Dead Head

The Hydrangea on the terrace got the ‘Dead Heading’ of a lifetime today. No I’m not a gardener, but as John mows the lawn, the trade off is that ‘I maintain the terrace’. It’s quite a big lawn to mow and as John has found, a final end of year mow, once all of the leaves have fallen, is the seasonal roundup and the garden then goes to sleep. No raking up of the multitude of leaves – a definite winner. So yes, I maintained the terrace today, ‘Dead Heading’ the hydrangea and de leaving and pruning into shape, one of the two remaining wisterias.

‘Dead Head’… makes you think doesn’t it! Forgetting the garden now, we all go through the ups and downs in life don’t we? But what about when the downs remain, when they don’t bounce back! Month after month of sadness, festering into blind despair. Definition of sad reads what exactly. I just googled it and dictionary. Com read some thirty six definitions. I won’t list them, but a couple that I personally felt a few years ago are – sorrowful, downcast, downhearted and despondent. And all of that after such a feeling of glory and adulation after the birth of the girls in the spring of twenty thirteen. You see it was a very long eight months I spent in Mumbai. Some of you may remember, some of it, perhaps. I would go as far as to say that coming home with the girls was the end of a very long journey for me. But we did get home, didn’t we? At that time, it was difficult as I was slightly morose, maybe not comparable to shell shock, but I felt like a person who was devoid of themselves. Of course with two young babies, you just have to cope. We were still living in London at that point. We had a nanny lined up to help out, but she was not the person we had hoped for and within four weeks of our return, we asked her to leave. At that point, the wounds I still felt from my extended time in India were still there, but babies and nappies and feeding and winding just filled in my time twenty four seven. There wasn’t any time to reflect on what had happened. I considered counselling, but would that of helped and there really wasn’t the time in the day to just ‘take off’ and sit on someone’s sofa for an hour. This is quite an admission to myself, but I felt completely ‘Dead Headed’ with all that had happened, the bureaucratic nonsense from both the Home Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, this and the corruption that I experienced, that is sadly part of Indian culture. Yes I returned a different man due to my experiences, feeling completely ‘Dead Headed’ at that time, but the love of our new family was binding, I got through the void that was there and replaced it with hope, yes hope of tomorrow and all that tomorrow will bring…