bob backside

One of those days where the only sensible action is to return to bed.

Awake just in time for the thought that the duck I meant to take out of the freezer the night before was still in it’s chilly coffin, that the milk that sits solid in the tray next to it wasn’t (as it should have been) defrosting for the first coffee. Good start.

A day set aside for pruning the vines. Planted only last April, I’m starting to get to grips with the annual cycle of our relationship. It’s not like a tree, where you plant it well and you can pretty much get away with the odd prune (or not) along the way. You and the vine have to become close friends.

They’re pretty energetic – going from this^^^ to this vvv in less than 6 months. Bear in mind that metal post is around 6ft6 tall. They do the hard bit. What I have to do is angle things my way and remove any obvious obstacles. Angling things my way means encouraging the right balance between fruit and leaves – which is a matter of pruning and training. The first of which happens now, while they’re (as I’d like to be today) dormant.

It’s easy – this first year you chop the stem back to a bud just below the first horizontal wire (about 1m above the ground), or (if the stem is less than a pencil thickness at that pruning point) you chop it right back to 2 buds above the ground. Simple. Except today it isn’t.

Life seems to get progressively bitty, made up of lots of small commitments and tasks that mean I rarely get a decent run at things. I’m sure I’m not alone. This is one of the beauties of having the vines – looking after them compels you to commit to a series of tasks, each of which means doing one thing and one thing only for quite a patch of time. The first of these came immediately after Ernst and his team had planted the vines. A 4ft cane next to each, a netting rabbit guard placed over it, and the cane twist-tied to the wires. 3500 times.

Today is the start of the pruning process. We start, and the wind picks up. We carry on and the clouds gather. We continue and it rains. Not heavily…but tediously, monotonously, steadily. I don’t mind rain, but it means you can’t kneal so readily when pruning to just about the ground (I know, get some knee pads…but there’s precious little left to feel like a real man about as it is) and in combination with the wind, it’s just enough to take the feeling out of your secateur hand. I’m sure Billy Connolly could have busied himself at this point.

It’s slow going. 350 pruned in 6 hours. Out of 3500. Even I can do that math.

And now my boots are leaking. I stub the toe only recently returning from purple to white after a good solid skirting-boarding a fortnight before. I open the barn door which sets off pool of water in a perfect arc from the roof down the back of my neck. Two minutes later I discover that only half had gone down my neck – the other half is sitting in my hood, waiting only for my neck to recover it’s temperature, the rain to start again, and me to put my hood up.

Rather than making me head immediately for a grouchy, lazy bath, all this incremental tedium makes me more determined to at least get one thing ticked off the list. I clear the sleeping flower beds of weeds and even the paths in between. I deserve cake, but obviously I finished that yesterday. Nice to get one thing actually finished. Perhaps today, as the rather marvellous Howard Devoto once sang ‘my irritability keeps me alive and kicking’, although I bet his toe wasn’t as sore as this. A proper ‘new wave’ name that, Howard Devoto. Of course, it can’t be real, or can it? I’ve stopped myself looking it up. It’d be awful to find out he was ‘Bob Backside’ or whatever in disguise. Discovering as a child that Alvin Stardust wasn’t Alvin Stardust, he was Shane Fenton was a real Father Christmas of a letdown. To then discover that he wasn’t even really Shane Fenton – that was made up too, he was born Bernard Jewry – was almost too much. I almost gave ‘Coo-Ca-Choo’ away.