It’s nearly three weeks since anyone did anything in the garden. I’ve had my newly sliced up foot propped up indoors for 10 days and the nursery team packed up when I turned off the water supply to the nursery for the winter. But Peter’s not been for three weeks either and that’s unusual. He sometimes goes awol – usually because the weather’s bad, occasionally if he’s not well and very occasionally if he just takes it into his head to do something else. One day his racing accumulator habit will pay off big time and I’ll never see him again. Or so he tells me.

Anyway, the reassuring sound of the hedge trimmer going on Tuesday morning told me he was back. And all’s well. I miss our little rituals when he’s not here, such as they are. In winter when there’s just the two of us here we each do our own thing, but I take him a strong tea (half a sugar) every now and then and we have a minute or three. I mooch about inspecting the buds on an apple tree while he finishes a bit more of what he’s doing. Eventually he stops, sticks his knuckles in the small of his back, has a stretch and shakes his gammy leg. ‘How’s the knee?’ I ask, handing him his tea. ‘No worse’ he says. He curves his back against the biting wind and lights a cigarette. A robin peers hopefully at the ground under our feet. He takes a long suck on his fag and nods in the general direction of the road ‘Ave y’eard about ‘er up there?’ ‘Who – thingy?’ (I guess the name – everyone is ‘er or ‘im) ‘Aye….’ and I get an entertaining update on the latest bits of local gossip – who’s left who, who’s gone on a flash holiday/bought a new car/drove their car into a ditch etc.’ There’s not a lot he doesn’t know – he’s the eldest of 11 and has lived locally all his life. The robin scratches around a bit more and we listen to a train swoosh by on the west coast main line. ‘Saw a flock of Waxwings in the fields last week.’ He updates me on all his bird observations. His favourite is the solitary Raven with its deep throaty caw. ‘Early for them, must be cold over yonder, where they come from.’ He flicks ash into the hedgerow and I absent-mindedly tug weeds out from under a shrub. ‘What do you think we should do about the mice/pigeons/dead tree/broken trailer/burst pipe?’ I ask. He shrugs ‘I’ll sort it’. And he does. Sometimes I ask him how, and offer to help or organise parts. Mostly I don’t. But I know it’s on his to-do list now. He goes back to his task, hanging his empty mug on a tree branch. I go back to the potting shed and so the winter days tick by.

When the nursery re-opens, the garden and I revert to our sociable summer personas, but I do enjoy the bleak peace and the sparse conversation of the winter months.

You’ve made it to half way through this blog post – your reward is this shot of two field fares and a Redwing in our Sorbus ‘Joseph Rock’ (Thanks to Kath for the correction!).
This tree was the inspiration for our new berry border – just one year old, but will hopefully prove a great natural bird feeding station in future years.

I mentioned on my earlier post that I’ve been twittering. I started mostly because I felt I should know what a hashtag is #admitssocialmediaignorance and partly because I was bored stiff sitting on my increasingly plump backside. I’ve only been playing around on it for a few days and am still a relative newcomer, so it was interesting that the subject of comparative/competitive tweeting and blogging has come up spontaneously amongst my circle of fellow tweeters on the aforementioned J-A-S blog. (Scroll down to comments)
My own take on it is roughly this. Blogging for me is about posting a series of sketches about this place and about my work here for the outside world to see. Posts can be thought about, edited, kept for ever or deleted. Of course it’s a self-conscious exercise, but I do it for pleasure – I’m not capable of doing anything I don’t enjoy. I lack that kind of self-discipline. Tweeting is micro-blogging in one sense – still a conscious self-portrayal, but other topics also fly by and you can quickly get totally lost, or equally, caught up in rapid fire, multi-way conversations about stuff you didn’t realise you cared about, and thus accidentally reveal much more about yourself. It is extraordinary how easy and quick it is to read people’s characters through their brief posts – warm, serious, arch, flippant, verbose, outrageous, uptight, blatant self-publicist, straightforwardly sociable, political, etc. I recognise that I am just as transparent.

Some people are there purely for social reasons – Twitter serves as a kind of substitute water cooler for the homeworker, but most people have an agenda of some sort, even if it’s just to ensure that people know about them and their wider work. That’s understood and no-one minds, or at least, they shouldn’t mind. Except that we all mind a bit when friends promote their work to us, don’t we? The point about Twitter, I think, is not to regard it as a source of friends, though friendships may and do develop, but rather a circle of contacts with overlapping, shared interests – a set of Venn diagrams, if you like. But just as you feel you’re getting settled in, one click on the profile of a follower may reveal that they are having a much more interesting conversation with someone else at precisely the same time as they are maintaining a polite but much less interesting conversation with you. Twitter is totally meritocratic. Anyone can post anything, but ultimately your @mentions, retweets and followers are in direct proportion to how interestingly you tweet. That’s the way it is.

It is also a wonderful source of recommendations, referrals and great people and for that reason alone I’ll stay engaged on some level. And to plug my own blog/nursery/forthcoming book etc. of course… :-)

Your reward for reading to the end of the post is this lovely picture of some barbed wire:

December 15, 2010