First Day of Summer?

End of March, the start of British Summer Time - and a truly summery day at that.

Took the opportunity to get out on the bikes - over the hill and down to Capel Bangor and along Cwm Rheidol, enjoying the afternoon sunshine.

Was glad of the battery on a number of occasions, but even it couldn't cope with one of the hills on the return journey and had to get off and walk for a bit!

A nice taste of the summer to come?

Project Moss

It's become increasingly apparent recently that quite a lot of our lawns are more moss than grass.

Having decided to do something about it, we've started with an electric scarifier on one of the front lawns - might have gone a bit overboard in our first attempt though as we managed to generate a ton bag of moss from the smallest of our bits of lawn!





Stage 2 has involved recourse to chemical warfare, and between the scarifying and the moss killer it looks like we may have got most of it - of course that means we're going to be left with a very patchy lawn (time to buy some grass seed?).

Tree Surgery

Time to do something about the Leylandii by the woodshed - while it looks ok from this angle, it had died off completely round one side, and it was getting too high to trim safely.




So out came the chainsaw . . . and an afternoon of chopping, and lopping, and sorting of sticks, and stuffing of leafy bits into bags to take to the tip ensued.


Took a while but in the end it was reduced to a stump - something for the firewood store for 2015!

Capital Days

Had some time off in March including a few days away visiting family and taking a side trip to London.

The sun shone for us for the most part, and we seemed to walk for miles . . . down to St Pauls, over the Millennium Bridge, and along the side of the Thames, back to Trafalgar Square, the National Portrait Gallery, a drink at the Three Greyhounds in Soho, then on along Oxford Street:

Had just about had enough for the day when our wanderings took us to this offer of spiritual messages.

Who knew?

Revitalised we made it to another couple of pubs before actually calling it a day.


On our final morning we visited the Hunterian Museum (an interesting if somewhat gruesome collection of specimens and instruments illustrating the development of anatomical and surgical knowledge).


The Museum is based in the Royal College of Surgeons, which is situated off another of those garden squares which London seems to specialise in.

Little oases of calm beside the busy London streets . . .

. . . particularly like the one in Soho Gardens with its charming half-timbered gardener's hut.