That doesn’t mean that that the garden gate wrote this! Only that the roses that needed dead-heading are by the garden gate.

I’d just got up, hadn’t even had a cup of tea when I was suddenly struck by the urgency of the requirement to ‘dead-head’ those roses by the front, garden gate. They are truly lovely roses, a beautiful, pale yellow with a scent that would make Mr Chanel jealous.

 But once they’re ‘over’ they’re like Cinderella after midnight, they need to disappear. 

I put on some shoes and walked down the back garden path to get the plastic basket that serves as a trug. It was full. Full of dying bits of plants that our lady-gardener had failed to empty onto the compost heap. So, sighingly adding yet one more to the lengthy list of chores that I’m responsible for, I picked up the basket and walked to the gate in the fence behind the garage which opens into a little copse. Well, actually it’s a few trees bigger than a little copse, I think. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines a copse as a small group of trees. Google doesn’t even know what a copse is!

Anyway, this group of trees is like a giant hedge, about four-hundred yards long and anything from fifteen to thirty yards thick and I can’t find a descriptive word that fits between copses and woods, but by now you’ll know what I’m talking about.

I looked through the fence. It was immediately obvious why the gardener hadn’t emptied the plastic trug. A little way beyond the gate there is a branch-path (in the sense of a branch-line of a railway network) which leads off the main path to the compost heap. The branch-path was impassable. Stingers have been prolific this year – here they were four feet high, leaning in over the path from both sides: jagged leaves, bristling with poisonous barbs, looking at me, smiling, waiting…

“Ha!” I said, “You don’t scare me!”

Not true of course, bravado. At least until I’ve got some protective clothing on.

I went back into the shed, dug out my wellies from under the workbench, behind two bicycles, asking myself as I did so why they can’t be kept in the middle of the shed floor where I’d left them the last time I used them. My stuff is always disappearing into drawers and cupboards. Anyway, that’s another matter.

I checked my wellies, for scorpions, by turning them, one-by-one, upside down and banging them on the floor – a habit I picked up in Oman when I worked there. Sometimes, it was believed, scorpions would crawl into one of your boots while you slept, with the intention of attacking your foot with a fatal sting when you put it in it in the morning (maybe that’s where the expression comes from?). Anyway, it’s worked for me all these years, I’ve never found a scorpion in any of my boots.

As well as putting my boots on I took thick gloves from the glove box and unhooked the old combat jacket that hangs on a nail in the shed wall and put them on. The issue with the nettles was going to be combat.

Armoured now, I turned the wheels in the combination lock, opened the gate and went through.

This time the nettles didn’t look quite so bloodthirsty, they’d lost a bit of their confidence. Quite right, I was dressed to kill.

I grasped the first three stems (traditional: ‘grasping the nettle’(s)) and pulled them out of the ground. They, and the rest of the avenue, and the dead and dying plants in the plastic trug raised the level of the compost heap a little higher.

Then, as I walked back along the branch path. I couldn’t help noticing that the main path – which leads on through the copse to the field beyond – was also overgrown and needed cutting back.

‘Well’ I thought, ‘I’m dressed for it!’ So that’s what I did next. It wasn’t a quick job. As well as nettles there were brambles, clumps of a fast-spreading, variegated green and white grass, ‘sticky’ chick-weed and even young trees.

Before I finished the cook called me in for breakfast.

I’ll dead-head the roses by the front gate tomorrow.

Early Morning Cup of Tea

I woke up four times in the night. The fourth time I took the hint and got up.

I went downstairs into the kitchen where I took the tea things – you know: mugs, tea bags and stuff – out from where they hide when not in use, and put the kettle on. ‘While it’s heating up’ I thought, ‘I’ll go and ‘dead-head’ the yellow roses by the front garden gate.’ I’d been thinking about that for a couple of days.

I opened the front door and was immediately confronted with the bountiful bough of beautiful white roses, which hangs down in front of the door. ‘That’ I thought, ‘is a higher priority than the roses by the gate.’  I needed to do something about pulling it up a little higher, so that the postman wouldn’t need to duck to push letters through the letterbox, but there’s a pigeon nesting in the cotoneaster bush which is next to, and intertwined with the rose bush, and I hadn’t wanted to disturb her. But… she wasn’t on the nest and I couldn’t see any eggs (which aren’t difficult to see in the loose pile of scruffy twigs that pigeons think is a nest), ‘so’ thought I, ‘I’ll do it now!’

I went down to the shed to get the folding steps – which would be necessary to enable me to reach high enough to move the wire hook that holds up the main branch of the rose-bough to a point further along the branch thus lifting the bough higher.

Now, the hook in the wall (hitw) – onto which the loop of clothes-line which is attached to the hook-which-holds-the-bountiful-bough-up (hwhtbbu) is hooked is an upward pointing hook so, as long as the pulling force emanating from the hwhtbbu was in a horizontal or downward direction all was well and the bough was held up, but, as you will already have gathered, the bough of beautiful white roses has grown, not just upwards but just bigger, all-around. And heavier, so it sagged.

I unfolded the step, stood on it, and lifted the bountiful bough up with my left hand whilst unhooking the hwhtbbu with my right and moving it further along the branch. Slowly I lowered the bountiful bough until the branch rested in the crook of the hwhtbbu.

‘Just right’ I thought.

Then there was a ‘pinging’ sound. The branch slumped, lower than it was before, and the hwhtbbu dangled uselessly on the now limp loop of clothes line.

‘Of course’ I can hear you thinking, ‘the direction of pull with the hwhtbbu now further up the branch, in relation to the hitw, is now slightly upward so the loop was bound to slip off.’

I climbed off the step and fetched a pair of pliers from the kitchen tools drawer, (I know that pliers are not normally classed as kitchen tools but the term ‘kitchen tools drawer’ is as it is because it’s in the kitchen not because pliers are kitchen tools). I replaced the loop of clothes line into the crook of the hitw, and bent the hook shut. (That’s what the pliers were for, see?) “Now try and escape!” I said to the piece of clothes line. It looked quite sheepish dangling there, until my right hand grasped the hwhtbu and pulled it to hook it around the main branch of the bountiful bough, which my left hand had lifted to meet it, further up the branch than it was before.

I climbed down from the step and stood back to admire the results of my efforts. The approach to the front door was white with fallen rose petals, as if for a visiting deity, I walked up and down a couple of times so that the transcendent beauty wouldn’t be wasted, then I fetched a dustpan and brush, swept up all the petals and threw them in the compost bin.

The postman will only have to bend a little bit now. I will point out to him that he might consider the considerable time and effort expended, largely for his benefit, as his ‘this year’s Christmas Box’ in advance.

’Had a bad night. Not horrible, just one long, bad dream. Of course I know that dreams don’t last all night – or do they? People tell me that dreams only last a few seconds. And the ‘human science (or maybe that should read ‘human séance’) columns in the Sunday papers tell us that dreams are confined the REM periods in our sleep. Well, the human-realistic dream in which I played a prominent role, and didn’t come out of too well, went on all night. Or so I remembered when I woke up.

 In fact, I didn’t come out of it until I was fully awake. I opened my eyes just before what would have been, almost certainly, an ignominious ending and was relieved to see the sunshine peeping through the gap between the curtains.

I lay there for a few minutes thinking first about the dream, the memory of which, except for the basic outline and the potentially horrible ending, faded rapidly, and then about what I was going to do today. I wrote a rough, mental list of what I intended to achieve on this bank-holiday Sunday:

Master the controls of my new, DAB radio

Deal with everything in my ‘in-tray’.

Cut back the overgrown privet bush that’s trying to take over the garden.

Write another chapter of the novel I’ve been writing for the last thirty years.

First, whilst drinking my coffee and eating my slimming-sized-sliver of toast, I would read the instruction book that came with the new radio, which is a birthday gift from my family to replace the steam powered job I’ve been living with for the last fifty or sixty years. It was breakfast time before I’d learned how to pre-set the stations I intended to listen to, and a long time after breakfast before I’d successfully linked my iPod to the machine. “iPod”? my youngest son said, not quite scornfully, when he finally reached ground floor level. He thinks I should have linked my new smartfone to the set.

But, by lunch-time I’d just about got the radio where I wanted it. I’ll learn how to switch it on and off tomorrow.

Further inroads into my job-list were postponed when it was announced that we were about to set off to walk to the post office to post a parcel. It was I who discovered that our local Post Office, which is within a Co-op store, is open on a Sunday! That I discovered when I turned up and found it shut just after lunch on Saturday. ‘We’re open from 7am until 9pm on Sundays.’ I was told. I found it difficult to imagine people queuing to buy stamps or post parcels at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning.

On the way home we observed what we think are Ash trees which are suffering from ‘Ash-die-back’. Sad.

Once inside the garden gate I was immediately invited go out again, to dispose of a basketful of weeds. That involved braving ‘stinging-nettle alley’. The ‘stingers’ have been prolific this year and those that line the edges of the short, narrow path to the compost heap deliberately lean in towards the middle. The best way to deal with them is to put on wellingtons and cut them back before negotiating the path carrying a staggering load of weeds. Of course, I’m male, so I don’t do that, I confidently stagger up the path – and get stung.

By the time I got back to my desk it was time for dinner. So I couldn’t start any more of the jobs on my job-list, but I didn’t publish or announce its contents, so the only person who knows is me. I’ll make another one tomorrow.

I walked into the sitting room.

The TV was on. Loud.

Wearing helmets and snug-fitting, silver suits, human-like people, with strange-looking weapons, fired lethal, green rays, that deleted (that’s the only word for it) scaly-skinned, non-earth-beings who also had strange weapons, but seemed not to have been very well trained in their use because they never seemed to hit any of the opposition. This was all taking place on a colourful battleground made up of sharp-looking, purple rocks, pools of pure blue liquid and a backdrop of dark, jagged mountains against an even darker sky pierced with a myriad of silver-white stars. The musical accompaniment to this one-sided battle was fast-moving and dramatic, punctuated by the pchiouw sounds of the green rays slicing across the scene to decimate more scaly-skinned, non-earth beings, and cries from male and female voices, in English, making comic-book battlefield noises like: ‘gotcha ya bastard’ or ‘die you galactic dungball’ (I made that bit up).

I took all of this on board in the time I spent looking past the just-opened-door and deciding I didn’t need to sit in my sitting-room armchair. I retreated to my little office in what used to be the lean-to conservatory at the back of the house. It’s comfortable there too.

I sat back and mentally revisited the TV scenario that was still bright in my mind’s eye. Then I projected my thoughts a bit further, towards stories I have read and films I’ve watched, and the plays and musicals we go to the theatre to see: ‘Midsummer Murderers’, ‘Non-Cooperation Street’, ‘East End Antagonists’, Macbeth, Les Mis, and, and, and so-on. Confrontation and violence the main ingredients.

Think about it.

So many of our heroes are gladiators, male and female, who win victories against the odds.

Should we wonder why children grow up to be violent?

Lift the filter jug and swing it over towards the open kettle, tilt it in the appropriate direction and pour enough water into the kettle to make a cup of tea. Simple – or should be. It wasn’t this morning.

Between the initial lift and pouring water into the kettle the jug had to pass the milk carton, either over it or around it, I chose ‘over’.

A tiny misjudgement of the height of the milk carton and how high I had to lift the jug to clear it was the direct cause of an incident.

As I swung it, the bottom of the jug caught the top of the milk carton – whose screw-top had already been unscrewed, removed and placed to one side so that, in the almost immediate future, a dollop of milk could be added to the tea that was about to be made.

I expect you will already have worked out what happened next.

Quickly I put down the filter jug and reached for the tottering milk carton. I caught it. I caught it! Before the tiniest dribble had escaped through the open neck of the carton.

Then the incident occurred.

In my mind.

A clash of two directions of thought.

1. I still have lightning reactions when there is no time for conscious assessment of the requirement.

2. My unconscious conscious judgement of the muscle power required to perform a physical task is inaccurate and, from previous experience of similar occurrences, always on the ‘too little’ side. Too many spilt milk situations.

Upon investigation I learned that the message from the brain to an arm or leg to perform a familiar function is based on what is known as muscle memory, which of course is a misnomer – muscles can’t remember anything, it’s the brain that remembers, and part of what it remembers is the power required for a specific muscle to perform the familiar task.

Now, if there has been a time gap between the last occasion when my brain memorised the muscle power requirement for lifting a filter jug and the current situation, and if I haven’t been maintaining a constant muscle-tone level, my brain might well have sent a message with a power requirement that would have been sufficient for a previous job, but not this one.

Which makes ‘muscle memory’ a double misnomer.

I call it ‘Brain Lag’.

(Of course, this morning, the filter jug might have had more water in it than the time when my brain’s memory of the lifting power requirement was last established.)