ARSENICALS, ICHNEUMONS AND BLUE-EYED SHAGS

Sunshine has brought this Crocus tommasinianus 'Roseus' into bloom.

The garden is coming to life, birds are squabbling and the buds swelling.

'You'll feel a prick,' the rheumatologist muttered into my ear, as he wrenched my pants down and grasped my buttock.

'How could one not feel like one,' I thought, 'lying prone, naked where it matters and with a medical apprentice of some kind looking on while his boss manhandled parts of me that I'd rather he left alone. I was about to respond with a smart-arse remark about sexual predilections when pain sharper than a scorpion's sting made me grunt.

My right hip, you see, has gone ridiculously on strike and prevents me from walking properly, or at times, from walking at all. The medics, so far, have been unable to diagnose the problem. X-rays show a healthy skeleton, so no arthritis which is comforting. The tentative diagnosis was an inflamed bursa. (Sounds like an angry school financial controller.) This has been injected with some kind of corticosteroid, but the hip still refuses to work. So instead of jauntily leaping from one spring garden job to another, I hobble, cuss and moan.

I spent part of the week end, cutting back the last of the dead perennials and did it all while remaining on my knees, like a penitent crawling through the Stations of the Cross. So I've got bruised knees, now as well.

I wouldn't have bored you with these tedious tales of self-pity, except to offer them as a partial excuse for the rather jaundiced tenor of my last post. I was rude about people - even politicians - and that won't do.

But the hip is still in the cack, so this week, I thought I'd carry on in a nasty vein - but be rude about words, instead of people. I'm referring, here, to stupid, lazy, superfluous, pointless, jargonic words and phrases that make me want to scream and smash things, every time I hear them. Such mind-numbing, ire-inducing, scorn-rousing, lip-curling, head busting, clichéd expressions should be stamped out. Now.

You know the sort of thing. Mindless utterances from people who can't be arsed to think up meaningful phrases for themselves; who haven't the vocabulary in their noddles to recall anything that transcends a bloke's normal daily occupations of sex, money, sex, food, sex, warmth, sex and security.

I'm referring to crap words and phrases like:

Leverage

Twenty-four seven,

Going forward,

Let's be clear,

Next up,

Mother's Day - referring to Mid-Lent or Mothering Sunday,

Strategic fit - an RHS favourite, I regret to say,

Fit for purpose,

On the back foot,

Comfort zone,

Wriggle room,

At this moment in time,

Recession busting,

Toxic assets.

Talking the talk versus walking the walk - what the hell does that mean?

Double dip - sounds more like an ice-cream than an economic graph.

and, of course,

Stunning! AAAAAAAAArrrrrghhhhhhhh! People are still using it!

Let's just glance at that odious word 'leverage.' It's perfectly acceptable as a noun but it is NOT a verb. You can't 'leverage' anything - or you couldn't until the word got so widely misused that it became part of the dross in the bottom of the gargantuan dustbin that is the English language. Lorries and cart horses haul loads. They do not haulage them. An engine driver would not 'leverage' the throttle but if he had a dozen levers to manipulate, that would be a lot of leverage.

It has to be admitted, that we all tend to laziness, when writing or speaking. It's a vice common to almost everyone, an example of the sin of sloth - though whether two-toed or three-toed, I'm not sure.

I think a good Mid-Lent resolution for all of us - particularly those of us wot rite for there living - might be to ban all clichés and hack-crap from our utterances and our writing for at least a month. Whaddayasay?

AND NOW:

And just to get the ball rolling, I've devised a ridiculous little exercise and you are invited to take part.

Here goes:

Construct a sentence which makes sense and which includes, in any order, all the words in this post's title. As well as containing those words, it must also hold at least one ridiculous cliché.

If it helps: blue eyed shags are being assisted, in South Georgia, by a rat-culling programme; I have just written about ichneumons in response to a query for Garden News and Arsenicals were once used as pesticides (lead arsenate) and more bizarrely, arsonic and arsonilic acids were used as growth-promotors in intensive pig farming.

A bouquet to the winning entry.

I'm listening to a Schubert String Trio

This day Last year I weeded our vegetable patch and planted tubercles of Achimenes. It was a cold Sunday.

This week's films were No Country for Old Men, and Laura. Two great films in staggering contrast. The sets and costumes, in Laura, were camper than a row of tents and the acting, especially from Dana Andrews, was a tad wooden at times, but that didn't spoil the enjoyment one jot. In fact it seemed almost appropriate to the preposterous story.

Bye bye - or should I say TTFN!