Just Another Flood

My ditch has flooded yet again, all over the garden. What a downer. A lot of us spent a month in the spring trying to ensure that it would never happen again. I saw it when I arrived home in the dark last night. Indeed I had been skating dangerously along the inside lane of the M4 which was covered in an inch of water.

By the time I got out there today in my scarecrow motley, it was raining again, and I discovered that the drainage pipe, which I thought I'd been clever enough to filter with two old fire grates, was choked with mud, so heavy had the deluge been. So I got into some old huge wellies and plodded across to the old chicken house where I keep my drainage rods. Of course they were mostly broken from the last marathon effort, and I only managed to get about five of them through. I wondered a bit about my life choices. I could have been just leaving my London flat in, let's say, the South Bank for a meeting with some lush man and a load of culture, having spent the morning with the sophisticated Sunday papers. I could have been dressed in heels and other such girly stuff. I could have had a head full of culture.

But there I stood, a bleak, Hardyesque figure in the darkening landscape, pondering whether to get into the car and get to Wicks or wherever for new plastic ones that I've noticed, or what. Or rather: Marty South or what. It was one of those dark moments I'll never forget. Another was being on Aust Beach on New Year's day 1986.

But no, I didn't get into the car. I went and pulled all the old runner beans off the poles before any more frost got to them, and pulled the poles down, as they, along with the suddenly bare mulberry tree (see comments under last post) are another miserable sight in my landscape.

And tonight I've been sitting on the floor for an hour sorting the seeds like Psyche, meditating on this and that (e.g., the one bit of good news today, and you can read the whole transcript here:
http://sarahpalintruthsquad.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/sarah-are-you-smarter-than-a-fifth-grader-palin-displays-stunning-ignorance-in-prank-by-canadians/), and deciding that Marty South was a heroine of mine, as is Shami Chakrabarti. As I asked before: does anyone want pints of runner bean seeds? And can anyone tell me how to get two spaces after the punctuation using this particular blog template. I type them in, of course, as all civilised people do, but the blog just makes them single, and thus the whole thing harder to read.

I was admiring my lovely flexible pose till I got up like an old lady and hobbled into the kitchen to see if the Rayburn had taken to its new log. No. Why? Because it had gone out when I fell asleep in front of it. And why did I fall asleep in front of it? Because I wanted a carbo fix and made pancakes, realised I had no lemons (never, ever, ever be without lemons), and so shook up some ancient Liquore Limoni di Sorrento with brown sugar for a kind of lemony syrup and piled my sultana pancakes with natural set yoghurt and this lethal mixture and, yes, lethal and lethe I guess are closely connected. What a literary, classical blog this is tonight. The tawny owls are hooting as I write at 2.30 am. It's kind of mild really.