if wishes were horses

I am running out of things to do in the house.  There are still things that need doing.  Yesterday I cleaned the bathroom, and I could follow that with cleaning the kitchen, and the downstairs cloakroom.  I could vacuum, or do the small pile of ironing that's built up since I did every last scrap of ironing, and sorted out two drawers of t-shirts into neat, rational piles (best Boden, old and somewhat worn Boden, posh pima cotton, ancient but still incredibly comfortable pima cotton for winter layers, short sleeved, sleeveless).  I could finish the biography of Sir Edward Grey (funny chap, the author keeps telling us how honest, upright and transparent he was, yet he fathered a series of unacknowledged illegitimate children, and had a long-standing affair with the wife of one of his friends).  When I finish that, there's the whole of Gibbon's Decline and Fall to be getting on with, or Moby Dick.

The trouble is, I don't want to read, or watch TV, or wash floors, or wipe the Aga, or even start the beekeepers' accounts, which I am going to have to do at some stage fairly soon.  I don't want to go for a walk by the coast and watch the short, grey, restless waves of the southern North Sea or the lower reaches of the Thames estuary.  I have no wish to tramp across the fields, the sodden and barely passable mud sticking to my boots with every step.  I don't even want to go round an art gallery.  I want to go outside and get on with the garden.  And the ground is very, very wet, and the wind is blowing a stiff breeze.

Treading on wet ground ruins its structure, especially on a clay soil.  I want to finish pruning the roses, the David Austin ones I haven't touched yet, the 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' which I took masses out of before Christmas, to try and open up the steps to the lower lawn, and clearly need to take as much off again, the tough yellow flowered climber that's hanging out over a grass path, and which I left until now for its hips.  But I don't want to walk on the rose bed, or be smacked in the face by the wind catching the long tentacles of 'Paul's Himalayan Musk'.

I want to get on with weeding the beds, and go with the Systems Administrator to collect a truck load of spent mushroom compost, and spread the compost, and order up a pallet of Strulch.  Except that I shouldn't walk on the saturated ground, and my trousers would become soaked and caked in mud within minutes when I knelt down, as would my cuffs, and great gobbets of earth would come up with every root, while every shrub I brushed up against would dump a load of water down my back.  And the thought of shovelling up two dozen bags of saturated manure and straw and heaving it on to the back of a truck isn't delightful either.

I should like to have a go at clearing the vegetable patch, finally, apart from the fact that I never managed to prune the grape vines round the edge when it was the right time, and now I suppose I can't until the leaves are out and the flow of sap has abated.  The last remains of the great compost heap like a neolithic barrow, which was superseded by the theoretically weed-free series of bins, is destined for the vegetable beds, but I don't want to have to push it a wheelbarrow at a time while it is soaking wet.

The boundary hedge needs cutting in the next month, before the birds can start nesting.  We have invested in a new electric pole saw for this purpose, a Ryobi which reviewed well on Amazon and which other users said was not too heavy as long as you wanted it for light garden use rather than hammering away all day on a commercial woodland scale, but the ground is too wet and slippery to walk on, and the wind is thrashing the branches about too much to cut them.

I could start sowing seeds in the greenhouse, but that would be a so much more relaxing job on a relatively calm day when the whole structure was not rattling fit to bust, and I would be more confident about the health of any seedlings which germinated if it were not so constantly damp.  I want them to emerge into the buoyant and encouraging air of spring, not a botrytis soup.

It could of course be much worse, and I must be grateful that we are not flooded here.  But it would be so nice if it could just stop raining, and blowing, and simply be average.  Boringly average.  Bit of rain, bit of sun, a few overnight frosts, nothing too severe, some calm days.  Just dull normal stuff, instead of the wettest/coldest (delete as appropriate) winter for the past fifty years/century/since records began (ditto).