Oh, and by the way, are you laughing now?

Piglet's always been a strange dog; he views Life very seriously. He's never seen the point of toys (unlike Harry who adored toys) unless it was to take Harry's favourite toy to annoy him, or playing games for pleasure. The concept of 'fun' has passed him by, and he totally missed out on the sense of humour gene (which Harry had in spades and was one of the many traits that made him so endearing). Piglet's always been more self-sufficient and anxious; I can see many characteristics in him that, in a human, would suggest a degree of autism. However in the months that he's been an only dog he's started to choose to be around us and seek our attention much more, which is nice.

Because he's never bothered about playing with our other dogs he's also never wanted to interact with dogs that we meet when we're out. He likes to ignore them if he can - he'd rather they didn't come too close unless he's met them amicably several times; if a strange dog pulls towards him he'll lunge and snap to drive it away. There were a couple of tricky moments at Cropredy when he felt pressured by dogs coming close (in a very crowded pub, for example), especially if they reminded him of dogs he knows he doesn't like (collies - they stare - and very hairy dogs mainly). However at Cropredy he also displayed a behaviour we've never witnessed before. As we were walking along past dogs of various shapes and sizes which were glanced at and ignored we saw another dalmatian; the first he's seen since Beattie left us. Piglet's ears pricked up, his tail started wagging and he pulled me towards it, squeaking with excitement. When we got close he knew it wasn't Harry or Beattie, but he was still keen to be sociable. His reaction brought tears of sympathy for his obvious loneliness; perhaps we ought to get another one sooner rather than later.

It was his and Harry's 11th birthday yesterday.

Watching flowers in the rain

Some people like gladioli, some people like dahlias. I like lilies, and they've been quite successful this year. I bought a few cheap bulbs from a DIY shop, not expecting great results, so was pleasantly surprised by the size and quality of the flowers that were produced - and they're sweetly scented to boot. This white one bloomed a few weeks ago and we could enjoy the scent when we sat outdoors.



This pink one is flowering at the moment, so I've brought it indoors where it's scenting the sitting room, and not being rained on.



There's another one (of a totally different variety that has much smaller, unscented flowers) that's been living outdoors for donkey's years, and is still managing to bloom each year despite the onslaught of the horrid lily beetles (which at least have the courtesy of being bright red so you can pick them off and squish them), which has the curious habit of producing little bulbils on the stem, which produce leaves and roots while still attached to the parent plant.



These bulbils can be picked off carefully



and potted on to eventually reach flowering size. Not wanting to count chickens but with luck I'll have a lily-beetle banquet in a few years.

She'll put a spell on you

"When shall we three meet again?" "Well, I can manage next Thursday." I think I'm being invaded by witches. Yesterday when I was locking up to go to work I found this little character on the back step trying to get in



Then in the evening when I was telling Ned about it a black cat strolled nonchalantly down the hallway and appeared in the kitchen, and was hastened out of the back door (rather faster than I imagine it had entered!) before Piglet woke up; the mess that would have caused doesn't bear thinking about! Goodness knows how long it had been in the house, but it was one familiar too far. They say black cats are lucky - that one certainly was, to have visited our house and left unscathed.

At a bar called O'Malley's

In the past I've often tried growing a pineapple plant from the tufty leaves at the top of a bought fruit, but never succeeded. However our latest attempt seems to have been successful!



As you can see it's already slipping baby plants, which we might try snapping off and growing on when they get large enough.

I know that they used to be grown in the 'big houses' but I assumed that you'd need a hothouse if they were to fruit. But then we came across this site where a chap from Surrey has catalogued his endeavours, which has given us hope that it might, just might, eventually bear fruit.

We're not holding our breath though!

"Whatever happened to my Transylvania twist?"

This year, as well as growing them in the ground, I've been experimenting with growing potatoes in containers. The reasons are numerous: you can grow more without having to dig, the compost is clean so the risk of blight is minimised, and because the containers are moveable they can be grown in otherwise idle corners. This year my containers have been of the cheap-and-cheerful variety; I bought some growbags, cut off one end and emptied the compost into a spare bag. I then turned the growbag inside out so that the black side was outside in order to let the compost warm up quicker (and it looks tidier). I rolled the open end of the bag down, punched a few drainage holes in the bag and added a small layer of stones for additional drainage. A six-inch layer of compost was replaced and a couple of sprouting potatoes placed on top and covered with compost.

As the potato plants grew they were earthed up and the top of the bag unrolled a bit to give more depth. They're very thirsty plants with all that top growth to maintain as well as growing tubers underground, but they don't like boggy conditions, hence the drainage at the bottom. Anyway one day after they'd flowered (and I needed some potatoes for supper) I thought the time had come to empty one bag and see how they were doing.

There was a lot of top growth



and a fair amount of success was evident.



Okay, so the local greengrocer isn't going to lose any sleep over the threat to his business, but they were fresh, organic and delicious.

Please release me, let me go

I'm very annoyed. In fact I'm more than annoyed, I'm very very cross and fed up. Yesterday I was silly and clicked on the Friend Finder application on Farcebook. I know, I know, you should never click on anything on the right hand side, but I believed its lies about which of my friends had used it, and now all my real friends are going to get the spam emails like Ned's had in the past about how X, Y and Z are suggesting he joins Farcebook himself. Seeing that some of the invites have been from me, and I haven't sent them, I know it's all spam.

But worse than that I now can't fully sign out of Windows Live after using my email account. All the Hotmail accounts on this computer, even ones that Farcebook haven't heard of, give the same message after signing out - that it's failed to log out of the following site: h ttps://ssl.facebook. com/accept_token. php (I've put in a few spaces to try to stop it making a link). When I paste that into google I find it's been happening for years, with various suggestions of what to do to fix it. The ones that aren't too complicated for me to understand are clearing cookies (done, no effect) and contacting Windows live help (done, no answer).

Does anyone else have any ideas? I'm really not happy.

I'll bet you think this song is about you

It must be ... ooh, two or three years ago I bought an apricot whip (that's a baby tree, by the way) that was guaranteed to fruit in the second year after purchase. Duly, in its first season it grew but didn't flower. Last year it flowered, but we had late frosts and no fruit resulted. This year it had plenty of blossom



but despite my best efforts with the pollinating brush and throwing bees at it only one fruit developed. This was nurtured; the tree, still in a pot, fed and watered copiously to encourage it to ripe fruition. This baby fruit was cherished and admired, and woe betide anyone who did anything to hinder its development. It swelled satisfyingly and the heat of the past few weeks blushed its cheeks to a delicate pink.



Then yesterday it fell from the tree in its ripe perfection. It was carried indoors in triumph and reventially halved and shared. The verdict? I have never sampled any fruit so sublime. Juicy and sweet and warm, like no other apricot can ever have tasted. Perfection. :)

She could clean the house for hours or rearrange the flowers

At last someone's pointed me in the direction of the version I really love ...

Your sweet face seems to haunt my dreams

My 'lilium regale' has excelled itself this year; so many beautiful flowers and a fabulous scent.

Hear the dogs howling out of key

And they think this is 'home', do they?



Acksherly it could be worse



What's 'caching'?



I don't know what a durdle is, and there's no sign of a door anywhere.



A castle full of maidens? Where?



I could be asleep, you know.



Where did that fat bloke go?



So that's a holiday, is it? I wonder if I'll get my 5.30 am walk tomorrow.

And I will give to you summer wine

After the required 48 hours had passed I dutifully strained the elderflower cordial through muslin to remove all the flowers and lemon and decanted it into sterilised bottles.



I was rather surprised this morning to find that it's started fermenting, which isn't at all what I'd intended; my plan was to have a soft drink and not an alcoholic one! It's been put in the fridge to slow it down for the moment (I really don't need glass bottles exploding!) but the fridge isn't really very big, so that can only be a temporary measure. I don't really want to haul out a demijohn and all the winemaking paraphernalia to fail to make a drinkable wine. I might have to add a little vodka or gin to stop it, but again that rather defeats the object. Drat.

To adorn and perfume those sweet meadows in June.

I love this time of year. The honeysuckle's in full bloom



and filling the air with its sweet scent; it's especially lovely in the cool of the late evening, round about ten o'clock when it's not yet quite dark. It's a shame that it's determined to flower at the back of the trees and not the side facing the house, but there you go. The roses are glorious, as well as the lavender, although the philadelphus (the variety we grow smells exactly like Juicy Fruit chewing gum) is dropping its petals, like confetti in a churchyard after a wedding.

Following the blackthorn blossom of early April and the hawthorn (mayflowers) of May, where the hedges looked as though someone had thrown muslin curtains over them now in the hedgerows there are the wild dog roses - some white, some palest pink and some really quite determinedly rosy. Not forgetting, of course, the foamy umbrella flowers of elder with their cool scent,



so many this year that we decided to seize the moment and have a bash at making elderflower cordial; grown-up squash which is a delicious long drink, with ice, on a hot summer day.

We decided to use a recipe from a blog I regularly follow, called the Cottage Smallholder; a real feel-good site.

So we gathered together all the ingredients



and put them all together.



Now we wait for 48 hours before straining and bottling it. Fingers crossed it will be as good as I hope!

Sitting on a fence is a man who drinks real ale

So we took the rickety old fence away and wondered what would be the best replacement. With it open the garden looked bigger, but it made it easier for the local foxes to poo on the grass which isn't pleasant.



A hedge was a possibility but would mean I couldn't grown many flowers that I'd be able to see from the house. So a new fence was the best compromise - one that allowed more light to get the garden yet still gave us a bit of privacy.

The posts were duly concreted in (using markedly less concrete than the ones we removed!) last weekend, which meant that this weekend, weather permitting, we hoped to be able to finish it. The weather did indeed permit, so in the morning the rails were added to the posts




then in the afternoon the pales were nailed in place, and a great improvement it is too. A good day's work; now, where's that beer?

The football it has taken away the wee bit of sense he had

Let's get one thing clear from the outset: I'm the first person to admit that my knowledge of, and indeed interest in, football is slightly less than zero and I have absolutely no intention of changing that, no matter what tournament is being fought over played for. It's a tedious winter game with no summer respite, but thankfully our TV is allergic to it and is incapable of showing any, other than isolated incidents shown on the news. So that's good.

Okay, having made that clear I have a query. In the world cup match against the USA I gather that someone from the England team scored a goal early on, and that later on someone from the US team scored. So why is the England goalkeeper being blamed for the TEAM failure to win, when there were another 10 members of the team who had 75 minutes or so to score again? Why were the rest of the team not preventing the opposition getting the ball down to the England goal in the first place? Surely the goalkeeper is the last defender, not the only one.

When your feet just can't keep still

I thought a particular style of footwear was hideous the first time I clapped eyes on them a long time ago, and nothing in the intervening years has changed my mind on that point. But I thought that they might be useful for trudging across a dew-soaked campsite at first light rather than donning wellies, so I tried on a pair in the shop (as well as you can try on shoes that are fastened together with a security tie, making actual walking in them impossible) and my neuroma didn't immediately have hysterics, which was a plus. So I bought them.

What a mistake. Why on earth did I think that a normal-shaped pair of feet (yes, they are normal!)



would ever be comfortable in something designed for ducks?



Just look at the difference in width!



How on earth are they meant to stay on, short of actually stapling them to your feet? Yes, I know there's a heel-strap, but that's much shorter than the shoe itself



which forces your foot forward and makes them agonisingly uncomfortable. In fact the only way to get them to stay on your feet is to wear a couple of pairs of thick hiking socks ... which rather defeats the object, because the dewy grass will soak the socks.

Now, if I had feet shaped like this they'd fit like a ...



I wonder if I can get my money back.

Breathe, breathe in the air

At last the year has begun! For the first time in 2010 there's been enough daylight and warmth for me to spend enough time out of doors to throw off the effects of SAD and start to live again. Perhaps this is why I feel so much better when we go camping, even if the weather's shit. When we come home the house is stuffy and airless and I feel trapped. But now my brain is clear, I can think as quickly as I used to (I'd begun seriously to think I was in the early throes of dementia), as if a fog has lifted. This is fantastic. The Real Me, who's been smothered under a suffocating blanket of nebulous nothingness, has fought her way free! Hooray! Hooray for sunshine! Hooray for air!

Sittin' in the mornin' sun

An established bay tree is usually very hardy, and able to withstand cold weather without turning a ... I was going to say hair, but that's not right, and leaf doesn't really fit the bill ... anyhow, they can usually come through the winter unscathed. Last winter was particularly extreme, and our poor tree is rather the worse for wear.


The leaves should be a glossy dark green, not dry and desiccated. In places there are signs of life and regrowth



but despite waiting for months, others have clearly had it completely.


If we amputate all the dead bits I fear it's going to be very lopsided and unbalanced. The poor thing might have to come down completely.

Gentian, lupin and tall hollyhocks

As is traditional on a Bank holiday weekend it was time to get working on the garden. The monsoon conditions of yesterday had softened the soil to workable levels from the solidity of its previous dryness, and today (surprisingly for a BH) the weather was absolutely perfect. Ned dug out the final enormous lump of concrete, and a friend's jack hammer made short work of reducing them all to more manageable proportions. Several trips to the tip will be needed, but soon it'll all be gone!


I took a barrow up the road to a neighbour's smallholding and relieved his fields of some of the molehills, which are the most gorgeous riddled topsoil and have filled in the holes beautifully so that it no longer resembles a poor parody of the Somme. One more barrowload should see the major earthworks completed.



Next job is to install the new fence, and then I'll be able to put in some plants so for a few brief weeks it might look attractive.

The concrete and the clay beneath my feet

A long, long time ago when we bought Genie Towers, it was what would nowadays be called 'a project'. We did a fair amount of updating (some new wiring, new windows, redecorating, new kitchen, new bathroom, new carpets, etc - all of which are now past their best again - don't mention the bathroom) but pretty much just kept on top of the garden. This meant that as it became more and more 'established' it started to look a little neglected, if not downright shabby. So we've taken the bull by the horns and decided to replace the fence at the front, from a delapidated standard panel affair which was well past its best and was, frankly, falling apart, to (eventually) a picket fence. This means not only removing the panels which I think were being held up by the ivy, not the other way around



but also removing the rotten supporting posts. It was at this point that we realised whoever installed them intended them to be there for ever and ever. How much concrete does it usually take to support one 3" x 3" fence post? We didn't expect this much. I wonder how we can get rid of it, other than digging another hole and burying it ....



Elsewhere in the garden the lily of the valley is going feral. That I can live with because it smells just delicious in the sunshine.

Those were the days, my friend

I remember when all this:



was fields.



*thanks Mallers! Please tell me how you did that*