Fresh starts and loose ends..

Sharp-eyed email subscribers to my posts may have spotted an oddity at the end of my last post - some idle notes I had jotted down and forgot to remove before hitting the ‘Publish’ button. The notes were not intended as a ‘teaser’, but since a few of you have raised a querying eyebrow over these apparent loose ends, I shall reveal a little of their meaning. First though, a week of firsts…

On Wednesday we opened the nursery and gardens for the first time this year. All those short, bitter days spent splitting, potting and weeding with aching fingers in damp gloves are behind us now. March culminates in a manic sprint ahead of opening day. Paths are strimmed and swept, a skip filled and removed. Our best plant stock has been hand-picked, labelled and neatly set out on the benches. New loo doors have been painted a fetching Bluebell blue by Robertas and the tea room spotlessly deep-cleaned by the speedy Skirmante, our new Lithuanian friends.

Talking of newcomers, meet our cheery and colourful newcomer Jess, above, who will be running the tea room for us this year. Inevitably the first day we opened was cold and rainy, with an unkind wind slipping its icy fingers down our necks. I think Jess had two customers all day. But it doesn’t matter. The doors are open and we are ready for the busy months ahead.

I always feel oddly flat on the first day. To an extent, my work for the year is already done.

I instinctively spend my time thinking about changes, and planning ahead, and this all happens when we are closed for winter: the construction of new growing areas in the nursery, the removal of dead and dying trees, as you see above, and stripping out overgrown borders in the gardens for renewal. Once we are open our priorities are maintaining appearances, stocking up the nursery and looking after customers. Important jobs, but for me, less enticing than change. So, what next, Susan Jane?

The truth is, there is plenty of ‘what next’ coming my way already. I have new and thrilling roles with the RHS on the horizon (more soon!). I’m just back from a visit to RHS Rosemoor in Devon for the annual gathering of all the Garden Advisors and my mind is pinging with bold ideas. I have borders to replant, piano pieces to learn, stained glass lamps to make and actual-not-merely-metaphorical hills to climb. And most important of all, friends to see and love and laugh with.

At the Rosemoor meeting, Mark Diacono and I fell to musing about ageing (by way of full disclosure, he is a good few years younger than me :-) ). We shared the feeling that around sixty there is a growing sense, not of having less time left, but much more. At 30-ish you feel you must crack on, get a house, find ‘the one’, have a family if you are going to, decide what you are going to ‘be’. Decisions seem urgent, important. And then, if you are lucky, you pop out of the other side of those mid-life years with the prospect of living to around 85 or 90, and life opens up ahead of you. What next indeed. Steve wants to read more. I want to write more. He gets up early to read. I flit around thinking about writing. No prizes for guessing which of us is getting where we want to be…

And so to my cryptic footnotes from last week’s post…

Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.

Well, yes… such truth in a seemingly simple song lyric. Another of my favourites is Tracy Thorn’s ‘you can be happy or unhappy anywhere’. I could readily have nailed up the doors on the crime scene that witnessed the end of my marriage, hoisted up a ‘for sale’ sign and danced away, hoping to forget. At 18,000 feet up at the Thorong La pass in Nepal that’s what I thought I would probably do on my return. But no matter how far I walk, or how hard I dance, forgetting eludes me. And so I choose to be happy here at Bluebell Cottage, with friends I love and a place I call my home. It’s as good as anywhere.

Finished the last of the Hedgerow Gin bought for my 60th. 

My wonderful friends the Olver family bought me a fine bottle of Hedgerow Gin for my 60th birthday in September 2021 which I finished off a few days ago. I raised the last glass to Martin Olver who died last year of a heart attack very suddenly, aged 62. He was a truly lovely man: primary carer to his fine son Nicky, prone to turning up at the nursery in his shorts to rip out brambles when the mood took him, a superb birder, renowned ceramicist and an enthusiastic helper at Tatton Flower Show - he was insanely chuffed about the Gold medals we won in recent years. Martin is a man we dance to remember.

Lucy Worsley On Agatha Christie….

I didn’t plan to write about this. But having accidentally started….

I have to confess Agatha Christie is not a writer I have read much. Detective stories, lots of them. Mostly set in the 1940s. Not my genre, or my era really.

Steve bought me Lucy Worsley’s biography of Agatha Christie for Christmas. I imagined it would be a warming, gentle read for a few chilly January nights. An interesting, affectionate biography, the cover suggested. Nothing too challenging.

At first, I was about right. And then, in the centre of Lucy’s bouncing narrative, we clicked, Agatha and I. On discovering that her husband was leaving her for someone else and that she could do nothing about it, she lost her mind, or tried to. And she did it in some style. She jumped in her car and drove around for several hours at high speed. After crashing into a ditch in the dark she somehow made it to London and went shopping in Harrods. She then caught a train to Harrogate, checked into a smart hotel under an assumed name, danced, played billiards and partied hard for a week. A full scale police search scoured rivers and ravines for her dead body and when they finally found her alive and quite well she was expected to account for herself, to explain her heartless, manipulative, incriminating behaviour (the papers suspected her husband of murder). Agreeing to say she had temporarily lost her memory was probably the least worst option, for her. What she had actually lost was her entire world, her identity, her anticipated future.

Her husband came to collect her, stony faced, paid all her bills, drove her home and then left her.

When a bomb like that goes off in your head and the alarm bells won’t stop clanging, what else can you do but try to escape them? I didn’t know it at the time, but my own response was a laughably cut-price version of Agatha’s spectacular flit. I jumped in the car and drove for hours around the interminably dull Runcorn Expressway system. Realising I had no spare clothes with me, I dropped into an all night ASDA and filled a carrier bag with ‘George’ underwear (surprisingly good…). I checked into the Travelodge in Widnes and spent two days and nights living off the contents of the vending machine. No-one came hunting for me, I was not missing, just utterly lost. I paid my own hotel bill and went home, to begin creating a new ‘me’ and a new future.