Convalescence is an expensive business. The Systems Administrator, reduced to spending days sitting on the sofa, ordered an Android tablet. I am not utterly convinced what gap in the SA's technical armoury this fills, given that the SA has a perfectly good laptop and almost never goes to places where the laptop wouldn't work perfectly well, if necessary with a dongle. However, bored and idle fingers will roam across the Amazon website, and the tablet was ordered, also a case. I don't quite see the attraction of a case, given that a tablet is supposed to be lightweight, and the case weighs 406 grammes, but that is speaking as somebody who puts their Kindle in a used envelope for safe keeping when taking it out and about. Also, as I persist in carrying my stuff around in a satchel made out of saddle grade leather, guaranteed to last practically for ever, that weighs approximately three quarters of a tonne, I am in no position to criticize.
The case arrived yesterday, but the tablet didn't. The SA had paid a premium for a guaranteed time slot delivery, and spent the morning hovering about listening for the van, so was rather irritable about this. The parcel seems to have made it as far as about Elmstead Market, according to the parcel company's tracking service, and then gone back to our local depot. Which is in Chelmsford. Note to the management of all commercial parcel operations: Chelmsford is a forty-five minute drive from our village to the east of Colchester, and that's on a good day when the A12 hasn't ground to a standstill because some clown turned their caravan over. It cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as local.
Amazon refunded the premium delivery charge, but the SA couldn't wait around for the van today due to having a ticket for the Test at Lord's. All that sofa rest has been building up to this moment, and the SA trundled off, ears ringing with instructions to wear a hat and drink lots of water, leaving me to sign for the parcel, which was due sometime mid-morning. I thought I'd better work in the front garden, rather than continue in the back and risk not hearing the van, so made a start on weeding the bed by the entrance. It's a task I'd been leaving until later, on the grounds that it wasn't as urgent as several other jobs, but if it's left too long it will get urgent. I weeded the whole thing last year, but never planted up the gaps, so once again the soil is covered in a layer of assorted grasses, mostly clump formers that are easy to pull out, but some with running roots.
It's a problem area, which I'm not sure how to fill. I've tried various things, some of which have thrived and many of which have not. Some were rescued and moved, some died outright, others merely languish. It is an awkward space, triangular in shape, on very light soil which by now is invaded by the roots of the boundary hedge and those shrubs that have taken, and blasted by wind. It doesn't merit very intricate planting, because nobody is going to hang about there to look at it closely. I need something that will cope with the drought, the wind and the rootiness, that will smother weeds, and grow fast to cover the ground, because I am running out of time, patience and energy to keep weeding it. I want the bed to look after itself for great stretches of the year, with my input limited to some pruning, and pulling out the small number of weeds that have crept in. I don't want to spend a fortune on plants, so herbaceous subjects that would need to go in at nine or ten plants to the square metre, and then take several years to join up, are definitely out.
At the moment I don't even have a feel for the look or mood to aim for. The surviving plants are a rather ill-assorted lot, accumulated over nearly twenty years of fiddling about rather than according to any sort of design brief, but I don't want to remove anything large that's coping because I want the whole thing filled up sooner rather than later. This leaves me with a magnificent pineapple broom, a couple of weigela and a philadelphus, two slightly unhappy crab apples, a shrubby honeysuckle that doesn't seem to mind the conditions, a scotch rose that is starting to run incontinently, some vast late flowering red hot pokers that are among the best plants for a dry and awful site that I've ever met, several hollies, a bird-sown Portuguese laurel, a Cotinus that's finally starting to get going though rather loomed over by the laurel, a mystery berberis that I think was originally the rootstock of something else, two large and well-established cottage garden peonies, a japanese quince that clashes disastrously with one of the crabs, a struggling Ribes speciosum, a yellow fruited shrubby ivy, a semi-prostrate cotoneaster that doesn't quite manage to suppress the weeds, a slightly tender thing from the pea family whose name I can't remember at this minute, and a few other odds and sods. They don't exactly gel to a unified vision, do they? Any suggestions will be gratefully received.
The van duly arrived. The driver was very young, and it turned out that yesterday his Satnav had taken him to the edge of our spinney and then wanted him to drive through a field. I suggested that he would get to know the route, and he said he had only been doing the job for a couple of weeks. Then he asked if I could possibly delay signing for the parcel for five minutes, because he was slightly ahead of his time and all hell would break loose if his electronic signature machine showed that he'd been early. I said that was fine, and hung around the kitchen for five minutes waiting until I could have the SA's parcel and the van would go away. Compared to DPD the Royal Mail looked almost good in comparison.
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