My first plant delivery of the year is potted up, labelled and laid out in smart rows in the back tunnel. Outside, the big spring clear up is under way with plants being weeded, potted on and relabelled. I do like it when the nursery looks so neat and new.

Pete and I have redesigned some of the borders between us, widening and rounding with hoses snaking down the garden as the inclination took us. There were too many straight lines before for my liking. Here’s the before and after…. Green Thumb aerated and scarified the lawn last week too, which is why the lawn looks a bit sparse. I badly need a good downpour now to kick it into life – we’ve had no real rain for two weeks.

So, business matters aside, I get a lot of thinking time when the nursery is closed. And I’ve found myself thinking about Jade Goody a lot this week. I don’t watch Big Brother, or buy the tabloids. And in general I think that living your life through the media is a skim-thin way of living. But who is truly not touched? There but for a throw of the dice go I – and many friends too. We all skip smear tests if we can justify it to ourselves, repelled by the process, subliminally angry at being in the 50% of the population at risk of this nasty disease and at being statutorily expected to submit to this five-yearly ordeal.

And then this brash, complex, ill-educated, media-centric woman steps forward and shows the world her bald head, bed-stricken pain and uncomprehending children as she tries to find a way to do the right thing with her last few weeks on the planet. I simply can’t sort it out in my own mind in any truly meaningful way. Except that she has as much right to tell her story in her way as Ruth Picardie, Dina Rabinowicz, Miles Kington or so many other middle-class broadsheet writers who have done so in their ways. She is more fluorescent light strip than candle in the wind but her story will no doubt burn bright in the study of popular culture and modern media for years.

February 21, 2009  
  , ,