Didn’t get into the Chelsea Flower show again this year? Your hydrangea not quite ready? Never mind, just have your own show at home. No garden is too small or too untidy to join in.
Show gardeners spend all year and vast amounts of money to recreate that shabby corner of your garden where last year’s plants are trying to regenerate.
The Garden of Good Intentions
Let nature take over and who doesn’t love to be welcomed home by their pet dandelions?
Put pots everywhere and never mind the weeds, some of them will turn out to be flowers.
You can never have too many pots and tubs, or can you?
No Mow May
No need to do any gardening, just call it your woodland corner. How tall will grass grow if the cats and foxes don’t flatten it?
Answer: Grass will reach for the skies, the more obstacles, the taller it will grow.
Sean sat staring at the blank screen. This week’s challenge for the Poison Pen Writers was to write a story without meaning. Now he was regretting being the one to suggest it. There had been much philosophical discussion at last week’s meeting, could there ever be a story with no meaning at all?
He could write a story about himself; as far as he could tell, his life had no meaning, but that would be a very dull story.
Poison Pen Writers was a cutting edge group that met in a crumbling old hall the council were trying to demolish. They had been expelled from the library before Sean’s time when Jago had forgotten to take his medication. Sean could well imagine that some members could be easily misunderstood, most of them were rather odd, but they were all very interesting and amusing. Sean was the only boring one and he took a vicarious pleasure from their chaotic and adventurous lives, past and present.
The screen was still empty as his mind wandered over the past year with the group. He forced himself to type.
John woke up to another day, at least he assumed it was another day as he was in his bed and sunlight streamed through the curtains.
As he dipped his toast into the soft fried egg, it reminded him of nothing at all.
On the bus to work he looked at the other passengers, they did not look at him.
As he walked into the large office building he heard a voice call ‘Hey John’ but it was a woman hailing someone else called John.
At his desk he logged on to the computer.
As he logged off the computer he wondered where the day had gone.
‘What are you doing this evening?’ asked a colleague.
‘Nothing’ he replied.
‘Nor me.’
On the way home he looked out of the bus window, but it was raining hard so he couldn’t see anything. He looked at his phone, it was Tuesday, so he would stop off at the fish and chip shop.
As he walked into Harry’s Plaice Harry greeted him. ‘Evening, usual?’
‘Yup.’
‘Good day at work?’
‘Same as usual.’
That night John got into bed, another day over.
Sean glanced through what he had written, then added the title Meaningless. Hopefully it was, he pressed Print.
Sam was looking forward to a peaceful Friday evening after a busy week at the lab. The house was quiet, Jill was bound to be in the garden as it was her day off and the weather fine.
The back door was open and Jill jumped up from a flower bed and rushed up to the patio to greet him.
‘What’s the excitement, have you found a rare butterfly?’
‘Mother’s been!’
Sam was taken aback. His mother-in-law had died three weeks ago, peacefully, in her 98th year. He thought Jill was coping well.
‘Jill, what do you mean?’
‘I found a white feather.’
‘You surely didn’t believe all that stuff your mother used to talk about?’
‘You didn’t believe, I kept an open mind. Mum said she would send a sign if she could.’
‘A feather left by some moth eaten pigeon…’
‘A perfect pure white feather floated down just as I was tidying round that shrub Mother gave us. At least let me show you.’
Jill moved across to the kitchen door, reached in for the lop sided jug her mother had made at U3A pottery class and pulled out a very large snowy white feather.
‘Okay, not a pigeon but a handsome swan. Did you see any flying overhead?’
‘No, we’re miles from any river.’
‘Well, all sorts of things get blown in the wind. If she wanted to send a message why not something useful or tangible.’
‘I imagine its not easy being dead, especially if you’re new at it. Besides, there must be rules, otherwise we would all be inundated with messages from the other side.’
‘Jill, we don’t get messages from the dead because they are no more. It’s the Twenty First Century, we’ve grown out of all that stuff.’
‘You scientists don’t know everything, I felt so peaceful out there in the garden, knowing Mother was happy.’
‘That’s your serotonin kicking in. A sunny day in the garden always makes you happy and you were also thinking about your mother. I’m a physicalist what you see is what there is, that’s it. Your mother is still with you, but in your memories.’
‘We can both see this feather, how do you explain that?’
‘Your guardian angel flew over, ha, ha, dropped in to help with the weeding.’
‘Why don’t you test its DNA in your lab?’
‘I will, might even contribute to our current bird studies. Right, I’m going up to check my emails before dinner.’
Sam looked out of his office window at the patchwork of little back gardens below. He told himself he was appreciating the colourful display Jill had created in their back garden, not looking for swans or angels. He noticed something new in next door’s garden, a large colourful playhouse. The new young couple had only just moved in and already Jill had discovered they were expecting their first baby, a bit early to be buying expensive Wendy houses… then he noticed movement on the overgrown lawn. Chickens, so that must be a modern state of the art hen house, hopefully fox proof. Shouldn’t be any trouble unless there was a cockerel to wake them up. At that moment there was a fluttering amongst the drab brown and speckled hens as a proud rooster strutted out. A dashing snow white rooster with a scarlet cockscomb. Sam dashed downstairs to tell Jill the mystery was solved.
Jill was excited to see the new livestock, but held the long straight flat feather aloft triumphantly.
‘This did not come from a rooster, magnificent as his curling tail feathers are.’
Sam arrived at the lab early on Monday morning; frivolous use of the facilities was frowned upon and he did not fancy telling the others he was checking for angel DNA. But the quicker he could identify the feather as belonging to a swan or an albino peacock the better.
The results made no sense, the feather was apparently freshly shed, clean and undamaged so the results could not be corrupted. The DNA looked like none he had ever seen before, certainly not belonging to any bird. If anything it was closer to homo sapiens, yet different, not to mention the fact that there were forty six pairs of chromosomes. He had already started from scratch again and achieved exactly the same results. Far more study would be needed to venture any theory as to what sort of creature this feather came from. He could be holding unique scientific information, but how could he tell his colleagues, what should he tell Jill?
Charlotte stared at the computer screen, her novel was not going well. Having ventured back to the Hambourne Happy Creatives writing group she had succeeded in confusing them with Lottie Lincoln’s latest mishaps in Puddleminster-on-Sea. There had been comments such as ‘So what happened to the head?’
She had made life too complicated for Lottie and hadn’t really settled on which event should set her hapless heroine on the path of reluctant crime investigator. Perhaps she could round off the body parts story on a lighter note, introduce a dog…
A week later Lottie decided she must get back to her morning beach walks. Puddleminster was returning to normal, the police had finished searching everywhere and locals were unlikely to learn what really happened until the trial started, which could be many months away.
As she took in the fresh sea air and observed the near empty beach, she was caught off guard by a large dog bounding up with a huge stick in its mouth. For a moment she did not recognise the owner as he stumbled over the sand to apologise.
‘So sorry, oh it’s you Lottie, er Mrs Lincoln.’
‘Sorry I didn’t recognise you with a dog.’
Once again she was face to face with Doctor Geoff Good, the pathologist now famous for losing a body from the hospital mortuary. What should she say?
‘Is he your dog?’
‘No, friends gone on holiday to Australia. I volunteered to look after him while I’m suspended, at least I’ll look less suspicious out with a dog next time I’m caught on CCTV.’
‘Oh dear, will you get your job back?’
‘Yes, otherwise the bodies will be mounting up! Just required procedure, our department under special measures… Hey, clever you, right about there being no murder and my technician taking a body to create a forensic drama. Obviously completely insane, he had the head at his flat, kept as a souvenir!’
‘Goodness, they kept that out of the news.’
‘I only knew because I overheard them talking when I was on one of my many visits to the police station. Hmm, forget I told you that.’
Lottie felt a thrill at being entrusted with secret information and besides she didn’t know anyone to gossip with yet.
‘But the point is he passed all the usual checks, no criminal record, no record of anything untoward. He knew the entry codes because he worked there and had security clearance. No CCTV in the mortuary as we don’t expect bodies to try and escape. He must have slipped in during the night. Oh by the way, it turns out my wife loves your novels, read all of them, in fact she’s rereading them for gentle escapism after all this business. She wants to know if you are writing a new one.’
‘I have writers’ block, I thought a quiet life at the seaside would inspire a new story after my husband died suddenly.’
‘Oh sorry, I didn’t realise.’
‘No of course you couldn’t know. I was just reading in the newspaper an article on being widowed and it said don’t make hasty decisions such as moving house or getting a dog; I had just been wondering if I should get a puppy or a rescue dog…’
Charlotte wondered what could have caused Lottie’s husband’s sudden demise, something dramatic for a darkly humorous novel, a piece of space station crashing on him, had she read in the paper about a chunk of space debris plunging through someone’s roof? Or something closer to home, Lottie and Callum probably lived in London, he was trampled by bolting cavalry horses, that would be tragically unexpected.…
Children or other family? No, that’s why Lottie and Callum were so close and now poor Lottie was truly on her own, except of course for all her writer and arty friends in London; she was after all a very successful author, well popular and best selling, not in the upper echelons of the literati, but certainly far more successful than Charlotte.
Now she just had to think what Lottie was going to do next…
Times and Tides of a Beachwriter 