More drawers

There’s nothing quite like painting a set of drawers, the sun shining down and the cricket commentary keeping you company.

Today was the first day of the fifth and final Ashes test. It was taking place at the Oval and more than a few times during the day, I thought of Bob and Graeme, sitting enjoying the glorious stroke play.

And glorious is the only way you can describe the wonderful innings with the bat had by Shane Watson (or What-oh, as the commentators insisted in calling him). His wonderful knock of 176 was not only his highest test score but it also marked his first Ashes century.

It was like he couldn’t do anything wrong. To be fair, he was dropped early on but he shrugged this off and ploughed on, destroying the under experienced English team. Under experienced because, for some reason, the selectors decided to field a team consisting of two spin bowlers making their test début.

For whatever reason, What-ho swung the bat and scored as if the cricket ball was the size of beach ball. It was pretty brilliant to listen to, so I can only imagine it was a wonderful display to watch.

And speaking of displays…this is what my efforts with the sander, rag and, finally, brush looked like by the end of the day:

All on the path

So that completed the first coat of primer which takes a ridiculous four hours before a re-coat is possible. This means I wasn’t able to finish them – that pleasure is reserved for tomorrow.

Then, at 5pm, two curtain poles turned up. One is for the Old Rose room, which has curtains but no pole at the moment. This is another job reserved for tomorrow.

Ignoring the strange battalion of drawers on the path, the garden looked particularly bright and beautiful in the sun today. I was rather taken with the sun shining through the gladiolus petals. The effect doesn’t look quite as good in a photograph, but, even so, was quite pleased with this effort.

Sun through gladiolus

While the garden looked lovely in the sun, the ground was a bit dry so I gave it all a jolly good watering before heading inside for dinner.

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I rather liked the story about how dad yelled at the mad old woman today. It just shows that even mild, mannered, gentleman Fred has a point at which he explodes. After hours of yelling and yahoo-ing, he finally snapped and told her to shut up. Well done, dad!