Lockdown Saturdays feel weirdly harder than schooldays. The pressure is off but there’s nothing to fill the gap. This is when the boys miss their friends the most; old enough to need the companionship, nonsense banter and physicality of their peers but not old enough to meet them on their own. I miss my friends too and my family.
By 11am we are voluntarily sorting Lego into myriad different colours in a bid to keep the physical fights at bay.
The sun is shining again, however, and I did manage to get out for a run. So lucky to have Wanstead Flats and Wanstead Park on our doorstep although I am craving a change of scene. Need to get the little one on his bike more so we can cycle a little further afield to other open spaces such as the Olympic Park.
Like last Saturday I’ve managed to grab an hour or so to do some work but am practising my own form of tax avoidance (as in putting off filling out my return) and writing this instead while staring at the garden and listing all the jobs I outlined last week that I haven’t done.
The sun has stimulated a bit of an over-optimistic ‘spring clean’ though and we’re reconnecting with the compost heap and directing an unfinished gutter into an unfinished barrel water butt.
The idea, sometime last summer, was to harvest rain from the roof of my garden studio and collect it in an old 250-litre barrel that we got from The Slate Yard, a reclamation yard cum plant shop down the road. However, it was one of those jobs we just we didn’t get around to finishing and now I’m back on the case, searching for a wooden spigot with which to tap the water and a diverter hose that we can feed in through the lid.
Ideally we should fill up the barrel before we attempt to use it as a water butt so that it naturally expands to avoid leaks but that would mean cutting off the lid entirely, which we don’t want to do. I’ll view it as an experiment, like last year’s pond (seems to be brimming with water and plant life) or my attempt to introduce a flowing mass of Hakonechloa macra to an under tree area (currently frazzled looking bronzy fronds; really hoping they perk up in spring).
In the name of experiments, there’s news in that my parents have just had the Pfizer vaccine, which is great – well the first shot at least. A day out together for them having shielded for the best part of a year due to my dad’s various conditions. Would love to be in their garden right now. Miss them and Yorkshire a lot.
Searching for a motto for it all . . . when the rain falls, you might as well make the most of it, I guess. The sun turns the billowing clouds outside my west-facing window butterscotch; the sun is a tangerine. On that note, off to play some Prince to keep my spirits up.