Category: B&Q

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…Plan to Fail

‘Fail to plan and plan to fail’ was another piece of wisdom which I acquired from my business networking days and totally failed to learn from. I reflected on this yesterday when I was digging holes for my newly bought plants and tenderly packing the soil around them. I plan to fail, not because that’s what I want to happen, but because that’s my expectation, on the basis of past experience. It wasn’t that I had no plan at all when I was walking around B&Q on Wednesday with all the other Diamond Card holders, all waving our ten-pounds-off-when-you-spend-over-thirty coupons – there were certain things I knew I wanted to buy, like compost, basket liner, and a 40 cm diameter pot, but when it came to plants, I was mainly driven by spontaneity – well, within bounds –mostly what I bought were pretty predictable: begonia, petunias, geraniums. But I still didn’t have any specific ideas about where any of them were going, and so I was making it up as I went along.

There’s a lot to be said for spontaneity, impulse, intuition – well, I would say that, given my aversion to planning. No, that’s not right, ‘aversion’ isn’t quite the right word: it’s not that I don’t want to make plans, it’s more that from experience I know the stress that planning causes, the struggle to sort it all out, to impose order and make sense, to remember the stages, to decide on the appropriate actions, to implement them without flying off in all directions, and to judge the outcomes. All those things that make perfect sense rationally, intellectually, academically and succumb to chaos when they hit the real world, that great, spinning distributor of ordure.

Having said that, it occurs to me that the major, dramatic changes in my life, the ‘leap before you look moments’, like starting a PhD, leaving a husband (both of them), travelling, moving to Prague and Southsea etc, were all preceded by years of ‘planning’, just not in the organised, logically –sequenced, rational fashion – more on the lines of: ‘…if I could, I would… if only…’ At New Year 2015, I met a lady and told her that I was hoping to move to Southsea one day, then when I announced in March that I was moving, her comment was: ‘you’re a fast worker!’, even though the idea had been in my head for three years.

There’s more I wanted to say, but as usual I started writing and then wandered off at a tangent. But I’d like to share a quote that I heard on Thought for the Day on Radio 4 earlier while I was making coffee: “You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.” It was attributed to Henry Nouwen, a name which means nothing to me (apparently he was a Catholic priest, but I won’t hold that against him.)

I’ve often been told I think too much… TBC

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Triumph of Hope

Yesterday I was debating over whether to take the van out to the country park for a picnic, or the car to B&Q to spend some coupons on stuff for the garden, or a combination of the two or something completely different. In the end, I went to B&Q in the car, and it was lucky I didn’t try to combine that with a picnic, because by the time I’d finished (after almost an hour), I felt quite worn out. I came home with compost, basket liners and enough plants to hopefully ensure one or two of each type might survive my half-hearted and inconsistent attempts at gardening.

I sorted out a few things into larger pots during the afternoon, the rest are lined up in a tray supported by two upturned buckets, along the fence, along with some sweet peas and other stuff in trays that I’d bought earlier from the Co-op as I walked past on my way home from tai chi sessions in the park.

They say a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, and I did that, but gardening fits into the same category for me. Maybe the same conditions apply to both – a lack of attention to nurturing the first time around, or, in the case of gardening, of all previous attempts.

Today I need to get out there and do some weeding to make space for my new purchases. As usual, there was minimal planning and organisation behind the things I bought. There are three wall-mounted baskets, two small and one large, on the wall outside my kitchen window, along the little alley between my house and the neighbours, which had trailing begonias in my first year living here, but which have deteriorated over the last few years until there were just a dead fuchsia and some very straggly geraniums, which didn’t flower at all last year. It’s not an ideal spot for geraniums, because, squashed between the two houses, it doesn’t get much sunshine. I can’t remember when the begonias gave up, but over the years I have made various attempts to replace them, but this is the first time I’ve replaced the liners, so hopefully that will help, and maybe give me something attractive to look at while I’m doing the washing up.

The large one was screwed to the wall, so I left it in situ and just reached up (it’s just slightly above my eye level) to put the new liner, compost and plants into it. I took the two smaller ones off, as they were just hooked over the nails, but didn’t think about the fact that one of them had come loose from one of the nails and was dangling at an angle from the other one, until after I’d filled them both and went to try and put them back. The first one was okay, but there was no second nail in the wall for the other, it had rusted or come away altogether.   

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Decisions

Today I have a decision to make.

It’s not earth-shattering – it’s this: should I take my camper van to the country park, have a walk through the trees and a picnic? Should I go to B&Q, buy some compost and plants, come home and do some gardening? Should I do both, drive the camper van to B&Q en route to the country park and hope to find a parking place not too far from home when I get back, so it’s not too much of an effort to carry the compost etc home? Should I take the car (camper van too tricky to park) and go to the garden centre that’s en route to the country park (if I can remember where it is, I’ve only been a couple of times, and that was years ago), and if I do, does my parking season ticket for the country park cover the car as well?

Yesterday I bought rolls and individually wrapped flap jacks in preparation for this picnic that I was planning. But – isn’t the country park getting a bit boring? I don’t want to drive the other way, to the New Forest, because that is a full day out, and does mean driving along the M27, which can be stressful. And putting the van back into the garage is always stressful. It’s only a couple of weeks since I moved the van, so it shouldn’t have seized up yet – though I did leave the battery connected up in the expectation that I’d be taking it out again in the near future. I won’t be taking it out next week, though, because I’m going up to Bedford – on the train, because hopefully my daughter will be bringing me back to stay a few days and help with sorting out the study.

I was going to go to B&Q because I have a coupon, and Wednesday is Diamond Card day, but of course you can’t combine the offers, and anyway if you read the small print the coupon only applies if you spend £30 on full price items, so it’s not great if you want to combine lots of small things, when some of them are likely to be on multi-buys anyway, so I’d spend all my time trying to work out what to spend it on.

I like the idea of going to the garden centre, but from what I remember the parking is pretty awful, so as I said, I wouldn’t want to take the van.

I’m just trying to give examples here of what my mind is like all the time. I think I’ll give myself a treat, but it takes so long to think through all the options, implications, ramifications and potential consequences that I start to dread it, even when the object is something I know I would enjoy – unless, of course, I don’t enjoy it at all and end up wondering what on earth I’m doing there, wherever it is. Which is quite likely.