Shagging in the Lilies

I've started avoiding the news. The hysteria this week over a certain government adviser has reached such a frenzy that I can't bear it any longer. Thankfully I'd booked the week off work and as the weather has been glorious I've been able to spend a lot of time outside in the garden.

Chris's lilies are about to flower, an event you'd think would be something to celebrate. Unfortunately the anticipation has been sullied by an invasion of red lily beetles which eat the stems, leaves and flowers. Battle lines have been drawn and Chris is not taking any shit.

"Chriiiiiis," I called across the garden yesterday, "there's another one!"

"Kill the bastard!"

"I'm not killing it! I'm a vegetarian!"

"I'm not asking you to eat it," Chris stomped across the lawn in his not so invisible socks and Birkenstocks combo, frowning. He meant business. "Where is it?"

I pointed to the pretty little gem of a creature twitching its antennae and wiggling its bum like it was doing the conga. "Look, just under that leaf. No that one. No, down a bit, down a bit. Up a bit."

"Twat." The expletive was directed at the beetle, not me, as he finally homed in on it. Grabbing it off the leaf, he plucked it from the plant, brought it towards his face so he could better see the culprit then squashed it dead, rolling its mangled body between thumb and index finger and flicking its lifeless and sticky corpse across the garden. 

"That'll teach it." He was triumphant.

"Yeah, it'll certainly think twice before coming back to our garden."

Chris won't tolerate anything eating his garden. The slugs have no chance as he goes through tub after tub of blue slug pellets every year, sprinkling them with gay abandon on the flower beds and planters. For those wily and deceitful gastropods that evade his obstacle course he has one last trick in store for them, a liberal sprinkle of blue dots in the cupped leaves of the plants themselves. He's like the Anti-Willy Wonka of the slug world.

One surprising shortage during the recent lockdown has been slug pellets, not that it's been a particular problem because it's been very dry, but you never know when we're going to have a damp spell, and slugs are devious.

"Why don't you try using beer?" I suggested. "We've got some old cans of Carling that someone brought to a party and nobody will touch. I'm sure the slugs won't turn their noses up at it."

"Isn't it cruel though?" Chris was more concerned about them having to drink shit lager than them shrivelling up and dying a painful death at the hands of the blue poison.

"There's two cans under the stairs somewhere. I think Mark and Darren brought them and we've not spoken to them for nearly five years so they might be out of date."

Chris declined and went out later that day to track down what I suspect to be black market slug pellets. The beer is still there.

While the garden has become Chris's hobby rather than mine in recent years, I've taken over houseplant duties. Only this morning he pointed out that my two avocado plants were in dire need of water.

"Again!" I whinged, "I'm having to water them two or three times a week at the moment."

"It's like a furnace in that window."

"They should be used to it! They're from Mexico!"

I have no idea if avocados are from Mexico or not, these ones are from Tesco in Stretford, I know because that's where I bought the fruit that I ate before spending months trying to get the bastards to sprout.

The fact of the matter was that the avocado plants were thirsty, their leaves were drooping, and after all the effort I put into getting them to be a foot high I wasn't about to let the buggers die, so I grabbed a watering can.

Much like Chris's slippers, we have a wide variety of watering cans, each with a different design and function, and each at a different stage of its lifecycle.

In addition to the hosepipe, which itself has a range of attachments from sprinkler, to handgun, to four foot wand, each with an assortment of watering options including jet, shower, cone and mist (for those early evening garden moments when you're feeling whimsical and pretty), there's the standard watering can with rose end for sprinkling, the small watering can, with its delicate nozzle and body the size of a cat's head for tricky to get to roots, and the comedy duck which was a gift but turned out to be most useful for small pots and planters. 

My weapon of choice this morning was the small cat head sized watering can. I grabbed the Baby Bio, read the instructions thoroughly, and carefully squeezed precisely ten drops of plant food into the water before doing a circuit of the house and making sure every plant inside was both fed and watered.

Feeding plants is an area where Chris and I have different schools of thought. I will spend time measuring the exact amount recommended per litre of cold water whereas Chris will give it a big squirt and hope for the best.

As the garden begins to flower, alongside his weekly slug pellet purchases he will begin buying Miracle Grow. He generally opts for the bright blue powder that you dissolve in a watering can as opposed to liquid feed or the slow release stuff you mix in the compost, and as with the Baby Bio indoors, measurements go out of the window. 

"One more scoop for luck." he'll say as an extra terrestrial, cobalt foam spews from the top of the watering can.

I'd never heard of Miracle Gro before I met Chris, why would I? I was twenty and more concerned with taking drugs and dancing than growing the best begonias on the street. How things change.

He's been a fan for as long as I've known him and every year it's astonishing just how well this stuff works. The bedding plants are monstrous, the hanging baskets gargantuan. Potted geraniums lean into you with a flick knife threatening to kill your dog if you don't do what they say; sweet peas hiss "I know where you live mother fucker!" as you squeeze by apologetically.

The lilies were a gift from me to Chris a couple of St Valentine's Days ago. Our friend Nathan, who we met on holiday in Thailand in 2000 with his then girlfriend Sophie, ran a company that imported bulbs from the Netherlands and sold them in the UK and he would always look after us when we placed an order, popping in something unusual like the pineapple plant he sent which looked beautiful but had a habit of attracting big brown flies. 

Sophie turned out to be a horror. She lodged with us for a few months when we lived in London and I had to ask her to leave after she became insufferable. She once installed a phone line without asking so she could work from (our) home and invite clients back to our house when we were out at work. The final straw was when she secretly added herself and Chris to the electoral register and not me meaning that I was denied a vote in the Enfield local elections. I wouldn't have voted anyway but that's not the point.

I wasn't surprised to hear many years later that Sophie had been embroiled in some dodgy dealings with drug dealers while living in Bali and luckily, for her and her kids, had managed to divert attention and slip her way out of big trouble with police. Her husband, known affectionately as Gobby, was not so lucky and was held in police custody after they allegedly found 78 grams of ecstasy in their house. 

This was reported in Telegraph in 2012 and if you're interested you can read about that here.

Nathan on the other hand was a lovely guy. Generous, genuine and charming, a gentle soul, so I was incredibly upset to learn, when I got in touch with him about getting some bulbs for Chris, that he was suffering from lung cancer. The cancer, he told me, had metastasised and was now present as brain tumours. It was, he said, just a matter of time before he died and all the medics could do for him now was lengthen the time he had left with his wife and children by a few weeks. 

Nathan arranged for the box of bulbs to be sent and refused to accept payment. I wrote to him at the end of February to tell him they were all planted and asked how he was getting on. 

He replied, "Good work. I'm doing okay thank you. Had Gamma Knife surgery on my brain on Friday. That was fun."

He sent me a picture of himself with a clunky metal head brace on. It had what looked like two thin metal tubes going into his forehead on either side. 

He joked, "If I sneeze the holes in my head whistle!"

We chatted on and off though Facebook messenger for a few weeks. In March he developed pneumonia and one of his lungs collapsed. "Never a dull moment!" he wrote. 

He went on to say that he could really do without it as he had some other treatment due to start and he had tickets to see The Doves at the Royal Albert Hall which he really didn't want to miss.

The last time we had contact was at the beginning of April. He'd managed to get to the concert which he said was superb. Roger Daltry had made a surprise appearance. He sounded relieved and said, "It was just good to get out again, it's been a long time!"

Nathan died on 28th May 2019, a year ago this week, leaving three daughters, his wife, parents and brothers behind. He was 43 years old.

His bulbs flowered last summer and both Chris and I sent messages to Nathan's wife with pictures of the lilies and other flowers saying they were a reminder of him that we hoped would come back every year and keep him in our thoughts.

As you can imagine it's lovely to see them back again this summer and we're not going to let those bloody beetles ruin them. 

I looked over at the lilies yesterday and saw two of the red horrors, riding piggy back.

"Chris! They're shagging!" I yelled over to him.

"They're like that, the dirty little bastards!" said Chris as he stomped over, finger and thumb held aloft, to save Nathan's lilies.

Serious Moonlight

The weather has turned so instead of working in the garden Chris is upstairs tidying the junk room. I can hear things being knocked over and thrown around from downstairs and it's making me tense.  The clinking of glass and half mumbled half shouted exclamations of 'What the fuck?' are clearly audible. This will not end well and I will have to bite my tongue later when he begins to accuse me of hoarding crap.

Admittedly I probably don't need half a litre of fake blood, a navy blue, polyester, woman's jumpsuit from Debenhams and one and a half rolls of wallpaper with a brick pattern on them. Nor do I need right now the unused easel which is about four years old and has never left its box, the cheap costume jewellery, and the broken, hammered metal, table lamp from Habitat which I've kept because it matches the not-broken, hammered metal, table lamp from Habitat which I don't use anyway.

In my defence, and with the exception of the lamps, each of these things were bought to be used in the production of a play. The twelve feet of thick, white, yacht rope for example was a prop in Marina and the Clone and was last seen tying up the reporter in Marina Oliveto's Primrose Hill cellar.

Chris is as happy as Larry out in the garden, pottering around all day, moving planters, hiding gnomes and pruning things to within an inch of their lives. He's very much like Dr Doolittle with the animals and has regular visitors in the shape of the neighbours' cats. At the moment there are three everyday guests who turn up unannounced a couple of times a day, usually in rotation, sometimes together.

Naturally we've given them names, nothing too personal because, well because they're not our cats. There's Blackie, who is silky and jet black from head to tail, White Face a sturdy beast who is black and white with, unsurprisingly, a smattering of white fur across his face, and Black Face who is also black and white and who I'm considering renaming because it sounds slightly racist to my sensitive ears. My auntie Elaine used to have a black and white cat who looked just like Black Face, he was called Minstrel which I think, as names go, is probably no better.

Since we lost our elderly and much loved cat Gilbert, in January, we haven't got round to getting rid of his remaining food, and now with Blackie, White Face and Black Face brave enough to knock about in what was his territory, Chris has been feeding them. The wet food and tuna ran out ages ago and now the biscuits are beginning to run low. Chris wants to start buying cat food for them but I have to remind him that they're not our responsibility and they a perfectly good home and owners who feed them just a few doors down the road. They are clearly taking advantage of his good nature, he knows this very well but allows it all the same.

As part of the growing menagerie we're also visited by an array of birds. Some of these visitors, like the robins and tits, are more welcome than the likes of the pair of shitting magpies who have spent the last fortnight gathering goodies with which to build a nest, and the massive pigeon that barges its way onto the bird table and flings whatever bits of seeds or bread are on there, all over the lawn.

I was sitting out on the terrace on Tuesday afternoon, soaking up the sun, and watching Chris gardening. To the idle eye of a passer by I could have been mistaken for a reptile warming myself up on a hot rock, only I was snacking on pitta bread and hummus, not flies.

As I sloshed back the last of my Pinot Grigio I noticed the ladybirds were back, buzzing around in the warm air and smashing themselves into windows willy nilly. I later went inside and found two more of them under the dining room table, dead and cluttering up the place. I fear the warm weather has brought them out early this year.

I was born in 1975 so I don't remember the fabled summer of 76 with its never ending heatwave, villages reappearing after a hundred years from the bottom of reservoirs, and the ladybird plague that came with the heat. Until recently, as far as I was concerned, these little red visitors were cute. They were flying jewels which ate greenflies and made the garden look summery.

That was until a couple of years ago when they started invading the house. I'm not sure how they get in but I find tonnes of them in the bathroom, the bedroom and now in the dining room. These once charming creatures are now revealed for what they really are - devil worshiping beetles to be hoovered up at the earliest opportunity. I must get round to sucking up the two in the dining room.

I finally got round to dying Chris's hair the other day. He struggles with bleach because his hair has a tendency to go ginger rather than blonde, so he leaves it on for way too long. I'm no hairdresser but I'll give pretty much anything a go so I used the tiny little brush that came with his kit to slap a load of this blue, stinking gunk on his head. 'There you go,' I said, 'now pop the little shower cap thing on and give it fifteen minutes.'

Chris decided against the see through polythene hat and it wasn't until one whole hour later he disappeared upstairs to shower off the bleach - eyes stinging and scalp burning. He reappeared after rinsing it through and blow drying his hair and asked 'What do you think?',

'It looks great!' I said, 'Really, very blonde.'

'It's a bit yellow,' he said, 'put the rest of it on would you?'

So dutifully I slapped the remainder on and left him to potter about for another half an hour. Eventually the burn was too much to take and he rinsed the last of the bleach off his hair and scalp. I asked if he'd used the special conditioner after washing away the chemicals, so his hair didn't become too brittle. 'No need,' he revealed, 'I mixed it in with the two bottles at the beginning so it's been conditioning as it was going!'

He has a look of an early eighties David Bowie now, if I had to pinpoint it I'd say the Serious Moonlight tour, 1983. I told him this to his glee and he spent the rest of the day and night singing away to himself - 'Ground control to Major Tom.'

I didn't have the heart to tell him that I'd missed a bit and there was a faint but noticeable brown line across the back of his head. Like a little cranial skid mark that only I was privy to. I've since taken the clippers to his head as he felt like he needed a quick trim and the skid mark has all but gone.

I suspect that he's waiting for that 'roots' look to come through so give it another couple of days and I'll be there giving him a short back and sides again. As I already mentioned, I'm no hairdresser, but I've been cutting my own hair for at least ten years and as long as he doesn't want anything fancy, I'm happy to give it a bash. I only really know two styles - short back and sides and skinhead - but thankfully that covers the pair of us.

I've been toying with the idea of writing to an author I've been reading recently but I'm not sure how that would be taken. I'm not a stalker and I don't want to profess undying love to them or anything, I just want to talk about how they write and learn a bit. I also like the idea of being an anecdote they recount in a future publication when they write about this person they had to call the police about. You never know, even though they are an acclaimed author with an international reputation, and millions of pounds in the bank, they might still want a new friend and I could be the perfect stranger they've been waiting for.

He lives in West Sussex apparently but I'm not sure where so I don't know how I'd get my letter to him. I remember as a kid my mum wanted to write to the Queen fan club. Queen the band not Queen Elizabeth. She too didn't have an address and this being pre-internet she took a punt and addressed the letter to The Queen Fan Club, London. Not even an attempt at a postcode.

I might try this tack myself, after all I have a name and there can't be that many people in West Sussex called that. Someone is surely going to be able to direct a letter to the right place.

Disappointingly it didn't work for my mum and a couple of months after posting it her little white envelope was returned to our house on the hill in Oldham.

Address not known.

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.

Frog

The most horrific thing happened on Saturday whilst I was gardening. I had taken over the mowing of our unusually hilly lawn from Chris - we were road testing our new flymo with it's ferocious full metal blade - and had worked my way towards the bottom of the garden, close to the blair witch project remains of our bonfire.

As I absentmindedly mowed over a patch with a dip in it where the grass was a little longer I felt something unusual - a thud and an interruption in the sound and feel of the mower. I looked down to see a frog. A large frog at that. It was just about in one piece but I had ripped into its flesh and I could see the deep tear in its back legs and a huge gash across its side where entrails were now peeking. I looked away in shock and said fuck.

I looked back and the helpless thing was still moving - not mobile but definitely moving and I could see its wide eyes looking around wildly. I said fuck again - a few times this time. I felt shocked, guilty, sad and a little bit panicky, it was very upsetting. 

My first reaction was to make it more comfortable before it died which it was inevitably going to. I put on a glove which I had been using to pull thorny brambles up with and picked the frog up. I took it to the bottom of the garden with the intention of putting it in the stream. I threw the frog down to the water and even before it hit the stream I knew that this was a bad idea. 

As it sank in the water I could see it struggling to swim to the top for air but obviously didn't have the strength - or indeed the ability with it's damaged body - to do so. I watched it twitching on the way down to the bottom of the stream where it must have drowned. I walked away feeling terrible and a few seconds later went back to the edge of the stream. It was still there on the bottom but now not moving. Chris started the lawn mower up again so I went back to where I had maimed the creature and did a quick check through all the remaining long grass for more wildlife. When I returned to the stream a little later the frog had gone.

Tree

I forgot... Yesterday after the car boot hideousness Buckley and I began to massacre the garden with our new saw. And no - that is not a euphemism. We decided that we should do a spot of tree surgery.

I climbed on top of the shed at the end of the garden, pulled up the step ladders and set them up nicely under the offending branches. I got to the second step when the rotting roof of the shed began to give way. The back two feet of the ladder went straight through the roof tipping the whole thing backwards with me on top of it. It was only my skilful and balletic movements that saved me from toppling off the shed and into the river at the back. There are now two holes in the roof of the shed which water will surely leak through.

Anyhoo - here I am to tell another tale and the branches have now been removed. I took the first one off quite easily but half way through the second branch my arm began to tire so Buckley gave it a go. After a couple of saws the branch started creaking and he started to panic - within seconds he was trying to flee the shed roof with a bloody big branch creaking towards his head. He too survived. I got up there and finished the job with the third branch - narrowly missing a potentially disfiguring accident as the business end of the branch swung towards my face.

Well - tree now surgeryed (?) - Buckley got the bug. He took down the caterpillar covered mini tree in the main bed then went for the blackened leafed tree next to the green house whilst I stood underneath it to make sure that the branches hit me and not the glass of the green house. Finally he had his eye on the neighbours tree of which three branches cover most of our lawn. The neighbours weren't in to ask and I persuaded him not to begin hacking away in order that we preserve relations - besides he needed to borrow their ladders to get to this one. Thus the massacre ended for the day...