Upside Down In A Rain Barrel! Is This Love?

Morning!

I know I’m a strange person. No point in denying the blatantly obvious. I’m wondering if I was born that way or if, like life, it was something I just grew into?

As a child I was painfully and pathetically shy, always sitting at the back of the classroom in case the teacher should ask me a question. I would most likely have known the answer but to actually speak, to put my voice ‘out there’ and have my classmates turn and look at me was unbearable.

I have no awareness of when shy turned into strange.

I think this thought re-entered my head two days ago when Richard attempted to repair a rain barrel by fitting a new tap. He’d tried in the past to tighten the tap and couldn’t. The tap went through the outside hole of the barrel and then a washer had to fit over the end of the tap, inside the barrel. A really clever design!!! The barrel was much deeper than Richards reach so it was quite annoying when, a week ago, he suggested buying a new tap and trying again. I grumbled and mumbled that the problem was still there – the tap was still out of reach of anything other than a gorilla with very long arms. Would he listen? Nah.

After fifteen minutes of Richard grunting and cussing he removed his bonce from the barrel and said, I can’t get in it. My shoulders won’t go through the top.’ Why don’t some people learn a lesson the first time? He stood staring at me with his usual vague, ‘I’ve given up look,’ so I snatched the washer from his hand and began my journey into the rain barrel. I managed to squeeze my head through the hole followed by my shoulders and then my breasts and there I was – engulfed in a rain barrel, shoving a washer on the end of the tap which, kiss my posterior, dear Richard managed to push through the outside hole.

I eventually retrieved my body and dignity from the muddy, dead-larvae infested barrel and regained my composure. The sod didn’t even have the decently to brush off the dead critters from my hair without me asking.

See? Now that’s strange, isn’t it? Who in their right mind would do that? And who in their right mind would be with a mountain of a bloke who would stand back and LET me do that?

And another thing that’s quite strange … I can’t stop singing, ‘It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas.’ I just can’t get that tune out of my head and packed away with the decorations. And I’m laughing now because I’ll bet every one of you who is reading this is now singing or humming, ‘It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas!’ Ha ha Merry Christmas!

Maybe I’m not strange? Maybe I’m weird? Or eccentric? I like the sound of eccentric. It sounds like a word and life-style you could use to get away with all kinds of madness? Yeah. Eccentric. That’s the one.

I think I have already done something that fits that tag. I was looking at the runner bean plants in the garden centre and decided that there were far too many in the packs on sale (18) because let’s face it, who wants to be digging out runner beans from the deep-freeze six years after their birth? So I decided that I may as well just buy a packet of seed and set as many as I needed, around six, maybe. So I’ve set forty. Why?

I’ve set seeds in the garden which still haven’t appeared. I think they may have gone the other way so you guys in Australia look out for my radishes and spring onions.

We had a bonfire yesterday in the neighbour’s garden. My garden is too tidy now so we borrowed next door’s wilderness. We burnt two old sheds and ten old fence panels and it took HOURS. I was the ‘stoker’ because Richard is not to be trusted anywhere near to bonfires. Although it was a pain in the butt it achieved the desired result. The garden project is now COMPLETED. Yeah.

Richard just needs to turn the sofa round in his summer-house (shed) and then I may borrow it on sunny days to write – the summer-house (shed) not the sofa.  I’m not allowed to move the sofa because it has a wonky back foot and unless you apply complicated technology (don’t ask me how Richard manages to do that) to move it, the foot falls off. Well, it was an Ebay purchase – looked a million dollars on the pic’. Looked like it had been through a war zone in real life. But it was cheap, leather, and the right colour, brown. I chose the sofa because it’s huge. Long enough for Richard to sleep on actually, and if the bugger attempts to send me into any more rain barrels he’ll be doing just that.

Today I am going to pop into the greenhouse and sweetly hum to my cosmos seedlings. Prince Charles talks to his plants, so I won’t be wearing my eccentric hat on this occasion – unless of course I’m humming, ‘It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas!’

Take care my lovelies x