I had the chance of a lie-in today, but I don’t really do lie-ins. It’s a waste of valuable life. And talking of wasting valuable life, I got up and spent an hour or so pootling around the garden. With the lawn mowed I then topped up the water level in the pond, and then vaguely pondered plans for the garden.
I want a couple more statues, so a trip to Whelan’s is in the offing. And I need to replace the broken decking area: possibly with a large mosaic. Having said that, my gusher fountain pongs a bit. I might open it up and have it as a “secondary pond”, fed from a stream from the main pond. The stream would go through the area where the broken decking is, so that would solve the need to replace the decking.
However, much as I like that idea, my provisional cost estimate comes in at about a thousand pounds, so maybe I won’t do that after all. I can do a large mosaic for a couple of hundred quid: I might just settle for that.
To Folkestone for a picnic. As you drive down the motorway to Folkestone, on your left you’ll see a range of very high hills. I first noticed them when I moved house to live in Folkestone in September 1984. At the time I thought that there would be spectacular views from up there. I lived in Folkestone for two years; at the bottom of those hills, looking up.
We moved away in 1986, but at various times over the last twenty five years I’ve been back to Folkestone so many times, and I’ve been all over the Folkestone area, looking up at those hills, thinking what wonderful views I could see from the top of them.
Today I finally went up one of those hills and we had a picnic at the top. And I was right – the view was superb. I had no idea how spread out Folkestone is. Or just how huge the channel tunnel marshalling yards are. Or how steep the slope is on which the white horse is carved.
We picnic-ed on Caesar’s Camp. I was tempted to go up Sugar Loaf hill as well, but where we were we had the hill to ourselves. On Sugar Loaf hill we could loads of people bustling about. Seeing as it was Easter, the Righteous were carrying huge wooden crosses up to the top of that hill. Not wanting to get embroiled with them, we went back to Folkestone where I got to meet a new cat: a particularly soppy animal (!)
And once I and the cat had enjoyed our little nap we came home where I cleaned out the pond’s fish poo filter. I’d noticed the pond water wasn’t as clean as it might be. So I thought that I’d rather clean the filter when I had some spare time, rather than waiting for it to block up when I might have better things to do with my time (other than being elbow-deep in carp poo)….
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