The garden is doing alright this year, it’s July already and some things are doing well and some not. We don’t know if it was the peat-free compost we got from the local supermarket but the peppers and tomatoes didn’t do much so we had to buy some plants from B&Q and Lldl istead.

The Hydrangeas are doing great for the first time in years and we have a lot of greenery going on in the side bed (above) even under the shade of the big tree next door. The poppies and the pot of lettuce on the weird wooden coat hanger are grand with not much interference from slugs. There’s a nice poppy just flowered next the lemon verbena (we’re having a cup of lemon verbena tea at the moment) and if you look hard enough you may see a tomato plant or two!

Yesterday while killing a bit of time we popped into a library in Clerkenwell in the afternoon and picked up the book All Gates Open: The Story of Can by Rob Young and Irmin Schmidt. We whiled away a bit more time than we thought as next thing we knew, the librarian was ringing a schoolbell and shouting “It’s 5 o’clock and the library’s closing”.

What was great was in said book there was a mini interview with Mark E Smith and Irmin Schmidt. Little did we know that in 1977 that Mark E Smith rang Irmin and asked if Can would come over and do a joint gig with them. Now how good would that have been? In Dazed & Confused a few years ago here Irmin says of The Fall frontman “What I took (from the interview) is that I met a very lovable person.” Ahh isn’t that great? A book well worth having a look at!