The weather warnings for Friday night and early morning today had been hysterical: thunderstorms, tornados even, all across the UK as its landmass would be bang under the boundary of two colliding fronts, one cold, one warm. OH and I had sat on the sofa as usual on Friday night, watching various online lightning strike detectors with bated breath but very little was happening. Thundery showers over Wales and Cornwall. The North of France got a good lightshow, according to my European lightning map, so maybe that cloud would move across the channel to us. Scandinavia had a bit of action, surprisingly, and Belarus was practically tornado alley, as was Turkey.
I made the mistake of falling asleep on the sofa and waking up at 1am, early enough to go to bed properly, but by then my sleep rhythm was disturbed and I was in and out of bed checking on the weather or chasing suspicious noises round the house and garden (it was only the neighbouring cats negotiating our new palisade fence). Fell asleep round about 3am and woke up to a promising roll of thunder at 7.45am. "Bang on time!" I shouted to a still-sleeping OH, "Bring on the lightshow!" Jumped out of bed to open the curtains but the sky was a meh-looking light grey, none of that scary poisonous-looking wall of slate I'm used to on the European continent where they get proper weather: proper sun during the day, proper storms in the evening. I looked south to where pandemonium was supposed to arrive from. Nothing. OH carried on sleeping. I went downstairs to make coffee.
There was one more peal of thunder that morning and that was it. But there was a lot of rain so nothing doing on the plot. Bustled round the house tidying things, getting annoyed at the invariable accumulations of crap and threatening OH with "massive clearouts". OH's response: "Yeah, fine. What do you want for dinner?"
We settled for venison stroganoff and pasta -- sounds posh but the venison had been from the comedy meat freezer section in Lidl, bought on a day when I was feeling particularly adventurous (also in there: moose steaks, ostrich leg, ocelot spleens).
I looked outside -- the weather was still too variable to risk going to the plot -- so we decided we'd do the weekend food shopping and run a couple of other errands. During one of my manic skip raids in previous years when I had foolishly envisaged I'd be able to ebay free stuff and get us a nice going-out budget, I'd made some errors of judgement and hauled in things that looked eminently ebayable but the fact that smart people had ditched the items should have alerted me to the possibility that they probably weren't. When I checked completed listings on ebay for the items, the results were dire-dire-dire. So for years they've been clogging up my shelves. Well, the council would take them, surely. With 2 small boxes of the stuff in the boot, we rocked up at our local recycling centre but the council worker there decided that it was commercial waste and refused to take it. Oh great. That's helpful. Surely, "commercial" in that sense means waste in appreciable quantities, not the 5 supermarket-bags full we came in with? "Ring the council but they'll probably tell you to put it all in your black bin," the guy said, by way of an apology.
So the stuff will now end up where it would have done, had I just kept my hoarding impulses in check: in landfill.
"Is that a thundercloud?" I asked OH, ever hopeful. Pandemonium Saturday had been a bit of a damp squib so far.
For our shopping we parked up at a new supermarket-plus-garden centre development on an industrial estate. The garden centre was of the posh variety. It was not very busy, despite it being a Saturday in prime planting season. The local populace has been underpaid for a decade now and the only people who have any disposable income left are tax-fiddling freelancers and wheeler-dealers, plus of course GPs, consultants, accountants, headteachers, bankers and UKIP-voting EU-subsidised farmers, none of whom would physically shop at this place anyway -- they'd go to the twee specialist places near the big halls dotted around the north Norfolk coast. So I drifted around the empty acreage of flowers, shrubs and herbs feeling like a subversive, noting disdainfully how the place still imagined it could con people out of 50p (reduced price) for a wilting, browning tomato plant that would never in a million years yield the same amount in tomatoes that season. "The roadkill shelf at the other place is much cheaper: you could get this for 10 or 20p," I said to OH, only to realise he'd wandered off and was nowhere to be seen. I followed a lovely scent to the rose shelf and sniffed at every flower there, just for the aromatherapy.
Found OH again inside -- he'd been drawn to some aquariums with live fish -- and together we laughed at a hapless young salesman desperately trying to earn his commission selling a grotesque, outsize weaverbird-style nest/covered seating area for £3000 that wasn't even rainproof. The young couple who looked interested in it may well have been on a combined annual income of £15000. Good luck, kids. Maybe if you knitted it yourselves?
And garden centres used to make me so happy.
We wandered across to the supermarket. There I spotted some bunches of sweet williams in a bucket. £1.50. We've currently got some gorgeous sweet williams (Nelken) in flower not just in the garden but in a vase too, all for free, grown from seed.
"I could be a sweet williams millionnaire," I said to OH.
"We need some mushrooms for the stroganoff tonight."
The trolley was filling up slowly. The supermarket had expanded its glutenfree range considerably -- an entire half of an aisle was given over to it. I was impressed. OH, however, instantly spotted an interloper, some product that contained barley. This is the sort of thing that really upsets him -- he's normally unupsettable -- but this gets his goat. It's hard enough finding nice things to eat as a "celeriac" as he jokingly calls his condition, and shopping takes twice as long because you're checking every single label and have all the shop detectives trailing after you and, and this is my point, because invariably an item will have been misfiled amongst the glutenfree products and OH then has to report it and complain about it. He once got fooled by one such misfile and had grabbed a breakfast cereal product with gluten by mistake -- it shouldn't have been where it was and the packaging was almost the same -- and ate it, which probably undid weeks if not months of recovery as just milligrams of the stuff flatten the surface of his intestines. So fair on him if he wants to educate the shop about smart shelving of their products, esp. aimed at those with non-negotiable dietary needs. But my God, it doesn't half prolong a shop. I usually get my revenge in by lingering in the scented-body-lotion area and pick something a bit more expensive.
Got back, unloaded the shopping, ditched the unrecyclable in the black bin and the cardboard packaging in the green bin, fed the cats and went outside into the glorious early-evening sunshine.
"I can't really start up the chainsaw now, can I?" said OH. It was a rhetorical question. He'd bought himself a folding chair with a pocket for cans or bottles and set himself up in a sunspot by the poolhouse.
"Well, I've got a project on the go which involves noise," I said. For the rest of the evening, I sawed old fence panels into short pieces and nailed them together to form palisaded bed edging, of the kind you have to fork out £15 for 1.80 metres for. My first Woman Shed project of 2014. OH sat there and watched me happily, drinking cola and stroking Mr Now-Not-So-Tubby (since he's been banned from the house). Spring hasn't been great for either of us but this is starting to feel a bit more like it now.
The venison was great by the way. "Moose steaks next time," I said.
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