Thousands
“There’s no need to thank me” he said last evening, on the eve before his business trip away for a few days and three sleeps away from my horticultural exam.
I know I bring him happiness - the expression on his face as he walks down the garden and slows to see what’s there, the spread of smile when he gets home, the look he gets as he watches me undress, the smile as I chat to his parents says it all - a few of a thousand reasons I know.
Two sleeps away from an exam which, if I pass, will see me with a qualification that is the result of years of bumbling around in gardens and, in the last two years, the garden at the Little House by the Big Wood, I am acutely conscious that I am at a place that I would never have believed that I would be in, either physically, metamophorically or otherwise. I have the undoubted support and love of a man that came out of nowhere two or so years ago which has, and does on a daily basis, dumbfound me but feels perfectly, absolutely right and is wholly reciprocated.
“There’s no need to thank me”?
For a thousand or so reasons, I think there is.
Potato head
Recent research suggests that picking the flowers off maincrop potatoes will divert sufficient energy from flower and fruiting by the plant to increasing the potato crop by 10%. Well worth doing as far as I’m concerned.
Low carb diet? Me? Not in a million years dearie.
Go placidly
I’ve been tagged by Sas whose blog I am compelled to read every day …
What is your current obsession?
Passing a particular exam.
What is your weirdest obsession?
Not an obsession as such but I have a panicky fear about stinging nettles which is a bit of a bummer given that I’m paid to remove them.
What are you wearing today?
Jack Wills menswear checked trousers, black Tesc0 cashmere sweater.
What’s for dinner?
Joe Brown’s homemade pasta with a tomato saucy thang.
What would you eat for your last meal?
Tricky one. Either roasted veg with lashings of garlic and grated strong cheddar with a huge glass of wine or double egg and chips with a bucket of tea.
What’s the last thing you bought?
A new dustpan and brush.
What are you listening to right now?
Joe Brown wrestling four-letter wordedly with the pasta machine I bought him for Christmas. I’m staying out the way.
What do you think of the person who tagged you?
I would like to drink champagne with her as I think she’d be rather delicious company.
If you could have a house totally paid for, fully furnished anywhere in the world, where would you like it to be?
South west England, possibly as far as Cornwall.
If you could go anywhere in the world for the next hour, where would you go?
New York. New York.
Which language do you want to learn?
Greek, I think. I like the sound, I like the way it looks.
What’s your favourite quote (for now)?
For now: “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got”. For always: Desiderata, which I like to think I follow but, in some way or another, fail to every day.
What is your favourite colour?
Deep red with white and black - striped.
What is your favourite piece of clothing in your own wardrobe?
Sequinned and beaded dress.
What is your dream job?
I have no idea - gardeny, writery something or other that would involve periods of hard, physical labour and also sitting under the apple tree sipping tea.
Describe your personal style?
Plain.
What’s your favourite tree?
Cercis canadensis (Forest Pansy)
What are you going to do after this?
Last check on a greenhouse up the lane whilst the owners are away on holiday, paint my toenails, manicure, pack up my college bag for tomorrow for the last time.
What’s your favourite fruit?
Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, lemons.
What inspires you?
Beautiful pictures be they on screen, in books, in my head, painted with words.
Your favourite books?
Animal Dreams, Shanghai, Charlotte’s Web, Jitterbug Perfume, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Portraits.
What are you currently reading?
The Principles of Horticulture
Go to your bookshelf, take down the first book with a red spine you see, turn to page 26 and type out the first line:
“… and that of his travelling companion Rumon (I think particularly of Landkey - the church of Kea - and the nearby Romansley - the field of Rumon - to the south of Barnstaple, it is from Somerset that we have the fullest accounts of these men. - The Celtic Year, Shirley Toulson
What delighted you the most today?
Seeing a few of the strawberries in the garden are ripening.
By what criteria do you judge a person?
The state of their fingernails.
The rules:
1. Respond and rework; answer the questions on your blog, replace one question you dislike with a question of your invention, add one more question of your own.
2. Tag eight other people.
Tagging: Doow, Laney, Jilly, McPolack, LiZZie, Newduck, Rachel, Vanillasky
Smile
Having checked the mid-February weather, I grabbed my bag and camera and headed for the ‘Set with three missions in mind. I wanted to clear the final few boxes of stuff I had stored in Sister Two’s garage, take a walk in a particular wood and take pictures of my day. Many, many times of late I’d been caught without my camera and missed countless pictures, all of which, of course, come out perfectly in my head.
The sun shone as I drove, brightly reflecting off the roofs of Pig City near Stonehenge, the residents flopped like pink beached whales outside their abodes with wispy clouds streaking across the sky but I hesitated too long and the chance to pull over to take a picture without causing a crash passed me by. I was too slow in spotting a heron standing stock still on a fence by the river, the surrounding slim-stemmed columnar trees mirroring the heron’s thin legs and tall shape and the verge was too wet and soft to risk parking up to trudge across a field to take a picture of the line of bare trees in the hedgerow, weirdly shaped like bent old men with their arms in strange formations.
I cleared the boxes from the garage and headed to the wood, awash with the pointy green fingers of forthcoming bluebells poking up through the ground under the bare trees. A squirrel watched me as I walked but made a ‘chick’ sound and disappeared higher up the trunk and by the time I looked through the lens, all I could see of two deer were white bums bobbing further into the distance as they bounded away. As I left the wood and turned onto the main road in my car, I spotted a buzzard virtually eye level in a tree across the road and swung the car round to see if I could creep up with my camera. Before I’d even got out the car, it turned and gave me a hard stare from the branch, spread its wings and flapped away and I hissed in irritation. I sat for a while drumming my fingers on the steering wheel musing on the deficits of my picture-taking mission of the day and the increasing flat light before reaching for my ‘phone.
*****
I met Jim shortly after I moved to the ‘Set in 1992. Everyone knew Jim which was hardly surprising as he’d been born and bred in the town and owned the garage where most people took their cars to be fixed, a garage he’d owned and run for some years. Short, chunky and with a shaven head, in a way he stood out from the crowd I’d come to know for the simple fact that despite his relative young age - some five years younger than I - he had a job and was clearly building a local business - whereas the vast majority of the people I initially chose to spend my time with in the ‘Set were either scratching a living or had no job at all. Thinking about it, he, with his west country burr, was probably one of the most hardworking, affluent people in the pub but, despite sometimes grudging appreciation of his hard graft, I heard snobbery towards him from people I drank with that shocked me. I believed that they should have given him far more respect - he certainly had mine.
Within a month of moving to the ‘Set, I’d bought a decrepit car and got a job and would occasionally appear in the pub of an eve to drink with new-found friends that, as time went on, I became unsure of. Jim was regularly in my peripheral vision, in the distance, in the other bar of the pub that I could view through lowered eyes and lashes, although sometimes and increasingly so, he’d appear next to me - a solid presence but with few words to say. Occasionally there’d be short, sharp sentences, observations about the world, his own small-town world and the people around us which were seldom complimentary and surprised me that he’d say out loud given that they were, to all intents and purposes, my friends. I’d be aware of him next to me, turn to say something to find that he’d gone, I assumed back to his live-in girlfriend who never seemed to accompany him. He was as British as a cup of tea in a Union Jack mug and intrigued, fascinated and unnerved me. He split from his girlfriend. “She fucked off” he said starkly and I wondered if she’d finally heard the rumours of his philandering. It was a small town - nothing went unmissed. My car got written off and I bought another one - a VW Beetle, green and pocked with rust. “Don’t bring that fucking car in my garage” he said with a curl of his lip when I told him. He preferred British cars it transpired and a car with the engine in the back was to be viewed very dimly. To give him his due, whenever I called him with car trouble and asked “Shall I take it somewhere else?”, he’d sigh down the phone and reply “Bring it in”. I had to bring it in many, many times and every time I called, I’d have to take deep breaths before picking up the phone - just talking to this bullet-headed man on the phone about backfiring and strange whirry noises would have me incapable of stringing a coherent sentence together and I became incapable of driving when in his presence, frequently stalling or crunching the gears in his yard as he looked on, with the seemingly permanent curl of disdain on his lips.
One evening in the pub, he mused that now his girlfriend had fucked off, his hair was growing as she used to shave it for him with clippers. “I’ll do it” I said brightly and, to my utter terror, found myself standing in his kitchen later that evening, holding buzzing clippers over the head of a man who I thought may, just may, rip my head off if I so much as nicked his skin. Call me naive but what I wasn’t expecting was two firm but gentle hands being laid to rest on the sides of my hips as he sat in a chair in front of me as I buzzed his head. I left his house early the next morning, chugging up the road and crunching the gears as I drove away - tired, achey and with astonishing pictures in my head of a man who, behind closed doors, became softly spoken, gentle, whispered in my ear in the dark and with hot breath and fingers, wrapped himself round my thighs. I returned to his immaculate but soul-less house a few nights later and as he made me tea in the kitchen, he told me he’d like to be married by the time he was thirty. “What age do you want to get married?” he asked.
“I can’t see me ever getting married” I said. He looked up.
“But what about children?” he asked.
“I don’t actually think I want children” I responded. He stopped mid-squelch of the teabag in the cup and looked shocked.
I didn’t spend any time staring at a silent phone, I knew he wouldn’t call. I was pissed off, hurt and, to be honest, worried - worried that in this small town, word on the street would spread like wildfire and I’d have to endure cringeworthy ribbing and questioning from people I knew which would leave me squirming, not because I’d spent the night with Jim but because it had clearly been a one night stand, I was worth nothing more than a one night stand to him. In an effort to avoid such embarrassment, the next time I had to chug that fucking car in to his yard, I blurted out “Please don’t tell anyone, I’d rather no-one knew”. His response was to slam my car door shut and snarl “I haven’t told anyone” before walking away.
I heard he starting working his way through the female population of the town and I began to avoid the pub and the people in it. My job became more time-consuming and demanding - my own small world was changing. That fucking car finally died a death and I replaced it with a more reliable one, with the result that I had to pull up outside Jim’s yard far, far less. On the occasions I did, I’d still have to pace the floor and blow into a paper bag before picking up the phone to speak to him and crunching of gears was still almost guaranteed, as was his slight sneer. He simply never smiled at me - at best, he’d turn away with a half-smile and roll his eyes.
He got married, he had children. I got together with a tall, lean man who bought me a camera. I became hooked on picture-taking and, without question, the pictures I take, the ones that make me gasp aloud if I think I get it right, are pictures of people. Usually candid, snapped, sneaky shots, there is something about capturing a moment that is missed with the naked eye, a look they give, an essence of them that delights me. On more than one occasion as I stood in Jim’s yard, I was acutely aware of the camera in my bag which I ached to take out and look at Jim through the lens to see what I could capture but I was as likely to do this as I was to ask “Did you ever actually like me at all Jim?” The tall, lean man and I dissolved in to nothing and I moved away to be with a man who understands the frisson of delight gained from getting a Good Picture and countless times I’ve lamented to him of missed shots, some of which have been lost due to lack of my courage to ask if I could take someone’s picture.
*****
I dropped my phone on the passenger seat and, buzzard long-forgotten, pulled away from the side of the road and headed to Jim’s yard. I had a minor problem with my car which he’d said yes, he could probably fix while I waited and seemingly swallowed the bullshit story I gave him of photo group, weekly project, blah-blah-blah, could I take your picture? “No problem” he’d replied.
His yard’s changed over the years - got bigger, more fancy, there’s more mechanics in matching blue overalls. As he bent over the engine of my car, I tentatively pulled out my camera. I’m not sure whether he was aware or just ignored the fact that I was clicking the shutter but he carried on with what he was doing, stopping frequently to answer his phone. Conversation was polite, small-talk and inbetween his phone calls but we managed to ascertain that he has three children, I have none, I left the ‘Set for a man and I’m studying gardening. He still lives in town. Work done, as he printed out my bill in his office, I checked shots I’d taken. He made no reference to them.
As I made to leave, he followed me out of his office and as I waited for a van to move so I could back my car out, I leaned against the door of my car. He leaned on the other side and I lifted my camera. To my utter surprise, as I squinted into the viewfinder, he looked straight at it and, instead of being incapable of stringing a sentence together, I had difficulty focusing on what I was seeing and tutted loudly. He continued to stare evenly at me through the lens. “You make me nervous” I said, out of nowhere, ”you always did”. He dropped his gaze and looked downwards and I inwardly cursed at ruining the moment but as I continued to view him through the lens, he started to smile - not a half smile and rolled eyes, not a curled lip of disdain but a proper, broad, even smile. I clicked the camera. I had my picture.
Weed
This getting paid to weed someone else’s garden malarky is beginning to have a marked effect on my spending. Every time I pick something up, the cost is immediately equated with how long I would have needed to weed so that I could buy it. There is clearly a huge difference between getting a payslip with a credit made to my bank account, or a cheque that gets banked as a result of sitting in front of a laptop and a pocketful of cash from physical labour.
I actually left my local garden centre without buying anything - I’ll say that again, without buying anything - at the weekend, I calculated that a cup of coffee I bought yesterday represented nearly 15 minutes weeding and I also put a beautiful silk dress back on the rail - not because I don’t have any occasion to wear it but because I worked out exactly how long I would need to spend hunched over the heavy clay soil at one of my clients in order to pay for it.
Work
“I think I’ll take a walk across and just have a look after lunch” I said possibly over-casually to Joe Brown three or so weeks ago. I caught a slight raise of one eyebrow before he replied “I’ll come with you”. There was no-one there despite it being a weekend and a fine day, the high sun casting no shadows on the ground. I stood for a moment leaning on the fence staring across at what I’d come to look at before swinging the gate open and walking down the narrow path, pointing and calling “I think it’s this one”. We stood and surveyed the ground, thick tufts of grass covering the area, discussing ways I could clear it before wandering over to check out the well-rotted manure, piled high in a large wooden bin which leaned with age, itself next to a wooden bin of dubious-looking compost.
“It’ll be a lot of work.” said Joe Brown. “Do you really need that right now?” he continued, asking a fair question.
The answer is no but having meandered across there three or four times in the last couple of weeks and spent time standing at the fence, clicking the gate open and mooching up and down the pathways, watching the way the sun moves across at different times of the day, checking the soil nearby and visibly noticing the couch grass growing higher and higher, I couldn’t let it go - it’s within walking distance, it’s smaller than the average, it gets all the sun it can, it’s next to a field with a couple of ponies, it’s £6.50 a year and someone else might get it before me. I’ve just got an allotment.
****************
I’ve attended a recent meeting within an organisation associated with ladies of a certain age which is synonymous with needlework, jam and cake-making. I haven’t made a cake for years, I have no idea how to make jam and my sewing is atrocious. I enjoyed it tho’ and I’ll be going again. My sisters snorted with laughter when I told them and a friend, when I emailed her what I’d done, announced that she felt the need to buy me a Hermes scarf. No need, I emailed back. I already own one. Joe Brown suggested I get some stout brogues and tweed. He may be sorry he said that.
****************
The warmth of the soil in the garden can be felt from the depths of my bed and I’m having real difficulty being indoors at the moment, even if the sun’s not shining. We have a greenhouse full of sprouting seeds, with more hardening off in the mini-greenhouse outside and I’ve planted enough potatoes to keep even a potato head like me happy. I’ve taken on an ongoing project that I fuss and fret over given that my writing isn’t hiding behind the anonymity of a blog and I’ve put notices up in local shops advertising my prowess with a garden spade. My horticultural exam will be upon me sooner rather than later and I cannot remember what collenchymatous cells do.
LBD
The day was spent with a woman my age, eye level with me but due to being pencil-slim has legs that look twice the length of mine. We’d arranged to meet in a supermarket cafe, me with a cup of tea, her with a glass of hot water and herbal infusion bag retrieved from her pocket. She doesn’t do tea. Or coffee or more drinks and foodstuffs than you could shake a stick at due to allergies that make food “nothing more than fuel” and has her laid low if she strays at all from her rather meagre list of acceptable items whereas I can eat effectively what I like. Our friendship is new and our drinks went cold as we relayed our lives and laughed muchly at our endeavours, hopes and past lost dreams and men. Later, we spent more than two hours flicking through racks and racks of second-hand clothes in a large, tatty-looking shop where wool and cashmere mix coats that look unworn could be bought for £15, Chinese silk jackets with sleeves far too short for either of us obtained for £5 - a revelation in rummaging for me and the norm for my companion. Our mission was to find an outfit for Longlegs to wear to a themed party we were both attending on the Saturday. I already had a suitable dress, bought some years ago at vast expense during my halcyon days of having a decent salary. Longlegs does not have this type of salary, nor a partner who indulges her as does mine. She lives alone and with a required frugality relies on her wits to get her through. I remember those days.
We squealed over an impossibly slim-looking short, black dress, with beaded spaghetti straps and fringes. She checked the price and furrowed her brow.
“Do you think it’s too tight?” she asked a while later, standing in the shabby changing room, knees slightly bent in an unconscious effort to lengthen the dress over her heron legs, shockingly large bazooms spilling over its fringed top, slinky black material stretched across her hips and abdomen. Before I could answer, she straightened and turned this way and that, twirling on her toes and pulling her long hair over one shoulder. “I’m not sure I’m brave enough to wear it on Saturday but could I wear it out to dinner with someone, do you think?” she asked and, turned away from me, I’m not sure if she was asking me or her reflection. “With heels. I think I’d be asking for it if I wore heels too” she continued. “I think I’ll get it” and cackled.
She had hangers over two fingers that she perused over, making two piles - one to get and one to have ‘put by’ whilst she thought about them. Her purchases came to £27 and she gasped in horror at her expenditure. I felt humbled and somewhat ashamed by nonchalant spending on clothes that hang in my wardrobe unworn whilst in the company of someone who deliberated over spending £3 on a dainty blouse. I’d spent more than that on a feather boa and feathery plume for my hair to wear to the party.
Later, I stood and watched as a petite woman with a peachy-from-a-pot complexion honed in on the leggy lady who was bending over jars of face powder and tentatively touching them to the back of her hand. The peachy lady smiled sweetly at her, undoubtedly taking in her height and bare face with patches of eczema round her mouth and launched in to her sales pitch. “I have allergies” explained Longlegs, stopping her mid-sentence. “I can’t seem to wear any make-up. I also have eczema”. She was promptly sat down and shown various pots of fine powder with soothing assurances that she “wouldn’t have a problem with this type”. With powder lightly dusted over her sharp angular face, her skin tone evened, her eczema-reddened skin virtually disappeared and she gasped at her reflection in the hand-held mirror. “What do you think?” she asked me, waving the mirror around her face, eyes shining. I smiled heartily at her, partly due to genuine amazement at the difference but also her girlish glee at her reflection, clearly one she’s not seen in that way for some time. We left the shop with decanted testers and I walked alongside her as she blinked with shimmery green eyelids, black lashes and rosy-tinted cheeks.
“I feel really conspicuous” she said “as though I’ve been made up to go on television”. I laughed and told her that, aside from a slight colour on her eyes, she didn’t look like she was wearing any at all which was perfectly true.
“Really?” she asked, “really, really?” and tossed her long hair over her shoulder, straightened her back and walked the walk of a lady with a Little Black Dress.
Spring
After a weekend of cleaning gardening tools, washing plastic pots, seed-sowing and starting a venture that was, and is, somewhat nerve-racking, certainly out of my comfort zone but conducive to putting my gardening skills and knowledge ‘out there’, I drove to college on Monday morning with the sun noticeably warming my right forearm for the first time this year. The nodding drips of pure white snowdrops have dulled and become tatty in the last week or so and have been replaced by the frothy white blossom of the blackthorn in the hedgerows and sharp yellow trumpets of daffodils in gardens and along verges as I drive. I am conscious that there is still huge amounts to learn and much to revise before my exam in little more than three months.
I’ve washed sofa covers this week - large squares and weird shapes draped and flapping in the warm breeze on the line, wafting Ec0ver laundry liquid mixed with ‘dried on the line’ across the garden as I took a break from studying fruit tree rootstocks and wandered round the veg patch with a cup of tea. I’ve fretted less over the fact that having started to look for an office job a month or so ago, nothing seems to be forthcoming and now that the peony has burst forth fat red fingers out of the earth, warmed by the recent Spring sun, I want nothing more than to let my fancy suits hang for another season in the wardrobe whilst I hang out in the garden in filthy clothes, with dirty fingernails and hopefully get paid to do the same in other people’s gardens.
I’ve spent two days this week being paid to clear and dig over a garden - two days of cutting back ivy, recognising dead-looking chopped back funnels of stems that actually promise weeks of dahlia blooms later in the season and carefully forking round green points of hostas that, for anyone who’s grown them, instantly make one think of slithery things with their homes on their backs. I’ve moved a small tree which I think will be absolutely fine but will check for signs of stress on my regular visits given that my gardening client of the week was Joe Brown’s parents who smile and laugh with me and generally fuss around a bit in a parental way which makes their son smile when I tell him. It makes me smile too.
I came home with soil-caked tools, offcuts of hostas, Japanese anemones and a dahlia, the colour of which cannot be remembered as well as a pocketful of cash, pressed upon me although I would have happily done it all for their smiles and peace of mind of Mr Brown who worries about his wife doing too much in the garden.
I have a pile of laundry to do, an even larger pile of ironing which I plan to do on Sunday morning whilst listening to the Archers and Desert Island Discs. As I further revise rootstocks tomorrow, I shall try not to think of the neglected, vacant allotment within walking distance with its large gooseberry and whitecurrant bushes, forgotten rasperry canes and a length of backbreaking-to-dig-out couch grass that I went to look at last weekend.
Pixel
I’m well aware that having a cat put to sleep is bound to be rather traumatic. I also appreciate that unless I’d left it until she was literally starving to death and fading away before my eyes, it was never going to feel like the right time. I cannot, however, get it out of my head that I could have left it one more day which, in ways that may seem rather stupid, would have made all the difference. The sun was shining the following day, it was peacefully quiet instead of a multitude of men in high-vis jackets climbing up and down telegraph poles on both sides of the fence outside. We would have had electricity instead of it having been switched off because of men on telegraph poles. She may have been able to stay on my lap instead of by the kitchen window where, due to no electricity, there was better light to find a vein. The following day it may have been a different vet who wouldn’t have spoken to me as though I was a five year old and refer to me as Pixel’s mummy. I wish I’d had the wherewithall to put my hand up and say “Stop, this just feels too, too wrong and you’re pissing me off” but I didn’t. I could hardly speak and I suppose went along with it on the grounds that it was never going to feel right, this must be how it is and, before I knew it, she’d gone and the rain was falling on the back of my head as I put her in the ground having neatly crossed her paws and wrapped her in a pashmina. The following day, it would only have made a difference to Pixel’s last minute of her life but it’s a last minute I want to wipe out and do again.
I am grateful tho’ that I realised today that she was nearly fourteen and not twelve as I’d thought which is not bad going for a cat who’s been at the very least partially sighted for the last four years and pretty much blind for the last year, had kidney and heart disease and harboured a tumour for who knows how long. One of her finest moments I feel was spitting full in the face of a vetinary nurse some years ago - not just hissing as she did on Tuesday but in-the-face, needing a tissue, spitting in the face. She’d also fallen out of two first floor bedroom windows in her time, was prone to sinking her claws in the back of my ex’s head as he walked down the stairs and was highly adept at articulating ”up yours/fuck off/kiss my furry arse” with a couple of flicks of her tail as she left a room. The only wildlife she caught were flies and a butterfly and in her days of being physically able to leap up on the kitchen worktop which she knew was Highly Forbidden, I couldn’t leave bags of mushrooms there because she’d eat them all. She’d also have sold her soul for a poppadom. In days gone by when it was just the two of us, she’d wake me in the morning by putting a paw on my face - no claws, just a paw which she’d leave there til I opened my eyes. She’d chirrup if you stroked her head and give a grumpy “Hmph” if you whispered in her ear. The arm of one of the sofas seems desperately bare without her.
Once the earth has settled having watered her well in, I’ll plant a shrub above her - a Christmas box, with glossy evergreen leaves, small black berries which appear just after the flowers at Christmas, the perfume of which will waft across the garden in mid-Winter and just a couple of stems will scent a whole room for days.
Pix
This weekend, I’d planned to dig a new bed in the garden for potatoes but after a visit to the vets on Friday afternoon I also thought I’d be digging a hole for one of my cats following a diagnosis of Something Serious.
Contrary madam that she is, she rallied and, to my utter relief, was given a reprieve at her follow-up appointment on Saturday afternoon and was as vocal on her return home as she was on the way there which, quite frankly, I wasn’t expecting. Her outlook is bleak however and that’s all I want to say about thayat.
