Revenge of the Weather Gods?

Getting watered in...?  Planting at Tatton

It seems I won't need to do any watering in the garden for a few days - we woke to torrential rain and spectacular lightning, thunder booming all around yesterday morning (it's very loud when you live on top of a hill!), and although there are blue skies now, they're scattered with some pretty chunky clouds. 

The decision to help out on the Tatton Park project Monday rather than Tuesday looks to have been a good one!

I did get a brief session doing some planting, in between acting as 'runner' - fetching the better specimens for those nimbler souls who could squeeze into the flowerbeds - and watering those blasted tall orange helleniums again.  When I saw them still standing in rows, unplanted, an entire weekend after I had last lovingly watered them all, I could almost have given in to my inner serial-killer, but it transpired that I had arrived too late to see them tried in the garden, only to be expelled for being that bit too tall (I sympathise).  They are going to look spectacular arranged around our marquee, while their shorter cousins added some fiery colour to the planting.

A planter's eye view

Hopefully the decision to select some shorter specimens will have helped our garden to withstand whatever the Mancunian skies threw at it on Tuesday, although the meadow grasses on the mound will need some sunshine and a gentle breeze to fluff them up again.

The results of today's judging are now in, and it's a Silver for the St Luke's Hospice Garden, although our fellow Reaseheathers working on the oddly named Mu-No Thing Galaxy Garden bagged a Silver-Gilt.  The links to both are here:

http://www.rhs.org.uk/Shows-Events/RHS-Show-Tatton-Park/2013/Gardens/Garden-directory/St-Luke’s-Hospice-Silver-Anniversary-Garden
http://www.rhs.org.uk/Shows-Events/RHS-Show-Tatton-Park/2013/Gardens/Garden-directory/Mu-No-Thing

It's faintly bizarre, of course, that as I count down the days to being plugged back into the Matrix, returning to the CAB and Social Security advice work, we finally get the sort of weather I'd hoped for during my two summers without regular work commitments.  I have long suspected that the Weather Gods have it in for me.  Colleagues avoided clashing their holidays with mine when I worked in Southampton on the basis that my annual leave inevitably meant grey skies.  To be fair, you could say the same for the Scaffolding Gods - I've lost count of the number of architectural wonders I've visited only to find them in the throes of major renovation.

So are the Weather Gods toying with me now, giving us this mini-heatwave to remind me that soon I won't be able to fit work around my plans and pleasures, but it'll be very much the other way round, or is this a sign that they are well-pleased with my choice?  Is it perhaps the case that they don't have it in for me at all, but that the true target of their wrath is the Con-Dems?  Do they have an income-redistribution agenda in which I am destined to play some part?  Do they, perchance, despise inherited privilege and inequality?  (After all, something seriously upset them in London late on Monday afternoon..!)

In short, are the Weather Gods actually Socialists?

Despite the odd downpour, the forecast ahead remains reasonably bright, with the prospect of blue skies over Tatton Park for Friday and Saturday.  If only things were looking so positive for our Social Security system.