Lizzie Ballantyne 🖋️

This is well worth reading.

Carla Bruni looks delighted that Sarkozy is going into clink.

'If garden tools really count as weaponry, I’m in command... Since when were secateurs ‘a bladed weapon in a public space’?

observer.co.uk/style/garden...

Definitely D. All the choices one could possibly want. Australia alone has a massive range of influences. And then there are all the rest.

This pleases me enormously.

Ah yes! My first computer, in the 80s, had to be connected to the home tv screen. I didn’t have an actual monitor until about 1988.

Computer monitors didn’t look like that until at least the mid 90s. You could barely lift them in the 80s.

Yes, sound. Although it took a while for them to get the orientation right.

@charlottemendelson.bsky.social 😉

Tomatoes are sexy, difficult plants. But I love them Our columnist is wooed by the joy of growing tomatoes, the more challenging the variety, the better

Thank heavens I grow them in the heat of the south of France. Never-ending blight would probably stop me gardening altogether.

observer.co.uk/style/garden...

Exactly.

If you’re about to say simplistic, you probably mean simple.

It’s a wasp beetle - Clytus arietis. Great find!

That’s a very beautiful grass snake.

I call it passover curry. An inappropriate dish where the ancient curry powder has been passed over it.

observer.co.uk/style/garden...

They might have phrased this better.

Frankly I’m ashamed to be British. What has the UK come to?

She’d be an idiot to leave.

This is absolutely sickening.

I’m having my hair cut there next week. Maybe we should have lunch too.

🤞

Joyeux anniversaire Tom!

I occasionally use them to send me to sleep at night.

Hooray!

Actually we’re hotter ‘cos a lot further south. Only at 400m. It’ll probably hit low 40s as usual but we’ve had a ton of rain since January so we should avoid a drought. Currently filling the pool.

I’d happily swap July & August for two Mays and two Junes.

Exactly.

Yesterday we had to get rid of a nest hornets had started to build in my shed. As if having a snake in there isn’t enough. I love 98% of summer.

Three days of beautiful sunshine and the wasps have to turn up causing trouble. Feckers.