Ok so I like my garden. Doesn’t mean I’m ‘green-fingered’, nor that I want to enter competitions, nor that I even like gardening. Yet a sense of pride (deadly sin alert) accompanies virtually anything you do in the garden. Which is why I’m selective as shit. Whilst Mel tends the flowerbeds, lovingly removing the weeds and turning the soil with little hand tools, I’m mowing the lawn. Because its noisy. And I like noise. And disturbance. And showing all those lazy fuckers who think Sunday afternoon is for a quiet nap the grim reality of living with neighbours. I took the silencer off my mower, bored out the cylinder, added 2 more carburettors and jacked up the back wheels. It’s really cool. Hmmmm. And I don’t mind using the shears. Clipping errant branches from overgrown bushes, of which we are blessed with loads. I like doing that because it is destructive. And I like destructive. They talk about ‘training plants’ but I’ve tried. Whip. Chair at arms length. Carrots. Biscuits and treats. Don’t work. They just grow. As if they don’t have a conscious thought in their dna. So a degree of brutality is required and that’s where me and my shears come in. I’m like the hit-man of the team. You want something killing? ‘Removed’?? Destroyed??? I’m yer man.

So at the back of the garden I noticed a ‘weed’. Of the incredibly big, very long, horribly prickly and very quick growing variety. They used to be known as ‘blackberry bushes’, which grow wild virtually everywhere. Now they’re called ‘suckers’ and we HATE THEM! They’re parasites. They grow in and around the other stuff and spread in a very big and fast way. Ok, you get 3 ripe blackberries once a year but it costs you having every other plant strangled and killed by these suburban variety of ‘aliens’. Bit like Ivy. Looks pretty as it creeps slowly up the house. Next thing its over every window, inside every drainpipe, covering the front door so you can’t get your key in. Another fucking parasite. The plant world is full of them.

So when I ‘tend my garden’ the persona I adopt is not Alan Titchmarsh, its not the old boy from Gardener’s World, or even Rachel de Thame (though I do think of her sometimes… just because). No. When I do gardening my persona, my ‘character’ is Vincent, the John Travolta role in Pulp Fiction. It’s Charles Bronson in The Mechanic. It’s Clint Eastwood in virtually every film he ever made. It’s Villanelle from Killing Eve, but in shorts and a dirty t-shirt. I AM KILLER!!! Ok, ‘garden killer’, but only the baddies. The ivy and the dandelions (got a special mediaeval type torture device which rips them out of the lawn) and the SUCKERS.

Yesterday I ripped out about 30 yards of ‘sucker’ that I’d previously not known was there, all hidden among the good bushes. But once I saw it… once I knew… the challenge was on. It was war. Man against… plant thing. It was brutal and there was only going to be one winner! Probably the one holding the shears with the ability to move. Not that I was unharmed in the process, but battle scars heal.

So a warning to any parasites looking at my garden with evil intent: DON’T FUCK WITH ME!!!

Happy brutal Monday

A xxxx