a mild interlude

There was real warmth in the sun when I went to open the chicken house, and so I took myself and my wretched ear outside, dosed with antibiotic eye drops and stoppered with a piece of cotton wool.  I used to suffer from earaches as a child, and really thought I'd outgrown them, but it seems as though every year I revert closer to my inner five year old.  The advantage of being middle aged rather than five is having an additional fifty years of practicing how to put pain to one side, so that although it's there it doesn't ruin your day.  The disadvantage is that you have read all those newspaper articles about people whose ear infection moved to their inner ear leaving them deaf, or worse.

The cats all appreciated the sun in their own characteristic fashions.  Our Ginger lay on the front doorstep with Mr Fluffy, and later I glanced up from weeding and saw him sitting neatly tucked among the shrubs further along the flower bed.  Mr Fidget occasionally rushed across my field of vision with a mad, joyous expression.  Mr Cool patrolled at a leisurely pace, stopping to say hello to me a couple of times, and sniffing the place where Our Ginger had been sitting very carefully.  As I was putting the pots of hyacinths and poppies back in the greenhouse for the weekend Mr Cool came over and made his feelings known about tea, leading me back to the house with tiny squeaks as he walked just out of my reach to show that he did not want to be fussed, he wanted to be fed.

It seems incredible that it is going to snow in the night, and that tomorrow the thermometer will not rise above freezing.  This is one reason why some north American shrubs can be tricky to grow in the English climate.  They are used to a regime where it is constantly winter until it is permanently spring.  A few days or weeks of balmy weather that encourages their sap to rise and their new leaves to unfurl followed by an icy blast does for them.

The leaves of Gladiolus tristis have slowly turned brown.  I hope the bulbs are still alive, but the snow has not done them any good.  The pink flowered Watsonia isn't looking happy either.  They are both on the side of the turning circle that faced the blast coming across the fields and so got the worst of the weather.

I hope it does not snow too much.  I need to get to the shops because we are about to run out of cat biscuits.