a cause for celebration...

I am bloody chuffed to read today that Gormley's "Another Place" is to remain on the beach at Crosby forever. Just needed to say how great it is - go there!






PS - this is a link, thanks to the Valley of Lost Things, to other weird works of art - air powered robotic sculptures.

our allotment.....

is not actually ours, it's Patsy and Mark's.
But they have generously given us a share - which will help them out of course.

Even better than that, it's near Jude and Al who have two plots, one of which is a share of Will's.

And the icing on the cake is that Scott and Cath have a share of someone's, just across the way, by the gate.

It's fantastic! Fresh air, exercise, the promise of fresh organic veg and with some brilliant people including our best friends. What more could we ask?

We first worked on it 3 weeks ago, we cleared some couch grass and picked off litter.

Last week I went with my Dad to pick up a load of horse manure from the people who keep horses opposite his field. We bagged up 8 sacks of it, and loaded up the campervan. It was in there from Friday to Sunday when we unloaded it..... only to find that the paper sacks did not have sealed bottoms, only stitching and so the liquid that had settled to the bottom of each sack had leaked out onto the plastic bags that I had stood the sacks on, and beyond. There was a stream of brown liquid horse poo running down the edge of the carpet and cupboards of the van! Oops! (It did not smell at all, thank goodness).

On Saturday, in beautiful weather, we spent 2 hours up there, spreading out the manure, and the compost that we had liberated from one of our 2 garden compost bins. We also took that empty compost bin up to the plot. We planted 6 fruit bushes and marked out 6 small planting areas according to our initial planting plan. I have consulted Bob Flowerdew, Alan Titchmarsh and Geoff Hamilton as well as Gardening Which and Jekka McVicker. Everyone says something slightly different and contradictory, but we have settled on a basic rotation plan with companion planting.

Tone has started some crops off as seeds in a propagator. We should be getting my Dad's old home-made cold frame. And thanks to freecycle we have an offer of a free water butt which I plan to collect tomorrow, that will collect water from a drainpipe off a shed. All we need now is the shed!

(photo by Tone)

lists....

I love 'em.
You'd think, therefore that I would have followed in Tone's footsteps and done a list of the month on this blog.
But I haven't.
Yet.
So I'm going to give it a go......

This is a list of my most memorable performances (the ones I can remember right this moment).

• Singing with the Moorlands Music Youth Choir at the Albert Hall when I was about 13.
• Being in "the Hired Man" with Stoke Amateur Operatic Society Youth Section when I was 19.
• Playing drums at a gig for the first time ever with Tone, Scott and Cath in a pub in Clayton a few years ago - I'd been playing drums for exactly 12 months at the time and we played "Moondance".
• Singing "Ozymandias" in the same youth choir at the Victoria Hall in Hanley.
• Being Pitti Sing in "the Mikado" at school.
• Singing "Here There and Everywhere" for my Mum's 60th Birthday accompanied beautifully by Tone on guitar.
• Singing "I Dreamed a Dream" from "Les Miserables" at a concert when I was studying music at Stoke Sixth Form College.
• Performing a monologue of the first part of "the Color Purple" for my first year of drama at University.
• Being Florence Nightingale in the local NHS show to celebrate 50 years of the NHS.