I have discovered an uncomfortable Home Truth about myself.
For years now I have had a list of jobs which I knew that I would get done one day. All I have ever needed was some time and a decent opportunity.
I have bemoaned the lack of such opportunity with much virtuous regret, but of course time has always been so limited I have known that it would never arise.
Until now.
Now I have been obliged to confront the regrettable reality that all of these things have not been done, not because of my overcrowded and hectic schedule, but because actually I really can’t be bothered to do them at all.
Today I found myself in the depressing position of not being able to think of a single excuse for not digging out the embarrassingly weed-infested flowerbed which is in the trough on the top of the wall at the front of the house.
I have been telling myself, and Mark, that I have been desperate to Get This Done, for ages.
Today I discovered that this was not at all true. Actually I was not in the least desperate to get it done. What I was actually desperate to do was loaf about in the conservatory with a glass of wine.
I was sorry to learn this about myself, and reluctantly put my shoulder to the domestic wheel.
This flower bed is the one that people see when they walk past the house. It is the single object which passers by will take into account whilst forming an opinion of our domestic life. Judgements about the respectability and industriousness of the inhabitants of our home will be made on that basis and that alone.
All it lacked was an upturned shopping trolley and a burned out Fiat.
It was awful.
Clearly it had contained flowers once, in an earlier incarnation, when Mark rebuilt it and I had a costly excursion to Hayes Garden Centre, but that was years and years ago, and it has been completely ignored ever since.
All that remained was a dried-out carnation, some cigarette ends, some straggly clover and some clumps of feverfew.
Feverfew self-seeds all over our garden, and irritates me enormously, until it flowers, at which point I am always very glad that I did not get round to pulling it up. It is supposed to be good for migraine, if you read websites written by enthusiastic hippies, although less so if you read websites written by actual doctors. I get occasional shocking migraines, at which point I like to take serious drugs, the sort that come in red boxes and that the pharmacist has to be called through from the back to agree about. Hence I have never tried self-medicating with feverfew, although it remains in the garden as a sort of vague insurance against the end of the civilised world.
Funnily enough, although we do seem to be at the end of the civilised world at the moment, I did not feel especially tempted to dig any up and dry it just in case.
I did not at all want to go and dig out the flower bed, and hoped against hope that Mark would be using the wheelbarrow, but he had thoughtfully emptied it and made it available, and so I trudged gloomily around to the front of the house with the wheelbarrow and a shovel.
I dug it all out, which was satisfying in a grimly exterminatory sort of way. I saved the crocus corms, which hadn’t flowered much in any case, but might do better next year, and chucked the feverfew on the compost heap.
It was dreadfully neglected.
The soil was not soil, but a sort of weary brown dust. I have no idea what I must have been thinking about when I put it there, or what it actually was, probably some ghastly overpriced shop-bought compound. Certainly it had never seen any kind of compost. Not a worm was in sight.
I dug it all out and chucked it on to the compost heap, where I mixed it up with the current thriving wormery and a bag of seaweed that Mark had pinched from the beach whilst installing rural broadband in a caravan.
Then I lugged bags and bags of rotted cow-muck compost around to the front and dumped it in the trough. I mixed in with a few handfuls of that crystal stuff that you put in flower pots so that everything doesn’t die when you forget to water it, and which turns into sickening lumps of sticky jelly when it rains.
I did not plant anything in it, because I had exhausted my interest in gardening by then, and also because I haven’t really got very much which is ready to plant out. People can now form their opinions of the inhabitants of our house by examining the trough of poo and jelly which stretches across the front of it.
I don’t care. I have been virtuous enough for one day.
I am going to go and drink some wine.
I didn’t take a picture of the trough full of poo. Mark took a picture of his newly completed wall at the back. I thought that might be a better idea.
