When You're Not Looking #4

By the time this post is published, the working week will be officially over for most of you - welcome to the weekend! Got any plans? I've become a bit hermit-like lately, so it's nice to have been invited out this evening (even if it is for a dinner/planning meeting), and I intend to make yet more cupcakes in honour of the occasion. Seriously, I think I may have a baking addiction, which is rapidly expanding into an any-food-making-activity addiction. There are fourteen jars of marmalade on my kitchen table, half a lemon cake in the tin, and ingredients for several experimental party foods in the fridge - I tried some out on the hubby for a Valentine's feast :) So if anyone ever needs a party planner/chef, give me a call and I'll be there in a flash!

Food aside, tonight's final When You're Not Looking comes courtesy of my terrible history with plants, and the sneaking suspicion that they die just to spite me. I love gardening; as kids, my siblings and I had a patch each of the garden, and I spent hours drawing painstaking plans, buying bamboo arches for the sweetpeas and laying black plastic over the weeds. The strawberry plants ate up space voraciously and sprouted delicious berries, although I never quite mastered the art of keeping them safe from the birds. I dug tiny ditches for the flower bed edging, and bought several bags of woodchips which remained unused, as we ended up moving house before I could complete my landscaping masterpiece.

The one thing I didn't do, however, was talk to my plants. I thought about it once or twice, but as much as the idea appealed to me, it seemed too ridiculous (although even as a 'mature' 22-year-old, I still talk to my teddies). Thus I continue to struggle along, trying to keep my plants alive without any verbal communication. Who knows, maybe that's where I've been going wrong all along! What do you think - have these guys got it right?

When You're Not Looking...

...politicians tell The Truth. But only to their plants. I believe we have Prince Charles to thank for that one.

I personally own two plants - a very sad Christmas tree seedling, which grew when neglected and now won't grow when cared for, and a small cactus named Clint. Clint lives in a similarly small teracotta pot full of blue gravel, with his gold gift-ribbon still tied around him and the name tag my brother put on it for me.

I can understand the urge to confide in plants, especially for politicians. After all, your peonies can't call the local press to refer to your fellow MPs as 'rabid monkeys', can they? And even if you do have a half-hour rant at your desktop spider plant about the inefficiencies of such-and-such a minister's department, it can hardly be expected to be secretly wielding a tape recorder.

In my opinion, it's only trees you have to be wary of. In case they're Ents. Everything else you can prune or tie to a trellis and it won't bother you. An Ent could quite feasibly perform a citizen's arrest - that is, if it's sorted out its immigration papers from Middle Earth and can be considered a citizen.