
This year Jane and I managed something we’ve not done since moving into this house over seven years ago: we weeded the entire drive. A job that took about nine hours, over four days; two of them, however, in the company of Test Match Special on BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra.
In the past I’ve managed to clear only a few square meters of driveway before either the rain swamped my handiwork, or babies needed to be attended to. This year, however, I had three willing little helpers who each contributed something significant to the purging of the weeds.
This is what the drive looked like when I started, a sorry sight of grass and muck between dirty paving stones:

And roughly the same area after it had been weeded, scrubbed with a wire brush, and blasted with a power hose that a colleague of mine kindly loaned me:

The next trick is going to try to keep it this way for the next seven years.