That was the Monday just gone. It’s supposed to be the most depressing day of the whole year. The third Monday of the New Year when people have dropped their new year’s resolutions, realise that they have over-spent at Christmas, pay-day seems like light-years away, and the short cold days and even longer cold nights just compound everything to make it feel 100 times worse.

There is actually a formula for this phenomenon…

Where W=weather, D=debt, d=monthly salary, T=time since Christmas, Q=time since the failure of new year’s resolutions, M=low motivational levels, and N_a=the feeling of a need to take action.

But it’s not all doom and gloom because brighter days are just around the corner. A nice short month called February is next, where your wages seem to last that little bit longer, the sun doesn’t set so early in the day, and snowdrops appear in the flowerbeds. Indeed, by the end of this month, the sunset is nearer to 5:30pm, the end of February is nearly 6pm and by the end of March it’s pushing towards 8pm.

Definitely something to look forward to. In the mean time, you know where we are if you need to chat with what I would consider are normal, well-balanced people (biased of course).

You may remember that last week I mentioned that we have a bit of exciting news to share. Well, we have received an incredibly generous and much needed donation from Wickes, the DIY chain.

This gives us enough fire-power to keep the nettles and grass really short on the edges of the path over the spring and summer. Ideally the path needs to be 3-metres wide. No more narrow trail where people have to walk single-file or get stung as they are forced to leap into the stingers, as they give way to passing bicycles or people coming the other way.

Thank-you, Wickes, you have earned a place in our “Sponsors” tab above. Please click on it and “like” it so sponsors can see that they are being looked at.

And before anyone starts hollering “what about the wildlife”, we’re making a transition from path, to short grass, to wildflower-rich longer grass, to scrub. So don’t panic Captain Mainwaring!

This week we managed to escape from the gravitational pull of the northern end of the trail, and started at the underpass, which is the halfway point, working southwards.

There are seven workdays left until the bird-nesting season starts and we move away from heavy cutting back, so we need to make every workday count.

I’m currently juggling three thoughts in my head at the moment, which is unusual for me because I can normally only manage one at a time. Make gaps in the dense scrubby tree edge to let sunlight in, removal of tree whips so mature trees can flourish without loads of competition, and deep scallops in the scrub where the new sunlight is hitting the ground.

This will create warm micro-habitats for insects and wildflowers to thrive.

Today we cracked on with the above plan and also did a bit of work on our hedge.

We also made habitat piles with the cuttings.

I don’t think we will be winning any prizes with the National Hedgelaying Society, but when it greens up it will look a lot better and be an absolute hot-spot for wildlife.

We enjoyed coffee and stuffed our faces with biscuits, again (thanks Andrew for the tasty treats), whilst enjoying the views and chatting about I don’t know what? Probably Land Rovers and things like that.

Here is our YouTube of between the benches.

It hopefully gives you a good idea of what we are trying to achieve.

That’s it for this week.

Catch you on the next one!