Bushes, barbecues and blatant sentimentalism

My last post was largely about sunshine, and the thought of sunshine can only lead to thoughts of barbecues. Surely eating outside, under the virgin sky, with a slab of meat thick enough to make your arteries shiver clenched between sauce-smeared fingers, surely this is the only way to be. Unless you’re a vegetarian. Or an agoraphobe.

Obviously barbecue season is a way off yet. It would be prudent to wait until the weather is a little more predictable in its generosity. No one likes eating in the wet and the cold; there are few things as pathetic as a rain-sodden barbecue. But I had a quick shufti outside at my back garden and thought to myself: “Yes, this is a beautiful and fertile land, here I may master the element of fire to enhance my repast. And probably have a few tinnies as well, and maybe watch the football through the living room window if I move the telly round a bit.”

It made me a bit nostalgic for other favourite barbecue spots as well. Firstly, the garden at my old house, which was a tangled and overgrown mass of briars and nettles when we moved in. I and my saintly, hard-working housemates transformed it over a weekend into a well-groomed and gravelled al-fresco paradise. I had the ‘before and after’ photos on my phone, and I would often amuse my friends and colleagues (and people on the tube. And sometimes people in the street) with the transformation, until I got wasted and lost my phone’s memory card in a club. Let that be a lesson to you, brethren.

The best place I ever had a barbecue was not particularly beautiful. Actually it was a scrubby patch of poured concrete and rotting litter out the front of my mate Mike’s house. It was bordered by a wall low enough to be fundamentally useless as a barrier, but high enough to fall over in the dark to comedic/painful effect. It was, therefore, completely open to the street.

So we’d kick back in ugly deck chairs, drink rubbish beer from warm cans and eat a beguiling but potentially lethal mix of frozen and scorched meat. Sometimes we’d chuck a vegetable kebab on there as well, although we would invariably burn that too. Tinny music would play through knackered speakers and all would be generally right with the world.

The best thing about it? People in the street would stop and say hello, with surprising frequency. Occasionally they’d be people we knew, and they were never too busy to scarf down a free burger, but more often than not they would be strangers who would pause and make time with us. It wasn’t anything particularly profound and I think we talked about the weather in every single case, but it was still pretty cool.

The front garden at my new house has a bush in it. It only needs the one, because the bush is unashamedly, ludicrously big. It takes up the entire space. I don’t really have a front garden, I just have an enormous shrub separating my kitchen from the street. It is so big and entrenched it could plausibly have already been there when construction began, and so the builders simply decided to build my house a metre of so further back. It’s straggly and itchy and I’m pretty sure it once ate a kid that was walking past. The only way I could have a barbecue in my front garden is if I threw a sheet over it and balanced on top, like a cloud from a Super Mario game.

So my front garden is, basically, useless. And it’s not the only one on my street that I would classify as such. Quite a few of them have impractically large pieces of arboreal nonsense taking up most of the space.

But, some might cry, the function of a front garden relates to more than its ability to contain a barbecue and a few chairs. This is a fair criticism (one which, as I hope I’ve made plain, I do not personally believe), and I will address is thus: what, in that case, is your front garden doing?

Is it beautiful? Is it a well kept and watered Eden, one that will both entrance and delight passers-by and show the whole world what a frightfully clever and organised chap or chapess you are? If so... well, good for you, I guess. You can go.

Or is it a grotty little mudhole that you barely have time to set foot in, let alone look after? Is it slowly filling up with crap and rubbish because you haven’t the time to get out and tidy it up? And it’s no good looking out of the window or up at the ceiling Mr. And Mrs. Majority, because I can see you back there looking sheepish.

All this got me thinking about wasted space, and how depressing we seem to find it. There’s always something nice about space which is being put to use, even if that use is simply letting nature do its thing. Apart from the 'hardy perennial crisp packet' and the rarer 'summertime used condom' there aren’t that many species flourishing in the front gardens of my street, and it’s a little disquieting to look at.

Picture a nasty, rain-soaked alley between two high-rises. All it has at the end is a crummy, tagged fence and, I don’t know, some mouldy cardboard boxes. Chuck some binbags down there as well. Looks rubbish, doesn’t it? Now picture the same alley, but build a solid little hut at the end, out of plywood, and put a motorcycle in it. Now it’s not just a crummy old alley, it’s a crummy old alley where you keep your motorcycle.

Am I the only one that seems to find the latter option preferable? Perhaps. But it always seems to me that a space being used for something is more... comforting, maybe, than one clearly going to waste.

Now, going out and tidying up your front garden is going to be a massive bugger. For one thing it’s probably still rainy outside, and it’s a whole lot of extra work that you could probably do without. I sympathise, I really do. I haven’t got a clue what I’m going to do about that bush.

But maybe somewhere down the line you might have a moment to step outside, and when you do, maybe you could give some thought to what you want the space to actually do. Obviously if I had my way you’d just gravel it, chuck some pot-plants on it and start making barbecue plans with your neighbours, but I can appreciate (just about) that that might not be everyone’s idea of a jolly.

There might be another use you could put it to, though. Or there might even be something you would quite like it to say about you, something you could achieve with a day or so’s hard work and then largely forget about. You could just plonk a sculpture out there. Or a birdbox. Or a plastic chair so that sometimes when the weather’s nice you can sit there with a cup of tea and watch the world go by. Just something, anything, that when you walk past it on the way back from work reminds you that this is my space, and this thing is what it is for.

I’m going to show that bush who’s boss at some point. I’ll probably shape it into something humorous first just to cripple its fighting spirit. And when I walk past where it used to rest I’ll occasionally think: “That’s where that bastard bush used to be. I remember how I laughed as I chucked its mangled carcass into the skip.” And, very briefly, I’ll smile to myself. It might work pretty well for you too. And if you do decide to put a barbecue out there, just remember who gave you the idea. I’ll bring buns, and mine’s a Kronenbourg. Cheers.