El Cesped

It was time to repair the lawn. All the chin scratching while pacing around Onawind Blue has worn pale, grassless tracks, like sheep paths on the hills, across what is otherwise a uniform swathe of lush lawn. And, though this probably isn’t the place to admit it, (or write about it) the upkeep of the lawn is my responsibility, I am the gardener, a dissolute, wanton gardener at best but one who at least knows how far a lawn can be pushed before it jumps.

Amazingly all the dripped globs of epoxy seem to have been absorbed, as have the copious amounts of sawdust but the bald patches had to be tackled before the crowds of summer arrive.

I bought some soil, fertiliser and grass seed, took it home and read the packet. Now I’ve done this several times in the past and don’t really need to read the instructions but the short paragraph on this packet was enough to have me pacing the sheep track, guffawing and chortling.

One of the perks of living in a country where English is not generally spoken is that it often appears in a translated form. Translations can range from the bemusingly surreal to the downright hilarious, especially those found in restaurants. Over the years I’ve been offered, ‘battered squibs’, ‘strawberries with scum’ and, even more alarmingly, ‘fried transparent gobby’ I could imagine that the first was squid in batter, that scum was cream but the fried transparent gobby (how did they keep it transparent?), not only put me off eating in that particular restaurant but had me stumped. Working back through the Spanish I came to the conclusion that it meant whitebait.

The seed packet contained some corkers, starting with the quaint ‘very hart and rustic lawn,’ moving on to the spiritual, ‘it endures well the trample,’ (just like me, I thought) and ending with the weird ‘useful for almost of places: in public and private gardens, in sports fields, in the streets of pith and putt.’ Ahh the streets of pith and putt, alas I know them well and many a man has been ruined there.

It left me wondering if such seeds will actually grow.

Despite the garden some progress has been made.

Dear Pig are you willing, to sell for one shilling, your ring, said the piggy, ‘I will.’ Onawind Blue got a ring through her nose. And a sizeable one at that. Big and strong enough, I hope, to break all those bottles of bubbly among other things.

I’ve realised why those six coats of ivory coloured paint look yellow. Between each layer of new paint OB’s received a coat of pollen. Pollen is everywhere. A savage rainfall worked its way through the boat cover and, mixed with pollen, stained the decks in the manner of a mattress that you might expect to find in a boarding school for small boys. It will need a deal of sanding if I’m to finish with varnish. For the meantime I butt joined the side decks to the fore and aft sections and epoxied the underside then left these two grim fellows to flatten out the warp.