Evening

Having taken an early walk, late afternoon I settled for a bit of light gardening, at the back of the garden, in the shade of the trees there. Cutting out unwanted ivy and suckers sort of thing. Bit like DIY these days: lots of fine tools, not too much action.

View above snapped from the brick compost bin, back right as you look up the garden. Honeysuckle box lower left. Maybe I will attend to that today (Tuesday), despite it being pretty warm in the study by 07:45.

Followed up by a couple of gallons for the fairly new bamboo, in the hole which used to be occupied by the oleaster. It seems to be doing well. Garden room behind - replacing, as I recall, the summer house of old - oddly, this last not being a term which is much used currently, at least not for new build. In any case, 'summer house' is perhaps a rather pretentious term for an open-sided shed in the back garden of a suburban house.

A spot of telly in the evening. We had watched some of the adaptation of 'Catch 22' at reference 3, a book I probably first read not long after it first came out in 1961. A clever adaptation, which I thought caught the spirit of the thing rather well - but I still tired of it before we got to the end - and switched back to Miss. Marple and Julia McKenzie - despite my not liking her as much as her predecessors Hickson and McEwan. On this occasion, the adaption at reference 2, which I suspect of being an intrusion, that is to say a Christie story into which Miss. Marple has been inserted for the benefit of the television audience, who like the continuity that she brings.

This resulted in a false alarm for registration plate No.43, there being precedent for scoring off the television.

Remembering that Amazon Prime cunningly inhibits screen scrapes from its product, I thought to take a picture of the television with my telephone. Much huffing and puffing while BH used the tricky Samsung remote to rewind to the right spot. Discovering on the way, that the stop button takes some seconds to click in, so one has to hit the button a few seconds before the image you want comes up. But, as I say, with a bit of huffing and puffing, it can be done.

Getting quite a decent image, although not one that zooms very helpfully. And, sadly, a false alarm. Not No.43 at all, rather No.543, which last is some way off yet. I suppose some part of the brain must still have been working on registration numbers in the background and went in for a bit of wishful thinking. To be fair, the '5' bit is a bit muted compared with the '43' bit.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/05/no42.html.

Reference 2: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1297403/. Marple.

Reference 3: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5056196. Catch 22.

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