Well, my online shopping arrived with almost no fanfare and no drama, except for some very late omissions which I still haven’t received an email about. There were the expected omissions - plain flour, which seems to be literally like gold dust here at the moment. Today though our local shop had some self-raising flour, so now do I too.
I made a cake at the weekend - a coffee and just-about-enough-walnut cake - which used self-raising flour, so I’m happy enough. The no-show from the shopping which left me slight more perturbed was the lack of tomato ketchup, thankfully that has been easier to source (pun not intended, but I’m keeping it in as it amused me).
Fish and chips without ketchup, nope, not here. Especially fish shop fish and chips, which has in fact been our only takeaway during the lockdown, and which tasted so good (with ketchup).
The cake was in part to commemorate VE Day, and so out came the cake stand and I even added buttercup, with walnut decorations too, though less than the recipe said.
When you read, or listened to the stories from VE Day it’s hard to imagine the enormity and the significance of the day. It was definitely a day that should be marked, and had the planned events taken place I’m sure we would have seen them on the TV, even if it was long after they’d taken place.
And so, out came my flag, which I bought back in 2012 and took along on our visits to the venues at the Olympic Park. It hung in our front window the whole day, and proudly too, even forming the backdrop for a video call, or two.
Much of the rest of the weekend was spent in the garden. Some gardening, some lounging in the sun. It was too nice not to! We were even out gardening on Sunday, which was much chillier than the days before. This weekend the focus of our gardening was on yet another tangle of jasmine and pyracantha, this time with some dogwoods, ivy and a cherry tree thrown in for good measure.
It’s looking tidier, but as ever, there’s still more to do. Though as you can see, there was some time spent tying the jasmine’s new growth (and some of the older growth too) onto the trellis.
We split a plant that dad had given us a few years back which had grown and grown, and was threatening to take over the raised sleeper bed at the end of our garden. It had grown with two stems, but even so MOH didn’t seem convinced when I handed him the saw and marked where to cut.
Both halves retained good roots, and so I’m hopeful both will survive. One half went back where it came from, and the second into one of the pots we manhandled into place just a couple of weekends ago. I’m findings that more and more, gardening is becoming a large puzzle and tasks are counter-dependant, so we find ourselves in a chain or sequence waiting for nature to catch up with us and our plans.
We’ll get there, and hopefully our plants will too - especially both halves of the one I had MOH saw!