Joanne McNeill: Keeping up appearances

Joanne McNeill

It's amazing how imminent deadlines provoke overwhelming urges to do anything but start writing.

Lopping at the shaggy garden topiary and mowing the front lawn are jobs that can easily languish on the back burner for months but which, faced with insistent necessity, suddenly become infinitely attractive urgent distractions.

It's not just procrastination, more a need for order, for the reassurance of the illusion of control, before leaping naked into the void of a blank page.

I guess though at least it's a handy device for tricking the self into tackling overdue chores, which is just as well because you never know who's judging you by appearances.

Multi-media promotion of rich-lister Diane Foreman's book In the Arena - billed as a guide for entrepreneurs - last week revealed that one of her tips for success (apart from marrying money) is to drive by job applicants' homes to see if they mow their lawns.

Who knew tidy lawns bespeak success?

There is a school of environmental thought that lawn mowing - scalping monocultures with fossil-fuelled mowers - is scourging the planet when productive ground would be far better used for growing food or left as fallow wilderness, creating wildlife habitats, flowers for bees, and sucking up the carbon emissions with which human economic activity is allegedly altering Earth's climate to the long-term detriment of human survival.

Don't get me wrong, I like lawns. Vast green swards with trimmed edges are irresistible landscape devices for taming aesthetic chaos, and immensely satisfying to create and maintain, but essentially they are luxury items, expensive mock-palatial psychological indulgences, symbols of rabid first world megalomania, only a tad less unnatural than concrete.

All humans want control - over themselves, others and the environment - but in my view, because control is a) ultimately impossible and b) undesirable (being potentially dangerous to all concerned), it should be resisted wherever possible. I try to curb temptation to wield it in the real world, only exercising it virtually, for instance on pages full of carefully selected words or by tickling paint on canvas where precision can be acceptable and, mostly, nobody gets hurt.

Mind you, no one gets rich either.

The rich and powerful don't seem troubled by such moral, ethical or philosophical considerations. Maybe that's how they get rich and powerful.

Ms Foreman advised: "You're not going to employ them if you drive by and find them living in a slum."

I suppose employers are entitled to their aesthetic prejudices, but it would be a pity if they all made similar snap judgments. Appearances can be deceptive.

For instance, a refugee from war-torn North Africa, having survived the deaths of family, loss of turangawaewae, a desperate boat trip across the Mediterranean, a trek through Europe, internment in a refugee camp and finally having found haven in a new land - keen, brave and willing to work - might take a while to twig to the importance of conforming to local suburban norms.

And by rejecting out of hand applicants whose frontages do not comply, employers could easily miss out on the inestimable potential, for creating wealth and global good, of employing individuals who think outside the square.

Meanwhile, back to the topiary; must keep up appearances.