Doomed.
So ......... all my comments have disappeared. When I try to look at them the box says that Internet Explorer can't find them. Maybe I will be alone HERE for ever now .. as well as in real life.

I was reading the April issue of V0gue and turned eagerly to the H0roscopes .. which said (roughly) .. 'By now you will understand why all your soul-searching of the past month was necessary. Mercury's two eclipses caused much disturbance and re-evaluation but the positive aspects of this should soon be in evidence'. How spooky is that? Hurry up April .. I am bored with being depressed.

Speaking of which .. I planted even more primroses yesterday. These are a combination of wild ones which I have moved from my own further away fields (there are millions but practically no one ever sees them) and bought (but very cheap) ones of a slightly different pale yellow. They are cheap because everybody else wants their primroses in weird garish shades of magenta or orange. I am recreating the wild look that would be there anyway if the previous farmer hadn't overstocked his fields so that every blade and leaf was eaten down to the hilt.

It is funny in a way that I have gone to so much trouble over these years to make this once anally neat place look romantically 'old fashioned'. Even buying wild plants and seeds to put back into the hedges and banks of the drives and planting ivy everywhere so that the barns and parts of the house now look like an agent's photograph with 'Suitable for Renovation' written underneath. On the rare occasions that I manage to foil my husband and get a builder near the house I have to hover about him saying 'Please, please don't touch the ivy ... Aaarrghh ... No ... could you lean your ladder over there instead .. Eeek ... that creeper is MEANT to be growing through the downpipe ... ' etc. They think I am a loony.

It means that gardening for me is an endless disappointment. I seem to be the only person in the world who revels in things trailing and winding and falling over the paths. Every gardener I have ever had has consistently ruined the 'look' that I fight to achieve. So that now I can't bring myself to employ anyone and the whole thing is really falling apart and in a messy rather than charming way. I gave up on 'help' when an actual friend who was desperate for money asked if he could work in the garden for a bit. Not only did I feel that we were close enough for me to be brutally frank about his NEVER using his own initiative but he also had perfect taste in clothes and interior decoration .. so I was safe.

There were a few slightly worrying moments when I would appear unexpectedly in the vegetable garden and find that he was pruning the raspberries without asking or had started a new compost heap but it WAS all useful. Until I went away for the weekend .. which did not include his working days ... and came back to find the entire vegetable garden 'tidied' with the attractive wild hedges clipped back and .. how COULD he? .. all the potted box bushes I had been nurturing before making into an insanely carefully arranged edging had been planted rather carelessly and not in quite the right place. And he was PROUD of how much he had achieved in such a short time. But every speck of it was stuff that I had firmly and even sternly told him that I didn't want done.

He was sad and low generally .. and this had made him happy for the first time in ages .. so I felt I couldn't say anything. But now having him there made ME totally miserable. Luckily he finally got a job and didn't have time to 'help' anymore .. but a whole Summer had been spoilt for me and the wrong edging is still an irritation after all these years. So I don't want a gardener ever again .. which drives my husband mad and that is fair enough in a way but he is another 'man' who never leaves the house without a pair of secateurs and snips casually at overhanging rose branches as he walks along. What is it with these f.ckers?

And it isn't just humans. Now the sh0oting season has ended the pheasants are free to wander confidently wherever they like and .. (why?) .. as they pass they pick off the heads of any emerging flower and just throw it on the ground. I hate them. Okay it is cold and pretty much everything you might eat is dead and you are stomping around in knee-high wet grass so you try to snack on something attractively coloured. And you don't like the taste. So why walk along and bite off every single one you pass and toss it aside? As I watched one doing this morning .. to the primroses I planted yesterday. Screaming and banging on the window fell on deaf ears and he pottered slowly away.

It is all so f.cking dispiriting. So bring on the 1 April .. as fast as you can.
- posted by Iris @ 3/12/2006 11:17:00 AM comment