Green Manalishi

It is one of those diamond-bright April mornings: T-shirt weather in the Sun, Arctic in the shade. This afternoon the wind is expected to pick up, rain is likely to drift in and turn to hail. Thunderstorms are predicted. This is spring in the UK. However you are dressed when you leave home, you will spend some of the day too hot, some too cold and always you will get wet. No amount of pre-planning will keep you dry.

We live on a little green dot on the map within which England is wet, Wales is wetter, Northern Ireland is wetter still and Scotland is probably the wettest place in the entire world. This whole nation radiates out from London in concentric bands of damp. By the time you reach the Scottish Highlands, the men have all abandoned trousers on the grounds that they are always wet from the knees down, and taken to wearing plaid skirts. (The sporran is nothing more than a vestigial mould growth.)

I, myself, live in a part of the country that appears to function as the nation’s sump. For most of us at this time of year, gardening boils down to washing the duckboards, but the time is coming when everything outside the window turns green – particularly on the inside of the shed. The general rule is, if it isn’t rotting from the root up, it will need cutting back. If it needs cutting back, it will injure you.

Secateurs are the instrumentum diei for spring gardening. You will find them, rusted, at the back of the garden shed in April and, with the regular application of WD40, you will be able to operate them by mid-May, at which time you will be able to remove branches up to the thickness of your thumb (and, for the unwary, your actual thumb.) If you do not actually excise your digit, you will trap it. The fastest growing item in the springtime garden is always the blood-blister… except for the lawn.

This is the time of the year when the front lawn will have grown by the time you have pushed the mower round from the back. Dandelions and daisies lengthen quicker than a schoolboy’s legs (although, unlike schoolboys, if you chop them off they will just grow back at double speed.) You have two choices with a lawn: keep it long and full of weeds, or keep it short and full of mud. In real life, lawn mowers have only two settings: ‘light trim’ and ‘scalp’. ‘Light trim’ achieves nothing except letting the midges out to play, whilst ‘scalp’ lifts the lawn out in giant clods and spits them into your shoe. As most lawns provide a half-inch covering of vegetation for a six inch layer of aggregate, this will be launched through your windows, greenhouse and lower legs. If you want to fill in the resulting ‘craters’ with grass, you will need to fill them first with a blend of finely sifted compost and sand dusted with seed and fertilizer, and water at least twice daily. Alternatively, if you want to fill them with weeds, just turn your back on them for five minutes.

Most importantly, do not worry: in April, moonless, crystal-clear nights can be very dark and when that happens, your garden will look Just as good as everybody else’s…

Now when the day goes to sleep
And the full moon looks
The night is so black that the darkness cooks
Don’t you come creeping around
Making me do things I don’t wanna do… Green Manalishi – Fleetwood Mac (Green)

Echoes

Sometimes I begin this thrice weekly little tarradiddle with a title, sometimes with a subject and sometimes with nothing at all. Sometimes I stride with purpose and sometimes I wander with nothing but peanut butter between the ears. Mostly I wander. As I get older it becomes increasingly obvious that there are very few new places to go, all that I seem to be able to do is alter is the route that I take to get there. My mind has become a SatNav which has, in addition to Fastest (slowest), Shortest (any route that passes via a sink estate in which mine is the only car that is not on fire, along an overgrown bridle way and across a twelve foot deep ford) and Eco (via Penzance) has Meander, which takes me from A to B via something that was inadvertently chipped off the Rosetta Stone, for the three miles per journey in which it has a signal. When you realise that there is little left to do that you have not done before, you start to search for new ways to do it. In every nano-second of life, there is an echo of another. There is comfort to be found in the familiar, but too much comfort – like malt whisky and the moral highground – can become disorientating. When destination becomes secondary to journey, it is time to take the bus.

At the time of writing, the post-Christmas/New Year tidy-up is in progress and I am forced to make a number of disconcerting trips up into the attic. Attics, like belfries, are uncomfortable places full of fractured memories and bats: filled with webs, but devoid of spiders. Mine also houses the ancient Christmas tree, a lifetime of baubles, the emergency chairs and a howling gale on the stillest of days. The attic is where the house goes to die, and it is where Christmas spends eleven months of the year.

Most people are pleased to see the back of Christmas by the time it is all packed away, but I find it unbearably sad: Goodwill to all men stashed in an old cardboard box and stacked underneath a moulding set of curtains you never quite got round to hanging three houses ago. There is something very forlorn about the rows of threadbare trees awaiting pre-mulching collection. There is a horrible finality to the departure of the holly and the ivy: peace on earth in a bin bag…

But Spring is just around the corner: a world full of new shoots, new colours, new lives… already the lawn looks like it could do with a mow. The WD40 sits with a rising sense of expectation. It is impossible not to be changed by Spring: the first frost-glistened appearance of snowdrops, the colour-splash of crocus and aconite, the full-on joy of daffodil and tulip, the sudden greening of a beige hemisphere. Hope* in every tree. What’s not to love about a season that heralds falling energy bills, thinner coats and longer days? Perhaps hormones might start to stir – not always a good thing for fifty percent of the species – and loins begin to gird. As one gets older, it becomes frighteningly easy to anticipate bad outcomes and almost impossible to perceive good, but the echoes are always there, you just have to choose to see them…

…oh, and put the postcode in the SatNav very carefully…

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can… Echoes – Pink Floyd

*Hope is the thing with feathers… Emily Dickinson

The Tale of Idris Wood Pigeon

There is a Wood Pigeon’s nest in the hawthorn at the back of our garden. I say ‘nest’ but what Wood Pigeons actually build in order to raise their brood is, at best, destined to be condemned before Spring is out, looking more like the aftermath of a child’s game of Pick-up-Stix than a family home. It has somehow lingered on, this ragged stack of disparate twigs, through the winter and the pigeon seems to believe that it will see him though another season, because he is currently making no attempt at home improvement whatsoever.

He (you will have noted the lapse into the singular) just sits on the high gate near the greenhouse and looks at it – alone. No Mrs Wood Pigeon has yet appeared and he has been waiting there, day and night, for weeks. It is unbearably sad. You see, I know what happened to his errant spouse because it was me who had to scrape her off the road out front, but I haven’t yet summoned up the courage to tell him. How could I? My grasp of Pigeon is on a par with my fluency in Serbo-Croat.

You see, I know because I looked it up, that pigeons, like particularly unpopular Mormons, are monogamous. I’d really like to tell him that he didn’t ought to sit there all day, shitting on my path, but get what must now be considered as his bachelor pad tidied up. Make it into something where he could happily bring what might – if she is adequately impressed – turn out to be the second Mrs Wood Pigeon.

Not that there’s much chance of that. He never goes anywhere. How’s he ever going to meet anyone without internet access? Beside himself, there is only me and next-door’s moggie who even knows there’s anybody living there. I can’t imagine that anyone’s going to come knocking on his branch – unless it’s someone from the council to warn him for bringing down the tone of the neighbourhood. My lawn is full of moss, why doesn’t he just drop a little bit on his floor? Well, if I’m honest, I’m not sure that it would take the weight.

I’d quite like to knock this nest down in the hope that it would persuade him to build something a little more durable, but I can’t because a) I saw his previous effort and it was even worse: improvement is not guaranteed and b) he never goes away from his gate post roost and I just can’t bring myself to do it whilst he’s watching.

Nature will, I suppose, take its course in time: there must be loads of widowed Wood Pigeons out there. They can’t all be that discerning. Maybe his springtime sap has not started to properly rise yet. When it does he might become an ornithological whirlwind of fevered hormones. He will be oozing pheromones like a feathered Idris Elba. Mind you, if it happens, I think he might have to move. I don’t think his current bedroom walls are up to it…

Gardening – a brief guide (part one – the fundamentals and the seasonals).

garden tools

Spring Bank Holiday is almost upon us in the UK and all thoughts turn to the garden and gardening. The garden centre is filled to capacity and, for once, not just with people waiting for the Sunday Roast. My little gardening guide is split into three parts, which will take us into and through the bank holiday. In the time you will eventually take to read it, you could have planted any number of shrubs, mowed several lawns or painted the shed. Just think of that… Now, would you like me to run you a bath?

Let us begin with a definition:
Gardening – The act of undertaking tasks for which you are not equipped, in a hostile environment full of lethal dangers both natural and manmade, from which you have no protection.

It is the arrival of Spring that first sends us tottering out into the garden with a broom handle (with or without broom head) to prop up the wonky fence panel; a dinner fork (as the garden fork will have rusted away) with which to dig up everything that has died over the winter, and several trays of various seedlings that we can watch over as they die in the weeks ahead. Each season brings its own challenges:

• Spring: the long, dark nights of winter are falling behind us and the time has come to collect together all of the tools that you accidentally left outside at the beginning of winter and spray them with WD40 – even though you know perfectly well that it will not work. Buds fill, leaves unfurl, early blossoms glisten in the morning dew and the door falls off the shed. Now is the time to give the lawn its first cut of the year, carefully replacing all the divots ripped from the ground by the winter-blunted blades as you go. However early you choose to make this first cut, it is always a) too early for nature and b) too late for your partner.
• Summer: your garden will be in full bloom. Now is the time to take a garden seat, reattach the leg with a six-inch nail, sit and enjoy the riot of colour and scent that is your garden in full bloom. Now is the time to throw away last year’s rusty – and let’s face it, unhygienic – barbecue and, if you’ve any sense at all, never to consider buying a replacement. Ever. Now is the time to find out where next-doors bloody cat keeps doing its business.
• Autumn: season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. In my experience, garden fruit exists in only two states: a) unripe and b) rotten. If you find something that looks ripe and hasn’t been half-eaten by insects, it is almost certainly poisonous. Now is the time to repair and pack away for winter. As most of your tools remain unusable from being left out over the previous winter and your garden furniture is so rotten it won’t even burn, there seems little point. Make the most of the relative warmth of long autumn evenings by filling the garden with candles. There is nothing quite like the combination of fading autumn light, flickering candle flame and red wine to heighten the awareness of your own mortality. ‘Tis the season to be maudlin. Although the insect-life is much reduced by now, most of what remains will either bite or sting or both. Wear a knitted hat at all times when in the garden. There is nothing worse than approaching winter with a grotesquely swollen ear that makes you look like Dumbo when viewed from the side.
• Winter: the best of all seasons in which to enjoy your garden – from inside. Revel in the fact that at this time of year nobody expects a person of your age to be out in the cold – and, also, that when covered in a thick blanket of snow, this is the one time when your garden looks just as good as everybody else’s.

The modern gardener faces a number of horticultural challenges seldom faced by their urban predecessors:

Hanging Baskets – The horticultural equivalent of the Mayfly: leave it unattended for 24 hours and it will die. If the weather is dry, it will die. If it is windy, it will die. If it is raining, it will somehow escape the water and die. I, on the other hand, will not escape the water as I will be outside watering the f*cking thing. Allowing the hanging basket to die is punishable by death or long silences punctuated by sighing.

Pots and Containers – Similar to hanging baskets (above) with the added attraction that whilst they too will dry out and die within twenty-four hours if not watered, they will also become waterlogged in the rain – and die.

Ponds – All the joys of a garden, with the option of drowning. If you must have a pond, just don’t be tempted to stock it up with expensive fish: they will only be eaten by next door’s cat who will continue to crap in your wellies regardless. As elsewhere in your garden, any expensive plants will quickly be swamped by weed which is almost impossible to remove. Ponds will attract all manner of wildlife to your garden: birds, frogs, toads, newts and god-knows-what when the lights have gone out. Official advice is that ponds require regular cleaning. If you have ever driven along the side of a canal that is being dredged, you will know how pleasant this task is. Whatever lurks at the bottom of the pond is either dead, smelly, slimy or all of the above. My advice is to leave it where it is. It may be a little unsightly, but the frogs seem to like it and the water is generally so green that you can never see the bottom anyway. Waterfalls and/or fountains require a suitable electric point from which to run them. The one thing I know about electricity is that it is never good news when mixed with water. Unless you want to get involved in a row with your neighbour over how, exactly, his cat came to be hurled, smoking, over the fence after trying to drink out of your pond, don’t bother with a pump of any kind. An electric pond pump will fuse the house more often than an inopportune finger in a leaking kettle and leave you continually fishing dead things out of the murky depths (preferably after turning off the electric). If you want to make more of a feature of your pond you could introduce some floating solar lights. They never work, but they do provide a convenient resting place for passing birds and they will not electrocute you when they finally fill up with water, turn upside down and sink.