Dog’s breakfast

I promised myself a couple of days of non-art-based activity. I developed a cold. I had things I wanted to do. I didn’t do them. I went to the Garden Centre at B&Q in Greenwich. It was a hideous experience. I grew frustrated at my own lack of energy, my lethargy and my unshakeable ennui which hit rock-bottom halfway through watching Lucas and Walliams’ Perfect Night In. It so wasn’t mine. What had happened?

On Monday I woke with start. Jude had been attacked by another dog and H brought her home with a chunk of flesh missing from her flank. It looked awful. Why do things like this have to happen on a Bank Holiday Monday when the nearest emergency vet is in Richmond? That was a rhetorical question – I’m perfectly aware of the random nature of things and the human need to attribute some sort of explicable reason for them in the desperate hope of maintaining a semblance of control. Let’s call it fate then.

After administering to that I rushed to Waterloo to meet dad for the annual geranium handing over ceremony. The annual geranium handing over ceremony is a spectacle which traditionally takes place during the first weekend of May, and is a colourful and exciting occasion involving a selection of standard (red, pink and apple blossom), trailing and ivy-leaf geranium plants being handed over from father to son beneath the famous clock at Waterloo Station. The actual time of the handover tends to occur around 10.40am, but it is advisable to arrive earlier to get a good position.

Back home I planted out my stamp-sized garden, window-boxes, hanging baskets, troughs and pots with all manner of flowering flora. If I’m going to become a full-time freelance gardener, I need a shop window! Gardening is so immensely satisfying. I felt much better, which is more than I can say for Jude who was feeling very sorry for herself as she licked her gruesome wound.