I am sitting writing this in the garden. Later in the evening, in the winter I’d be thinking of bed, but as we stroll towards midsummer the air is still and bright.

The sky, fading to the palest blue at the very edges, is still swimming-pool-blue above me. I curse not grabbing my cardi though, the cooling night a chill against my bare arms.

After weeks of work, the garden is starting to feel like a room to sit in once again. Neglected last year as both my husband and I struggled with covid, this year’s tidy-up has felt endless.

We do not garden well together.

He of the ‘I did a bloody course in gardening you know,’ variety. Me of the ‘well I’m actually a bloody gardener.’ In years past some of our biggest rows have been about horticultural debacles. (now we argue about serious stuff like, why he leaves the empty plastic paracetamol wrapper on the side every bloody time when he could just take a step to the right and put it in the bin?) 

(He doesn’t row with me – I am obviously a perfect joy to live with.)

Back to the garden.

He likes straight lines and hard edges. I like curved flowing beds and the chaos of things fighting for space and spilling, like friends drunk on summer spritzers, into each other’s arms. I like seeing what will work, going with my instinct and the picture I have in my mind. He likes to read the label and explain again the difference between feet and meters.

I don’t know how we stay together.

We are building a pergola.

Now you’d think, wouldn’t you, that Mister ‘I studied this at College,’ would be all measure twice cut once. It’s what he thinks he is!

But we are the house of neurodiverse, with ADHD and Autism, flying about all over the place.  Add an extra sprinkling of dyslexia, and trying to do anything between the two of us can get spicy.

We measured the timber – I say we – he lost two tape measures, I squinted a bit and said that’ll do. Then the baby polytunnel arrived so we paused pagoda construction to build it. Squabbling like a chunky version of The Chuckle Brothers, we realise the polytunnel was massive – feet and meters again – and the pergola looked tiny.

We go in to eat curry and frown at our phones, pinging pictures of dream pergola’s to either end of the sofa.

‘That’s not a pergola that’s a temple,’ he texted.

‘Yes, but we could move that bit and swing it round a little,’ I replied.

‘We should just do it like this,’ he suggests, frantically adding a supplementary smiley-face emoji message, just in case I think he is getting ahead of himself.

(There is not a satisfactory eye-rolling emoji that portrays the gravity of my response.)

We thought it best not to actually talk to each other at this point. Overtired from putting up and taking down the same pergola our communication is limited to what we could be arsed to type. It’s safer that way.

The next day we went and spent the month’s food money on more timber to make the pergola bigger. (And replace the bits that ‘we’ cut up wrong.)

It is serenely peaceful out here in the garden now. Candles lit, incense burning, the sky fading to an icy blue, as the birds settle down for the night. Even the puppy is sleeping.

Half a pergola stands erect, waiting for the redesigned plan that we thought of two hours after we bought all the replacement wood. It will look amazing when it’s done.

This is my favourite time in the garden, chair positioned at an angle so as not to see all tomorrow’s jobs, a little bit of chocolate, the night air cooling around me.  

But the real secret to the peace – the real gift of silence contemplation?

He’s in the loo, with his phone trying to follow football things and pergola designs.  He’ll be forever.

Now, if we just moved that upright over there… look if you squint you can see what it’s going to look like.