Lettuce be lovers..............

We've eaten produce from the garden every day this week - sometimes twice, if nothing else to keep the rampaging lettuce crops under control. The Boy has gone a bit crazed, bringing out new trays of seedlings (mostly lettuce) from the greenhouse nearly every day to fill in the every decreasing gaps in the already overburdened borders, raised beds and pots. With the warmer weather, everything is sprouting really fast - I can't get down the path beside the garage without fighting my way through a jungle of potato plants (now in flower, so not long til the first crop), the greenhouse is full of tomato, radish, pepper, aubergine, okra and strawberry plants, there's chard, curly kale and broccoli, cavolo nero, celery, leeks, garlic, shallots, spring onions, beetroot,carrots, blueberries, strawberries, cherries and plums outside and courgettes, squash cucumbers sprouting in the compost bins and herbs fairly burgeoning on the potager.

It's just unfortunate that all that's actually ready at the moment is lettuce - 10 different sorts, it's true, but lettuce all the same................to be fair, we DID eat the first of the peas on Sunday, stewed up in that particularly delicious Spanish tapa-like way with little bits of jamon and garlic, but since then it's been lettuce. All the way.

I've been doing the proofs for a staff evacuation plan for one of the clients today. They're a small company operating in a support role on an on-shore oilrig somewhere in one of the less stable parts of the world. They've suddenly decided, what with terr and the war thereon, porcine and avian flu and being in a pretty jungly sort of a place where insurgency and coups are, shall we say, the norm, that they need a staff evacuation and Crisis Management plan. The Boy has gathered together pretty much everything there is to know about any sort of emergency, both natural and not and has spent a week writing a coverall policy. There are pages and pages, covering flood, hurricane, tempest, plague, wildfires, earthquakes, civil unrest and the rest. What it boils down to in essence is: Managers: Keep a helicopter on standby on the roof and get in it at the earliest possible opportunity. Staff: Kiss your sorry arses goodbye.

I corrected the grammar and syntax of 64 pages this afternoon, sitting in the sun on my verandah. That was the introduction. I lost the will to live at about 4.30 and had to eat a couple of slices of banana cake. I have five more similarly sized sections to correct and he's STILL writing it. Still, what we'll get paid will go some way towards the huge second home tax bill we have to pay for the other house this year, which seems to have increased by a phenominal amount since last May. I may have to insert the babelfish and ring up the belastingsdienst to see what the hell's going on.

In the meantime, there's always lettuce...................