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It’s always fun writing something new, and although I’ve done the Guardian before, I’ve not done its columns and opinions site, Comment is Free.
Until today.
So, it was a nice end to the week seeing Tim Danton vs Nik Rawlinson […]

So, yesterday no beans. Today… six beans, the tallest a good 10cm out of the pot. Wonder plants.

Apart from that early update, when the first shoot of the leaf salad popped up above the compost, I’ve barely written a thing about the garden since planting began.
It’s going great guns.
The tomatoes are poking through now, although they took longer than I thought they might. Two or three weeks for the first shoots to […]

For April, the weather is unseasonably warm. The weekend has been wall-to-wall sunshine, and hot with it. The trees are heavy with blossom, the skies an electric blue, and it feels for all the world like summer is here already.
So, deciding to take advantage of it while it lasts, we spent Sunday zizzing back and […]

OK, so it’s small, but this is the first of two shoots already popping up in the greenhouse. I didn’t expect to see anything so soon (we only planted them on Sunday) but as I briefly dropped in last night to squit them with water, there they were, poking their heads up through the soil.
It’ll […]

We went to see William today. My first nephew. And, if Sal’s threat that the next one will be adopted is more than idle banter, perhaps my last, too.
He was tiny. Really, really tiny. And much smaller than I ever imagined. We’re talking the size of a small hand towel bundled up inside a shawl […]

Rich finds the switch that turns on Lucy’s mouth
The crashed van has now been moved into the street, and the electricity is back on. I know that because all the lights came on in the middle of the night and woke me up.
Anyhow, even before I’d exchanged on the house I knew I wanted to […]

No kettle this morning. It was broken, presumably by some kind of power surge, as the orange-jacketed workmen were out and up the poles as we woke up, fixing the damage caused by yesterday’s crash.
Rich tried to switch it on, but all it did was spark and buzz, so he made tea in a saucepan, […]

A very exciting day. A launch, a police chase and a birth, all in the space of 24 hours.
It started after breakfast, when I picked up Rich at the train station and we buzzed up to Harold Hill for the launch of Link FM. It was the first radio station on which I ever had […]

An expensive and busy weekend. Expensive because I was buying furniture. Busy because… well, I was buying furniture.
The first things I bought were probably the least important: deckchairs. I sat in some in the Norwich John Lewis a couple of weeks back, and despite the fact it was a rainy grey day I knew there […]