I must have mentioned before that my ideal job would be Assistant Head Gardener in a large country house. I wouldn't want to be the head gardener - too much responsibility - but I would like the outdoors nature of the job, the solitude, the reward of growing plants and knowing the Latin names for them. There would be a walled garden, an orchard and an orangerie. I would spend my days grubbing in the borders, pruning roses, mulching, bluing the hydrangeas, smelling freshly-cut grass and reflecting on the big questions that are habitually provoked by tending to small things. I would have all of the joy that would come from spending my days in such a place, and none of the financial obligations. One day, shortly before I reached retirement age, an old-fashioned-looking, late-flowering, fragrant rose with dusty pink petals would be named after me.
Unfortunately I have no skills that would recommend me for such a job and you will look in vain for the Helen Smith rose in garden centres in twenty years time. Most house plants die in my care (overwatering - it turns out you can love too much, especially if the recipient of your love has green leaves). I have a small, pretty garden in London with an apple tree, roses, orange blossom, peonies, foxgloves, hollyhocks, hydrangeas, clematis and some excessively tall spiky trees that attract admiring comments from friends who like tall spiky trees. But I'm plagued by hungry slugs and the grass on the lawn is tatty. The other week I bought a plant in Homebase that turned out to be a buttercup.
Still, we all have our fantasies. At the weekend I went to Cardiff with my daughter to help my sister-in-law clear out her parents' house and tidy up the garden. Inside the house we threw away most of it, kept some of it, laughed at old photos, and lugged and heaved, dismantled and dusted. I drove there from London in a rainstorm on Friday and drove back in another rainstorm on Sunday, but on Saturday the sun shone all day. I know you don't believe in any of that nonsense, and nor do I really, but it did seem almost as though something or someone must have intervened to ensure the weather gave us a chance to sort out the garden while we were there. Lauren, Leanne and I - and Louis, my little nephew - weeded and hacked at the brambles, and Lauren planted petunias, begonias and lobelias, and other bright plants she had grown at her place from seed. 'It's like the
Lost Gardens of Heligan,' I said when we had finished. Which it wasn't. But it was nice to see the place restored to some of its former loveliness, with peonies and primoses and self-seeded love-in-a-mist visible in the borders, and even some rhubarb in the corner near the sundial.
So this week I'm supposed to be writing. First I have to go to Oxford on the train
to do a reading for the Oxford Fringe Festival. If you're going to be there, I'll look forward to seeing you. I love travelling by train because I can pretend I'm going on an adventure, and also I can read. I can't read while I'm driving, obviously, because if I did that we'd crash. But I can't even read when I'm a passenger in a car or on a bus because I get carsick.
I'll take my Kindle and finish
The Zoom Zoom by Penny Goring, a collection of crazy, sexy, dirty, beautiful, sad poems and short pieces of fiction. I have never read anything quite like it, her writing is awesome.
Talking of awesome things, I saw Inception last night. I don't understand why so many people told me I wouldn't like it. I loved it. I loved the lucid dreaming mythology, the casting and the ambiguous ending. I understand how Christopher Nolan could write something like that but I don't begin to understand how he'd go about filming it. I don't care if it is his job, it's an extraordinary achievement.
Whatever you're doing this week, I hope you're planning something wonderful. If not wonderful, I hope at least you'll get a chance to do something creative, whether it's gardening, knitting, painting, writing or whatever it is that you like to do. Talking of which, I wish I could include blog posts in my daily writing word count but I can't. Nor can I count chatting on Twitter. I need to turn off the Internet and do something useful. I think I am going to start writing the thing I said I wouldn't write next (my novel,
Beachy Head, about a woman and an angel who go on a road trip after the angel saves her from suicide). I have seen and admired too many artistic things recently that have reminded me that the whole point of
everything is to spend your days doing something you're proud of, that you think is good.
What are you doing this week? I know I said I would turn off the Internet but of course I won't. If you comment on here I will come back and peek.
I have heard from English PEN that Tran Khai Thanh Thuy, one of the recipients of a book I sent through their Writers in Prison programme, has been freed from prison in Vietnam and is now in the US.
