Spring is ...

(You know the rest!) I was sitting at the dining room table this evening, when the last hour of the sun shines on the border beside the path out to the car, looking at the plants and marvelling at how big and green they've become over the past couple of weeks: it seems no time since the rosa rugosa plants were just sticks with small green blobs on them and now they're big and fulsome and threatening to overwhelm said path - did I prune them too lightly? But the floribunda climber of great antiquity at the back gate, which was professionally savaged by our gardener, has produced at least one new sprout that's already 2 feet long, so ...

All this waffle is to disguise the fact that today was really rather tedious. It was also rather chilly, after yesterday, but this made little real difference. I found it really hard getting up - I took a co-codamol last night to help with the post-vaccination aches and pains, and the effect seems to stay with me more than when I was younger. I did a bit of dusting (not too much) and the Italian needed to keep me at the top of my league. And then, fortified by coffee, I started to remind myself of what I might want to take on holiday next week - it's been a while since we got abroad in May other than on a walking holiday (different needs!). This involved a bit of trying on to ensure that I've not outgrown something I was relying on - this business of losing height comes with its own set of side-effects. 

After lunch we went down to the garage to see if our car was ready to collect, but the four new tyres were all we saw of it (it wasn't ready!) so we had yet another circular walk , this time around the West Bay and the back of town, meeting in turn two former colleagues (one after the other) and another friend who used to sing in the choir when we had tenors and basses in it. When we got in, I was just in time for another friend, my partner in the altos for more than 50 years, so that we could go over a part that I was pitchforked into last year, in which she joined me only two weeks ago. Margo and I used to take the French Exchange away and found ourselves laughing crazily at the end of each, exhausting day - perhaps that was what had us screeching with mirth at my strategies for remembering the odd awkward interval ...

And that was it. I cooked salmon with pesto, oatmeal and lemon juice, accompanied by pak choi, the first of the season's samphire, some baby potatoes with butter ... and we ate it and realised we were both exhausted. Again. But we got the car back, all cleaned and lovely ...

Collage is of the pretty things that have suddenly come into bloom in my garden.