I have cut down the bee garden in front of the house.
The flowers were finished and everything was starting slowly to fade. Instead of a boisterous mass of green, it was beginning to become a dismal forest of sticks.
It was starting to look awful. Actually it has been looking a bit awful for ages, but every time I have thought I would go and do something about it, I have discovered it still to be buzzing with lots of bees, and desisted. It has been wonderful to have such a cast-iron, politically correct, fashionable excuse for idleness.
There was a lot of mint. The new baby bees are going to find that their honey has a very interesting flavour.
Today I took the secateurs out and chopped everything down. I pulled out the worst of the weeds and then strimmed all of the grass. It was not exactly grass any more. There was an awful lot of creeping buttercup, and dozens of dandelions.
I do not mind these. They will all be lovely for the bees next year.
I was quite startled and a bit distressed to discover how much wildlife was still lurking there. There were so many tall plants that I had not given the soil level very much thought, and there, in the cool dark, scuttled hundreds of little spiders and beetles, accompanied by slugs and snails and dozens of other nameless creatures.
I felt terribly guilty to think that I was destroying their home, like a villainous slash-and-burn logging company in the sacred Amazon rainforest.
I tried very hard to be as careful as I could with them, although one poor slug had a terrible fatal misfortune with the strimmer, and tried to leave as much plant life as I could so that they would still have dark spaces to hide from the ravening birds, but I do not know how successful I was.
It is not easy to have a garden where the postman can get in and out, but which still provides a wild sanctuary for all living creatures. I would not have been surprised to discover a deer or two in there.
In the end it was done, and it looked very much tidier, although I do not imagine that Kew gardens would feel any anxiety about the imminent arrival of a northern competitor. You can get all the way to the front door now, with hardly a single hazard, although I left the giant fennel by the doorstep, even though I expect it will drip rain down the back of the postman’s neck, because it is full of ripening seeds and they are excellent in curries.
Afterwards I turned my attention to the back of the house. We have had something of a domestic dispute about the back yard over the last few days. I ought to feel guilty about this as well, because poor Mark has been made to feel very inadequate and inefficient, but I don’t, because the result has been splendid. Every last rusting piece of scrap iron has melted away to Ambleside tip, the stacked wood has been sawn into stove-lengths and squirrelled away for the approaching energy crisis, and the heap of not-at-all handy bricks upon which I have stubbed my toes so many times, has disappeared. There is not a single bicycle remaining.
It will help you to appreciate Mark’s capacity for storing endless junk if I tell you that a couple of weeks ago, as well as the pile of bricks, there were five bicycles in our yard, along with a water tank, an enormous rusty tow bar, his hydraulic jack, his axle stands, and a massive pile of firewood. It is the tiniest possible yard and when I tore an irreparable hole in my dress whilst hanging washing the other day, divorce became a topic for discussion.
I can now reach the flower beds again. These have not helped matters by expanding enthusiastically all over everything. Green tendrils have reached everywhere, in the way they do in television documentaries about what the world might be like if all of the people disappeared.
I trimmed all of this back as well.
The compost heap is now so huge that it is practically above next door’s wall, but that does not matter. As long as Mark keeps having the occasional wee on it it will disappear quickly, and next year we will have lots of rich compost to turn into another domestic jungle.
After this it had got so late that it was practically time to get ready for work, which is where I am now.
I am not having a very good time.
It started much as normal, but halfway through the shift, when Mark came back from installing rural broadband, we had to exchange cars. He has now got mine at home, and I have got his.
This is because mine needs an MOT and he is taking it to bits to see what is wrong with it.
There are several things wrong with it. I know this because it has got more than one sort of clunk.
In the meantime I am driving his car. I have never actually driven it before, and it is just about as wrong as a car can be. Everything is in the wrong place and there is nowhere to put my things.
I do not like it at all.
On the plus side it has a functional radio. I have not investigated this yet, but I will.
I think I might do that now.
