Today we had a parcel delivered. Nothing very unusual in that I hear you say, but we also had a parcel delivered yesterday, and if all goes well there should be another one coming tomorrow. In fact since the beginning of the year we have had 7 parcels delivered, which for us must be a bit of a record.

Two hoovers (a long story) a birthday present for me from America, a new computer for Peter, a mouse and keyboard for the new computer, a telescopic, cordless hedge trimmer and a cordless strimmer/trimmer.

The telescopic hedge trimmer will help Peter to cut the arch between the garden and the field. Always a tricky manoeuvre on a ladder with a heavy hedge trimmer and trailing flex, he’s cut through it several times.

With this gadget it should be much easier, and we may be able to trim the arch throughout the season instead of one huge task in the Autumn.

The strimmer/trimmer is for me, primarily for cutting the grass around the bottom of the trees in the field, but if it’s any good I might use it for trimming the grass edges around the beds too.

We had a strimmer once before, but we both hated it. The ‘strimming line’ which was supposed to feed effortlessly through from a sort of cartridge thing, got jammed all the time, and to say it was a pig to get going again would be an understatement.

In fact in the end we put it out for the bin men to take, but it disappeared overnight. I hope whoever took it had more success with it than we did.

Since then we’ve been strimmer free, and so the grass round the bottom of the trees has been a problem. Ideally it should be done whenever I cut the grass, or at least every other time, but in practice it’s been lucky to get done twice a year.

I’m not getting any younger and crawling around on my knees with a big pair of scissors is no fun. Hopefully this new gadget should improve things. We shall see.