I HAVE not often, or at all, been compared to the actress Helen Mirren, and the disparity between us deepened this week when she said that gardening kept her “dark dragons” at bay.

For, in my case, gardening lifts the latch on the gate and shouts: “Come in, ye dragons dark and drear/Come boot daft Rabbie up the rear.”

In desperate, virus-haunted times such as these, the garden is supposed more than ever to be a haven of peace but I find, increasingly, that it leaves me irritated. Every day, I enter it full of hope and, by dusk, I’m trooping back into the house, defeated once more and depressed.

Nothing I do in the garden works. I don’t know what it is. I want to be good at it. I watch all the requisite YouTube videos. I do everything by the book. I buy the powders, lotions and tools. And everything wilts. You scrabble for metaphors pertaining to my life. I do not blame you.

The garden: I put so much work into it. Never stops. Never a minute just to sit down and enjoy it. In Spring here, it’s more often than not still blustery and wet. In Summer, you get bitten to within an inch of your life.

As a sympathetic tear plops into your Honey Nut Loops, you ask: “But what is it in particular, dear Robert, that has occasioned this wittering and wailing?”

Thanks for asking. Well, I guess it was moving the buddleia that did it. I checked with all the authorities and halfwits online. Oh yes, they said. Really easy. Anyone could do it. Five-minute job.

Ninety minutes later it was moved. Three hours later it was deid. Once more, I’d been led up the garden path. I did everything by the book. And, as usual, it was a waste of time. I’d have been as well sawing the beast off at the base and chucking it into the rough where, doubtless, devoid of my ministrations, it would have prospered.

Now the buddleia-loving bees and butterflies will curse me. This comes in the wake of the privet. Yep, even privet! The leaves on most of the 25 I planted are rapidly falling off. Beyond that, there are beech, hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel and holly; another 150 in all, and all looking either poorly or on strike.

Perhaps it’s too early to tell. But I fear the worst. However, even if I had the money, I’m determined never to let gardening become like DIY where, in order to save expenditure, I do the job myself, buying the tools and hats, then making a botch of it and having to get “a man” in after all, thus spending twice as much, not to mention the time wasted and the humiliation to my manly pride.

If, at my impractical writer’s hands, this former Garden of Eden (originally planted by an expert and full of specimen bushes) is to become a horticultural Hades then so be it.

Still, all that said, I’m glad of the place. At least the lichen on the trees tells me the air is clean. The birds sing blithely and, in these times of draconian restrictions, I make myself recall that, last summer, in what was thankfully a temporary arrangement, I lived in a tiny one-bedroom city flat with a herd of tap-dancing elephants upstairs.

But I’m reminded also that it was Stan (Satan in some translations) who said: “Et in arcadia ego.” And I am in arcadia. He’s certainly in my arcadia. He pours fetid, infernal breath on my privet. He boots me in the buddleias.

Flour corrupts

ONCE more, I am swept aside by the raging mob. Even before this wretched virus, I’d decided I wanted to bake a cake. In particular, I was after a kind of tea-loaf.

As with the proper woolly pullovers lamented in these columns a fortnight ago (check your cuttings), you just can’t get a decent one any more.

It’s the age of plenty, where you have to make everything yourself. I’ve only ever tried to bake a cake once before, many years ago, and seem to recall that Stan was also in the kitchen, over-egging everything.

But I had a recipe online and couldn’t go wrong. First ingredient: self-raising flour. Twice now, in these past two and a half weeks, I’ve been to the supermarket and, twice, the entire stock of self-raising flour has been bought up.

What is wrong with the British? All the evidence suggests that, in the rare moments when they’re not sitting on the lavvy, they’re baking cakes.

It’s the age of plenty, all right: plenty of nothing. It was the same with vegetable seeds. I’d decided BV (Before Virus) that I was going to grow my own veg and, accordingly, had rotavated a patch of land.

Then, by the time I get round to sending off for seeds, I received the repeated message that they were “out of stock”. At the time of writing, I still don’t have a solitary seed.

Look, I know these are difficult times, but can I make this plea to everybody: stop getting the same ideas as me. It’s very irritating.

Don’t bug me

I’LL be candid with you and confess I never expect to find antennae in my food. However, in the post-apocalyptic age due by late June, that could well be what happens, at least to people still forced to live under the cruel yoke of the European Union.

Reports suggests the controversial organisation is about to force decent ratepayers across the Continent to eat locusts, crickets, grasshoppers and mealworms.

I say “force” in a pathetic attempt to whip up a storm. All the same, the European Food Safety Authority is expected to legitimise insects as an optional grub for people who enjoy scrunchy food packed with vitamins and frightfulness.

Leg or breast? Not much choice with mealworms, but extremists who care about the planet say switching to such foods from meat will have a beneficial effect on yonder environment.

Actually, while it’s frowned on in some (but not all) European countries, it’s already technically legal to eat bugs in the UK, as long as you ask the police force first (see also going for a walk, sticking your heid oot the windae etc).

Nothing Elsa will do

AT last, I’ve seen Frozen II. I loved Frozen I and, as usual, thought I was a minority in this. I would drag elderly neighbours along to see it, and proselytised its delights to any who would hear. Then it exploded into popular consciousness. Damned kids.

Mind you, I’d forgotten it was an animated musical. I’ve been forced to attend actual musicals in the past and do not recall one occasion in which I did not doze off.

As for Frozen II, watched on DVD, despite the trying-too-hard songs and the usual politically correct “homework”, it was still magical.

I even stayed awake for most of it, unlike that time I made a lassie watch a Star Wars film at the cinema when, after a small vat of wine with sumptuous rich food, I conked out as soon as the lights went down and she, poor lass, and not a fan of the genre, had to sit through the three hours alone.

Afterwards, she scolded: “Whole universes were blown up, and you slept through the whole thing.”

But I caught up later on DVD. Marvellous stuff.