I used to dislike gardening intensely. It was a chore, a thing that had to be done, effort, hardwork, a preventer of idling. But in recent years I have discovered, and come to love, its soothing qualities.
The most pleasurable aspect of gardening is its multiple time scales - the immediate, the medium term and the long term.
In the immediate, you can dig, plant, cut, trim, lop, harvest, tie, rake and hoe for instant, and often striking results. In 30 minutes I can mow my front and back lawns. In 45 I can also trim the edges, pull a few weeds from the borders and sweep the yard.
It seems to me that gardening has much in common with hairdressing - lots of snipping on autopilot, interspersed with brief checks and course corrections.
Unfortunately most hairdressers allow the underused brain to stay that way and instead subject the customer to banal conversations on themes of weather, holidays and last night's major drinking session. Personally I derive little comfort from knowing that the wielder of razor sharp scissors has a hangover that could fell an elephant. And I don't want to talk about the weather. In fact, shut the hell up and cut my hair.
Hairdressing should be the perfect career for philosophers and novelists - plenty of thinking time combined with the opportunity to meet a huge range of different people, potential characters all. For a couple of years of my Oxford incarnation my hair was cut by someone looking not unlike Zadie Smith. Now I am wondering if maybe it was her after all. Sure, she claims to live in cor blimey east London but that is probably just the marketing department being cheeky. In reality she plies her trade as a crimper in Oxford while she ponders her next opus.
There are other authors who fit the bill too, not least Julian Barnes, although clearly more of a barber than a 'hair designer.' The fact that the first short story of his last collection was titled "A Short History of Hairdressing" only adds weight to my flimsy argument.
But before I travel too far along the back passage of hairdressing (a passage, by all accounts, that is reguarly and vigorously travelled) I recall that I am supposed to be writing about gardening.
You might wonder how gardening is so different from housework and home improvement. They certainly have similar attributes - a quick tidy-up yields big results, they are easier if done regularly, and there are endless TV shows about them. But housework is only ever short term, and with housework you don't get any help from external forces.
Consider this: in March I planted some grass seed in a bare patch on my lawn. That same weekend I placed a tin of paint in my spare bedroom. Six months later, and with no additional work by me, the bare patch has been replaced with luxuriant grass. The bedroom meanwhile is still unpainted.
This is idler heaven - plant an acorn, get an oak tree. Ten minutes' effort by you, a bonus 50 years of effort from nature.
I have a variety of plants in my garden and I only know the names of two of them: grass and mint. The rest are a mystery to me, but with gardening that doesn't matter. No homework is required. The plants know what they are and what they need to do - they grow anyway.
If you have a specific need for a plant you can head to the garden centre, find an old-looking member of staff and say you want a shrub, so big, with blue or purple flowers that bloom all through summer. He will reel off a couple of latin words and lead you to the plant. If only all shopping was that easy.
There are those that try to make gardening a science, but it doesn't need to be. Gardening is a link to our agricultural past and needs no more science now than it did then. Plant, tend and harvest. All the real work is done by sunlight and rainwater.
And the result of this moderate effort, this gentle steering of nature - the perfect place to sit on a summers' evening, soothed by birdsong, fanned by a soft breeze and surrounded by nature's splendour.