TIMES OF NO GARDENING ramble

Left pretty much on its own the garden has gone autumn-wild and punky looking, the marigolds taking over where the tomatoes used to be, the peppers going wild with fecundity. The cucumber and goya vines have withered, the only structures now remaining are the unexpectedly graceful ad hoc architectures of bamboo that once balanced reaching festoons of green and yellow but now stand without purpose. Before it snows I shall turn all that into next year's compost, apart from the marigolds.

Surprisingly, the monkeys have left my 6-week-old shallots untouched! I can't really convey the surprise in this, those green fronds are so succulent and simian-vulnerable. It's a you-had-to-be-here-for-15-years kind of thing. There they are, my happy green sprouts growing unmolested by simian hands for all this time. Either there has been major monkey culling of some kind or the redfaced gang is planning a large operation. It's been suspiciously quiet.

Gardening will get you through times of no marijuana better than marijuana will get you through times of no gardening, apart from the hallucinatory aspects, unless you're growing the weed itself (a topic for another time), to which by the way I am not opposed, though marijuana has never been my drug of choice, which is any kind of pie in season.

I also endorse the weed's use under circumstances of wisdom seldom observed nowadays, particularly in politics and finance, which aspect might interest any young persons who happened to read this without zoning out at the logical and grammatic challenges embodied in some of these sentences, education (another form of gardening) also being what it is today.

Implicit in this pastoral metaphor of course is that knowledge is the seed, the educator is the farmer and the student is the soil, which seems apt enough... Seeds are what they are, but basic educators today are overworked and students are underchallenged. The knowledge is there and vital; we need many more and justly compensated teachers who love to 'garden,' and hungry students rich in compost...