We are promised a few days of fine weather, after which no doubt autumn will commence. Today was another fine and bright day, albeit a trifle windy. We were delighted to see our mother duck was leading out her band of seven ducklings onto dry land for an excursion so several of us captured the event on our mobile phones. In the midst of all of this, we were especially pleased to see our friend Julie who had bought Meg one of her favourite pastries from Waitrose (of which she has been deprived for the last seven weeks) so she enjoyed a delicious coffee break. Having said that, our sojourn on the park bench is always a perilous affair as I have to ensure that nothing touches the hard surface of the park bench (lest it is virus-laden) So we have to balance my rucksack on one knee whilst simultaneously unscrewing the cap of our coffee flask and pouring out its contents single-handed – and then we have our oatmeal biscuits to be extracted from their plastic container. Still, you get used to any manouvre in time. Julie was greeted by a near neighbour and we were saying to each other that never had we realised that there were so many footpaths to be explored, not to mention the park itself whose charms were very much under-appreciated when we used to walk straight on past each day.
This afternoon was very much a gardening afternoon and a typical spring-time clearing task at that. There really is no substitute for getting down on your hands and knees and tackling the weeding head-on. My particular task is to clean out a gully by the side of our communal grassed area and this is always completely overgrown with a combination of couch grass, dandelions, ivy, nettles and a variety of other weeds that I cannot begin to describe. The only way to tackle the job is to cut a section of the overhanging grass about a yard at a time and then clear the gully in about two-feet sections with specially ‘grippy’ gardening gloves that pull out the unwanted growth before cutting the grass again. Although this sounds long-winded and tedious (which it is) at least if you get on top of it in April then the task for the maintenance for the rest of the gardening year becomes somewhat easier. To make matters worse, my task was not supervised by our adopted cat, Miggles, about whom there is speculation in the house that she may be pregnant. I’m not too sure but if you are an avid reader of my ‘Virtually Challenged Anecdotes’ you will realise that I have yet to perfect my skills in performing gynaecological type operations on the cats of neighbours (see VCA No. 29 at the start of the blog website for full details of my earlier career as a would-be surgeon)
This afternoon was very much a gardening afternoon and a typical spring-time clearing task at that. There really is no substitute for getting down on your hands and knees and tackling the weeding head-on. My particular task is to clean out a gully by the side of our communal grassed area and this is always completely overgrown with a combination of couch grass, dandelions, ivy, nettles and a variety of other weeds that I cannot begin to describe. The only way to tackle the job is to cut a section of the overhanging grass about a yard at a time and then clear the gully in about two-feet sections with specially ‘grippy’ gardening gloves that pull out the unwanted growth before cutting the grass again. Although this sounds long-winded and tedious (which it is) at least if you get on top of it in April then the task for the maintenance for the rest of the gardening year becomes somewhat easier. To make matters worse, my task was not supervised by our adopted cat, Miggles, about whom there is speculation in the house that she may be pregnant. I’m not too sure but if you are an avid reader of my ‘Virtually Challenged Anecdotes’ you will realise that I have yet to perfect my skills in performing gynaecological type operations on the cats of neighbours (see VCA No. 29 at the start of the blog website for full details of my earlier career as a would-be surgeon)
Although I haven’t followed tonight’s COVID-19 news in any real detail, it appears that some of the more Republican elements of the USA are out on the streets (with the tacit support of their President, whose lockdown orders they are actually ignoring) demanding the freedom to go out and restart their economy. I suppose that in a rather grisly way, it will be a fascinating social experiment to see what the consequences of a too-early loosening of the lockout policy will prove to be. It always amazes me that ‘freedom‘ is one of the totemic rallying calls of the American population but the freedom to do what (carry guns? exploit your fellow citizens?) I can never actually discern.
On a technical computing note, I was quite pleased to be able to purchase yet a domain name at a specially cut-price (£0.99 + VAT) and then apply it to the text version of this blog which is now available as a continuous ‘stream’ at http://mch-blog.uk
© Mike Hart [2020]