I have only spent a little time in the garden during the past two days.  I won’t be at home for the next couple of days so I have been doing housework and shopping to make sure E and R will be alright while I am gone.  I am going to Sheffield to see A, my eldest daughter and to watch her perform in her dramatic society’s production of ‘Julius Caesar’.  A is playing Portia and I am really looking forward to seeing her and watching the play.  I won’t be staying with her this time as she is now in a shared house and there isn’t the room.  I am staying in a hotel in the centre of the city close to the Cathedral.  I hardly ever go away on my own – in fact the last time I did was just over three years ago when I attended A’s M.A. graduation ceremony in Sheffield.  She has been studying for her PhD for the past three years and it is nearing completion.  She is also looking for work and running out of money!

E, my younger daughter, has been looking after a little fir tree sapling in her room for a year since my mother gave it to her.  It is growing quite well but looking a little pale.  I have been suggesting for some time that it ought to go outside and get some fresh air but she has been reluctant to let it go.  I think she remembers the ones I grew from seed a few years ago that were doing very well until I put them outside only to be eaten by something.  I have put her little tree in the greenhouse with other trees I am growing – a yew, two beeches, two oaks and a couple of laburnums.  In the spring they will go outside but somewhere where the deer and pheasants can’t get at them.  While I was in the greenhouse yesterday I checked all the plants in there – tidied them up and gave a little water to most of them.

  The geese are making themselves at home as usual.  They wander about over the garden leaving ‘little messages’ all over the place.  They join next door’s chickens in pecking up spilt seed under the feeders and bird tables.  The female especially has started following me about when I am outside in the hope that I may give them something to eat.  They were around this morning but when I got home about 3pm they had flown off somewhere less windswept.  I spent most of today with my mother helping with shopping, going to Harleston and Diss with her and then collecting her medication from the surgery.  We had a nice chat over a cup of coffee when we got back to her house and then I had some shopping of my own to do in Halesworth and my own medication to collect.  I also remembered, at last, to call in at the church and change the church colours;  the altar frontal and the cloth on the pulpit have been white since Christmas but now that we have had Candlemas the green cloth and frontal must be put up.  The colours will stay green until Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, when all changes to purple.  R usually does this as he is one of the Churchwardens but he has been very busy this week so I offered to do it.  He had to take his car in for a service today at the recommended garage in Norwich.  In total he has driven about 140 miles today just for a car service!  Thirty miles to Norwich, probably over forty miles to his place of work, the same distance this afternoon back to the garage and then thirty miles home again

.  I didn’t spend long in the garden this afternoon as the weather was so wet and windy.  I saw more molehills, more wood down off the birch tree and all the ponds have risen again.  R tells me that the there is a flood warning on the Waveney and the Beck today – this does not surprise me though we have had less rain here than most other places around the country.