Snapshots

It was a day without a plan, which somehow formed itself into something highly satisfactory.

We'd expected the weather to break, but while it had rained a bit overnight (and there was a shower around 5.15pm), it's been mainly sunny and quite warm. Ideal weather for getting out in the garden.

Lots of jobs were done. Thoroughly soaking the front garden, and washing off the slabs at the front, which get grimy quite quickly. Strimming and raking at the back so it all looks a lot neater. Mr A made a new bed for strawberries (hard to believe we brought four plants up here last March and now we have about 24 across two large beds). I purchased compost for the new bed and some lavender plants for the side beds, where I'd done quite a bit of clearing of weeds. It's starting to look quite acceptable around there. And the brown bin is almost full.

In and amongst, we had a visit from the BT Openreach engineer. We'd complained to our broadband provider a couple of days ago about the state of our internet connection which was both weak and also regularly dropping out. We'd been promised that something would happen, but to be honest neither of us had given it much further thought, so we were surprised to see the Openreach engineer turn up and labour for a couple of hours to sort out our connection. We've got a new connection in place, which is so much better and while I must admit it might well have been the people who sorted our soffits and fascia boards who caused the problem, I am not at all sure we are going to be charged for the work.... Well, we'll see. We also had an "only in the Highlands" moment. I arrived back from the garden centre with a car boot full of bags of compost and the Openreach engineer insisted on helping me get them up the path into the garden.

The day concluded with a couple of beers in the garden and then I fetched fish and chips. We'd both laboured so hard, I'm not sure either of us would have been up for making dinner.