Spring FEVER

The sun is shining, but Mr Dear definitely isn't

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Mr Thomas Dear stood in the middle of our modest greenhouse and sighed deeply.

By the way, you might have noticed that we do a lot of sighing deeply down our way. It's not that we have very much to sigh about — we live on the edge of a small provincial town and life is very pleasant here.

We have lots of jolly friends, and there's proper countryside just a stone's throw away (assuming that the stone is thrown by an Olympic standard, world record-holding stone thrower).

But, as I suggested only last week, you don't really want to read about life when it's going well. You want drama, you want light comedy drawn from the daily routine.

Anyway, back to Mr Dear and the greenhouse. He was sighing as I stepped through the door with a mug of latte from our new coffee machine.

Well, I say new but actually it's a hand-me-up from my little sister Deb, who now has something which looks like the flight deck of a Boeing 707. If she goes for a couple of days without coffee, it will throw the Brazilian economy into chaos.

'That was a deep sigh,' I said as I handed over the mug, which has the inscription Head Gardener.

'Oh,' he said, stretching that word out for about five seconds. 'It's the sheer monotony of it.'