Yesterday Sunday I had a thoroughly lazy time in my computer was on only half today I spent time sitting on my bed reading light literature including Clare Balding’s description of her rambles around the United Kingdom. Last night I did not sleep well and moved to the living room where I so often pass a few hours. I find I can sleep best when there is complete silence; I return to the marital bed perhaps at six in the morning and sleep again for a couple of hours.

The night before last there was a temporary failure of the electricity. I knew about it because the oven started bleeping and the front doorbell rang. Such activity is quite strange at 1.30 in the morning but never mind we’ve analysed what had happened and went back to bed. I would hate it if someone had genuinely tried to break in at 1:30 AM.  Touch wood it has never happened. In any case robbers would be disappointed by volumes of books, some stored food, lack of anything that could be considered to be valuable.

We did two jobs today, the first one was halving the height of a hedge which was made a very hard prickly stuff and not easy to deal with. Fortunately I have the tools for the job and I can say that we spent as much if not more time clearing up the results of our cutting than the actual cutting itself for which I use a very powerful electric hedge cutter which goes through most things.

I have seen some strange street names in my time……

We then returned home, I loaded the rubbish and reloaded with a mower and petrol strimmer to go to another job. The customer is a delightful lady of senior years called June who loves sitting and watching us work. She lives in council accommodation in Paulton. I have to think of a way of telling her that if she stands 3 foot away from when I’m doing strimming there is a high likelihood that one of the stones will fly out and hit her in the feet or worse. I have asked her carer to please discourage her from standing too close.

We always make it a point to talk to the neighbours because the bonds between people, especially the more disadvantaged, are strong and we do everything we can to show that we are interested in people’s welfare and we at least listen to them. The first customer today could not stop talking and we had to listen to her bearing in mind that this was probably going to be the only conversation she was going to have today. The weather was really lovely and thank goodness we worked early in the day because in the afternoon the rain came.

I have made plans to go away shortly to visit Derbyshire, Shropshire, and Ashton under Lyme. It’s always good to see friends and we shall enjoy travelling in our new car hopefully trouble-free. I have a three month warranty which is comforting. Our new car contains information about how many miles we will get out of the tank and tells us how many mpg our driving is causing us to do. We shall be driving about 400 miles over six days so I wonder how much petrol that will take. Maybe £100. That would certainly be much cheaper than going by train.

I’m looking forward to the break.