I’ve lost another pound
in weight this week. Not bad. I was hoping for more, but even staying at a
constant weight is better than weight gain.
As we walked the dogs
this morning "Daddy’s
Little Angel TM" was having a rant. Yesterday she’d
stumbled across “Alfie’s Army”; a campaign set up to prolong the life of
terminally ill toddler Alfie Evans. From what I can work out, Alfie Evans is
incredibly ill and doctors in Liverpool wanted to turn off the life-support
machines whilst the parents want to take the child to Italy where as well as
the faintest hope of successful treatment, there are also religious laws
preventing turning off the life-support. In fact the Italian government offered the child
Italian citizenship
yesterday in order to keep the life-support machine running. Apparently the
Pope himself has got involved on Twitter; hoping that the child can be kept
alive so more forms of treatment can be tried. The life-support was turned off
last night, and the child carried on breathing unassisted overnight. The
hospital’s press releases say he child is in a vegetative state with little (if any) hope of improvement.
Passions and feelings
run high in this sort of case. What *do*
you do for the best? On the one hand you want to keep your child alive. On the
other hand you wouldn’t want to inflict needless suffering on a hopeless case.
Personally I can’t help but feel I’d take the advice of medical experience.
Long before "er indoors TM" became pregnant
we discussed this sort of thing at length and decided that we would not allow a
child to remain suffering. Were we wrong?
With dogs walked we
came home. I’d already spent the best part of an hour pulling the weeds out of
the graveled areas of the garden before "Daddy’s Little Angel TM"
arrived, and with no better offers for the day, I carried on gardening.
I gathered up as much rubbish as I could and went to the
tip. The tip was heaving today. Had one or two people parked sensibly then
twenty people could have got done in a fraction of the time. Tempers were
frayed there today, and the rather stupid woman shouting at everyone to move
their cars because she wanted to go really wasn’t helping. I came home via the
co-op where I got lunch.
Regular readers of this
drivel may recall that over the last year or so I’ve replaced broken fence
posts. In doing so I’ve acquired a small collection of concrete cores. I wanted
to make a feature of them; I spent a back-breaking half-hour dragging them into
a pile. Not quite the feature I was hoping for, but this pile is less likely to
collapse now.
I then got the
pressure-washer out and scrubbed down the back yard. Pressure-washing is fun;
even if it does flood everywhere.
I paused for lunch; as
I scoffed a wrap and a bag of crisps (over
a third of my day’s calorie allowance) I watched an episode of “The Mighty Boosh”, then got on with the
garden. Over the weekend I’d potted two plants; today I wanted to put
weed-proof membrane and gravel over their soil. I thought I had a *lot* more gravel than I had; gardening
went on hold whilst I went on a little shopping trip.
Bags of gravel aren’t
cheap. It wasn’t that long ago that they were four quid each, or three for a
tenner. Today I paid nearly seven quid per bag. I also got some pansies. I like
pansies; I think they are rather pretty, even if I do get stick about them. I
blame the name. I’m sure they would command far more respect if they were
called “double hard b*stards”.
Home again. I got
membrane and shingle on to the new plants. I potted my pansies. And then I
looked at potting the palm I bought yesterday. First of all I had to get rid of
the dead acer. Last year I’d put membrane and shingle in its pot. That stuff is
far easier to put down than take up. Getting the dead acer out of the pot took
some heaving. By the time I’d got the palm in place (and membrane and shingle done) I was ready to collapse. I’ll sort
the paving slabs, replace the shed curtains and jet-wash the front garden
another time.
I’d been working in the
garden for a shade over seven hours, and when I’d finished it looked pretty
much the same as when I’d started. I *hate*
gardening; you break your back just to stay still. The very early days of this
blog featured the transformation of what was once a jungle into a half-way
decent garden. The whole idea was that with much of the garden being shingle or
water, there wouldn’t be *that* much
maintenance to do. I suppose there isn’t really much. But there is still far
more than I would like to do.
I ache now…
No comments:
Post a Comment