I LOVE all this hot weather and long may it continue. Apart from putting smiles on the faces of the people you pass in the street, the sun also stunts the growth of the grass in the back garden, which is helpful.
Not that I cut it anymore. Since my last bout of bad back syndrome, Maria has undertaken grass cutting duties while I sit in a deckchair and point out where she has missed a bit.
In fact, I felt so guilty about this situation that I bought her a new mower.
The manly stuff in the garden is more my domain. Like cutting off branches of trees with a saw.
The other week, I also tidied up some borders with mulch and pebbles, because we had family and friends coming to stay.
One of our guests, unfortunately, was a prize gardener who pointed out the weeds I had let grow in mad abandon down the far border and rockery.
Not only did she point them out, she started pulling them up and putting them in a black plastic bin bag until I told her to stop.
I’ll do it later, I said.
The bag has sat under a bush ever since in silent accusation and so this week I at last went weeding with a vengeance.
These are those sort of spindly weeds that climb over everything else and are so hardy they can grow on corrugated iron.
They form themselves into a network of sticky foliage. If I hate nothing else in the world, I hate them.
They seem to have no purpose in life other than to annoy me.
Oh yes, and sting me.
A word of advice: don’t go weeding stripped to the waist.
The weeds are gone – three sackfuls – but my arms and body tingle like I’m being eaten by leeches. You don’t think they’ve laid their seeds beneath my skin, do you?
And that I’ll wake up tomorrow covered in vegetation like a Hammer Horror Horticultural Thing?
“By heck,” Maria will say. “You need weeding. Not my job, though. I only do lawns.”
