Anyone see Kate Bradbury and her pond on Gardeners World tonight?

 One of my guilty pleasures is Gardeners World, an hour of pure escapism on a Friday night. Being in a wheelchair 🦼 I can no longer garden as I would like but those of you who know me will remember my description of how Heather and I garden now : I supply the brains and Heather supplies the brawn. Heather is a reluctant gardener and I am a reluctant disabled man! Recently I bought a special offer from Sutton seeds of 200 summer bulbs 💡 as you can imagine Heather was delighted 😁  Well let’s get back to tonight’s edition of Gardeners World. Monty Don has taught me almost everything I know about gardening (not strictly true) and I try and watch Gardeners World whenever it is on.  

Tonight’s episode (yesterday’s episode now 🤣) had Kate Bradbury on talking about her Brighton garden in lockdown. Kate is passionate about wildlife gardening and I can recommend her books as great places to discover the joy of gardening for wildlife. The first of her books I read was https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-bumblebee-flies-anyway-9781472943125/

I loved her honesty and her helping ways to invite birds and insects into what began as a wildlife desert. She is a wonderful writer and has written some other books about ways to enable the birds and the bees 🐝 visit and establish homes in our gardens. One of the absolute best ways to encourage insects and birds into a space is a pond! I know that can sound kinda scary it I’m not talking about the Serpentine in Hyde park but any kind of container from an upturned dustbin lid or a semi submerged washing up bowl up to a full on deep hole dug with different tiers and a beach, or anything in between. The RSPB in their adverts say “if you build it they will come” 

I know it is true because the more wildlife stuff I build in my own garden some creatures move in. Kate has recently written a book about how you can build a pond or should I say dig a pond? Kate has been promoting ponds in gardens for years. I discovered some YouTube videos Kate did a few years back and when learning about the pond videos I discovered that she has just written a book RHS How to Create a Wildlife Pond 

As I said earlier providing a pond is possibly the best thing to do to bring wildlife into your garden so I recon reading Kates book will be the best thing you can do if you want a pond . Good luck 🤞 👍

Second jab done

 I lied in my last post and said our jabs were booked for the 14th! Wrong it was today, a whole day earlier 😇 so my apologies for my wrong information 🧐. Since our last jab a new hub has opened and the old Saga offices has been press ganged into the job. Talk about a slick operation 👍👍👍 they were on the ball and I would estimate about four hundred people being inoculated per hour in the one section that we were in. My congratulations and heart felt thanks to the army of people involved. 

April’s arrived and flowers are blooming

 Yep the year marches on, we have got our second Covid jab booed for the 14th. And Easter looks like a cold flop. The weather is set to cold with even colder weather to come. The great news is we have loads of flowers showing themselves. Daffodils 🌼 of course but Heather took some photos of what look like fritillary and maybe some irises so stay tuned over the next week or so because as soon as the bloom they will be photographed by Heather. I can’t get into the garden as we have steps down the back of the house into the garden 🪴 and as of yet my electric wheelchair has not learned the art of getting me up or down stairs. We have a through floor lift to get me upstairs and I have to be hoisted in and out of bed. My multiple Sclerosis has left me unable to stand or walk. Still it’s one way of not doing the washing up 😂😂😂 

I have been on eBay and also on https://www.suttons.co.uk/ for the last week or so looking at plants 🪴 Heather is th gardener, I think on a previous post about Geraniums I described her as the brawn and me as the brains of our gardening efforts! Click here to read http://reflectingandmusing.blogspot.com/2020/06/wheelchair-gardening.html 

My enthusiasm is peaking to early this year, I have decided to hang fire for a few weeks and buy some garden ready specimens when the chance of frost has past. Plus we are waiting on 200 bulbs Heather planted to put in an appearance before anything else goes in the ground. Research 🧐 is key to gardening 🧑‍🌾 had I just gone ahead and bought one thing I liked the look of I would have been waiting until next year for it to 🌺 flower 🌸 . Right I am in bed writing this and it’s 11:59 pm so good night and and good morning all at the same time, I am signing off for now , here are some pictures of the garden.

First day out this year

 With the weather warming up and the Covid restrictions easing we managed to get out today for ther first time this year! Being in a wheelchair 🦼 I suffer from the cold but with the temperature set to hit twenty degrees C I braved the big outside and Heather and I drove over to Sandwich and ate a sandwich on the Quay. I did mean to take a photo of the road sign THE QUAY but forgot. I did manage a few others. I hop you like them.

COVID-19 jab done

 Got a phone call yesterday and was jabbed today. We arrived a few minutes early to the church hall and was greeted at the door asked have we been in contact with anyone suffering from COVID or symptoms did we have a temperature etc then directed Inside to a receptionist. She had Heathers details but not mine but no problem we had a few questions and answers and I went from being the invisible man in a wheelchair to a man in a wheelchair waiting for my Covid jab. We went through to the church hall to find four lines of chairs laid out and a slick operation operating. Directed to the front line they removed a chair and asked a few more questions and most importantly which arm. We sat for a few minutes before a nice lady appeared said back in a second I need more vaccine. She reappeared seconds later I peeled back my cardigan to expose my arm and it was all over jab done and before I could replace my cardi she was doing Heather. Over and done with and back outside before the time we had been allotted. Heather had been told not to drive for fifteen minutes and we had both been told our arm may ache but take paracetamol if it did and expect to be contacted by the GP surgery again for the second dose in around twelve weeks 📆  👍❤️ Job done. Anyone who is feeling anxious there’s nothing to worry about. My arm don’t ache and Heather’s does so it seems a fifty fifty chance unlike the flu jab were we both hurt 😢. So get yer jab done we both had the Astra Zeneca vaccine 💉 if anyone is wondering 

Those who can do those who can't teach? depression and tricks to get out of it

 I am useless at many many things and I have just tried to write ✍️ in my journal for the first time in a while. I can’t write anymore my hands are just not working well enough so does that mean I have to become a teacher 👨‍🏫 . Why this emoji has come up because I wrote teacher I don’t know 🤷‍♂️ but it did. I am writing ✍️this post on my iPad with a stylus, I call it my stabby stick. Everyone knows if I ask “anyone seen my stabby stick” that I cannot find my stylus! Well now I can’t write does the quotation “Those who can do those who can't teach”George Bernard Shaw penned over a hundred years apply to me? I know what you’re thinking’why pick on me with such a profound question so early on a Monday. All I can say is man up it’s 3:45pm . 

Is no longer being able to form legible words with pen 🖊 or pencil ✏️ something to get depressed over? Yep another profound question 🤔  From what I know is anything can cause me to become depressed. So what do I do to beat depression? Well I am not sure I actually do beat it now it’s my turn to answer a profound question. I don’t think I beat depression it’s more that I suppress it. The ways in which I  suppress it are  many and varied, all are easy the hard part is actually doing something. An old Chinese proverb goes A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step but we all know the first step is the hardest.

I always recommend people seek the advice of a professional, my GP has helped me tremendously but going back to the last paragraph taking that first step is difficult. I know because I refused to accept that there was anything wrong. Who me I am fine nothing wrong with me I’m alright etc. etc. Anyone recognise themselves in those few words? Actually doing something is the hard bit once you have admitted to yourself speaking to your GP 👩‍⚕️ is easy, they know about this stuff they are the experts . You wouldn’t let a gardener fix your car 🚙 or a bricklayer rewire  your house 🏠 or your mate from the pub do a filling on your teeth would you? And if you are prescribed some tablets take the darn things. So many people read the leaflets and scare themselves that the possible side effects are going to happen to them. It might say one in ten thousand people but I know people who then say I’m not going to take that chance! Madness completely bonkers.

Hello people just talk!

 I am nearly always the one who strikes up a conversation, maybe I just like the sound of my own voice. But with lockdown it’s difficult. I haven’t seen anyone and it’s gotten so as I don’t know 🤷‍♂️ if I actually want to see anyone. For me to be like that anyone who normally is a bit shy must be really anti people. I know I can pick up the phone but really the only people who I have called since lockdown have been my family and because lockdown has taken away things to talk about. Now in normal times I don’t need anything to talk about, I once struck up a conversation with three strangers explaining that I will talk to myself lamp posts and stray dogs! The strangers all women of a certain age asked which category did they fall into then one came to the conclusion of ‘stray dogs’ which caused much hilarity. The spoken word can  be such a lift, I used to read poetry aloud to Heather my wife and have only done so once in these lockdown conditions ☹️ I must try harder.

Depression is a thief it steels your sense of fun in life, now that might not sound much life ain’t meant to be fun but if you don’t enjoy life you become miserable. I am sure life was never designed for you to feel miserable! When life is fun you actually smile 😆 Everything becomes a reason to laugh you smile and those around you smile, smiling is infectious. You might smile to a lady weeding her garden and finding her task tedious that brief smile could lift her spirit and her tedious task becomes a joy. The trouble with COVID is we are all wearing a mask 😷 so we are being robbed of simple joys. My personal pleasure is music, l love early rock n roll and music from my youth and the 60’s and 70’s to me music stopped in the 1980s  and restarted when Adele released 19 in 2008 I enjoy all of her albums. Ed Sheeran has become another of my favourites. 

My mainstay of enjoying life in recent years is photography. With the advent of digital photography and then the camera 📷 in phones photography has be one of the easiest of hobbies to get involved with. I do have a phone but mainly use a camera 📸 as this gives me far greater control over the creativity of an image. I am not an artist but sometimes I do venture away from the cameras auto settings to capture something a little bit different. Then after shooting the pictures I have some more fun transferring said pictures onto my laptop 👨‍💻 or more recently my iPad. Transferring images by WiFi is new to me and as with any learning experience fun and frustrating in equal measure. Twenty years ago I tried using photoshop and was bewildered by the complexities of post production of photo’s I didn’t enjoy the process and on one forum I frequent I use “life’s to short to learn photoshop “  as my tag on each post😃

Each of these stages is an escape from reality! When I am engrossed in taking photos or transferring them and cropping and enhancing the images I become detached from my everyday problems. I use photography as a means of escape. I will write ✍️ more about my escapism from depression in future posts.