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Spring! And the gloves don't fit.

Birthday celebrations in Spring. Life is yellow. And the birthday boy is 245 years old.




"My heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils."

... what me! Dancing? With flowers! I don't think so ...




Like the 'ducks dabbling up-tials all', 'wandering lonely as a cloud' is a treasured verse from childhood. I wish I remembered more.

Happy Birthday William Wordsworth.

Apart from the flowers my favourite part of Spring is the light - crisp, clear, vastly distant. Casting low, long shadows




and blinding you in the car at the beginning and end of the day (that bit I don't love, very definitely don't love.)

Spring is also the one time of year when gardeners have the opportunity to beat back the rising tide of   emerging seeds, the first winding thready tendrils of bindweed, the low furry haze of nettle carpet and the first yellow heads of buttercup that scream catch-me-if-you-can. Lose the battle now and the weeds win. Again. Spring after Spring they win. Year after defeated year. Not this one though ...




With a little help from Four-legged-friend




...  I think there's another weed here.


One of the pleasures of gardening - apart from clean sharp tools. And a laboured-over, now weed-free soil. And the emerging red of rhubarb leaves. And the first flower-buds on strawberry plants. And Four-legged-friend raising an eyebrow to check that you are still busy and still safe as he lies at your feet - is the promise of a new pair of gloves.




Gloves that still smell of leather - rather than an earthy bouquet of bird-dropping, compost and sweetly fermenting grass. That have a soft fluffy lining that cocoons your tired aching fingers - rather than an outer shell of dried mud that has to be crushed and rubbed and shaken into something resembling pliable leather And an absence of aberrant secateur nicks to let in the nettle hairs that sting those hard-working, allergic to everything, gardening hands.


Sadly, after a mild and muddy winter, my Spring treat was not to be. My best laid plans for restoration of comfortable extremities had thrown a tantrum in the hand cream pot, stormed off to the land of bespoke clothing and basically gone far. far astray. My lovely new red gloves pinched. In all the wrong places. But mostly between the ring and little fingers. Which hurt. So I had to go back to pulling nettles with the holey, old, reeking pair. The pair that are so well-worn that they spookily look like my hands are still inside when I take them off.




Ho hum.

They say hit pain with pain. But I am yet to be convinced that the burn of nettle sting helps aching finger joints.

Maybe Littlest would like to grow into my lovely new gloves.




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