Redjacket

Redjacket

(acrylic on canvas board, 8x8 in)

An addition to my Major Players series. I'm quite pleased with the way this series is developing, even if rather slowly. I think it's likely to grow over time.

The Side, with Snow

The Side, with Snow (oil on canvas, 36 x 36 ins)

I finished this, the second of the bigger pictures yesterday, although I'm still waiting for some of the white paint to dry. I had it out in the garden sunshine for an hour or two, while I hacked away a year's accumulation of brambles, but the sun seemed to make very little difference.

After that I stood it in front of the radiator all night as I continue to pander to the idea that heat will help, even though I know in my heart of hearts that oil paint dries by oxidation rather than evaporation. I'm supposed to get it to the gallery today, but I suspect I may be able to delay until tomorrow. That would be a good thing for a number of reasons, not least the weather forecast for today, which is truly horrible.

Old Drawings #20

Blawearie Garden (Charcoal and pastel on cartridge paper, 20 x 33 ins)

I don't recall when the drawing was made, I'm afraid, and I hadn't intended to post another Old Drawing so soon, but this one seemed apposite. My friend The Architect is off work for a couple of weeks, so he suggested that he and I and Mrs Sums should walk across Bewick Moor to Blawearie today. As I've said before, it's one of my most favourite places and I was looking forward not only to the walk, but to maybe getting a little sketching done. The Architect is an artist too, so I reckon he'd have been amenable to a short delay in the walk to make a drawing or two.

It was not to be. The weather has been quite pleasant so far this week, but for one day only it's due to visit us with gale force winds and lashing rain. Not the sort of weather you really want on Bewick Moor, where the only shelter is at Blawearie.

Mr Zip's Nature Diary Contd.

So there I was, getting on with my little jobs in the garden. I'd finished putting some chunky brass screws into the fence panels ripped loose by the rampaging Italian topiarists and was getting ready to fill up the birds' seed feeders.

Then the mouse walked by.

It's that mouse I've seen before, scoffing the birdseed, but this time he was really close. He crept over and picked up a sunflower seed, tested it , then ran off with it to wherever his apartment is under the badly-laid concrete path.

Seconds later he was back, so I threw him a piece of breadcrust. He thought about it briefly, then came forward and picked it up. It too passed the nibble test, so he went off with it.

When he came back I was bending over, filling up the container with peanuts, so I threw a couple his way. He liked those too. Then he came back and edged nearer the little heap of seed I put down for the ground feeders. Eventually, he was directly below me and as I was still bending over, he was within a foot of my hand. I could see his pale little limbs with their beautifully delicate paws and his bright, bright little dark eyes.

Why should it be that a fieldmouse isn't scared of me? I'd have thought that by it's very size and nature he would be scared of just about everything. I accept that I'm probably too slow to actually catch him, but getting within a foot of me seems like extreme rodent bravado.

Whatever he felt about the experience, it gave me a little thrill.

Careful with that axe, Eugene

A gang of crazy Italians has destroyed my hedge.

Woken by the sound of rhythmic thumping from a reverie over what to do with the stalled picture on the easel, I went outside to find three old men armed with a big axe and a pair of loppers cutting into the hedge.

Watching them wield the axe in a most un-Boy Scout-like manner (I had my Woodsman's Badge, so I know about these things) was really frightening. If the axe hadn't been quite so obviously sharp, I'd have feared for arms or legs ending up on my lawn. And arms and legs do make such a mess in the shredder.

Within an hour they'd hacked it down to fence height, luckily sparing the thick branch to which one end of my washing line is tied.

So why didn't I tell them to piss off and leave my hedge alone (apart from the presence of a glintingly sharp axe)? Well, because it's not really my hedge. It belongs to Lucy Smooth, whose husband used to keep it under control until he died.

It's not exactly hedge material. Not your privet or Leylandii. The gardens round here are regularly visited by the Tree Fairy who leaves little trees agrowing. Most people just pull them up, but years ago Lucy Smooth's husband thought it a good idea to let one grow and turn it into a hedge. Although it flowers, I've never seen it produce any kind of fruit, but I think it's some kind of Mountain Ash.

Training the trunk to grow horizontally, he allowed the branches to shoot away in a vertical direction, weaving some of them into a dense screen.

However, by the end of every year the branches are some fifteen to twenty feet high and have to be cut down or they'll turn into trunks. Since he died, I've done my best to deal with the monster. But as the tree-hedge is actually in the garden next door, I can't quite reach some of the branches and Lucy Smooth's son (who lives just over the road) is too indolent to lend a hand.

So it seems she's called in the local mafiosi to make the hedge an offer it couldn't refuse.

But I've been there. I know how the prune-craze can grip you when you set to with the secateurs, let alone a pair of loppers and an axe.

In a pruning frenzy, they gave the olive tree a flat-top. Then they parted the apple tree from its crown. By then everything in the garden was no taller than they were, so they retired indoors to shout at one another. It's the Italian way of having a conversation, compounded by aging hearing I imagine.

The wind sure as hell is whistling across the blasted heath and through the gap where the hedge and trees used to be. To make matters worse, on my way out today I noticed that a small blight on the hedge at the front (not mine either) has turned into some kind of arborial alopecia and there are huge areas of dead leaves and shrivelled berries.

I feel like my cocoon is under attack.

And the birds aren't gonna like it.

Slug Pellet Story

The Martock Beans are looking very sorry for themselves. They were doing fine until very recently - three nice shiny pods and some flowers which would hopefully produce more.

Then came the wet weather and the Attack of the Monster Slugs from Hell.

Within 24 hours they'd reduced the plants to skeletons and even had a go at one of the pods. I was out of slug pellets and didn't have the time to get into Newcastle to buy more.

Then I remembered the little shop on the local high street I'd passed umpteen times before . A pokey little place with a shabby exterior, some plants and rabbit hutches outside. Walking by, it was impossible to see anything inside.

I had to go past it again the other day, so I thought, what the hell, give it a try. Nothing to lose but our Martocks.

Once my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I realised it was TARDIS-like. Much larger on the inside than the outside. But every square inch of it was crammed with stuff - household, gardening, pets. In fact, because it was nearly closing time, it was also crammed with the stuff which normally sits on the pavement outside.

I could see a small box of slug pellets sitting on a shelf, but I couldn't figure out how I was going to get to them past the piles of other things.

"Can I help you, mate?" came a voice from the darkness at the back of the shop.

"I'm after slug pellets," I said, "but can't figure out how to get round to them."

"Divven't worry, Aa'll fetch them oot."

And from out of the realms of darkness and the past came Rod Stewart!

It was the Rod Stewart of the Faces days, with a big hooter and a ridiculous kind of mullety hairdo. And a limp. And a Geordie accent.

So perhaps it wasn't Rod the Mod. On the other hand, maybe he's tired of his life of fame and riches. Maybe he's gone back to being the down-to-earth guy he used to be and has taken on an old persona. Maybe he really is selling slug pellets in Gateshead.

And could that have been Maggie May he was humming as I walked out the door?

Dead & Buried

In my efforts to create a more "natural" garden, I've left things to grow as they will; to run wild, in fact, much to the chagrin of Lucy Smooth next door who sees it as her Mediterranean duty to use the land as profitably as possible. My crops of grass and brambles threaten her more carefully tended beans, lettuces, garlic and artichokes, and the Martock Bean Enclosure must look like a sick joke to her.

Alas, the thickening undergrowth has also proven the undoing of one of the less bright avian ground feeders. I discovered the remains of a collared dove under the bushes this morning. I say "remains", but frankly it was virtually intact. Just dead and a bit defeathered. Bloody cats again.

I dug a hole for it next to the garden wall. In the process, I uncovered a very active ant colony which I thought I'd persuaded into non-existence a couple of years ago.

They're now going to have to decide whether the presence of a rather large bird carcass presents insurmountable rebuilding problems, or simply incorporate a considerable food reserve into a remodelled colony.

Oh to be at the council meeting.

Arm and Hammer

It's been a funny couple of days. Yesterday was taken up with yet more paper-clearing. One of the annoying things about clearing kipple (a fine word coined by Philip K Dick for accumulated paper) is that when you open something and decide to tear it up, it almost inevitably involves doing something else before you can actually tear it up. So, if you don't do that required thing, you have to put the original piece of paper back into another pile.

Regarding this as self-defeating (and acknowledging that this is what contributes to the huge piles of kipple in the first place), I decided to make sure that all the chains of requirement were carried through to the end.

Even if this led to the wrath of Patsy123 who was waiting for me to help with assembling various bits of IKEA flatpackery.

Which it did.......but we'll not dwell on that.

Anyway, I finished assembling her new computer desk with the aid of a hammer. This rare item of toolbox gimmickry was something Patsy123 doesn't have. My friend CJ doesn't have a pair of pliers. How do women get along without hammers and pliers (he generalised)?

After seeing her off to London again, I wandered home and sweltered a little in the garden. A turn about the Martock Bean Enclosure shows that three whole bean pods have developed and there may be more to come if I can remember to buy some slug pellets.

And then it was a bit of a slump in front of, alternately, the tv and the monitor. Should have stuck with the monitor, but instead I half-heartedly watched a 1987 movie called Over the Top.

Made by Golan-Globus, in fact directed by Menahem Golan, it starred Sly Stallone and featured him as former loser making good in the world of boxing. No, sorry, what made me say that? In the world of armwrestling.

The finale took place in Nevada (Las Vegas, I guess, but I wasn't paying that much attention) at the World Armwrestling Championships. Inevitably, Sly done good by beating a HUGE mountain of a man, some twenty feet bigger than himself, and in so doing, won the love of his estranged son and the grudging though unstated respect of his father-in-law.

Yeah, you got it. Absolute bollocks.

But it got me to thinking: is armwrestling one of those "international" sports the Americans so love, like baseball?

So I googled it. And lo and behold, it has member organisations in just about everywhere you can think of. Even Scotland.

I didn't think it possible, but here's another sport I can add to those I already take no interest in. Wonder if I'll be ignoring it as part of the Olympics?

Garden Treats

Doctor Pam's arrival found the weather trying to make amends for its former behaviour, but the prospect for the Hoppings still looked poor.

My Gardeners' World aspirations got the better of me on Friday afternoon and we tootled off to a garden centre in Birtley, Thing about garden centre stuff is that it tends to be very heavy, so the availability of Doctor Pam's car enabled me to hammer the plastic on all sorts of stuff.

I got:

* two really nice big blue earthenware planters,
* one bird table (sans pole to support it),
* one huge bamboo pole (which might support the bird table or get a rose up it),
* two lots of dianthus (Corona Cherry Magic) for the gaps in the tubs at the front door),
* one pack seed and insect suet feast (for wild birds),
* one pack berry treat feast (for wild birds),
* one "Seven Friendly Men" garden decoration.

The last is interesting. As you may remember, my intention on the garden decoration front, is to make various ludicrous objects from some kind of All Bran & Concrete Secret Recipe (when I find it - still looking).

But I couldn't resist this Seven Friendly Men thing (there was a bigger one called "Five Friendly Men"). There were quite a lot of them, so they were cheap, but they were obviously hand-made. There are seven men standing in a circle, looking in over, their arms round each other's shoulders. Their faces have a curious Inuit look to them. In the centre is a small bowl. (Wonder if Marja-Leena has come across anything like this?)

Anyway, whatever their origin, they look really cool standing in the middle of the lawn. I try not to think they may be pissing into the bowl.

Doctor Pam reckons she's never been to a garden centre before. It was, therefore, a revelation to her how much fun you can have there (including the wealth of wonderful real food available at the farm shop) without feeling you've fallen too deeply into the shocking ways of the Middle Classes.

Musical Beetroot

Spinach beet (A4 sketchbook, Pilot disposable pen)

It can hardly have escaped your notice that I'm passionately interested in Art and in Gardens. I'm therefore really pleased, over the moon, even, about having booked my tickets to London at the end of the month. At last I can get to Tate Modern to see the Hopper exhibition.

But I've also just realised that on the same trip I can take in Tate Britain, where they're showing The Art of the Garden. Hurrah!

Lest you get the impression that the Zip Passion Portfolio contains only two quivering passions, however, let me reassert my abiding interest in music. And here, I'm indebted to Occupied Country for drawing my attention to the existence of The John Martyn Website. They're playing One for the Road and Johnny Too Bad at the moment, but the selection will change.

I've been a fan of John Martyn for years and used to look forward to his gigs in Newcastle a lot. Even when I thought he was slipping a little into MOR with the Phil Collins-produced numbers, I still thought he was terrific; just not as terrific as in his Echoplex period.

There was a good tv documentary on Martyn a couple of weeks ago and it was encouraging to see him making a determined effort to get back on the road, despite all of his set-backs, not least being the loss of a leg.

Last night's BBC4 documentary on Viv Stanshall was also well worth watching. I had no idea he'd done so much after the Bonzos split up - everything from an opera to a ship converted to a floating theatre. Yet most of it came to nowt, mainly because he had no faith in his ability to succeed, and kept walking away from things, people, projects.

An unjustly neglected English eccentric, I didn't even know, until now, that he'd died in his top floor flat when he set his beard alight. I think it was "Legs" Larry Smith who said that if the fags couldn't kill him from the inside....

Neil Innes carried much of the story, inevitably, and had a good tale about their first drive across America. Being somewhat odd-looking, they were stopped by a police car. The police officer asked them if they had any drugs, coke, hash, whatever. "No, no," said Innes, hoping against hope that Stanshall would keep quiet, "we're British, we prefer a good pint of beer."

"D'you have any weapons, any guns or knives?"

"No, no."

"Then how do you fellas expect to defend yourselves?"

At which point Viv Stanshall leaned forward and said, "Good manners!"

Oh, and it's not all old stuff I like. This week, the CD player has been occcupied with: Manu Chao, Philip Glass, Andy Sheppard, Andreas Scholl, Duke Ellington, EST, Brad Mehldau, Bill Frisell, Rabih Abou-Khalil, Gregory Isaacs, Zappatistas, the Baghdaddies and Natacha Atlas.

And Donovan.

Venus & Madonna

Ford Castle grounds (sketchbook, coloured conte)

Venus successfully completed its Transit of the Sun today. I suppose there never was any doubt that it would do so. However, the Weatherman had given me similar assurances that I would have no difficulty in viewing same, while I could expect to sit about being scorched on the hottest day of the year.

Round about 9 o'clock this morning, the skies over Stately Zip Mansion did their best to conceal the fact of the Sun, let alone the Transit, by putting on a thrilling display of black rainclouds. Lightning flashed and the accompanying crashes of thunder set off every car alarm in the street. That was Venus done for the day. Still, I saw it on the telly, didn't I, so that's alright.

We did get to the Alnwick Garden, however.

And what a mixed blessing that was. The Phase 1 Cascade is fine, the biggest in the country. But almost everything else is a sea of mud, concrete and noise. Dumper trucks jockeyed for position with elderly grey-haired ladies, most of them in wheelchairs. Down from Scotland in big charabancs, I trust the ladies didn't feel cheated.

I don't know how the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland - for it is their Garden - have the nerve to charge full price (£4.00) for permission to come in and have a cup of tea on a building site.

Except that they have the nerve for anything. The Garden is being built with £50m of Lottery money, which might sound OK until you realise that it's not a public garden, it's their land, their garden, and the public have to pay to get in.

And lest we forget, the public had to stump up £22m for the Madonna of the Pinks this year to stop the public-spirited Duke from flogging it to the Getty Museum.

Putting aside such socialist-inspired carping, however, there were small moments and places today of real pleasure.

Sheltered from the rather cold breeze, we found a handy wooden bench next to a circular pond and yelled at one another over the roar and gurgle of the fountain in the middle of it. And there CJ produced her picnic, splendid as usual. Poached salmon with Bearnaise sauce, potato salad, spicy couscous, green salad, washed down with my contribution, a bottle of Chardonnay.

Oh, and a special word for the ornamental garden and its attendant gardener, full of tales of heavy cow manure mulches and liquid manure feeding. Unfortunately, the delphiniums were only just opening and most of the roses were not yet in bloom. Suckers for punishment, we may well go back when the roses are out, and give His Grace some more money.

In the heat of the night.....

Believe me, I should be in bed now, not tapping the old keyboard. But suddenly I felt I had to keep up the pretence of blogging every day.

So just a few lines about the day just gone.

I saw Patsy123 off at the station. Through the window of the carriage I could see her arguing with a passenger who was evidently in her seat. Tickets were compared. I did my utmost not to smirk as she then shuffled back down two carriages to what was actually her seat. She told me later she'd tried to sit in the seat shown on her ticket to Newcastle, rather than that on the return ticket.

I know smirking is wrong and most ungallant - indeed, in Eshington, it's even bad for your health - but sometimes one cannot help a smirk stealing over the Zip features. I made up for it by smiling in an extra-winning fashion and waved at least twice as the train pulled out.

Other than that, well, it was a Do Nothing kind of day. I bought some acrylic primer and lugged it home, but couldn't quite summon up the energy to do anything with it.

I checked out the Martock Beans in their Enclosure and watered them, but am concerned with their definite dwarfness. Pinching out the tops in accordance with my Bumper Fun Book of Broad Bean Etiquette seems not to have produced the desired result. They are definitely not bushing out.

I thought for a while I heard a snigger from somewhere nearby, but realising that sniggering is an ungentlemanly thing to do, coming higher than smirking on the List of Unpleasant Traits, I knew I must be mistaken.

A ham sandwich and a cup of revitalising tea, replete with guarana and acerola, were sufficient to send me instantly into an afternoon zizz, and after that, well, Do Nothing indeed.

But tomorrow, I must be up bright and early. In addition to the Transit of Venus, there's the Garden at Alnwick to see. More later.....

The Secret Garden

I fancy a monolith in my garden, it would look great and I could pop out and do a bit of worshipping on hot summer nights, said Anna, commenting in Maria-Leena Rathje's blog.

Which set me to thinking about my garden.

The borders are pretty much full of the usual sort of things: cherry trees, broom, hawthorn, raspberries, rhubarb, pyracantha, clematis, birch, and like so. But the middle has a big balding lawn which serves no purpose at all and two weed-strewn beds which occasionally play host to courgettes and now hold the Martock Bean Enclosure.

Pretty damn dull, really.

When I was up at Duntrune, I was captivated by the garden there. Whether by design or neglect, the place has fallen into a considerable state of disrepair. The croquet lawn is full of tufts and weeds and - best of all - the stonework balustrades are overgrown with moss and ivy, roses and other creepers. Here and there, small bronze figurines peer out at you from the dark bushes. There's a rill dashing through, which the chaffinches were making great play in, and a splendid pond with a winged Mercury sitting gazing sombrely into it's depths.

Magic, indeed, like Sleeping Beauty's castle garden.

I want my garden to be like that. I have plans for a rockery through which water cascades, then runs down a channel to the pond. The pond, of course, will have to have at least one sloping side to allow the birds to get down and bathe.

When Patsy123 was here last we went to a garden centre which had some great arbours and swinging seats. Maybe I could have one of those.

But I'm particularly keen to introduce unexpected pieces of sculpture and ancient-appearing monoliths. Like the one above, perhaps. Paths made from mosaic pebbles and broken paving stones will wind through forest glades, leading the visitor to secret places and moonlit grottoes. Water will trickle audibly here and there, and there'll be the gentle swish of bamboo and tall grasses. The scent of jasmine, lavender and roses will fill the air. Curious objects will suddenly come into view. The wildlife will scuttle and rustle as we pass by. Sagging pagodas of an indefinable origin will waft their rotting vapours at us. Dark and brooding figures of the Elder Gods will loom out of the shrubbery, and brambles and thorns will tear at our legs as we run for the safety of the patio....

But how do I go about making my monoliths? Easy. Somewhere I have a recipe of Geoff Hamilton's showing how to make a kind of biodegradable concrete out of All Bran and cement!

Wait though. All Bran and cement? That can't be right, surely.....

Green Fingers (didn't mention that on the box ...)

I put the empty milk bottles out last night. They were still there this morning.

I put the wheelie bin out last night. It was still there, unemptied, this morning.

It's a Bank Holiday, right!?

When you work for yourself every day's a holiday. Or a workday. You can pick yer choose. But it does mean that you lose sight of the statutory holidays.

Anyway, once I'd realised it was a holiday, I figured I ought to do something of a traditional Bank Holiday nature. But I don't have a car. So going out on the roads and sitting in traffic jams was out. (I was always puzzled by my parents' need to drive out on a Bank Holiday, long after they'd retired. Some kind of Pavlovian reaction, I suppose.)

For a while I considered painting the front door. It does need it. But after I'd looked at the instructions on the paint tin, I figured my while might mean that it would now take too long to dry. In passing, however, I did note something important in the instructions which I'd not taken into account before.

When empty do not use this pack to store foodstuffs, it says.

Who the hell would want to store their Hobnobs or their bacon sarnies in an old paint tin? Yet I'm well aware that manufacturers only put this sort of cautionary wording on their packs because someone has already done what they now warn you not to do.

I opted for that other holiday pastime, gardening.

I mowed both lawns, back and front. I sprayed spot weedkiller very carefully on the dandelions at the front. I have to be careful, because in essence the front lawn is composed of daisies, some buttercups, a funny little purple flowering thing that came from Lucy Smooth's garden, and, oh, a little bit of grass. Difficult for spot weeder to find the spots in that lot.

I raked out the thatch from the back lawn. Amazing how much thatch you can rake out from a lawn if you let yourself do it every two or three years.

I sowed a little bag of grass seed I found in the garage and watered it with Weed & Feed, taking great care not to water my trainers (Will mark clothes and hard surfaces, it says on the box)

It might not sound like much to a seasoned gardener, but I awarded myself a bronze star. I didn't stick it on my T-shirt, however (May cause staining of some cotton items, it says on the packet).

Most of the evening I spent watching from the window for the woodpigeon who normally comes every night to hoover up the seed I put out for the ground feeders; I was sure he would sense my seeded lawn.

He didn't come. I guess he knew it was a Bank Holiday.

Gardener's World

So much to do, so little time. I have, I confess, fallen behind on my unexpressed but firmly-made resolution to get something into this blog every day, or as near as damn it.

I blame the fun. And the gardening. Could it be that these might not be mutually exclusive?

I like gardens. I like wandering round in them, bending down to read the labels and sniff for olfactory pleasures. I like to see how the gardener has played one colour off against another or created a visual architecture with differently shaped foliage.

But I don't like mowing lawns, or weeding, or hoeing, or any of the myriad tasks that seem to go into maintaining a garden.

Pruning. I quite like pruning.

As a consequence, the garden has become somewhat jungly. Until recently, I was able to blame the weather for preventing any reasonable attempt at maintenance. (Not, you appreciate, that there is ever anything other than sunshine on Tyneside, but sometimes there's a splashing effect from over the Pennines, or down from Scotland.)

It was Ted who stirred me into action. When he called a couple of weeks ago to exchange my drawing of Duntrune Castle for his Hermesetas and a can of PEK (We'd got them mixed up on the way back, as can so easily happen), his opening gambit was, "I have with me from the Council a Mowing Edict, such order to be effected on this property forthwith." I was stung, I can tell you. I didn't show it, though.

"Fuck off, Ted," I countered. I've been to Repartee Classes, too.

As always, the wheels of Mr Zip grind exceedingly slowly, but by Thursday of last week, I thought I might join in the general uplift of our street. It seems that everyone hereabouts has it in mind to block-pave their drives, and build on extra bedrooms, turrets, sheds, garages, observatories, flying buttresses and Guard Towers. The least I could do was mow the front lawn.

With my magic new Flymo, donated to me as a needy cause by my painter friend Mo, I was able to whizz over the daisies, clover, and dandelions, in no time at all, while even getting at the wisps of grass. A liberal spraying of spot lawn weeder and all was tickety-boo.

What I find happens when I put in an appearance in the garden, is that the neighbours like to come out and lend support, as if to say, "Well done, not too bad was it, why not try to keep it like that?"

It was Lucy Smooth's turn. She's a nice lady who puts in hours of back-breaking work in her back garden to grow enough vegetables to feed, well, all the people who seem to come to her house regularly to drink wine and sing fairly dreadful Songs of the Mediterranean. Today she was determined to show me up by scrubbing her decorative concrete paving with a brush and some "Mr Propre" cleaning liquid (her son works in Brussels).

I tried to distract her by talking about the weather, the thankfully absent junior footballers from over the road, and anything other than the state of the immediate landscape. But she wasn't having it. She cleverly manoeuvred us into discussing the back gardens and by the time I'd disengaged, I'd promised to have a look at the unusually large crop of dandelions I'd been nurturing.

Yet even a quick trim of the back lawn went reasonably well. I quickly discovered the branches I'd pruned some time ago, lurking in the long grass to upset Mr Flymo, and threw them into some other long grass on one of the former vegetable patches.

And there it was: a lawn with a haircut which only a wooly hat could improve.

I had an appointment with Patsy123 in Waterstones (tip: a good place to arrange to meet someone when you're habitually late) later that day, but I figured I had time enough to sit with a cup of tea and admire my efforts.

Despite my general reluctance to enter the gardening arena, I've always found that sitting in the garden makes me unsettled. I keep seeing things I want to do, and before I know it, I'm out of my seat and - usually - pruning like crazy.

And so it was again. Before the last dregs of Assam had passed my lips, I was up and about with the strimmer. I figured I could at least clear most of the long grass, buttercups and bitter cress, while avoiding the clumps of bluebells which have strayed into the vegetable patch while my back was turned. I'd reckoned without the aforementioned recently transferred woody prunings, of course, and the stumpy remains of last year's bronze fennel (kindly provided by Will Barrow's friend Matt - see Martock Beans). How could I forget about the branches which I'd thrown there only an hour or so earlier? You tell me. Could be the aluminium pans I used to use...

By the time I'd run into a branch or two, then taken the decision to move them again, this time to a spot up against the fence, I'd cut only half the savannah before I ran out of the long wiry strimmery stuff that is so essential to the smooth operation of the strimmer.

With a cry of "Bugger!"I retreated to the comfort of the garden chair for another cup of tea.

Everything packed away. Uncooperative strimmer cable coiled up, ready for the next time I needed to unknot it. Easily enough time to finish my tea, take a shower, get changed and go to meet Patsy123.

Glancing up, I noticed the two branches of Lucy Smooth's hedge which had escaped both the efforts of her son (as enthusiastic a gardener as I am) and my loppers to remove. It's a pretty daft hedge, frankly. It's actually a colossal tree (maybe mountain ash, but there are never any berries) which Lucy Smooth's late husband had bent and pruned into the shape of a hedge. A sort of bonsai on an enormous scale. Every year it's given its head and allowed to grow as much as it wants, so that by the end of summer it forms a serviceable wind-brake. By early winter, after all the leaves have gone, we give it a good old prune so it can start again in spring. This winter, neither Smooth Fils nor I were able to easily get to two of the taller branches and they'd now reached worrying proportions.

It came to me to try to bend one of them over with the aid of a rake, secure it and cut it off with the loppers. If it worked, fine. If not, I'd have lost very little time.

It didn't work. The branch slipped out of the clutches of my rake and sprang upright again. "Laugh at me all you will, "I thought, anthropomorphising once more, "but I'll get you yet." And I made to put away the rake prior to meeting my Patsy123 deadline.

Which is when Bob Eh rapped on his window. He'd been watching me again. He knows when I come out of the studio at 3 o'clock in the morning! Admittedly he's not got a lot else to do. He suffered a brain haemorrhage a few years ago and is paralysed down his left side. Unfortunately he was left-handed.

Anyway, it seems Bob Eh has a long-handled pruner which he was most insistent I borrow to have another go at the reach-for-the-sky branches. Bob Eh likes talking and seemed not to hear my protestation of a need to get ready to go out. "It'll only take a minute," he said. "But if you find yourself falling off the ladder, don't worry about throwing the pruner away." As if I would. I'd be more worried about falling into the pyracantha.

Climbing the ladder was fun. The more I climbed, the further the ladder sank into the lawn. But eventually I was up there, wobbling over the pyracantha. And with a bit of effort, the first of the errant branches fell to earth. Not so the next one. Even after I'd climbed over the fence, wormed my way up through Lucy Smooth's wonderfully productive fig tree, I still couldn't get the remaining monster into the jaws of the pruner. Mr Zip falls back defeated.

And late for Patsy123.

One thing I did get from Bob Eh. "What do you think of that shed next door to Lucy Smooth's?" he asked. While I was still grimacing, he continued. "Looks like a bloody Watch Tower, I think!"