gardeningwithinlimits.com/2020/09/25/reflecting-on-the-2020-that-should-have-been/
Tag: off topic
Still pondering whether the grass can be dug up, ever?
I’ve started this blog so long ago, and in posting about getting paving slabs delivered in March I don’t believe I am still not walking out of the bedroom onto a patio… Every time I think we are going to move forward, my other half finds a reason for me to have to do another bit of demanding physical work. And I can’t, I truly can’t keep digging. I don’t have the strength. I can prune and weed like it is my only role in life but not digging, I feel like running away and not coming back.
The shed has been decided but it’s not really for me and the planning and building seems to have moved full centre on the plans we have for the foreseeable. Which has put said slabs on hold…
In St Albans, I dug a pond but my dad helped me when I was flagging but it was when I was turning 35 and just before my MS diagnosis. I’m now closer to planning my fiftieth than I care to think and dad is mid 80s, planning on golfing his way to 100! I am not giving in but I am facing reality. How do I finish the slabs when lifting one is hard and moving four, one at a time, kills me? I’ve been advised in the past to get a work party organised by offering food and drink? Well that’s also easier said than done when we have barely seen a soul during lockdown. In the past I’ve tried to get charities to help. I must be sounding too well off or something, not so in need as others. I got a freebie from a gardener but he does plants rather than hard surfaces.
So I have so many things currently in progress that it is depressing me so much. I am not as fit as I was in November, the Pandemic saw to that. I have only got sporadic work and it pays for the odd coffee/bag of compost from the garden shop, so I am caught in the cycle of being unemployable due to lack of experience and employment that pays the bare minimum. Which garden rescue tv programme can I apply to, without having to stump up a budget or hack off a leg? (Only joking but my MS is largely too invisible… and I have not been raising millions online for others). My Green-fingered Christmas Selfpity Fairy? Ho hum. Ho hum. Ho hum.
Completely Off Topic?
It’s been raining for several days and it has stopped my tending of plants very well. But they’ve had rain… It has caused me to dwell though. Parenthood for me came about just months after the very high-profile abduction of the British McCann family’s daughter Madeleine. It was hard to miss the story while on my very unusual prolonged maternity leave. I would get very upset at the idea that someone would be hunting little girls and I felt so upset for the family. Pregnancy hormones being rampant and all. I swore to myself that my baby would never be left anywhere at risk (fast forward three years and the police helicopter almost being sent to find her and her little friend who was hiding in bushes in another part of the park.) Heart in mouth that day…
Hard to forget the feeling though and today seeing headlines that 13 years later a suspect may be questioned for Madeleine McCann’s disappearance. Police have started to look into 400 recent (ie. they took 13 years to think about it) reports that have come in. Doesn’t bear thinking about how many incidents have happened since because people didn’t think they had information…
Keeping us all safe from Covid has seen less people roaming around the world and we may have to rethink why that is so much part of people’s psyche and that they must have certain things they won’t have without jumping in airplanes every year. How do we know the same aircraft aren’t spreading the germs? How many of our TV stars and politicians who’ve had it, have regular fliers cards?
So being on a tiny unstable income and one regular salary puts us out of the regular flier club but actually more used to isolating and staying at home. I’d love to go to far flung places if I’m honest. I’d love to show things to my girls but are we safer now staying put? When will we know? When will the authorities know or act in our best interests, not theirs? Six million dollar question. Answers on the email…
