With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed by Lynne Truss Read Free Book Online Page B

of middle-class dinner tables; yet
Come Into the Garden
still somehow failed to clean up. Michelle was often struck by the sad image of her beloved magazine pathetically sheltering indoors in the breezy climate of the 1980s while other, brighter, glossier monthly publications came stumping heartily into its territory, utterly oblivious to its existence. She imagined these competitors taking a quick glance round, sniffing the wind, and thendigging energetically with flashy stainless steel implements, heedlessly scattering the sod.
    Michelle’s picture did not end there, either. It was remarkably colourful and detailed. For example,
Come Into the Garden
wore a pair of brown corduroys, tied at the knee with string, and an old jumper with holes, and plimsolls, while the rivals were togged in Barbour jackets, riding boots and aristocratic flat caps, rather like the pictures of Captain Mark Phillips in
Hello!
magazine. Michelle was good at mental pictures. Once, when she observed Lillian standing tall, knock-kneed, spare-tyred and stupid in the middle of the office, the word ‘Ostrich!’ leapt quite unbidden to her mind, and she had relished the analogy ever since. She had successfully thought of other animal-types for the remainder of her colleagues, too. But luckily – apart from flinging the odd ‘Oink, oink’ noise at a departing back – she kept this personal taxonomy to herself.
    The depressing thing about working for
Come Into the Garden,
however, was not the variety of wildlife. It was that the general public had this awful habit of remembering it from years ago, placing it on the same conceptual shelf as Reveille, the
Daily Sketch,
Noggin the Nog and Harold Macmillan. ‘Blimey,’ they said, shaking their heads in disbelief, ‘my
Nan
used to read that; is it really still going?’ – at which one could only smile weakly and try not to take offence. It was nobody’s fault, this widely held assumption that
Come Into the Garden
had long since sought eternal peace in the great magazine rack in the sky. Nevertheless, it required strength of character for those intimately acquainted with the title not to take such comments personally. After all, it was a bit like being accused repeatedly of outliving your own obituary, or being dead but not lying down.
    Imagine the difficulty of applying for other jobs. Michelle in particular had tried quite strenuously to outgrow
Come Into the Garden,
but she had been compelled to realize that citing heroccupation as chief sub of this magazine sounded suspiciously like Coronation Programme Seller, or Great Fire of London Damage Assessor: prospective employers simply assumed she hadn’t worked for years. On the whole she bitterly envied the sensible, big-headed young journalists who had joined the title only to use it as a tiny stepping-stone en route to bigger things. They had come into the garden (as it were) and then pissed right off again, with no regrets, and moreover without a trace of loam on their fancy shoes. She did not blame them for this, she just despised them – a feeling she expressed quite eloquently by affecting never to have heard of them (‘Paul who? Doesn’t ring any bells’) whenever their names were raised.
    Editors too had come and gone, almost on a seasonal basis, but that wasn’t so bad, because mostly they kept themselves to themselves. And if they tried anything clever, Lillian was a highly effective means of damage control, since she paid absolutely no attention to anything they asked her to do. At the time of this story – the early 1990s –
Come Into the Garden
had seen four editors in five years, but it would be fair to say that ‘seeing’ was literally the limit of the acquaintance. A police line-up featuring all four of them would not necessarily elicit a flicker of recognition. By now, the long-standing staffers had grown quite blasé about meeting new bosses – content merely to count them in and then count them all out again. Indeed, when