The site where our practice is currently situated was a domestic bungalow until about 2004 so my office is upstairs with most of the administrative stuff and for any of you know, it’s a small space. There are two toilets though, one with a bath and one with a shower (the one with a shower is a girls toilet and the one with the bath at the top of the stairs os the boys toilet)
The boy’s toilet has a Velux roof window which opens out and you can stand there and see the back garden of the house next door. It always drew my attention because it was beautifully manicured. I never really saw any of the people in it (I don’t really spend that much time in the toilet believe it or not!) but I always enjoyed looking out that window from time to time to see the window.
Today I looked at it again – I think the house has been sold to someone else and the garden has very quickly become overrun. The grass isn’t cut, the borders are really untidy and it seems quite sad that something someone had spent so much time on has now just been left to go back to a wild state which is not particularly beautiful. The person who has got the house now is probably doing something else remarkable somewhere else. To make your garden as nice as the people next door had made it you would have to spend quite a lot of time in it, 20 hours a week maybe when you got home and at weekends, learning about it, going to garden centres and buying things and the executing the jobs that needed to keep it in good shape so that at the end of the day you could sit, relax and enjoy it.
You could pay someone to do that if you earned enough money and then you could sit in the garden and enjoy what someone else had created but I can’t see that that gives you the same sense of achievement. Or you could accept that your garden is going to be overgrown because you’re achieving something you want to elsewhere.
We have a gardener that comes to our house called Charlie, he’s brilliant and really knows what he’s doing. He does three hours a week on a Friday and the garden looks really good. People say it looks good but I feel a little bit ashamed about that because I don’t do it myself.
I guess the moral of the story is – it’s unlikely that Charlie is ever going to participate in an Ironman because he spends his time gardening and it’s unlikely that I’m ever going to have the skills that Charlie has because I do something else.
Blog Post Number - 1267
Leave a comment