Quiet Saturday

Bails and I went for a coffee at the garden centre in Alexandra Palace. It was overcast and drizzly. We sat under a great big patio umbrella in the rain. Bails was buying a pot for her rubarb plant. I was trying not to buy anything at all since my garden is full, but came away with a clematis to climb through an old arching rose and some fat balls to try to temp the sparrows away from the shooting bamboo (they are sitting in big gangs on the limbs and bending them until they break and pecking out the forming leaves).

Definitely the summer season has started, I woke up this morning with 8 mosquito bites itching like mad on my legs. Probably picked up from a raku firing on Thursday or sitting outside the pizza place after (neighbourhood restaurant where we eat outside and drink too much sambuca). I forget how badly I react to their bites each winter and only remember when I've scratched them into big hot red patches - in India at the Taj Mahal, families kept staring and moving away because I looked diseased and a fellow british tourist pointed and exclaimed my girlfriend is afflicted with exactly the same problem!