A Familial Garden By Day

The artist returned with the children. They had just been to the park to do some cycling and drawing, in an age when few mothers take their children to the park to do some cycling and drawing. I had vowed to stay at home in order to attack the obstructive but friendly chaos taking root in the flat. I do the sitting room first, working from one side of the room to the other. My head as I clean is still filtering the myriad of news stories - war, politics, sport - gleaned earlier from the newspaper and Internet. I am also thinking about a friend of mine from school. He spent some of his morning interviewing on TV the most powerful man in the country, in a chummy but penetrating way. I smiled to myself when I was cleaning. I bet he wasn't visiting the skirting boards of his living room with a brush and bent back. When the artist returned they all looked just as they did yesterday after watching that film. Refreshed, in other words, and visibly revitalised. I am full of admiration. I move to the garden with the children and set about playing football with them, plus our own rather eccentric version of rugby. They grow stronger by the day. It is not even them doing the growing, it is nature's relentless and inspiring growth march. In the garden, there are other signs of this thing we call nature. The holly leaves remain a fetching dark green but their berries predict Christmas. An unidentified plant, for most of the year the colour of a dull grey cloth, is suddenly a subtle but gorgeous red. To our right, twining vines of honeysuckle adorn some wooden beams. A dead bee, examined the day before with a magnifying glass, is tipped from a green plastic chair to the grass. Sycamore seedlings lie scattered on the ground, though one is reintroduced to the air again in order to demonstrate its aerodynamic beauty. At one stage as we all wrestle with the ball a few moments later we collapse in a heap of giggles. The alien parakeets I heard screaming in the garden earlier would not have known what to make of it, sunbathing no doubt being more their thing. Later, we return indoors and as a family are all one.