You get to a point where you sort of know what you need to know.
Or at least that’s what I thought. Anyway.
As previously mentioned, our time over the Christmas/New Year break has been spent relaxing, but also tackling a bit of gardening.
You will recall I absolutely despise gardening. Particularly pulling out weeds.
In my book, it is a complete waste of time and energy. This is especially so in the case of a cottage garden – what we have – which is designed to ramble unrestrained and wild.
I explained this to Mrs P when she first mentioned her garden needed some attention. Long story short, my explanation and plea for exemption from the task fell on deaf ears, and over the break we’ve been getting stuck in.
Luckily, I managed to draw one concession from my beloved.
We are adopting what I like to call the “Great Wall of China Method”.
Put simply, rather than do the whole thing in one day, we will just do an hour or so daily, and by the end of the holiday period it will all be done.
Much like the Great Wall. Okay, the wall took something like 1000 years to finish - I’d imagine the budget blowout was quite big - but I’m sure you get my drift.
So. There we are on day seven of the project and we’ve entered the stretch along the road frontage.
Obviously, I’ve managed to pull out all manner of stuff that looks very weedy to me – I am a bloke after all - but apparently is a flower, so She Who Must Be Obeyed is a little, er, shall we say, emotional.
Thankfully, my pending bollocking is averted by the arrival of No 1 Son and his new squeeze (column name as yet undecided - suggestions on a postcard please), who pull up out front.
The usual pleasantries dealt with, we decide to call it a day and go inside for a drink.
As we do so, the newcomer promptly plucks a couple of sprigs of the pesky stuff I’d been yanking from the garden and starts eating it.
To say I was somewhat surprised would be an understatement.
‘Okay’, I thought, ‘Maybe she’s from overseas and this is some sort of custom they have in her culture.’
I enquired thus and then immediately felt like a complete fool as Mrs P and No 1 Son started to laugh. New Squeeze politely explained the offending weed was oxalis, which was okay to eat and a bit citrusy in taste.
By all accounts, if you eat too much you can give yourself a gut issue, but by and large it’s all right.
Anyway, feeling suitably sheepish, I jumped online first chance I got to discover she was 100 per cent right. Who knew? Not me, that’s for sure. I mean, obviously I knew there were edible flowers and that sort of thing, but I have to confess I was not up on the edible weed side of things.
So there you go. Never too old to learn something new. I was discussing the incident on the phone with my old 80-plus-year-old mate the next day.
He’s not been too well lately and his medical team has decided they need him to do a stool test. As I listened on bemused, he explained the process to me with growing indignation. “... And then they want me to do this,” he said, before launching into a blow-by-blow description of how the sample needed to be collected and sent off to some laboratory.
The whole thing was, he said, “disgusting”. It occurred to me he had never heard of such a test or had one in his 80-odd years. As I say, one is never too old to learn something new.
There wasn’t a lot I could do other than try to put his mind at rest and assure him he wasn’t having his leg pulled by the boys down the club or being used as some sort of sick medical experiment.
It was all quite common, I said, and a good way to get to the bottom (oh, see what I did there unintentionally?) of the issue.
I’m not sure my reassurance worked, and he signed off with a promise to “think about it”. Back home, Mrs P was limbering up for one last big push to finish our holiday gardening spree. Dejected and sulking, I stuck on my wide-brimmed straw hat and wandered ‘round the back to get the wheelbarrow.
And as I settled into the drudgery of the task I allowed my mind to wonder if a better way to get rid of it would simply be for No 1 Son to bring round his new lady for a hearty feed.
I figured if she ate too much and gave herself a gut issue, we had a solution. I knew just the bloke to give her a blow-by-blow explanation of what would come next.
