Life In 79

I inherited the gardening bug from my father. I don't know any of the plants' latin names, have never tested the pH levels of my soil and must be the only person in Christendom incapable of producing fruit from their orchard, but the garden is the place I go if I want to relax.  Anna, my wife, has no interest in this past time. I have tried to pass on my enjoyment of horticulture by encouraging her to join me in the vegetable patch, but she has resolutely stated, on many occasions, gardening is not for her. She loves being in the great outdoors, riding up and down on the sit-on lawn mower, but if asked to fetch the secateurs from the potting shed she would struggle. Her interests lie elsewhere.  When we lived in Lincolnshire we had a potted grape vine given to us. It did nothing, but when planted in the ground it took off, like a beanstalk, across the back of the house and within a few years was covered in grapes. Anna announced she was going to make wine. I scoffed in a suppo...

When we purchased our French property we inherited numerous freebies including a sit-on lawn mower, chainsaw, strimmer...it was like a bad episode of The Price Is Right. Needless to say everything broke within the first few months. The only thing that wasn't terminally damaged was a Kangoo van. This enabled us to take all the broken stuff to the déchetterie.  We did have to jump start the battery and pump up one of the tyres every visit, and when it rained the footwell filled up, so I was often driving around the Deux-S è vres with my feet in an inch of water. But it worked. That lovely little van has been like a work horse over the years, ferrying countless van loads of detritus to the dump. It has clocked up hundreds of miles delivering magazines around department 79 and beyond. It has been used and abused; a forklift load of slabs was inserted into the back with millimetres to spare and driven home with the rear wheel arches grinding against the tyres, scraping its way home alon...