I’ve been sowing grass seed on our new meadow. A few days ago this was still a few ugly piles of clay, gorse and weeds but a man with a digger came in and transformed it. I had insisted that I’d be able to do it using my shovel and a bit of time (say a year and a half) but the man with the digger did it in seven hours. I’ve been into a vague idea of the nobility of manual labour since we got here, most likely a reaction to years spent working in front of computer screens, taking ages to do jobs when machines would do them much faster. I’m testing out my back against nature. But a lot of that time would be better spent elsewhere, like drawing wobbly roads and town centres onto the tarmac with pieces of chalk or playing offground tig on the pieces of slate that lie scattered across our bare lawn.
Sowing the seed last light as the sun went down and the lights went on all over Galway Bay and the Aran isles, I felt the peace of the west of Ireland. Although there was always the danger that someone would pop up from behind a bush and say “Jesus, you don’t sow grass seed like that you sow it like this”. There is lots of advice around here (especially for a man like me who professes to know little of the world of DIY or gardening) and most of it is well-intentioned. The trick is sifting though it all and developing a coherent plan of your own, otherwise you’d end up like the man in the Aesop fable who keeps jumping on and off his donkey according to the opinions of passers by.
I finished sowing just as the rains came. At night I dreamed about grass.