Easter weekend

I had a productive weekend, if not quite the weekend I was expecting. My original plan was to do a bit of general tidying and cleaning, make some inroads on the washing (as I'm a bit behindhand), do a bit of cycling and/or pottering round somewhere historic and spend the rest of the time curled up with a book. In fact, in a packed weekend of DIY, gardening and helping with someone else's Spring cleaning, I ended up eating take-away Chinese while covered in mud, (bought) steak and kidney pie while covered in paint, and sundry other assembled meals while tired and/or covered in sawdust. Proper cooking, cycling, reading and visiting places were put off to another occasion while I and friends dug things, painted things, and planted things. The spare room is now looking much more like a room and less like a collection of things to be sorted, the bookcases are waxed and ready to be filled with books (hooray!), and we have discovered and eradicated from the garden a weed which looks innocuous until you try to pull it up, at which point it becomes apparent that it's been busily taking over the entire garden with one root network, buried a foot deep in solid clay. For want of a handy guide to awkward weeds, we've named it 'the bugger plant'.

It's such a relief to be able to start unpacking books. Some have been languishing in boxes for a while, and I've been missing them. Once I've got them where I can see them I'll have to go through and do some pruning, but I'll admire the spectacle of books on shelves first.