It is Friday evening. An estate agent has just left, having brought some people round for a second viewing, and my wife is staring out of the back window. “We should go to that garden centre tomorrow,” she says. “We need a few things.”
“Gardening?” I say. “I’m not gardening.”
I find it hard enough to work up any enthusiasm for chores that need to be performed just in case we happen still to be living here in six months’ time. To garden in the present circumstances seems like a kind of madness, an investment in someone else’s future.
“Come on,” my wife says. “It’s something we can do together.”
The children are still asleep when we set off for the garden centre the next morning with my wife at the wheel. She likes this particular garden centre because it’s tucked into an unlikely corner of London, and she thinks she’s the only person who knows how to get there.
Her phone is balanced on the dashboard, and its satnav function is yelling something about the second exit at the next roundabout.
“That’s incredibly loud,” I say.
“I need to be able to hear it over the radio,” my wife says.
“You’re supposed to know where this place is,” I say. “Why do you need it?”
“It helps me,” she says. “Be quiet.”
As we approach the next intersection, the phone shrieks an instruction to turn left. “I’m not doing that,” my wife says.
“Why do you even have it on, if you’re not going to obey it?” I ask.
“Last time it told me to turn right here anyway,” she says.
“If it’s telling you something different, then maybe it knows something you don’t know,” I say.
“Why are you in such a bad mood?” she says. “You’re spoiling our outing.”
I am reminded of the sheer pointlessness of the errand. I spend the rest of the journey looking at my phone, not glancing up until we pull into the garden centre car park.
“We’re here,” my wife says. “Cheer up.”
I don’t want to, but I can’t help it; I do cheer up. The sun is shining and the garden centre is brimming with freshly stocked, just-watered plants. People are strolling through it as if it were a botanical institute. Next to the trolley stack there are pallets piled high with topsoil, compost and manure.
“Do we need anything here?” my wife asks.
“No,” I say. “Soil improvement is long-term. I just want huge plants I can stick in the ground right now.”
That is more or less all we buy: a trolley full of ready-to-plant greenery. It feels so recklessly profligate that I’m disappointed when the bill comes to only £60.
“A lot of it was on sale,” my wife says.
When we get home, we set about planting everything straight away, filling up the pots and beds indiscriminately. It is a long morning’s work, and by the time we’re done my back aches, but the garden has been noticeably transformed.
My wife and I stand on the patio, arms caked in dirt to the the elbow.
“It’s very satisfying, isn’t it?” my wife says.
“It certainly shows what you can do if you’re prepared to throw money at the problem,” I say.
“I meant the actual gardening,” she says.
“If you’re suggesting the journey is the destination,” I say, “I’m too old to learn shit like that.”
“What should we do now?” my wife asks.
I look out over our handiwork: the turned soil, the freshly raked beds, the pots full of already flowering plants, the tidy garden that may not be ours by summer’s end.
“Let’s have a stare,” I say.
