Sorry. The spider is a cross shaped tool with four arms, each ending in a ring spanner of various sizes for different wheel nuts. The spanners included in most car tool kits, along with the jack (UK also jack) are often inadequate to undoing nuts fitted with the machines garages use, flimsy little things. With a spider, you can use two hands at opposite sides to apply more leverage. With a bit of steel pipe to insert in one arm, the force gets even more effective. (I think I've seen spiders with 6 arms - obviously an appropriate 8 would not be possible.)

I have watered the brick like bit of the garden so I can dig up the periwinkle which is taking over, and move it to the old flats garden. I really don't know why the previous owner had so many invasive plants in a small garden. I've stacked up some of the moved flags, which have turned out to make a useful stand for the laundry basket when pegging out. I've attacked the clay soil in a second raised bed with an odd cultivator tool from my Dad's, called a "Garden Claw", and topped it with bought top soil, lion poo pellets, and prunings. (See cat thread for reason.) Found that the seed propagator had got too wet, and I only had one pea germinated, so planted some more peas and beans.

Watched a bit of the wedding - they were playing it on the radio in the local shop when I went for my paper. Then the flypast - my friend's father flew Lancasters in the war. I noticed that the crowd movng forward looked like the water flowing over Japan. There was a letter in the paper complaining that the future head of the Anglican church had been flouting its teaching on matrimony, and Kate shoould not have been wearing white. I would have thought that there was cause for celebration that they were putting it right, that the living together had always been associated with getting married. It looks like a relationship that is not the stupidly artificial mess that his parents were trapped in.

Penny