Essential gardening

Today was spent, almost exclusively, in the garden (I’m going to ache tomorrow), as I made a start repairing the weed drenched hot border.

The weather, at first, didn’t shine kindly on me. Actually it didn’t shine at all, a constant light drizzle falling all day. Normally this would be a bit of a put off but today it worked out quite well, cooling me down and keeping the soil damp.

I started at one end and just kept going, removing hundreds of little misplaced plants while taking care around the ones we’d placed intentionally. And there was the horrid bind weed, it’s evil tendrils trying to dominate anything pleasant trying to grow skywards. Particularly invidious, the ghastly white strands of bind weed spaghetti, succumbed to my little hand fork.

At the back of the hot border is a rosemary bush which has not been happy since being transplanted. It’s even more miserable now, given I dug it up and threw it on the stick pile. The plan is that we’ll get a new, healthier one this weekend to replace it.

After I’d finished the constant bending, pulling, digging and inserting into a black garbage bag, I stood up and surveyed my work. It was with a sense of achievement that I started to barrow loads of top soil to be spread out over the weedless bed.

The top soil is the ton of dirt I moved earlier in the year and it was with a great sense of relief that I finally used some of it.

Finally, following hours of mud and toil, this is how it finished:

Weeded and top soiled and ready for the biddens

And, with even greater joy than a hot border full of bright poppies, Nicktor came over for the first Nicktor Night for over a month.

We celebrated by watching two movies. The first, Liar, had a sparkling array of acting promise (Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Renee Zellwegger, Rosanna Arquette, to name but a few) and an interesting premise (man beats lie detector test and escapes the law) but was not very good. All I can really say about it was that it was very arty, a bit pretentious and far too confusing. We were not impressed.

Our second film, however, was the brilliant Ted. Knowing nothing about it apart from the basic premise of a boy who wishes his teddy bear alive, I have been reticent about seeing it. However, Nicktor insisted that I would love it…and he was so right!

Matt Damon is superb. Mila Kunis is gorgeous. Ted is extraordinary. Made by Seth MacFarlane, responsible for Family Guy, it is incredibly funny with many, many cultural references liberally sprinkled through it. Ted is voiced by Seth MacFarlane, who is also the voice of Peter Griffin in Family Guy, and is beautifully manufactured. (Mila Kunis is also one of the regular Family Guy voices, playing Meg Griffin.)

A couple of highlights include Patrick Stewart giving a hilarious narration at the beginning and end of the movie and Nora Jones featuring as one of Ted’s ex-lovers.

That more or less gives a flavour of the film that thoroughly entertained the two of us in ways that Liar before it could never hope to do. But then, it is pretty much meant to entertain males who laugh at anything.

I should add that Matt and James bought the DVD of Ted for Dawn for mother’s day. A very odd choice which caused some squirming on the lounge when they watched it as a family.