GLORIOUS!

I'm not going to make any great claims about my abilities as a gardener because I know that they leave lots to be desired, but, as I sat there last Sunday, listening to my radio and drinking my coffee on a blisteringly bright summer's afternoon, I looked up and along the row of other people's gardens in front of me and was just struck dumb by how astonishingly green and utterly beautiful it all was.

And then I was reminded of one of the criteria that I set for myself way back in the late 1990s when I was looking for a tiny piece of England to call home. I wanted a patch of grass where I could sit outside with a good book on a summer's day and listen to the Test Match on my radio, and I realised that, despite everything else and all of the many, many failures in my life, I had actually managed to achieve that one small goal.

There's nothing else that I want to add to that thought, really, other than to say that, on a day like that one was, and looking out over a sea of green, there's really nowhere else in the world that I'd rather be.

Glorious!