David Gillon

The weather here today has been weird.

It hammered down with rain last night from about 2AM til 6AM (and has been doing it again pretty much since dark), but by noon we had blue skies, temperatures pushing an unseasonal 20C, and a howling gale. This is an unusual combination.

Given the gale I decided I'd pass on doing anything in the garden and curled up with a good book, at which point I promptly heard a dull thud.

It wasn't that loud a thud, but I thought I'd better check. So I wandered through to the back bedroom, looked out and spotted that my patio table had blown over. Given it's glass topped I'm pretty impressed it survived undamaged. And clearly it had blown over because the wind had caught its furled umbrella, which I was still using just last week.

So I had to throw on outdoor clothes, find some shoes and hurry out to put things to rights before anything more happened - table back upright, dismantle umbrella, store umbrella indoors. At which point my neighbour, out checking her washing, pointed out some minor damage to the garden fence that separates our gardens. The top bit of wood on one of the panels, mainly there to shield it from rain IMO, has rotted through and the wind had torn a lump of it off, leaving several nails sticking up. She suggested fixing it with some scrap wood that's left over from a panel her husband replaced earlier in the summer (he's working away right now), but that wasn't even close, so I said I'd do it as I knew I had some wood in the shed that was about the right size.

So off I trot to find the wood and a hammer, then spend half an hour or so levering out old nails, removing the rest of the rotted bit, and then nailing the new bit in place. (I did have the police helicopter hovering overhead for about five minutes in the middle of that, clearly they thought fence repairs in the middle of a gale either suspicious, or stupid). And that worked, job done.

But standing where I was to do it made it readily apparent that the jasmine bush needed pruning, not only was the weight of growth pulling it away from the fence, but it had managed to stretch out and snare one of the patio chairs. So there was nothing to do but go and find the secateurs and give that a good pruning, half-filling the gardening recycling bin.

And when that was finally done, I came in, picked up my book again, and promptly fell asleep.