Hallo Hallo

"Leesten vurry carrefullee, I shall say theese unly wunce"
... did you see the documentary about the sitcom last night?
I thought it was good to see some of the actors back on
screen again after so many years - excellent acting and
comic timing from them all, but a poor script -- too much
present-day padding for me, with Rene talking about his
war-time diary with the other characters, interspersed with
clips from the old series -- the programme makers set about
making nearly two hours of telly time, when I think one hour
would have been enough. I was entertained, but if I'd
videoed it to watch later, I would have skipped over a lot
of the padding.

Mrs C and I have been busy in the past week or so altering a
few things in our garden. Our overall plan is to make it
safe for toddlers to play in, so we decided to get rid of our
pond. We gave away our goldfish "Jaws" to a neighbour, and
our massive water lily to a couple on Nottingham Freecycle.
They said they'd split it into 8 plants with view to keeping
a couple themselves, and giving the rest to friends and more
folk on Freecycle. What a brilliant idea.

I was very lucky to see some landscape gardeners working at
the bottom of our road, who were filling a skip with a lot
of garden soil -- and to be brief, I've brought up eight
barrow-loads of soil to fill up the pond - another 4
barrow-loads to go, I reckon. I'll wait for another neighbour
to do the same, so I can ask for some more.

Our garden is more or less level with the first floor of our
house, as it was built into an embankment. So at two sides
of the approach to the garden we've got precipitous drops down
the hillside, which we're going to fence off. We've asked the
landscape gardeners for a quote.

Our other project is to re-decorate our ground floor hallway
-- after months of indecision about what colour paints to use
to match the wallpaper we've bought, we've finally bought some
paints. I'm making a start this morning by painting the hall
ceiling and that of the staircase.

We'll spend a few weeks doing all this gradually, so as not to
knacker ourselves. I would have made a start yesterday, but we
had family round for part of the day, and also we went into
town for a bit of shopping and for a stroll around in the
lovely warm sunshine.

As you may have heard, the UK has had the warmest and driest
April for about 150 years -- it was 23 deg C in the Midlands
yesterday, a gorgeous sunny day with a lovely cool breeze --
ideal for walkers. Temperatures are going up to 28 deg C today
-- a good day for staying indoors to do the painting. :)