Lush Life

I was pondering just the other day what a very easy life I have. In church Sunday, it was, as the collection plate was going round.

Indeed, it struck me that if I don't ease up on the old botanophobe moan, the wind will change and I really *will* be handed hoe, mow and haystack and told to get on with it.

I also fell to musing on the chances of a sufficiently skilled sleightist of hand making a decent living cruising church services and scooping from the offerings.

What more could one ask than to be left alone to ignore in blissful oblivion of all matters sordidly jardonières, a state courteously reciprocated by the weedy arts.

But isn't it true?

You can write or read your pretty-pictured fauna-catory tomes.

You can hold dinner parties with the table in thrall to your tales of loamy servitude.

You can wear big badges to conferences and vie with others over whose manacles de manure chafe the painiest

One can even batten down the hatches during the merciful months of winter and drink deep of the malt whiskey in toast to the glorious respite.

But for the real deal, intravenous sensurround experience, you can't beat just getting out there and going mano-a-mano with the sheer bloody futility of it all.

On the collection money front, I suppose one waits for the precise moment that the collection plate reaches one and then murmurs, "The peace of God be with you" (or perhaps just "Love the tie!") sufficient to distract the side-man from one's lightning movement.

How many services could one do in a Sunday? Only one out here, but back home in Clapham or Swiss Cottage, quite a few.

I suppose you'd have to step on it - have a fast car waiting - if only to make it to all services in time. Then again, if you were doing well, you could afford one.