNews and the reason for the Bavarian coverage.

What a bunch of incompetent, nasty scheming, malicious scum are running the UK. Trump makes no secret about his lying bigotry but the UK politicians claim the higher moral ground. What a farce when the "Brexit is easy" mob are doing a better job of spreading fear than the "Operation Fear" bunch did in 2016.

I have lost well over €50,000 of UK savings value in the time since Cameron announced the referendum in February 2016, solely on the £/€ exchange rate. And now I am being told that as a British citizen, I may well no longer have access to my UK bank account, savings, investments, private and state pension. I wonder how many UK nationals offered positions by their UK companies to work in Europe and push through the "shackles-free" post-Brexit UK export drive, will be taking up the offers?

I hope the whole bunch of them are digging a very big communal hole for themselves to lay down in. I suspect they will be hoping for the tile of the hole to include the word "Unknown" for fear of their children and grandchildren finding out they were part of this mess.