When I got up this morning, and wound the bathroom blind up, it didn't look too bad out of the window. Grey, yes, but I thought that maybe the rain that was forecast yesterday evening hadn't made it this far east. Going out to let the chickens into their run, I discovered that I was mistaken. It was raining, a gentle steady silt of water, the sort of rain that if you were to dash outside for a minute you could deceive yourself into thinking that it was nothing much, but if you were to work in it for half an hour you would be soaked.
At least it meant I sat down to the third re-write of the garden guide without the feeling that I was missing out on doing anything more exciting. It is supposed to read as though the visitor had somebody friendly, chatty and knowledgeable walking beside them (someone, in other words, just like me) but I've now read it so many times that I can't tell how it would seem, if you were coming to it cold. I think it's OK. The next step will be to send it off to the people who are going to print it, and we'll find out if it is far too long and needs to be cut down. The owner is using the same firm that designed the website, to get a unified look for the business, and presumably because she is used to working with them. They provided text for the website when it was first set up, which was written in a sort of mangled estate agent speak and was truly awful, so we ought to be able to do better than that. I have discovered, though, that if you want to avoid sounding like a magazine advertising feature, you do tend to end up rather jolly and hearty like the Boden catalogue.
Then I ordered some pots from the Whichford Pottery. In recent years they've done a January offer, with 10% off pots and free delivery on orders over £90, a minimum saving of £38.50. I wanted some more tulip pots, and while I won't need them until November when it is the right time to plant tulips, I thought I might as well get them cheap. I can use them for bedding over the summer, which will be pretty, and it's not as though I'm going to get ten per cent on the money from the bank between now and then. I was just beginning to worry that I hadn't had details of an offer this year, and wonder if they were going to do one, when the catalogue arrived. I have said it before, but they are wonderful pots, and will last you a gardening lifetime, unless you drop them (or run them over in a truck, as happened to one of mine once).
It was still raining. I arranged to meet up with various friends and relations, and trawled through my Amazon wish list. I always keep a long list. It acts as a reminder of things I've read about or heard on the radio that sound interesting, instead of keeping notes on scraps of paper which I invariably lose. Sometimes they sit on there for years, and I go off the idea and delete them again. Prices go up and down a lot, especially for second hand stuff. There was a folk album I tracked for years, that always seemed to have three vendors on at £38.50, before a used copy described as very good popped up for a tenner. I've gone off Amazon vendors for used books, after buying one too many that was grubbier and more battered than I would have expected from the description, but used CDs are generally fine. After all, every CD I own counts as 'used', and unless they get scratched there isn't much to go wrong. Or at least, we have been threatened with disc degradation and incompatibility with modern equipment, but it hasn't happened yet.
It is of course very quaint and old fashioned to still be buying CDs, and statistics show that the trend is against me. I still like them. Apart from a few that I have managed to scratch, every CD I have ever bought since they were first introduced still works, which is more than you can say for all the computers I've ever owned, most of which are completely dead. And no, I don't expect Apple to go bust, and the chances of my music collection being lost in the cloud are probably about the same as those of my house burning down with my CDs in it. But I like having information stored in discrete packages where if one gets damaged or lost the others are fine (eggs, baskets). As I'm not great at managing technology I like having a disc that I can put in a slot just like putting vinyl on a turntable, without getting caught up in an episode of Computer says No. I like the sleeve notes. I actually like the thing-ness of the row of cases in the shelf.
It's still raining. There's no more to be said.
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