We spent the day doing what any red-blooded, newly childless couple should do in the springtime.
We have been gardening.
Mark went up to the allotment.
We have decided that our chief expense in produce that could be done perfectly well from home is in fact not vegetables but cut flowers.
As far as fruit and vegetables go, we use an awful lot of melons, sweet peppers and onions. We use things like carrots as well, but if you regard your time as having a value they cost about ten times as much to grow your own as to buy them in Asda.
The thing which is a really huge and unnecessary expense is flowers.
I like to have flowers in the house, and we buy them whenever we can. We used to have an arrangement with the florist across the road, in which we delivered her flower arrangements to hotels in our taxi, and she paid us in flowers. This worked brilliantly until she sold the business to some people who had very sensibly invested in a van of their own.
Mark has planted the allotment with flowers.
So far he has dug half of it over and dug in a trailer load of muck from the farm. He has covered the other half with a large plastic sheet in order to slow the encroachment of dandelions and couch grass. We will grow melons in it next year if we get organised enough. Then he has dug the uncovered half into ridges and planted flower seeds.
I am very touched by this decision, which he has explained is because he loves me, although I suspect a sideways glance at the prices in the florist’s shop may have helped.
He has been at the allotment all day, digging and weeding and doing man things. I stayed at home and when I had finished doing my housewifely chores I went into our actual garden.
The sun was shining, but I still needed a sheepskin jacket and my furry boots. This was because our garden does not need vigorous digging any more, and it is enough to potter around it gently with a trowel. I like doing this far more than I like double-digging waste cow products into trenches.
I have been replanting our hanging baskets and contemplating nature, which is the best way to do gardening. All sorts of things are beginning to sprout now, there are some tulips that Number Two Daughter brought back as a present for me from a rascally trip to Amsterdam last year, and a surprise lily.
It is a surprise because it is the sole survivor of the joyous and determined digging done by last year’s litter of eight adventurous poopies. I planted more than a dozen lily bulbs, and they were all unearthed and eaten, except, it turns out, for this single one. I was very pleased to see it. There is a self-seeded sweet pea beside it. I was pleased to see that as well, you may not be surprised to hear that sweet peas are my favourites, along with hyacinths and bluebells and all my other favourites.
I am sure I have told you about when Lucy was small and pretended to be a puppy called Hyacinth all the time. Eventually Oliver wanted to be one as well. Lucy allowed him to be a puppy as well. He was called Lowercynth.
In the end the dogs and I took a short walk across the road to the allotment. Mark will not take them with him when he goes there because Roger Poopy is a complete buffoon, and belts about all over everybody else’s shallots, but we were only going to say hello, so it was all right.
I admired his trenches and he ambled back with me and brought a wheelbarrow load of muck for me to use in our own garden. We had a cup of coffee before getting ready for work and felt pleased with the world.
It will be lovely to have lots of flowers. I can’t think of a better use for an allotment.
He has worked jolly hard at it.
I do like being married.
