The other immensely satisfying aspect to this morning’s activity is that I’m gardening in my own garden. This doesn’t happen nearly as much as it should, and it shows. I’m painfully aware that over the past few years, I’ve been carefully honing a whole arsenal of useful skills in gardens belonging to other people, skills which are all too rarely unleashed upon the wilderness outside my own back door.
Well, no more. Enough is enough, a line must be drawn and all that guff. From the new year, I shall be taking on a new client; a grumpy, capricious and exacting character, as short of temper as indeed of stature, with the mind of a butterfly, the mouth of a sailor and the feet of a hobbit. Me, in other words. I’ve come to realise that the only way I’m going to gain any traction here, in my own garden, is to put it in the diary. To hell with the expense and the inevitable impact upon the rest of the week’s work, I’m convinced it will be worth it, not only for the obvious positive benefits for the garden itself, but also to free my mind of the constant, nagging feeling that there are several (many) things which I really ought to be doing.
So this is the plan, and you, dear reader, may hold me accountable for it. In fact I ask you to do just that and if, in a few months time, the place persists in looking as though a family of hephalumps has been rolling around in it, you have my express permission to berate me strongly, and stick wads of goosegrass down the back of my jumper. After all, I’ll do the same for you.