BASKETTCASE

Mary-Ann started a blog a week or two ago as a sort of personal diary. I have tried various ways of trying to keep in touch with friends and family and nothing has really worked, so Dave and I thought we would try this. We are not going to bare our souls, and don't want to get into the whole Facebook thing of living life twice, once for real and again for the internet, but this could be useful. Mum'a funeral really made us think about how inportant family is, and how easily lost. I have been doing a family tree for several months, using the internet and Ancestry.com, and again it makes me realise how may people we are connected to by our genes but have no real knowledge of. ( If anyone wants a link to what I have done so far, just e-mail me. You can have access to the website as an editor of my Family Tree. As the census results don't cover anything after 1901, it is more difficult to research living people than ancestors, so many of you could help me out with dates, second names etc. If you can't work out how to add information, just e-mail it to me.)

Dave and I have been working in the garden this afternoon. Building Mum's annexe caused major disruption to the garden you see on the photograph. The digger and dumper caused impaction of the soil, and the area where we had to fill in our pond is waterlogged most of the time. The builders kindly came back after they had finished and dug up some mature shrubs that we wanted to re-site. They have been langushing in tubtrugs for three months, so today we got around to marking out where we want to put a stream. We managed to plant three shrubs along the margns of a stream that doesn't exist yet, so hope they will survive. I think when I close my eyes tonight I shall be seeing twisted clumps of bindweed root.

The stream is a compromise, we have enjoyed our pond over the years. Dad made it originally, and when we moved in we re-shaped it and used a liner instead of the concrete. A few years ago we had to replace the liner and took the opportunity of extending it and adding a bog-garden and stream. Over the years we have enjoyed the wildlife even more than the goldfish, so when it turned out that the annexe foundations would sit in the pond we re-homed the fish and mourned the newts and frogs. However, the anxiety of keeping two small grandchildren out of the water convinced us that this is not a good time to be making a new pond, hence the plan for a stream. Charlie Dimmock has achieved some attractive ones, so we'll see. Watch this space.