Of Boxes and Beetroot

 

During our brief visits to the house before we moved in properly, I pined for all my stuff. I couldn’t tell you what the stuff actually was, but I knew that when I was sitting in my office room in London the shelves behind me were full of comforting stuff, rather than the bare void around me now.

Well, the comforting stuff followed us down here, along with all the other stuff from every room in our flat, and now I find myself pining for the simple days when we would spend a few days here in a beautiful void with just essential clothing and a few bits of crockery, leading that simple rural life we’ve all heard about. You don’t have to open many removal cartons before you swear to join the ranks of those artists and idealists who get rid of all their possessions and start all over again.

I feel it rather more keenly I suppose, because in a way this country living project carries with it a promise of simplicity. But is it just us? Or does everyone move house by boxing up all the things they should really be throwing away, creating an overriding sense of deflation when they open the boxes in their new home. 

"I'm sure the driving licenses were in this one"

The mad thing about it is that all of a sudden our lovely new roomy house starts to feel tiny under the onslaught of our cumulative tut. How did we manage to store all of this in a flat with no loft? A flat which, when we moved into it, forced us to dispossess ourselves of 50% of our possessions just to make it vaguely manageable. Now here we are, with a box of coats and nowhere to hang them (there is a downstairs cloakroom, with hooks, but once my jaunty country hat was in there anything else feels like gilding the lily.). I can’t find the box with my shampoo in, but I’ve found 20 boxes called some version of “misc.”, all with stuff I dread unpacking because it will sprawl over the available floors and surfaces and shrink the house even further.

The only solution, of course, is furniture. Too many books? Buy more bookcases. Too many clothes? Buy more wardrobes. Build a second kitchen and fill it with cupboards. Dig a cellar. Build a garden office. The temporary solution, as our houseguests will discover, is to fill the spare bedrooms with stuff – interspersed, of course, with corn dollies and sugar loaves so it looks like a designer-led rustic hommage.

Meanwhile, within a few hours of her removal men departing, my mother had her flat looking just right, devoid of any piles of random accoutrements. She’s doing Settling In rather well, getting the once-a-decade village bus into Taunton, and trimming all the trees I should really have trimmed. Except, as I will tell you in a weary, misunderstood-artist voice, I am experimenting with the “wilderness” concept, where you let your garden do what it wants. So far my experiment has rendered our stream invisible beneath a tangle of out-of-control weeds, caused giant stinging nettles to shoot up in the flower beds and rendered the compost heap inaccessible.

It doesn't help (Or maybe it does) that the garden we inherited is planted with things that shoot up and flower abundantly in huge clumps. It looks splendid, but I’ll be hiring a chainsaw come October. I battled for months before we moved in with what appeared to be an aggressively invasive weed springing up everywhere. I strimmed it to the ground – it shot up again. I blasted it with weedkiller – it died back, then grew again but with leaves edged in pink, like a scene from a 50s sci fi movie. Finally I did what I should have done at the beginning, and looked it up on my phone app. It turns out to be grape anemone, which come August erupts in beautiful pink flowers. Beautiful and invasive – I can get enough of that at home, thanks.

For those who have been following my vegetable growing exploits, the scoreboard at the end of July stands at 12 varieties seen off by the unseasonably cold early summer, 6 grown to seedlings only to be eaten by rabbits, a massive crop of potatoes left by the dirty dentists, loads of blackcurrants, redcurrants and rhubarb (ditto), and three varieties of raspberry plant (all my own work, thank you very much). 

"Romeo Alpha Bravo two. I have a visual on the seedlings. I repeat..."

My despondency at the poor harvest has been seen off by a day on a “no-dig” gardening course, run by the head of the “no-dig” movement, Charles Dowding. If this is new to you it means, er, you don’t dig, just plant stuff in the undisturbed soil, nestled in compost (the plants, not you). Yes, that really is it. You might accuse him of trying to get money out of the naive and unwary, but I can confirm after spending the day with him that (a) he’s a decent bloke and (b) he doesn’t have a shop full of expensive T-Shirts saying “I DIG NO-DIG” or “NO-DIG ENTHUSIASTS DO IT WITH COMPOST”.

I returned home enthused and bearing, notwithstanding Charles’s lack of commerciality, two specially designed seed trays at £5.50 each. I found in the shed some rocket and beetroot seeds that are viable to sow in August. I shall now adopt a less gung-ho approach, growing seedlings on the window sill and then planting them out beneath a cavalcade of netting with the odd gun emplacement for good measure.

Well, the extra bookcase has arrived, and the extra wardrobe is coming on Tuesday, so who knows, by the time you and I next meet we may have all the boxes unpacked. Either that or we’ll be looking for a 16 bedroom house.