This morning I wrote the first draft of the piece on yesterday's garden visit. I was gratified to see that the Explore Your Body Clock page on the BBC website confirmed my belief that the ideal time to do this sort of work is in the morning, the mind being most alert between 09.00 and 11.59 am. Once again, the allotted word count of six hundred or just over felt stingy, and I was regretful about all the interesting snippets I'd learnt and would not be able to share, but I got the bones of it down. After a slightly late start messing around with other things, it took me until lunchtime.
I looked again after lunch at my two pages of A4 spaced at one and a half lines, which is roughly what six hundred words equates to, and decided to leave revisions until the next day. I have never found the graveyard slot after lunch conducive to clear thought, and looking at the BBC website I see that's because from 12.00 to 14.59 I am programmed to experience a biological siesta, with a post lunchtime dip in alertness reflecting my increased gastric activity. OK, we only had cold meat and salad for lunch, but it certainly felt like siesta time. I need to concentrate for the revisions, not just to make sure that I haven't accidentally left out any key points, but also to get the prose as clear and concise as it can be. Each eight words used where three would do are taking up space that could otherwise make room for extra content.
Perhaps I should set myself a word limit on the blog. Though I don't have time, when it's a hobby to be fitted in as and when. Cutting paragraphs down so as to express yourself as simply and accurately as you possibly can is much harder work than allowing yourself to witter on at whatever length suits you. The first requires skill and thought, while the latter is mere self-expression, and can be as flabby and indulgent as you choose.
Later on I had a cheerful email from the bookings secretary of the garden club I've been writing the presentation for, confirming their meeting and enquiring whether I wanted a couple of tables. That was my cue to break it to her that this time I would be talking entirely from slides. It is something we considered when she was originally going to book me for February, before deciding that month should be given to an address on pruning. More to the point, I am no longer in a position to borrow the plants. It's strange how resistant people can be to new ideas, since when I started doing talks, relatives whose only experience of garden talks was slide based wanted me to get a projector, and now they have got used to me talking from plants they ask whether I could not still borrow the plants, even though I no longer work for the plant centre. I couldn't. Apart from the faff of the twenty-two mile round trip to collect them and again to return the unsold ones, I don't want to take any responsibility for the performance of plants supplied by a business I am no longer anything to do with, and I don't suppose my former employers would be happy with me wandering in and out taking and returning stock unsupervised (though they might be. On my last ever day at work I was left to till up and lock up by myself, my colleague having to leave early and my employer having other fish to fry on a Sunday afternoon).
I will admit, it was a deliberate decision on my part to leave telling the garden club organiser about the slides until near the time of the talk. I thought that if I contacted her well in advance, informing her of the planned change in format and asking whether that was OK, she would probably start thinking of all sorts of reasons why it wasn't. If, on the other hand, I presented it as a fait accompli and one that we had previously discussed, that would make the talk better, she probably wouldn't have the energy to start running around looking for an alternative speaker at two or three weeks' notice. Cunning as serpents, us horticultural journalists. If she throws a wobbly I'll know I've miscalculated.
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