mostly of the druidic persuasion

It's official, my body hates me. On top of orientation, doing two people's jobs, start-of-term chaos, a dislocated knee and a sort of weird bug that's making me wake up at 4am coughing, what does it give me? Emergency root canal. The two days of increasingly painful toothache and no actual solid food have given way to a dull post-operation throb. I am so miffed by this that I'm not proposing to talk about it any further. Instead, I'm going to talk about gardens, which are at least soothing.

Over the Christmas break the Evil Landlord made me two huge wooden planters, painted in a pleasing shade of green, that were designed to break up the bleak white boxiness of the back courtyard. After lugging an incredible number of bags of compost around, I'm now growing vegetables in both of these. Mad, enthusiastic vegetables. A mad, enthusiastic vegetable jungle in which can be discerned, if you squint, miniature brightly-coloured parrots and a teeny weeny Tarzan swinging through the tomato branches. Of an evening, after a hard day's biting the heads off students, I wander out back with the hosepipe and stand there for twenty minutes, obscurely soothed by the sound of water on the leaves and the presence of all this joyous, irrepressible vegetative life. I may even chat encouragingly to the plants.

( Before and after lurk under the cut. )