The Garden Year
January brings the snow,
Makes our feet and fingers glow.
February brings the rain,
Thaws the frozen lake again.
March brings breezes, loud and shrill,
To stir the dancing daffodil…
Which doesn’t quite work here in the Southern Hemisphere. Here, February brought Scout summer camp, where we took the 11-15 age group a kilometre away from running water and electricity and challenged them to get on with it. Are people even still alloowed to do things like that in the UK? It was lots of fun, and looked like this…
Then we figured to finish the summer holiday with a few days out as a family. We couldn’t get accommodation anywhere in our favourite destination of Miramar, and then at the last minute the car died, limiting us to somewhere easily available by bus and preferrably without having to lug camping gear. So we ended up in Arroyito, which is a bit like going on holiday to Bedford or something. But it has a nice wide shallow river, some good plazas, a better selection of eateries than San Francisco, an old non-functional steam train for the kids to climb over, and we found a sweet little hotel, with a very inviting swimming pool, run by a sweet little elderly Spaniard, and all in all we had a nice relaxing few days.
The first of March was supposed to bring the start of the school year, but according to custom, we begin the year with a series of teachers’ strikes. The dispute will probably drag on for a while yet, but tomorrow we should finally have all four children in their appropriate educational establishments on full timetables at least for a day or two until the next set of strkes is announced.