I Valentine This Day

I have it on good authority that “there ain’t no noun that can’t be verbed” so I’m valentining today. Why? Because I’ve found that waiting for a noun to drop through the letterbox is a poor way to approach love. 

The way I’m going to valentine my day is to go to work by train, and to notice all that’s beautiful and wondrous: a frosty sunrise, a conversation with a colleague who’s full of enthusiasm, the repairs to the keys ‘O’ and ‘R’ carried out on my laptop, new sheets of card. I will reflect on the many blessings of love I have in my life, one of which is for mushroom risotto which I’ll cook for myself this evening when I get back to my warm home. As I stir the onions in oil, I’ll remember the times I’ve done this on a stove each evening of the brilliant camping trips I’ve shared with my longest-serving friend. Our next adventure begins in 3 months, 13 days, 15 hours and 57 minutes’ time.

Later, I’ll take this picture down from my wall. It’s a work of art that moves me each day of the year. It was brought home from school by my eldest son one February 14th long ago, He showed he is good at valentining from an early age. I relish the way his work shows a free, creative, colourful and open expression of affection for his younger brother. I’ll sit with it next to me while I eat the chocolate hearts given to me by my amazing goddaughter yesterday. We spent the afternoon painting pottery and chatting about this and that. My bowl expresses my love of flowers; hers, her love of animals. Both express our love of play. In her farmyard scene, among the chickens and pigs, lurks a T-Rex. If you look very carefully (and with your imagination) among my flowers, a chameleon is hiding.

❤️

I Rewild My Garden

In the height of the first lockdown, I discovered I had a garden (I Find A Garden). It was something of a surprise, given that at the time I found it, I'd lived in my current home for several years. Part of the explanation is that access to the garden is through a window, and climbing out of it reminds me of why I practise Warrior 1 and Child Pose. There was always the feeling, in doing so, of what the British Board of Film Classification calls 'mild peril'. But to everything a season and a risk assessment, and, sensing opportunity and necessity, I became proficient at folding myself in and out.

The rooftop garden meant freedom and fresh air at a time when living in a flat seemed like a poor choice to have made. I climbed out sometime between 11 and 1 each day of that first beautiful and strangely silent lockdown spring to drink coffee and watch the leaves on the nearby plane tree unfurl. These were the hours I learned that the sun passed by before hiding behind surrounding buildings. This was the time by which I needed a break from my laptop screen.

I pottered about clearing leaves and moss from the flat roof, reclaiming some abandoned plants. I made do with what I could find, enjoyed the inventiveness and limits of it all. I wrote poems, painted canvases, phoned friends, read books, hung out my washing. In the long hot evenings of that strange summer, I took my glass of wine outside, chatted to my shirtless young neighbour who was sat in the courtyard below, keeping cool. I think I reminded him of his mum whom he couldn't visit. Once, he sent a gift of a pizza delivery for me and my younger son. 

In the second year of lockdowns, growing in garden confidence, I planted seed potatoes in tubs given to me by my Longest-Serving Friend, with socially distanced compost borrowed from a friend's garden. I grew lobelia from seed on my windowsills, then transplanted the seedlings outside. 

With the return to greater freedom in 2022, my visits to the rooftop began to decrease. In the spring, I tidied the space again, but by summer, when restrictions lifted, it started to feel like an eccentricity. It was harder to explain why I was climbing out of a window to meet the sun in a few square metres of space, when there's a huge park, long cycle rides and friends' gardens nearby. When the restaurant next door became busy again, I began to feel conspicuous sitting above the chattering guests in the courtyard, with my underwear out on the drier. None of them mentioned pizza. 

I haven't given the garden much thought in the past few months, but today, when the fresh young sun beckoned, I decided to go out, to tidy up and think about this year's planting. Looking through the window, I stopped myself before opening it up wide, noticing a blackbird gathering flat-roof moss. It was so bright-eyed, so glossy, so busy collecting what it needs for its new nest and brood that it came to me, there and then, that I will let my garden grow by itself this year. I'll leave the moss and the leaves and the twigs of last autumn for the birds, the brave ones who visit the town centre, and their young. 

For everything, there is a season. A time to garden, and a time to refrain from gardening. The rooftop was loaned to me, for a while: an open secret. For the time that I needed it, I made of it a sanctuary.