Totally unfeline post

Today you’re not getting a word out of me about the kittens or the two plants that they knocked off the kitchen shelf while I was out this morning having coffee with friends and mourning the end of the holidays. (One pot broken, one cracked, lots of compost scattered far and wide, while my friends and I had coffee sitting on a balcony in South Queensferry, overlooking the water, thinking that we could do this sort of thing every day if we didn’t have to work.)

I don’t want to become a kitten bore, so I won’t mention how utterly sweet they are in the evenings, when they lie on my husband’s lap and snooze away, purring fluffily and preventing him from doing anything useful. And I certainly won’t tell you about how much they like their new cat litter. They kick bits of it out of the litter tray and chase this around the kitchen floor – you don’t want to know that, do you?

No, today I’ll show you some pictures of my garden. As I’ve said before, it’s quite small but I’ve made it labour-intensive by concentrating on herbaceous plants, and also by making extra little flower beds here and there. This summer the weather has tended to be cool and damp, which hasn’t encouraged blooming, so it’s not looked its best. (Oh, look at these fine examples of the use of “it’s” and “its”.)

However, one minor excitement is a recent small expansion of the garden round the side of the house. When we moved here eighteen years ago (“I’ll stay five years,” I said, “and then I want a bigger garden”) there was a nasty cracked concrete area round the side of the house, and since we couldn’t afford to have this removed, we put up a shed between it and the back garden and pretended that the bit at the side didn’t exist.

In the course of time, the shed started falling gently to bits, and one day this spring Son was in a demolishing mood and offered to remove it. This left the nasty cracked concrete once again visible, made worse by odd remnants of shed material and various items left sitting around which had been in the shed and now were on their way to the tip.

I had been spending most of my free time since September visiting my father in hospital so hadn’t done the usual spring tidy-up. Then he died and the subsequent arrangements and emotions then took up our time and thoughts, so that the ex-shed area grew weeds on the nasty cracked concrete – making it all look much worse than it had when the shed was in situ.

Bear in mind that it was early spring at this point. There are lots of spring bulbs in the garden, but not visible from this angle. Dear me, how horrible this looks!

Eventually we got a chap to come and remove the tree that had grown up in the middle of the iron fence between us and the neighbours, to dig up the concrete, put up a fence and put down grass and paving slabs. And here, with a bit of planting, is how it looks now.

I know this must look feeble in the extreme to those who live in big American or Australian houses with lots of land, but you have to remember that we live in a wee country, in a city where land is very very expensive. So it’s a very tiny paradise, but it’s ours. And sometimes the sun shines.