Getting There

Heres' how the garden was when we bought the house last March. There was a big, steeply sloping, lawn, an enormous Leyland Cypress and not a great deal more. As Marion loves gardening we wanted to create something pretty quickly as we haven't got the twenty years we had when we bought our last house to create a garden at leisure.

Our gardener Tony started work in January and this is how it looked a few weeks after he began. Although the photo is from a different view point the Leyland Cypress had gone along with all of the lawn.

We had hoped that the work would be finished on 28th February but the weather put paid to that and only now (six weeks after it was due to be completed) we can finally see the fruits of Tony's labour starting to take effect.

When we got home yesterday afternoon we had a partial lawn. 

And when Tony went home the lawn was finished. Whilst you can see the difference from the photo at the top of today's blog it may not look like four month's work. That's a bit unfair as there is an enormous deck to take into account as well. 

Tony asked if his son could come and work on the deck today. We've always said that there should be no Sunday work out of respect for the neighbours but Tony assured us that there would be no noisy work at all and, as we're desperate for the work to be over, we said okay. HIs son came first thing this morning and told us that he only had 1,000 screws to fit. It turns out that these needed to be fitted with a power drill - so much for a noiseless day. Marion and I spent the day cringing and worrying about the neighbours as each screw drove another potential hole in our neighbours' goodwill.

I say "we' cringed but in reality it was Marion who had the worst time as I managed to get out for a couple of hours with the detector. I found another two elusive hammered coins. After finding only a few of these in twenty years detecting I have now managed to find ten in the last few months. I think it shows how good the latest detector (XP Deus) is.

The sun has shone brightly on Framlingham this weekend. We had a great Saturday with a visit to the market (and other local shops) followed by a walk in the countryside which ended at a beer festival at The Castle Inn where I enjoyed a great selection of beer and we watched an excellent live band.

In the evening we walked down to the packed church for a concert by local soprano Claire Weston. Accompanied by another local, the excellent John Hutchings on the piano, ex English National Opera's Claire sang a wide selection of short classical songs by Wagner, Britten, Walton and others. It was a very enjoyable couple of hours and it was really good to have enjoyed live popular music and live classical music within a few hundred yards of home just a few hours apart.