Cloudy.

We woke to rain and a gloomy, grey day. It was cold enough to justify turning the heating up to bring the temperature in the kitchen/sitting room (never quite sure what to call it, Google says 'great room' but that sounds weird), to a more comfortable 18C.

However by the time we were eating breakfast the light rain had stopped completely. Although I stuck to my plan to take a break from shifting soil in the front garden that didn't stop me from spending most of the day working in the back garden. I'm trying to co-ordinate the clearing up in both gardens which means utilising the last of the bricks and concrete blocks before moving the remainder to the raised beds. The biggest blocks are now stacked against the slightly dodgy looking retaining wall, the one the builders built the first raised beds against. I cleaned off some bricks and used them to conceal the blocks and then created a planting space by removing a paving slab. Into that went the one flourescent purple buddelia I brought with me from Devon. After much thought I've decided to plant bamboo in an enormous plastic tub that I have. I can get bamboo from the zoo so I know it can cope with the sea air and the tub is to keep it from spreading. Today I filled up the tub with soil ready for planting. As part of the general tidy up I put white beach stones and some white gravel that I found in the garden, on the surface of the big tubs I planted the clematis in. That should stop the birds from flicking the compost everywhere. I like the challenge of using up materials I find around the place.

My final garden job was the fun one of going round and tying in all the new growth of the climbers. I may have lost two clematis over the winter, I suspect slugs in the autumn but I've still got spares in pots.

I was just thinking it was time to relax when I remembered that I'd sprayed bleach cleaner on the floor tiles in the blue loo so they had to be scrubbed before I could take a breather.

I think there were more seagulls on the beach than people, apart from the big surfing class in the morning. A group of house martins were back from Africa and zooming about yesterday, at least I think they were house martins not swallows but they were too fast to photograph.