The Write Stuff

Alchemilla mollis - does 'herb garden' and 'ground cover'.

Well, wouldn't you just know it; home again from a few days on the narrowboat and damn me if it isn't another cold, wet day!  The sort of day when merely getting out from under the duvet is a challenge, let alone venturing out to see what the slugs and snails have been up to in our absence.  So I haven't, yet.  Gone out to see what the slugs have been doing, that is - I have managed to crawl out from under the duvet and rashly committed myself to a morning of proper commecial gardening tomorrow.

Yes folks - proper commecial gardening!  A project for someone who isn't a friend and former work colleague, but is a lady in need of a herb garden and some ground cover for a rather dry front garden.  Precisely the type of work I need and enjoy!  She also lives in a very salubrious neighbourhood so if I can make a good impression I may find more customers in the vicinity.  Fingers crossed...!

I was beginning to wonder if it wasn't time to consider alternatives to the life horticultural.  A great friend and keen reader of this blog, impressed by my writing, recently remarked that I should 'write a book'. 

A cunning plan, though whether my literary talents would stretch to anything commercially viable in the current post '50 Shades...' climate is, to say the least, questionable!  I can't help thinking that if I attempted the proverbial 'bonkbuster', complete with sighing, swooning, profoundly annoying unassertive heroine and mean, moody, anatomically implausible hero, the result would be rather too tongue-in-cheek, and nowhere much else.  Things might get very dirty, but only in the way you do handling fresh compost or silty soil.  And the title?  See if you can guess it before we get to the end of this post.

There is already a dangerous precedent in that no lesser horticulturalist that Alan Titchmarsh once won a 'Bad Sex Award'.   Apparently his novels aren't that good either... 

(And there goes my chance of ever working for B&Q!)

When it comes to horticulturally-themed parodies, I would have to work very hard indeed to trump this rather excellent effort from the Guardian's Simon Hoggart that had me crying into my cornflakes a few weeks ago.  "He stood above her, holding a rope, thin, silky, sinuous, as if it were possessed by a life of its own. 'You know what I'm going to do with this?' he said slowly with a beguiling smile on his fleshy lips. 'Yes, I'm going to tie up the sweet peas before it starts raining.' "

It is tempting to wonder if it isn't just the grey skies that are to blame for the apparent lack of interest in gardening this year.  Once upon a time, they used to say that 'gardening is the new sex'.  Now it seems sex is the new gardening; respectable suburban folk who would normally be pondering whether to go for begonias or bizzie lizzies in their bedding schemes are sitting indoors clutching their 'Kindles' and pondering an entirely different concept of bedding!

And if I am reduced to writing 'mommy porn' for a living, the Potteries-based horticultural bonkbuster would have to be called...

Fifty Spades of Clay!

Ouch!