One little girl was trying to get a reaction from my by crossing her eyes and I just ignored her. She was so unused to being ignored that she was increasingly crossing her eyes – so much that she was crossing them straight again. I could see she was getting all frustrated and kept trying to look at her reflection to see why I wasn’t reacting.
I recounted the story to Ian, who said that when he was working in the petrol station a man used to come in regularly with his eye lids turned inside out. Ian didn’t like to comment or stare, thinking it was a disorder of some type. However, some years later he saw the man with his eyelids totally normal, and realized that this man turned his eyelids inside out every time he went to the petrol station just for Ian’s benefit. Needless to say he was probably confused too as to why he didn’t get a reaction. Anyway, I suddenly remembered this and couldn’t stop laughing.
We bought a pomegranate tree last week to mark where we put Herbie and we also bought a plum tree as we’d never marked Tib’s spot. We also got a couple of honeysuckle plants. We see these growing wild and are planted by the council to cover verges so hopefully we’ll be able to grow them with relative success. We started our weed reducing mission last week, which entailed digging out some of the larger ones and spraying the rest. One of the things we are good at growing is prickily pear, and we have one that was so large it couldn’t support itself and a massive chunk of it broke away.
We’re not going to bother to try to grow anything else this year. We’re too busy really to give it the attention it needs, and I’m not completely certain that there is any cost benefit. I am sure that when we add up the price of compost, fertilizer and water, and given that harvesting time comes the same time as when veg are cheap and plentiful in the shops, there is no great saving to be had. Perhaps we’ll try again next year.
We’ve also decided to try putting grass down in our back yard. We would need to look for drought resistant grass, however it might be worth investigating.