after the rain

The rain gauge in the front garden recorded fifty-five millimetres yesterday, which sounds about right since somebody in Elmstead Market  posted a reading of  fifty-seven.  That's a lot, two inches in old money, or ten per cent of our average annual rainfall.  It had stopped by this morning, leaving a very soggy garden.  The cats were delighted to get out after spending yesterday evening stuck inside.  It was touching the way they followed us from room to room, but the way they tried to chew my hair, my shoes and each other did suggest they would rather have been out on their evening patrol.

One of the advantages of light soil is that you can get on it about five minutes after it has stopped raining.  I gave the water laden foliage and sodden clay of the back garden a wide berth, and carried on weeding and deadheading the thrift in the gravel at the front.  The sheep's sorrel has crept about some more since the last time I weeded the turning circle, and rather infuriatingly some of it has seeded.  The worst bits to winkle out are where it has grown up through the cushions of thrift.  Sheep's sorrel in light ground is like horsetail in poorly drained clay, you will never get rid of all of it.  The best you can do is pull out as much of both as you can, and learn to live with the rest.

The gravel in the turning circle is thin in places, and I have a nasty feeling I should have ordered a third bag, except that I'm not sure I could face spreading as many as three and I didn't want the third hanging about for months.  My back is still feeling tender from the second, and there's half of that left to do.  I have read (though not understood) how in order to build up muscles you have to break them down first, a statement I saw repeated this morning on the Telegraph website (not in a Premium article.  We don't subscribe to the Telegraph) and my back feels just as if I might have been breaking down my muscles.  I trust they will grow again, better than before.  The photo illustrating the article was of a male torso, but I daresay it works for middle aged ladies too, not that we are supposed to want muscles.

The car will not be ready this week.  Having first of all told the Systems Administrator that the new windscreen had arrived damaged and the work would have to be postponed to today, the latest tale of woe is that some necessary clips were missing, and they can't do the work until next Tuesday afternoon.  That will take it more than ten working days from the MoT, meaning that in theory it will need another full test and not just a retest.  In the meantime it is stuck at the garage in Ipswich.  Lucky they have plenty of space.  Lucky I had not made any plans for next week beyond Tuesday morning.  So much for all those Autoglass repair, Autoglass replace adverts on Classic FM.