GARDEN MOANS

Did you know 27% of male heart-attack victims are struck down while cutting the grass ?? What, you didn’t ?? That’s because it's not true, I just made it up. But I bet the real figure is huge.

I recently spent a (what was supposed to be lazy) Bank Holiday off chopping down a tree, laying slabs and getting covered in mud and cement dust as a result. What the garden now looks like isn’t that much different to how it started either. According to another recent bit of mysteriously-obtained statistics, 2.2 million of the new homes built in Britain this year will not have a private garden. This is because developers are building lots of flats and - I never would have guessed this - the likelihood of having a garden is greater for larger detached dwellings than flats.

I believe there is another way of looking at this. If people are paving over their front lawns and selling their back gardens to Bryant and Barratt, it must mean they value a car-parking space and an extra bit of dosh more than they value spending half their weekend huffing and puffing behind a lawnmower. Clearly, some people plainly don’t like having a garden, and I can understand why. It’s because once you start gardening, there is no end, no point at which you can say, “It’s finished”, unlike when you’re painting or redecorating the front room, for example.

First of all, there’s the bothersome business of choosing from a vast array of plants, all of which have horrendously-complicated Latin names so that the people who work in garden centres can laugh in your face when you get it wrong. Flustered, you will make a panic purchase of something that is pink and won’t grow in your particular garden because it’s not north-facing, or the soil is too acidic, or the wind’s too strong. And even if it does grow, it will turn out to be either a twig, or something so rapacious that within five months it will have eaten your lawn, your shed, your pets and probably your children as well.

First, though, it will want to eat your satellite dish. All plants do this. No matter how hard you encourage them to grow in one direction, they will make a beeline for the dish, so that in the middle of "Doctor Who", you will suddenly get a notice saying no signal is being received. This means you have to go outside armed with a pair of secateurs and some dynamite. Well, I would.

We have had some weeds that, in their desperation to get at our satellite dish, brutally murdered three of my Mum’s rose plants that lay in its path. It used them as a launch pad, until the poor things couldn’t cope with the weight and simply snapped. Gravel does not do this. And anyway, once you embark on a project such as a garden, there is simply no end. Next thing you know, you’ll be in a greenhouse, making Harry Potter-style potions with a pestle and mortar, and not sleeping at night because of the prospect of greenfly. Nobody ever loses sleep over their Wickes timber decking.

The other thing I’ve learning in my short career as a gardener is that everything you want to grow dies, and everything that you wish was dead grows like wildfire. It’s like "The Killing Fields" out there sometimes. But let’s just say you do have a garden, you don’t mind dragging your lawnmower through the house every weekend, and that you like being up to your elbows in mud and mortar.

Fine, but because you are an amateur, your garden is likely to be fairly small, and because you are British you think pansies are pretty, so you will eventually end up with something that looks like a sponsored roundabout in Milton Keynes. There are some great gardens in this country, but yours isn’t going to one of them. Yours is going to look like it was planted and maintained by Ozzy Osbourne.

And it’s not somewhere you can ever sit and relax or have summer barbecues or parties either, because every time you try, you will notice a bit of moss that needs removing, or a beetle that needs spraying, or a weed that needs beheading. So you’ll be up and down a jet-propelled pogo stick, until one day, while doing a bit of hedge trimming, you will probably cut through the cable and wind up getting electrocuted.

Just make sure you stress in your will that you want to see Alan Titchmarsh get the pants sued off him.

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

At this point in human development, I think we can look back on what we've achieved and agree that language is one of our better inventions – certainly better than Wi-Fi, the Dustbuster, “Britain’s Got No Talent” and Super Mario Galaxy.

Picture a world without language. Go on. No gossip. No chit-chat. No road signs. No newspapers. No theatre. No internet. The only forms of mass media entertainment available are slapstick and photography. But then, that's the beauty of language. It can change the way you see things without actually altering anything in the physical realm. It turns good into bad and bad into good and back again without anyone ever lifting a finger.

Take "fun-size" Mars bars. They're tiny. Gone, in just a single bite. So, they don't last as long as a regular chocolate bars, in fact as a taste experience they probably last for less longer than the average X-Factor winner’s career. And there’s another thing, with them being individually wrapped, they're fiddly as hell too. And pound for pound, they're actually more expensive than their standard counterparts. But, back in the mists of time, some marketing genius decided to label them as "fun-size". And it worked. These were dinky novelties you could eat !! Hooray for fun-size !!

But the magic of language didn't end there. As well as instantly transforming each and every shortcoming of these miniscule snacks into a thrilling bonus, the sly association of the word "fun" with the concept of "small helpings" had the side-effect of making regular-size chocolate bars seem less decadent, less naughty by comparison. If little ones were fun, regular ones were pedestrian slabs of edible workload. Sometime later, of course, “king-size” Mars bars hit the market, thus imbuing an act of calorific gluttony with an unwarranted air of imperial glamour. This was an imposing, statesmanlike snack to be reckoned with; a nougat mothership; the Mars bar of royalty, language had worked its magic once again.

Now, as a result of all of this, there are many silly, twee and unnecessary words in the English language. Tasty. Meal. Cuisine. Nourishing. I also have a bit of an aversion to the use of “home” instead of “house”. So if you were to ask me round to “your home for a nourishing bowl of pasta”, I would almost certainly glare rather angrily at you until you decided to go away.

But the worst word. The worst noise. The screech of Lady Gaga’s fingernails down the biggest blackboard in the world, the squeak of polystyrene on polystyrene, the cry of a baby when you’re hungover … is 'beverage'. Apparently they used to have “bever” days at Eton when extra beer was brought in for the boys. And this almost certainly comes from some obscure Latin expression that only Albert Einstein would understand.

And therein lies the problem. People who work on planes and in hotels have got it into their heads that the word "beverage", with its Etonian and Latin overtones, is somehow posh and therefore the right word to use when addressing a customer. Even when said customer is wearing ripped stonewashed jeans and a t-shirt with more holes than the plot of the last Star Trek movie. And why is a bowl of pasta more appealing than a plate or a dish of pasta ?? And why not simply say pasta ?? Because don’t worry, I’ll presume it’ll come on some form of crockery, in the same way that I’ll presume, if you have a kettle in your kitchen, you might have some coffee granules and tea bags in there as well.

Now I’m not trying to give the impression that I’m in favour of one of those “Campaigns for Plain English”, because I know how important it is that our language evolves, but just to illustrate how much of a rain check we need here, I’ll leave you with the best example I know of this nonsense.

It was a rack of papers in a hotel foyer, over which there was a sign:

"NEWSPAPERS FOR YOUR READING PLEASURE"

All they had left was a solitary copy of The Daily Mail, so it wasn’t even technically correct.