Hard labour

We didn't know if we'd be up for it. After all, both of us are still in the nasty post-viral limbo of sudden exhaustion and wanting to lie down. But when Himself appeared after breakfast in his gardening trousers and the fleece he stole long ago from our younger son I knew that it was on: he was going to cut the hedge. 

Our back garden is separated from the neighbours on our right by a privet hedge of impressive thickness and varying heights. At the moment it's about 6' tall, and so wide that I can't reach the far side with my outstretched hands. It was cut to the bone last autumn, but hasn't been touched until the birds were out of it after their Spring residence - in the early part of the year it's alive with the chirping of innumerable speugs. (I see predictive text doesn't like that word.) We let our gardener loose on it for its post-summer crop, but he won't touch it when the birds are there and neither do we. 

It had become absurd. Looking out of the kitchen window, I felt that the hedge was obscuring half my view. So while Himself got out the electric trimmer and the extension cable, I attacked the pots which were all along the foot of the hedge, some in danger of vanishing under it while others - the ones with the ill-advised sweet peas - were entangled with bits of hedge in an unhelpful way and had to be dislodged. By the time I'd dragged them all out - and some are very heavy - and disported them around the garden table I needed a lie down ...

So I went inside and did Italian instead. And made coffee. By the time Himself had joined me and we'd both fortified ourselves, I was ready to do the exciting bits which involved me climbing onto a wee ladder to deal with the sprouting bits on top of the hedge that Himself hadn't been able to reach. (He doesn't do heights and balancing.) Then we swept it all up into a variety of unwieldy bags and went to the tip recycling centre.That's it in my collage, with the blue railings - you haul your bag up onto a metal ramp and tip it into an enormous skip, avoiding letting go of the bag ... We nearly came to blows trying to coordinate this. 

Why I think you're at all interested in a blow-by-blow account of something so tedious I don't know; it simply took most of the day and all of my energy by the time we'd finished and I'd scrubbed the patio ineffectually (note to self: use the patio cleaner the next time) and put all the pots back except the one that would be in the plumber's way when he comes to try our stop-cock (under the hedge, wouldn't you know?) I was fit only to lounge in a chair with a phone call. 

The last act of the day was to have a singing rehearsal, just the two of us, before the rest of the quartet come over on Thursday. One of the madrigals is a piece which I first sang when I was 17; it makes me feel quite odd singing it again now and remembering how we won two classes in the Glasgow Music Festival with our performance of it. (Hillhead High School Madrigal Group, if you're interested.) And then I made a rather fine risotto with the scrappy remains of the chicken and the stock I'd just made from its carcass, plus some tomatoes and some peas for the colours thereof. And there were strawberries. 

And that was that. Phew.