The Growing Season Begins

I thought I'd be planting my wildflower seeds in Hastings this spring- but I'm not, I'm planting them here.

We may not have done all we might have done to the house, but we haven't neglected the garden. Well you can't, can you? A neglected garden ceases to be a garden very, very quickly.

I repaired the garden path the other day. One of the crazy paving slabs was poking its nose in the air and people who don't lift their feet properly- like me- were tripping over it. When I lifted it I found the trouble was being caused by a root- which I removed- surgically- chop, chop- with my spade.

Mental Travel

I've done a lot of jigsaws this winter. I started off with maps and moved on to landscapes. I'm not saying it's a substitute for travel- though perhaps in a very limited way it is because I've spent a long, long time gazing at a river in Alaska with the Northern lights dancing in the sky, Mont St Michel in Brittany and the bridges over the Moldau in central Prague. And now I'm viewing a park in downtown Cuzco. It's extraordinarily unlikely that I'll ever visit Cuzco in the flesh but if I did there's a little section of it I'd feel right at home in. Cuzco is beautiful- or at least my corner of it is- with the lower slopes of the forested hills stacked with tier after tier of adobe wall and orange tile.