Early in the Year.

There is an art to pruning, and I love to see the bush take a new shape under my hands. No-one in the family can prune a bush like me.

My White Versailles currant bush, my pride and joy! Bigger every year!

I tear away the brown weeds that festoon the branches, snip off straying vines, shift the grey, foreign wood that my husband threw down while preparing his bonfire. Thus having divested the bush, I can discern the shape, note the proportions of old and new growth.

This plant is living on borrowed time. Twenty years, say the instructions that are buried somewhere in the house though I have long since memorised their contents. My father set the bush soon after we took possession of this garden, when our daughter was a baby. I appreciate Dad's foresight. It might have taken me many years to think of buying a fruit-bush. It was one of the last presents he gave to me. Now his ashes are resting in a Warwickshire graveyard and my daughter is married and a hundred miles away.

But it fruited well last year,masses of those little white jewels that turn a delicate pink when stewed. I shall not uproot the bush yet. Here and there gnarled blackish branches show tell-tale hollows. I can snap off this, and this. All around them, brave new rods grow, slim and light brown, to take the place of the originals. So I shall not destroy, but challenge and renovate.

Attack the brambles in between whiles, to make myself room. Blackening leaves and half-dying stems that fruited last year must go. Thick tan stems already dead must go. The pliant thorny green growth will spread quickly enough and safeguard our garden from intruders. I deplete the vines in between them. I claw off the thin, brittle dead bindweed that clings spiralling to the chain-link fencing between our garden and Eddie's plot. The reinforced concrete posts are perhaps as old as I am. This one is showing its metal rods at the top, where a piece has been chipped off, and rusty water has trickled down leaving a stain.

There is no-one at hand to disturb my reverie, or my concentration. No need to serve anyone or discuss politics or justify my actions. I feel safe. Sometimes I think Eddie is over there. It is just his bird-scarer catching the tail of my eye - a balloon with a face on, a festive, incongruous party balloon, yellow, black and red, spinning, spinning ceaselessly.

And overhead the seagulls driven inland fly about in the damp air and the grey clouds float along in the grey sky and the restless wind thrills me. Perhaps it will rain, perhaps it will be cold, but not yet.

Nothing I do may last. I prune the bush, it grows again. I pick fruit and cook it, it gets eaten. A man can spoil a fruit-bush, deliberately or through negligence. But stalks will sprout again. The stagnant pond will fill with duckweed and stink with dead leaves, however often I fettle it, and the water-snails will multiply as best they can. The nodding ash-tree boughs shed their keys. The dry brown bunches drop, one by one, on to the muddy lawn. But soft baby leaves will appear soon, like a gentle ubiquitous haze, and grow, and shade the side of the lawn, as they did last year and the year before and for the last quarter-century. The wind will go on blowing. And, God willing, we shall continue to have food on the table.

Until, one day, God says, "Enough!" and rolls up Planet Earth like a garment.