Living the dream?

We meet some lovely folk who stay in the cottage.  After all, if you choose to come here you are not after noise and fleshpots and potted entertainment but comfort and quiet and a dose of rural bliss.  Whether it is families with young children who love opening the cottage door and letting them run in the field or couples who sit on the bench with a glass of wine watching buzzards soaring and looking into the view, it is not at all uncommon for people to tell me that I am living their dream.  It's a perfectly sensible thing to say - I'm living my dream too for that matter!  The place, the garden, the ancient house, the hens, the self sufficiency.  It's all pretty damn lovely.
But it's not all moonlight and roses you know.  I thought it was time to show you some of the grot as well.

So here is the dream, although I expect you have got the idea:

And here is the not so dreamlike.  The kitchen is plastered and painted.  No electrics yet.  Not much of anything else yet to be honest.  The bright orange plastic thing on the table is a fairly tacky pinball machine described by four year old grandson as "I think I need  my computer".  It would have been even worse if I had shown you the old kitchen we are moving out of but it is such an unmitigated disaster area I couldn't bring myself to photograph it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is the waste and desolation that follow the cutting back of the oriental poppies.  There are supposed to be dahlias and cosmos in there getting ready to pick up the baton but behind them is an exhausted phlomis staggering dazedly into the light and a pittosporum Tom Thumb which has lost its colour and most of its foliage while the poppies were making their bid for world domination.  Note to self: do not be tempted to keep too many poppies when the bed looks empty and sad in spring.  Pull the blighters up, or some of them at least.  It's so hard to do.  Perhaps I should start an oriental poppy nursery, or nurserylet.

 

 

This table came out of the utility last year and has proved to be that lethal mixture of heavy and useful which makes things stay put.  I have sort of stopped seeing it now, a bit like the boxes on the landing and the nettles in the field.  At least I suppose nobody else sees it either but it is hardly the dream now is it?

I could have carried on with large scale weeds and the paperchase which is my study and the dustbaths which the hens have created which I have to edit out of lush garden shots, but I got distracted by this and then I thought that I won't show you any  more.  You might not come again.