House

Raining - and raining yesterday too.  So plans for making an effort in the garden have gone by the board.  I did plant some coriander seeds in little pots and put them in a spare bedroom.  I was going to do the same with some butternut squash seeds but goodness knows where himself has put them.   

The butternut squash were a sad disappointment last year.  I dried the seeds from a bought squash very carefully and raised lots of little plants.  I had so many I was distributing them to friends who got lovely squash crops and were all grateful.  However, our squash came up round and green and striped.    I can’t blame the seeds as others had success with them.  Somebody told me that the butternut squash is a very promiscuous plant and will “cross-pollinate” with anything going.  If I can get any started this year, they aren’t going to get a chance to start branching out and getting tiddly on nectar and “cross-pollinating”.   They’ll be strictly confined to a butternut squash only area. 

As I couldn’t garden this morning I forced myself into some house cleaning whilst still in my pyjamas.   House cleaning isn’t my best thing but I do prefer the house not to look like a complete tip.  For an Easter treat (for the house, not me) I’ve swept the stairs down, cleaned the bathroom, done some dusting, wielding a hoover, changed the towels and also put clean sheets on the bed.  That will probably be it until we either know there’s a visitor coming or I can see the dust on the furniture again. 

I change sheets once a fortnight (not weekly).  Mike has a much bigger tolerance of used sheets than I do.  When I’d been away for a few weeks and noticed that the sheets seemed to have been on a while he pointed out that they were quite clean on my side.

Some people are much more particular than me.  I was visiting the flat at Scarborough last year.  My niece had arranged to come for the following week with some school friends.   A very clean nice tidy woman friend had slept in one of the beds for two nights and offered to change her sheets on leaving.   “Certainly not." I cried,   "They’ll be perfectly alright for school kids”.  My friend said that she thought that was very dirty.  I didn’t think to ask her what she’d been doing in them but knew she'd been alone.      

Over the last two nights we’ve watched an old film and an old play – The Godfather and Abigail’s Party.   There’s a really horrid marriage in each of these – Connie Corleone’s husband chases her round the apartment beating her with a belt,  but Michael Corleone subsequently has him garrotted,  so that’s alright.  In Abigail’s Party Lawrence and Beverley spend most of their time in mutual snarling and demonstrating how thoroughly miserable two people can make each other.  Lawrence ends up escaping by dying of a heart attack. 

Mike and I said afterwards how glad we were we had a happy companionable marriage - slight bickering thrown in but no beating and hardly any snarling.