Le Weekend

Decided to spend the entire weekend at home, without speaking to anyone. Works for me.

Did a lot of gardening yesterday, it doesn't look lie I've actually achieved much apart from general clearing up - but I'm happy. It's only a matter of time before next door says something about my cherry tree - which is now huge and hangs into their garden - hopefully not before the end of the year - it's going to be a very large harvest this year and I want to get everything I can from it. They are welcome to any fruit on their side.

One of my neighbours spent the entire weekend on a sun lounger smoking dope. The rest spend hours at a time using very noisy lawnmowers.

Today I used caustic soda to clear all the old varnish of a lovely old office cabinet that I'm using as kitchen draws, managed to only burn myself a couple of times. As soon as I get paid again I'm going to get a skip and buy some garden storage - I have a lot of dry timber I was to save up for next winter and I'll need somewhere to store it. I'm planning of getting rid of some more topsoil and rubble from the garden, and any other crap I can dump - I've already set aside a load of stuff for Oxfam.

The weirdest thing happened earlier. I went to buy milk and saw a scrawny looking woman who was probably about 30 but looked 40, hip-hop style Primark fashions, leggings and a Croydon facelift, and the look of a woman who had an appetite for white powders - she just seemed out of place in Ore village and was hanging about outside the COOP. On the way back home she was still there, near the traffic, and tried very hard to attract my attention with some odd and... uncomfortable gestures - at first I thought she was going to ask me for money - bit realised that she was actually a prostitute. It's years since I've seen one - in the flesh, so to speak. There used to be a lot of staggeringly rough girls around the East End when I lived there - and when I worked in a bar in Covent Garden we had quite a few working girls come in, I'd also see them in hotel bars and the better places like The Atlantic or the Criterion, you could spot them a mile off - there was always a bloke in a suit hovering about in the distance to look after them - and they were, almost without exception, young - extremely well turned out, confident, and generally beautiful. Crucially - they always seemed to have spent more time and care getting ready than the girlfriends of the men already in there. The girl I saw today was, in common parlance, mutton.

I popped into B&Q to buy some hard setting cement to fix the render cracks at the front, another job I didn't actually get round to. There has been very high winds up here at the top of the hill for about a week. The garden centre has been decimated - even the gazebos had been blown over - it can't be that hard to pick up a few plants.

Early this morning - while walking the dogs around Clive Vale - a big white fluffy cross breed and a little white terrier appeared from nowhere - and tried to follow us - much to the irritation of my dogs - they were clearly strays and had escaped from a house - good thing it was very early and there was no traffic, I had no phone on me and couldn't manage 4 dogs so I took mine home and went back out with a couple of spare leads but couldn't find them - hopefully they had found their way back to their own homes.

I bought a coir mat for the back door. One of the feral cats came in and pissed on it.