Sunstroke - apparently it does not involve actual stroking.

It was blisteringly hot this weekend. I know this to be true because I have an actual blister on my back from attempting to garden this weekend in the searing heat.

A valuable lesson was learned during my brief attempt at gardening;

I can’t garden.

Oh how I would dearly love to just wave a wand over the whole bloody thing and just ping it into an ordered, colourful mix of perfectly manicured lawn and decking.

According to my mother, I was the only child she ever encountered that hated the beach because of the sand, apparently I hated the way it got everywhere and made me dirty, I would sit in the car and cry at the very thought of sitting on the beach, and if I got there I would push myself into the very centre of the beach towel and try to flick all the sand off it. My parents always thought this was very funny, and regularly flicked the sand back onto the beach towel where it seemed to crawl perilously close to me, aided by the wind and my father. Sand: a tiny evil.

This goes someway to explaining why having dirt under my fingernails fills me with a kind of horror that most people only experience when faced with pools of their own blood. I dig a bit, then spend 10 minutes scrubbing my hands, then I dig a bit more, scrub a bit, dig a bit, scrub a bit until my hands are stinging and bleeding.

Then I stood on a paving slab that was not actually attached to the ground, slipped and ripped a chunk of skin off the top of my foot, which just goes to show why Charlie Dimmock never wears flip flops to garden, she may not be able to properly support her bosom, but the woman sure can pick sensible footwear.

Glenn is prone to sunstroke, because he is the colour of the milk produced by albino cows, I’m not entirely sure that albino cows exist, but they might, and if they did, their milk would surely be much paler than the milk of regular cows, you see what I did there…..

People who suffer from sunstroke also suffer from the lesser known ‘Fear Of Sunstroke’. This is rarer but much more disabling, sufferers are prone to an attack at the very hint of a sunny day, blistering heat leaves them paralysed inside the house, drinking gallons of water while lying down near a fan and murmuring “I think I have a headache…”. Glenn’s last serious attack of Fear Of Sunstroke was in Ibiza in 2004, the time he spent outside during the daylight hours reduced more and more each day until the middle of the second week, when all attempts to see Ibiza in daylight were abandoned and he caught up on his reading (mainly novels about some kind of fictional history, King Arthur is a particular favourite).

So yesterday we attempted to garden, me with my obsessive compulsive handwashing and Glenn with his Fear Of Sunstroke, and we dug shit up.

We are crazy sons of bitches.