Saturday 19 September 2009

My last remaining iota of street cred has gone.

I really really wish I had taken a photo of my garden last week. I had booked a gardener to come on Friday and fully intended a great "before and after" post. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on the level of importance one attaches to blog posts and the need for material for same) they finished a job early and turned up instead at lunchtime on Thursday.

When I say "gardener", what actually turned up was the gardener himself and a team of chaps and some heavy-duty shredding, chopping, cutting and obliterating equipment. After a mere 4 hours, the garden looked like it had been targeted by a particularly well-drilled plague of locusts. The buddleia is gone, as is much of the foliage in the back garden (nettles included) and I can actually see my garden wall again.

The cat, however, is back in a huff. If you thought she gave me a hard time when I threw out her smelly old doormat, you should see the air of martyrdom she has adopted now that she has no cover to hide in and has to poop in public. If she had an opposable thumb and a stepladder, she would have phoned in to report me to the SSPCA by now.

The garden now looks rather bare (who knew stinging nettles took up so much room?) so some advice from you green fingered types out there would be welcome (Isabelle? Put that marking down, my garden needs you.)

I have an area of ground in the back garden, roughly about 12 feet by 4 feet which is now empty, dug over and begging to be filled. The plot is right beside my high, stone, garden wall and faces east. It is pretty well drained (in other words I have never noticed it being particularly water-logged) and that is all I know. We sort of like the idea of planting some vegetables some time but don't know what or when, and otherwise just need pointers on what to plant that will look pretty and need virtually no help to survive and thrive. Suggestions?

In other news, Husband and I went to see Kajagoogoo in concert on Friday. This was my birthday gift from Husband and I can honestly say it was a lot better than I was expecting. Mind you, I went to see them in 1983 as a 16 year old and I left before the concert finished so my expectations were perhaps not very high. That said, the people watching opportunities were wonderful. The concert was at The Ferry in Glasgow and the table next to ours was occupied by a girls' night out. Not just any girls' night out either. A Glasgow girls' night out. A fair amount of fake tan, cleavage and what I always privately think of as "stripper shoes" - the kind that look like they weigh a ton and need six months of intensive training to learn to walk in.

There was a lot of shrieking and giggling and HUGE amounts of photo taking. In fact there was so much photo-taking that there did not seem to be any time for anything else. It was as if they were s0 determined to have photographic evidence that they had had a good time, they didn't actually have any time to ........have a good time. A bit sad really.

At one point prior to the concert actually starting, the band members wandered nonchalantly across the dancefloor on their way backstage. The girls spotted them and woo-hooed loudly. My Husband gazed sympathetically at Limahl and co. "Poor sods must get that everywhere they go" he commented. "Ironic whooping".

The concert itself was really rather good. Kajagoogoo live are a very talented, very tight little funk band. Limahl is a camp little article and probably the least talented of the five of them, but the bass player is frankly brillient. Their live set is very entertaining and bears little resemblance to their recorded music. I rather enjoyed it.

I went to see Kajagoogoo (or "The Goo" as they were laughingly calling themselves) and liked it. So there you go.

8 comments:

  1. Well, I could offer you some lily of the valley and some tellow nettley things. Also valerian. All pretty, briefly. Also rampant. Plant and stand well back before they engulf you.

    No?

    Heather? Rockery plants like aubretia? Periwinkles? How about agapanthus? They're big, flower for weeks and look very striking. Roots go down to Australia and you could never get them up but then why would you want to? (Unless you lived in Australia, where evidently they grow like weeds. But here they just grow.

    Nettles are very good for butterflies, though. And soup, I believe.

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  2. Kajagoogoo? Really? It's great when bands are even better than you remembered them. I had that with Lloyd Cole recently. I put a full stop there because I didn't want to mention him and Kajagoogoo in the same sentence.

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  3. I have very little idea what will grow in the south of Scotland, but if you have a fair patch of ground going spare, what I would plant would be either berry bushes or perennial vegetables. In eastern Ontario that would be rubarb and asparagus; I had a grapevine, but it got frozen one especially bad winter.
    On the other hand, I would love to grow heather. Can you take a day and pop around some of the fancy gardens and see what looks good (and easy - easy is good).

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  4. Can't you make a tiny little fishpond out of it? Or would that be too much work?

    Kajagoogoo, ohhhhhh, yep, your street cred is running for the hills, screaming "save me, save me!" I remember their album, White Feathers or something wasn't it? Sounds a great night out, and I had to laugh at the table of stripper-shod, tangoed keelys. Know what you mean about desperation to document a good time - must have been a bit irritating, no?

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  5. Placate the cat: plant catnip. Or how about lentils, lol.

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  6. Mary seems to know what she's talking about except that I don't think rhubarb or asparagus would grow where you are, would it? You wouldn't be planting vegetables until spring anyway, but you could prep the soil now and spend the winter figuring out what would grow

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