Gardening

With so much going on at work it never quite occurred to me to plan anything for the weekends, so in order to avoid an entire weekend dedicated to the XBox and my guitars, I volunteered to help out Claire (a friend from work) with her belated summer gardening.

She's got a gorgeous country cottage, bizarelly located in some kind of vortex in the middle of Reading. The whole area is green and rustic, yet for miles around it in every direction there's the usual urban sprawl one would expect - very confusing. Claire herself lives in a thatch-roofed placed amongst what used to be an orchard, so there's a lot of great apple trees around.

I was charged with hedge trimming, and much though I appreciated an excuse to get out and about, and have some real exercise, things didn't exactly go swimmingly. Cutting through the wire of the first pair of electric hedge-clippers fortunately didn't result in any form of electrocution, but still wasn't exactly ideal. "You realise they're [the cables] painted bright orange for a reason" says Claire - which would be a fair point if the rest of the thing wasn't also bright orange ;)

It wasn't until about an hour into causing bits of tree to rain down upon me that I realised I was allergic to something within that particular plant - a bit of a downer as I was covered in it. The rash has mostly gone away now at least, though I am still finding bits of tree dotted around the house...

Anyhow, back to reading The amazing adventures of Kavalier & Clay (great), playing Crackdown (great) and learning these 12 songs for a band practise on Monday with some guys I found through someone at work - more on that Tuesday morning I imagine.

Xx