Watching my Language

The boy has a toy croquet set in a draw-string bag. He brought the bag to me a few days ago because he couldn't open it. He handed it to me and said, "How the hell do I open this?", which is probably a sign that I should be watching my language.

This weekend I repainted the fence. It looks like a very little fence normally. It runs along the top of the garden wall so people can't look over and see me sunbathing naked. When painting it, it seems much longer. I bought a large bucket of "light oak" fence preserver to do the job. It actually should have been called "radioactive orange" fence preserver. It was on special offer in Homebase. It wasn't enough to do the whole fence however, so I Went back to get a second bucket. They didn't have any light oak left, so I got "cedar red" to do the other side of the fence. That was, if anything, slightly brighter than the light oak. It does seem to have calmed down now that it has dried.

I've also planted three, yes three, varieties of tomato, and I can report that my crop of white radish, and garlic are coming on very well. We've also managed a spectacular crop of tulips this year.

Do you know you can control the colour of hydrangeas? Apparently they tend to give blue flowers when in acidic soil, and more pink flowers in alkaline soil. This is because the blue colour is a result of aluminium salts, which are not present in alkaline soil. This I know because the dragon specifically wanted a blue one, and it started going pink almost as soon as we put it in a pot. So, I've bought some hydrangea blue-ing compound. I suppose I should take before and after pictures.

The government is now 19% behind the Conservative party in a poll commissioned by the Independent newspaper. That would give the Tories a majority of 186 seats. There is some evidence to suggest that the poll is a reaction to the disastrous budget rather than positive feeling towards the opposition.

I hadn't realised that Carla Bruni, the wife of President Sarkosy, had such a racey past. According to various sources, "highly intimate" pictures and video footage of Ms Bruni have been stolen in a burglary. It also emerged that before she was married to the French Pres, Carla had steamy affairs with loads of people including Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, and Philosopher Jean-Paul Enthoven. And here is the interesting part; it appears that the "intimate pictures" were of Bruni with Jean-Paul Enthoven's son, Raphael Enthoven, the father of her child. I didn't know she had a child! It all sounds a bit dodgy if you ask me. Not only did she dump her lover in favour of his son, she recorded the event in glorious technicolour! Raphael Enthoven's brother was then entrusted with the pictures, but thieves apparently knew exactly where to find them, taking prints, a camera full of pictures, and computer files.

I made the mistake of reading the above story in the Sun first. The Sun hinted that the "intimate pictures were porn. In fact that is not the case, they're just family photos that she wanted to keep private.