Nuclear Gardening

There’s an innate pleasure to be had in starting with something which looks like shit, and successfully employing effort and sweat to make it look much better. It’s the sort of satisfaction probably often experienced by furniture restorers, property developers or Caroline Quentin’s make-up artist, though on the weekend it was my turn, in a jungly garden with a hover mower.

“I am become death” said Oppenheimer when he witnessed the atomic bomb he’d created explode at Los Alamos, creating widespread devastation that no living creature could ever hope to survive.

I felt much the same, ploughing through bits of slug, worm, woodlouse and other miscellaneous examples of God’s garden-dwelling creatures, systematically mangling them to a pulp with the aid of a Flymo Compact 300. I’m sure though, had they lived to see the end result, that they would have agreed that the sacrifice was worthwhile. It looks smashing.