The forecasts at the start of the week indicate ten days of warmth and sunshine with very little rain. What a change. It means that I could try to make some more progress on my great rockmoving project. For a second time, Ricky came to the fore as I moved a further ton of rocks from our stock in front of the house to the watercourse that forms every time we have heavy rain. It’s quite a job, rather more than I had envisioned at first. It’s not just a job of dumping rocks in the way of potential rushing torrents, they need to be carefully angled and bedded down to direct the water. After a day of fairly heavy exertions, I am about half done. But I did pull a muscle in my forearm, so I think it will be a few days before we get on to more rock hauling. We had a short torrential downpour on Friday afternoon. Nearly three quarters of an inch in 30 minutes. The incomplete work on the dry creek bed to date did show – a fair amount of the water gushing down the hill was redirected in the general “right” direction.
There’s been lots more planting this week. The garden looks a bit unbalanced at present, small plants surrounded by quite a lot of space. We have hopes of future garden with lots of perennials which will repeat year after year. They will expand over time, so we need to leave a bit of space for growth. And since we don’t have the hard landscaping (including raised beds for vegetables) done yet, the 120 foot long planter bed has a mixture of flowers and vegetables coexisting happily.
We are happy to see the results of earlier work starting to show, too. In the autumn, I planted about 50 bluebell corms in the hope that we might be able to establish a bluebell wood. Proper English bluebells (albeit from a nursery in Wales). There is now a small show visible. I guess that the this means that they will be viable – I can see a lot more bluebell planting later in the year.
In the house, this was picture hanging week. For a long time we had been planning to frame both some prints that Lisa has had for many years, and also a set of “Four Seasons” acrylics that our neighbour Will Redpath had given us before we left England. These were finally all ready at the framers, so we picked them up and I hung them in the entry hall and in our bathroom. We’re starting to run out of wall space now.
On the international front, Thursday was election day in UK. For all the runup electioneering period, the polls had predicted that no party would gain an overall majority. We made our contribution to the democratic process – we may be living overseas, but we still qualify for a vote. It took a little hassle to obtain these and exercise our democratic rights. The results were not as the polls predicted – the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government was replaced by a Conservative majority government. But I was amazed at the distribution of parliamentary seats that the surely outmoded constituency system produced.
The results do show a mockery of democracy that the current constituency voting has created. It may work when there are only two real parties, but not with 8 competing. UKIP has a bigger share of the national vote than the next two parties combined (Liberal Democrats with 8 seats, and the Scottish Nationalists with 56 seats in parliament). For this, they were awarded just one single seat. It’s not that I want more UKIP MPs, even if their leader went to the same school as me. Even though electoral law reform was kicked into touch 3 years ago (in a political stitch-up between Tories and Labour), it is more important than ever now to improve this ludicrous situation.