16 August 2010

It's All Quiet at Le Brin

Peace, perfect peace. It’s just me and the animals.
Guy is in Ireland with his dad whilst Kitty is also in Ireland (Cork), but with some friends she met when she did an exchange trip earlier this year. J is doing a tour of Manchester and the surrounding areas, doing a final clearing out of her late mother’s house. Tan and Angie (and the kids) are in Cyprus. The whole place is deserted.
And so I’m home alone – and it’s great but the weather’s not been so good. Since J left last Thursday, the weather has been awful, culminating in two days of torrential rain and strong winds on Friday and Saturday, and so all the outside jobs I’d planned to do when the neighbours were away have been put on hold with me only starting them on Sunday afternoon. Still, the ground and the plants needed a thorough soaking and that’s precisely what they got. Being a bit of a dope though, I managed to leave the windows on the jeep down and to surpass that, I even left the sun-roof open. What a wazzock!
And as I write this I’m picking thorns out of my flesh. The first job I tackled when the sun came out was to cut down Tan’s dead Bougainvillea which I planted ten years ago and which, each summer, produced masses of purple flowers as it climbed along their terrace pillars. The frost in February had killed it and as they are very difficult to grow up here in the hills, I was resigned to having bare terrace walls next door but then a few shoots came out of the ground a few weeks ago and now it seems to be making up for lost time and is growing at an astonishing rate. The problem is with the old, dead wood and the multitude of razor sharp thorns the plant produces, presumably as some sort of natural defence mechanism. Well, it was no match for my secateurs although quite a few thorns managed to get me and that’s why I’m scratching like mad. If it’s not the brambles it something else!
A final job was to make sure Shadow had ‘nil by mouth’ on Sunday as he was due at the vets again on Monday and if his mouth infection hadn’t cleared up, he was to go under the knife. Poor soul. I’ll update you all in the next posting.
Well, Tan begged me to keep his pool clean when he was away so I’d better get over there and make sure it is as pristine when he returns as it was when he left. Having now mastered keeping a pool nice and blue, he’s desperate for it to remain that way.
Gardener, pool boy, cleaner, dog carer – what a life!  
The picture was taken four years ago – since then the Bougainvillea had grown quite a bit, but alas, is no longer a semblance of its former glory.     

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