First the good news

It was a much nicer day today than the forecast would allow, sunny enough that I managed to wash and dry a load of washing in the afternoon - I wish I'd been more hopeful in the morning, could probably have done two or three loads.

 The first potatoes, not just the Swift but the Red Duke of York are showing. The Duke is a passionate purple tinged shoot, most exotic looking next to the rather sickly Swift. The onion sets, even though planted very late, are also showing life.

Rook has taken another tumble into the pond and survived. He wasn't just sopping wet but layered with thick mud indicating he'd gone in at the deep end and had to struggle to escape. I'm glad he seems to have learnt what to do as I fear a cat that panicked would come to a sorry end in the sucking quagmire of the silted up pool.

He hates to be brushed but he did eventually allow me to remove a substantial quantity of muck from his coat and was soon returned to shiny cleanliness.



However, almost continuous rain and strong winds interspersed with heavy hail storms in the last ten days mean that little useful work has been achieved in the garden and nearly all motivation to get anything at all done has been lost in feeling miserable and trying to keep warm. I'm wearing five layers of clothes topped off with an outdoor fleece jacket every day and don't need to dress up to go outside since the temperature in both places is much the same.

And although today has been a welcome respite the pattern is set to resume tomorrow with 100% chance of rain and high winds forecast, the rain continuing well into next week. It's tremendously depressing and despite starting some of the more tender plants like courgettes and morning glories I doubt it will ever be possible to let them outside.

Almost worse than that - can you hear me Google? - they've finally forced me to use their broken and confused new editing system for blogging. There were very few problems with the old one but the new one isn't WYSIWYG nor is the HTML pane much better. Laying things out is almost impossible in either mode and it's making me very cross indeed.