There was frost on the lawn this morning, and I congratulated myself that I had remembered to set the glasshouse heaters, but it was not actually a very hard frost, and by ten I'd checked the watering in the conservatory and the greenhouse and was happily ensconced in the herb bed with trowel, hand fork, secateurs, a bucket for the weeds and a big bin for the dead dry stems that could go on the bonfire heap, and the latest film review podcast. Tidying the herb bed was one of those half-done jobs that surely couldn't take more than another day to finish, tops, and I'd been saving it for a day when it was too cold to walk on the grass but not so cold I would develop hypothermia while weeding.
It was all going so well for the first hour, and I began to plot how I could soon put in a builders' merchant order for another bag of gravel to top up the mulch, along with some scaffolding boards for the vegetable beds, and perhaps some corrugated stuff to mend the roof of the blue shed, where a recent gale lifted the roofing felt yet again. Then it began to feel colder, and I had to go and get an extra layer, and then it began to spit with rain so I had to abandon the podcast half way through before my tablet got too wet.
The Systems Administrator said that it had always been due to rain later, but that it had arrived earlier than forecast, and was going to last for the rest of the day, having started. Tomorrow would be nicer, he added by way of consolation, but it is maddening getting such miserable little dribs and drabs of time to spend outside. I suppose a professional gardener would just keep going, but I am doing this for fun, and am prone to respiratory infections. And by the time your average Medieval peasant or Victorian farm labourer was my age they were dead, or crippled with rheumatism.
I resorted to doing my ironing, since the pile of crumpled clothes on the spare bed had grown to the point where there were more of my shirts on the bed than in the drawers in our room. And it would make me feel good being able to tick Ironing off the list, and I could finish the podcast while I did it. In fact there was so much ironing it took an episode of The Kitchen Cabinet and one and a half of Tim Harford's Fifty Things that Changed the World, as well as the rest of the film programme, but then I ran out of ironing so don't know how the story of Bakelite ended. I do now feel a warm glow at being able to pull open the drawers and see stacks of clean t shirts, graded into piles by tattiness, from the fairly new Pima cotton not to be worn anywhere near the cats, to the less smart but fit to be seen, to the frankly shabby and for layering only. I suppose there is no real point in ironing the latter, but I still do. I did stop ironing my gardening t shirts a while back, but there is something demoralising about unironed shirts, as if the next step could be going to Tesco in my pyjamas.
One of the cats must have lost a mouse under the hall dresser, because Mr Fluffy spent all morning peering into the space beneath and poking his front legs in as far as he could reach, while Mr Fidget went and helped when he managed to concentrate for that long. Mr Cool curled up in his basket as soon as it started raining and would not have anything to do with the mouse party in the hall. I have a dark suspicion it was probably his mouse, as he has previous form on dropping things indoors that immediately run off. With the benefit of hindsight it would have been better to choose a dresser with a solid base instead of one cut in ornamental curves, so that lost items of prey couldn't disappear underneath.
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