GILES: Phew! It’s arrived! Last year, Gogglebox sent a Christmas bonus in the form of a hamper. It was most welcome and the anxiety of whether it would appear this year was heightened by Channel Four’s rash and extravagant offer to Paul Hollywood to start a rival Bake Off – at £75 MILLION. Was it really as much as that? These figures put cottage-dwellers in a spin.
The whole mystique of a hamper is deeply retro. It’s ‘round the world in eighty days’ stuff; it’s Rudyard Kipling…it’s a foreigner’s idea of Englishness.
I would like to think that the hampers were made in England from sustainably sourced willow from Somerset withy beds, where generations of basket makers have eked out a living making panniers for hot-air balloons, and for the luxury-hamper market. Fathers teaching sons ancient skills from thatched hovels with hollyhocks round the door where the mother is scouring the front step and the baby is in a crib nearby with a black cat. Ahh! That is good…Mary has just confirmed by googling that the hamper was indeed made in Somerset by a family firm in their seventh generation of hamper-mongering, P. H. Coate and Son, whose fastest-growing line of business is wicker coffins, incidentally.
That would explain the astronomical price of The Epicure Hamper (£300), but women and children are no longer involved in the hand stripping of the bark of the willow, which is now done by noisy machine. More’s the pity, for a neo-Luddite like myself. But this has taken the wind out of my sails, as I was just about to launch on a tirade against the global economy, assuming the hamper-making had been outsourced to China or Vietnam. Good for Fortnum’s!
But, as Mary has observed, not only do I bite the hand that feeds me, I like to look a gift horse in the mouth. Like everything else, I have my reservations about the hamper, not least the tongue-in-cheek fruity language that accompanies the printed words on the labels – ‘Your parcel of joy’, indeed. ‘We hope you enjoy the adventure.’ Just as in previous years I will unceremoniously dive in, remove the superior spaghetti-like wooden shavings and use them for my compost heap – all heaps require layers of dry matter amongst the rotting veg – and line up the comestibles for some serious cherry-picking.
The Epicure Hamper contains a small proportion of inedible (my words) foodstuffs. One example is shards of lemon and orange peel, coated thickly in luxury chocolate. That is all very well but impractical; as with lemon zest in chicken fricassee, the reality is that there is simply too much spitting out required. The hamper also contains ‘classic’ marzipan fruits. These are replicas in miniature of oranges, apples, pineapples, etcetera, made exclusively of marzipan. I have never known anyone purchase marzipan fruits or even offer them to me in their house. In my judgement they should be confined to bushtucker trials along with crystallised fruit in general.
The 18-inch-high, dark-brown metal cylinders of luxury chocolate and walnut biscuits will be recycled as presents to aunts and uncles, in the full expectation that they will then be recycled by those aunts and uncles and used as presents for others they have failed to buy for in a continuous cycle of giving. The Germans have a word for a present that never stays with its recipient, because, although perfectly desirable in theory, no one actually wants it. It is called a Wanderpreis – literally a present that wanders.
Wot – no liqueur chocolates? We used to get tipsy on De Kuyper as youngsters but mayhap they are too plebeian for Fortnum’s (mayhap is a very Fortnum’s retro word).
Last year, Mary caught me trying out the crystallised peppermint creams late at night (we had run out of chocolate) and, not for the first time, I felt like Richmal Crompton’s character, the eleven-year-old schoolboy, William Brown.
You see, my view was that the fact that I might have removed the odd cream or two from the bottom layer of the box in no way disqualified the whole from being recycled as a Wanderpreis. By the time, if ever, the recipient got to the bottom of the box, they would hardly notice, or assume it was a member of their own household who had done the filching. It would not be a mystery to which anyone with any sense would want to give time to the consideration of.
After all a few missing chocolates is a very small mystery compared to the big mysteries of BREXIT and TRUMP. Oh yes – and why no ale amongst the fine wines for those of us English gentlemen, like musself, who are allergic to the grape and prefer fine ales to fine wines. Wine drinking is for womenfolk.
MARY: The diatribe above is a perfect example of Giles suffering from what we call Ratnerlallia. Gerald Ratner, the director of the successful jewellery firm, when asked why he was able to sell his products so cheaply, retorted cheekily that it was because they were all ‘crap’. The joke backfired and he had to step down. The shareholders were livid. Instead of Giles falling on the hamper with gratitude, he chose to start writing notes about what was wrong with it. ‘Send an email, Mary,’ he ordered.
‘Ask is it possible that we can redeem the whole hamper for cash?’
Naturally I ignored this Ratnerlallia.
GILES: Cottagers of old would have fallen on the Dundee cake and Turkish delight like flotsam and jetsam from a looted ship. But sensibly I have wrapped these items for my elderly mother who has a sweet tooth but very little appetite. Christmas presents ‘for less’. Good on yer Gogglebox!
280 grams of Salisbury Plain Honey took my interest as I read the blurb on the label:
In summer we move some hives onto sites around Salisbury Plain. The army firing ranges on the Plain have surprisingly created a large area of wild grassland habitat, undisturbed except for the occasional explosion. Carpets of summer flowers spread for miles, scabious, sainfoin, vetches and numerous clovers producing distinctive honey.
I will bear that in mind when I’m having a quiet cuppa with toast and honey and the windows are rattling from the din of superguns on the plain. ‘Occasional’ indeed. Year round, more like, especially on damp days which, in Blighty, are year round.
When I first moved to a Wiltshire cottage I imagined the constant background noise would be that of chirping house sparrows – as supplied the soundtrack to every radio play and TV series set in the English countryside in the Seventies. Now sparrows are rarer than hen’s teeth.
The thuds and rattles of guns on the plain and the clatter of helicopters are the reality of our country life. Occasionally a Chinook, on a so-called manoeuvre, comes thundering over the thatch shaking the brick-built cottage to its foundations and making us feel as if we live in Aleppo. But the wording on the honey label is wrong. The army hasn’t ‘created’ the bioabundance (buzzword) of Salisbury Plain. It is one of the last remaining large expanses of land to have gone unmolested by farmers and provides the evidence of what nature will give us if spared the crucifixion of intensive farming.
The longer I live, the more it seems to me that conventional farming, so-called intensive farming and wildlife conservation are all contradictions in terms. Biodynamic farming, high conservation grade farming – now that’s where they put the culture into agriculture.
MARY: Giles’s description of the noise from the army’s manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain is wildly exaggerated. They happen rarely. We hear occasional ominous dull thuds and see the occasional Chinook.
GILES: Just when you are feeling a bit post-prandial or liverish and need some old-fashioned Heinz salad cream or pickled onions to revive your worn out tastebuds, Fortnum’s suggest you use their orange curd as a ‘garnish for meat leftovers’.
No thanks. This leopard cannot change its spots. Lemon curd is acceptable but orange curd? Once again, the label is a bit of a giveaway, written in that characteristic, slightly fruity language that I imagine Simon Callow speaking: ‘Crafted in England from butter, eggs and oranges. Buttery, satisfying and awfully orangey.’
I am inclined to reply in my best public school mockney accent, ‘You said it, mate!’
Orange curd?
It’s like when I was a student at Harrow School of Art (Foundation Course), bedbound and breathless from bronchitis, I could just about stomach baked beans on toast. My sister kindly came to cook for me in the bedsit in Pinner where I resided. She duly presented me with a meal on a tray and I thanked her, but what a shame! She had thought fit to add mixed herbs to a tried and tested combo which needs no improvement, especially on the herb front.
‘Start again Jax,’ I wheezed. ‘I can’t eat this.’
Take this masterpiece of verbosity, from the label of the Fortnum’s relish Anchovy Alchemy:
AN ARMADA OF SUPERIOR ANCHOVY,
WARM PEPPER
AND JUST A LITTLE DILL COMBINE
TO CREATE A TASTE THAT,
ONCE ACQUIRED,
DEMANDS
REGULAR
SATISFACTION
Not since Edward Lear have words been required to make shapes.
But a word in defence of the flowery verbiage that accompanies Fortnum’s products. It must be remembered the store is selling a vision of England largely to Japanese, American and Chinese customers in search of that elusive Downton factor.
GILES: Mary has forced me to come up to London for three days of Christmas parties which I cannot get out of. A kind friend, who normally takes in lodgers, but currently has a free room, was the host of one of these parties and suggested that, since our normal bolt hole is unavailable, we take advantage of the free room and parking (for friend of a resident) at only £10 a day.
It’s a long time since I spent three days in London and it’s bringing back fond memories.
For many years I have liked nothing more than to do a bit of moonlighting from my painting ‘career’ by helping London friends in their gardens. No assumptions should be made that, because of my age and encyclopaedic knowledge of horticulture, my contribution would be designing said gardens or ordering workmen about. On the contrary, I’ve always shied away from any position of authority.
What I like is the act of rolling up my sleeves and getting stuck into some pro-active clearing, pruning and letting in of light. It’s the same impetus which makes Mary enjoy ironing – you get instant results and job satisfaction. I enjoy physically demanding work but my preference is that it should be mentally undemanding. I often wonder if my favouring of these infantile roles in the garden stem from the happy memories I retain of working during bob-a-job week as a wolf cub in the lane where I grew up near Keele service station in Staffordshire.
Observing this preference to always favour the downwardly mobile position, in contrast to her own upward mobility on the social scene, Mary has been known to call me a bob-a-job man.
MARY: Giles has always had a love of garden waste disposal. His ownership of estate cars – first a series of three Lada Riva Estates, then a seven-seater Peugeot, then a Volvo – has facilitated the removal of vast quantities of London-based garden waste, broken outdoor furniture and decades of plastic pots. So cathartic does he find the satisfaction of a decluttered garden that he was almost tempted to go into waste haulage as a profession. He has even considered having the legend ‘Garden Clearance – no job too small’ on the side of my car. But this sort of dynamism is not really his style.
GILES: It helps that I have an acre’s worth of wild garden in which to process the London green waste by burning, composting or ‘slow heap’: a sort of laissez-faire composting where you dump stuff and it slowly decomposes to dark matter or ‘humus’ (as opposed to hummus, the foodstuff). The slow heap would provide a valuable overwintering site for hedgehogs if we had any, but we don’t. The badgers have eaten them all.
But back to Shepherd’s Bush and my temporary residence in Loftus Road where, ten years ago, I was employed by the owner of another garden in the same street. What made this wild, neglected London garden a pleasure to work in was the insect life: bees and tortoiseshell butterflies and hoverflies were all attracted by a huge overgrown elder bush in full flower resembling some half-hardy exotic from sunnier climes.
In Wiltshire, the elder bush is viewed as a despised weed, a dweller of drains and outdoor privies, and is persecuted especially by the natives. But the status of the elder tree or shrub has always been subject to the vagaries of fashion, and currently enlightened landowners, fond of a little re-wilding, are finding themselves attracted to its wayward rampant growth.
The appeal is obvious when set against stiff garden centre plants arranged in neat rows with all the formality of a chess-board. Middle-class revivalists like myself read up old cottage herbals wherein every part of the elder has been praised throughout recorded history by Pliny to Evelyn as a medicinal plant whose virtues border on the magical or miraculous. You could say it’s the ultimate hipster’s plant, giving us elderflower cordial, elderberry wine and the finest homemade flutes and pan pipes – the ultimate in authenticity. I would like to see bird-sown elder bushes sprouting from every crack in London’s pavements, and that would have been a possibility had we not strayed away from Europe.
A strong EU current of thought and opinion was well on its way to banning Glyphosate as a possible carcinogen. This is the active ingredient of Roundup, the world’s most popular so-called harmless weedkiller and the cornerstone of GM technology.
MARY: Lovely to wake up in Virginia’s warm, clean, bright house in the middle (up to a point) of buzzy London. Virginia is an agony aunt who has lost her weekly column on the closed-down print version of the Independent newspaper. She has been helping people in print for fifty years and, knowing that it’s a vocational role, I had no hesitation in requesting a private consultation about a personal problem.
Virginia agreed, and I found it so helpful to thrash through all the agonies I am undergoing about having to sell my family home in Northern Ireland, which I co-own with my sister. We are not even selling it for the money – our eight-bedroomed house in a one-acre garden in the centre of a town. It was my mother’s pride and joy, and my grandfather moved into it 102 years ago. But no one wants it.
I’ve had second and third opinions from people on my side, not crooks, and they tell me that no young people want to buy a ‘period home’ that needs work doing on it. Young people can barely change a plug, the estate agent said. It’s been on the market for five years since my mother died. Finally my sister and I offered it to the next-door church at a cut down price, thinking at least it will serve a useful purpose to the townspeople, they can go in there and have counselling, meditation sessions possibly, prayer meetings and so on. But now we find out that, once the paperwork has been signed and the church owns the property, they are rumoured to have plans to bulldoze the house with all its lovely parquet floors and panelling and big windows, and use it as a car park. Last night an architectural historian was at Virginia’s dinner and he and his wife begged theatrically: ‘Do anything but don’t let an Edwardian house be replaced by a car park. Anything would be better than that in a town which is already blighted.’
‘What can I do?’ I agonise to Virginia as I pace about her sitting room.
Virginia, with all her years of experience, is able to point out what had previously escaped me but once she mentions it, is blindingly obvious. ‘All this is grief. You are trying to cling on to your mother, not to the house.
‘Times have changed since your mother lived in that house. The town is not the town it used to be. She probably wouldn’t want to live there herself if she had the opportunity to move into it now for the first time. You’ve worried about this house for five years. Your mother wouldn’t want you to go on worrying about it.’
And of course she is absolutely right. I let the worry go.
GILES: The Uxbridge Road is the most ethnically diverse spot I have been to in England. Arabs, Afghans, Somalis, Yemenis, Lebanese, Pekinese, dirty knees so goes the playground chant. I used to read a massive book in my parents’ library called Peoples of All Nations. Little did I know I would be meeting these very peoples a few decades later in my own country. Why the English kids feel they have to go abroad for a gap year experience is beyond comprehension when all the cultural diversity they could hope to experience is already present and correct on their own doorstep. Unless of course it’s the sun and palm trees you are after.
Mary has gone out to lunch but since we have to go out again tonight in another gruelling round of pre-Christmas socialising, I insisted that I should be allowed to hide during the day in Virginia’s spare room. I’m not alone amongst men whose hearts sink at the very thought of socialising. From watching so much TV, I can recall Bear Grylls describing his worst nightmare. Far from it being trapped in some sort of cave without food, light or water and surrounded by biting insects and snakes, he observed that his own worst nightmare would be to find himself stuck with a bore at a crowded London cocktail party.
Yet while Mary was processing old friends at the Chelsea Arts Club, here I was watching ring-necked parakeets from a window and sporadically letting myself out to spend this gap day immersing myself in the Heathrow Terminal Three-style crowds of the Uxbridge Road. My aim was to see if I could integrate into this strange and unfamiliar world.
I set myself the challenge of finding a KitKat amongst the rows of halal butchers, Damascene restaurants, Sudanese travel agents and Jamaican barbers.
Eventually I was successful. An Afghani ironmonger has been cunning enough to spot this gap in the market and, as a nod to Western culture, has accommodated amidst the nuts and bolts, a small confectionery counter with KitKat centre stage.
As I proffered the cash, my attempts at affability were not so much rebuffed as ignored. The shop keeper continued to yabber away in Pashto or Dari on his mobile phone and with much gesticulating but no eye contact, he accepted the money and returned the one penny change which went into the Afghan helping hands charity box. Null points on the integration front. Not even thumbs up or a high five. Admittedly I couldn’t do a high five myself – this leopard can’t change its spots.
But over the road in Shepherd’s Bush Market I admired the colourful packaging of olive oil, black peppercorns, pistachio nuts, Iranian dates and Turkish delight, all for less than in my local Wiltshire Co-op, and observed how much fresher and more appetising seemed the fruit and vegetables than on our own high street equivalent. The textiles alone were a feast for the senses and I even bought a pair of wellington boots for less (£12) and on exiting the souk-like market was recognised from Gogglebox by a woman who shouted ‘Nutty!’ Soon her dreadlocked partner had spotted me and I gurned for several selfies. ‘Where’s Mary, Nutty?’ they asked. And I told them Mary was having an ‘affair’ so she was in a different part of London. We all had a laugh, or laff in the immortal words of Hyacinth Bucket. It’s a go-to destination, far preferable to soulless Kensington. Yet now I’ve discovered the Uxbridge Road boasts a hipster café and a Polish shop which sells pumpernickel bread and kefir.
Ten years ago, I remember having to step into the road to avoid an excitable crowd of young men at the nearby Shepherd’s Bush masjid. The prayer meeting was in full swing and once again I felt invisible. I had stepped into a parallel universe. A stranger in a strange land and unable to protest because the territory was theirs by dint of sheer numbers. Not that I expected them to part like the Red Sea, but an Englishman prefers not to be run over by an omnibus but to walk on the pavement.
In the intervening decade, a victory for common sense and race-relations has resulted in a prominent sign being erected: ‘Please do not block the public pavement’. If we are to integrate on this over-crowded damp island, we must emulate the Japanese by being much more disciplined and more polite. We must robustly defend our values and not yield to zealotry. I once had a car sticker knocked up by the local printer ‘say no to women bishops’. The printer really enjoyed the challenge – he photoshopped the head of a long-haired woman onto an image of a dog-collared vicar and had a large X through it, but my politically correct youngest daughter peeled it off, stating that if I parked the car anywhere near her student lodgings in Oxford’s Cowley Road the Volvo would certainly receive a brick through the window. It was only meant to raise a laugh, but for her generation the only legitimate target left in Britain today for ridicule are the upper classes.
MARY: I paid an agony aunt favour back to Virginia. There was a giant duvet cover on her kitchen draining board. Virginia explained that it would take three days to dry it because it was too big for the tumble drier and for some reason her washing machine had left it sopping wet.
I suggested that as a treat for her I would take it round to the laundrette on the corner and put it in the giant tumble drier there. Virginia was amazed that such a thought had never occurred to her. I took it round and spent thirty minutes of bliss while it dried.
I have always loved laundrettes. They guarantee more happiness to me than a trip to a beauty spa would to another woman. First of all, there are the community viewing and bonding opportunities, the sense of real life and real talk. Then the sense of competence. These are machines that even I am able to work. Just slot the right money in the holes and ram the tray in. There is nothing to beat the satisfaction of tackling a simple job and doing it well. The duvet cover comes out bone dry after thirty minutes of my spying on the local women and men coming in and out and chatting to the laundrette keeper about what they are going to buy from the market for their Christmas dinner etcetera.
GILES: I am twenty feet up an extending ladder which I have tied, for personal health and safety reasons, to the trunk of a Black Walnut tree, donated to my plantation by my brother Pip. I was about to cut a lateral branch that was as thick as my own leg as I felt instinctively that the vigour of the tree’s growth was being diverted into this rival side branch and threatening to unbalance the original crown of its parent tree. I have got to the stage now where my thirty-year-old trees are telling me what to do on a telepathic level. The so-called Wood Wide Web has been identified by the German Forest Ranger and best-selling author Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees). The high winds on these Wiltshire prairies mean that tall brittle trees tend to be blown over. So I am converting part of my wood into thickets by cutting selected trees or shrubs to the ground which (fingers crossed) will promote rapid bushy multi-stemmed growth. The process is called coppicing and is at least as old as the Neolithic period. Not all species are suitable for this treatment but it is hugely satisfying work and quite addictive.
However, I would argue that restoring habitats on ecological principles seems an infinitely better way of spending my time than watching sport, drinking alcohol or going to lap dancing clubs as other men do. I love being outdoors I am in my element. Mary is in her element in a restaurant or cocktail party telling anecdotes to an appreciative audience (preferably those who are new to the anecdotes). Mary has a tendency to set the scene of an anecdote to an almost over-descriptive degree. I remember her Aunt Joan, in Dublin, asking her son Donald whether he had time to hear an anecdote about something which had happened in the bridge club. Donald, who was on his lunch break from work replied, matter-of-factly, ‘Yes – provided you don’t start it with the day you were born.’ And I know the feeling.
Wiltshire seems dank after the contrast of multi-coloured, multicultural London. It was the worst kind of winter day: short, sunless cold and dark. In order not to be defeated by the winter you must force yourself outdoors. Hunting and shooting and the ownership of dogs who need walks are the means by which members of the countryman fraternity ensure they are driven outside whether they are dreading it or not.
How different my life might have been had I emigrated to Australia for my health.
Up here in the bare branches of the tree canopy wearing my camouflage jacket I have a bird’s eye view of my wood and soon I hear the rusty gate hinge squeaks of a troupe of gold crested wrens. They are so tiny that they almost resemble Christmas decorations. It’s odd that extremely small creatures are the least afraid of mankind. A blackbird or thrush would start in fear if you approached them, not so the gold crest.
Other branches offer me the spectacle of coal tits, long tailed tits, and wrens and robins which often hunt for food in packs.
Unobserved on my perch I spot Mary framed in the window of Room Two, where she’s ironing. It’s her way of relaxing. I just wish she wouldn’t use white Irish linen table napkins as they enslave her in an endless washing and ironing treadmill and are quite unsuitable for the way we live now. What’s wrong with kitchen roll?
MARY: Regarding kitchen roll – it’s too much like having loo roll sitting about, but these hundred-and-something-year-old Irish linen napkins lend a certain distinction to the table. Unlike in my grandparents’ day when people hung onto their own napkins, identified by their own napkin rings for day after day, and were therefore careful not to generate too many smears, I encourage my guests to use theirs with gay abandon. They stand up to any number of batter wash cycles. Holding and handling them is a sensual pleasure and the intricacies of their subtle design bear up to sustained scrutiny. Of all the things which are enjoyable to iron, table napkins offer the most satisfaction – especially when I wield the spray-on starch available from the hardware shop in Devizes.
GILES: My garden boasts bullfinches which, with the aid of my new Chinese manufactured binocular, resemble miniature parrots with exotic pink colouring. Since I’m the only local ‘landowner’ with dock plants – the others are too tidy-minded to tolerate them – I’m the only one to attract bullfinches which feast on the seeds so I have the last laugh.
I am a weed worshipper and Mary is really starting to appreciate teasels especially when the bees forage and later the goldfinches probe the seed heads.
There’s time to think when perched at the top of a ladder which is gently swaying in a light breeze. Huge efforts were expended year on year in planting trees, but why didn’t I just wait for them to arrive instead of doing it myself? This they surely would have done, as anyone who has seen trees growing on railway embankments can testify. No one planted them, they are wildlife. It was Richard Mabey who first pointed out that tree planting is an activity more to do with atonement for our warped relationship with nature than with anything else. That deep-seated sense of a fall from a state of grace comes from the fact that we were the first nation to industrialise our landscape and most city dwellers dream that one day they will leave the city and return to a country cottage with apple trees in the garden and roses round the door. On daytime television, this fantasy is packaged into a programme called Escape to the Country. Like most terrestrial daytime television it is a terrible thief of time.
Down to business, enough dreamtime. I spray the bow saw with WD40 and perform the undercut in order for the cut branch not to snag or leave a hinge of stripped bark. The exertion coupled with fear causes a trickle of sweat to run down my forehead. One of the disadvantages of hard manual work in a cold climate is this clamminess of cooling sweat which would burn off if I was cutting a Californian Redwood or Australian Wattle. How much longer must I live in a cold climate? The Englishman’s lament.
Andy Martin, who is a professional local tree feller, speaks in hushed tones of widowmakers – beech trees with vast crowns which he had to fell in the Savernake Forest back in the 1970s. Trees have ways of fighting back their oppressors: dead branches fall in illogical trajectories, in such a way as to maim; and live branches, when split off from the main trunk can, when tormented by man, spring back in sudden and unpredictable ways to get their own back.
Ellum she hateth mankind, and waiteth
Till every gust be laid,
To drop a limb on the head of him
That anyway trusts her shade
Andy Martin derives adrenaline from his job – it’s what gets him up in the morning. But nothing he does is in a hurry. ‘Slow and steady’ is his motto. I let my saw do the work in an easy rhythm back and forth; a splintering and then a cracking noise like treading on an icy pond was followed quite suddenly by a sound like a triple rifle shot as the huge limb obeyed the immutable laws of gravity. Landing on its springy branches it bounced and tried to nudge me off my ladder but I had outsmarted it by tying a safety noose.
In the still air the noise ricocheted around the vertical escarpment of the Downs and was echoed back by the gable ends of at least three brick cottages. Quite a racket all in all, causing some cottagers to exit their rear garden doors like so many cuckoos from cuckoo clocks to get to the bottom of what had made the unwonted commotion. To my satisfaction my camouflage deerstalker jacket – as preferred by hunters, supremacists and survivalists – gave me excellent cover, rendering me invisible.
Not so to Mrs Wood, who against strict protocol, flung open the unsafe upstairs French windows and bellowed, ‘Stop cutting trees down, you cruel sadist! I liked that tree.’ Ouch…why can’t women shut windows and doors without slamming them?
Opening this particular window in winter is crime number one. A gust of wind might wrench it off its hinges in today’s climate chaos. Furthermore, the same gust might carry the glass with it and even cause a beheading in the village, like the scene in The Omen. But more pertinently, Mary had interrupted my quasi-aboriginal deeply meditative man-time state, which at its best is like a waking dream. My sacred elfish woodland world had been shattered by the inconsiderate profane alarm call of my fish-wife who would prefer me to spend my time painting pictures on the grounds that she married an artist not a lumberjack! Fair enough. She’s got a point but I have Dyschronometria, an inability to notice time passing. I often suggest we pop in to see my godson, Harry, at nearby Marlborough College but he’s now 33 and living in Kenya and over all the five years he was at the college I only took him out twice because I kept thinking it would be better to leave it until we had better weather. I always think I’ll start the painting in an hour or two but by then I’m tired.
Real gardeners work through the winter. Hobby gardeners only work in the summer. The job of letting sunlight onto my woodland floor and creating open sky where there was once a canopy is a case of correcting the condition of being unable to see the wood for the trees.
But I am now beginning to think that it may be the adrenaline of being on a ladder and doing dangerous tree work that I crave while I look for ever higher branches that ‘need’ my attention. Mary suggests that I may be getting some sort of legal high from this tree pruning, at the same time as overcoming my lifelong fear of heights (vertigo).
I once read, while in South Mimms motorway service station on the M25, from a novelty surname keyring, that my name derives from ‘men o’ the woods’, and by the considerable power of suggestion, I may be fulfilling my destiny. But Mary cites the parable of the talents and says I am wasting my time in working as a labourer. She dismisses the mystic, Zen-like calm promoted by contact with the soil and by healing natural habitats to land damaged by pesticides.
