You win some...

Ah, thanks, blogfriends, for your generous sentiments. But alas, the next day that I had this class, Claire was in a bad mood. When I gave her some work to do, she said… well, I won’t tell you exactly what she said. But it meant that I should go away (though it wasn’t as polite as that) and insert my worksheet up my… (I’ll leave it to your imagination). Ah, the joys of teaching.

She did apologise later in a sort of head-down “SOrrEE (humph)” way. Of course, I could report her and have her excluded. But then where would she be? Back out of education.

I’ve been in the garden and gardening is always reliably soothing. Mind you, it’s a source of annual astonishment that although each October I sweep up every dead leaf which has fallen from my two trees in the back garden and put them in plastic bags to rot down for leaf mould, by the end of November all the flower beds are once more covered with a thick layer of dead leaves. Where do they come from? We don’t live in the middle of the Amazon rain forest, or the thickly-wooded acres that I remember from American journeyings in my youth. There aren’t that many trees within blowing distance of my little patch. And yet they must come from somewhere.

Between November and February we’re hardly home in the daylight so I more or less ignore the garden. It looks horrible – the herbaceous plants that I didn’t cut down in my October holiday because they were still blooming feebly are now skeletons of dead twigs poking out from this nasty carpet of soggy dead leaves. Snowdrops, crocuses and the shoots of other bulbs are beginning to force their way through the mush but everything looks deeply depressing. And I know that the only way to remedy this is to get out there with the rake and secateurs to cut down the dead bits and rake up the leaves. So that’s what I’ve been doing.

Our garden is small and yet I’ve made it fairly labour-intensive by having quite a few flower beds. The biggest is a herbaceous border about 36 feet by five feet. (Mr Life is a tall chap, over 6 feet, and I tend to measure things by imagining him lying down (something he does quite a lot). So I think the bed is about 6 Mr Lifes long and a bit less than 1 Mr Life deep.) A lot of leaves can lie on a bed this size, all tangled up with dead stalks of Michaelmas daisies and marguerites and Japanese anemones and so on. Dealing with these is not good for a woman with a bad back.

However, it’s now mainly done and the garden's MUCH better. While it currently looks rather empty, I know that lurking beneath the surface of the earth are wonderful summer flowers, already beginning to send their shoots up towards the increasing light. The early spring bulbs are blooming and there are some green shoots on the little crab apple tree by the gate. These photos were all taken today.

Gardening is an optimistic pastime. You’re always thinking ahead to the pleasures of the next part of the growing cycle. And although I didn’t exactly enjoy my raking and cutting, it did give me a feeling of achievement.

The cats are particularly interested in gardening, though their assistance is more theoretical than practical. They enjoy jumping over piles of leaves, for example, and chasing bits of vegetation around the garden. Cassie cranes her neck to look at seagulls flying overhead (not a chance, Cassie – they’d be more likely to eat you).She’s good at climbing up the middle of hedges and is extremely alarmed by the flapping polythene bags that I’m cramming with leaves.

After that, they're tired. No, Cassie – that is NOT your quilt.