In The Garden

I'm not sure what the Home Secretary has done but social media is awash with spite directed at her. Maybe she's murdered an orphan or abandoned a puppy. For the time being at least I won't bother investigating the source of the moral outrage, mostly because of where it's coming from. Instead I'll satisfy myself by snoozing people on Facebook, something I've been doing with glee for the last couple of years. Safe in the knowledge they will never know.

I just discovered to my delight that you can now mute people on Instagram too. Though because it's permanent this is a more severe punishment than Facebook's snooze which is revoked automatically after thirty days. Not quite as harsh as the hide option or indeed the social media capital punishment that is to unfriend someone but still, in terms of passive aggression, it scores extra points because you have to remember that you froze them out if you ever want to see them again. It leaves me wondering if I should make a list so I don't forget whose baby pictures I'm missing. A missing persons list for people that haven't gone anywhere.

It's Easter Sunday today, the holiest day in the Christian calendar, so as usual, in celebration, we're eating chocolate and doing some jobs around the house. Chris has cleared out his bedside drawer and I have emptied the dishwasher. Today, along with Christmas day, is traditionally a day when all the shops and restaurants are shut but as that's been the case for a few weeks now there's not much difference really.

The garden is looking good. It's still coming to life after a few months of winter so everything isn't quite where it should be yet but, bit by bit, Chris is resurrecting it. With all the free time forced upon him, he now spends hours out there, planting and weeding, fixing and painting, lighting up the trees and moving planters around. One of his favourite pastimes is pruning and there is a constant battle between us to stop him from chopping everything down, his argument being that 'It will all grow back.'

I don't see the point of decimating a perfectly good specimen in order for it to grow back again but I choose my battles and this year, already, we have lost the top fifteen feet of an acacia in the hope that he will leave the acers alone and spare the life of the beautiful, blue California lilac that grows over the terrace closest to the house. He's right, they do grow back, it's just that with vital limbs removed they tend take on the form of a twisted hunchback or a pair of tights frozen on a January washing line in a winter storm. Symmetry and grace fly out the window when Chris comes a hacking with his scimitar.

Sometimes I suspect it's a contest of wills between him and mother nature. He loves nothing more than to torment tubs of flowers and plants by turning their beaming faces away from the sun after they've spent weeks positioning themselves for the best access to it. Yesterday, while sitting out in the blazing sunshine on the decking, I suggested that he might want to invest in a bunch of lazy Susans to make the process simpler; it was greeted with a snarl of derision and, as if to prove a point, he immediately stood up and turned his two newest planters a hundred and eighty degrees so the purple blooms faced us and away from the sun.

One of the things I love about our garden is all the odd little ornaments and decorations dotted around it. Admittedly it may have gone a little overboard, what with the mantelpiece propped up against a fence with two Staffordshire dogs perched on it, and my grandpa's goat skull hiding down amongst the roses, but who wouldn't delight in the Gnome Zone at the end of the garden, a place where our seven or eight gnomes hide out amongst the shrubs?

I've probably said this before but the garden is a godsend while we're all being asked to stay at home. We have friends who live in flats who have no outside space to speak of. One friend told me that he likes nothing more than to sit in the carpark on the main road which his flat is on shouting at people passing by or yelling into his phone on video calls. The one hour day release is obviously a bonus to these folks but there's talk that even this might be curtailed to stop people from abusing the so-called privilege.

I'm a natural worrier so I try to be lighthearted about what's happening, otherwise I'd go mad with sleepless nights and fretting, but the stark reality is that nearly ten thousand people have died as of today, with over nine hundred of those in the last twenty four hours. Granted as a proportion of the UK's population, that's small, and undoubtedly some of those people that died while they have COVID 19 would have died anyway, but that doesn't take away the fact that these are real people with families and friends and lives to live. It's dangerous and it could easily be one of our friends or family if we're not all careful.

Our elderly neighbour Mary continues to be oblivious. Twice last week she jumped on a bus, first to go to the hospital with a sore wrist, and then shopping later in the week. She's happy to trot out to the shops twice a day then come knocking on our front door for help to close her garage or to comment on having some daffodils stolen from outside her house in 1998. There's a touch of dementia there according to her family and she's either forgetting the warnings or simply not comprehending what's happening.

Mary's daughter in law came round one day last week but did nothing more than yell at her from the street. She refused to go near her, reprimanded her, then shook her head and drove back to Urmston leaving a confused and irritated old lady standing in her front porch.

Mary continues to post stuff through our letterbox, more often than not TV Soap magazine which she gets free with a tabloid and which we have never shown any interest in, let alone asked for. She also has a tendency to poke ice cream cones through the fence for Chris while he's out in the garden. We appear to be unwittingly taking on the risk of transmission that her sons aren't prepared to take.

I wrote a letter to Mary explaining in quite strong terms why she needs to stop going out and also stop coming to our house. I didn't go as far as to call her a super spreader but I did tell her that two thousand, three hundred people had died. That was on the 2nd April, it's now ten days later, the letter is still in our hallway because we didn't want to scare an old lady, and five times that many people are dead.

So anyway, on Easter Sunday, when Christians traditionally remember Christ coming back from the dead, while simultaneously, on the television, all we hear is news about more death, I try to think about the other significance of this time of year. The one that's tied up with Spring and pagan beliefs of new life and new beginnings.

It won't go on forever; surely at some time in the coming weeks or months, this too shall pass, and we can look forward to new lives, and new ways of living. Living without the fear of going near friends, or helping a neighbour, taking public transport or going to work. Nina Simone once said that freedom is living with no fear, so maybe when this is all over, we'll feel free again.