Help in the garden

After yesterday, I have booked a four hour session with the gardener.

I'd just like to pause here in the hope that you think this is Grit in hot sex with Mellors down the potting shed.

It isn't.

Glastonbury the gardener comes round twice a year to prune hedges and to help hack bits off trees and the tallest shrubs. I am incapable of doing these things. The power saw got stolen. Anyway, if I had hold of it I would probably fall from the wobbly step ladder and be killed by a stake of holly through the heart, or I would sever my own arteries by accident. That would be typical. The only safe way now is for Glastonbury to do these things instead of me.

Really, I would like to think Glastonbury is an actual gardener, with a gardener's attention to detail, like can this plant live or die, but every time he opens his mouth he confirms to me he is not. He is a man with a chainsaw.

And that's what he does today. Chainsaws his way through overgrown trumpet vine, takes down the branch of the fig tree that's stopping everything from doing anything beneath it, and makes sure we can actually walk through the rose arch without having to crawl on our hands and knees, Colditz style, to get onto the lawn.

The only advantage to this carnage of the shrubbery is that I get to rest after my labours yesterday, and watch someone else do the same job but with much greater speed. Glastonbury does not have to pause his garden work to minister to a sickly Tiger on the sofa, nor feed a hungry Squirrel, or placate a steamed up Shark who has locked herself in the bathroom and won't come out without an apology.

And I know that the idea of having an old gentleman gardener tenderly pruning overhanging shrubs in a rambling Victorian garden may be quite appealing. But I suppose there are some advantages to watching a young man grunting and swinging a chainsaw about. And if it were not this frosty mid winter but the dog days of summer, then who knows? He might possibly arrive with his chainsaw, half naked.