And we've got to get ourselves...back to the garden

There are times when I deeply miss Maurice and the old Woodstock Garden Centre. He ran the enterprise on the site where Squires, Long Ditton, now is firmly installed. Turning up there on a Saturday afternoon was less of a shopping experience and more like dropping in to a social club of like-minded souls.

You would recognise the girl on the des, who would wear no earpiece and give you no vouchers for plants you would never ever want to buy (chrysanthemums). Derek, his horticultural contractor son would often be on hand to give advice, and Maurice was never far away, ready to hand out a barbed comment about what you wanted that chosen product for and what method you were choosing to kill a particular plant with.

Now I’m not saying Woodstock Garden Centre’s replacement is a bad thing. For a start, if something breaks or doesn’t work they will replace it or give you your money back, something as infrequent as Halley’s Comet under the previous owner. Only these days the place feels more like a gift shop with a restaurant attached; and if you’re really really interested, there’s a garden centre out back.

Last weekend I ran short of potting compost and had to jump in the car and whizz down there, and it was only when I caught sight of my reflection in the glass sliding doors that I realised how different I was dressed from the other clientele in the ‘Palace of Gifts’.

My jeans had rips in both knees, which on the streets of London is a look often shared by fashionable young women, many of them blonde. What they don’t have, though, is the last knockings from a 50-litre bag of GrowSure compost, with added John Innes, plastered up both legs and one trouser tucked insouciantly into a thermal sock. That look is very definitely my own.

Nor do they wear the kind of woollen SAS/Commando-style cap that I thought made me look just a little bit dangerous, but in fact reminds my mother-in-law of Compo from Last of the Summer Wine*

*People say it’s not on television any more, but the tall, authoritative one; the small funny one, and the dull, droning one have actually moved from the BBC to Amazon Prime and now call the show The Grand Tour.

Anyway, walking through the entrance past the ranks of scented candles and cascades of crockery I felt like Worzle Gummidge in Harrods. What a rarity this was, a hands-on gardener rocking up to buy garden products, looking like he was in the middle of hands-on gardening. And also with some of the garden still on him. He couldn’t have been a builder, it was after four o’clock.

In the days of Maurice, we were the majority – the ragged trouser brigade who thought of the place more on the lines of a builder’s merchants than a gifting destination. Those days are long gone but not forgotten. That cluster of hardy souls, that band of brothers, the three beaten up cars in the car park on a Saturday afternoon; we were the Woodstock Generation. Though we’re neither stardust or golden, but we were as muddy as they got in upstate New York.