Today was another gardening day, though it was colder than yesterday. In fact, if I claimed it wasn't cold, I'd be fibbing, but the ground wasn't frozen, and it scarcely rained, just a few spots at lunchtime, so I pressed on up the long bed in the front garden, trying to get as much weeding done as possible before things turn properly wintry. The truck is currently at the garage for its MOT, and since they have now had it since Wednesday, and haven't rung to break the bad news, I presume that means it only needs welding within the Systems Administrator's agreed financial limits for it to pass. The truck always needs some welding done to get through the MOT, but as the SA says hopefully, fairly soon the entire chassis will have been welded and so effectively replaced. The mechanicals are fine. As the garage says, trucks of that vintage were far better built than the newer ones, and will go on practically for ever, apart from the rust.
The point of telling you about the truck is that the SA promised that once we got it back from the garage, assuming we did, we could take it to buy a bulk load of compost. That would obviously be much more efficient than my ferrying muck home from the garden centre eight bags at a time, and the long bed will need a lot of compost, once it's weeded. The last lot has vanished almost without trace, and I have been pulling the annual weed grass that is the main problem in that bed out of almost pure sand. Even plants that like sharp drainage and poor soil struggle in it, without some assistance.
I was followed closely today by a robin. Robins are generally keen on people who are good enough to disturb the soil, but this one was extraordinarily bold, hopping around within a foot of me. Sometimes I stopped weeding, and it stopped hopping, and we stared at each other. The eyes of birds are unfathomable. I like birds, on the whole*, but I can understand why some people find them frightening, even if they haven't seen the Hitchcock movie. Birds are very alien, even the robin is a tiny feathered dinosaur, for all that sentimentalised versions appear on myriad Christmas cards. In real life they are pugnacious little beasts, forever fighting each other at the bird table, or trying to keep all the other birds away from the food.
When I'm weeding I chuck any stones I find into piles for collection, rough stones for the path by the dustbins, round pebbles to decorate the gravel in the middle of the turning circle, so I had to be careful not to throw any at the robin, as it flitted about. I had a couple of near misses, but it seemed to have grasped that I wasn't throwing stones at it, and didn't seem concerned. The SA says that a robin was equally bold and nosey yesterday when the SA was chopping up wood, so maybe it was the same one.
*There is something very annoying about pigeons, from the way they flap to that infuriating oo-koo-koo noise they make. And the magpie that bangs repeatedly on the study window is just plain creepy.
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