FENG SHUI AMONG THE APRICOTS

Homework again! This time an easy response to Faith's call. This isn't the first blog I ever wrote, but it was at least one of the first pieces I entrusted to the blogosphere. And one or two people seemed to like it.

Like all such pieces it doesn't age too well. There is a reference in it to Mr Howard sacking someone. That tells you something. Mr Howard led the Conservative party at some point in the dim and distant past. Who he sacked and for what reason - clearly something to do with venturing an opinion at an inopportune moment - are lost in the mists of time. For all I know it might have been Boris Johnson though I think on reflection it may have been something to do with the man who said the Conservatives were going to cut taxes. Ha! The only other thing I know about Mr Howard is that he and his wife, having nothing better to do of an evening, watch re-runs of Brideshead Revisited, which is, in a manner of speaking, really all about terminating otherwise promising relationships in colourful settings.

By coincidence, this little piece is also about terminating a relationship in a colourful setting. In this case the relationship was with an apricot tree and the languid setting was Syon House, by the Thames in West London. Now apricots are one of my favourite fruits; I eat apricot jam every morning with my yoghurt. I fell in love with a pretty tree, but the relationship, as you will discover, was not meant to last.

My garden still lacks an apricot tree (though the faithful, but dull, blueberry continues to struggle for sun outside the kitchen window. As it happens I am reading Jane's lovely and fascinating book on Feng Shui at the moment and have just discovered that I lack a marriage corner, which, after 37 years, is a trifle disconcerting. A big plant, I suppose an apricot would do, strategically placed, might help to cover up. Perhaps, this exercise will persuade me to go and buy one.


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DON'T ASK AN APRICOT ABOUT AN AUTUMN FESTIVAL

In my experience Easter is either surpassingly mild or unreasonably cold. Sometimes it is both at once. Cold and clammy dampness suddenly gives way to merry sunshine in which birds sing and daffodils flounce thus confirming the sentiment of Robert Browning's line 'Oh to be in England now that April's there.' Or even, March, as this year the full moon determined it should be. Early or late, Easter always seems to creep out of the Spring calendar at a most inopportune and unexpected moment, but there we are.

It had so crept, I seem to remember, one Easter Sunday on the Ile de Noirmoutier where some friends had a holiday cottage. They had spent the journey - most of it passed I recall dodging in and out of thick sea fog - boasting of Noirmoutier's microclimate. Crossing the causeway to the island, they swore the sun would be there to welcome us. When it wasn't they insisted that it would be when we reached the restaurant on the other side. It still wasn't. Not only that but the restaurant was full. So, huddled in overcoats on the terrace, we ate moule-frites, stone cold, with the mist swirling about our heads, while glancing enviously at the earlier diners warm and snug inside.

This year there were neither moule-frites, nor swirling mist, but there was an Apricot Tree. We had eschewed the romanticism of La France Maritime for prosaic suburban London - the lovely Syon Park Garden Centre to be precise. And it was there that I dithered over whether to purchase an apricot tree that looked so pretty covered as it was by pyrotechnic bursts of white blossom. And as I was dithering I wondered whether we should not have a festival similar to Easter sometime in the autumn, this being another season that Britain tends to do rather well, as Mr Keats this time was wont to remind us.

Autumn festivals we have a plenty. Harvest Festival and All Saints battle it out with Bonfire Night and Halloween. And now - 200 years late - the idea of a Trafalgar Day is mooted. Could all be combined - I put it to the Apricot - into a new autumn Friday to Monday holiday called, for linguistic balance, 'Wester?' The Tree made no attempt to disagree.

That would open the way for the more commercial aspects of Christmas to become 'Norther;' which would prompt an equivalent summer festival called 'Souther,' clearly a name with just the right sort of resonance. As in "we're spending Souther at our villa in Antibes this year." We would all know where we where and the religious among us could then celebrate their own sacred festivals at the same or different times free of disfiguring commercialism. "What?" I asked the Apricot. But reply came there none. Evidently, the tree was too pre-occupied with its pyrotechnic bursts of pretty blossom - or maybe it just didn't want to risk being sacked by Mr Howard.

One day the Apricot might have provided fresh fruit at my Souther party, but surely, I mused, that pretty blossom would not survive a long car journey and the indignity of re-potting? So I chose a blueberry instead, and now I can't shut it up.