I have developed four vertical wrinkles under each eye. They are brand new and are more Daddy Long Legs’ Legs than Crows’ Feet. Horrified, I tried tackling it with a cosmetic version of pollyfilla but after a day in the rain and streaks of emulsion running down my face, I was reminded yet again that vanity and this job just don’t go hand in hand in that horse-and-carriage kind of way. What hair-straighteners?
And the cause of the facial additions? I’d hate to put my premature (yes premature) ageing down to worries about Chelsea, but there’s a common denominator in all those feeling-funny-when-you-wake-you-up stomach churnings, and it’s not down to cheese or red wine. The RHS have a gorgeous new Chelsea website: however, there’s one element of it that literally makes me freeze. In the top left-hand corner, somebody has added A Countdown-The-Days Calendar. I’ve developed a weird obsession with checking it every day, in the same spirit of impossible hope in which I check the National Lottery site: I think there’s a tiny part of me that clings onto the fact that this calendar might have gone backwards overnight.
So what worries? Well, mainly, should the gaps between the timber on the seats be 5mm or 7mm? After days of muttering and actual real arguments, we decided (on 4mm, by the way, just in case that question was going keep you up at night). And they say garden designers are introspective.
The brilliantly good thing about this week was my lovely breakfast meeting with Carmel Meade and two pains au chocolat: Carmel is patiently designing 50 patchwork squares with which to construct the hammock.
You’ll be seeing a lot of these on designers’ websites in the next couple of weeks. I promise you that this is not one interchangeable photo that we are all sharing whilst in reality panicking that we haven’t even acquired half the list.
The other extremely good thing about this week was the signing off of the construction of the green roof. Yes, a dog kennel.
I have totally abandoned the Less is More philosophy. I wave my arms about in a sort of Viv Nicholson-fashion, substituting ‘Spend’ with ‘More’.
