Twelve Days in the Year: 27th April 2025

Woke around six, feeling exceedingly groggy – recovering from very little sleep the previous night, due to getting far too wound up on Friday evening by the need to be coherent and engaging on live radio and then getting talked over. It would have been nice to sleep rather longer, but I’m feeling a lot better. The cats want breakfast and attention, and I need the bathroom, so I can’t get back to sleep; I do puzzles from yesterday’s newspaper until A wakes up and then go down to wash dishes and make tea. The kittens go outside briefly but then come back to bed and arrange themselves in their now familiar places: Buddy lies next to A, Olga goes under my legs and Hector leans up against me. It’s now very nearly a year since B arrived, and while he really doesn’t like sharing with other cats and they reciprocate, things have really settled down, with only occasional spats, and they all seem quite happy and relaxed.

There is always something wonderful about the first proper cup of tea after being away: the right teabags, the water that I’m used to, decent soya milk. No free biscuits, but that’s the only thing. Scrolling through the usual websites to catch up on news and German football results, finishing puzzles, waiting for the regular social chat to start up on Facebook. The radio chunters away in the background, quiet enough that I can ignore it. We get up and strip the bedclothes, much to the annoyance of the cats (who perhaps feel that one should not do washing on the sabbath); get dressed and downstairs for another cup of tea. While A starts cooking kedgeree, I then drive over to Wincanton to fill up with petrol, as I have to make multiple trips to the dump with garden waste today. Back for kedgeree, which is not quite up to the usual high standard as A has mistakenly added caraway seed rather than cumin, producing not just the wrong flavour but a quite overwhelming one; it’s a struggle to come up with the right form of words to express genuine gratitude for being cooked for without total dishonesty that no, this does taste rather odd.

Cup of espresso, washing up, stirring the new pot of fermenting apple vinegar, load up car with rotting logs and bags of bindweed and nettle. Down to the tip – long queue, lots of people being rather slow and ineffectual. Back to work in the garden for the rest of the morning, planting out beans and sunflowers; load up car again; in the afternoon, clearing bindweed, rocks and junk from the shaded area at the very bottom of the garden to plant out some autumn-fruiting raspberries; mow lawn, trim edges around the raised beds. Regular breaks for water and a bit of lunch – weather is ridiculously warm and a bit stuffy. Towards the end of the afternoon, start juggling with preparations for supper; putting the beef in the oven, preparing batter for Yorkshire puddings, preparing dough for rolls for lunches next week, preparing vegetables. The final stage is rather thrown off track by waiting for the arrival of the man who has been repairing A’s border fork, who phoned to say he would bring it round in twenty minutes and then took over half an hour, and needed to be shown round the garden; supper is half an hour late and slightly over-cooked, but still entirely edible. We’re not taking a plated meal round to our elderly neighbour before we eat, as usual, as she’s preaching at an evening service – the plate goes round later to be heated in the microwave.

For entertainment, we continue with the classic Pride and Prejudice, after hearing The Reunion on the radio (the news that Mr Bingley decded to give up acting and become a teacher continues to delight). It’s episode three, the visit to the Collinses in Kent and Darcy’s first proposal. Magnificent brooding and glowering. Put oven back on for the bread rolls, and forget about it; put rolls on, and then forget about them, but thankfully A remembers and they are crisp rather than burnt. Fighting the urge for yet more beer – on the one hand I was very virtuous on Friday (actually a drink beforehand would have helped with my radio performance) and relatively virtuous last night (sheer tiredness), but I really do need to work tomorrow. [update: sadly I felt completely wiped next day, despite a reasonable night’s sleep, and got very little done].

I go down the garden and back with the bat detector. Newts and frogs in one pond, more newts in another; a decent assortment of bats, both regulars (common pipistrelle, serotine, noctule, brown long-eared), a soprano pipistrelle, and a strong signal from a Myotis – the software thinks it’s a Whiskered Myotis, but I now have enough knowledge of the subject to know that I can’t trust it and need to upload recordings to the higher-powered online software to check. Still, that’s eight bat species confirmed in the neighbourhood so far this year. Write up my nature journal briefly and then up to bed.

It’s been a while since I’ve had such a straightforward, unremarkable 27th of the month to report!