Fade out.....

I moved my stereo back downstairs into the living room. Even rearranged to find the perfect spot for it. I am wending my way through my CD collection, dusting off old favourites (I've been mainly existing on my mp3 collection using the laptop. It's not the same). I feel so much better.
I've noticed that there are those songs that I have carried with me, and those that, when I hear them now, transport me back vividly to a particular time or moment. There were a lot of teenage Radiohead moments! I'm sure most people had them!
'Phew, for a minute there I lost myself' was my mantra. I was 17/18, studying to get my grades for university, and waitressing 3 or 4 times a week. I carried that lyric with me written on a postcard. It used to be my reminder, my cue to stop, to reflect, to put things back into perspective. I'd forgotten. Maybe I should have it tattooed along my arm.
I want a record player.

Remember, Spring swaps snow for leaves

So that's January behind us, and onto February, my very least favourite month of the year. It's a month of waiting, and hoping; Winter has been upon us for seemingly ages, it must be Spring soon....look there are the first green shoots from the bulbs I planted, and buds on the trees....and then suddenly it's bloody freezing again!

I also seem to have failed on most of my new year's resolutions already but I'm going to put that down to them being vastly over-ambitious and instead of giving up am scaling them down a bit :-)

On the plus side, it's a quiet time of year and we are using the mainly empty weekends to plod on with working on our house. The kitchen floor may be finished this weekend! That must have been one of my resolutions, surely, to get the kitchen finished?! I'm also spending free evenings knitting again and researching ideas for the garden.

As the garden begins to wake up I am getting excited about getting out there and starting the long (and possibly expensive) process of shaping it into the garden in my head. I bought a load of seeds (mainly annuals which hopefully will self-seed in later years) ready for planting in Spring - I even collected some of our aquiligea seedheads last autumn to harvest the seeds (thanks for the tip Carol Klein!)

My head is full of ideas for raised beds, perfect colour palettes for the borders that will be overflowing with flowers, for veg plots, herb planters, native hedgerows, pleached fruit trees, ponds, herring-bone paths and cobbled circles.... too many ideas for a relatively small garden probably! I'm learning to try to scale back my ambitions, at least to tackle things one small task at a time and realise that my dream garden will be years in the making (or should I say growing) - The first task will be to fix up some trellis for the clematis & honeysuckle that has overwintered in the cold frame. The second will be to find homes for all the bareroot plants which were supposed to be lying dormant in pots in our tiny boxroom, in fact they're mostly sprouting like mad! Of course there's plenty of room for them but first we justneed to dig out some more beds, dig up the root systems of some quite large and very ugly shrubs, and move rather a lot of boulders.....see, breaking it down into small, easy tasks. Hmmmm.