Teasel in bloom

The pale lilac florets of the teasels are just opening. They never emerge all at once: the colour slowly travels up and around the spiky head, attracting bees, hoverflies and other insects. It was another grey, cloudy day, but there will be more photo opportunities for these, especially as I'm not getting out much at present.

It was a rather frustrating day. The plumber arrived as promised, but the leaking heating pump has more serious, and therefore expensive, problems than we had imagined. The everyday necessities of showering, feeding and generally supporting J seemed to swallow up most of the day, so I didn't feel I achieved much. I need to keep reminding myself that supporting her 24/7 while her both PAs are on holiday is not "getting nothing done", and that for the next couple of weeks it's my most important task. It's not that I dislike doing it, I would happily help her with animation, social media posts and art talk preparation all day, but I just can't stop fretting about the mess in the house and garden and the lists of emails I haven't written. I should also remind myself that, for a variety of reasons, I haven't tried very hard to recruit more PAs over the past year, which is why we have no holiday cover when M and S unavoidably need to be away at the same time.

I decided I needed some reasonably light reading, something easy to escape into late at night or in brief moments, so ordered four second hand books on a four for three offer - two more Tracy Chevalier novels and two Joanne Harris ones, the third and fourth in the Chocolat series. I may need to ration my consumption of them, but they should be fun and absorbing, something small to look forward to.