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Hose Pipe Ban.

My Grandmother was a fantastic gardener as are my parents and siblings. In fact, my entire family could probably star in a whole series of Gardner's World such is their expertise.
Me? What I know about gardening could be written on a cigarette paper. Growing up, I found that gardening bored me stupid. Who wanted to while away the hours pruning and cutting and weeding and digging when you could be out partying or shopping? That's what I always thought over the years and my garden showed that with its neglected borders and overgrown hedges. Then I hit my thirties and suddenly, as if I had woken up and decided to be sensible, I saw my poor garden for the first time in all its weed filled glory. Right, I thought. I'm going to turn my garden into a paradise to rival the Garden of Eden.

The very next day, I traipsed off to the local garden center and bought everything I needed: spade, compost, hose pipe, shears, trimmer, plants, flowers, watering can and weed killer, then I went home and into the garden to start this mammoth job. It can't be that hard, I thought. After all, my family have cultivated beautiful gardens over the years as I was growing up, apart from the incident with the cannabis plant that grew in one of the flower beds and which had to be removed by the drugs squad. My minister father has never lived that one down. He was totally innocent though much to the relief of his parishioners. The plant had already been growing when we moved in. Anyway, I digress.

I stood in my jungle of a garden much like David Attenborough in the wild and then I started my trimmer and wreaked havoc on the undergrowth. Two hours and a bucket of sweat later, I had cleared much of the grass and discovered various varieties of cat poo, bugs the size of small rodents and a pathway that I didn't know existed. After mowing the grass down further to a mere inch I was starting to get excited in a way that previously only a pair of high heeled real leather boots could get me. When I had completed the grass cutting, I started on the borders, digging and weeding and sweating and screaming as spiders the size of my hand scuttled from the weeds and earth.

By the time I had finished the borders,I couldn't stand up straight and was sweating worse than a bleeding man in shark infested waters. On the plus side, I had lost two stone and was a svelte size ten. After a much needed drink or two or six, I resumed the gardening and started to plant the flowers and shrubs in the borders

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