We live, or more accurately exist, in an old-fashioned house typical of some English towns a century ago. Inside we've modernised obviously, I'm something of a new man, with electricity, running water, a fridge-freezer, colour television and all manner of time-saving gadgets but I still make my wife walk 5 miles to the river and use a mangle for washing and drying. In every other respect, however, the interior is reasonably up to date.
This preface is to introduce our typically English garden. Like an Edwardian cock, you have to admire the length and ignore the width.

At the bottom of our garden, is a huge chestnut tree. That tree is 50 years old today. I know you are probably wondering how on earth I can know such a thing, but the fact is this house has only had one family live in it, three different generations since 1902 when it was built. The tree was planted on this day, fifty years past, when the grandson of the original owner, and the person who sold it to us, was born. It was he who proudly detailed the tree's heritage. Besides that, I had it carbon dated, this is the English property market after all, if he could lie about the tree, what else would he try and stitch me up with?

The area around the tree, was something dark, dank and foreboding. Two rotten sheds, a bowed but unbeaten collection of fence panels, looking like they'd been press-ganged unwillingly into action, and a flower bed with a brick surround that I suspected held various remains of pets or other such wonders.

Now I'm not a gardener. I barely know the difference between a weed and a flower. I once weeded a small area and removed all the flowers but left all the weeds, by virtue of leaving everything that was flowering there and anything that just looked green and boring I was yanking like a two-bit whore in a crack-rush. My wife claims I "did it on purpose" in order to be released from weeding duties again. But if so it didn't work, because now she supervises with industrial strength language.

So despite my lack of skills, I do try, and I'm good for manual labour. Jobs such as clearing areas of all their rubbish, that I can do. So the area around the tree became my small project this year. It took me three weekends, and a hired skip, to do it, but I managed to remove 2 sheds, half a tonne of concrete and bricks, I got a tree surgeon in to cut back many of the branches and give the tree a health check, I completely de-planted everything around the tree for about 40 square metres and dug it over, and then I bought some weed control matting and covered the entire area with that. I laid some paving stones to make a small, lazy (how apt) path around the tree, a bench, and bark chippings (the shredded remains of the branches as provided by the tree surgeon - how ecologically sound.) It's probably ever so dated and out of garden-fashion, but it looks ok to me, with sun light dappling through the newly shorn branches and leaves, a woodland feel to the previously dark end of the garden, somewhere nice to sit and read a book, and an area that I plan to put a swing for my 5 year old daughter.

Now during the 3 weekends of this project, and bearing in mind that I worked on it for 8 hours on at least 4 of those days, my wife made various comments as to it's progress. She loved it at first, there were minor criticisms obviously, she wouldn't be my darling wife without those.
"You've only dug down 3 feet? You never wanted to do this anyway did you?"

But there were some compliments too.

And then came along the herbaceous period, bloody distemperia, named in honour of cranky menstrual gardeners everywhere, and suddenly nothing was right.

But the absolute worst, the one thing which kicked everything else into touch, was the positioning of the weed matting. Or to give it it's full title, weed control matting.

It is supposed to let moisture and goodness through to the soil beneath, but inhibits anything growing through it, like weeds for instance, wanted plants should be pulled through small cuts in it, rather like a swimming-cap hair-colouring operation.

In the midst of her interior walls crumbling one weekend, she decided to examine at close detail the laying of the matting. Allegedly, I had left a gap of one to two inches uncovered by this matting by the right-hand side fence. That one to two inches of uncovered area includes underneath the fence panels too I should add.

"You are fucking joking aren't you?" She asked me, standing there, pointing aimlessly at the futility of my matting.

"What? What's wrong with that?" I asked.

"Oh just a HUGE fucking gap where all the weeds are going to come through. And I suppose it will be ME doing the weeding as per usual." she accused.

"That's not a huge gap. It's just a slight edge by the fence. I'll stick some more bark chippings over it."

"yeah, that's it, take the easy way out, don't do it properly will you?"

"It's not that bad sweetheart." I said.

"Look at it, here and here, it's terrible, we're going to get weeds all over the place there." She said, pointing.

"Look, it's fucking weed control matting at the end of a garden, not fucking ground zero nuclear zone where nothing is ever supposed to grow again."

"No need to get sarcastic." She stated.

"Have you any idea of how hard I have worked for 3 fucking weekends doing this?"

"Oh yeah, really hard, you should try looking after a 5 year old."

"I do." I said. "And I love doing it." I certainly don't bitch about it like you do I thought.

"What are you going to do about this area then?" She asked.

"I'm going to fucking concrete the garden."

"Don't be stupid."

"No fuck it, I'm sick of these bastard weeds. Let's be done with it all, just fucking concrete the lot and make it look like a fucking carpark. As long as you don't have to pull a weed up we can be happy."

"Now you are just taking it too far, you always have to over-react." she said.

And as she walked away, I could see her shaking her head. Later on she was on the phone to one of her friends. I heard her relate what I'd been doing in the garden. She said it "looked ok, but he's only done half a job as usual... oh I know... men!"