Day 21. Monday

Is anyone else having difficulty remembering what day of the week it is? I've just spent ten minutes trying to join a scheduled zoom meeting, before it finally dawned on my that today is not Tuesday.

A productive day, though. Weeding, sycamore murdering (how did Zacchaeus climb a sycamore tree? They seem most insubstantial), thistle digging, fence fixing, and in the absence of our wonderful hospice volunteer gardeners, an attempt to hack the grass in the back garden down with a pair of rusty shears. My back will not thank me for this later. And I'm not planning on doing the front that way; it will just have to take its chances until we can move freely again.

Honeysuckle is now wired to go up the fence not across the grass. Oregano and thyme are trimmed to manageable sizes. An unseasonable big daisy thing has either survived the winter unscathed or else decided it is August already. A number of plants I thought were weeds have turned out to have roots in a neat square "grown in a nursery" style. Oops.

I gave up when I realised the dried leaves I was clearing from the last corner were in fact a rather angry toad. There will be time enough tomorrow.

My mission; hide my fences. Train the ivy, the honeysuckle, the jasmine, to grow up against them and disguise cracked wood with delicate shades of green and evening scents. I have ordered brambles to fill in some gaps, and hope my other shrubs will grow tall, unfettered. If we are to be under house arrest for the foreseeable future, we will make it as gentle a prison as it can be.

The downside to this garden frenzy is that, unchecked, A chose to spend the entire day watching Full House on Netflix occasionally rolling a piece of play dough out flat then squashing it up again, and graffitiing the number 15 on her arms in Sharpie. She tells me that tomorrow she will do things, but she needed a day off as it is the holidays now. We shall see. So much for yesterday's plan to bring her projects outside and work all day at the garden table. Again, there is always tomorrow.

At least by staying indoors, she did not notice my first job this morning - cleaning cat poo off the trampoline. Not an experience I am keen to repeat, but deeply thankful I found it before Dylan had his first bounce of the day.