things to do

I make lists of things to do.  It's a habit I slipped into during adulthood: as a teenager I found the plot device in one of Dorothy L. Sayer's novels whereby the detective found someone's To do list incredibly unconvincing.  In middle age I find it entirely believable, though I keep mine on my laptop rather than a piece of paper ready to be dropped where a passing detective can pick it up, but any amateur detective worth their salt would find a way to look at my computer anyway.  My memory may not be so good as it was a few decades back, and I have more to remember.  Pay Visa bill by the 18th of the month and Get cat worming pills don't feature in your life when you're fifteen, don't have a credit card and your parents take care of the cats' medical requirements.

A good To Do list is broken down into bite sized chunks.  Weed in front of the Buddha statue now the cyclamen are coming out is an achievable instruction.  The area concerned is about fifteen feet by eight, and in the course of an afternoon it's quite possible to weed it, mulch it, stand back and admire the bright pink and soft white flowers of the cyclamen against their new dark background before deleting the task from the list.  Weed back garden is a useless reminder, since it will never all be weeded at once.  I might as well add Remember to breathe or Keep in touch with friends.  A To Do list needs to be more specific than that.

I add new things to the bottom of the list, and delete items as and when they're done.  I don't date them when adding them, which would be too weird, but obviously the things at the top of the list have been there for longest.  The bottom of the list always has rapid churn, as I add reminders to myself to post birthday cards, and other simple but time critical jobs.  It is very interesting to see how different tasks fare, which ones linger for ages, and which are tackled smartish.  You learn quite a lot about your priorities and your method of tackling them, when you write them down and periodically review them.

I am dreadful at not quite finishing things.  I will do most of something, maybe nine tenths of it, and then fail to make the final push that would allow me to say it was finished.  The Osmanthus delavayi at the corner of the island bed nearest the house has been almost but not quite pruned into a dome for weeks.  Why?  I truly have no idea.  It's not as though I disliked pruning it, or grudged the necessity to prune it, or had suffered a past pruning accident involving Osmanthus which left me with a suppressed fear of taking the secateurs to it.  I just don't seem to get round to finishing it.  At the opposite end of the scale, I am prone to mission creep.  Weeding in front of the Buddha statue took longer than an afternoon, because once I was settled in that corner of the garden I felt unable to stop weeding at the edge of the area with the cyclamen, and continued under the canopies of the neighbouring shrubs before I could declare the job done.  Which is fair enough.  It's my garden, so I can do things in any order I want to.  The list is only meant to act as a memory jogger.

Sometimes I realise that the reason why I still haven't done something ages after I thought I should do it is because I don't want to, or the thing itself is fundamentally misconceived.  That can be a useful discovery, and mean it's time for a total rethink on the issue.  Sometimes the answer is to grit my teeth and do it anyway.  Tax returns, for example, are dull but essential, and the week comes when they can't be put off any longer.  Sometimes the avoided task is totally innocuous, and I can only think that it has become abhorrent as a way of justifying having put it off for so long. Some tasks go away by themselves, as they are superseded by events.  Clearing the dead leaves from under the eleagnus hedge, for example.  I worked my way along about the vast bulk of the hedge weeks ago, picking up the fallen leaves, but never got right to the end.  Now it's time to cut the hedge back hard, which will reveal a whole new lot of leaves needing to be picked up, but makes the old memo redundant.  And sometimes things stay on the list for ages simply because I was totally over-optimistic about how much I could get done in a week, and added a month's worth of work in one go.  From that point of view the list can be a useful reality check.

Today was a red letter day, as I polished off the top item on the list, Tidy the HT bed.  The box hedge around the bed, which has been cut in several stages since Derby Day without ever quite getting there, has finally been hard pruned all the way round.  The worst of the non-thriving roses have been dug out.  The scaffolding pole for the standard wisteria has been installed, using a spirit level to get it vertical, and the wisteria planted, along with a slightly battered Buddleia fallowiana alba which someone gave me ages ago.  The weeds have been grubbed up and the bed mulched with mushroom compost, 6X, fish blood and bone, and Strulch.  The only thing not done is to prune the remaining roses, because while it would be nice to be a completionist and cut them down now, I felt I should leave it until they'd gone dormant and prune them at the conventional season.  I have been working on this mini project intermittently since March, when I bought the wisteria, and at some point over the summer I dug out the scaffolding pole from its previous too crowded and too shaded position.  At last it is done.