Sunday singalong

There is a view in this household that Joan Jett should be commissioned to rehabilitate the whole of Gary Glitter's back catalogue, this giving us back the excuse for a lot of road journey singalongs.

Lessons unlearned

You'd have thought I'd know better after the episode with the quilt, but oh no…

Much to my — and the blue tits' — dismay, I've temporarily put a clothes line up in the garden so that I can dry a bed cover which has been drip-draining into the bath for the past 20 hours after I had a fit of bank holiday domesticity.

For those of you struggling for pub quiz questions, it turns out that a quilted blanket can hold eighty litres of bathwater.

28 Days Later...

The Small Object Of Desire And Moon Of My Delight woke up with a start.

"I've had a horrible dream," she said. "I dreamt that I was being set challenges. If I got the challenge right then a small disaster happened and only a few people died. If I got it wrong there was some sudden huge disaster and thousands of people died. And we were running round like mad trying to round up everyone we knew so that if anything else happened we'd know where they were and we could look after them and we wouldn't be having to keep going off to look for them.

"And you kept telling me off: we only had so much time to find everyone and if we didn't get back soon we might never get back so we might have to leave some people behind."

It's awful when work intrudes into real life.

Déjà vu

I think I need to start writing a blog about my workplace, to get some of the stresses out of my system…

The uncallings-for of Summer

There's no call for that, Summer days in Helminthdale or no Summer days in Helminthdale.

We spent ages trying to work out whether the elderly chap making his way to the bus station was wearing particularly disreputable Bermuda shorts or had forgotten his trousers.

One swallow doesn't make a relationship

We've finally(!) had a drop of rain. OK, then, a torrential downpour, but it's the first we've had since the beginning of April. We've been lucky with the bank holiday weather and took advantage to loll around the garden awhile. Taking care to ignore the neglects of Winter, when I was a bit preoccupied.

The damson, cherries and pears have all flowered and the scent of the rowan has gone over from fishy stickiness to bletted wonder. By the looks of things we'll be well-stocked with blackcurrants and cherries and the first few figs are happily swelling up. The borders are chockablock with hardy geraniums and iris and the shrubs are thick with sparrows, goldfinches and dunnock. We also seem to be hosting nestboxes full of great and blue tits and a blackcap has taken ownership of the sycamore on the railway embankment.

So there I've been, sitting around on the patio, sipping tea and reading The Hotspur. Meanwhile, the Small Object of Desire and Moon of My Delight has been chopping up the firewood and the garden is full of birdsong.

Life is pretty good at the moment.