Tag: Gardening

Spring, where the first cut is the deepest, noisiest and the smelliest!

Well, it would appear that we’re well and truly right in the throes of Spring! The weather is largely warming up – although we stood out in hail while volunteering at ParkRun this weekend – and the days are getting lighter all round. There’s colour in the garden and I’ve also been able to get some washing out on the line, which always makes me feel a bit more optimistic about the time of year…I don’t really know why.

Today though, I thought I’d write a little bit about my morning and the sights, sounds and the feel of Spring that I got to experience. Let’s just say that none of it really stuck to the stereotypes!

So, this morning, seeing that we were going to have dry weather until early afternoon, I took the opportunity to give our back lawn its first cut of the year. It’s always an arduous job as by the time the weather is good enough, the lawn has always grown to a good few inches in length and is soaking wet, meaning that it will take hours to get through. In truth, I despise having to do it!

At this point, I’ll introduce my neighbour. Now, don’t get me wrong, he’s a lovely, well meaning elderly gentleman who’d do anything for us. He’s also very hard of hearing and loves to chat. The job of listening to him generally falls to me and believe me when I say that sometimes this can be even more arduous than cutting the lawn as he never really hears what I’m saying and has a tendency to repeat a lot of what he’s already said to me!

Anyway, having got the mower out of the shed and put it back together – it’s over 10 years old and very much on its last legs – I started to mow, kind of knowing exactly what would happen next. I was still surprised by the immediacy though!

After no more than 20 seconds of mowing I heard the click of the neighbour’s gate – one of the first sounds of spring round these parts. And when I looked up, there he was. My neighbour. He didn’t really wait for me, just set off talking. So the mowing got delayed for a while!

Our back garden is bordered by houses on both sides. My aforementioned neighbour’s garden runs parallel to ours, but on the other side, the end of two gardens back onto us. One of these neighbours has a terrible habit of clearing his throat and nose, very loudly. He seems to save it all up for the moment he sees me in the garden as well. It’s not something I hear much of through winter as I’m not outside anywhere near as much. However, this morning just as I’d reached the end of the first couple of strips of the garden, there it was. Another delightful spring sound. A wonderful hacking of the throat and nose sounding like it had been played through Glastonbury’s PA system, all the way from inside his house to the middle of my garden. And every time I stopped mowing, there it was a again! This must have gone on for about 10 minutes! So, no nightingales singing, just the sound of phlegm!

I had the wonderful Spring experience of clearing fallen blooms away too. We have an enormous camellia that gives us an abundance of huge bright pink flowers from February. It’s genuinely stunning. However, the downside is that by the time I come to cut the lawn, hundreds of flowers have fallen from the plant and litter the garden. And I get the job of having to pick them all up, as if I mow them they splatter all over the place. In turn, picking them up gives me the wonderful sensation of soaking wet flowers in my hands and also quite a few slugs, who seem to find the flowers far too good to resist. I hate anything on my hands, so this genuinely makes me feel queasy.

Later, sounds included a really annoying crow, some girls walking along the footpath that borders the back of my garden and swearing loudly and my neighbour’s wife asking if he wanted a cup of tea – she didn’t extend the offer to me. I also managed to unearth some cat poo in the long grass, before sliding through it a little later and suffering the stench of it every time I went near!

Finally, the sounds of spring reached a wonderful crescendo when my neighbour came to talk to me twice more; once to rant about the price of the new England football shirt and the modifications made to the flag of St. George on the back of it – capitalism, mate – and then to talk of something that seems to be uniquely him!

He’s a keen gardener and tends to order his plants off the internet. However, I swear that every time he does, they seem to mess up his order. And then, when he complains, the companies always seem to send him more than he needs. This isn’t just restricted to plants; he’s had plant pots too. And he always offers us his cast offs, which is nice, but even when we politely decline he just doesn’t listen and brings stuff around anyway! This happened again today, which given that we’ve only just started ‘garden season’ is quite some going! Anyway, to cut a long story short, despite turning them down we’re due to get a load of free mystery plants in a few weeks. Lord knows what we’ll do with them!

So, Spring has indeed sprung. But round these parts there’s no delightful birdsong or the smell of budding roses; no, just elderly neighbours, coughing and sniffing of Olympic proportions, wet and dirty, slug laden hands and the feeling of almost pulling a hamstring as you slide through hidden cat poo!

Reader, I hope your Spring is going better than mine!

Poetry Blog: To a terrifying mouse.

Spring brings with it many jobs, especially if you have a garden. And it was while embarking on some jobs in our back garden that I encountered a somewhat unwanted visitor, just the other day.

As I’m currently on holiday from work – it’s our Easter break – I thought that it was about time I got stuck into some of the more difficult jobs that needed attending to. Principal among them was cutting our back lawn, which I had allowed to get to an out of control kind of length. I do this every year; tell myself that it’s too early for mowing the lawn when it’s reasonably dry in March and then watch on in relative horror as it rains for weeks and the lawn grows and grows. By the time I’d got the lawn mower out last week, it was around a foot high in most places, meaning that this would be a big job!

I’d actually prepared fairly well for this task, making sure that our garden waste bin had been put out for collection the night before, so that it was completely empty when I started the job. However, as I repeatedly emptied the basket on the mower it looked more and more like I was going to run out of space. I turned to our compost bin but that too began to fill up quickly.

I then began to push the grass cuttings down, hoping that such compression would create the space I needed in the garden bin. It didn’t work. And then I was struck by what I thought was a very clever idea. Taking the lid off our compost bin, I got the garden sheers out, inserted them into the pile of grass cuttings and trimmings from various shrubs and began to chop away. It worked and the level of the ‘compost’ began to drop. But not nearly enough.

Warming to my task, I went to the shed, got my garden fork as well as a weed digging tool and began to push them down into the compost, twisting and turning in order to mix it all up and hopefully make some of it drop downwards. Again, it worked and this time well enough to allow me to get carried away, delving the tools repeatedly down into the bin. And then it happened…

To a terrifying mouse

I have climbed mountains,
clung on as if my very life depended on it while others screamed with joy
on rollercoasters,
peered nervously over the edge of perilous waterfalls,
flown in a seaplane very much against my better judgement,
hurtled headlong down steep, snowy hills
on a makeshift tarpaulin toboggan,
faced down bullies,
been confronted by an angry rattlesnake,
had desks thrown at me by frustrated pupils in a failing school
and argued with an Ofsted inspector, despite being warned never to do this by those who knew better than me,
but I have never felt fear like that felt when a tiny mouse scurried out
of our compost bin and escaped over my foot.
No more than three inches in length
from snuffling nose to tiny tail,
as I cowered, this timorous beastie,
no doubt far more scared of me than I of he,
disappeared behind a pile of bricks to sanctuary,
whilst I screamed like a child, yet cursed like a pirate
and promptly cut my finger on the edge of the compost bin,
on reflection a fair penance for my ridiculous behaviour.
Later, as I slept, it crept into my dreams,
turning them into nightmares,
leaving me to smile ruefully next morning at the memory,
while silently hoping to never encounter it again.

I’m slightly ashamed to say it, but I got the shock of my life when I realised what was happening. I spotted the blur that turned out to be a tiny mouse out of the corner of my eye. Then I felt it run across my foot. It couldn’t have been there long however, due to a combination of the speed of the mouse and me leaping into the air in shock!

Later, after I’d told my wife and children about our little garden visitor, I started thinking about how I could turn the whole encounter into a piece of writing, settling on a poem. By the time I’d got to the writing things down stage I’d decided that I’d start with a list of scary experiences, then compare this to what had happened that afternoon with the mouse. I sat listing things I’d done that had caused me tension or fear before thinking about how I’d get on to the mouse.

The one thing that sprang to mind was the first line of the poem ‘To a mouse’ by Robert Burns and how he described the mouse as a ‘beastie’, which made it sound much more scary than it was in his poem. I liked the idea of my mouse being a ‘beastie’, just because it gave me some such a shock and so I decided to use that line, but play around with it a little bit. So instead of the mouse being ‘cow’ring’ I thought it would be better used to describe me and just left the mouse as a ‘timorous beastie’ like Burns had.

The fact that I then dreamt about the mouse that night helped me confirm my thoughts of it as threatening! In the dream I could almost feel the mouse on my feet and it actually woke me up! It definitely made me smile the next morning and had to be included in the poem once I wrote it up as some kind of first draft.

I’m pleased with how this poem has turned out and I have to say that I really enjoyed drafting it and then putting the finishing touches to it. I hope you enjoyed it too!

Poetry Blog: ‘As he fell…’

As someone who lives away from their home town and family home, I find it difficult to keep in touch. Sometimes that’s down to having quite a busy life. Family life can take over at times and then there’s work; having a job that is regularly the wrong side of hectic can mean that it’s tough to find time for a moment to relax, let alone time to think about who I need to get in touch with.

Sometimes though, I have to admit that my lack of phone calls home is just down to sheer laziness. When I finally get the chance to slump on the settee in front of some mindless television the last thing that I want to do is pick up the phone and make the inevitable and somewhat awkward small talk with my dad, asking and responding to the same questions that we always ask each other. A lot of our chats are just us counting down the minutes until we can tick a box marked ‘Chatted with dad/Graham’ and pass on the baton on to my mam.

A recent phone call got me thinking about the relationship I have with my dad though. Although I don’t think I’d ever describe us as being very close, my dad has always been a bit of a hero to me and always been someone that I’ve wanted to impress. My dad has always seemed invincible to me as nothing ever seems to really stop him in his tracks. He’s a typical Northern bloke, not given to outbursts of affection or praise and so it’s always felt like I haven’t really impressed him very much. That’s not me reaching for sympathy, it’s just the way things have been. I can’t say it’s ever stopped me from getting on with life.

There have been sporadic moments of affection and expressions of pride along the way but I think it’s best not to be greedy or needy. I’ve learnt to be happy with myself or proud of my own achievements and my relationship with my dad has been largely based around chatting about the football, something that I don’t imagine it’s unusual to build a father son relationship on!

A recent phone call led to my dad revealing that he’d fallen off a ladder and hurt himself quite badly. It was almost a throwaway conversation for him. No fuss, no need for sympathy, just very matter of fact. But it shattered my thoughts of him as being somehow invincible. He’d managed to hurt himself quite badly and had to go to hospital – of course he’d driven himself there – to get stitches in a leg wound and everything else checked over. He’s in his eighties now though and the incident and the way he reported it in our phone call made me think about him and I suppose his life expectancy a lot. And so, I wrote about it.

As he fell...

As he fell it was nothing that flashed before his eyes
and after the whump of the ground
and the surge of air that left him
all that remained was one, over ripe question mark.
Lying voiceless, his only thought formed as slowly 
as a child colouring carefully to avoid breaching the lines;
if this is how it all ends, was there ever really any point?

Flat on his back, doing whatever it is
one does when you cannot even manage to gasp,
he relaxed, rather than gave way to panic,
revelled almost in the moment that told him to do nothing,
prone in the hinterland somewhere between life and death,
looking serenely skyward while the now fallen ladder
balanced awkwardly across his chest
and wondered what was meant to happen next.

A faceless nothing seemed to silently gaze, take him in,
measure him up and contemplate his place in the world
before deciding that the time was not yet right
and placing him back carefully, like one would a
freshly unhooked trout spared the pan
and allowed to feel a freedom that would for now
be marked by the pain that besets the old fool
who overreached and fell from the ladder.

Breath returned, he gathered his thoughts,
dusted down his creaking bones
and swam tentatively back through the lake 
in search of not just sympathy and the inevitable scorn,
but a familiar face who would narrow her eyes 
and pass her shaken headed judgement ,before gently tending his wounds
and share not just his tale of woe and bloodied laundry,
but everything that life had, could and would throw at them
for their eternity together, and now for at least another day.

In order to write this poem I tried to imagine how my dad must have felt. All he really told me was that when it happened he lay there for a while to kind of gather himself before getting up and making his way slowly home. So for a bit of an uncomfortable while I had to try and inhabit my dad’s mind and think about what he’d have done, how he’d have felt and kind of join the dots about what had actually happened, because he’s very much an octogenarian of few words. Has been since he was about 40, I think!

He was actually in his allotment pruning a hedge and overreached. Subsequently, he lost balance and over he went. But given his time of life I imagined that he’d have felt quite bewildered by it all and having fallen from quite high up on the ladder I thought it might have knocked the stuffing out of him and left him not only in pain, but groggy, confused and possibly…possibly, even as a big tough, gruff Geordie, a bit scared.

Speaking to my dad that day he was resigned to more or less giving up on his allotment, admitting that it had gotten too much for him. He’s 82 after all! But there was a definite sadness in him about that as it’s something he’s toiled away at for probably well over 20 years now, since they moved from the family home to where they live now.

I ended the poem with a little bit about my mam. They’ve been married for around 60 years and it’s always funny to watch them together. For every small tender moment there seem to be a thousand gripes and snipes and they argue like, well like an old married couple. But I know that she worries about him and as an ex nurse, I know that she’ll have tried to clean him up and get him to just sit down and take it easy. There wouldn’t have been a great deal of explicit sympathy, but I think she’d have been scared by it all too. He actually managed to slice his leg open and only noticed a while later when his leg felt damp and he thought he’d had another kind of accident altogether.

I hope I’ve done them both justice with this poem. I wondered what must have gone through his mind as things failed him again. He’s always been so strong and just tough, so I think this latest age episode must have been strange for him.

As ever, I hope you enjoyed the poem. Feel free to leave a comment. It’s always good to read people’s thoughts, particularly when what I write is as personal as this poem.