Green Shoots

We seem to be getting somewhere with the lawn. We were in Aberdeen all day and though we didn’t see anything when we left, somehow returned to see a fine, adolescents’-whiskers green fuzz over the bare brown veldt, which is very good news. Our Tromsø friends are taking charge, and are, as is their wont, making things better with concentrated intelligence: we have planted up the big pots outside my study with begonias (evicting them from various blue pots about the place), and very fine and grand they look too. Planting up these pots has been a headache because the tulips were hugely late, and by the time they had died down, the South, because it has been on a more normal schedule, had gone over its season so we couldn’t buy bedding plants (the pots were full of white begonias last year, which was nice, but the begonias may be really quite fruity) Our absolutely-un-Doubtful-Guests also undertook to cook for us, so we came home from a day in the Vinegar Works to the welcome sight of someone else bustling about with potatoes and things. Meanwhile, we have a bit of welcome progress on matters personal – by recommendation, we went to a jolly physiotherapist in the course of our Aberdeen day, who has diagnosed my mysterious ankle problem (which has had me limping for two months) and told me what to do, and has a firm theory about the Professor’s iffy knee joint, which includes acquiring a bicycle: because he’s been compensating all over the place, he needs to be re-balanced, and since the only way you can ride a bike is by being in balance, this is a succinct way of taking relevant exercise. It makes perfectly good sense. He has had a pang of regret for the nice oldfashioned Dutch bike left outside a shop in Leiden when we were in the process of moving back, due to the absolute state of distraction induced by the move, but perhaps there are still bikes with handlebars in the right place, fewer than 10 gears, and no fibreglass or carbon components whatsoever …. though in the world of today it may be quite a bit to ask for.