The heap reduced

Today’s flower is campanula persiflora alba (Mrs Tootlepedal says without a fantastic degree of confidence)

I started the day on a good note as I went round the morning run by myself on Dropscone’s borrowed bike, which turned out to be a pleasure to ride, while he played golf at Peebles.

When I returned, I set to work under the supervision and with the co-operation of Mrs Tootlepedal on shredding a huge pile of clippings. The shredder is a wonderful petrol driven beast and it can reduce a pile of clippings like that on the right to a handy pile of compostable shreddings as in the illustration on the left  in a quarter of an hour.

After attacking heap 1, we set about heap 2 which had a large number of branches from the hawthorn tree which we had cut down a few days ago. In about another twenty minutes we had reduced it to this. It is most satisfactory to have a machine which works so well and produces such good results. It is almost worth the myriad scars on every part of one’s arms caused by the hawthorn thorns.

In the evening I went to the Archive Centre to do a little work and then retired to the pub for beer research with my co-worker Sandy. Unfortunately the research proved that the beer was off in a big way so I was forced to drink two large glasses of red wine instead. How we suffer but we never complain. (Sandy drank Guiness.)

The munching beast with Mrs Tootlepedal behind