Thread:Meterman80/@comment-33611550-20190123192742/@comment-33611550-20190125070928

My first flat away from home in Nairobi, when I had started my first secretarial job, was a bedsit with a garage below. The garage was for the use of the people who rented the cottage behind. Originally the old lady who let both the cottage and bedsit, only had the cottage and then someone suggested she built a small bedsit above the garage and she could let out both. Although it was a bedsit, it was well thought out and I was allowed to choose the cover for the divan bed which doubled up as the sofa during the day.

Anyway I digress. The bedsit had a huge trough built into the brickwork for flowers. This old lady asked whether I would like to grow some flowers and, if so, she’d put some soil in this trough. She went on to say that she’d had some terrible tenants in the past who had just used the trough as a trash bin.

Mum and Dad came and topped up the soil with some leaf mould (compost made from broken down leaves), and planted Ivy geraniums and Impatiens or what I know as Buzzie Lizzie (they have seeds which are sprung to burst if you touch them). The ivy geraniums just loved it there and cascaded right down. The couple who rented the cottage didn’t want to break the flowers, as they were so pretty, so they parked their car outside instead and, as you can imagine, it was regularly broken into.