Waking up and smelling the roses

In this house we like a good, definite colour, even in our flowers

Although I am not much of a gardener (this is an understatement), roses have appeared in my garden! The above is a single rose in quite an unpromising bit where I have to fight brambles. It has a faint but nice smell. I have got another one in bud. Go me. This is thanks to my Judicious Pruning.

I pin it up, it falls down. I pin it up, it falls down

And this is the climbing rose round the window which keeps falling down and we have to keep pinning it up again. It is in a falling down phase at the moment so I have had to take this photo from a funny angle. Almost having roses around our door is possibly the only way in which Partner and I have managed to attain a picture-perfect life, in all other respects it is not picture-perfect. Partner would say at this point, very briskly, why would I even engage with outmoded stereotypes of How Life Should Be because everything is marvellous, the sun may shine tomorrow, there are faggots* for dinner and later he can watch The Avengers, drink wine, and moan about my knitting. (‘Don’t let that furry wool touch me! I can feel it on my leg!’).

This is from the naturalistic school of photography. I have more where this came from. My mother in particular should be very nervous

I have gone through some old photographs and I have found this one which is about 15 years old. It is of Nana Mollie, and my brother Dan in the foreground. Nana Mollie, who was my dad’s mother, looks like she is going after the wine and Dan looks helpless to stop her, this pretty much describes all our family gatherings, one of us going after the wine with a determined expression and the rest of us sitting about raising our eyebrows in a half-ironic fashion, although we now have a new recurrent theme in that someone will also be feeding a dog with an Inappropriate Sausage Roll and someone else will be trying to stop them. Nana Mollie was a woman who brought up 4 children on no money and, I learn subsequently, produced complex lace knitted things. Let us all pause to imagine what she would say to someone who suggested she knit a £55 tea cosy. Do you see my problem? It is very difficult to escape your genetics.

* This is a meat thing that you get in the North. I had to sweet-talk the butcher and get him to make them specially. They really are called faggots. I may engage with faggots but I draw the line at Hodge, please do not ask, I cannot even find it on google.