Funny. I didn’t write yesterday. I didn’t even think about it. Writing never crossed my mind. I was digging a hole in the garden discovering liquorice root, and then I visited Tom and Erin. And now I’m writing and trying to remember what it was that brought me here to write. There was something.

I’ve just received four books like the one I am trying to write. Not like it – it was the not like it ness of one that brought me here to the keyboard – I don’t want to write like this I thought, I want to write like, well, this.

I’m quite angry with everybody else. Quite angry with me. Mainly with people who’ve actually written books.

I have a potential mentor to help me with the project, writing this. Oh, I should say, this isn’t a blog anymore, it’s a potential book. A year in the life of the garden. Did I mention this before? Maybe.

I’m a bit scared. I just want this to be a bit of heart spilled out every week, and the idea of turning it into something bigger is scary.

The reason I’m digging a hole in the garden is that I am extending the paving a little so we can eat out next summer. It is necessary following the installation of the rainwater tank. Did I mention the rainwater tank? Maybe. Definitely. It’s a very exciting water tank. So digging – I need to remove the top soil and bag it up to use elsewhere in the garden. It’s really yummy stuff. The liquorice is an outrider from the plant some distance away. It’s Glycyrrhiza glabra, a plant I bought from the Agroforestry Research Trust, and it took some time to establish. It seems to have made it. The shoot I was digging up yesterday is about six feet from the original plant, which means there is now a network of underground roots all about the original plant. Which is both good and bad. It seems to be something of an invader, though that will mean lots of liquorice root. Now I have to learn how to get the Liquorice Allsorts out of the root!

I should probably stop writing now. I’m about to mention growth. It’s a word that the politicians go on and on about, and I always find myself saying ‘but this is a finite world’. I don’t know what I’m talking about, which is why I should stop writing. And then I thought, am thinking, about growth in the garden, and how it happens year after year, going round and round, and that seems good. How is this growth, in the garden, and that growth, in the economy, related. Answers on a postcard…