My next career suggestion! An hour in the front garden has seen me eradicate some nasties. Maybe I should start a firm that just does weed extermination… Everybody has a weed that keeps coming back and I swear that my nemeses are out to taunt me every year.

With a big plot I/we wanted to have lots of different things in place to make the garden a family space but to be honest there is so much scope but my pockets haven’t been large enough and my knowledge/awareness of my limitations haven’t really been realistic.

This year has been shock after shock and that hasn’t been good for my energy levels. I’ve been popping a real diaspora of vitamins and minerals hopeful that they’ll stave off the worst of the symptoms my MS can throw at me but the new Invigilating work has meant a whole lot more standing than I previously did in the colleges, where I did a lot more individual work with SEN kids who had readers or scribes and individual rooms.

I want to ‘do’ a pond. The garden is big enough and there is scope to follow a path from the back corner that meanders round a pond which enables us to hold the water that comes from the back corner of the garden when we have heavy rain. I wonder if there was insufficient drainage when the houses behind us were built. We put a storm drain in when we extended but it needs to flood again to know whether it is effective… which we don’t want to happen either…