a safe arrival

My tickets for the Chelsea Flower Show arrived this morning, which was a good thing.  Given my lack of faith in the postal service I always worry in case they have been randomly shoved through some other local letterbox.  This time they arrived relatively early, and so I hadn't started worrying yet, but I would have, very soon.  It is my grandest day out of the entire year, besides being horribly expensive, and it would be a crushing blow if the tickets did go astray.  I am not at all confident that the RHS and the vast commercial ticketing agency they use would offer replacements, not like LSO St Lukes, who when I rang them to explain that two sets of lunchtime concert tickets had never arrived just said to say what had happened on the door.  I did, and the very sweet junior arts administrator behind the desk let me in, but I can't see the high vis jacketed security goons on the turnstiles at Chelsea doing the same.

We are definitely not the only people to be suffering from colds.  The friend I was due to meet this morning for coffee had to postpone for that reason.  Mine is not developing into anything very exciting, but then, this one doesn't seem to, just hangs around the edges like somebody unpopular at a party making spasmodic unsuccessful attempts to join in.  You think they've given up and left, or at least found someone else to talk to, and then suddenly there they are again at your elbow with another story with an unfunny punchline.

I tottered out into the front garden, and raked the weeds out of the paving by the pond, and brought over the pots of tulips.  They are coming out, and it seems a waste to have them blooming largely unseen outside the greenhouse.  In a fit of optimism I got the cafe table and chairs out of the garage as well.  The whole ensemble looks quite like something out of The English Garden, viewed from the right vantage point.  The cracks of the paving are still full of oxalis roots, which it is impossible to extract completely, and I must try and remember to run over them occasionally with the new sprayer.

The replacement tyres for the wheelbarrow and ride-on lawn mower are ready to collect.  I know this because Ernest Doe sent me an invoice.  It seemed very large for two small tyres, but includes fitting, which the SA couldn't do because we don't have the equipment, and of course VAT bumps it up another twenty per cent.  I didn't have any luck tracking down the lawnmower repair man, though, to see if the Mountfield was ready.  It would be handy to have that back.  It is really rather desperate for it to be the ninth of April, and to have no working lawnmower at all.