Not letting the grass grow under our feet

This spring, Barry the Great sadly but decisively pronounced the lawn to be beyond recovery. He weedkilled it, as a first step to reseeding; the idea was then, once the grass was dead, to rotovate it. This, unfortunately, didn’t work, and after we got back from the Deep South, a nice and smiley bloke called Bill turned up with a digger the other day, and scraped it, producing a pile of moss which looked like the Great Wall of China. It is still more unfortunate that what with one thing and another, this mighty effort, followed by the deployment of 80 kilos of grass seed (I think) has coincided with the first patch of really nice weather this year. We have therefore had to get a sprinkler, because unless the ground is damp the seed will dry up and die. We’re not on the mains: though our water supply is, thank goodness, now working, since it’s a gravity-fed system, it enters the house under no great amount of pressure, and the sprinkler refuses to lob the water any great distance. I spent yesterday beetling in and out every twenty minutes to move the damn thing. The lawn has now been fairly thoroughly sprinkled, which is just as well, since the weather gods show no sign of wanting to help. The whole exercise was a cause of great rejoicing to little birds, who seemed to think that the whole exercise constituted providing a shower bath for their entertainment. Various people are drifting in and out: we’ve given up apologising for the lawn, and are concentrating on damage limitation, viz., re trying not to to track too much mud into the house. The ex-ambassador has just left, another friend came to lunch, someone else, whom we know only as a correspondent, is turning up this evening, and tomorrow, the friends from Tromsø arrive, to great and general rejoicing – they will mind the beasties while we go on our travels next week – we’ll be visiting Würzburg, Innsbrück, and Trieste – but we will have the pleasure of their company for a few days first. We were sorting out our journeys last night: the plan is to fly to Köln and take trains on from there, which is mysteriously a lot cheaper, and as on previous occasions, Deutsche Bahn was no trouble at all, nay, lucid and informative. Then there was the little question of Innsbruck to Trieste. Now, there is a good way of doing this, but Deutsche Bahn doesn’t admit to it – the Munich-to-Venice Intercity 86 which seems in some bizarre fashion to do its business by stealth. The Professor got there in the end, via the Trenitalia website, but compared to the Deutsche Bahn, it had a certain Alice in Wonderland quality. Not least because, though the train starts in Munich and traverses Austria before ending up in Venice, you can only pick up your ticket from a designated ticket machine, in Italy. Fortunately the railway station at Innsbrück are all that is helpful, so we will get them to sort this snafu out for us, but really, it makes you wonder.