Sunday, sweet Sunday..

...with nothing to do. I wish. There is always too much to do here. But it's been nice so far and I feel satisfied with myself.

Sandy stayed over because he still refuses to stay with his dad over night. (He spent too many nights trying to shut out the sound of a drunken Geordie getting angry with Chloe on the mobile, or becoming actively aggressive. That stage is over now, hopefully, but it will take a while for Sandy to forget. Forgiving is easier than forgetting.) When Sandy sleeps here I wake early to get him breakfast and to bake little cakes he can take with him for his day out at the riding stable. This means that instead of mouldering in bed I am active and feel like doing something once he has left. This day I chose to go to a car boot sale, without much hope of finding any interesting books, but it's something I haven't done in a while, indeed they can only just have got started again as the weather hasn't been the sort to tempt people from their beds on a Sunday. It was a pleasant surprise to find a dozen books really worth having. At a pittance! They should make me 700% profit. Now THAT'S satisfying.

The rat catcher was there with his offerings, very neatly displayed and priced, but none of them appealed to me because I have seen them all too often. Also his prices were higher than other people who were just trying to clear out their stuff. That's the trouble with becoming semi-professional! When I could get books at 50p there was no point in paying him £1. We exchanged pleasantries and fragments of comradely thoughts about what was selling well and what only fit for the tip. I have to admit that I admire him. He knows many of his regular customers by now and they ask him to look out for books for them. He has made an arrangement with most of the charity shops in town here to look through their books and take the ones they don't sell or don't want to put on the shelves. He sells them at the mart or puts them on Amazon. The remainder he sells on to another secondhand shop or takes to the recycling. To my knowledge no-one else is doing this in the area, whereas in England there are people making a business out of scooping up excess books and selling them in pallet loads to people who put them on the internet. They guarantee to have weeded out all the ones that are not suitable for Amazon,the Mills and Boone, Reader's Digest Condensed, Marks & Spencer and so on. When the possibility of selling secondhand books on Amazon opened up it spawned this secondary livelihood.

This wasn't what I intended to write about today. Something more 'OT' was what I had in mind. After the book sale I came home to do some weeding. Now this might not sound very exceptional, but it is for me. I am not a gardener and weeding is high up there on my list of tasks I dislike. This house came with quite a large garden and though it is layed out in such a way as to be the least possible trouble whilst looking pretty, it still has to be weeded. It is incredible to me how many hurtful things there are lurking out there in the undergrowth. Two hours at it and I am now stinging and itching and bleeding. I also have bruises on my knees from kneeling on stones. Probably the serious gardener would have Equiptment for all this, gloves and kneelers and so forth, but weeding, in fact any gardening, is something I have to surprise myself with so not something I spend money preparing for. It is only by accident I have a trowel. The last owner left one here. I can't tell myself I am going to do the garden twice a week, or for an hour each evening, because the part of me that really hates gardening will sabotage such a plan, whereas if I set out to do one or two other more enjoyable things and then, as if by accident, find myself weeding, well then I can keep going for a couple of hours. I have to keep my mind occupied with other things so I don't become aware of what I am up to.

Weeds are to be admired. They are intelligent - possibly more so than the in-bred garden plants. They choose to grow under shrubs that will hide them from me and make them difficult to extract. They pop up through clumps of golden thyme that I don't want to damage by rummaging for their roots. Smart little beggars they are. I am a little hazy on the difference between a weed and a potential garden flower when they are young but not as hazy as the weeds would like me to be. Today I filled a large plastic bin bag with them then poured myself a sizeable whisky and sat on the new bench to admire the (almost) weed-free first garden. Happily I can't see the other two gardens. The plot is long and narrow and has been divided into three 'rooms' with a fence or screen between each to increase shelter from the strong winds that whip up the hillside (it's on a hill)and create more areas that are as private ass possible when sitting amongst the large stone houses on either side of it. the rooms a great psychological help as I can sit in one at a time and not feel the pressure of the needs of the other two. No lawn. I despise the traditional rectangle of lawn edged with beds of flowers. It's so depressingly unimaginative. Possibly a family with children need a lawn for them to romp on but I can't think of any other good reason for it's existance. When I was about ten years old we moved from a very old (Tudor) cottage with a pretty walled garden full of old shrubs, to a new house set in a much bigger very overgrown and neglected garden. I loved the wilderness there with a passion and wept angry tears when my father cleared away the last of it for - a lawn!! A lawn offers no place for dreams.

When Nick and Danielle moved into their house up the road it was surrounded by mossy lawns and overgrown, overshadowing conifers, a half-hearted and dingy plot. They set about turning it into a wild garden with flowers that would seed themselves and appear ever year, mongst them the flowers that grow naturally in rough ground like foxgloves, campions, fire weed and granny bonnets - I have no interest in their latin names; they planted sweet scented ground cover, heathers and grasses. It has been hard work. Obviously if you are not to have a formless wilderness with all the flowers choked by couch grass it has to be a conrolled wild garden - a paradox. Eight years later they have what they envisioned and each year it becomes more beautiful with a pond which a heron visits regularly. My garden was designed to be much the same but on a smaller scale, and without the pond. I just have the dish in front of True Thomas for the birds to drink and bathe in. It has come on a long way already and I have some nice ground covers in place, but the wild strawberry is a bit out of hand. It will give me bowl-fulls of the delicious little berries (especially the white ones are good) but it does want to rule over all so there will have to be a cull.

Once the bag was full I sat with my whisky on the new bench and thought how peaceful it all is out there, although I am in the middle of a High Street. A blackbird was singing. A dog was barking (there's always one, although it isn't always the same voice.) Sparrows chittering amongst themselves; some deep-throated wood pigeons sounding almost like cuckoos. I've only ever heard a cuckoo once in this part of the world and I believe they are getting scarce everywhere, but the shroo-coo of the pigeons are a good substitute. There were gulls overhead but for the time being they were silent. One harsh crow. The eucalyptus, cut down radically two years ago to the distress of my neighburs, has now achieved the 20' height it had before but more bushy rustles in the wind; a football game at the Academy was raising young pre-pubescent voices and the deeper shouts of their fathers. Traffic noise from several distant roads, worn down to a purr by the air between us. No planes because it is Sunday. On the day of rest, or the Lord's Day as it still is for some in this part of the world, the birds beasts and fishes don't get shot or snared, and the warplanes don't fly.

If I were living in silence like Nick and Danielle then the noises when they come would sound so much louder but with the constant friendly drone of life around me I am happy enough when a motor bike roars down the street, or children cry, or a lad shouts abuse at a mate.

It doesn't disturb me.