MAY DAYS BE MERRY and BRIGHT

I’ve always said that autumn is the time of year that I like best, followed by spring, winter and – very much last – summer. I can’t stand heat. (Not that heat has been a summer characteristic lately; we certainly never guessed that we might have log fires burning in successive Augusts). But high summer is horticulturally the dullest time of year, in my view. And slapping on sun cream is a chore that ranks with ironing shirts.

Now I am beginning to feel that May is the most glorious month of all. Of course living surrounded by a satisfyingly unkempt garden and lots of trees and a field that is slowly being turned into a meadow means that May is more noticeable than it used to be when we lived in the city. It’s a dirty job, gracious living, but someone’s got to do it. And rather us than Tory grandees claiming public funds to have the wisteria removed from the garage roof and pipes re-laid under the tennis court.

As I slide into my dotage, it is the transience of May’s delights that tugs at the heartstrings too: the “blossomingest blossom” that the dying Dennis Potter could see from his bedroom window. Blossom doesn’t survive long, especially when it’s wet and windy. Today, like the weekend just past, is blustery between the showers but much holds on with gritted teeth, both flora and fauna. As I write, our lilacs are coming to the end of their brief span of glory. We have all three shades – dark, pale and white – vying with each other and with an ancient laburnum that is also in its full pomp, sharply contrasting with its brilliant yellow flowers (so much more arresting than the common-as-muck forsythia of early spring).

The apple and cherry blossom are done now and the magnolia so long gone it’s almost forgotten. But the late flowerers stand proud against the gale, especially the hawthorn which of course is also known as may. The old rhyme “Here we go gathering nuts in May” is really a rewrite of the notion of the nuts of the may tree – so it should be “nuts of may” – because of course there are no native plants that produce nuts in the spring. Our hedgerows – two sides of the field have full hedges – are full of white hawthorn, while square on to our conservatory is a red hawthorn, its carmine flowers just this side of full vulgarity. Its covering is at its height now. Next to the red hawthorn is an old and doubtless doomed pear tree into which David has allowed a pale pink Clematis Montana to climb. The clematis is in its best fig now. Another one, clean white, climbs along the house under the window of the shower room so that you dry yourself while gazing on the vista of the three lilacs and the laburnum with the white clematis framing the view. Elsewhere the honeysuckle has kicked in so that twilight invites a heady stroll through the garden, reeling from one outrageous perfume to the next.

Also close to the conservatory is an ash. Ashes are the property’s most numerous trees – we have not flinched to have one or two taken down for they seed promiscuously – and they are always the last to come into leaf. So while the fruit bearers and our gorgeous tulip tree – my favourite; we planted it to mark the millennium – are in full leaf, the acers are not far behind and even the tardy oaks are now well covered, the ashes still have the look of winter about them. Nothing undaunted, a pair of nuthatches are raising a brood in the long-established nesting box in the ash, despite having so little cover for their duties. We keep an eye out for magpies, crows, woodpeckers, squirrels and other predators of fledglings but we can’t manage a guard right through the hours of daylight. I feel protective towards them yet when we lived in town I wouldn’t have recognised a nuthatch if it jumped up and pecked me on the leg. Now I can tell one just from its flight, never mind needing to see one still and in repose and relative close-up.

The robins seem to have finished their child-rearing duties for the time being. They build against an outbuilding wall under the aforementioned Clematis Montana. We’ve seen fewer wrens obviously foraging this year. Maybe they nest later. Last spring we installed a so-called sparrow parade near the eaves in a roof gully. Sparrows prefer communal living. But I think we started too late and this year, at the crucial time, we had roofers up there, enough to put off any would-be nester. But sparrows have been as noticeable by their absence here as anywhere else. Does putting up a dedicated nesting box bring them in? Or do they need to be here first before the box is going to be spotted? It’s perhaps instructive that we put up a box specifically designed for nuthatches and tree creepers on the old oak, further away from our busy bird-feeders, yet the nuthatches opted for a generalised box that is on the main strip and not well protected. You can take a horse to water, you might say, but you can’t make it drink.

“What potent blood hath modest May” Emerson wrote. It is indeed a time of energy and promise. Wild deer sometimes venture into our field, despite the menace of our dogs. The fish are at last rising in the pond, having passed half a year in suspended animation near the bottom – and that’s twelve feet down. Already Ron the heron has visited several times, planning where he’ll stand to have the best chance of spearing something. I don’t rate his chances though we shall remain vigilant. But if last year’s kingfisher returns, I shall not begrudge him anything small that he can manage. He’s much too magical to resent.

DOWN HERE on a VISIT

Tomorrow, March 21st, is the first day of Spring. Actually, some argue that today, being the Vernal Equinox this year, is the first day of Spring. I was always taught that the seasons begin on the 21st of the month irrespective of the small changes in the dates of the equinoxes (equinoces? – on the analogy with index and indices?); one tends to cleave to early teachings.

At any rate, spring certainly didn’t begin on March 1st. The political parties, ever spinning reality to make it seem more attractive, each call their opening gathering of the year The Spring Conference, even when it takes place in February. But it’s no good putting your faith in politicians.

A few years ago, the weather forecaster Penny Tranter mentioned in passing that it was the first day of spring. I checked the calendar. It was March 1st. I wrote to inform Ms Tranter that I had been taught that the first day of spring was the 21st. When and why had she changed it? Ms Tranter wrote back, very promptly and fully. She reckoned that meteorologists measure the seasons by quarters beginning on the 1st of the month, rather than from the equinox. I found this rather unconvincing. Meanwhile, Michael Fish had explained much the same thing on air. Every viewer but me must have wondered why he suddenly felt the need to launch into this subject. Nevertheless, my letter has changed the thinking at the Met Office in a way I could not have anticipated. On March 21st the following year, Helen Willetts announced; “It’s officially the start of spring today”. On March 21st the year after that, Daniel Corbett was saying the same when I switched him off (I can’t watch Corbett and still keep my sense either of humour or of proportion). Nevertheless, I suspect I am fighting a losing battle over the ”official” First Day of Spring. Another gallant but doubtless doomed fight is to keep the designation of this coming Sunday what it has been historically – Mothering Sunday – rather than what the transatlantic media calls it – Mother’s Day.

Spring heralds the houseguest season. Indeed, the season has already begun at our gaff. Having friends to stay is an almost wholly unmixed blessing. Apart from the particular pleasures associated with particular visitors, the generality of these visits suggests far more to raise the spirits than to lower them. First of all, it means we have to do some cleaning. This is a necessity from which we gain as much as do our guests. I confess that, while my partner and I are in many ways opposites (a lark and an owl, for instance; a nurse and a patient), we share an almost limitless capacity for squalor. If no one ever came to the door, we might well succumb to a sea of paper, discarded clothes and dust. Actually, the dust is under rather tighter control since our little dog Tati, the one who has suffered a major sight loss recently, was diagnosed last year as atopic, which means that among his twenty-odd allergies are dust mites. So we need to pay attention to the level of dust.

Something David and I also share is a tendency to solitude. It is no hardship for either of us to be confined to our shared company or – often even better – the company of none, not even each other. Happily, our house is large enough for this to be practicable. For David to pass the day in the garden while I fill the same time in my study makes us both as happy as pigs in muck. Neither of us wants such days to be unavoidably the norm but to have the choice is very heaven. To have this complaisant peace shattered is of course a most welcome change. We genuinely relish visitors.

Solitude can make you cranky, isolated, wary and inured to matters that you ought not to neglect to tend. Visitors bring important input: the direct or vicarious perspective of different generations, different circumstances, different geographies, different cultural textures. Sometimes, they even bring political and other challenges to one’s settled views. This is essential stimulus. And just as it is patently good for our dogs to have socialising with people reinforced by a steady traffic of intruders upon their territory, so it is equally good – nourishing, challenging, expanding – for us.

I think, hope and believe that we show our guests a good time. With few exceptions, they are temporarily escaping life in the city (usually but not always London) and are taken aback all over again by the restorative powers to be found even within spitting distance of the A4. It helps a lot: a) that our house was long ago re-orientated away from the road and towards open fields (and the guest bedrooms are on that side of the house); b) that the journey from London by road or rail is a snip while psychologically the distance is vast; c) that our guestrooms and especially the beds are very comfortable; d) that David is a fabulous (trained) cook; e) that we are, I think I can claim, in no way proscriptive.

Needless to say, we have made mistakes. An early guest, whom we dearly wanted to make welcome, insisted on coming at a time when there were builders here, not merely at but in the house. Our guest – let’s call him Andrew – is himself a noted and fastidious cook. We weren’t up to speed yet with the kitchen and even found ourselves offering Andrew a takeaway one evening. When he complained about a splash mark he’d noticed on the bathroom mirror (which is the full length of the wall), David lost sympathy and has little regret that he has steadfastly never returned.

Another guest – Ruth, say – came with her husband (Robert) and child. We had already got off slightly on a wrong foot over some footling misunderstanding about what the child was prepared to eat. On the second day, Ruth couldn’t stop herself, over Robert’s objections, asking David why we didn’t use liners under the pillowcases. David dealt with the query civilly enough but he was furious because he had spent more than the issue deserved looking for the missing items the morning before. After that, things flew downhill. I handed Ruth a glass of sherry that she promptly handed back because the glass was clearly cracked. How had that happened? At lunch, I was mortified to spot a flake of some previous morning’s cereal still attached to the bowl from which she was about to attack her pudding. The visit’s sense of being doomed has been reinforced by Ruth’s kind but firm refusal of a repetition of the experience. The innocent child would, I swear, come like a shot if allowed, though more to see the dogs than us.

Other visitors have been less than well attended. In David’s absence I served to guests from the Americas a bowl of home grown raspberries that, had I been more attentive, I might have noted were more mouldy than good. On another occasion, my culinary innocence was revealed by the offering of a dish – “the Aga is perfect for this” – that inadvertently lacked one of its major ingredients; a little short of perfection on that occasion and no fault of the Aga.

On the other hand, there have been guests who have fallen short of our own expectations. The most tenacious of guest faults is the (no doubt earnest) desire to “help”. As we sometimes bark at strangers who stray into the kitchen: “no passengers in the engine room, thank you – please return to the sundeck”. Stopping them clearing the table requires eternal vigilance because it’s the kind of gesture that they can slip past you without you registering that it has begun: the major alert usually comes with the question “where shall I put this?” to which the only sensible rejoinder is of course: “back on the table”.

“Helping” to clear the table is the thin end of the wedge. Once they’ve persuaded you to let them “help” with the washing up, the peace of the house is doomed. I learned this long ago. In my childhood, when Christmas Day was hosted turn and turn about by different households within the extended family, there was a lame-brained “uncle” (by marriage not blood, I hasten to add) who always took it upon himself to “do” the washing up and who, without fail, broke at least one item every year, to my mother’s white fury when it was one of hers. Before we hardened our own hearts against those who would take over the sink, we did permit one or two minor washings-up to be conducted by guests. I think it was the six weeks it took us afterwards to find the potato peeler that finished that foolish weakness.

Guests have other traits that do them no credit, from commandeering the television (particularly for some seemingly endless sports event) to misunderstanding the function of the bidet to making off with the toothpaste or a book that was in the process of being read by one of us. But no one has yet come close to the nightmare of one of our first guests. Admittedly, we had already been warned by mutual friends that ‘Miles’ was “the houseguest from hell” so we should have known better than to admit him. Like many who have lived alone for years, he has lost all notion of consideration for others.

As it happened, he and I travelled down from London on the train together. I had asked him (as we always do) if he had any particular dietary requirements and he announced that he was indeed on a special diet at that time. I no longer recall the details, save that potatoes were not permitted. This did not prevent him from consuming an entire 150-gram bag of kettle chips, which he declared to be “not the same”. Aside from the diet, he claimed to be easy to feed, so long as he was able to have his daily Marmite. I couldn’t remember if we had this item in the cupboard and couldn’t raise David to ask him (this was before either of us had a mobile phone) so I purchased a jar ahead of the train journey, only being able to put my hand on the largest size. Needless to say, it turned out that we had an almost full jar in the cupboard (the new one eventually had to be thrown out); that was irritating enough, though not quite as irritating as the fact that Miles never once touched the Marmite during the endless week of his visit.

What else did he do? He was forever leaving ajar the door of the fridge (which he visited often and without a by-your-leave), justifying the laxity by claiming that his cats were always opening his own fridge and failing to close it. After he had taken a bath, I found he had trampled under the bathmat my own towel, which he dismissed as “some old thing”. He complained because on one or two occasions he was down before me in the morning (though never before David) as if somehow I had an obligation to be up and ready to wait on him each day. I pointed out that, unlike him, I did not take a lengthy siesta after lunch, an irrelevant point as far as he was concerned.

None of this, I am sure, seems much of a trial but it all came wrapped in a loud and insistent expectation that he deserved all the consideration that the white colonialist would demand of his coolies. We were profoundly glad to see the back of him, as we indeed have done definitively because a few years later we came to the realisation that, living abroad as he now does, he had dropped us from his contact list without a word of explanation. Perhaps he was afraid that we might want to visit him as we did once long ago when he lived in another foreign land. On that occasion, we arrived laden with the comestibles and other items he missed from Britain and found ourselves sleeping each on one of the two foam mattresses that served as his regular bed, while he slept on a rather comfortable-looking futon that he had borrowed for the duration of our stay. I wish we had had the foresight to leave his fridge door open.

Next week I shall be in London, staying as the houseguest of someone else. I hope I shall manage to comport myself with proper but modest deference.

PS: This week's was a fabulous episode of Desperate Housewives. For the benefit of my international readers, it was episode 13 of season 4, a self-contained story entitled The Best Thing That Ever Could Have Happened which, like many of the best episodes, is named after a Stephen Sondheim number, the kind of allusion that alerts those viewers likely to know that they will share a sensibility with this show. Beau Bridges played a handyman who had come to know the various housewives professionally but also as something of a confidant. It was a finely-turned portrait of a good man, neat and economical, sentimental but not superficial and it also shed passing light on each of the regular characters. What a terrific piece of bread-and-butter television, as nourishing as it was delicious.