I am going to start with a quote from Horace Walpole (Google him and the lovely Strawberry Hill House)
“Don’t let this horrid weather put you out of humour with your garden tho I own it is a pity that we should have brought gardening to perfection and have too bad a climate to enjoy it. It is strictly true this year – that ours is the most beautiful country in the world when glazed and framed.”
I am personally feeling a little glazed this morning having spent the last week on constant alert for a plague of frogs or locusts and then being tricked into celebrating the Welsh victory in an Italian cafe. All this without the in-house trials and tribulations at Kingston Kastle, a rich vein of inspiration.
My boys have been bickering like British politicians and readers may recall a previous incident when they came to blows under the dining table about the homophobic nature of the King James Bible. (You couldn’t make this up.). I sent them both to their rooms, an obvious sanction for people in their twenties. The latest spat was about the unauthorised wearing of a jacket and broke the most important of Commandments: Thou shalt make wake thy Mother up with thine bickering. Useless the Elder ended up with a very swollen hand which required minute and frequent inspection, often in the early hours, for the next week and my offer of immediate amputation was dismissed, dare I say it, out of hand. After a medically qualified visitor expressed a vague opinion that it might actually be damaged nothing else would do but a blue light, bells ringing dash to the nearest hospital where he was X-rayed within ten minutes. The staff there are old friends and know procrastination is pointless.
It turned out that he had an injury popular with the boxing fraternity (and prisoners punching walls in jails) so on the plus side the plaster cast could be passed off as a tribute to the late, great Mohammed Ali.
The fun continued when my late husband popped in to collect some incredibly important book he had abandoned along with his wife and children a quarter of a century ago and now wants back – only the book, needless to say. He remarked that I was looking tired which might appear to be concern to someone who had never met him.
‘I certainly am tired’ I informed him, somewhat archly, ‘Tired, exhausted, worn out and fed up with all of you. Perhaps you would like to do the next 25 years of solo parenting?’
How we laughed! And I would have punched him if I didn’t need both hands for the next month of nursing duties.