Friday, January 28, 2005

A surprise at the door

Whenever I return home it’s always with the sense of expectation that something exciting might have happened. Have we been burgled? Is there a parcel full of goodies waiting for me? Has my cat left me a present on the carpet? This feeling quadruples when I really find something.

And so it must have been for my girlfriend when she arrived home to find three bags of shit blocking our front door. Not just any shit, but wonderful life-giving mucky shit. I’m sure she must have been thrilled to squeeze past it to enter the house. At least it was in bags and not just sitting there steaming on a piece of tarpauling. Actually, the thought of arriving home to find a pile of crap on Tom Paulin quite appeals.

But I digress. My weekend is now set. Saturday morning I get to shovel shit again. I vaguely remember, in my squeamish childhood years, pushing some manure around on my parents’ vegetable plot. I didn’t have the guts to really dig it in, and i paid dearly for it: the radishes they let me grow struggled to reach a centimetre in height. And then I don’t think I even ate those as I didn’t like radishes in the first place. Radishes? Oh so exotic for a nine-year-old’s taste.

So my vegetable odyssey is truly under way. Seeds rest on the shelf ready for planting; the muck will soon be spread; spring is threatening to be in the air. I haven’t felt this excited about a lot of hard work in a long, long time.

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