Nothing...

I hope that nobody minds but I'm trying hard not to think about anything at the moment. It's much easier if my head is full of nothing and if I'm doing nothing about anything. Everything is too confusing and serious and nothing is a much easier bag to handle.

Of course I can't do completely nothing - that isn't the way I'm built - and I need something to take my mind off everything and in times like these I turn to gardening. So, I apologise in advance for all the gardening posts I'm likely to be making for a while. For me gardening is like doing nothing whilst it being everything for a few months. It's something I don't really have to think about it because I've been doing it since I was too small to understand what I was actually doing and it has stuck with me since then - thank Priapus.

My sort of gardening is easy; I like small spaces I can make into a tiny world of my own. Fortunately choice and happenstance have provided me with just that which means I can spend a lot of time doing nothing, thinking about nothing, and at the same time considering everything from my small world's tiny perspective. Is that the best place for the pottery hare? Should that pot be an inch or two to the left? This is a place that I can almost control, and what I can't control doesn't need to worry me. It can all be changed if I need it to be - a snip here, a new plant there, some slug pellets or a spray.

This evening, whilst I sat in my broken, three-legged, wall-propped garden chair, Mr Robin came to take mealy worms from the feeder. It wasn't long before Mrs Dunnock joined him, hopping around on the ground picking up seed in its small grey beak. How could I do anything? I couldn't move for fear of scaring them away, so instead I did nothing except sip the first glass of red of the evening and watch them from my hiding place against the wall shielded by a hollyhock.

It seems to me that there is nothing so good as nothing.