30 April 2006
CdP
It's salutory, sometimes, to come up against your limits especially if you're someone like me who doesn't, deep down, think that they have any.
We had a week to spend in the country, a week when C was off in Paris on her school trip and when I could get to grips with making a watering system. I had designed it. I had bought the very professional-looking components needed. This would be no little-bits-of-string watering system like the ones that had been functioning perfectly well in small verdant patches of my garden for the past three years. So expert have I become in telling plumbers and gardening contractors what to do with tubes and sprinklers that I decided that it was time to stop them moaning and complaining about my demands by being able to say "look, if I can do it, I don't see why you can't."
I started with the patch at the top, my high-level orchard by the front gate. It was easiest, of course, by virtue of having nothing planted there except six fruit trees and the row of rugosa roses which will one day be our front hedge. No grass, is what I'm saying. What it did have was the flattened and well-concealed remains of piles of variously-calibrated gravel and drainage stones, which made hacking channels through it with my little pick a sweat-inducing activity. (L would say he did it but in fact he only did about four metres of it before he declared it 'too boring' and went back to tinkering with his latest article or chapter of his novel.) As I was twisting the pipe and screwing the joints into position, I was guiltily aware of the fact that this relatively flat bit of the garden was the one area where I could reasonably and easily follow my own dictates (to others) and make the pipe system a closed circuit. But that would mean a further five metres or so of pick work. I didn't. The first time I turned on the water, nothing much happened at all. I went back and tightened joints. The second time, my pop-up sprinkers neither popped up nor sprinkled: oozed would be a better description, and closer inspection showed that far more water was coming out of the joints than the sprinklers. In fact, it was emerging in great fountains from the point where the sprinkler screwed into the joint... a point which had looked quite quite wrong to me while I was doing it. Nothing I could do would make it stop. Miles of plumber's tape and lashings of joint sealant had no effect at all. I studied it carefully. These things didn't have proper screw threads. They certainly weren't meant to have sprinkers screwed into them. What on earth did that boy in the plumbers' supply shop think he was playing at? It wasn't my fault: it was somebody else's! What a relief. Just swap the wrong joint for the right and all would be fine. My belief in my all-encompassing powers remained intact.
Mirko in the plumbers' yard looked at me with disbelief when I told him about the joints. "But I remember giving you the right ones!" No, not a single joint with a screw exit. He looked dubious and handed over the correct pieces, while I told him how I'd been damning him to hell for the past 24 hours. I have still not summoned up the courage to go back to him and tell him that, yes, in fact, the correct pieces were there, hidden in the box beneath dozens of the other kind. Who would have thought? I substituted the wrong for the right and, hey presto... no better than before.
I swallowed hard and decided to move down in front of the house where things would no doubt go far better. Here, a perfectly acceptable system of DIY-shop squirters had been keeping my rose-and-herb patch looking lovely since last summer. After I had extended that with my new professional kit, taking lines out and putting pop-ups in the lawn above, the DIY squirters continued to squirt. The pop-ups stayed firmly down. When Stefano the builder passed by and saw what I'd done, he said, as diplomatically as he could "maybe you shouldn't start out with a half-inch pipe at the tap end, and then have it going up to a 5/8th inch pipe later on..." He's right of course. But up the top, where it's all 5/8th inch, it doesn't work anyway, so I'm drawing my own conclusions. (And calling a plumber.)
The next stage was the grass between house and chicken house.
The patch immediately outside the front door is looking perfectly lawn-like. I mowed it, and it's almost good enough to picnic on. Elsewhere, I could only wonder whatever possessed me to think that leaving a bit of self-sown country grass could help fill in the gaps between my struggling seedlings when I planted last autumn. Of course, there would be self-sown stuff there anyway by this time, but I certainly did nothing to help eliminate it in the early stages. Now, my little emerald-green sprouts were struggling, thinly but bravely, between great brutish lumps of some pale green gramineae which at first looks quite manageably domesticated but the moment your back is turned explodes into a knee-high bush, crowding out anything in a range of half a metre.
And so, much to L's disbelief and disgust, I started weeding. Started at one end and worked towards the other, watering system all but forgotten. He couldn't see the point of working so hard and so painstakingly just to give a few tiny blades of grass a chance. He wanted to get out there with his strimmer, though I explained over and over that strimming would solve nothing (and anyway, each time he lets loose with his strimmer, we lose something precious: two of my lovely partridge ground-cover roses have now succumbed, though the strawberry plants he 'pruned' seem to have come back to life with a vengeance). I don't think I'm kidding myself, but the effect of my patient weed-pulling – slow but not difficult, with the soil so soft after such a damp winter – was instantaneous and heart-warming. The poor benighted blades picked themselves up almost immediately. And from one day to the next, they seemed to have multiplied. I'd like to think that next time I come up, there will be a soft carpet of green. Though as I see no way of finding the time to finish the highest layer, up by the caravan, what I will probably find next time I'm here is sad wilting once-hopeful grass shoots betrayed by a lack of water, and being colonised once again by the foul, unplucked fiends setting seed and ready to let loose their next generation in my freshly-weeded lawn.
There are bad things about weeding. It is, as L keeps telling me, terribly boring (but does everything in life have to be exciting?). What's more, it seems to be giving me RSI in a way that spending hours at the computer each day never has.
But there are good things too. I mean, in its own tedious way, it does provide instant gratification: direct from jungle to neatness. And it gives you time to get inside your own head. All right, I can see that some people might number this amongst the bad things. But there are so few times in our busy, work-filled, children-filled, technological input-filled daily lives when we do something brainless and repetitive with no external stimuli save those of our natural surroundings when the only thing you can do is think your very own thoughts. Ironing is a bit like this, though there's always the temptation to turn on the TV or radio (or get the cleaning lady to do it). And sewing can be, though that requires a certain amount of concentration on the job at hand. But when you're weeding, apart from very basic concerns like making sure you don't pull out the things you're trying to conserve, and trying not to sit or kneel in muddy patches, all you can do is reflect.
So what have I been reflecting on? Family for a start. My mother and her strange life with a father who had two families – one in Sydney, one somewhere in New Zealand. I wonder if I have a whole half-family somewhere. If I do, they probably are still burning with resentment at a father who ditched them one day and opted to stay in Sydney and change his name. Did he drop out of their lives totally, from one day to the next, and never go back? I think my mother spent most of her life wishing that he would go back. Funny things, families. I have his birth certificate (born in Sunderland, father a rivetter at the shipyards, illiterate mother who couldn't sign her name and gave a surname – Croison – which long trawls through the internet show to be rather rare, even in France where it clearly comes from), and various other pieces of paper relating to his subsequent career as a french polisher at the maritime services board in Sydney. I remember his superbly black and shiny wooden-handled tools hanging in perfect order over the work bench in the garage and wonder what happened to them... how I would love to have them now! But I know no more about this enigmatic man, except that he was mustard-gassed in the First World War and quite crazy.
What I try not to think about during my long weeding sessions is my watering system – too painful – though I have reached one momentous decision. In this section, I am going to keep the half-inch tubes that I laid, in a fit of brilliant pre-planning, before I sowed my lawn. And I'm going to attach my professional pop-up sprinklers to them. I bet you anything this will work far better than any other of my pitiful attempts at advanced plumbing. And then, of course, I'll have the gratification of being able to think that my skills are limitless after all.