Fun in the garden

I have ordered myself some fruit trees and am ridiculously excited about them. I'm mad I know - anyone who believes 10% of what they say in a newspaper advert is being over optimistic, but I can't help it. When an envelope arrives with 5 fruit seeds instead of the five foot trees I'm expecting my bubble will burst but until then...

It's late October now, the clocks have changed and it gets dark at about 4:30, it's certainly pitch dark when I get home from work, so the only time I have to garden is at the weekend, unless I invest in some floodlighting

So if I want to clear a bit of the wilderness to receive these trees I have to do it this weekend hail, rain or shine and rain is what we've been promised. This morning I saw a gap in the clouds and decided to get cracking on the weeds, maybe clear a couple of feet of ground. So out I went and I actually found the weeds were coming up quite easily. The ground was quite loose and the fork was able to scoop the greenery off the top. For some reason the fork wouldn't go very deep into the ground though...

When I started to pay attention to what I was doing I realised the soil was very sandy here - and the barrier was a sheet of plastic (2 actually) I had discovered a sandpit! Complete with little plastic toys, a plastic rake and at least one melamine plate that didn't enjoy being buried for several years and had degraded into bits. My heart sank.

I would have to find the edges of the plastic layer, remove all the sand, pull out the plastic layer then dig up the base, and mix the sand back in (Is that a good idea for my trees?)

It took me 3 half hour sessions, the first to clear the weeds and assess the extent of the sandpit, the second to clear away about a third of the sand and start pulling up the plastic. At this point I took a photo break


The third was the most satisfactory. I focussed on shovelling sand and chucking it in a pile. On reflection it would have been wiser not to build the mountain on the edge of the plastic liner. I had to undermine my mountain to get the last of it out, but get it out I did. So now I have a hole, a sandy hill and no energy at all!


Now I just have to dig it all over and sit back and watch the weeds take over again

Your Teeth Are Fine But Your Gums Will Have To Come Out

I am a complete coward when it comes to dentists. I know it's irrational and they are gentle creatures who don't inflict pain without fully anaesthetising you first, but the thought of visiting one fills me with terror. This has had an adverse impact on my mouth as you can imagine ;)

A further complication is that the good old NHS has done something really weird with dentists contracts over the past 10 years or so with the result that NHS dentists are now as rare as hens' teeth and for some reason they are dead keen to remove you from their lists. There must be some benefit to them in being a rare species, maybe they get funding from the world wildlife fund or something.

Anyway, the key point being I had a right dose of toothache last weekend and on Monday discovered I had been de-registered by my dentist. The combination of pain, fear and having the means to end the pain taken away from me increased my stress levels dramatically. There followed a bit of slapstick concerning a single vacancy on my own dentist's list, an elderly couple waving a �20 deposit and a rush to the counter to try to secure the magic place on my behalf. They failed. I was out in the cold with panic gripping my heart.

Fortunately our Health Board has a fallback in place. You phone a number and tell the nice girl on the end the nature of your emergency and she arranges an emergency appointment for you with distressing speed. So by lunchtime on Monday I was heading off to a health centre in Galashiels, quivering in my boots and with no time to head to my doctor to try to extract a couple of tranqillisers from them. (I use them once every couple of years, only for dentists visits why are my doctors so reluctant to prescribe them?)

Anyway, the upshot of all this was I saw a nice young dentist (probably just out of college - why doesn't he have a proper practice? Don't think things like that Heather, he has the power of pain over you) who looked in my mouth very gently and pronounced the tooth is fine, there was nothing to be done. Relief? Horror? So what about this pain then? The problem is my bone is receding, and the tooth is coming loose, the roots are exposed and if anything touches the root it hurts. He packed a bit of filling around it but implied it was like putting a plaster on a gaping wound. I have to be careful with it and watch for food getting caught under there and it getting infected. If an abcess develops they will treat it and remove the tooth. But for now I can take paracetamol and wait for it to go away.

So I have been given official confirmation that my usual practice of ignoring things and hoping they go away is the correct action in this case. I'm surprised, every other episode of toothache I've had has been pain that escalates dramatically until a dentist makes it go away. Although this tooth did hurt during the summer and it did go away again, and currently it has reduced to a slight ache so here's hoping...