I don’t know what other people do in their gardens in the spring, but we seem to do a lot of mending things and painting them. Inspection revealed that this seat was rotting badly in places. So Charles did a lot of repairing with wood filler and wood hardener and made a general mess of the wooden seat part, so that, for the first time, we decided it had to be painted.

We have to thank our friend Kathy for her help with the repair when she visited. She advised us to stop future rot by separating the wood from the supports with a washer, so that the wood wouldn’t sit in the wet we found there.

And we realised the back had to be repainted.

The trick being to paint very carefully round the lettering, as doing all that again would be no joke. I had done a little bit, then Charles came to help and suddenly it was getting done faster.

You may wonder about what the seat says. We used to get visitors who would tell us how we ought to spell the house name – that it should be in Welsh. Fedw is almost Welsh, and certainly highways told us when they did a sign for the lane that it had to be in Welsh, so they put ‘The Fedw’. And any fule kno that that is all Welsh.

Anyway, I put some of the various spellings that I’ve found of the name on our seat, with the dates when those spellings appeared on documents. Personally I love these border Welsh hybrid names we get round here.

Then, of course, as soon as we finished it started to rain.

Next day it stopped raining and I addressed the crack issue. At some point the seat had moved in a frost and has cracked. I have decided to follow the Japanese philosophy of living at peace with imperfection, so I’ve painted the crack gold.

Then Charles painted his mended seat part.

And contemplating the next job. Which is rather more demanding. These are heavy…..