A Waiting Game

I nearly didn't get away at all at the weekend. My Saxmundham friend Helen said I could leave my car outside her house and she'd run me to the station, and collect me when I returned. I arrived as arranged, got out of my car and realised my suitcase was sitting on my drive. "Go, go!" shouted Helen. "I'll be waiting with the engine running ..." and so I turned around and sped back home, and I mean sped. Luckily there wasn't too much traffic. I made it in time, but when I tried to collect my pre-booked tickets from the machine I fed in the code for collecting a parcel from Fram Co-op. Gawd. What am I like? There were two women sitting opposite me on the train, two very smart, well-dressed and well-made up ladies from the neighbouring county, and they were real characters. Their lippy chat with the inspector - "Why shouldn't you lot work on BH Monday if we are?" - was very entertaining, and when I asked him which platform the London train left from in Ipswich and he told me 1, they corrected him with rolling eyes. "It's 4", they told me. We had a chat as we waited for a goods train to pass so that we could get into the station. "If women ran the world this would never happen," the blond told me. "Parcels before people? Men, what do you expect? Women would ban football, ban children, make pubs women only, wine would be tax deductable, no sport on TV apart from tennis and rugby. Everything would run efficiently, men would be given subservient roles. Pillocks!" I'd vote for you, I told her, and she laughed merrily. "That'll be the day!" But with Sandi Toksvig's Women's Equality Party, don't rule it out.

I was thrilled to notice that I'd slightly underdone the Suffolk bird scene. All day I've had skylarks in the barley and wheat fields behind my house singing and soaring, soaring and singing. Other birds too have been celebrating the warm weather, and there has barely been a moment's silence. I've seen tits, chaffinches, goldfinches, blackbirds, robbins and horrible magpies, but no swallows or swifts, or even house martens. Where are they? Not here anyway. But maybe all is not lost.

Newly planted ex-wallflower bed

Where the pond will go

Wallflower bed waiting to be resuscitated

Planted

Lupins and delphiniums coming out

Main shrub bed with bark

Lemon-scented azalea

These past two days I have removed all of my wallflowers, dug the beds they occupied, and replanted with crocosmia, hemerocallis, and the first batch of dahlias - Bishop of Llandaff. The soil in the two beds was intransigent - total understatement - but I soaked it and gradually it came to heel. I also planted some more phlox in the perennial bed, though I suspect they're really stocks, and two pots of what will be red "flars" beside my pink roses. It's been massively hard work but so satisfying. I'm not there yet, but I'm on the way. And the body seems to be coping with the strain. I hope that isn't going to be famous last words.