5th May

May Day Bank Holiday. Raining. We spent a lazy morning inside without being miserable. I am all for going out and enjoying a day off, or the garden, or meeting up with people or going and doing something, but I am equally happy with little to do on a ‘rain stopped play’ basis. We all lead such busy lives and I think we can all be going so fast that we don’t enjoy the ride. We have so many fast and brief encounters with people and yet we don’t really know the people we meet or spend much of our time communicating or dealing with. Personal relationships go out of the window; we do not foster deep and meaningful friendships. This is worsened, I am sure, by the use of emails and text messages. People have quick, poorly spelt communiqués written with appalling grammar, and they are so shallow (the messages and sadly too, at times, the people sending them).

For example, on Christmas Eve last year I received a text message from a young man that issued a ‘Happy Christmas’ message as well as the command ‘I am your friend so message me back’. I had seen the man twice the day before and was due to see him the next day, I had sent him a card already and he was now insisting I send him a text message. When I spoke to him on Christmas day he said he had sent 150 of those texts and had only received 20-30 replies. I pointed out that maybe people thought that he was only sending out such messages to get many in reply as if receiving so many almost forced wishes made him feel popular and if people were really his friends as he suggested they would send greetings regardless of his instructions.

Such is our mad world, and so it is with no great sadness that we as a family simply had time to chill out, indoors, with little on the agenda. We had a leisurely breakfast, got dressed late and enjoyed the children running around our feet – they do not need sunshine and expensive days out to enjoy themselves, our 1 year old  is entertained with one Lego brick!

It has become a tradition to go over and see my parents on some Bank Holiday Mondays at some point in the day so we had this in mind. This idea went out of our minds as soon as warm sunshine shone into our garden. As the wetness evaporated, so did any thoughts of doing anything but finishing off the hanging baskets. Their designated fuchsias and trailing plants were planted and compost filled around. I also put up the bracket at the front of the house for a blue basket and potted up that one with one central upright fuchsia and 4 surrounding red trailing petunias, for what I hope will be a red, white and blue display. Our 4 year old helped me dig holes in the front garden for the fuchsias from the back, so we now have the original one by the front door, and 3 of its cuttings (one was a cutting from a cutting – it separated as we manoeuvred it). A lot of manure, compost (both commercial and home made) and water went into them as the ground is very poor. Into the gaps in the back garden where these fuchsias came from, we planted 2 upright fuchsias – Snowcap and Brutus.

So absorbed were we in these tasks that the thought of going out to visit anyone just faded away.