21
March 2007
Memo
to self: when setting out to do some phenomenally ambitious – nay,
utterly impractical – thing, do it alone. Don’t, whatever
you do, allow any reasonable person near enough to express logical doubts
about your activities – especially if you happen to be married to
that person, because it could lead to cataclysmic rowing and quite a bit
of dashing sledge hammers to the ground in fits of pique.
No, over-ambitious projects are best struggled with in contented solitude.
As I must have said before, I actively enjoy biting off more than I can chew. I need it, it’s what keeps me going. There are even times when I outdo myself and manage to conclude whatever it is, against all the odds. Just as I’m sure that, eventually, I will finish my raised beds. They may never be very elegant. They may demand quite a lot in the way of running repairs to hold them together. But they will be charmingly, lop-sidedly rustic; they will, in their way, be pretty as a picture; and they will, naturally, serve their purpose as containers for soil in which vegetables will grow. But only, that is, if I manage to spend sufficient time up there without L telling me that what I’m trying to do in moments snatched here and there would take a team of five professional carpenters the best part of a week to achieve.
So what exactly did I get done in my last, precious, country weekend before decamping to London for ten days? Well, I finished treating that frustrating last little bit of the two final planks that had remained wood-coloured when my wood stain ran out the previous week. Of course, I didn’t have time to get back to Perugia to get the right stain, and the same-company, different-product replacement that I managed to find in Rome simply wasn’t as good – despite the woman in the little eco-architecture studio in San Lorenzo telling me that it was exactly the same. So thank goodness that I had so little left to paint (and of course in my make-do, muddle-through way I can take comfort in the fact that the colour will soon fade and it will all look the same): this product just didn’t seem to take my pigments as well as the other, and went on rather thick and lumpy.
And then I knocked six pointy stakes into the ground. That, unfortunately, was when L intervened. He started off by making desultory offers of help – even dealt the final blows to a couple of the stakes. After which he started to point out – not very helpfully, I have to say – that I was being utterly ridiculous. So I stomped about and chucked tools to the ground and resigned myself to a couple of hours of grumpy weeding between buddleias and caryopteris, and much-needed pruning of the latter. Plus I clipped some edges and mowed a bit of lawn, and generally stood in amazed wonderment admiring my daffodils – of which there are many – swaying in the breeze… that kind of thing, until I felt calm enough to realise that the secret of success is simple: autonomy.
It’s the first day of spring today, and the sun shone blue as blue over the grubby London skyline, though I don’t think the temperature can have been much more than five degrees, and it felt much less than that in the biting wind. In Bloomsbury Square I counted two rather sad little narcisi bobbing limply behind a wall. Otherwise, there was no sign of the early spring that everyone claimed was happening here last week, at the same time as I was getting a sunburnt nose and doing advanced carpentry work in 25-degree heat in Umbria. There’s such a gulf between there and here for these few weeks at the beginning of spring. All the willows and poplars along the motorway between Rome and CdP are already in leaf; the Judas trees are great splashes of mauve. Here, there’s not a leaf in sight and even the grass in the London squares seems to be quaking.
But our ludicrously hot weather ended abuptly too the day before yesterday. Lucia phoned this morning; she said there had been no snow in CdP. (Where L was yesterday, on another of his peregrinations around Umbria for an article he’s writing, it was sleeting hard.) But our summery weekend had come to an abrupt end with a devastating downpour, she said (the up-side… everything was looking very dry). And the cold went right through you.
So what will my swaying daffodils look like now? And all those crisp shiny new leaves on my roses? And the snow-like petals on the little fruit trees? I dread to think. Instead, I’m trying hard to believe that the sudden cold snap will have no other effect than to kill off the wasps which had already started crawling out. Maybe.
I suspect that Lucia’s weather report served only to pave the way for her announcement, some time later this week, that she hasn’t met my ultimatum and hasn’t completed the garden in Cetona by Friday, or else lose the contract. I’m so bad at being tough. But I had to lay down the law because my hand was forced by my client and her architect. And quite rightly too: my vivaista needs a deadline – an opening, a party, a visit, a definitive date – or else never gets anything done: in this garden, she hasn’t had a bridge to take it to. Now she has an ultimatum. But she also has the elements against her… or in her favour, depending on how you look at it. For once, however, I have no choice: I will have to be ruthless. It will probably do me good.
No, over-ambitious projects are best struggled with in contented solitude.
As I must have said before, I actively enjoy biting off more than I can chew. I need it, it’s what keeps me going. There are even times when I outdo myself and manage to conclude whatever it is, against all the odds. Just as I’m sure that, eventually, I will finish my raised beds. They may never be very elegant. They may demand quite a lot in the way of running repairs to hold them together. But they will be charmingly, lop-sidedly rustic; they will, in their way, be pretty as a picture; and they will, naturally, serve their purpose as containers for soil in which vegetables will grow. But only, that is, if I manage to spend sufficient time up there without L telling me that what I’m trying to do in moments snatched here and there would take a team of five professional carpenters the best part of a week to achieve.
So what exactly did I get done in my last, precious, country weekend before decamping to London for ten days? Well, I finished treating that frustrating last little bit of the two final planks that had remained wood-coloured when my wood stain ran out the previous week. Of course, I didn’t have time to get back to Perugia to get the right stain, and the same-company, different-product replacement that I managed to find in Rome simply wasn’t as good – despite the woman in the little eco-architecture studio in San Lorenzo telling me that it was exactly the same. So thank goodness that I had so little left to paint (and of course in my make-do, muddle-through way I can take comfort in the fact that the colour will soon fade and it will all look the same): this product just didn’t seem to take my pigments as well as the other, and went on rather thick and lumpy.
And then I knocked six pointy stakes into the ground. That, unfortunately, was when L intervened. He started off by making desultory offers of help – even dealt the final blows to a couple of the stakes. After which he started to point out – not very helpfully, I have to say – that I was being utterly ridiculous. So I stomped about and chucked tools to the ground and resigned myself to a couple of hours of grumpy weeding between buddleias and caryopteris, and much-needed pruning of the latter. Plus I clipped some edges and mowed a bit of lawn, and generally stood in amazed wonderment admiring my daffodils – of which there are many – swaying in the breeze… that kind of thing, until I felt calm enough to realise that the secret of success is simple: autonomy.
It’s the first day of spring today, and the sun shone blue as blue over the grubby London skyline, though I don’t think the temperature can have been much more than five degrees, and it felt much less than that in the biting wind. In Bloomsbury Square I counted two rather sad little narcisi bobbing limply behind a wall. Otherwise, there was no sign of the early spring that everyone claimed was happening here last week, at the same time as I was getting a sunburnt nose and doing advanced carpentry work in 25-degree heat in Umbria. There’s such a gulf between there and here for these few weeks at the beginning of spring. All the willows and poplars along the motorway between Rome and CdP are already in leaf; the Judas trees are great splashes of mauve. Here, there’s not a leaf in sight and even the grass in the London squares seems to be quaking.
But our ludicrously hot weather ended abuptly too the day before yesterday. Lucia phoned this morning; she said there had been no snow in CdP. (Where L was yesterday, on another of his peregrinations around Umbria for an article he’s writing, it was sleeting hard.) But our summery weekend had come to an abrupt end with a devastating downpour, she said (the up-side… everything was looking very dry). And the cold went right through you.
So what will my swaying daffodils look like now? And all those crisp shiny new leaves on my roses? And the snow-like petals on the little fruit trees? I dread to think. Instead, I’m trying hard to believe that the sudden cold snap will have no other effect than to kill off the wasps which had already started crawling out. Maybe.
I suspect that Lucia’s weather report served only to pave the way for her announcement, some time later this week, that she hasn’t met my ultimatum and hasn’t completed the garden in Cetona by Friday, or else lose the contract. I’m so bad at being tough. But I had to lay down the law because my hand was forced by my client and her architect. And quite rightly too: my vivaista needs a deadline – an opening, a party, a visit, a definitive date – or else never gets anything done: in this garden, she hasn’t had a bridge to take it to. Now she has an ultimatum. But she also has the elements against her… or in her favour, depending on how you look at it. For once, however, I have no choice: I will have to be ruthless. It will probably do me good.
