‘Nobody cares about your creative hub so get your f*****’ hedge cut’

Listening to music in the garden is a great pleasure, but it has its pitfalls too.

If you take a radio out there, unless you are going to the enclosed space of a greenhouse, you are forever moving it. And so ever since the advent of the Walkman, its replacement the MP3 player and now the smartphone, music has been confined to a pocket and a set of headphones.

Of course if you don’t mind looking like a Cyberman from Dr. Who, then you can dispense with the lump in your pocket and the complication of the headphone wires and clamp two ‘cans’ over your ears. That certainly dispenses with the problems encountered when pruning whilst listening to music. I can be in the middle of removing some troublesome shoots when suddenly the earphone will leave at great speed like some stretched bungee cord that has just reached the bottom of its descent and twangs back to smack me in the face. Great care must also be taken when carrying anything with a thorn or a burr that might (or will almost certainly) hook under the wire.

Another aspect to wearing headphones in the garden is that it’s quite anti-social. When Leaf Lady is out with me it’s impolitic to stick the music on because I need to be aware of helpful alerts. They may be for tools left in the wrong place, or gentle, light-touch nudges such as, “Are you going to clear that mess up?”

Then there’s the singing.

It’s only natural when listening to your favourite songs to join in. And the glory of headphones is that you never get to hear how bad you actually are. This wasn’t a problem in our last house, where the garden was huge, and either side of us had professional gardeners, so our neighbours were very rarely out there to enjoy my singing.

These days we have a large enough garden, but Ken next door – a keen and expert gardener – is often out there too. A six-foot barrier separates us, so I can’t see him, and when I hear rustles and scrapes from the other side I know it’s either Ken working away in his raised bed section - or the badgers have got hold of the trowels again.

Now, given the genteel nature of gardening you would probably expect a typical gardening playlist to include relaxing, chill-out music, the kind of classical compilation Richard Baker* (and these days Petroc Trelawny) might present from the Albert Hall. But listening to the Nuns’ Chorus or an extract from a Mozart opera is not for me. I’m right at the other extreme.

I’m more likely to be ambling round in my Fox-chewed clogs to the likes of XTC, Vampire Weekend, or the anarchic and funny post-punk delights of Half Man Half Biscuit. HMHB are a band that has come up with brilliant song titles such as, ‘Even Men With Steel Hearts (Love To See A Dog On The Pitch)’, ‘Joy Division Oven Gloves’, ‘We Built This Village On Trad. Arrangement’ and ‘A Man Of Constant Sorrow (With A Garage in constant use)’.

This is where the trouble comes in. Their latest album, (it’s the title of this blog) which takes gleeful pot shots at posturing couples watching Saturday Kitchen and hipster-ism in all its studied forms, has a very catchy chorus which goes: “Get yer hedge cut, get yer f****’ hedge cut.”

And yes, on Saturday I found myself scuttling around by the broad beans, just a metre from our shared boundary with Ken singing, “Get yer hedge cut, get yer f*****’ hedge cut.”

Luckily it’s a fence between us.

*He’s still with us – 93 and going strong when Wikipedia last checked.