I'm Just Sitting Watching Flowers In The Rain

I have slowly come to realise that, far from being a GOD I have become a DOG. This awakening isn’t down to dyslexia, I’m sorry to say, as I officially and undeniably became a DOG on Friday of this week. You see I used to be a TOG and I was OK with that but now, thanks to Gardener’s World on the telly, I realise that as sure as “wow” follows “bow”, time has run out and I can only sit up and beg.

A TOG, by the way, is a Trainee Old Git, and it seems to me that you know you’re one of them when you embarrassedly start watching the gardening programmes now and again on a Friday night instead of going to the pub with your mates or staying in with a curry and watching a horror movie on DVD. But then comes the next step which I took this week, the fatal, and final, step where I found myself programming my hard drive to record the gardening shows in case I might miss any. And that’s when I realised I had moved up the rankings from a TOG to become a Decrepit Old Git. A barking old DOG. What a sad, sad day.

When I was much, much younger, maybe a few months ago, the idea of going out and doing gardening would have been bottom of my list of priorities alongside smoking a pipe and reading the People’s Friend, or maybe buying a cardigan, getting a flat cap, putting my teeth in a jar and then sucking on boiled sweets before putting them back, unwrapped, in my pocket to finish later after picking the lint off. But now, almost as a final flourish before the care home calls, life has somehow forced me out in to the back garden like an obsessive, compulsive kid who rushes back from school to tidy his room.

I really have tried to fight this addiction, and if the local council had organised meetings, I’d unashamedly look for help by standing up and confessing “My name’s Paul Coia and I’m a keen gardener”. And before you tut and start to lose sympathy let me say I really have fought this but the dealers just get cleverer, even delivering plants and shrubs round the doors in my neighbourhood by van. I’ve tried going cold turkey several times over by getting away on holiday but it makes me come out in sweats and tremors. Even though the Portuguese doctor said it was sun stroke, I knew what it really was and recuperated by stealing cuttings from the hotel gardens to bring home and pot on.

Yet life’s surely too short for this, and having to spend every Saturday morning in garden centres while taking hours choosing rakes and spades or wondering whether peat free compost wins over the other stuff, is doing my head in. For me, bedding used to be for lying on lazily, late on a Saturday morning. Now it means colour coordinating petunias and nasturtiums.

And gardening is not just a question of pulling up a few weeds is it? Oh no. There’s a whole business built around us DOGs, and more tools and hardware are available than took America in to Vietnam. You want a Compost Maker do you? Well, would you like anodised aluminium or environmentally friendly timber sourced from sustainable B&Qs in Putney? Or how about lawn mowers that you ride on? “We’ve got them sir but would you prefer the petrol, diesel, or nuclear fuelled ones? Or how about solar powered?” I turned that one down as it seems to me that cutting your grass at midnight in the dark is a great way to unwind if you wake up needing a fix.

Then there’s what to wear. Wellies or just old shoes? Shorts or old jeans with a Batman utility belt for cutters, dibbers, slug pellets and a bit of chocolate to keep you going?

And then, worst of all, there’s the hours and days wasted as people seem to want to keep you talking over the fence about whether it’s time to bring in the banana plants before the first frost comes, or what treatment is best for weeds. Moss, to me, used to be a model called Kate but now it’s an hour long discussion on lawn control.

And I can’t see any upside to this oldie curse. Sure you get fresh air but you also get cold and wet. Of course you get exercise, but you also get a sore back and cramps in your knees. And yes, it’s nice when people admire the garden and say it’s pretty but they don’t see the pile of weeds hidden behind the bushes that you’ve got to get rid of, week by week, by sneaking them away inside corn flake packets so the bin men don’t notice.

So why don’t I simply pave over the whole place and have one great big patio? Well apart from the cost, if I’m honest I think I’d still get obsessive about the paving too, maybe rushing out each day with a pressure hose to clean it up, assaulting squirrels or birds that made a mess, or repointing between the slabs every hour. I could even see myself rearranging the patio furniture according to the laws of feng shui now and again.

So maybe it’s not the gardening that’s the problem, perhaps it’s just me. I can see how some of you might think I possibly need to learn to be less obsessive and try to just chill out a bit, and I promise I will try. But I’m not sure you can teach an old DOG new tricks.