Well Met

I took Hugo into the college field when I collected him after work yesterday as both Penny and Roger are nursing bugs and hadn't really taken him out much. The sky looked threatening but there was still sunshine so we enjoyed pootling along, looking at the swollen stream where at one point a waterfall crashed down several feet. The last time we were there it was bone dry. A groundsman in a tractor appeared just ahead of us and parked. As we approached I asked him if he was the man who sells firewood, and he agreed he was. "Are you the woman stopped me once in Cransford when I were delivering a load?" he asked me, crinkling his eyes against the sun. I agreed that I was, though he told me then he had all the customers he could handle. "My son used to work for you in that garden o' yours couple years ago, young Ashton." Gosh yes, so he did. I suddenly remembered the connection, and asked how he was, and if he was working as an engineer now as planned. "He work for me now, doing the groundswork and that," he said. "Nobody answered none of his letters for jobs. That got him down, and then this job come up." I felt a stab of disappointment for Ash. He would have been the first in his family to get GCSEs never mind go to college, and he was bright and ambitious. We often talked about his plans. How cruel that his attempts to get into a profession should be thwarted. His father might have noticed my face because he told me Ash intends to go into management and is already attending courses to that end. "He won't just be a groundsman like me," he grinned. God knows there's nothing wrong with doing manual work, especially gardening. But it should be a choice. Anyway, I'm having a truck load of logs delivered right into my woodshed in the autumn, and Ash will be given my very warmest wishes. What a lucky encounter.

It's been a day of very mixed weather, hot one minute and freezing the next. I hate days like that where you are constantly pulling on and off sweaters and jackets. At one point I went and got my lined winter trousers, and then I couldn't wait to peel them off. I'd finished the crossword by 11 so my usual Saturday practice of dipping into it throughout the day was spoilt. In the end I brought my bedtime reading down and stuck my nose in that for an hour or so. Peculiar Ground by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, her first novel. Her biography of Gabriele d'Annunzio, called The Pike, was an unexpected bestseller a few years ago (plucking the Costa prize from another on the shortlist, a certain Ms Laing). It's an ambitious book, fat and chronologically challenging, but quite gripping. Until I fell asleep. 

Track cleared all around the fields

Johnson's Blue geranium

Chives in flower

We had our third walk of the day around the fields, me constantly looking back at the house to view it from different directions and feel a small swell of happiness in my centre at the sight. Hugo had his eye on other game, and soon he was after a small reddish hare that led him a merry path through the barley. He'd disappear and then leap into the air, unable to run through the tightly-growing crop and thus giving the creature a sporting chance. His bouncing progress was comical and there was no danger of him going near the road. When he finally returned to me he was soaked through. When I'd seen him fly over the ditch, now full of water with the banks obscured by a lush growth of cow parsely, I thought he'd misjudged it. His face was covered in spittle and he was panting crazily but he'd had a good run, and I'm sure the little hare got away. Win win.