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.

And then there were none

Even under normal circumstances I’m not keen on making a big splash when I leave a job. I’m not saying it’s wrong to do so by any means; it’s just not my way. After all, under normal circumstances, you’ve taken a conscious decision to leave the job you’re in and move to another because for some reason the job you’ve got just doesn’t fit you properly any more. Under normal circumstances.

I guess redundancy is not really normal circumstances. That it might be common circumstances at the moment is certainly helpful and reassuring in the shoring-up of self-confidence dimension but otherwise - at an individual level - doesn’t really cut the mustard. I should say that I’m not remotely bothered about leaving this job; the only thing that had concerned me was finding another before my somewhat fragile finances fell down the gap in between like the TV remote control accidentally falling down the back of the sofa. You know you’ll find it again, just will it be quickly enough to catch the documentary you really want to watch before it turns into a cardboard soap opera.

But I have –luckily – found a new job that starts next week and have already shaken the dust from my feet of this one. So my reluctance to have any kind of leaving do was even more heightened than normal. Nevertheless people had asked me if we were having a final get together, and so a few weeks ago I’d invited our little team along for a lunch at the Tudor Rose pub in Sittingbourne. After all, it would give us all a chance to say goodbye to each other for the last time, and any excuse for a pub lunch is good to go as far as I’m concerned.

The first previously accepted apology came on Tuesday. A colleague would be elsewhere, in another part of the county, she said, and couldn’t cancel. Perhaps we could catch up another time? Of course, I said, yes, we’d catch up another time, gave her my personal number too, and know full well I’ll never hear from her again. It’s a polite end of work charade that suits all parties I’ve found and I’m happy to play it. The next apology was brought along by another colleague upon arriving at the pub. A washing machine problem, apparently, so he wouldn’t be able to join us lest the water ran into the flat below. And, added my news-bearing colleague with a flourish, he said his household insurance has just run out. My absent colleague does clearly not read as much detective fiction as me, otherwise he’d know the surest way to spot a fib is one that’s dressed up in a fur coat and diamonds and way too much detail. The final apology didn’t actually arrive at all; or rather the colleague who’d confirmed he was coming along just didn’t show up. Which is at least as blunt and as honest as one could wish for.

So in the end our final get together was four of us, sitting round a rectangular table in the large square conservatory at the back of the pub. One chose not to eat, electing instead to sip Diet Coke and watch as we three shovelled forkfuls of delicious pub grub and made conversation in between. As she stood up to go, another colleague also got to her feet pleading pressure of work, wished us well and put a tenner on the table for her food. The two of them left together, making telephone gestures with their hands and mouthing ‘keep in touch’ through the window as they walked to their cars.

The two of us looked at each other and asked for the bill, which we settled in cash and walked outside into the early afternoon sunshine. She starts her new job the day before me and we’ve grown quite close over these last few months. When she said she’d keep in touch, I have the feeling that she actually might. I watched her get into her car and drive off to collect her young children from her parents’ house.

I stood there for a moment longer in the car park, alone and smoking a cigarette, then I too got into my car and drove off. And then there really were none.

Garden well

I was surprised at the weight of the ashes.

The funeral parlour had given them to me in an understated but nevertheless attractive cardboard purple bag with lilac swirls and matching silk cord handles. The canister itself was inside a further maroon plastic bag and, as I peeped in surreptitiously in the checkout queue at the Co-op, I was thankful for their discretion. After all, it's quite possible that some shoppers might have been put off by the thought of standing next to the cremated remains of my deceased great uncle as they paid for their packets of cheese and tea and milk and eggs.

By the time my late uncle and I arrived home the silk cord handles were digging into my palm and I was glad to put the bag containing his ashes down. The previous day, the funeral parlour had called my mother to ask her to come and pick Roy up. If she preferred not to, they said, no problem; he could be taken with the other uncollected remains and laid to rest in a communal grave. She in her turn had phoned me and now here we were, back in the little house by the seaside where Roy had moved with his own mother in 1940 and I had gratefully moved with Roo a month or so previously after the ex and I split up.

Uncles Roy's mother had died in 1966, a few months short of my own mother's wedding, and I knew that mum had always been very sad that her beloved Grandma wasn't able to be there in person to see her get married. Roy himself had continued to live in the house, alone, until he died in April 2004. Three and a half years after his death he was back in the house, but this time with me, the dog and a teenager for company.

I didn't really know what to do with the ashes, truth be told. I put them on the kitchen worktop, made a cup of tea and stood outside in the late summer sunshine pondering the question and having a smoke. Roy had loved this house, had lived here since he was twenty years old until time and illness caught up with him and carried him off at 84. A lifelong cricket devotee and one time top class umpire, he'd have smiled in his reticent way and declared that wasn't such a bad innings.

He'd have laughed with joy too at being back at the house again. He'd never wanted to leave it, always resisted the kindly-meant persuasion of health care professionals when they'd tried to convince him to relocate to a retirement flat or, later, a nursing home. Roy had been ill for a long time when he died, perhaps 14 or 15 years, but he always said no and they always went away frowning and puzzled at his refusal of their offer. They didn't know him well, didn't know that he, like the liking of olives or blue cheese, had never really acquired a taste for the company of others.

A few cups of tea and several cigarettes later I placed the urn of ashes in a little space on the floor beneath the boiler and to the left of the sink in the kitchen. And there they have remained, still in their handsome purple bag, for the last eighteen months. Until today.

I had decided some time back that, in keeping with Uncle Roy's wishes never to leave his little house by the seaside, I'd bury the urn and the ashes in the back garden. The house was built before running water on tap was a standard feature of the homes of working people and as such came complete with a well in the back garden. My mother, who spent some of her childhood living here, can just about remember when the well was still in use, although more as a novelty to amuse a child in the early 1950s than as a necessity.

At some point the well in the yard had been capped off. When I was renovating the house prior to moving in back in August of 2007, I'd uncovered the well. I'd always known it was there but had never actually seen it before. I'd removed and discarded the ill-fitting cover, leaving a round hole in the ground perhaps eighteen inches in diameter and the same in depth to the top of the concrete capping. Other than the dog losing his rubber bone and tennis ball in the hole on any number of occasions, the partly uncovered well had not caused any problems. And now it also provided a solution.

I'd put aside today for garden renovation and my first job was to set Uncle Roy to rest in a slightly more fitting place than under the sink next to the dog's bowl. I cleared debris and a few fallen bricks out of the well, levelled off the surface, and placed the urn inside. It was the first time too that I'd taken the urn of ashes right out of the funeral parlour bag. I was surprised to see it was maroon, made of plastic with a screw on lid, and with an ornate label on the front giving Roy's name and the date of his cremation - 7th April 2004. Almost five years to the day.

I carried buckets full of top soil from the end of the garden and filled the well right up until it was almost level with the rest of the yard. I raked it off smooth when I'd finished and sat down on the doorstep next to the well to have a cup of tea and a smoke. I'm going to buy a plant to go on top, perhaps a rose bush or a low-growing shrub or something of that kind. But I'm going to wait a week or so until the earth has settled in case I need to add more soil.

I don't think Uncle Roy will mind waiting for a bit; he's not going to leave his beloved little house again in any event.

Not such cold comfort

A dog’s capacity for sleep is a wondrous thing.

Kaos’s sleep glass is not just half full but brimming over and slopping into a snoozy treacly puddle on the table top. He sleeps for, what, twenty hours of every twenty four? Or appears to, sometimes occupying that half-way fugue state at a point between full consciousness and sense-less oblivion. When he dreams, his legs twitch and his eyes roll as he chases hapless rabbits or misdirected cats. Perhaps his dream net casts further back to his wolverine ancestors and he hunts with his pack, full of cunning guile on an endless plain full of wildebeest or cow-eyed deer. Maybe he’s stationed at the door to a Stone Age cave, permitted wood fire warmth and scraps and bones in return for his protection of the tribe. Who am I to know where a dog’s dreams take him?

When I open my eyes this morning, he is precisely where he was when I closed them, curled up in a ball next to the radiator. That no warmth is emanating from the cold steel panel because I’d switched the central heating off over night simply underlines the force of habit. In his mind, the radiator is a place of warmth and comfort and safety, somewhere to prop his back and stretch his tummy, close enough to me to feel part of the pack but near the bedroom door just in case.

If the heating were to remain off until autumn trails in once again with her misty dew drop fingers and the returning blast of fog horns from container vessels sounding warnings and seeking refuge out in the treacherous shipping lanes, my guess is he’d still sleep there. Such is the power of security and comfort. And habits, once learned, take a long time to break. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes months. Sometimes years.

One of my favourite books when I was very young was called “The Bunny Fluffs’ Moving Day”. It is a Ladybird Book and was originally published in 1948. It’s a wonderful adventure, told in pictures and verse, of the scrapes and escapades that befall the Bunny Fluff family as they move from one house to another. There’s falling into rivers, unexpected mishaps with umbrellas, some lost-getting and stuff-strewing and wrong-doing along the way. I loved the story, made my mother read it to me repeatedly, re-lived every twist and turn afresh with the Bunny Fluff twins each time I heard it. In between times, I’d look through the pictures, hearing my mother’s voice in my head telling me the story in my pre-reading days. The little hard backed book eventually fell apart in spite of the liberal application of brittle 1970s sellotape, but not before I could read the words for myself.

I’ve got my own Bunny Fluffs’ Moving Day later on today. One of my sister’s friends has kindly offered to meet me at the barn with his van so that I can pack up the last of my remaining items. A fridge, a freezer, my mattress. And the dog’s bed.

If it all goes well, I think I’ll order a copy of the book from an online auction site when I get home. I also think that the dog and I may sleep more soundly tonight.

Dog-gone

I never think I’m one for the grand dramatic gesture.

In my mind, yes, I’m the older guy at the end of Independence Day, seeking to find peace and redemption through the sacrifice of his human bullet into the under-belly of the invading mother ship; or maybe I’m Superman, dashing and Bryl-creamed and saving the world one cape full at a time. But in real life, you’ll much more likely find me right there on the railway station in Brief Encounter, eyes brim full of unspoken passion and unrequited yearning as the train trundles forever away into the distance in a whoosh of steam.

I’m very far from being a superhero cartoon character or a silver space-suited cowboy in a sci-fi western. I’m really not all that poutingly unobtainably glamorous in black and white either, truth be told. My not-very-grand-at-all gestures are human-sized even if my horizons are broad; I’ve never been inclined towards door-slamming or crockery hurling, after-hours brawling or running street battles.

Which is why I kind of surprised myself today by slinging my bags (and the dog) into the back of the car and moving out of the barn.

There are a couple of old and well-used phrases that are often called upon to describe this moment: reaching the end of one’s tether and the straw that broke the camel’s back are two that have bubbled up. I hadn’t even been aware that the thought of moving out was so close to the surface of my consciousness. Quite the opposite – I’d come back from Egypt a couple of weeks ago determined to make sharing the site with my ex work, even if that was likely to take some getting used to and be tough going in the interim. But it seems that it didn’t after all take much scratching of the surface to let the moving out decision erupt like a geyser and be activated in a few moments. Just one falling-out too many. Perhaps the concepts captured recently in Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent books, Tipping Point and Blink, more closely approach the truth?

I was back at my little house by the seaside with a couple of bags full of clothes, books and food before my brain had time to blink twice. The dog clambered down the steps and flopped onto the carpet behind my swivel chair as if he’d never been on anything more than a walk chasing waves along the beach. I envy the dog his gift to live completely in the here and now, his joy in the fiendishly simple and almost impossible ability to just ‘be’. I wish I could capture it in a butterfly net and swallow it whole.

I spent a welcome couple of hours this evening enjoying spaghetti Bolognese and home made bread with my three year old niece, my sister and her husband. We watched cartoons on the television and ate chocolate bars, drank tea and Diet Coke, and talked of this and that. I am relieved I’ve acted on my misgivings whilst there was still time not to finish tying up the moving threads.

I thought that we could make sharing the space work. It turns out I was wrong. At least I tried.

And breathe...

You may be wondering why I’ve titled my blog Moving Back, Moving On. Well, like a crap poker player or a poor side-show magician at a travelling fair, I’m about to reveal my hand.

In June 2007, my long-term partner and I split up. We were both approaching 40, so add in a bit of proper real-world stress and some family issues and ye olde fabled mid-life-crisis was close at hand. That the split came out of the blue to me is an understatement, although looking back I can see there were many things that hadn’t been quite right in our relationship for a while. We had also been carrying out the self-build renovation / conversion of a derelict 200 year old barn over the previous few years and found ourselves mentally and physically exhausted some way before the finishing touches were added. We’d moved into the barn and made the best of it as far as we could but...

Well, there are always ‘buts’ aren’t there?

Anyway, fast forward through that period... 18 months on, and what with the credit crunch and such we’ve been unable to sell the barn. I had moved out with the dog to my little house by the seaside and been very happy there, whist he’d remained back at the ranch. But we still continued to confront the insoluble unsellable on a daily basis and needed to find a way forward that acknowledged the fact that the wider economic (and personal) financial situation was unlikely to improve within the next couple of years. So...

To cut a very long story short, I have moved back to the barn today. We are not getting back together in any shape or form, but it is conceivably possible that – as there is enough space on site and we have managed to retain / develop a relationship as ‘friends’ – it could work out, living essentially as house mates under the same roof. It’s a trial period in the first instance. I’ve brought over some clothes, laptop and other essentials (the dog, for instance) and will be living and going to and from work from here over the next few weeks.

In the middle of February, I’m off to Egypt for a week’s holiday with my good friends David, Stephen and Liz. By the time I’ve completed the month’s trial and been away on another continent - diving and eating copious amounts for a week - I hope to have some idea of whether it’s going to work out for me here or not. If it does and has done, then I will make the move a permanent one. If not, I’ll either extend the trial period or move back to my little house by the seaside and call it quits.

It has been a bit weird today, of that there’s no doubt. I’ve felt angry at times, sad at others, and fair to middling in between. I’m trying hard to approach it with an open mind; after all, if it works out OK, it could provide a very practical and logical solution for the next 2 years or however long it takes us to complete the finishing touches here and for the credit crunch to blow itself out so that we can sell up. Practically and logically it all makes a lot of sense. Emotionally, well... that’s where the proof of the pudding is in the dwelling.

And so...

Well, just wish me luck please!