I am the mud monster…

Or at least my hands and trousers definitely were while I finally managed to plant my other four raised beds. Three of them were planted on Thursday morning, while it was only just getting light, because the forecast made it clear that Storm Goretti was heading for us. Somehow, I don’t find it at all friendly when they give the storm a name. You might as well have Storm Moriarty or Storm Blofeld or pick any other villain you like the sound of, because it’s never going to be good news, is it?

We’re looking at 50mph winds down here on the not-so-posh peninsula of Poo,le where I live. The posh people live on Sandbanks, andetts far worse traffic in summer, andt' is further away from the shops, hospital and swimming pool. It does have a sea view, but that's not always a blessing, any more than having it come close enough to pay you a visit is.

Instead, I have the sea on one side at Sterte, the other at Harbourside, and then down to the Quay, on the third side, so I'm a fifteen-minute walk away in three directions. Obviously, this means that I also catch the sea winds from three directions. The good news is that the washing usually dries brilliantly, but you need to use strong pegs. I like the metal ones, if that’s any use to anyone. I also need to change the rope that goes around my old-fashioned washing line regularly because it zips to and fro most of the time, and the clothes props are amazing for keeping it stabilised. They and the line are such old-fashioned things, and yet they work so well.


Esther Graham, who is one of the stars of my Esther and the Professor series, which is the book I’m working on at the moment, would have used ones like them, because I still use cotton sash cord as I was taught to by my first neighbour. The garden is the same too because this house has a lot in common with the one where she lives at Ashley Cross, probably because it’d have been built at the same time and to the same pattern. When I go for a walk, I can see the gaps where houses were destroyed in World War Two, on the night they bombed the hospital, because they have relatively new houses in them now. Other houses have cracks in the walls from where the ground shook when the bombs landed, but they haven’t fallen down since, so they’re probably okay.

One of my favourite research books is Fred Sturgeons Poole War Diary and other writings, which you can get from the Poole Historical Society. He was a journalist who lived on Longfleet Road, which is my nearest main road, so it makes the war into a very local war, and that may someday be a title for an Esther book.

The garden is a mere 30 feet long by 15 feet wide, which is still big enough if you plan carefully, and you may have noticed that I like doing that. So we have a garden shed and a set of trees planted on the raised part of the garden that once had an air raid shelter under it. (It was gone when we got here, and we dug out the middle part to make a sheltered patio and a flower bed, because it was such a small lawn that it took longer to get the mower out and plugged in than it did to mow it.) Right now, that patio holds bags of compost for the makeover in progress, and here’s a picture for you, complete with mud. It’s getting closer but there’s still a lot of sweeping up and potting on to do.

Those are the new raised beds, complete with my Army of gnomes, protecting the little gnomes from the dinosaurs who are carrying them off. (Yes, I know they're daft, but it's a small tribute to my Army background.)

The beds seem to make the garden look bigger again. My husband that’s because they’re taller and all the same size and colour so it tricks the eye. I just know it looks nice and I like knowing that every single shrub there started in 3” pot, usually bought from the sad patch in the DIY shop or the end of season offer online. Others were grown from seed, but they all have as many memories as the house.

I keep a diary (again, I bet you’re surprised) so I know that the earliest day it was warm enough to sit out was the fifth of February in Covid year. The latest was the twenty-second of March, which happens to be our fortieth wedding anniversary. My husband asked me what I wanted for such a special day, and I, with the wisdom I’ve learned in those forty, sometimes difficult years, asked him for time. Specifically, time to build my new raised beds. Time to put up my new signs. Time to finish our lovely new garden gate, which he commissioned to his own design and had built after many consultations, which involved asking a lot of things about garden gates that I’d never thought about before. Time to sit there with me and enjoy home made scones and jam or ice cream on sunny days.

So the mud is one stage and I’m well on the way to being able to make some more happy memories out there by sitting out. Till then, I’m happily making them even when I’m a mudmonster. I hope you find ways to make your happy memories too, because we can never have too many of them, can we?