I was given a pair of tickets by The Independent to go and see the Rodchenko & Popova exhibition that’s currently on at Tate Modern. They sent them by post, Special Delivery and for the past few days I’ve had the notion of either getting up an hour earlier or finishing work an hour earlier in order to get to the post office to collect them.
Getting up earlier is never an easy option, much less when I have a persistent cold and insomnia and that window of opportunity at work, when I can leave in time is frightfully narrow but I thought I had cracked it on Friday. I left work, caught the tube to Leyton and jumped on a bus at the station that was destined for Walthamstow Central, I should have paid more attention as the bus was probably the only one that doesn’t go anywhere near the post office! It did however drop me off quite near home so I walked there and planned my attack of the post office for this morning. Saturday opening hours are 7am to noon… this would indeed be a test of determination.
As it happens I was up and showered and dressed by 9am and back indoors enjoying a cup of tea and some toast by 10am, surveying the newspaper and wondering whether to work on the garden or not. I have to admit that last year I completely neglected it and it showed. There was hardly a patch of soil to be seen, it was hiding underneath a lush blanket of green…weeds! So, spurred on by the sunshine and a burst of energy that only sunshine seems to give me I set to work and removed all the weeds, cut back the mint that was growing wilder than the ivy and then mixed in a few spadefuls of compost from the compost bin. I was oddly strange to see the remnants of the rose bush I put in there 2 years ago still in one piece, I made a mental note to cut things down to smaller pieces in future.
After receiving my groceries from the man from Ocado I sat in the garden and surveyed my handwork, it didn’t look too bad, even though I know it will never last. By tomorrow the local cats will have passed the word out that there is a new litter tray for them to come shit in and even though I put down the cat-away granules, it’s only ever a momentary reprieve. The thing is, I’m not sure what I want to do with the garden this year, should I grow some more veg or perhaps just plant flowers? That’s the problem I had last year and I let nature decide, she decided weeds, not very colourful or fragrant but then again, it didn’t involve any work on my part!
I’m waiting for a delivery of potato planters, I’m not making the mistake I made before of planting them in the garden, too much effort and space taken over for too little reward. I may pop over to B & Q and get some netting to cover the garden while I decide, not that it will keep the cats off, the last time I tried that I looked out one morning to watch a cat attempting to balance while shitting and then getting so tangled in the netting that I had to help the little fucker out before the neighbours called the RSPCA in the belief that I was skinning it alive.
Now, the only thing left for me to decide is whether or not I finally get around to trimming the hedge out front, the deciding factor there will be how much rubbish the neighbours have put in the green recycling bin. You’d think the fact that it is a different colour to the regular bins would be enough, or perhaps even the almost A3 sized notice that states it is only for kitchen and garden waste would alert them to the fact that it is not to be stuffed full of general waste but no… I came home yesterday to find they’d filled it to overflowing and are no doubt wondering why it wasn’t emptied… I’ll have to transfer everything in it to the general waste bin so that I can get the hedge clippings in there… spending Sunday rummaging around in bins is not quite how I had planned things :(
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