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Peeking out from between the clouds
Jul. 23rd, 2023 02:08 pmIt's been a rainy, windy weekend, which to be honest suited me perfectly. After the excitement of my (chaotic) return from the holiday trip to Italy, and a lot going on at work, it was good to be forced by the weather to snuggle up at home, cooking, reading and nesting. I did go to the gym (my classes were a real struggle after three weeks away, and my legs and shoulders are feeling the effects this morning), but other than that, stayed mostly in the house.
The big news this week is that the work by landscapers on our front garden is finished. When we bought this house, this garden was a bit amateurishly put together — some nice lavender bushes, erratically placed tile offcuts, ornamental gravel, and a bunch of other ugly plants haphazardly scattered about the place. The fence was falling apart, and weeds were constantly growing in all the various cracks. I liked the lavender, but disliked everything else.
After a lot of calls to different landscapers, meeting them, getting quotes, discussing things, and waiting until our chosen company was free to do the job, the work is finally complete. The fence has been replaced, the existing garden was completely removed (I'm sorry to lose the lavender, and there was a moment where our next door neighbours were going to take it, but that didn't work out unfortunately), and has been replaced by massive, L-shaped raised beds (filled with soil from a local farm), and a small area paved with different coloured slabs of sandstone. We still need to fill the garden bed, and the timing is less than ideal (since plants grown from seed won't germinate at this time of year), but it looks fantastic, and is a huge weight off my mind. I've already had two random groups of people walking past compliment us on the changes, and overheard another group praising the garden from the open window. This work is the first of a bunch of fairly substantial things we'd been wanting to do in the house, and it's great to be able to tick it off the list. And if you're local to me, I highly recommend the landscapers who did this work — professional, reasonable price, easy to deal with (in a major change from most contractors I've been speaking to about various things, they actually communicate mainly via email and respond promptly when contacted), and friendly — the sort of people I was quite comfortable having in and out of the house for two and a half days.
All this is obviously much more thrilling for me than for the rest of you, but it's done a huge amount to lift my mood.
Other than watching the garden work taking shape, I've spent most of the weekend reading my way through a behemoth of a book — The Square of Sevens by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, whose Regency-era crime novels I'd really enjoyed reading last year. This book is also historical fiction, but although there are various crimes taking place within it, it's not a traditional mystery story, but rather a cleverly crafted mixture of Dickensian sensationalist family melodrama and gothic horror, with a frame of eighteenth-century occult beliefs (the protagonist tells fortunes through cartomancy, and much of the action takes place among fairgrounds, travelling soothsayers, and practitioners of interpretations of the zodiac), moving with ease from the inns of Devon and Cornwall to aristocratic society in Bath and London to a Tudor-era estate full of hidden passageways, priest-holes, and lots and lots of secrets. Like most stories about magic and the occult, there's a lot of sleight-of-hand, misdirection, and a massive twist at the end which even I didn't see coming (even though I guessed another major twist, and really should have spotted this one given the various genres at play). Every element of the book — from the evocation of a particular time and place, and the research into historical British occult practices, to the deft blending of different genres, the gothic, decaying family estate, and the interplay of the various characters — is perfectly done, and has certainly solidified Shepherd-Robinson's place as an insta-read for me. I can't wait to read whatever she writes next.
And that's basically it from me in terms of noteworthy weekend activities. I've got an Ottolenghi/Tamimi lamb dish slow-cooking in the oven, I've got washing outside on the line (causing me to anxiously watch the sky), and I've got a slow, stretchy yoga class lined up to do later in the afternoon, and everything feels restful and sleepy, in the best possible way. I hope you've all also been having nice weekends.
The big news this week is that the work by landscapers on our front garden is finished. When we bought this house, this garden was a bit amateurishly put together — some nice lavender bushes, erratically placed tile offcuts, ornamental gravel, and a bunch of other ugly plants haphazardly scattered about the place. The fence was falling apart, and weeds were constantly growing in all the various cracks. I liked the lavender, but disliked everything else.
After a lot of calls to different landscapers, meeting them, getting quotes, discussing things, and waiting until our chosen company was free to do the job, the work is finally complete. The fence has been replaced, the existing garden was completely removed (I'm sorry to lose the lavender, and there was a moment where our next door neighbours were going to take it, but that didn't work out unfortunately), and has been replaced by massive, L-shaped raised beds (filled with soil from a local farm), and a small area paved with different coloured slabs of sandstone. We still need to fill the garden bed, and the timing is less than ideal (since plants grown from seed won't germinate at this time of year), but it looks fantastic, and is a huge weight off my mind. I've already had two random groups of people walking past compliment us on the changes, and overheard another group praising the garden from the open window. This work is the first of a bunch of fairly substantial things we'd been wanting to do in the house, and it's great to be able to tick it off the list. And if you're local to me, I highly recommend the landscapers who did this work — professional, reasonable price, easy to deal with (in a major change from most contractors I've been speaking to about various things, they actually communicate mainly via email and respond promptly when contacted), and friendly — the sort of people I was quite comfortable having in and out of the house for two and a half days.
All this is obviously much more thrilling for me than for the rest of you, but it's done a huge amount to lift my mood.
Other than watching the garden work taking shape, I've spent most of the weekend reading my way through a behemoth of a book — The Square of Sevens by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, whose Regency-era crime novels I'd really enjoyed reading last year. This book is also historical fiction, but although there are various crimes taking place within it, it's not a traditional mystery story, but rather a cleverly crafted mixture of Dickensian sensationalist family melodrama and gothic horror, with a frame of eighteenth-century occult beliefs (the protagonist tells fortunes through cartomancy, and much of the action takes place among fairgrounds, travelling soothsayers, and practitioners of interpretations of the zodiac), moving with ease from the inns of Devon and Cornwall to aristocratic society in Bath and London to a Tudor-era estate full of hidden passageways, priest-holes, and lots and lots of secrets. Like most stories about magic and the occult, there's a lot of sleight-of-hand, misdirection, and a massive twist at the end which even I didn't see coming (even though I guessed another major twist, and really should have spotted this one given the various genres at play). Every element of the book — from the evocation of a particular time and place, and the research into historical British occult practices, to the deft blending of different genres, the gothic, decaying family estate, and the interplay of the various characters — is perfectly done, and has certainly solidified Shepherd-Robinson's place as an insta-read for me. I can't wait to read whatever she writes next.
And that's basically it from me in terms of noteworthy weekend activities. I've got an Ottolenghi/Tamimi lamb dish slow-cooking in the oven, I've got washing outside on the line (causing me to anxiously watch the sky), and I've got a slow, stretchy yoga class lined up to do later in the afternoon, and everything feels restful and sleepy, in the best possible way. I hope you've all also been having nice weekends.