Monday 28 July 2008

After the heat and dust

The Lovely Son came and went, moving heavy stuff for me, clearing jungle on the allotment, and leaving an amazing number of cups and mugs in his wake. He has pootled off back to London today, and has just rung to complain about the raging and airless heat there. Meanwhile, it is cool and grey here, with enough moisture in the air to make your hair frizz out and the washing to dry to the point of being "just right for ironing" as my mother used to say, but which I have no intention of doing.

I picked exactly 4 pounds of red gooseberries from the two tiny little plants that Beercan Alistair* gave me a couple of years ago; they are sweet and delicious, and if I had an ice cream maker, I would use them to make gooseberry and elderflower ice cream similar to the wonderful stuff we ate in Suffolk. And convert those four pounds into body fat. I spent hours yesterday with a fine needle, teasing tiny thorns out of my fingers, and dread the prospect of harvesting the hundreds of green gooseberries on the rather overgrown bush that is full to bursting. If the rest of the plot was as productive as the gooseberry bushes, I could be a prizewinner at that rather
weird allotment show held in the Civic Centre in September.

I am so-o-o-o-o tired. And the builders start work here on Thursday, not Friday. Will I survive? I must find out how to say in Polish "I am going for an afternoon sleep now; please carry on working, but without banging about".

*so called because he edges his flower beds with flattened beercans. An unusual aesthetic.

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