Getting preprandial with privet

The brilliant forecast for this weekend turned into a gorgeous reality, and after months of being cooped up in the house and the almost endless decorating it was good to be outside, making a start with the traditional first gardening jobs of Spring.

But our small lawn takes less than 15 minute to mow, so it wasn't long before I was casting around for something else to do.

The remnants of next door's raspberry canes were starting to make themselves known again around the roots of our copper beech hedge, in various parts of the border, and popping up in the middle of the lawn, so I spent an hour or so trying to tease their roots out from around all the other roots. I managed accidentally to bring up a chunk of the lupin that had become totally enveloped by raspberry tendrils, but 80% of the lupin remained, so not too much damage done.

I was in the mood for a larger challenge than this though. Like digging up the privet in the front garden. I'd cut this back in late summer last year as it was up to about 15 feet, and starving all the trees of light. Cutting them back revealed the size of the main stumps. Comparing them to the trunks that I'd helped my Dad pull out of the front garden in Nottingham 30 years ago, I reckon that hedge must have been there as long as the house. But, you know, privet? It's a bit 1950s isn't it? So we wanted rid.

I didn't feel like breaking my back on the privet trunks back then, but I was up for the task now. It's funny how those jobs that you dread tackling, and put off for the longest time, usually turn out to be nowhere near as bad as you expect. The first three stumps were so shallowly rooted that all I had to do was grab them and pull, and they came up in my hand. Admittedly it began to get tougher after that. The further away the privet stretched towards the road, the deeper the soil in the bed, and consequently the deeper the roots. Some of them even headed off under the wall, requiring the application of a bow saw.

Even so the whole job took a lot less time than I'd expected, and left behind quite a wide bed, filled with lovely rich loam, that I'll be able to fill with some nice dwarf rhododendrons once I've dug in a few bags of peat.

First Scrape

It was a bit of a shock to have to scrape the car on the first frosty morning of the season last Thursday, but even worse this morning as temperatures hit -2°C and the scraping was correspondingly more vigorous and knuckle-numbing.

There's only been a few years of my life (I could probably work it out exactly... hang on... *stares at fingers* ... 7) when I've enjoyed the luxury of a garaged car in the winter (and then only after a massive clearout and shelf- and wood store-building operation) and the benefits of that luxury were more than outweighed by the drawbacks in the end (!) but on mornings like this I must admit that a small part of me hankers after structural automotive protection of some kind. Even a car port would be enough to keep the frost off. Probably.

Seasonal bombardment

This year will go down in my memory as the year online retailers finally caught on to the use of email to whip up business. I'd already done my Christmas shopping (almost all of it online) by the end of November, but back then things had hardly even got warmed up in terms of emails. Guess I can't call them spam, because I signed up to them when I joined, or used, the sites, but damn there's a lot of them!

During December I've been getting at least one per day from
amazon.com
play.com
ebay
hmv.com
the PlayStation Store
Xbox Europe
thorntons
iwantoneofthose.com

not to mention all the usual stuff inviting me to "review my shopping experience" and the odd seasonal message from other retailers - like the local garden centre - we've used during the year. It's going to feel really quiet in my inbox once all this dies down. Unless they're just as keen to drag me back for the January sales! ;o)

One downside to shopping early is that I've missed out on some deals, but that's always a balancing act even with traditional B&M shopping. On the high street some places have been offering 50% discounts, or better, in the week before Christmas. Personally I'd rather be sure I've got everything covered, and it's all been delivered, in time for a leisurely wrapping experience in the few days before the main event. This year especially, with the weather causing major disruption to deliveries, I've been grateful for putting my innate procrastination to one side where gift buying was concerned.

So now it's looking quite festive under the small tree in the lounge. Everything's done - apart from cooking the bird - and it only remains for me to crack open the wine, light the fire, and wish all my readers a very happy Christmas and a peaceful, prosperous and successful New Year. May 2010 be the year everyone stops referring to the date as "two-thousand-and-something."

Cheers!

Tis the season...

Well the best laid plans did indeed gang awry this week, as the tree stood bare in the hall day after day, its decoration slipping backward in the priorities until we reached the point of no return - today: the day of our mulled wine party.

After a fairly relaxed start we set off for Homebase to get a few extras - candles for the house, a few extra decorations, that kind of thing. Our flabber was totally gasted when we pulled up at White City retail park to find the shutters down and the Homebase warehouse totally deserted. It's closed down! Luckily B&Q (Home Depot for my North American readers) is just around the corner, and proved to have an adequate supply of goodies. More than adequate actually. What we'd really gone out for were curtain poles for the study. What we came back with were three wise men fetchingly rendered in polymer resin, three lengths of tinsel and a pot of three candles.

It was down to business once we returned home, and after spending a little over two hours decorating to the sound of Christmas tunes, the tree was looking fabulous. Even better, if I may say, than last year. But there was no time for idling - we had holly garland to thread up the banister, lounge and conservatory decorations to hang, cleaning and tidying, and sorting out the party music to attend to.

So here we are at a little after 6pm, with everything done. Now all that's left to do is shower, shave, change, eat, and await our guests!

The day dawns dark

There's a day every year that I really don't look forward to, and it's always a Monday. To be precise, it's the Monday after the Friday you got up when it was already daylight, but during the weekend something happens so that when you wake up on that particular Monday, it's still dark.

That, for me, irrespective of the actual date, is when autumn starts. And it was today.

True, the darkness had some help today from two quarters. Firstly, unlike most Monday mornings where we're quite content to hunker down under the covers and listen to the radio before deciding we *really* can't leave it any longer, this particular morning we both leapt out of bed on the dot of 6.30. And secondly Manchester was living up to its reputation as the Rainy City and was sitting under a blanket of thick black cloud that was busily dumping its load on the early risers.

It was black. Autumn is here.