Endings

Endings can be good news, as well as bad. I have finally finished the baby shawl. It's taken almost exactly three months, but it has been worth it. It looks fabulous, which may sound as though I am blowing my own trumpet, but really the credit belongs to the makers of the yarn and the pattern designer.

August is almost gone, and with it the fan's holiday and the extra time that gives me in the evenings and weekends. I've cut the lavender back - a whole week early, but it seems to have died off earlier than usual. The allotment season is rolling on, boosted by this late spell of unseasonable warmth. I am considering giving up my gardening notebook. I've kept it for 5 years, ever since I took posession of my plot. The gems of gardening lore noted there boil down to this:

1. No two years are alike in terms of weather and how the crops do.
2. Each year some stuff will do well, other stuff will not. Generally this is different stuff each year.
3. A good time to plant something is when you notice everyone else planting it.
4. You can never be too assiduous in picking out tomato sideshoots and should never forget that they shoot from the bottom as well as the top. 
5. It's worth sowing broad beans November and February, but not too late in November because the blackfly will ruin them
6. Don't forget to start pulling and using onions as soon as they are ready. Waiting for the tops to die and drying them is only needed for storing unused onions.

That's it: five years of gardening and notetaking boil down to six unoriginal points. So I am rather thinking of stopping my gardening notebook, although I am not at all thinking of giving up the plot, which I love.

And this notebook? I've been keeping it for a similar length of time and could probably precis it as follows: I'm not as bad as I was, I do seem to be improving, I do really need to play more often.

I have no intention of giving up piping. I've not done much of it of late (see above re shawls, gardening) but whenever I play I get an enormous amount of pleasure out of it. But I am not sure how much use or enjoyment I am getting out of blogging. I'd quite like to post some recent tunes, just to tie up the before and after, the blog as demonstration of actual progress. I suppose the blog jogs me into playing sometimes, just because I feel that I am not its only reader (posts get a fairly consistent 16 or 18 hits) and I feel some embarrassment that there are people expecting me to blog and that blogging in this case is somehow a proxy for piping. On the other hand I've used up a good number of hours blogging when I could have been piping, this evening being a prime example.

So is this the end? I'm not sure. If I decide that it is I will come back and make a formal farewell, just in case there are really people out there who have been following progress with me.