green toes

It only occurred to me on Sunday, that the garden (now our garden for a whole year) is MY GARDEN! Hurrah! Spent 4 gloriously sweaty hours pruning leggy roses, shaping unruly hedges and removing shoes from the undergrowth. Yes, shoes… amongst other random items, including: full beer cans, a mouldy shirt, a fork, insulated electrical wire and numerous stolen ashtrays & pint glasses. Not a bad haul for a patch of garden no bigger than 10sq m.

The whole ‘hose pipe ban’ slightly bemuses me though. Drought? This country has no idea what a drought looks like. I look outside, I see green – we’re all good. Call me back with your crazy water restriction talk when every last blade of grass in your back garden has turned brown and died. Still, I suppose it’s a good idea they start pulling up their socks sooner rather than later. It's not really going to get much better from here on in, is it. Possibly a side effect of where I was raised, but running out of fresh water comes second only to being buried alive, as my biggest fear.

Damn it all, El Nino is pooping all over my dream of my very own English cottage-garden! Grrrr.