Oh, My Days!

 Bambino de-Bobbled Wilson and Sidney Sans Tackle this morning, sharing chit chat. Reminiscing about the days, no doubt, when they thought they had something but now they’ve somehow lost it, and were things better back then or not? For yea verily, yesterday Sidney had a hospital appointment with his lady surgeon, Dr Beth (Dr Andy was otherwise engaged with other appointments) to be debobbled of his baby making kit. He is recovering indoors today, although I have to say that he seems to have made a faster recovery from all the anaesthetic and surgery malarkey than Edith did. But then he didn’t have to go through quite as much trauma what with his bits being external and all. Arriving home last night, he immediately noshed into an apple and some dandelion leaves, and was far more active and less zombied out than Edith. He is also pooing and peeing with great gusto which means I’ve had to open the living room window to keep fresh air circulating and niffiness to a minimum. The subject of

  See that pile of brambles running up the left hand side of the photo? That pile of brambles was, five hours previously, growing INSIDE that lovely pathway right next to the fence that has now been exposed because (trumpet fanfare) Lady Malarkey the Bramble Wranglet (c’est moi!) has done battle with them because she was bloomin’ well fed up with them growing like triffids over the fence and encroaching on her garden.  Yesterday, in glorious sunshine and resplendent in her new teal dungarees and yellow pruning gauntlets, and armed with her lovely secateurs that were an excellent birthday gift from Malarkey the Younger Heather, Lady Malarkey set about The Battle of Bramble 2022, and emerged triumphant a few hours later. Tired and a bit achey, but triumphant! Here are more photos of the up the field view and the down the field view… The operation was conducted by accessing the area via squeezing through the gap between the oil tank and the protective wall that keeps the tank (full of fla

 The astute amongst you (e.g KJ!) have already picked up the hint at the end of my last blog that there is a story to be told regarding Andy plus bicycles. (By the way - Edith is all ticketty boo. After 24 hours of being zoned out and making Andy and I hypersensitive to her every movement, she suddenly perked up yesterday evening, trashed her hospital ward because clearly the arrangement didn’t meet with her approval, and so this morning has made a permanent return to her own home and I need fret no longer about finding a stray bunny poo underneath the sofa, probably when I move the sofa to show someone important, like Her Maj the Queen, the lovely engineered oak flooring we had installed 3 years ago. Well, it COULD happen…quelle embarrassement…) Back to bicycles. Yesterday, I drove Andy to a nearby village to their bicycle shop which is closing down. Andy had already noticed they were having a closing down sale (20% off everything) and had reserved a bicycle. He announced this to me b

 Here is Edith yesterday, in her oxygen tent, post op… Her personal physician and surgeon, Dr A Hunt, took her in to be spayed (on his day off - greater love hath no man than this, that he surrendered his free time so that no baby bunnies may be created), and he made a jolly neat job of it. ‘I can be neat sometimes,’ he said in the post-op interview, conducted by Edith’s concerned bunny mummy, Mrs D Hunt.  Rabbit anaesthetics can be fraught with various perils i.e rabbits can die easily whilst under them, and I did not know this until Andy explained the process about ten minutes before he set off with Edith in the cat carrier. And the fact that rabbit bowels are extremely sensitive and he had to avoid touching them as much as he could, which, given the size of a bunny and the close proximity of her lady bits to all other internal organs, is no mean feat. Even more so when the surgeon himself occasional refers to his operating digits as ‘sausage fingers.’  The operation itself takes abo

 The greenhouse staging is filling up nicely with seeds trays after yesterday’s seedfest planting effort on my part. Determined to grow more flowers for the garden this year, I’ve started off : pansies, cornflowers, cosmos, nasturtiums, evening primroses and some sunflowers, courtesy of a packet Heather sent me in a birthday card. I have also, optimistically, sown some of the seeds I collected when this plant threw out a couple of flower spikes last year… It’s called Haworthia Limifolia, or (more charmingly) Fairies’ Washboard. According to all the books it grows to around 4 inches in diameter and is therefore ‘perfect for window ledges and desks.’ This one, however, is already 6.5 inches in diameter. It clearly likes where it lives, which is on the bathroom window ledge, and how I’ve been treating it, which is giving it a light shower once every six weeks or so. Anyway, in the spirit of optimism and my tendency towards no-faff, mildly slapdash gardening approaches, I’ve popped ten see

 A couple of days ago I received a membership renewal form in the post which I didn’t read properly until yesterday morning. And when I did read it, I discovered the membership renewal fee was £60, twice what it was last year.  Well, my immediate thought was, ‘I could buy a lot of garden plants for £60,’ which, as an instinctive response, should have told me immediately that that particular membership and I were about to part company. However, because I occasionally doubt my instinct, and because this particular membership has been an important part of my life, I ‘phoned a chum of mine who is on the same wavelength as me, ran my instinctive response by her, and we had a jolly chat about it, along with MANY other things which extended into two hours of chat and anyway, the decision was made. My instinct was correct and the membership was, indeed, extraneous to my current life pathway.  By mid-afternoon, I had invested the £60 potential renewal fee in these… …a pair of dungarees from the

 I made a video of the bunnies whilst I was up the garden a few afternoons ago. I tried to put it in a blog post but for some reason unbeknownst to me, it refused to publish. Every time I pressed ‘Select’ to embed it in the blog it vanished - pouff! - into goodness knows where. My final attempt to overcome the vagaries of technology with my wit and skill ended with considerable and unladylike effing and jeffing, so I put the video on Instagram instead. Soz. Here then, are the bunnies in still life… Can you see that pile of cream fur sitting between them? Do you know what that is? That is Edith the Strumpet saying, ‘Hey, you - sexy Sidney! C’mon and make some babies!’ Basically, she is all overcome with rabbitty lust and is putting on a show of nesting. Andy the Vet (her private physician) was unable to secure an operating slot for her this week, so he is going to try and squeeze her in this week before she ends up bald.  And whilst we are on the subject of hormones and rising sap, look

 ‘He’s a bit of a digger,’ said the rabbit breeder lady as she transferred Sidney into our pet carrier. Then, ‘Good luck!’ before cheerfully taking our cash, telling him to behave, and beating a hasty retreat through her gate. A bit of a digger? What’s THAT supposed to mean? There was no mention of being ‘a bit of a digger’ on the website details. Behave? Why did she specifically tell him to behave? Why did she wish us luck?? Thus I woke a couple of times last night in a bit of a sweat borne of the tail end of my cold and nightmarish dreams that Sidney had decided he did not like his new home and had burrowed his way to freedom/ the wide open fields/the slavering jaws of a fox/badger/dragon.  By 6.30 a.m I could bear the tension no more. With rabbit breakfasts x 2 in hand I ventured to the mini-orchard bracing myself for, well, I don’t know what really, just as long as it didn’t involve blood and entrails. Edith came boinging into view, all enthusiasm and ‘Hurrah! Breakfast! Gimme, gim

 Our attempt to secure a bunny via the Cheshire branch of the RSPCA met with the same dead end response as the Shropshire branch. The rabbit we enquired about, we were informed, was already in the process of being adopted. Do you have any others then, said we. Oh, we’ve only got pairs that need rehoming, said they. But we’ve got one already, we only want one, said we. Radio silence. Then a message saying if the adoption of the rabbit of our original enquiry failed, they would be in touch.  Too late!! I can’t be waiting around for the RSPCA to get their act together. Edith is a lone bunny. She needs a companion. I had also made contact with a woman in Stoke who wanted to re-home her rabbit but she never got back to me when she said she would i.e almost a week ago. Too late for her, too.  Because, from a breeder just up the road, for the grand sum of £20 (a third of what the RSPCA wanted), ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce…. Sidney! He is hiding in the Eglu after a twenty minute car

  I genuinely cannot remember the last time I caught a cold. It’s got to be well over 3 years ago. According to t’internet (which, to be honest, seems to know Jack Shit on the fact front these days) the average adult can expect to suffer between 2 and 4 colds per year, so I can count myself lucky that I’ve avoided my average dose. Of course, in my cockier moments I like to think I am not an average adult, but ‘Feeling of The Day’ today is ‘Contemplative’ not ‘Cocky’ so today I am ‘average.’  Hang on a minute… ‘Whomp! (There It Is) by Tag Team is on the radio - I need to get up and dance to it. Back in a mo…. …all done! Sorry about that. It’s like Aerosmith and ‘Walk This Way.’ Both songs make me want to strut my stuff. Still feeling contemplative rather than cocky though, so no harm done. Just a bit out of puff, that’s all. Where were we? Ah yes - catching colds. Well, on Thursday, as his Lordship Malarkey and I were travelling to his Dad’s funeral (the journey took us an extra hour be

 When a person dies and moves on to better things, there’s a lot of sorting out to be done by those left behind. Especially if that person was a great collector of books, as was Andy’s dad. Andy has been charged with sorting out ALL the books, a task he has taken to with great aplomb because he has inherited his dad’s bibliophile tendencies and is never happier than when surrounded by books. Okay, maybe when surrounded by Doctor Who stuff, but we’ll gloss over that.  Anyway, he is thrilled to be back in possession of this little beauty… It’s called ‘The Boys’ Own Conjuring Book’ and it was published in 1860. Andy says he loved reading it as a child, so much so that his dad eventually took it away from him because, Andy thinks, he didn’t want him to ruin it because of its age and fragility.  Why did Andy love this book so much? Aside from the fact he loves the whole magic trickery thing, the main reason was that this book holds within its enchanting pages the trick of ‘How To Breathe Fi

 Having declared the Official Arrival of Spring yesterday because Mr and Mrs Duck said so, overnight a lightweight frost promptly laid itself across the gardens of Damson Cottage. Undeterred, I crunched my way to the greenhouse first thing to begin the Official Seed Sowing of 2022… This is my seed box. I’ve been perusing some seed catalogues this afternoon. I may need another seed box. I digress… This morning, then, I sowed peas (to pop and eat) and sweet peas (to admire and enjoy their heady scents) using my collection of empty loo roll tubes that I’ve been saving as root trainers for just this purpose since last Summer. I also planted up a load of leeks using an unnecessarily large tub. This is because the year before last I planted them in small pots to start them off and they were an absolute bugger to separate and untangle when I wanted to transplant them outside. Once I have reassembled the various parts of the electric propagator (which appears to have spread its components acro

 I am pleased to announce that Spring is officially here. How do I know this? Because this morning Mr and Mrs Duck arrived to take up their annual residency chez the tangle of undergrowth in the corner of the field attached to our driveway. You have no idea the level of joy and excitement that emerged from me when I saw their little heads bobbing about there as I was looking out the window whilst filling the kettle for first cup of tea of the day! It was INSANE! I shouted up the stairs to Andy (home from Lancashire) that Mr and Mrs Duck had returned for the seventh year in a row; I have to report that his level of euphoria at this news nowhere near matched mine.  ‘How do you know they are the same Mr and Mrs Duck?’ said he. ‘Of course it’s the same Mr and Mrs Duck!’ said I. ‘A different Mr and Mrs Duck wouldn’t know where to come, would they?’ (I rolled my eyes. Honestly…) By this time I’d already checked my diary and was able also to inform him that last year they arrived on 12th Marc