The English Summer

In my ongoing poll, two of you have asked for a Madeley rant. Well now is the time. Since I'm not in the mood to write my usual technically impressive piece of journalism, full of obscure but fascinating facts, I've scribbled the following over a drunken lunch. Judy doesn't like it and has asked me to remove a few of the coarser words, but I've had it with people today.

If some of you hate what I've done so far on this blog, you'll learn to hate me even more with this.

Is there anything so mundane as the British love affair with the garden? When I see adults kneeling on their padded mats at the edge of shrubberies, I feel like giving them the final coup de grâce before burying their heads beneath well mulched biannuals. It’s homicide that’s as justifiable as it’s fertile, and at least we put them out of the misery we call ‘doing the garden’.

Because nothing is as futile as gardening. Does nobody feel for those poor grey fellows, stick thin, who work all winter long, preparing their idylls for the warmth of summer, only to find the imbecilic neighbours appear with the first bumble bee of summer? Out these neighbours come, arguing about how to work the lawn mower. And when that’s done, these cretinous goblins have machines to cut and to grind, mulchify and liquefy. They have sprays and potions, poisons and fertilizers. They have every tool made by Black & Decker except the one that will help them prune their family tree which has pollinated itself so often that uncles and brothers are now one and the same.

And once the lawn is cut, the decking is down, the gravel spread over last year’s dirt, the neighbours change into their summer casuals, filling out vests from gut to man breasts; fathers in tight nylon shorts with one hand on their bollocks as the other turns red raw sausages on the barbecue. And if they sometimes confuse the two, it only adds the to flavour, barbie-style.

Gardens provide a summer home to the offspring of idiot brothers who have bred with idiot sisters. They let their dogs shit on the lawn, their scab faced babies shower toxic toys everywhere, they leave their inflatable swimming pool to turn green as plastic meet parasite. Then some acne ravaged teenager appears, extruding more oil than an Kuwaiti pipeline, and spends her holiday rubbing ointment into festering pores while listening to music dreamed up by some cocaine addled DJ with an obsession with John Barry.

There is no more public a place to do all your private business than the garden; where large breasted mothers with nipples like blackened onion rings sit breast feeding ‘little Daniel’, while cradling the latest Jackie Collins on their stomach's mound of pallid putrescence as they allow the juice of some summer fruit to drip from their lips before casting the flea stuck remainder into the flower beds they spent the previous weeks tidying. They have their decking, their fake Tuscan earthenware, their hammock from Homebase. They have their meals on the garden furniture; shoving barely cooked lumps of cheap meat bought from the market around with plastic forks. The meat’s more donkey than beef, less healthy than lard, and with more dangerous germs in it than in a cache of Iraqi chemical weapons. It makes them fart freely, which doesn’t matter because they’re out in the open. Enjoying the summer.

Is there any hell greater the English garden at the height of summer?

If there is, please take me there. I could do with a laugh.