:: summer

Yesterday was summer, and very enjoyable it was too. Addled by the heat, I scrabbled around in the bowels of the shed to find the paint I bought months ago, and painted the back door and the front and back doorsteps. It wasn't a total success: the door paint is a brighter green than the label on the tin suggested, and the doorstep paint is bright red. The result is garish to say the least, and very shiny.

I haven't painted the big doorstep outside the livingroom doors because I'm not sure if there's enough paint left. There's loads of door paint though, so I might paint the shed doors even though they're falling apart.

I also dug over the new vege bed, raked in 80 litres of soil improver, covered it all with more newspaper and fenced it off with a little bamboo trellis thingie, to keep Bertie off. Ha ha. Then I cleared all the grunge and dead grass and bricks and stuff from outside the shed window, to see if it's worth replacing the broken glass. The answer is possibly not -- the frame is all rotted away. An interim solution is to patch the broken bit and get some of that "No More Big Gaps" expanding foam filler to plug the hole underneath it. That will at least keep the shed reasonably dry.

There's a ceiling light in there that doesn't go -- I tried changing the bulb and I checked all the fuses. The fusebox is reasonably new so maybe when that was done, the shed light didn't get wired in. The cable from the switch is cased in a metal tube which disappears into the concrete floor, no idea where it goes from there.

One day I'd like to get the shed sorted as a workshop, with a power point as well as a light, maybe knock the coalshed in together, but it's looking like a bigger and bigger job. So maybe not.

After all that huffing and puffing and breathing in paint fumes I was hot and exhausted, so after washing and changing into a frock (horror), I retired to the lawn with a rug, a stack of cushions, a book and a tall drink clinking with ice. Ahhhhhhhhh.

Poor Bertie though, he hates the heat. He spent most of the day inside, asleep. He sloped out a couple of times to see what I was up to -- most disconcerted to find me lying on the ground. "Are you ok?" But he soon went back upstairs -- outdoors has too many annoying insects. I took him for a good long walk in the evening, when it had cooled down.

I'd wanted to go to Devdas, a Bollywood extravaganza that's showing at a cinema in town, but I couldn't drag myself away from the garden. It's light until so late, and the sunset was gorgeous. Not so much the sky, but the beautiful golden light from the setting sun -- it gives everything it touches a surreal feeling, an extra lush depth and glamour.

Today it's back to weather as usual -- cloudy and grey, with a heavy sultry feeling like a hangover from yesterday's sunny excitement. It's so tragic, the weather this summer! Even yesterday people couldn't fully enjoy it: "It won't last," they'd say, with a grim glance at the sky.

I'm ordering 100 onion sets and some more garlic for the new bed, all autumn planting. The raspberries are ripening and being eaten as soon as they do by the birds, but the blackcurrants are a bit slower. I pulled all the garlic this morning -- mixed results there, but I think the next lot will do better.