Thursday 4 May 2023
Sunrise was 05:25 (05:26 in Lewisham), sunset is at 20:53 (20:27 in Lewisham). It’s currently 5°C with a feels-like of 1°C (10°C currently and feels like 10°C in Lewisham). The high for today around Selkirk is 10°C and in Lewisham it’s 19°C. I’m very surprised to think this but it feels like we need some rain. The river and waterways around us are significantly quieter and the ground is nowhere near as squishy. It somehow feels wrong. However, I have looked at the weather for the week ahead and we are forecast some rain. I think my rain paranoia is because I now know that our spring can run dry, though I can see that it isn’t going to happen in May when we are most definitely not in the midst of a drought and when we do still have waterways flowing down from the hills. I doubt I ever expected to be so aware of the importance of rain, and I do say that having never really had my own garden (I had an allotment but because I couldn’t see it when I was at home, I worried less about it. Well, yes, that and the fact it never produced as much as it would have had it been watered regularly, ho hum).
At around 18:00 last night, I sat by our rapidly growing rhubarb with a baking dish, a small chopping board and a knife and cut rhubarb straight from the ground into the dish before cleaning it up a bit and making a rhubarb crumble, the first one with our own rhubarb. I added too much rhubarb and, as Chris pointed out, there wasn’t much ice cream to sweeten the crumble – well, sweeten the rhubarb. I did add sugar but probably not enough for what I expect was double the amount of rhubarb required. We are, however, officially having a glut of rhubarb so I’m going to see what recipes I can find to vary the means of rhubarb consumption.
Chris is doing a shop today ahead of his son Sam’s visit from Friday. In addition to the food shopping, he’s taking an old pair of lawn shears my mum gave me to be sharpened, two leather bags for repair, a letter-box drop-off and he’s collecting the two items we ‘won’ at the Peebles online auction yesterday. These do not seem to be the kinds of chores we had in London. The auction was a bit disappointing for us as we had put autobids in for about twelve things, mostly old pictures (for the frames) but also a rug and, randomly, a tall, old abacus. We were outbid on most things. We have one old picture and a small Indian table to collect. Disappointing haul, but, as ever, lessons learned … wait, we learned the same lesson last time: if you really like something don’t just autobid for the lowest suggested price, think about how much you’d pay for it in a shop without baulking at the price and make that your bid, though bearing in mind a 24% fee on top of the hammer price.
I’m going to take the almost-dry washing out and see if the feels-like 1°C air will be enough to finish off drying the damp patches.