Creepers and Crawlers

In between yoga sessions, medical interventions and my prayer group meeting today, I spent a happy, if warm, hour or two in the garden this afternoon. Some of you may remember when I first started writing the ‘Lock Down’ blog, I felt beleaguered by the bindweed taking over the garden. Several people offered advice. Fed up with hearing my regular angst over it, they said ‘let it go’……

Ha! Thanks for the advice folks. It’s now all over everywhere.

Anyhoo…. since we haven’t been very busy in the garden this year, in addition to the bindweed, we seem to have got ourselves a wild flower garden. The creepers are not simply restricted to the bindweed; I found lots of Herb Robert, making itself very much at home, joining hands with the bindweed and joyously poking its little pink flowers through the newly-planted (well, last year) hedge.

Tormentil, too, so aptly named as it snakes through the rose bushes and my lovely Phlox, and cheerily torments me with its little yellow flowers, like buttercups.

Then there’s the Lesser Trefoil, which is a little b****r to get rid of, crawling along in every nook and cranny that it can find and obstinately hanging on for grim death as you try and pull it out.

Self-heal may be pretty to look at but that, too, is tricky to remove….

But then! A sweet find of wild strawberries crawling along the back of the house, with yummy fruit to eat. Don’t mind if I do.

And of course, several ‘lovely’ nettles – also edible. Not crawlers or creepers but bold, nasty things that leap out at you when you least expect it. I slashed them down. Nettle Soup, anyone?

John, meanwhile, spent the morning trying to create a safe environment for our mains electricity, which comes into the house next to the loo……we’re hoping to get a SMART meter fitted on Thursday, but we’re expecting some sucking of teeth and shaking of heads ~ we’ll see.

Having successfully finished the safety job, we were due to go over to Solihull hospital for John to have a pre-op assessment. Momentarily, we thought we might not get there. John was in pain from his ‘bag-for-life’. We phoned the community nurses to ask them to come and sort him out. Got the answering machine.

The painkillers worked sufficiently for us to get to the hospital and he was whisked away by several of the nursing staff to have various checks made. One of which was his blood pressure. ‘Oo-er’…. they said…. ‘it’s a bit low. Have a couple of glasses of water’. That did the trick.

While I was waiting for John, I phoned the community nurse again and spoke to one of the team. “Yes,” she said, “we are aware of John’s situation. Yes, we’ll send someone round” Ha! We always live in hope but……that was a ‘No Show’ wasn’t it? Maybe tomorrow?

However, as we were driving home, I asked John how his pain was. “Not too bad. It’s gone off a bit.” he said. Ah…… the penny dropped, was the pain related to being a bit dehydrated, we wondered? I have force-fed John water ever since and his pain has lessened. Phew.

Susie Dent’s Word of the Day is the 19th-century ‘hingum-tringum’, meaning ‘barely presentable’, or just about hanging together. Now then, who or what can she be referring to, do you think?

Take care everyone. Make the most of the weather while you can. God bless.

Note: The photos are not my photos. I forgot to take any as I was weeding. They are ones I have picked from the internet.

Herb Robert from Wikipedia; Tormentil, Lesser Trefoil and Selfheal all from the Wildflower gallery; and the wild strawberries from Wiktionary.