I have had a somewhat difficult day.
Do not feel anxious at this point, you are not about to read one of those miserably gloomy entries which bemoans life, and the world, and my despair therein. There have been good things as well as difficulties, and for the purposes of this entry, as well as my sanity, I think I should highlight those.
The first difficulty concerns flowers.
I have spent the day cleaning.
The house needed this desperately. If anybody is inclined towards reading past entires they might wish to look backwards and find out exactly how long it is that the dust has been collecting on the tops of the skirting boards. I do not need to look. It was instantly obvious that it has been a very long time.
When I had almost finished I thought how lovely it would be to have flowers.
Back in the days of our wealth and financial success, actually when the children were small really, certainly not very recently, I used to buy a lot of flowers. Indeed, when we had an actual taxi business I had an arrangement with the florist that I would send a taxi driver to deliver all of her flowers and she would pay me in flowers for the house.
This was glorious. In those days, in between running a taxi business, I used to arrange them in huge vases and distribute them all over the house. I loved this, and appreciated them every time I walked into a room and saw the vivid splashes of colours, and breathed in lilies and night-scented-stock and freesias.
We have not bought flowers for ages, for various pecuniary reasons which I shall not go into here.
The same pecuniary difficulties, incidentally, have had an effect on my ablutionary habits. I recall with wistful regret the days when I thought Molton Brown was a range of toiletries fit only for the lavatories in second-rate public houses. How the mighty have not only fallen, but crashed humiliatingly to the ground with their knickers on show to the world.
Mark did some extra work this week, and we had not quite spent all of the proceeds yet. I looked round my gleamingly clean house and thought how lovely it might be to have some flowers to go with the scents of beeswax and lavender polish.
I do not like flowers from the supermarket. I like to buy flowers from somebody who knows about flowers, who has trimmed them and arranged them, and thought about them, and where I can choose the ones I like. I do not want to buy my flowers in a dreadful wilting prearranged bunch labelled a bouquet and charged at eight quid. I would rather have not so many flowers for my money, but bought from a proper florist who suggests the right bits of greenery to go with different colours.
Anyway they last longer.
I do not know what I was thinking.
I walked into the village with the sun warm on my face, feeling contented with the beautiful spring day.
The florist is not there any more.
Of course, I realised, with a dreadful, jolting shock, in our brave new world which has forbidden all beauty and joy there is no space for a florist. They are inessential, not allowed, closed.
Ours has not only closed, but gone.
In any case they made most of their trade from providing beautiful flower arrangements for hotels and guest houses.
Readers, in that moment a bitterness entered my soul. I wonder how many people have contracted bat flu in the cool green tranquillity of a florist’s shop.
I went home.
When I got home I thought I was deceiving myself, because as I walked through the door I could smell flowers.
I realised that the daffodils on the kitchen windowsill had opened in the sunshine.
Mark brought me the daffodils the other day. He has grown them at the farm, because he knows I like them so much, from bulbs that his friend Ted had dug up during some rebuilding work.
Mark saved them, and then planted them and had managed to keep just a small handful safe from the ravening sheep.
They are huge and fresh, and beautiful.
I looked at their clean dignity and thought that nothing is nicer than flowers grown for you by somebody who loves you.
It is a wonderful world.
The second difficulty, which I shall describe only briefly because I am running out of time, concerns the august Daily Telegraph, fount of much wisdom but today proven to be a fibber.
They have, this very evening, published a handful of brief sentences purporting to be an extract from my diary.
I have not written a single word of it. Worse, it is twaddle, and they have put my name next to it.
Please do not read it. I did not say it. It is a lot of junk – not even a lot of junk, there is hardly any of it – written by somebody who sounds to be in the throes of a depressive episode with an unwanted deadline looming over them.
I don’t know whether to be pleased or not that they have not, as they promised, added a link to these pages. It is such tedious bunkum that nobody would have followed it in any case.
If I was the Queen I would skip over it.
Fortunately I had got so bored with waiting for them to get on with it that I had lost interest and given up, and hence am not disappointed. Six weeks ago I would have been very sad indeed, but it was so long ago that I had forgotten, and do not mind any more.
It goes to show that you can’t believe a word you read in the papers.
Have a picture of some interesting tree roots.
