Quarantine - Covid week 22

Well, Biggest Granddaughter's Covid result didn't come in the suggested 48 hours (which would have been Monday morning if they work weekends - unclear) and indeed it hasn't come yet, and when Daughter 1 phoned up to enquire, it turned out that it had got lost. Or at least, there was no record of the test ever having happened.

Which is, you know, somewhat irritating, since it means that we all have to remain in quarantine for - not really sure how long. I must check. At the beginning of lockdown everything was clearcut, but as time's gone on the rules have become more complicated. The rest of this week, anyway. Biggest G and her brother thus have another week off school, having been back for a day and a half.

Sigh. Next time she has a little cough... well, I don't know. She's prone to little coughs.

So here's a photo of my pincushion. Daughter 2 borrowed it for a minor repair and returned it prettily arranged in flowers, which it wasn't before. This was my granny's pincushion, from her workbox that I inherited when she got dementia. She was born in 1885 and I imagine she made the pincushion. It doesn't actually look so worn to the eye. Daughter 2 and Littlest Granddaughter went home on Sunday, so it's nice to have a little reminder of them.

And here's our hedge. It's an annoying hedge, planted by the previous inhabitants of our house and added to by random nature. It's mainly lilac, with some leylandii, a wild rose, a cotoneaster, some holly... and it takes up a lot of room in our small garden. I love lilac blossom but the plants are very vigorous so we keep having to cut the hedge back, which very much limits the number of flowers we get, and lilac also suckers like anything. We recently got chaps to prune the hedge and when I muttered under my breath that I wished it wasn't there, the boss chap said that they could remove it. And theoretically they're going to, tomorrow.

I'm somewhat dubious that they'll be successful because there are a lot of stems, with all those suckers. He said confidently that they would grind the stumps, and I asked our horticulturist friend, the Minor Celebrity on Scotland's gardening programme, and he said that the suckers would be discouraged if the main stems were gone. So I'm pinning my faith on the experts.

It's about five feet wide, which is why I want rid of it - I'm excited at the idea of an extra five feet in the garden. But I'm worried that it'll look like the Somme battlefield with suckers, instead of the extra sward I'm planning to create.

That's if the chaps come tomorrow. It's been wet this week and so it could easily rain, and anyway he only hopes to come if they get the morning job finished. I think our hedge will take them more than one afternoon.

Ah well. I hope I don't regret this. (I suspect the chaps might.) I suppose I shouldn't really let them come because of the quarantine but they don't need to come through the house and I'm not planning to do anything apart from watch in horror from the patio doors. And anyway I'm as sure as I can be that there's nothing wrong with any of us.