Messy Generosity
23 Feb 2010 by Paul Northup
The first trip of the year back up to the allotment (I know, we’re slacking) brings the truth sharply back into focus: when it comes to living a Generous life with kids in tow, things get pretty late and pretty messy.
Let me explain. It just so happens that our allotment is right next door to the neatest, most timely plot of our set. (It’s quite possibly the neatest allotment anywhere in the whole world.) The guy who works it (he’s newly retired – an important note) does everything by the book and bang on time. Clinically so. He actually uses an old wooden metre rule – the sort you might remember from school – to measure out his planting distances. And he has special tools and schedules for every single allotment task.
Ours, by contrast, is a raggle-taggle plot. It’s not weed-infested. It’s not overgrown. And it’s very productive. But it’s just not ordered and timed in the way our neighbour’s is. Even more than that, because my partner and I end up snatching a couple of hours here and there to get some frenzied digging or planting done without proper handover and briefing notes, we often end up undoing the good work the other has done. I’ve even dug up asparagus before. A crime my partner would say warrants a life sentence.
Anyway, if allotments are Generous places – and I think, like another Generous blogger before me, that they are – then our neighbour’s generosity is not of the messy, often-late variety ours is. It’s neat and tidy.
And that brings me to the Mister Men. Our boys love the Mister Men. Especially the story of Mr Messy. Mr Messy runs into Mr Neat and Mr Tidy who well and truly sort him out – starting with his garden, then his house, and then, finally, him!
In the end Mr Messy doesn’t look like Mr Messy anymore. He’s been all neatened up. I’m not sure how I feel about this story. I’m not sure about Mr Messy having to conform to the tyranny of Mr Neat and Mr Tidy’s world. It’s an unspoken tyranny I sense wafting over from our neighbour’s allotment when the wind is in a certain (paranoid) direction.
But I know it’s never as black and white as that. Our allotment neighbour is probably just as Generous as we’re trying to be. Probably more so. It’s just that he practises a more orderly, punctual form of Generosity. Ours is simply more loose and messy.
The good news is that it takes all sorts. Which is why Roger Hargreaves’ Mister Men are so enduringly popular. Because his view of the world is that we come in all shapes and sizes.
(For more on the Mister Men from Radio 4 on Sunday 14 February 2010 click here.)
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About the Blogger
Paul Northup
Reading a few lines before sleep, listening to Elbow, inspired by Stanley Hauerwas, on the way down with the Rams, trying to hardly ever use the car, hopeful and fearful for my children, tired but usually happy.
