Blog Revamp; Now I Really Must do Something About the Garden!

I do like Roses and so I thought I'd change my header and background, especially as there are no rose bushes in our new garden.  As we are now in accommodation that has been provided with my husband's new job, the garden (having had several tenant carers in the past few years) although tidy, is in need of a bit of TLC. Actually, I'd have to say it's more than tidy, it's rather boring, but do I want to go to all the effort of digging up the invasive weeds, and planting out new borders and shrubs, if we are not destined to stay here any great length of time?  (Somehow, we always seem to move on after about 5 years of hard labour in a garden - yep, just at the moment when it was all beginning to come together..sigh). I did purchase a huge load of bulbs very cheaply in December, but when I tried to dig some borders up there was such a tangle of roots that I didn't get very far. So the poor things sat in the garage, until a few weeks ago, when I had a mad hour or so of plonking them into the soil wherever I could. I wil be intrigued to see if any of them come up!

Still, we do have two fine Pigeons who like to be sentinels for Our Lady of the Compost Corner (we really must find her a more fitting niche!).

The Monkey Donkey!

We moved, had lots on the go, no time or inclination to blog, 'till now...

So, here we go again.

Sometimes you just feel like a bit of an









You spend so much time trying hard to do the right thing, but in the end haven't got a clue whether what you're doing is the right thing, or not. Take the case of a home-educating mother with one son. He's about the age when he could go to school, his Dad's got a job at a very good school, but... because he was home-educated he got really into tennis (a great outlet, and if that mother is going to supportively watch any sport, tennis would be the one) so much so, that he's become quite good at it. The school does not specialise in tennis. He doesn't want to give it up. So we carry on home-educating, and getting stuck in the rounds of tennis training, tennis competition, until that mother begins to feel like a real donkey. So she carries on, carrying him around on her back* through the leafy counties of Southern England (and doing a bit of sewing in between times) in the vague hope that he will get some kind of education from the books that get pushed in his direction, when he hasn't got a racquet in his hand.

Is the plodding along worthwhile? In the great scheme of things, who knows? But Providentially (so it seems) the tennis monkey is improving, having won two tournaments last weekend, so maybe the home-schooled boy will improve too, and in the long run, maybe the donkey will cheer up...



















*Actually it's a nice little red car, Deo Gratias.