I have been away in Devon for five day’s holiday and returning has been made bearable by the sight of my breathtaking overgrown sweet peas…even the ‘rogue’ nasturtiums, which I had planted thinking the sweets would be my usual pathetic show, are clashing in an acceptable way!
I have/had smoked since the age of 12, my parents used to offer me cigarettes, filterless Senior Service, and in my time I could have bought a mansion with the money spent. I have tried many times and methods to give up but to no avail until in 1999 The Allen Carr Method hit the ether. Went to London, did the sess, threw away my ‘last’ ciggy (spargebane was a nickname given to these weeds by my old friend G) and returned to life without. This lasted about three weeks, the critical time I’m told, and mea culpa, couldn’t hold out. Many attempts and years later, I woke up one morning feeling as though I was going to die. I rang the Allen Carr local phone number and insisted I got onto the course that was running that day. At last I saw the light and really realised that it was all in the brain. 
The end of an era for me and my tennis playing. I haven’t been able to play for some years now due to my emphysema (but that’s another story), but at last I have had to admit to myself that I really couldn’t under any circumstances even hold a racquet let alone walk onto a tennis court. Not that I couldn’t physically hold a tennis racquet but the embarrassment if, holding it, anyone asked me to play. So my old Dunlop (Fort) Maxply has now definitely been put out to grass……R.I.P.
Wimbledon eat your heart out www.bryanku,com
Googling myself (as you do) I came across this old article in The Independent dated 29th July 1995 which talks about the early days of opening my shop which was then called “Heaven on Earth”, now “Urbi et Orbi” (“to the city and to the world” for those without Latin). My partner and I had not had very good ‘funeral’ experiences and realised that you could not buy a coffin without buying the whole funeral package. So we decided to make coffins as pieces of furniture so that you could use one in your lifetime and again in your ‘deathtime’, in other words you were able to get a free coffin! Quite soon after opening our shop we were perceived as doing funerals and someone asked us to do a funeral for a friend. We were green and totally without experience. So for our first funeral we had to borrow a car and when we arrived at the burial ground, we couldn’t open the boot…..but more of that later. Our learning curve went steeply up and we found that those people who were concerned with the environment were not catered for in death and so we became “green”funeral directors.
My partner introduced me to The Grateful Dead long before I got into ‘death’. One of my favourite tracks is ‘The Lady and the Fan” with that wonderful riff near the end. Since then we have been grateful for all the deaths that people have brought to us and we are reminded of this daily by a Mexican shrine that we had in our shop, “Urbi et Orbi”. We couldn’t resist bringing it home and it is now on the wall in our kitchen.
The death of my Tree of Heaven and its eradication has meant I have a whole new area of my garden to plan. Slowly the wound healed and I was able to start designing anew. My shop, “Urbi et Orbi”, sells some garden related goodies and when I discovered some salmon putchers at one of my favourite wholesalers, I decided to buy some and also to put some in my garden for my sweet peas.
Whether it was the decorative frames they had to grow up or my vigilance in feeding them I’ll never know, but this year has been the best so far for this most delicate, pungent and desirable of flowers.
I’ve never had such an exotic pot of sweet peas on my cluttered kitchen table. The scent is so overpowering and evocative of enjoyable life-filled days, that it makes me want to tidy up……………..
Most of my life is taken up with death and so it is gardening that gives me the will to live. However, I had a terrible tragedy in my garden – a death – of my huge 80 foot Ailanthus Altissima – my Tree of Heaven, and I’m still grieving. Even though it is regarded as a “serious environmental pest” that makes life “hell on Earth for gardeners” (The Observer, 17.09.06) it is a tree that I have loved, that my children have climbed and it has been a vital backdrop to my 1790s Georgian terrace garden.
I had been told that this tree is the Japanese Knotweed of trees, but I didn’t believe the tree surgeon until it took weeks to eradicate the stump – and also the whole experience.
