Suzanne Harrington: Assault course must be completed before start of intense gardening
What else are we going to do apart from shove plants into the ground? Stock image
A fight breaks out in the queue at the garden centre. Now there’s a sentence I never imagined writing – for a start, I’m too young for garden centres – but this is 2020 and all bets are off. The Teen and I are queuing for compost, because what else are we going to do apart from shove plants into the ground. Someone told us it was therapeutic.
It’s all about displacement activity, to distract the Teen from daytime drinking with the Kardashians, and to stop me from thinking about my adopted country of residence being run by an evil goblin and his Latin-speaking monkey. I am digging holes in the garden to stop thinking about Dominic Cummings. It’s not working. And now we have run out of compost.
There is a long queue at the garden centre, but this being England, queuing is a national pastime, and people have taken to the 2m thing like paranoid ducks to poisoned water. By the entrance, workers in hi-vis vests smile awkwardly as they wipe down trolley handles with squirty disinfectant and thank people for waiting.
Nobody is used to this much social interaction just to get a bag of compost; people stare at their phones, their feet, anything except each other. We are all acutely aware of the weirdness, but too worn down from it to bother acknowledging it anymore.
Easier to just pretend to be invisible, a tactic which would never work in Ireland, given our genetic incapability to not talk to each other.
Teen and I reach the top of the queue, and along with the burly man behind us with the neck tattoo, are given our trolleys. The compost is piled up on pallets away from the entrance; we load up, then double back to the top of the queue to go inside to pay. A shout comes from the back. Not the kind of passive aggressive tut you might hear under more normal circumstances, but an actual yell of fury. One that begins with “Oi!” We are being accused of queue jumping.
Shouting ensues. A middle aged man in leisurewear seems to be having some kind of Trumpian rage moment. He is pointing at Teen and I and the burly man. The hi-vis people, their smiles fixed and agonised, reassure him that actually, there have been no breaches of queue etiquette.
That we are perfectly entitled to go forth, and pay for our compost without rejoining the queue again. It’s not snakes and ladders. And that should be the end of it, this micro-aggression. But the burly man is affronted. A volley of words which require asterisks fill the air around his head. His accuser fires expletives back at him across a no-man’s-land of queuing grannies.
The hi-vis people have to intervene, mortified, and persuade the burly man to go inside and pay for his azaleas.
Teen and I side eye each other. We had no idea gardening could be this intense.
