Music for the bees

Gardening is perhaps a little like housework I think, in that it's not really possible to show what's no longer there in the same way that nobody really notices a dog hair free carpet or a sparkling basin. But boy, do you feel the muscle burn in your arms and back. Reduced to a couple of photos from a mobile phone, my two raised flower beds here don't even seem much to show for a week's work. But - and you can only take my word for it I know, so please trust me on this one - this is an enormous transformation of my little back garden.

My little house by the seaside had been empty and close to derelict for about 4 years before Roo, the dog and I moved here in August 2007. Prior to that, the garden itself had been more or less untouched for the best part of 40 years. My great grandmother had always loved her little garden, planted it with bluebells, scrubbed the brick red cobble stones and kept it neat and tidy, but all that stopped when she died in 1966. Her son, my great Uncle Roy, left behind in the house after his mother's death, was not really one for the keeping of gardens any more than he was one for the keeping of much company beyond cricket, Proust, Kafka and Tchaikovsky.

How he loved his books and music. As a childhood visitor here, I'd blow the dust from one of the huge Bakelite 78rpm records and put it carefully on the old dark wooden gramophone, lowering the fat needle carefully onto its edge and cranking the handle round and round and round to spin the turntable. Uncle Roy would watch with amused delight from behind a folded copy of The Daily Telegraph as the crackly sounds of a long-dead orchestra rose to the command of a ghostly conductor and filled the room with the most beautiful music. Outside, the sun might have been shining on the seaside visitors, the gulls circling waiting patiently for sticky toddler fingers to let slip their ice cream cones. But inside, in the dark coolness of the front room, the little house was temporally transformed into a Baroque concert hall, the shabby curtains replaced with lush velvet drapes and the battered brown armchair with a sumptuously carved chaise longue as the maestro stepped up to the podium and wielded his baton to let the magic fly, just one more time.

Forty-odd years of debris takes a lot to undo, and at some point the general jungle-ness of the yard had been added to by the collapse of the rear wall and the influx of dumped rubbish from who knows where. Broken mirrors, shards of glass, bricks, tiles, plastic sacks full of women's clothes, crockery, all had conspired to submerge the garden and bury Grandma's cobbles under feet of soil and detritus. I lost count of how many sacks of rubble and rubbish and soil I've dug out by hand, bagged up and taken in my little car to the municipal tip.

But at last, after a week or so of excavation and general shovelling around, the red brick cobbles are exposed once more and the garden looks more like a garden and less like a landfill site. I created two raised flower beds about two feet tall, one made entirely of the whole bricks I found in the yard, and one from huge wooden sleepers from the timber merchant a few miles away. Today, Roo and I went to our local garden centre and chose a selection of plants that we hope will grow and creep and climb and attract the bees and the birds. We planted climbing ivy, forsythia, anemones, pansies, lavender, clematis, honeysuckle, foxgloves, jasmine, a couple of tall grasses and several more things besides. At the weekend, I'll add some wildflower seeds and some summer-flowering bulbs.

At the top left of the first picture, you might also be able to pick out the little round bee house I bought at Flynn's Bee Farm the other day, a device full of thin cardboard tubes especially to attract solitary mason bees. For once, I hope it rains and rains and rains for the next few days, to wash the remains of the mud from the cobbles and to water the plants as they settle into their new home. Come summer, I hope that our little garden is filled with the heavy heady scents of the flowers and that it once more throbs and dances to the music of the bees.

Time travelling junk

The funny thing about time travel is that we all do it all of the time. Or until we're dead at any rate. It's the ultimate eco-friendly mode of transport: no machinery required (just one more-or-less functioning mind each); only a modest daily calorific allowance needed (wholly from renewable sources of energy); and all contained within a human-shaped capsule (with self-healing properties and infinite variation). Yep, pretty much perfect.

Except our uniquely designed personal time machines each have one big Achilles heel; we can only travel forwards. Assuming that we're not all about to be issued with a manufacturer's recall notice from the great garage in the, um, wherever, we learn to live with this fault. By age six, say, we start to accept that we have an annual ration of one birthday. At age seventeen, we cringingly appreciate that we cannot take back that declaration of enduring love made by text message. We know it's a waste of our thirties to wish we had done things differently. No, by means of whatever particular lessons it takes - whether through osmosis or simply by observation - we find ourselves knowing that our own personal time machine does not come with reverse fitted as standard.

Or at least most of us do. For within every generalisation lies an exception. My mum is one such.

Thirty years ago mum bought a house. The house has seen its share of comings and goings and undergone its own gradual shifts of layout, decor and furnishings in the three decades that have passed since. The one and only constant during that time - the datum point if you like for the scientifically-minded - is my mum. Or more accurately, my mum and her ever expanding strata of junk.

Now yes, I'm well aware that junk is often perceived as a pejorative term; and yes, that one (wo)man's trash is another (wo)man's treasure. Walk into my mum's house on any day at any time in any year and every surface in your eye line (as well as those below it) will be piled high with interesting things. In her accumulation of stuff, my mum is ruthlessly Marxist - everything truly is equal in her eyes. Thus broken lampshades, threadbare school uniforms and mouse-eaten Easter bonnets are treated just the same as her wedding dress, my late father's stamp collection or the small pile of rare first editions. Family photographs jostle for space with the Radio Times from last Christmas; her newly-bought clothes with those that fitted the infant me at the tail end of the 60s; handmade English slipware china made just for her by a potter friend with plastic union jack flags and bunting from the Queen's Golden Jubilee.

The trouble is, I think, is that to my mum it is not junk around her but a means of re-living the past and of breathing life into her memories. She does not see the same old heap of tat that I do when I walk into her bedroom; she sees the faces of my little sister and I as children; she smells the smells of her own mother cooking; she hears the laugh of her late husband. Thinking about it, it's maybe not so much that the things around her enable her to put her personal time machine into reverse as such (although I think she'd like them to); it's perhaps more that the objects enable the past to come with her into the present.

Mum is, needless to say, also exceptionally reluctant to throw anything away. It is as if the items contain a little of the essence of the person that owned them, rather like people were once afraid of having their photograph taken because they thought it would steal their soul away. Over the years, I've got used to how mum is. I appreciate too to a large extent it is also none of my business if she chooses to fill her house with all manner of ephemera, even if that means that no living soul has actually sighted her bed in the last six years. Except of course when she needs some help shifting it, as she did today in anticipation of the men coming to fit her new central heating tomorrow

I have to be honest and say that I was not looking forward to it. I knew the day would consist, in large part, of me saying "let's chuck this old thing out" and her being all wild eyed and defensive and snatching the item from my hands as if I was suggesting throwing a real baby out of the window. Repeat ad nauseam until both of us were sweaty and hot and irritated and bad tempered with each other.

However today, for the first time in a long time, I detected a different force at work. Yes, she put up a token gesture of reluctance when it came to me throwing into the recycling three large boxes of my old school exercise books, for example. But a token gesture is what I mean, not the anger that has been present on similar occasions before. So as a result of which, with valiant help in emptying the attic from my brother-in-law, we got enough cleared for the plumbers to get access where they need it in about half the time I had anticipated. I was even able to take a whole car load down to the municipal dump, an unprecedented move.

Afterwards, when we were at my sister's house waiting for dinner, I thought it was right to say to mum how impressed I was with how relatively easily she'd been able to 'let things go', that it made me think that she must have been actively disengaging from some of the stuff in advance. I think she was pleased that I'd noticed but didn't really say much by way of response. But it did make me wonder if it really has taken until now for her to accept that her personal time machine does not have a reverse gear. I guess only time will tell.