Sunday, October 30

 

 

Last night we went to bed early and the clocks went back. We leapt out of bed earlier than expected. The temperature had risen again and I went for a longer walk.

A woman moved into a house on the other side of the short path through the woods a couple of years ago and has become obsessed about people (ie people on our side of the woods) “ruining” the woods by taking a barrowful of leaves from our gardens into and putting on the massive piles of leaves that the wood generates by itself. She has also waxed hysterical about people pruning their bushes and trees and taking the branches into the woods to join the branches that drop from the trees in the woods. I thought this simply made the compost the woods need to survive. She, however, has taking to running into the woods to scream at people whenever she hears the sound of leaves or twigs hitting the ground.

Her one-woman campaign has paid off. The city have erected a new sign in the woods forbidding people to put leaves there, or to add anything to the mess the woods makes itself. The part I like most about this concerns the positioning of the sign. It stands less than one metre from the caravan that the people who moved away a couple of months ago have parked illegally here for the last year or so. They have gone but the caravan remains, while only the unauthorised leaves seem an important issue.

The caravan has come and gone and I know for a fact that it has killed all the grass underneath it and destroyed a number of saplings. I wait with amusement to see if they knock the sign down when they come to take it away; assuming that they do, in fact, ever come to take it away.

We spent the afternoon removing all the solar lamps from the garden for winter and putting them in the shed. This in turn led us to move our winter clothes from one cupboard to another before driving to Prisma and K-Rauta in search of hooks, lamps and other such things.