Today ended up as a bonus full day in the garden. I'd made a slightly provisional arrangement to visit some elderly cousins up in Suffolk, and take them to a nearby garden that was open today under the Yellow Book scheme, but I hadn't had any reply to my gentle e-mail enquiry yesterday sounding them out about whether or not they would like to go, and when I rang this morning it was clear that my cousin had completely forgotten about it and was already very busy. So with mutual expressions of goodwill we didn't go, and suddenly I had the rest of the day to get on with weeding and planting things out of the greenhouse.
In theory I have allotted myself three days a week to work on the garden, since I average out at two days a week at the plant centre. That gives me two days off a week to do everything else, just like normal people with full time jobs. In practice it never works like that. There are so many things to fit into the two days that they invariably spill over into the gardening time. There are my friends and relations, for a start. Then there are the talks, for the woodland charity, and some on my own account about gardening and beekeeping. There are art galleries and museums to visit, and open gardens, and occasionally it's nice to go for a walk. There are the bees to be looked after, the chickens to be mucked out, and sometimes the cats need to go to the vet. There is the mundane business of housework, and haircuts, and trips to the dentist. There are the Pilates lessons and exercises, without which my back would seize up. And there are emergencies, like falling trees or the car breaking down.
I can't really grumble about it all, since to friends who still have to work full time, working part time seems an unimaginable luxury. I don't know how they fit all the non-work things into their two days, though of course part of the answer is that they don't do some of them. The talks, for a start. If I still had a proper job I wouldn't have time to do volunteer talks, which would be a shame, though of course I wouldn't be in a position where I needed to do them to keep my CV looking vaguely interesting and my presentation skills up to date. And people with proper jobs generally have a cleaner. We don't, partly because we couldn't afford one, but also because the whole idea of having to tidy up before the cleaner comes, and your things being moved anyway so that you can't find them afterwards, is abhorrent. Even when we both had real jobs we didn't have a cleaner, after one unsuccessful experiment in about 1988.
My determination to keep time free for the garden does mean that other activities get ruthlessly pared back. It's one reason why I buy most of my clothes by mail order, since a mooch round the shops isn't a pleasure, but a waste of good gardening time. I try to fit in a regular haircut before, as PG Woodhouse memorably put it, my head looks like a chrysanthemum, but that's it. Going defiantly and naturally grey is partly a feminist statement, but largely because there is no way I'm spending hours in the salon having my hair coloured. A pamper day sounds to me not like a treat, but a completely pointless use of hours that could have been put to much more interesting and productive ends. If I'm not in the garden I'd rather be in the National Portrait Gallery than Champneys. Friends and visitors know that our house totters along just on the untidy side of downright insanitary, and that's after we've made a special effort to clean it for them. I could dust the mantelpiece or I could plant out the horned poppies that are still sitting in the greenhouse. There's no contest, most of the time.
(It should be noted as a matter of record that the Systems Administrator today did the vacuuming and washed the kitchen floor, and that I am very, very grateful, since the amount of cat fluff was getting so bad that even I minded. When you sit down to lunch and realise that there is cat fur stuck to your hands, which you have washed, and the edge of your plate, and the butter knife, it is time to Do Something.)
Sometimes things have to go by the board that would have been nice. I ended up missing the RA exhibition of Zoffany portraits, which I'd have rather liked to see, and I'm about to miss a Garden Museum exhibition about the history of garden visiting that shuts tomorrow, because there just wasn't a spare day to get to London. That was worse when I worked full time, and I missed all sorts of things I wish I'd seen.
The garden could really do with three days a week. In fact, it could do with twice that, but three days would be good. Of course I could not have a garden, or at least not one so large and so complicated, but you see I really like the garden. It suffers, compared to a paid job, because employers take a dim view if you bunk off to do other things, but there is no external pressure to stop me taking time off from gardening, only my own force of will.
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