Recycling an old friend

Thank you to for all the kind comments and good wishes. We are still here and after a difficult few months, life seems to be - at  last - starting to move in the right direction. A small piece of administration held Joe's new job up for three months, so as you can imagine, it has been a particularly stressful time. I have been in the cottage for nearly six years and in all that time I have lived with an uncertain future here. Much of that time has been used recovering from losing Andy so suddenly and suffice to say that gardening and home improvement have not been high on my priority list. And it is hard to make a house a home or start to establish a garden with no idea of whether one will be here in a year's time to enjoy it. This is not a plea for pity, but my roundabout way of explaining why blogging has been sparse and sporadic.

However, now there seems to be a point to it all and so last week I tackled the nasty little shed at the top of the garden. It is part of the complex of rotten old dog kennels left behind by the previous owners and quoted as an 'asset' in the estate agent's blurb when Andy and I were viewing the cottage. When we moved in, this shed became the dumping ground for anything useless and it's been lurking there ever since. Time to clear it out.

In the end, nearly everything went. The front yard began to resemble a junkyard. Brian-next-door gave me a lift to the recycling centre, several miles away near town; I had not realised that this space age looking development takes practically anything from rubble to old timber to the usual metal, electrical appliances, clothes and anything that can be re-used.

I was very happy to see the back of most of my bits, with the exception of what remained of my old bike, Hercules. Hercules and I spent many happy hours pottering about at a placid pace around my old home in the Cotswolds and he was a regular character in some of my early blog posts. Until  he was stolen one night and eventually found beaten up and wrecked in a hedge by the village green. Andy bought me a new bike in secret ('the Best Surprise Ever') and so everything was lovely in the end. But I hung on Hercules for years out of silly sentiment. Now, with what is hopefully a new and more certain future, I felt it was time for him to be put to good use. Although I could not resist one last photo.