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Only people who are not interested in gardening or just lazy want someone to make over their garden. If you want to change your garden, then get on with it. Nothing beyond the limitations of health, time and money is stopping you. [....] The truth is that if you are lazy then you will never garden. Gardening is hard work. Gardening can be difficult, confusing and frustrating. It demands a commitment and a desire to learn and to keep learning. You have to accept that you will get wet and cold, hot and sweaty, sore, tired and depressed. It will cost you money and will take up more time than you have to spare. And this will make you feel, at times, as fully alive and as content as body and mind can be.

Monty Don, 2000

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If you pay someone to come in ‘do’ your garden for you, it will not be true, and you can spot a phoney garden the minute you set eyes on it. Anyway, ‘doing’ a garden is like shovelling the tide, because a garden is never ‘done’ any more than a river or the breeze is done. Gardening is something you do privately and without inverted commas.

Monty Don, 2000

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There is no doubt that after a certain age one puts into the garden the hopes and aspirations that youth put into the wider world.

Monty Don, 2009

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On the subject of Northern Lights / The Golden Compass (It is not a fecking compass, it is a truth teller, you fecking dimwits), having read this article, I think Philip Pullman is my kind of fellow.

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P J Harvey at Pitchfork “I think I’m much more selective about what I choose to put around me, musically [...] I think that is a getting older thing, I sense more that I won’t tolerate having just OK music around me. It has to be life changing or I don’t particularly want to hear it. I’ve probably narrowed down my listening to other people’s work to just what stimulates me.”

I am with you on that Peej.