Suffer for your art...

We have new neighbours two stairs up in our building. I'm sure they are very nice, and that they have the best of all intentions in life, but I fear they aim to make a living from their art - which incidentally seems to be some kind of performance art involving drills.

Today said neighbour have practised their art to their hearts content, and my discontent. I'm not entirely sure what they are working on, but by the sound of it I would hazard a guess that it has to do with a very large piece. For a moment I thought they were trying to drill their way all the way down into my bedroom.


What is wrong with being a mime, I ask? Mimes may be a bit odd, have weird ears and bad dress sense, but they are wonderfully quiet. Something sadly lacking in my building, I must confess. Next time I move house I will choose my abode on the quality of the neighbours. No drill artists, no old people with bad hearing, no families and no garden enthusiasts. Everyone knows they are the worst, always prying into your own English Park inspired patch, suggesting you may want to prune this hedge or that...

The little gardener

The ideal image I have of myself is one of a divinely gifted gardener, producing most of the vegetables and fruit for our household on our allotment. The allotment is – in this image – superbly cared for, no weed in sight and it’s heaving with an abundance of traditional and exotic produce.

Let’s dwell on that image for a little while longer, just long enough for us to not have to grab our tools and go down to the muddy and weed infested place.

I love my allotment – or rather, I love the image of myself as a self supporting member of the producing society it allows me to have. Of course the reality of the whole thing is slightly different…

Have you ever tried to dig, rotate and weed 70 m2 of land, where the “wild flowers” grow waist high? It’s bloody hard work! However, I have thought of a solution. In the autumn, when all our neighbours are enjoying their produce we shall turn the soil over and cover the whole damn place with this kind of nifty plastic you can buy, which basically suffocates everything beneath it. Then we’ll leave it for a year or two until all the weeds are dead as Dodos. Clever, isn’t it!?

You just wait and see. We’ll have a lovely allotment in no time – or at least in a few years.