"All my own work ..."

Today - whisper it - felt like summer. Not, maybe, in the morning, but as the day went on I began to hope. I wasn't very brisk first thing - we were awful late in bed last night - so breakfast segued into coffee and then I was off to walk down to Paddy's for my painting class. My fellow-pupils and I felt we were surrounded by dogs - I we really only needed the fat bulls of Bashan to join the party - as Paddy's dog-sitting, but two of us finished the landscapes we've been working on for some time and they remain only to be varnished. The photo has them being shown off by the hairier of the two small dogs (the collie had gone romping off at this point) and it was the expression on the wee dog's face that prompted this particular photo. We talked a great deal in the course of the class, in two languages because the only chap there is southern French (think flattened vowel sounds that bear no resemblance to what you learned at school). I had the company of the teacher and the collie on my walk home via the shop to pick up some salad things, talking all the way; my lunch didn't happen till after 2pm.

By now the sun was fully out and Himself had begun the horrid task of clearing out the storage bin in the drive-in, a wooden structure with a heavy lid that needs propping up on a stick to avoid decapitation. It was full of cobwebs and desiccated woodlice as well as some dangling, white blobs - a bit like Shelob's lair, if you're familiar with Tolkien. We extricated all the ancient, not-quite-empty tins of paint (kept "just in case" and never used) along with several redundant car cleaning substances and Himself took them to the tip while I dealt with the cobwebs. Tomorrow the garden shed ...

Before dinner we went up to the church to deposit some unbleached beeswax candles that we've had for 50 years (don't ask) and the keys I used to entertain the film crew the other day, so dinner was also a tad late and was the very first salad of the summer, with chicken and new potatoes, as the sun shone on the white of the philadelphus (intoxicating scent) and the bright orange of the lilies just outside. And we finished off with mini figs in spiced syrup ...Sybaritic? Moi?