It's not unusual these days for a young Irish male to find himself in an exploitative relationship. And it doesn't always involve the opposite sex. Twelve months ago, I entered one which has left me impoverished, depressed and imprisoned. Yup, I bought a house.
The initial stages of this process involved supplicating myself before a money-lender, spoofing to him about everything from my income to my health, and persuading him to buy a small patch of land for more than it was worth, then sell it on to me for twice that sum over the course of 30 years. Before the moneylender, who hides behind the grandiose title of mortgage provider, would agree to abuse me in this fashion, he sent me to an extortionist.
"Pay him the remainder of your monthly wages, then add commission," ordered the money-lender, "so that if you become terminally ill, lose your job, see your house burn down around you or meet some other tragic comeuppance that makes it impossible for you to part with the exorbitant sum you have agreed to cough up every month, he will do it for you - unless, that is, the illness is viral or bacterial, you lose your job due to your employment being terminated, or your house burns down as a result of fire."
I did as they asked and, filled with euphoria, joined the legions of schmucks who have bought into this elaborate confidence trick over the past 50 years. But knowingly entering an abusive relationship with the bank is one thing - it's a rite of passage into responsible adulthood, a point of solidarity with one's peers who have been equally duped by estate agents and financial institutions in recent times. In my case, a far more complex association was about to ensue: a relationship with the land.
Instead of sensibly following the example of most people I know and buying "Damp redbrick Victorian townhouse in neck-of-the-woods requiring some gentrification, close to all amenities including three chippers, surfeit of pubs, legions of prostitutes, failed experimental social housing from the 1960s and three other chippers, with two-square foot of land in adjacent window box and hanging basket", my partner and I chose "Run-of-the mill, pebble-dashed property adjacent to unkempt grazing horses; would suit young couple with busy lifestyle who feel obliged to spend already scarce spare time weeding, mowing, digging, painting and pouring water out of small receptacle onto parched ground, and other attempts to prevent nature taking its course."
Confronted with two medium-sized gardens, my first reaction was to ignore them. Denial is a perfectly good policy in September, when plants keep a low profile and grass behaves itself. Come spring, as the lawn - a generous term embracing grass, foot-high dock leaves, nettles and dandelions - climbed skywards, the weeds plunged their roots ever deeper, and the electric mower gave up the ghost, I started dreaming about tarmacadam. I scoured the local garden centre for some, but they don't appear to sell it (must give Gerry Daly a ring for some advice on that).
I couldn't write an article about gardens without reproducing that pearl of wisdom on the subject: "If you want to be happy for a few hours, get drunk; if you want to be happy for a few years get married; but if you want to be happy forever, get a garden." Nice idea. It conjures up images of a man escaping to his vegetable patch during a child's birthday party. Or of my father, annexing part of the football field at the back of his house as a retirement project. I can see kindly old widows, pottering about in mid-summer among luxuriant brambles and bright flowers. But myself, in the prime of life, sporting wellies and gardening gloves? No.
Private gardens, I gather, were created so that rural folk settling in city housing estates could retain an association with the earth. What a load of compost! By the same logic, is a garden not a terrible psychological burden to impose on an urban native whose horticultural knowledge just about extends to accurate identification of daisies and buttercups?
While I was mulling over such anti-green arguments and indulging in tar fantasies, my loved one took action. I arrived home from work to find newly created flower beds in the front garden, and the die was cast. Despite my limited gardening experience - a bit of childhood lettuce murder, and the short-lived cultivation of some not-quite-legal herbs - I was about to get green-fingered, like it or not.
And like it or not, I'm beginning to behave like a real gardener. For starters, I've acquired crank status among the neighbourhood youngsters who, when they decide to use our patch as the World Wrestling Federation arena, are now greeted with a stern "get outta that garden". And I mean it.
I've planted a respectable number of blooms out front and have become the sworn enemy of the snail, his homeless cousin the slug, and the indomitable weed. Those weeds. Killing Rasputin was easier. You poison them; they thrive. Uproot them; they come back. Shoot them; they laugh (OK, that may have been in a dream).
Indoors, on the bookcase among the interiors magazines, DIY manuals and cookery books sit tome upon tome on gardening, and, to decode the scientific terminology, a tatty blue book called First Steps in Eating (originally First Steps in Latin, but you were nobody in our school if you didn't indulge in a little typographical high-jinx).
There's something a bit creepy about gardening books. Their sheer numbers are daunting. I'm quite sure that if you spread out all the gardening books on the market, they would cover the Botanic Gardens several times over. There are so many that I worry they must run out of gardening experts. What do they do then? Invent new ones? A quick scan of my bookshelf does nothing to allay my fears. Is "Pippa Greenwood" a real person or a confection of Dorling Kindersley publishing who deemed it an appropriate name for a gardening writer? And could the real "Susan Berry" step forward? All right, libel lawyers, I'm sure they exist, but you must admit they have dodgy-sounding names.
This winter I must actually read one of them, before embarking on next year's challenge: the taming of the jungle out back. Will it be a low-maintenance "room outdoors", with gravel underfoot, plants in aluminium tubs, extensive decking and an overhead gas heater? It's an attractive solution if you've got a couple of grand under your mattress, and would permit me an urban yuppie lifestyle with more time for eating Sunday brunch, going on skiing trips and walking round Habitat. However, it has a garden-for-dummies feel about it.
If I'm to have a garden, I'd prefer one in which things actually grow. No doubt, in a couple of years I'll be running out gleefully with a spade every time one of the local nags opens its bowels on the road nearby, and hoarding eggshells, apple cores and teabags for the compost that will push up tomorrow's hostas in the shady area next to the to-die-for water feature.
Gerry Daly, Jane Powers, Pippa Greenwood, pray for me.
