Tamed.

Gnocchi in olive oil, a scattering of parsley growing wild - approved wild - in the back garden, and a dusting of parmesan sent me sleep (I found a bottle of red as well). I had worked until after sundown. 

Now it was 7.30am. I walked down the hill for the morning paper and it was a ghost town, even in the early morning sunshine. The permanents must have been still quaking inside their houses set behind front gardens fussily manicured as if in purse-lipped contrast to their enforced back-to-nature neighbours. Now, back at the house, coffee and the paper, and back to work. The mountain of thistles lay behind the old bungalow, the original fisherman’s hut that sat further down the block a couple of decades before the modern square flat-roofed timber house was built on the crown of the hill to catch the 1970s sun. I got the mower out of the shed.

By mid-afternoon the place looked half-civilised again, the mower modified by leaving off the catcher and wiring the flap to half-open. I cleaned up, locked the house and set off again down the long sloping hill to the bus stop on the beach road. The overgrown gardens looked even wilder than yesterday.