Yes, there needs to be some mopping up action, and I wouldn't want to put the house on the market until digging out every last dandelion out of the flagstone path, but the veggie trug is weeded and the primeval Scottish forest has been beaten back. I have even sowed runner beans, broad beens, dwarf beans, Swiss chard, kale, spinach and peas.
I'm not sure why I procrastinated so long. Perhaps the thought of sharing a space with our scheme-y shed was too depressing. Our neighbour had called it scheme-y, and since my worst British nightmare is ending up in a housing scheme, I brooded upon his choice of adjective.
"S. didn't call it a scheme-y shed," said Benedict Ambrose.
"He did. He said after the gardener came that instead of a jungle of vines, we now had a scheme-y shed."
"Well, he meant shonky," said B.A. "He meant that it was a shonky shed."
"Is that Gaelic?" I asked, mostly to wind him up. B.A. has told me countless times that Gaelic is not native to this part of Scotland, and that what everybody spoke, when they weren't speaking proper English, was Scots or Lallans, and before that it was ancient Welsh. (That is, Brythonic. Weird, but true.)
Anyway, we hired some men last week to take away the shed, just as we hired a man to cut all the ivy from it, trim the beech hedge, raze the rosa rugosa, and eliminate everything except the black currant bush from the raised bed. We have a fine crop of black currants this year as well as harvest of cardboard since, as I told the lady next door, I put it down to stop the weeds from coming back while I decided what to do with it.
In my dreams men transplant the black currant bush, destroy the raised bed and erect a dance studio no more than half the size of the property, as the regulations stipulate. If we had our own enormous summer house, I could host dance parties for free, as I told B.A. when we were on our way to Sunday Mass. B.A.,who hasn't been keen on dancing since we got married (oldest male trick in the world), is even less keen now that he can't walk, surprise. He pointed out that I would still have the expense of building the summer house.
Having checked the figures, I know it would actually be more cost effect to build the summer house than to keep on hiring Edinburgh halls, and then I could have weekly dance parties. However, we do live inconveniently far from Edinburgh University, which has a very strong gravitational pull upon my target demographic. If I (that is to say, men) built it, would they come?
Meanwhile, the shed is gone, and we await our builder to tell us how much it will cost to even out the path to our garden (concrete? paving stones) and to erect an electric wheelchair (and bicycle) garage. And the comparatively beautiful black square of earth may have inspired me to pull up all the unwanted greenery in the veggie trug at last and plant a lot of flowering edibles.
My other domestic tasks today (besides putting down the 20 lb ramp and picking it up again) were doing the laundry, buying the groceries and making a lovely pudding for Dominion Day. Obviously this is not a bank holiday in the United Kingdom, but I have always chosen to take the Canadian holiday option at work.
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