I was only after some documentary closeups when I took these photos. That's the red, white and black nail polish treatment that's only been done three times in my life, only after winning a preliminary final, so 1997, 2009 and now 2010. Two and a half weeks later, it's still there, or fragments of it, and the red has bled into the white, to make easily overlooked pink blots, edged in tiny slivers of colour. The end of the official grieving period will be signalled by the disappearance of the last of this. Only now, in brief and oblique ways, can I really manage to even turn my mind back to that time.
So these were some jobs done in the days immediately after that shattering loss.
So why is there such solace in gardening? A complete shift of focus of course, though not one that necessarily requires much thought, and one that often is welcomed precisely because it does allow the mind to stray to other things, or to dwell on other ideas or problems. Perhaps it's the sense of smallness and passingness that are necessarily the context for anything we do on our land. Or the affirmation of a cycle of new beginnings.
One 'season' ends - ends in the worst way possible - and the off-season begins, a new season not coming till March, both way too soon and not soon enough. But in the garden, one season gives way inexorably - sometimes dramatically, sometimes haltingly - to the next.
In the garden, as in sport, we can plan and predict the implications of each move, each intervention, but we can't promise, much less determine, their outcomes. But unlike sport, here it's us taking that initiative. My hands on that unwanted new growth, my hands on that unwanted weed, my hands handling the tools, working the soil.
Thank god for the garden.
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