THE GRUMPY GARDENER

Have you noticed the irrepressible cheerfulness of TV gardeners? Carol Klein  on Gardeners’ World gurgles inexpressible wonderment about her burgeoning blooms. Others take optimism to yodeling heights.

 

Last week after months of idle self-pity I decided to start gardening again. Whilst we and our neighbours share a three-acre parkland full of mighty elms, our own little gardens leading on to this are more a thing of nail scissors than shears.

But gardening of any kind is serious so I must be prepared. I put on my crumpled gardening trousers and my gardening jerkin with its multi-pockets for secateurs, string, spare gardening gloves and a small but lethal trowel. I open the door and squawk…it’s freezing out there…..!!

I retreat indoors to do some research. It makes gloomy reading; “clean out, clear, remove, repair and tidy.” Most of all there’s the caveat “prune but not too soon.”

The next day it’s sunny, so I try again. I adopt the random-inspect-and-ruthless-remedy technique, favoured by dilettante gardeners. It comprises surprise attacks on areas of weeds or degenerate perennials. I fill a surprising number of refuse sacks with floral detritus quite fast and reflect on the philosophy of gardening. There’s the current fashionable vogue for wilding and pest balance. There’s the ‘if-you-can’t-eat-it-don’t-plant-it’ Vegetable Fanclub.  But I belong more to the school of striped lawns and immaculate herbaceous borders and, failing that, a less-is-more strategy.

After two days of work I have two tidy garden cupboards packed with impressive array of nuclear-powered pest-killing products and all those plastic pots, old seed packets and out of date stuff have been binned. The garden has a new layer of top-soil – have you any idea what damage 30 litres of that stuff can do to your back? The worst of the straggling overgrowth has gone and the plant-corpses of the past season have been removed. To give hope for the future a few about-to-bloom bulbs have been strategically placed to please the eye and cheer us.

Finally the garden is tamed. I am a bit grumpy because I ache all over but escape my wife’s reproachful glances when our garden is neglected. It’s only early next morning, as I walk around this fresh canvas on which nature will paint its colour, that I realise how nice being  clean and tidy is.

So I decide on two final touches. Karcher is a second-generation, family-owned German business. They make various excellent products but my favourite is the pressure-washer for cleaning paving. Our muddy paving slabs are transformed to a sparkling, clean, grey blue. It’s pure magic. Danke schön Karcher. 

 

The second is to prune the dead wood in the awkwardly located lavender bushes which have got a bit out of control. Balancing on one leg I get along splendidly until I overbalance, slip and fall into some viciously prickly Teazel plants. Gardening is dangerous,  I mutter, with 115,000 accidents a year in the UK when they last counted. No wonder I’m a grumpy gardener. But like fishermen -  not grumpy for long. Gardeners always hope for a great year, huge marrows, wonderful roses and spectacular displays. Gardeners know there’ll be growth and we’re heading towards the growth season. 

 

Man-made artifacts are less predictable, as the past week or so has shown. Cryptocurrencies (which have a gardening cousin in the Dutch Tulip Bulb Bubble of the 1660s) have declined by 40% compared to their November peak.  More dramatic, in many ways, is the recent, colossal share price tumble of Meta (aka Facebook, Instagram et al).

 

 

Maybe it’s best to leave growth to gardeners and rejoice in seasons.

"I'M OUT!"

Dragon’s Den and The Bidding Room are TV programmes where these words are heard.  People who displease their peers are “ghosted” or “cancelled”. Rejection is sadly part of our culture now.

Still, it was a surprise when a friend who’s always been engaged in events and current thinking sent an e-mail saying he’d had enough … so no more USA, land of lost souls and close to Civil War (again) – no more Guardian (the paper which just tells you what’s wrong with the world) - no more FT (the paper that always knows best) – no more Boris and “the schoolboys round him” – no more Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook – no more Nigel Farage (oh no, not him again surely?). In short, he’s “out”. Like Leslie Bricusse’s and Anthony Newley’s musical he’s declared “Stop the world – I want to get off.”

I sympathise even empathise but I won’t accept that things are so awful that they cannot be lived with any more. 

The biggest threat to the UK economy is this retirement malaise leading to a collective sense of unproductive despair. The continued furlough makes things worse because many people can afford (just) to carry on not working. After a year of being in semi-retirement getting the car out of the garage and expecting it to start first time (let alone start at all) may be rather harder than the government hopes for. 

My suspicion has always been (and this has intensified) that the opportunities now are enormous. Opportunities to restructure radically, to relaunch, to be enterprising and free from the shackles of a treadmill clinging on to withering businesses, to break away from terrible management practices (private equity, hang your heads in shame), look for growth potential  and, finally, put your foot on the optimism accelerator and floor it.

I’m in. Otherwise I might as well be dead.

But not yet. Not yet. 

We need to give our politicians a kicking – all of them – because their lack of resolution and constant looking over their shoulder at what the Mail, Express or Guardian is going to write the next day or what trends on social media leads to sloppy thinking and bad decisions or no decisions at all.

We need to start planning for a new future not a back-to-normal. It’s winter and gardeners throughout the world are pruning, removing old plants, replenishing the soil and planning for the future. They are thinking, researching and are full of hope. Let’s think like gardeners not like MBAs.

And we need to think of new strategies. The Financial Times asked the right question of what a post Brexit Britain might look like. Professor Ian Angell wrote in his prophetic book, ‘The New Barbarian Manifesto’, 20 years ago, about a new kind of Britain which broke free of the Union and became a Singapore solely within the M25, in GDP per capita, a world beating entity. The Financial Times considered this concept more recently.  Venice even after they lost their unique benefit of being the only gateway to Asia when the Portuguese discovered a sea-route there, continued with a population of under 200, 000 creating wealth and success for two centuries until they became addicts of hedonism and went potty. 

We need to keep our brightest and best on side playing their best game. At worst our politicians and governments last only a few years. We, who believe in ourselves and our potential last much longer than they do.

Be in. And if I hear anymore of this “out” nonsense I’ll get cross.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE...

I’m on holiday. I’ve stopped working, whatever that means, as my back, aching from brief gardening, mutters. So no more blogs for a week then…
………………..

But the discovery of a new life changes perspective. It includes having my eyes wide open, imitating Omar Sharif under the unaccustomed anvil of sun and the indulgence of reading stories (currently the Hypnotist, a Nordic noir offering from Lars Keppler, the Demonologist by Andrew Pyper and a couple of Donna Leon’s.)

I’ve lost myself in a kind of literary autopsy – blood, gore, entrails and lots of “!!!!!!! and …… and AAAAGGGHHHs.”

We all talk about the importance of storytelling yet don’t do it or respond to it nearly enough.

Mahyad Tousi CEO of BoomGen Studios (yes I know) said at a recent TED talk “stories help us remember, understand and think” and following a few days of letting the sunlight in I’m inclined to agree.

My three stories of the week are the one I read about the experiment to see how flowers respond to music. Plants were subjected to extended bouts of Black Sabbath, classical music, Cliff Richard and a silent control environment. Those subjected to heavy metal did best, bloomed more healthily and proved more resistant to disease, classical music did more than silence but nothing special but Cliff Richard singing managed to kill off all the plants. Boom boom! Great story.

The second was a 70th birthday party I went to at the Constitutional Club in Lewes where some exceedingly old rock stars banged out stuff like My Generation:

“People try to put us d-down (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we get around (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (Talkin' 'bout my generation)”

The guy playing the harmonica was about 80 and they managed to make the Stones look youthful but they didn’t look “cold” they looked hot, happy and heavy. Rock on.

The third story is about the suggested death of journalism at the hands of social media junkies. The Huffington Post gets 70 million reader comments a year, employs 30 full time content moderators to deal with them and yet discovers the most frequent and opinionated of the comments come from just 40 people.

Maybe there are fewer storytellers than we’d thought.

Once upon a time I must write a blog about that….when  I get back from a few days off.

www.colourfulthinkers.com