This morning, for the first time in ages and ages, it did not rain.
I woke up, albeit rather later than I might have liked, to blue skies and a blustery little breeze, and bounded out of bed to get the washing on and to take the dogs out.
We had a very splendidly sunny walk over the fell.
I was rushing, because I wanted to get some outside things done, and sunshine is something of a novelty in the Lake District at the moment.
The sun was still beaming down when I got back, and so I filled the wheelbarrow and trundled it around to the front of the house.
I was getting the front garden ready for the winter.
One of Mark’s mother’s friends has horses, and whilst Mark was home last time he very kindly made a couple of expeditions up to her stables and brought home ten sacks of horse dung.
You may laugh, but that was exactly why I fell for him in the first place. He had just been another taxi driver until he found out that I was an obsessive vegetable gardener in my spare time, and then one day he turned up at my house with a whole trailer load of well-rotted cow manure and a wheelbarrow.
Readers, from that moment there could have been no other outcome. I was enchanted.
It had a similar effect this time, actually. I was very pleased indeed and let him take me out for dinner.
Obviously he had to go offshore after that, but he left me with the sacks of horse dung by which I might remember him.
Today it was not raining, and I got the wheelbarrow out.
I had mulched the front garden quite hard. We learned to do this in France, where summers are long and dry. You dig everything in and then mulch with a really thick layer of something, anything really, as long as it isn’t going to set seed. Cardboard is better than nothing. Cardboard and grass clippings are ace.
We had bought mulch, because we are too idle to cut and stack grass to rot down, and today I scraped it all off the beds so that I could get to the soil underneath, which was dark and crumbly and full of worms. Lots of things are growing very nicely now, the garden is looking brilliant.
I had also bought bulbs. I have bought daffodils and hyacinths and snowdrops and crocuses and English bluebells. The snowdrops have not turned up yet, but I couldn’t wait any longer.
I planted them all in – all two hundred of them – and then shovelled a top dressing of muck over it all. This is one short sentence but took absolutely ages. Sacks of wet muck are very heavy indeed, and it all took a very lot of shovelling and spreading and digging in. Then I spread the mulch back over the top and added some more just to be sure.
When I had finished it all looked ace, as if I had covered everywhere with a thick brown blanket, ready for the winter. I had saved some muck for the back garden and spread that as well. Then I dumped the last of it in the flower beds in the conservatory. It is a long time since I have put any decent dressing on them, and I could practically hear them sighing gratefully.
It had started to rain long before I had finished, and by the end I was both sodden and filthy, by which I mean really filthy. Really, really filthy. I had borrowed a pair of Mark’s shorts, which I had had to tie up with string, and they were covered in horse poo, which was running in little grimy rivulets down my legs. My arms were poo-coloured right up to my armpits, and even though I had worn gloves my hands were so dirty that I had to wash the door handle after I came in.
Also there was poo everywhere. It was all over the conservatory, and I had helped the decor along by refilling the fireplace with several armloads of wood, leaving a mixture of sawdust-and-dung footprints in my wake.
I peeled my clothes off where I was, in the conservatory, and abandoned them to hum on the floor. Then I scrubbed myself clean at the kitchen sink and set to clearing up the mess, which took some time, I can tell you.
It took ages because I think I am too old for lugging heavy wet sacks about, and something in my back had made a bit of a ping. Actually it was a feeling a bit like the one you get when the dentist accidentally injects into a nerve. Fortunately I had almost finished by then, but it slowed the rest of the operation down a bit, and is still reminding me of its presence even now, here on the taxi rank.
Oliver came down to get himself ready for work, and I told him all about it, but he was not interested in old-person backache, I will have to call Elspeth if I want to talk about ailments.
It is done, apart from the snowdrops, which can just be shoved in when they turn up. The garden is ready for the winter, and the conservatory smells faintly rural, which I quite like, although will probably not eat my breakfast in there for a while.
We are going to have a lot of flowers in the springtime.
I am feeling very pleased.
