Whitsunday

My favourite moment in the liturgical year occurs today, with the list of people in Jerusalem who heard the apostles preaching each in their own native language: Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia and in Judea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya around Cyrene…

The reader almost never gets it right (one syllable for “Medes”, three for “Cyrene”, and so forth), and often sounds as if he or she has never even seen the list until the moment it comes up on the lectern. I sit there and glower.

Here we are back.

The first sight of the garden is always a disappointment, this time of year. We arrived in the rain on Wednesday, and the experience was worse than usual. A frost – the night of May 30, I suspect – had touched the potatoes and runner beans (they’ll recover)

and carried off this year’s apple crop completely.

No lettuce at all (except the bought-in ones). Feeble germination from the courgettes. Rabbits (presumably) have wiped out a row of perpetual spinach – some years, they’ll leave that.

The man who is paid rather a lot these days to cut the grass had turned up, belatedly, in our absence and made a poor job of it, wide edges undone, lumps of rotting grass left hither and thither.

I felt much as I often feel in the face of the stash cupboard: this is too much. We can’t manage any more.

However, it’s wonderful what even the geriatric ward can accomplish in 48 hours. On Thursday afternoon, and gloriously all day Friday, the sun shone – and that does lift the spirits. I cut more long grass for my Stout-style mulching, concentrating on the places – where to begin? – where it most offended the eye. I sowed more lettuce – sometimes the slugs give up and sit back, around now.

And some things are doing fine: Jerusalem artichokes and potatoes and broad beans and two sorts of pea, my beloved bunching onions – I sowed some more this year, a red-bulbed sort, and they’re coming along nicely too. My baby artichokes are still there.

My poisioning of the verges of the driveway was a brilliant success:

Yesterday as we were leaving the grass-cutting man turned up again – there’s been lots of rain; it needed cutting again – so we were able to give specific instructions and we parted friends.

Alas, now we must stay here in Edinburgh for a whole fortnight and a bit, because of a series of ineluctable appointments spaced three days apart, a dentist here, an MOT test there, a session with a diabetic dietician.

I didn’t get much knitting done, but even so, the Araucania sweater is within a few rows of completion, so I brought it back. Assembly won’t take all that long – the neck and collar are complete. It’s just a matter of setting in the sleeves. That’ll have to wait until the Aran sweater is finished.