String, string, where was the damn string when you needed it? I dug through the drawer under my planting table, I knew I had some in here somewhere. Or, wait, did I run out of it when I was tying up the tomato plants?

Damn!

Why hadn’t I added it to the shopping list? And this was not a job that could be left half-finished, or botched with wool. My knitting yarn was both too expensive and too prone to stretch to be any use in keeping these rather special little packages, for want of a better term, properly bound.

I grumbled at myself, then phoned Myra. “I’m in the middle of securing the Beltane bundles, and I’ve run out of string. How fast can you get some to me?”

I could hear Myra’s eye roll over the airwaves. “I’m not going to say you should have checked your supplies before you started.”

“You just did.”

“No, I just said I wouldn’t say it, there’s a distinction. I’ll send Herbert over with a couple of balls.”

Great. Not only would I have to stand here, in the freezing cold, my greenhouse was anything but a hothouse at this time of year, and then get cackled at by an insolent raven as and when he decided to show up.

Thankfully he showed up fairly quickly, I’m not sure whether it was because he wanted to laugh at me, or if Myra pointed out that unwrapped Beltane bundles were the type of trouble he hates most.

He dropped two large balls of string on the table and cocked his head at me. “Preparation?”

“Yes, yes, I’ll make sure I do a full stock check next time. Now I have ten more of these damn things to wrap so if you’re not going to help, I suggest you hop out of the way.”

Herbert gave a far-too-human snigger and launched himself into the air. Only as far as the top of the storage cupboard, too much to hope that I’d managed to get rid of him so easily.

I grabbed one of the balls with one hand, the other had been gripping the half-wrapped Beltane bundle ever since the other ball run out, and was near white with lack of blood. I teased out the end of the string and lay it over the last four rows of existing wrapping. A few turns of the bundle and I had it strongly wrapped.

I placed it in the basket with the fourteen already completed, I hadn’t been completely unprepared, and flexed my cramping fingers, ready for number sixteen. Next year, Myra was NOT going to talk me into doing them, it was her damn turn.

Other 10 minute sprints