Gardening:

‘The glory of gardening: head in the sun, heart with nature.  To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul’

-        Alfred Austin

It’s got that reputation, hasn’t it?  It’s something sad, slightly obsessive, middle-aged eccentrics do: like putting ships in bottles, collecting beermats, double bagging old comics or supporting Spurs.  Gardening doesn’t have the best reputation, but it’s slowly moving past baking as something everything right-minded, decent person does.  Which is appropriate really: nothing is ever fast or easy when it comes to gardening.

 

We arrived in Devon to the cold, slate bones of a late 1960’s council house.  The loosely termed ‘garden’; had both paving traced with weeds and plants that were on the verge of going to the big compost bin in the sky.  We started to get the vibe that this would require an almost equal application of both time and money.  Most things do. And yet, it didn’t really fit me yet.  It sorted drifted in and out as my soul rattled in my mind.  There was a sort of division of labour between my wife and I, both her and my stepson did the preparatory work as a mild Devon Winter set in.  I changed beds, hoovered, baked bread.

Relationship in a nutshell.

Once we’d had two late, but heavy snowfalls, the hard work could begin.  Equipped with a pair of rigger gloves my wife bought me, I was given a job that would require as much mental as physical strength.  There was a plant, left to us by the previous occupants.  The leaves of which, were growing brown. Mmm.  I can, thanks to Mrs McCready; now identify this as a Torbay Palm, genus Cordyline Australis.  We had vague plans to move Cordy into a pot.  However, this would not be as easy as we possibly envisaged it.

For a start, Cordy was well past her past.  In addition, she refused to move.  The best laid plans gang aft aglay in the green, palmy gaze of Cordy.  In addition, she refused to budge.  A hacksaw blade was applied to the trunk, which was relatively easy.  The hard part was digging the roots out of the ground.  I was instantly reminded of the quote by Seamus Heaney about working ‘to move a certain mass… through a certain distance, is to pull your weight and feel exact and equal to it’. However, Heaney was talking about ironing.  Feeling less metaphysical and more Withnailian; I started calling it ‘you fucker’. I called it the worst name I could possibly think of: that of my previous employer. 

This appeared to work admirably.  Dead fingers of black roots were lifted skyward by spade; from the heavy, argillaceous earth.  Or, to put it less eloquently, the fucker was finally loose.  I felt elation that Cordy was finally free.  Conversely, I felt something poisonous and noxious was ripped from my mind.  I had worked on something, both mentally and physically that had no place in my life.  Into the brown bin she went.  Gardening counts as good physical exercise, but it also counts as good mental exercise.  Maybe Cordy was emblematic of something that needed to be ripped from the psyche as much as the soil.  I certainly felt better after it.

This is not to say I’m the only one doing the work. While I’m doing these altruistic, almost Herculaean tasks my wife and stepson are pottering around: planting seeds, weeding, deciding which would be the best bed for planting; amongst a wide range of recently ripped up paving stones.

And, yet: I’m still seeing it as some sort of metaphor for, well everything basically.  Weeds and unwanted plants are things, people, places that need to be removed from your green little universe.  The hard work, the mental and physical effort needs to be applied, to feel alive again. Conversely the hard work pays off: the right plant, in the right place with the right care will; possibly produce results.  Sometimes that can be an immediate payoff, or some kind of delayed gratification. As metaphors go, it’s a pretty organic one; never mind an apposite one.

In short, gardening has re-wired my brain. It’s not put food in my belly yet, but it has certainly given me food for thought. It’s made me at peace with myself for the first time in a long time. It’s also made me look at things I took for granted, left behind or simply forgotten about in a different way.  Like most people, myself and my wife binge watch the odd boxed set.  When my stepson allows us to (current obsession: the Boss Baby series).  The other night, we found ourselves watching an episode of Love Your Garden we hadn’t seen, now the whole series is on Netflix.  For the moment, the fact that we’ve still got four series of current family obsession Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D to get through; wasn’t a major issue. 

So, this is the way I live now.  Separate trolleys in the garden centre, having split the purchases between us. Buying the odd garden magazine; for the bounteous serendipity of free seeds. Paying diligent attention; whilst inwardly groaning when Monty Don (my current guru) tell us ‘Here’s your jobs for the weekend’. Whistling the Gardener’s World theme at odd hours of the day. 

Gardening: you should dig it. 

#ynwa:

‘When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die’

-        Jean Paul Sartre

I have no direct experience of Hillsborough.  I’ll leave that to people who were actually there.  My experience is second-hand, shop-soiled by both where I live and who I am; both as a political and as a human animal.  There are a number of core things I believe in, as a result of what happened 29 years ago.

Firstly, it’s that The Sun is still the great, beating heart of darkness in the English consciousness.  Their headline, The Truth is still the greatest lie ever printed in a British newspaper. They’ve apologised several times, but as we say in Liverpool ‘they can shove it where Paddy shoved his ninepence’.  The Sun made us the enemy.  Thirty years ago, we were alongside other groups like Asians, gays and lesbians.  Now: this metaphorical ‘enemy’ is Muslims, transgender people, anyone with a mental illness.  

I believe Rupert Murdoch would regard this as progress.

It’s not the most egregious British newspaper.  I believe that is The Daily Mail, a paper which supported fascism; which both hates women and sexualises teenage girls at the same time.    But The Sun told a lie to sell newspapers.  It insulted a city and trivialised the grief of people to do so.  That is unforgivable.

I lived in Liverpool at the time.  I can remember the public burning of The Sun, the endless funerals, and the second-hand news of who had died and who had survived.  It’s a special city, Liverpool.  It’s like a column of Roman soldiers that closes ranks when one of us is attacked.  I saw this again four years later, when James Bulger was murdered.  I saw it again, ten years later when Ken Bigley was murdered by insurgents in Iraq.

It is still fashionable to insult our grief. Those who do, quite rightly suffer the wrath of our bombast.  Boris Johnson, a man with no principles, accused of us ‘wallowing in our grief’.  Billy Connolly was heckled off stage in London, after wishing that Bigley’s captors ‘would just get on with it’.  Alleged comedian Alan Davies played to a half-empty Liverpool Empire, after saying about Hillsborough ‘It gets on my tits, that shit’ on an Arsenal podcast. It seems that we are still fair game, even in the era of more minutes silence than you can throw a referee’s whistle at; fields of flowers sellotaped to lampposts and the oxymoronic phrase ‘thoughts and prayers’. To paraphrase Orwell: English grief good, Scouse grief bad.

On a side note, every time Liverpool plays Man Utd, Man City or Chelsea they sing songs about Hillsborough.  A minority of Liverpool fans sing songs about the Munich Air Disaster.  You do not fight shite with shite.  There needs to be a cultural change, a spirit of mutual respect.  It’s eleven humans against eleven, not city against city, class against class, death against death.

Ultimately, Hillsborough needs to be seen in the context of other English tragedies.  Five years prior to Hillsborough, Miners at Orgreave were beaten, attacked with dogs, arrested and charged for the mere crime of defending their livelihoods and communities. Again, South Yorkshire Police closed ranks to protect its members.  Last year, we had the fire at Grenfell Tower.  People died, at home, alone in the middle of the night.  I can already see the powers that be, closing ranks, mouthing platitudes and hoping it will all go away.

The over whelming message of Hillsborough, Orgreave and Grenfell is that if you are working class, you can be insulted, belittled, arrested, charged and ultimately killed by the upper classes. Your grief costs less than theirs.  You can be treated with impunity, simply due to the amount of zeroes in your bank account. On the bright side, we have our uses; the English working class.  We provide wealth and labour to the wealthy.  We can create convenient outrage for press barons.  We can be told that voting for Brexit - an act of economic and cultural hari-kari would be a good thing – by failed stockbrockers, insurance salesmen and overgrown public schoolboys.

However – we will not go away quietly, doffing our metaphorical cap. We are not as bovine as we seem.  We can stand together as one class, one group of people, in the face of almost insurmountable forces and odds.  #ynwa is not just a hastag; or even a song.  It should be a belief. 

Justice can be delayed, but not denied.