Hearts and shoots

February 15, 2012

The best thing about Valentine’s Day is Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 on Radio 4. I almost fly the A303 in fifth gear to the same crashing bars and waves of musical emotion that  speak the stifled passions of Celia Johnson’s and Trevor Howard’s lovers in Brief Encounter. Back in town,  there’s more romance with couples holding hands and cellophane wrapped roses.

I can’t ignore the scuff marks on the walls and  the wet dog paw  effect which make the white floors  look  pallid and under the weather.  Everything is in need of a lick of white paint and a  good spring clean.  So decorators Bob and Keith have set up camp  with paint pots, wads of sandpaper, ghetto blaster, and saucer of used teabags.  I am on my knees, housemaid-style,  scrubbing the kitchen floor to get it prepared for  coats of white floor paint. Everyone’s saying, “Mum, how can you have white floors in the kitchen (we have plain oak boards) they’ll get dirty ?  “We have them everywhere  else” I retort and think, but don’t say (Idov quite a lot of this) that  apart from Lina on Saturdays  I am the only one to have a one to one with the floor mop.

Ten degrees warmer than  last weekend.  It feels like summer in comparison and so I have a little wander in the garden.  The wallflowers, globe artichoke and  agapanthus  lie in limp and soggy  frost damaged clumps.  But alliums, tulips  and blue bells shoots are pushing through and the fennel’s delicate fronds have proved to be astonishingly hardy.

It’s mild enough and motivating enough to unwrap the  willow sticks with which  I  will  make twiggy wigwams to support the beans.

PS  My 13 year old godson and I laugh at the slapstick in Comedy of Errors at the Olivier.