With some things you read in the press you agree, with others not. Some you find more interesting, others less, and yet others totally dull. There are pieces you feel a need to read with care and pieces you're content to skim. But unless it's something deeply scientific or highly technical, plain understanding isn't often a problem in reading a newspaper. Yesterday, however, I came across a column in the Irish Times by which I was flummoxed. It took me a while to get beyond the opening sentence:
It is a terrible thing when you lose faith in gardening.
What? That must surely be the wrong g-word, was my first thought. Gardening? OK, I'm familiar with the words of the immortal Jane: 'One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other'. Though I have no love of gardening, in fact an antipathy for it, I do not deny the possibility of its giving pleasure to others. But a terrible thing, and to lose faith? Some overstatement, surely.
But there's more in the same vein.
It is particularly terrible to lose faith in gardening in these troubled times, when more than 90 per cent of the Irish middle class remain attached, both intellectually and emotionally, to a horticultural orthodoxy that foreign observers find extraordinary.
If you think this 90 per cent statistic surprising stick around, because it has a twin following close behind:
In this matter the Irish middle class exhibits a striking uniformity of belief. In a recent survey, nine out of 10 of them stated that they would prefer their children to marry gardeners.
Readers, I promise you, my tolerance for the different tastes of others is enormous. As I have said more than once before, I am untroubled by the fact that there are fans of the singing of Mary Chapin Carpenter. But nine out of 10 middle class Irish people wanting their children to marry gardeners is astonishing even once you realize that that doesn't necessarily mean professional gardeners.
How have I managed to miss this level of insanity amongst Irish people that I know? Liking, even loving, gardening I can understand, though I do not share it. But having faith in it to the tune of 90 per cent and preferring your children to marry into the faith? Isn't it like wanting your children to marry collectors of cricket books? Complete failure of comprehension... 'How do you carry on when you know that, contrary to all the lies peddled in the newspapers, on the radio and on television, that you can go wrong with potatoes?... It is hard to try again once you have been visited by carrot fly... The scandal of compost alone is horribly under-reported.' A colleague once suggested to me that my... er, indifference to gardening wasn't entirely uncommon amongst Jews. Maybe so. But, whether for that reason or for some other, I'm struggling with this one.