I love a flower as much as the next man. Possibly more. Though it gets a bit less when I come home from work one day in about May and Mel tells me she’s bought ‘a few bedding plants’. And I open the car to find 2,000 little polystyrene boxes of earth looking at me, all with tiny little shoots on them. Shutting the door doesn’t make them go away. I tried. They need planting. Petunias, daisies… errrr… flowers… shit-loads of ‘em, so we dig. And then its done.

But its not. Because bedding plants need watering. Every fucking day. All of them. Otherwise THEY DIE!!!! Which, after a few weeks of watering, wouldn’t be such a bad thing. And you never get a hose-pipe ban when you need one. But actually its a type of therapy, watering the flowers. Its cathartic. And feels great when it’s done.

The other night I was watering (“I’ll clear away the dinner stuff, you water the garden” is an irresistible division of labour) and I just managed to finish before it started raining. I mean, how lucky is that??? Phew, I thought, just made it in time.

And much as I love flowers, I really love metal. Not the music. Not just my new shoulder, but just metal ‘things’. Objects d’art. Objects d’anything. Objects d’metal. So when they fitted our new bathroom and intended to throw the old radiator out, I cried “NOOOOOOO!!!” because giraffes get lonely too, ya know.

I’m turning into my father. I called LBC radio. Talking about the NHS. Now the new, government initiative to create 300,000 more key workers in 12 years. Wow! That’ll solve ALL the problems. They’ll be doing hip operations when your 19, just cos they’ve got the time and man-power and you’re going to need a new one sometime. Right. But the government haven’t announced either how these new workers will be paid, nor how the old workers (currently on strike half the time) will get the pay increases they really deserve but the government can’t afford. And for ‘government’, read ‘us’. So my point was: isn’t this national obsession with ‘free at the point of delivery’ simply unsustainable and the NHS needs a new model whereby users possibly contribute?

So many problems in the world, I’m only one man ya know!!!

Happy Saturday

A xxxx