Dreadful Nonsense

The one single thing that would complete the current high pitch of contentment and smug satisfaction that is my present daily life (apart from a win in the Euro lotto and an end to "rush hour" as a travel phenomenon) would be the acquisition of a puppy. Or even a slightly older dog. Or a mangy, stinking, flea-infested wreck at death’s door. Anything. A dog. I want a dog.

Of course, we live on the third floor of a building that doesn’t have a garden or any grassy space to speak off, and the nearest area of anything remotely resembling grass within 10 minutes of the building are the banks either side of the train tracks, and it just wouldn’t be ideal to throw the puppy over the fence every morning and night (on some kind of bungee rope) so that they could perform their morning or evening ablutions the way that god intended them to.

So, yes, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that a dog won’t be turning up in our flat any time soon, and that I won’t actually be a proud, fanatical, over-indulging dog owner until we live somewhere with a garden, or until I go crazy and steal one of the tiny ones we see walking around everywhere we go and hide it up my jumper, and then pretend like we always had a dog, and what are you staring at?

Instead, I decided to channel my urge for nurturing into a different avenue, now I’m a housewife and one of two bosses of the abode. I resolved instead to cultivate green fingers and grow some plants. My main ambition is to have a row of tomato plants growing in the front room by the window, all lovely and tall, with tiny baby tomatoes ready for the picking every morning. My Dad always grew tomato plants in our dining room, and as a child I used to walk past them and pick them off all the time, walking around the house munching them down like a normal human would eat apples.

But I decided to start small, and flex my green fingers around one of the easiest plants to care for - the miniature daffodil. M&S had even done the dirty work for me, planting bulbs and growing them to a suspiciously uniform height before lining them up along the tills in the store in Liverpool Street and selling them off for 50p a pop. Who could resist? Not me.

This, ladies and gentleman, is what happened to the plant when left in my care:

You’ll note that there is one solitary shoot still left alive, desperately trying to claw its way towards the window and salvation. Last night, I snapped that single living shoot in two, and threw the entire thing into the bin.

All I can say is, thank god puppies don’t need watering.

This entry was posted on 28 February 2006 at 3:27 pm. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

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