The Front Porch

These days I'm taking my morning coffee, refreshment breaks, aperitives and indeed post pranial digestives in the shade of the front porch.

It's not much of a front porch, being a bodge-up of iron tube and plastic corrigated sheets, but I've let a creeper grow over, which both disguises it and also provides a pleasant dappled shade, until the sun disapears behind the house after lunch. It's replacement is on the list of DIY jobs and there's half a palet of matching roof tiles in a corner of the barn, in truth, given the amount of time I spend sitting under it, there's not a lot of hope of an early start to working on it !

The older part of the house and thus the front porch forms an "L" with the barn and faces east across a gravelled court-yard to a small garden area. This later is dominated by a huge old cheery tree and this is a very special tree to me. Many years ago I was offered redundancy and although a very generous early retirement pack was also on offer I was pretty pissed at being thrown on the scap-heap at 50. We came over here for the first 3 weeks of March and I sat on the front porch, sipping a chilled glass of white wine or two and watched the cherry tree come into full blossom. I came to the conclusion that, without too much pain, I could probably do this for the rest of my life.

Went into work on monday, saw the peronnel bloke and left on the friday. (I know it's P C these days to say H R but to me they will always be the plonkers from personnel and what's more I'm not even certain how to spell it. )

Then, as now, the cherry tree always has a magnificent head of blossom, but I never seem to get many cherries from it. This year I have spotted the reason. The tree seems to be a magnet for every magpie, jay and red squirrel in the neighbourhood all of which seem to like cherries before they are ripe. The death blow for the crop is the blackbirds, they fledge on the day that cherries are ripe for picking and mums and dads from all over the village bring their young to learn all about the delights of cherries.

I have made an interesting and, I think, origional ornithological observation about blackbird behaviour, they are frightened of heights, as they only eat the fruit that I, otherwise, could reach to pick and leave those out of reach of even my longest ladder at the very top of the tree to rot and fall to the ground