venturing out

I left the property today for the first time in a week.  Three times, in fact, since my car was due at the garage, and then we had tickets for the Colchester Mercury in the evening.  The car goes to see a Skoda garage outside Clacton, which has to be one of the best places in Britain to put a Skoda dealership.  I would hazard a guess that Frinton has one of the highest concentrations of Skoda ownership on the planet.

I like my garage.  Every so often Which? or one of the national newspapers runs a survey of car repair businesses, and comes out with shock figures on the proportions of garages missing obvious and sometimes dangerous faults, or inventing unnecessary repairs to inflate the bill.  Apart from a transmission fault that was covered under warranty and a scheduled belt change after X thousand miles, the only repair my Skoda has ever needed in eight years was one burst gaiter (or something.  It might have been a gasket, or a valve) and the bill is always itemised down to the last washer. The latest year of trouble free motoring cost me shy of two hundred pounds, including the MoT.

I did feel a twinge of anxiety as the phone rang mid morning, in case it was the garage calling to say they had found so and so needing attention, but it was simply one of the beekeepers committee wanting to talk about beginners classes and not the garage at all.  The Skoda is not so very old, but old enough that I don't take it for granted like I used to that it will sail through services and MoTs. A bit like human contact with the medical profession once you turn fifty, you don't think there's anything wrong but there's always the chance that any doctor, dentist or optician who has examined you may be about to deliver Bad News afterwards.

The evening tickets were to see Monty Don, and were a Christmas present.  I like Monty Don a great deal, good writer, thoughtful and engaging TV presenter.  I've given up with Gardeners World, too bitty, but his series on world and Italian gardens were both really good.  I wasn't at all sure what he'd do on stage for a whole evening, though, and probably wouldn't have thought of booking tickets if I hadn't been offered them.  The Systems Administrator gamely agreed to come too, though secretly harbouring dark fears of an entire evening of botanical Latin or worse.

We did not get an evening of plant names.  The show was a sell-out and the Mercury was packed with people of a certain age, not all ladies, the grey pound out in force.  You have to feel sorry for the Arts Council.  They support Colchester's theatre but we do not want to go and see productions of Julius Caesar with all female casts or re-workings of Greek mythology set in Manchester housing estates, we want that nice gardening man off the telly.

Monty got the backdrop of a full set as well as the drop-down screen and table with laptop (Apple) and glass of water I was expecting.  We worked out when we got home that was because the Mercury is doing a run of Educating Rita, but as it happens the background of crowded bookshelves, shading into rank untidiness at the edges and decorated with photos of Dickens and TS Eliot were rather atmospheric.  There were two halves, and an interval, allowing him a break and the Mercury a chance to sell ice creams, while given the audience demographic quite a few were probably happy of the chance to nip to the loo.  In the first half he talked about his formative childhood gardening experiences, how he and his wife were unusual in gardening in their twenties, how this led to his career in garden writing and then TV, and the personal meaning of gardens.  In the second half he gave selected highlights from the making of his overseas garden series.  He was comical and self-deprecating, laced with a bigger dose of pantomime in terms of funny walks and voices than he does on the BBC, and periodic asides on principles of garden design that were spot on.  And he was very, very fluent.  He carried two fifty minute spots of what sounded like off-the-cuff thoughts on life and gardening (though they must have been very carefully prepared) with no auto cue, and practically no fluffs.  I spotted one verbal slip and one point where he was starting to bog down a little, but it was almost faultless.

So my adoration of Monty Don is intensified.  It helps, of course, that he so often says what I already think, that the point of private domestic gardens is mainly the process of gardening rather than the end result, that if you encourage plenty of birds and toads and things you won't be unduly bothered by pests, long grass is good, structure matters as much as colour and in fact more, leaf mould is good but earth is magic.