Drunken Woman Fringed Head

I am not a drunken woman with a fringed head, though I sometimes wish I were (I've never been any good at getting more than mildly tipsy). This is the brilliant full name of the lettuce Ali found for me to plant on Wednesday, when she came to give me my monthly gardening day.

"Italian Heirloom. Attractive bright green leaves with ruffled almost frizzy edges in deep bronze. Leaf lettuce type with dense centre that is very showy and slow to bolt."




Now that does sound like me, at least the slow to bolt part. And here's what they look like now.

They will grow. We put in Cos, too, for Caesar salads, and replaced the one casualty of the snow, the pansies. I know you're supposed to plant everything when it's NOT flowering, Harvey was adamant on that point; but I did that, and after weeks of waiting, when they were just starting to get buds, they were reduced to a sad brown mess. This time I crammed in five little pots in full flower. So there.

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I needed them to cheer me up - as I half expected, I collapsed a bit after Harvey's birthday events were over, and wasn't helped by having to go down the road this week to the very nice people at Guardian Memorials and finalise the wording for his plaque. Still, it had to be done, and now it's settled, and I've had a very helpful talk with a friend about the draft of the latest book chapter, I've got through and done some good work. What happens, I think, is that a succession of small upsets accumulate, wihtout you quite realising it, to push you back down for a while. But then it passes and you cope better. And I'm really looking forward to eating the Drunken Woman, leaf by leaf.