Tales from Awkward Hill

My gardens (my old garden in London and the new one in the Cotswolds) have been featured on two television programmes, and I'm always intrigued by what the director wants to show, and what they don't show. Unfortunately, the BBC Gardeners' World episode is no longer available, but it featured garden designer and television presenter Joe Swift, talking about exotic, or sub-tropical gardens. Filming was great fun, partly because Joe (seen here in my London garden with the BBC film crew) is very friendly and funny. The latest programme, MDR Garten, which is like a German version of the BBC's Gardeners' World, hardly showed anything of my garden in the Cotswolds, precisely because they had used long lingering shots of the Oxford gardens, and wanted something a bit more hands-on and active by the time they came to me. So there are lots of shots of me supposedly planting and/or weeding, or pottering around with the dog. You can't actually hear much of what I

You've probably heard the song about the old lady who swallowed a fly. "I don't know why she swallowed a fly. Perhaps she'll die". The song goes on to relate how she swallowed a spider to catch the fly, then swallowed a bird to catch the spider, then swallowed a cat to catch the bird, and so on, and so on. I felt a bit like that today. I have a Kärcher pressure washer, which is about 10 years old. They don't make the exact model I have any more, but this is vaguely what it looks like. It works fine, but it doesn't have a very long high-pressure hose, which means that if you want to reach a particularly awkward corner, you keep having to unplug it and plug the whole thing in again. Pressure washers have three connections: the hose that supplies the water from the tap, the power cable, and the high-pressure hose. You can plug the power cable into an extension lead, and you can use a longer hose to supply water to the machine. But what I wanted was t