Stop the Week 20

I’m still not really sure what T.S. Eliot had in mind when he described April as ‘the cruellest moth’ – despite having studied the man’s poetry for ‘A’-level. It always seems to me that April and May are palpably the most wonder-full months of the year: when winter is put to rest for another year and nature bursts miraculously once more into bloom.

What’s more there’s the promise of summer to come without the burden of expectation. So if the weather’s not too brilliant, you don’t feel cheated. As it happens, the weather last week was in perfect synch with Mother Nature. It was hot – probably a little too worryingly hot for early April – with just enough of a light breeze to render temperatures impressive rather than oppressive.

Spring sprung

The birds all around us are doing their collective nut, singing as if their lives depended on it. The wood in front of the house is turning the most vivid, succulent green imaginable. The only down-side to such fecundity is all the work demanded to keep it in check. I’ve been far too busy all week, working my fingers to the bone, for cultural activities (other than polishing off The Forsyte Saga on three successive evenings, but I won’t bore you with further eulogies about the Granada production and the lead performances).

The heartless, thankless task of weeding has begun again. Tender new brambles are popping up in all the usual places and the bindweed is already making its triffid-like move on any plants that look vulnerable enough to throttle. And because the soil here is so poor – turned into concrete after two successive day of unbroken sunshine – there’s very little chance of ever extricating the roots.

It’s the dandelions that are the current bugbear. I did for a misguided moment consider getting the strimmer out and lopping off their heads before they are able to spore, only to look at the carpet of yellow in the meadow behind the house to realise the futility of such a notion. Last year, I remember the proprietor of one of the holiday homes I look after telling me to instruct the gardener not to spare any single dandelion lest they multiply. I pointed out the state of the surrounding countryside and suggested that it would be as vain a gesture as Canute commanding the sea to roll back.

Probably as vain a gesture as the F.A. banning Wayne Rooney for two matches following his latest in a long line of unspeakable acts. No doubt the brouhaha has found its way into French television sets. I do wonder whether our French neighbours sometimes see Britain’s only cultural exports as Benny Hill, Mr. Bean and the kind of yob culture personified by the boy Rooney. It’s kind of embarrassing and I do what I can to disavow natives of that idea.

Of course, Wayne – and inevitably the awful Sir Alex Ferguson – feels that a two-match game is excessive. After all, he has apologised, which makes everything all right again, doesn’t it? Saying sorry, though, in my book doesn’t make things better without some kind of genuine sense of personal responsibility. Far better that the F.A. should ban the boy for two years, channel his monstrous wages to charitable causes and devise some useful community services for the period of the ban. That way, it might have some effect on the boy himself and his legions of misguided fans and admirers. Moreover, it might stop Manchester United winning everything in sight and enforce the retirement of the graceless, boorish manager who seems so adept at nurturing such graceless, boorish human beans as Roy Keane and Wayne Rooney.

Ho hum. Pigs might fly. Weeds might stop growing and ants might stop tunnelling under our attempted lawn and producing myriad miniature mole-hills everywhere. I think I’d better stop ranting and go fire up the strimmer, so I can take out my venom on a host of golden dandelions.