Re-potting, not mowing, aphid control, less cake more quiche and Tiktok
Hello friends!
My brain is broken. So I do what I always do when my brain is broken and reach for my bullet journal, which usually has the information I need, written down. But no, I remember that I haven’t written in my bullet journal for three weeks. Nothing. Not a sausage. It’s not like I actually JOURNAL friends… I use it purely as a sort of bin, where I put everything, however dis-jointed or badly advised, so that I can then refer back when I need to. It’s a strange compendium of lists upon lists upon lists, with many pages full of plans for certain weeks, events, days, perhaps a few recipes…you get the gist. But my goodness it is useful, for I have only to look at a single paragraph or part of a list from a certain week, and the synapses of my addled brain are sparked suddenly, and I have a clear view of other things, important things. I think the empty journal must be some sort of rebellion. We have been deluged since the beginning of this crisis with voices telling us to write it all down…make a time capsule! Write a diary! Tell us how you are feeling! What you did! How you coped! The idea is that this stuff will one day be pulled from a dusty bookshelf by some great grandchild on her way to school as they learn about how we tried (and failed) to deal with a pandemic that we knew for decades was coming. I won’t do it. The closest I’ll get to it is, well this! Although I know what day it is, I have no idea what I’m doing, so the safest thing to do is go auto-pilot, and that’s what I do ( in the garden at least).
My default, when things get desperate is my Five Minute Method. It’s a simple thing to follow and requires zero brain power. All my brain power is taken up with homeschooling (we have started school again this week) and making three meals and two snacks a day with limited choice of ingredients. If the physical stuff of laundry, cleaning and tidying on-a-loop wasn’t involved then I would perhaps be fit for other stuff, but that’s not the situation.
Monday
We have had a rather lovely weekend, helped enormously by a drinks ‘party’ with our dear neighbours (with whom, in another life, we would just have returned from holidaying). We wheel the drinks trolley out into the front garden and wind stiff wire around the end of 2m long bamboo canes so that we can put our drinks on the end and toast them from far away. They bring their own drinks, complete with ice and glasses. They make amaretto sours and we have martinis and we talk (shout) and laugh for two hours and it is almost as if the horror of this disease doesn’t exist. Anyway, Monday is better for Sunday’s frolics, and I put the children in front of their respective homeschooling videos and escape to spruce up the garden, which involves a bit of sweeping, a bit of watering, a bit of weeding, a bit of setting up (cushions, etc) and a general tidy up. This tidy is always Monday’s thing. It sets me up for the week and I love it.
By the time evening comes though, I haven’t the energy for anything other than the essentials and I feel totally okay with that. There is no art project, or extra story before bed. Fish fingers for supper. I had turned off Whatsapp at the weekend and it stays off. I do manage to hoover the bottom floor (with some sweet five year old help) and I am blindsided by how much better it makes me feel. Not to be stepping on crumbs. That SOME things are being done. It feels good.
Tuesday
I charge up my mower battery for the weekly mow (the ‘Tuesday chop’). It literally takes five minutes, because it’s a weekly thing. There is no dealing with grass clippings (I just let them fall to the ground because they are short). I have decided that next week I will start to grow the middle of the lawn long. I love it that way, but had been holding off because we were supposed to be hosting a load of people for a summer party in honour of my mother’s 80th. That now looks unlikely (although we can still hope I suppose) but anyway, I’m going to grow that long shaggy lawn in the meantime. It becomes a ‘meadow’ of sorts, and host to so much wildlife. It also provides a really lovely extra storey to the planting of the garden - so much added interest.
Things are less simple with the children…we just seem to get off on the wrong foot this morning, and things go downhill fast. I am insisting on morning exercise, and there is dissent. I just don’t have the energy to dig my heels in…I would make a terrible dictator, but the annoyance and bad feeling persists. In the end I buy Forrest Gump on the advice of my friend and we all enjoy it enormously. Tomorrow is another day.
Wednesday
We are off to a slightly less shaky start this morning. I realise that the smaller children’s homeschooling videos need my presence (funnily enough)…I had put them in front of their machines and wafted off into the garden, determined not to have any part in it. But no, it seems I must be ‘the CLASSROOM’. I must take the place of the friends and teachers with whom they discuss which words are adjectives and which ones are nouns. I must be there to ruminate on what makes a good opening, build-up and climax of a story. And I must absolutely stand over them and encourage as they laboriously write a sentence on how the dish ran away with the spoon, ensuring it contains enough exciting adjectives and finger spaces and capital letters and full stops. This is all totally fine. I’m cool with it, but then it’s also my job to photograph the sentence and send it, via an unbelievably complicated app, to their teachers. You will perhaps be unsurprised to know that it is THIS that is frying my brain. We manage in the end, and once again my mind boggles at how brilliant teachers are and how fantastically UNBRILLIANT I am at doing their job. And then I remember that they have ONE job, in a room full of SAME AGE children who know and accept that they are IN SCHOOL.
We spend most of the time in the garden. I pull my monstera deliciosa out of its pot and find to my horror that the roots have been sitting in water and are rotting. Middle child beams at me and says he has been watering every morning for me (the fiddle leaf fig is sodden too). I thank him and explain that these plants don’t like too much water but I want to scream. I’m rather afraid it might be curtains for my two beautiful houseplants. I stuff several towels into the tray of the fiddle leaf fig to soak up the excess, and re-pot the monstera in a mass of dry multi-purpose with more than my usual serving of perlite in the hope that it will wick moisture away from the roots and give the plant a fighting chance of recovery. If not, I will just have to treat myself to some new plants. I adore re-potting. I makes me feel all good and smug and WORTHY. This idea that ones plants are happy and content and COMFORTABLE. It’s everything and I highly recommend it. Here’s a video I did with the RHS about monstera.
Thursday
Another utterly beautiful day. If you read my newsletter last week you’ll have been introduced to Regina, our resident mouse. My slovenly house work has provided her with a varied diet of, well, literally EVERYTHING that my children drop on the floor (and that’s a lot of things). I have begun hoovering every day for five minutes (yes, it works indoors too) with the result that I am now coming down in the morning and finding traces of Regina ON MY WORKTOP. FFS. I do not know how she gets up the sheer cliff-face of my Ikea kitchen cabinets to feast on the crumbs around the base of my toaster; all I know, is that she DOES. Ugh. Disgusting. Amazing that something as harmless as a mouse can take my anxiety to a new level. We ought not to have named her because I am also becoming FOND of her. I like the brazen CHEEK of Regina. But I cannot, and will not have her on my kitchen counter. Sorry. I remove the toaster and tell Rotter he needs to ‘deal’ with her. Smallest child now also has a ‘pet’ fly called Tiny. It’s one of those lazy flies that lands on you and doesn’t scare easily. Flies gross me out too because of that Jeff Goldblum film, and also the fact that they basically cover you with faecal matter. Yes, that.
I fuss around in the shed for a while, noting that it needs a good clean but doing nothing in that direction; just throwing stuff away and tidying it. Putting things on shelves, revealing the floor…it’s all good stuff and transformation occurs after a mere five minutes. This is the sort of fussing about that I love. I am listening to a brilliant book called ‘The Heart’s Invisible Furies’. I listen to it through one headphone, the other cocked on my head above my ear so that I can hear the children. I’ve found this double-listening strangely less intrusive than having my clothing yanked and having to stop listening altogether when they want me. Instead I have developed a system of half-listening to them and repeating, with enthusiasm, the last three or four words they say to me which seems to satisfy them and means I can continue listening to the story. I pull out lots of bindweed ( a constant battle) and water the pots again, praying silently for some rain. Sorry friends. We need some.
Friday
Rotter has given me his old computer - it’s very flash and much bigger than the one I’ve been using for years; in other words, a massive step up for me. The only slight problem is that the left hand shift key is bust. That means that in order to capitalise anything beneath my right hand I’m needing to do acrobatics with my fingers and it is blowing my little touch-typing mind. Also realising how many sentences contain the word ‘I’ is making me rather sheepish. Anyway, today I need to plant the akebia quinata that arrived from Sarah Raven. It’s absolutely beautiful and I am now cursing myself for not ordering two, because everything is now sold out everywhere. Planting this is a bit of a project because it involves removing a piece of lawn. Predictably I go about it at the end of the day, once the children are in bed, cutting out a square of lawn and removing it by slicing my spade beneath. I find many stones, lots of big fat worms and a chafer grub, together with a small child’s tiny pink plastic comb which looks as if it belonged to a doll. I love finding things like this. It’s partly nostalgic and also a bit macabre…can’t decide which. Anyway, the vine goes in, together with some soil improver and my love and good wishes for its happy life. Rotter comes out and I make him swear that he’ll edge the new bit of flowerbed tomorrow with some bricks so I can mow around it easily. He promises.
Today my eldest has made quiche (she is a keen baker and I am rather baulking at the amount of CAKE…it is too much) so I tell her to make quiche and it is delicious. REALLY good. Proper, buttery pastry, lovely and thin. I hope she makes more. I find myself wishing that she would just do all the cooking and thinking about the cooking and online shopping for the cooking and clearing up after the cooking all the time. I am staggered by the short amount of time it has taken for the DRUDGERY of cooking to set in and take over. I used to quite enjoy it. Now I am in a place where I would willingly swap the cooking and the thinking about the cooking for hoovering the house or cleaning the loos every day. Everything is made ok because I have discovered Tiktok. For the uninitiated, Tiktok is an app full of funny, fifteen second videos that you can sort of re-create yourself. We have had the loveliest time learning the moves and uploading our efforts. It’s so much more rewarding than adjectives and fractions. From now on there will be no more homeschool. Just Tiktok. The End.
All the good things
x Laetitia
ps you may have missed:
How to control aphids without them controlling you
Deadheading how-to and why-bother?
Three things to do with your children during lock-down beyond seed sowing
pps I want to thank those of you who have taken the time to leave a five star review of my book on Amazon. It is HUGELY appreciated and much more important than many of us realise. Things are pretty ouchy for authors at the moment, and a book like mine, which really relies on footfall in small shops attached to National Trust properties, is suffering the consequences of the covid19. So if you haven’t yet left a review and feel you might be able to spare a few moments to do so, it would really make a difference. THANK you!
If you want to buy The Five Minute Garden, it’s available here.