Applause for the pause

It has been a couple of months since my last blog. I - along with a friend or two - have been busy transforming part of my garden. Applause for the pause and more of that later. 

For all of us 15 months of lockdown, changing habits, using sanitiser, masks and contactless payments, standing a metre or two apart and joshing for supermarket delivery slots have altered us. I haven’t had the strain of home-schooling, nor working from home with a dodgy signal nor with bored children needing a lot of attention. I haven’t had to travel to work on a crowded bus, train or tube. But I am a carer. And I don’t watch football or tennis from the terraces. 60,000 spectators are due to watch the next round of our fabulous football team versus Denmark at Wembley on Wednesday but what of the covid risk? 

‘We are all spectators in a giant human health experiment.’

More prosaically I have chosen to go to friends, usually meeting in their gardens or in a conservatory, to outdoor cafeterias or to a carers’ cafe. But I haven’t gone anywhere with crowds. When I go for a swim I walk there through the city. Bath’s Pulteney Bridge has become very crowded  since the April lockdown restrictions were lifted. Traffic is back to its usual heavy self but the walk to my swim is along a lovely Georgian boulevard, up an incline and into a fairly spacious changing room in a hotel. Residential hotel guests are asked to change in their rooms meaning our changing area is for us - the members of the spa club. Fairly safe in terms of social distancing. 

I have, in the main, been able to keep my distance during lockdown but with rising cases owing to the delta variant of covid I am inclined to continue wearing my face mask and sanitising frequently whatever Bojo announces for the July 19th lifting of restrictions. 

But back to the garden. Since January friends and I have transformed an area at the top of the garden which was formerly just gravel with a few raised beds. It now has a greenhouse, a new substantial potting shed, three water butts with new guttering and the raised beds are truly raised. They are on legs! As I write my dwarf beans are in flower, the leeks are still thin but not still like strands of green hair, the climbing beans are climbing, spuds are flowering, the cabbages are getting fat and a few pea plants are growing strong. The rest have had it. But I never promised you a pea garden.

Beans are my thing! 

Next time I write I will tell you of the triumphs and frustrations of my more recent gardening life. Especially now I’m waiting for an op. on my knee. Just like Roger Federer. I have yet to get the deckchairs on the lawn this year. That tells you something! 

Adieu.

Bye for now.