back on the road

Today, as the Systems Administrator was standing in the hall, he saw a hare go lolloping across the front garden.  It did not appear to be in any great hurry or to be running away.  Initially the SA took it for a munjac from its size, before paying attention and seeing that it had long ears and a hare's gait.  I saw one in the lane a year or two back, around dusk, but never in the garden, let alone right by the house.  Hares are a menace in very cold weather because they will ring and kill trees, but I rather like the idea of the odd one passing through.  They are unmistakably different to rabbits, much longer legs, a more purposeful, loping run, and generally wilder aspect.

The level of coolant in my car had not dropped since the SA topped it up.  The handbook said that on no account was I supposed to just top it up, and that I should take it to a specialist garage immediately to have the coolant chemically rebalanced and the reason why the car lost coolant in the first place identified.  The SA said that the handbook was written by the manufacturers who had a vested interest in sending business to Skoda dealerships, that the coolant had fallen only just under the minimum level when it triggered the alarm, and that in the first instance it was fine to top it up and see if the level fell again and if so how quickly.  Certainly when we were young we used to fill our car radiators without a second thought.  I remember coming back from the vet in Ipswich with one of the previous cats in a basket and having to stop in the outskirts at a convenience store to buy an emergency bottle of mineral water because the engine was over-heating.  The car, and the cat, both lived to a ripe old age.

The SA announced that as a precaution he would come with me on a trip to the dump to test the car.  We set off with two emergency bottles of water, and the SA promising to take over and nurse the car home if anything happened, like steam coming out of the bonnet.  Nothing did happen, and we went to the dump, and the useful garden centre to buy chicken food and gardening gloves, and the other useful garden centre to buy locally made beeswax hand cream which the first garden centre declines to stock.  At th end of it the coolant was at the same level as it had been at the start, though I am still suspicious as to why the level dropped, when it never has before.

In the afternoon the plants arrived from the nursery in Dorset,  called (unsurprisingly) Dorset Perennials.  It was the second time I'd used them, which is always an encouraging sign.  I only placed the order on Sunday morning, and they sent everything I'd asked for (assuming that everything is correctly labelled, but their last lot of plants were, unlike the wretched bog primulas), and it arrived undamaged within the hour's time slot that their courier emailed me this morning.  They accept PayPal, give free delivery on orders of £39 or more, and do not sent out pots with weeds in them.  All of this puts them considerably ahead of several of the other mail order suppliers I've tried.  Their list is not the longest, but they offer good forms of what they grow, and you could furnish a very respectable border from them without looking any further.