A robin and a blue tit saw off a nuthatch from the bird station. Really it was the robin who did the business, the tit being like the little kid who eggs on the bully to snatch some of the glory. The robin then stood guard, looking threatening, while the tit, knowing he didn’t belong in the same space as the toughie, head deferentially bowed, waited his turn. Modern technology found a wonderful new way to send me ballistic this morning. We received a phone call from the handyman who is to fix a few things in the flat. One item was not on his list. Since, without the agent’s say so he could not fix it, unless we contacted them we would need to continue flushing the lavatory with a piece of string which gets soggy if you drop it in the water. Rob, the handyman, asked us to call the agent. That was when the fun started. After dialling the number I was asked by a machine to enter my password. Well, how do you do that on a mobile phone? I also had an e-mail telling me the device would not receive messages because the password was incorrect. Thinking this may have been to do with my having reset my e-mail password on the BT account, I followed the directions given to do that. I was not allowed to do it that way, so I tried another. The new password was rejected, and the phone locked. Now, my mobile phone is on an O2 account, as my regular readers will already know. The home phone, in Jackie’s name, is a BT account. So you will be able to imagine my surprise, and mild expletives, when I got the same password request on the home phone. My expletives became even milder when Jackie got the same response on her pay as you go T-mobile. Eventually, I received a call from the home phone on my mobile. Jackie had now discovered that that had begun to work without the machine’s interference, as had her mobile. I could now receive calls, but access nothing else on my locked phone. There are seventeen apartments in this building. During this fiasco our entry buzzer was activated. Hoping it was our Rob, Jackie answered the door to a deliveryman who was trying to access number 15. Ours was one of only two buzzers he had managed to get to work. Rob arrived in good time. He was unable to access the loo until I got out of the bath. My ablutions had been delayed by the shenanigans. Whilst soaking comfortably I contemplated ‘Murder In The Lounge’, posted on 25th August last year. That story was about a cat fight. What I didn’t mention then was that the people next door were out when I returned the perpetrator’s collar, so I put that through the letterbox and left an answer phone message. My neighbours did not receive the message, and what is more, their entry phone did not take messages. Nevertheless, as I pressed the buzzer, a machine from inside the hall asked me to leave a message. So I did, and when I heard nothing more from my neighbours whose cat, after all, had left my sitting room looking like a pile of feathers after a predator had made a kill, I thought that rather churlish of them. So, did that buzzer short circuit with the telephone, or was the timing pure coincidence? And, if that was possible, could the deliveryman, trying all the buzzers in turn, have managed the same thing? It was, after all, only after he left that Jackie managed to use the phone. Or have I simply gone mad? 
Never mind, I thought, the birch on the lawn now sports fresh green leaves, and the sun casts its rays through our huge mullioned windows. There was, however, nothing remotely amusing or cheerful about the way the rest of the morning was spent. I was rash enough to telephone O2 about the locked phone. First of all the advisor suggested the earlier problem must have been related to the number we were trying to ring. That made sense to me. She then took me through the very lengthy process of unlocking my mobile. I had to enter, ten times, the password that kept showing up as incorrect. She could then reset it for me, but all the information carried by my phone would be wiped. I did this, and watched all my contact information; e-mails; saved messages; texts; and anything else I haven’t thought of, represented by a black line progressing across the screen. Twice. When she reset it, the password I had been using all along worked. Perhaps I have gone mad. This is exactly why I have always been reluctant to keep all information in my mobile phone’s memory. But I’ve often been a bit lazy in this respect. So, if you ever want to hear from me again, please send me an e-mail with your contact details. If I don’t receive any of these, I will know where I stand, and I just don’t know what I’ll do with myself. After lunch, with all this buzzing in my head, Jackie drove us to Elizabeth’s, where she continued planting bulbs and seeds and I cut the grass. This was slightly problematic in that I couldn’t get the mower going again. I was just about to throw in the towel, when, realising that would only clog up the works even more, I remembered Elizabeth’s technique, displayed on 20th, of pushing the machine along, jerking it up and down. A few yards of shoving what looked like a giant snail with hiccups did the trick. 
We were pleased to see the early, red, rhododendron has benefited from the bracken compost and the removal of diseased buds last summer. Before I could put my mind to this, I gleaned some family phone numbers from my sister and inserted them into my mobile. If you are a family member do not assume I now have all your details. Danni cooked a superb roast chicken dinner with all the trimmings for the four of us. Pudding was apple and blackcurrant pie. Danni and I drank McGuigan Estate shiraz 2012; Jackie drank Hoegaarden; and Elizabeth drank water.
Tag: Honda lawn mower
Greengrass
We chose a gorgeous spring day to begin catch up in Elizabeth’s garden. As we left Castle Malwood Lodge, leaf buds were at last appearing on the deciduous trees. The sky was a clear light blue, as it was to remain all day, although there was still a chill in the air once the sun had lowered and moved behind buildings. 
Mum, who came to lunch and stayed on to bask in the sunshine, had to keep moving out of the shade.
Elizabeth shopped, prepared lunch, and collected our mother. Afterwards she started weeding another bed. My task was collecting some of the two year compost from the first bin and distributing it as a top dressing to the bed she had weeded last week.
It has broken down well and will be a useful supplement to the still stony soil. After this I trimmed the lawn edges prior to mowing. I was careful not to chop any overhanging flowers. 
The odd forget-me-not wouldn’t have mattered much, but I didn’t want to cut through wallflower stems. 
I’m glad it wasn’t me who knocked the head off a fritillary. Elizabeth quickly placed it in a silver egg-cup, along with a sprig of epimedium that had suffered the same fate. 
Jackie carried out a number of tasks: fitting together and filling the various bird feeders scattered in bits about the garden: raking the grass ready for cutting; cleaning out pebble features; and weeding.
When it came to mowing, we could not get the Honda petrol driven machine to start. Apparently it needs a service. I wasn’t all that sorry.
There were two new golf balls on the lawn. This prompted me to explain to Mum the theory of the foxes conceived on 12th September last year. Briefly, we think the balls are carried here by foxes from the golf course behind the Hampshire County Cricket ground. ‘You should do what Greengrass did’, said Mum. Claude Jeremiah Greengrass is the loveable and utterly hopeless rogue played by Bill Maynard in ‘Heartbeat’, the television series set in the 60s. He had a good line in recycled golf balls. He would send a posse of children to seek out lost balls, pay them a small token, and sell them back to the golfers for an inflated sum. 
The boys, a bit smarter than their employer, trained their dog to retrieve balls that were not lost, and indeed were still in play. This caused quite a furore among the upper echelons of Aidenfield.
As I pottered around The Firs’ garden, aware of the flapping of wings and satisfied cries of those wood pigeons having been successful in finding a mate, I began to take in all the other sounds of a neighbourhood stirring into life. 
A bee buzzed busily; small birds whistled tunefully; children’s voices chimed; a light aircraft rattled overhead, in tune with a solitary magpie; a high-pitched electronic car alarm irritated; a power tool droned in fits and starts; my large fork struck the bricks of the compost bin, and the hand fork grated on the flinty soil; the blades of the hedge trimmers clipped rhythmically; and Jackie’s rake rustled the dried leaves and twigs on the grass. Next door had been for sale as long as we have been travelling to The Firs. Recently, new occupants have moved in. One is a particularly unpleasant sounding dog that barks continuously and snarls as if it has a mouthful of ball bearings. Occasionally what I think must be a woman who sounds like a Dalek with a mouthful of pebbles gives the dog as good as it dishes out. This is all a bit incongruous on a beautiful spring afternoon.
Later, Elizabeth did manage to make her temperamental mower work. But by that time I was cooking turkey jalfrezi for our evening meal, so she cut the grass herself. She had discovered how to persuade the machine into stuttering action when, twice, taking it to an engineer to sort out the problem and finding it had no problem when she got there. She decided it must have been the jolting up and down in the car that did the trick. So now she gives it a good jerky walk around the garden.
With the meal we enjoyed wild rice and a jalfrezi bread from a local baker. More like a pud than a naan. Jackie drank Stella. Elizabeth and I shared a bottle of Mondelli reserva chianti 2009.