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The jungle Our house sits some 600 feet above sea level in a wooded valley overlooking Cardigan Bay. The garden runs to about a quarter of an acre and curves round the house on three sides with a traditional lawn/veg patch and seating area at the back of the house, a sloping wooded area at the side and shrubs and lawn to the front. Our long-term plans for it are still thoughts in progress - for the first year we mainly watched to see what grew - but the combination of work deadlines and last year’s non-stop rain mean that everything in has well and truly escaped, so this weekend we took action to reclaim the sea view. The intermediate zone  The hacking back's fine... but what do you do with all the cuttings? Preparing to shred... One branch down One tree down We now know that every hour of hacking through the undergrowth creates two to three hours of shredding and log sawing.  But the end result's worth it... Over the hedge Especially at suns...

‘So what you need to do,’ says the kindly consultant ophthalmologist, ‘is throw away your gas permeable lenses and wear your glasses until the eye is healed. It’ll take about three months.’  Three months!    ‘What’s the matter?’ he smiles, seeing my shocked face. ‘I love my glasses and, if I may say so, you look perfectly all right in yours.’ For the second time this year , a consultant has proved me wrong. Good job I didn’t go into medicine then. The joke horror eyeball with a scarlet cornea and swollen eyelid I’ve been squirting with antibiotic for the last week, is not, after all, a complication of a suspected blocked tear duct after my sinusitis, but has been caused by my eye quietly rejecting a very old contact lens. Despite being a very careful user of contact lenses (of anything, really), the lens has built up protein deposits which have sandpapered my cornea and caused all sorts of havoc. There’s nothing to be done other than to apply eye drops and wait...

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