Gardening matters - at home and out and about. Short shorts. Passport problems.

Our house, in a style that is unusual in Southport where I grew up, but quite common around here, looks as if it has two storeys at the front and three at the back. You go in through the front door and have to go down some stairs to get to the back door. Visitors from other places find this confusing. What appears to be a basement is in fact a large open space kitchen - dining room. The garden at the side of the house slopes down to a set of five or six steps into the back garden. 

There is a stone wall supporting the garden path and preventing it from sliding down into the side garden. On this wall, once winter is coming to an end, I place pots of flowers, adding a bit of colour. They need occasional rearrangement as the contents go in and out of season. 

During the night it rained, quite heavily in fact; I could hear it beating down on the attic skylight windows. (If you count the attic, which is quite large, then I suppose our house has four storeys.) however, I did not think it was particularly windy. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I stepped out of the front door this morning to find that two of my pots of plants had disappeared. They were in fact on their sides in the side garden, one of them with its contents spilling out onto the grass. How had that happened? Two other pots of flowers - a tub of violas and a tub of some kind of daisy-like flowers - still sat on the wall in all their glory.

If the wind had done it, why had not all four pots been blown down? If it was vandalism, were the vandals some kind of aesthetes, judging the two pots that ended up in the side garden as being past their best and therefore meriting a shove off the wall? Did they spare the others because they still look bright and colourful? Who goes round in the dark judging flower displays anyway? So my guess is that it was the wind. It is possible that the two pots that remained on the wall were heavier. I had, after all, given those pots extra water over the last few days because their still plentiful flowers were drooping. I had not exactly neglected the other pots but, on reflection, I don’t think they had such a thorough drenching. Consequently they were a bit lighter. 

Anyway, the two fallen pots were rescued, plants pushed back into place, and then relegated to the far wall that separates our garden from the pub carpark - garden area. 

 

In my photo they can just about be seen, relegated to a background position in the photo as in life. 

Yesterday, in the mid-afternoon, we took a stroll up the hill to to Dobcross in the intermittent sunshine. 

 

The lower section of the road up the hill is a kind of tree tunnel, currently overhung with masses of laburnum - quote an impressive sight in my opinion!

Dobcross village is always very well maintained. The roses there are coming on nicely.

  

But then, the roses in our garden are not doing badly, especially since I spent an afternoon pulling up the long grass that was hiding them. 

 

It’s usually at this point that we have several days of heavy rain so that the roses become waterlogged before they can reach their full glory. Maybe this won’t quite happen this year. 

Okay, that’s the gardening report over and done with. 

According to fashion reports, men’s shorts are getting shorter this year. In some cases, I hear, they are real hot-pants, barely to be noticed if the gent wearing them has a very long t-shirt. That’s fine so long as we don’t start to get glimpses of buttocks, which is what happens with some of the extremely short shorts worn by certain young ladies! One explanation given for the upward creep of men’s shorts is that more young men are working on their thigh muscles when they go to the gym. Thighs are the new abs … apparently.

Here’s a report about Sheku Kanneh-Mason, a British cellist who was BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2016. He played at Prince Harry’s Wedding. Because of the fun and games caused by Brexit, the hoops musicians and their ilk have to jump through if they want to fulfil commitments abroad, he applied for a second passport; presumably this means a second copy of his existing passport. I didn’t even know you could do that but it seems to be possible. But it seems that having more than one copy of your passport makes life easier if you need to apply for visas to visit more than one country. His sister, also a musician, applied at the same time. She received her second passport without problems. His passport was cancelled! The Home Office has apologised for the mistake! I wonder if they plan to compensate him for lost earnings. 

It seems to me that before taking back control government departments need to be sure they know what they are doing. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!