Yesterday was one of the best days yet this season: balmy, a fait breeze that dried the sheets on the washing lines, the neighbourhood ringing with the sound of a chainsaw and, once that had fallen silent, filled with the voices of birds and of children enjoying their first proper day off school... Fairly peaceful.
I was raised in Protestant Switzerland where Good Friday is one of the holiest days of the year, meaning that pretty much everything comes to a standstill. So it's still a bit of an experience to find that on the West Coast of Scotland Good Friday is a day like just about any other: the post is delivered, shops are open, people hang their laundry out to dry if the weather is good.
Well, being an agnostic who no longer cares about church festivals, I appreciate shops are open so I could make the most of a lovely day by taking myself to the nearby garden centre, which has been holding a sale.I bought three tall terracotta pots for less than £10 each, as well as plants to go into them (3 for the price of 2), and bags of compost (4 for the price of 3 -- I'll be in compost for a good while!). The pots now adorn yellow patches in the drying green. The patches are the result of the next-door neighbour's white boxer peeing again and again and again through the wire-mesh fence. I spoke to its owner but she shrugged it all off, saying it cannot be trained, which is rubbish! Mind you, I quite like her so I wasn't going to make a fuss.
(photo taken a couple of days later, on 4 Apr 2010, when the sun was out again)The pots contain one red gooseberry and two raspberry shrubs. I will have to build some sort of support for the rasps, eventually, and some kind of shelter to keep them out of the worst of the north-easterly that sometimes comes bearing down the glen with a nasty, cold bite.
Still, I feel well pleased with myself for having brought this project to some sort of conclusion. There are too many still hanging about unfinished (the yellow shed, for one, which I have been meaning to paint a yummy purple -- it will happen, promise).
In stark contrast to yesterday, today has been grey and wet and quite cold.
Some neighbours in this terrace if not in this close toss pieces of bread out into the drying green. They have been attracting large jackdaws. I managed to capture two of them through my closed window this morning:
While I love their plumage that shimmers green and blue in the sun, I'm not sure they are the kinds of birds we want in our gardens, where I've lately been observing the odd wren, several bluetits and a couple of robins.
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