Real gardeners, look away please! This jungle - with its basil forest leaning into the celery patch, three varieties of lettuce, all running to seed, slug holes in the cabbage leaves, codling moth in the Granny Smiths, and lemon trees complete with borer and verrucosis…and everything planted too close and growing together, including numerous weeds and a few rogue narcissi bulbs which I thought I had lifted when I turned this part of the garden into a vege patch - this is my garden. If Michael Green had written Coarse Gardening (pretty sure he stuck to rugby, acting, sailing and golf) this would have a perfect illustration. No steady weekly or monthly programme of work happens here. I tend to garden in bursts of enthusiasm, when I can fit it in between all the other stuff. Or when the guilt gets to me. Or when I get inspired.

The inspiration this week was Felix (4) telling me as we walked through the garden on our way to school, “I love your garden, Oddie! It has the whole world in it.” He was talking about what he thought was lots of food (I did gently ask him what he meant) - the lettuces, cherry tomatoes, mint, berries, oranges and other things he and his little sister find and feast on here. And maybe all the other tiny miracles that happen out there in the half-neglected mess. He and I planted potatoes a while ago, and then some pumpkins from the compost heap grew over the top. The potatoes disappeared but now we have some beautiful big pumpkins. And now that the pumpkin vine has died away, the potato plants have reappeared. I have no idea if there are going to be potatoes under the plants, but I guess we’ll see.

Anyway, he’s small and the garden looks big; he doesn’t yet know many varieties of fruit and vegetables, and this garden must seem like it has lots of the ones he does know…. and that was what inspired me to get out there today and plant some more. I kind of wanted to meet his expectations a little better, even though I know it makes no real difference to him. I don’t want him to catch up to me quite yet. Next year I’ll be able to introduce him to tamarillos.

But I was also thinking about balance in my life. Years ago, I read the memoir As It Was and World Without End written by Helen Thomas. She was the wife of the Welsh poet Edward Thomas, who was killed in the Battle of Arras in France in 1917. They were intense and passionate people, and their relationship was loving but turbulent. When things felt uncertain, she would resort to cleaning everything. She found that if her body was occupied in a useful task, her mind would settle. It was a strategy I adopted myself in earlier times when my life was harder than it is now and my mental health sometimes felt precarious. When my thoughts were racing and I was uncertain what was coming next, I would try to put things in order - sometimes the house but more often the garden.

The big advantage of applying this strategy to the garden is that some of the changes between bursts of activity are positive. If I clean the house, it gets dirty again. Entropy rules - especially when children are in and out of it, as has always been the case with this house. If I work in the garden, weeds do come back, but the things I plant and tend, even a little, grow and produce flowers and food. It’s always amazing. Sometimes things come back without me doing anything, as with a particular cherry tomato plant which always pops up spontaneously every year in the flower garden. Little moments of grace.

But what does this have to do with choir and singing? A while ago, a choir member sent me a link to an article about “Opposite Worlds” - things busy people do to balance their lives.( https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7023754275688259584-2BYa?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios). I guess you could say it’s just having a hobby, except that it needs to meet the very specific requirement of taking us away from the mode of working and thinking that we are usually in when doing our job.

Lots of choir members have singing in the choir as their Opposite World, even if they haven’t heard that particular term for it. Our choirs include all kinds of people with very skilled, responsible, difficult jobs. Singing, especially group singing, must be one of the best possible ways to come and be bossed around and shaped into a team doing something completely outside the day-to-day. Two hours of not being responsible for others.

But of course, that’s an Opposite World that’s not really available to me. With choir as my day job, although I love it passionately (there’s nothing quite like hearing the gorgeousness come together when the choir really nails something we’ve worked and worked on together), even just listening to music can feel like part of my work. How fortunate that I have the Whole World, in all its messy glory, just outside my door!