Taking the air

This morning’s southerly would take the skin from your cheeks. Unusual for us. It’s most often the north easterly winds that hurt. Of course, it feels completely painless in one direction, that’s the thing with beach walks. Stride out and you have a salty power source, pushing against the back of your waterproof. It’s when you turn to come back that you realise how far you’ve travelled. There will be a guru somewhere extolling the virtues of salt-water exfoliation. Perhaps you’ll get facial sandblast at the same clinic at a price? This morning’s natural treatments cost nothing and yet I quickly had enough of them. Even the gulls weren’t really bothering to play. The sea remains beautiful, even when it’s cross. The low tide tripping great crashes of water  against the offshore sandbank that’s moved in the space of a week. There’s a scarf of stringy seaweed just above the waterline that goes on for hundreds of yards. I stop and peer at it and am rather embarrassed ...

I was chatting to the man that runs the tree nursery. I was after a couple of roots of copper beech to fill a gap in a hedge. “You’ll find it hard to find copper beech roots in Suffolk now. You don’t see young beech hedges, do you, if you think about it? There’s only the big old ones and they’re quite a rarity. We’re too dry. Too hot and dry. No point in selling them.” Of course he’s right. It was the dry heat of this summer that had cooked the small pieces of hedge in the first place. Although that summer now feels like a lifetime away, in terms of gardening, the ground’s still dry. Last week, I fell for, ‘10 tulip bulbs for a pound’. When it came to putting them in, half a hand-depth down, there’s barely any moisture. The bulbs effectively dropped onto dry earth. I have a good friend that used to live nearby. She’s from the US. Witty, kind and bright, a Wellesley girl, and in the old-school American way, she celebrates the start of each evening with a cocktail. It ...

I gave the bay a flirty little prune in the end. Short enough to show off her beautiful legs and give her a frilly skirt that raises the canopy just enough to let in light to the ground below. Pruning is gardening for the adrenalin junkie. There's no going back. You can spend years growing and just moments lopping off a significant part of that growth. Plant something in the wrong place and you can move it. Pull something up, chances are, with a little love and luck, you can plant it again. Trim the grass or a hedge and in less than a year your mistakes are hidden. Lop off a branch and not only is that branch gone, others move, free from its weight. Do it right and you liberate the tree along with everything around it.

I am flaunting my winnings.  The tomatoes came home with me in a washed plastic take-out box. They were my chosen raffle prize, well, one of my prizes. I'd been invited to make some oral history recordings at a local 'afternoon club', which sounded delightfully raffish. John, a friend from our local museum, had invited me. He and his wife had taken over the running of the fortnightly get-together a couple of years previously. Of course I'd agreed to go, John's a lovely man.  As the day got closer, I regretted making the commitment. The afternoon was half way through a week of being overwhelmed with 'real' work. I felt stressed and unreasonable. Under the cosh from more than one direction. Fortunately, John and his wife don't have a computer or a smartphone, a fact which instantly whipped away any opportunity for a wheedling email from me seeking postponement because something (infer 'more important') had come up. I spent the morni...