I don’t think I’d manage to live anywhere that didn’t have a garden.

I have no idea when I’ll ever hear live music again – though I think I vaguely heard someone practicing on a violin the other day.

I know it was practising because it sounded just like a cat does if you stand on its tail.

There seems very little prospect of gigs in the foreseeable future.

There’s a very slight chance of pubs. But if I can’t sit at the bar and bore the barman and I have to sit two metres away from the person I’m drinking with, I don’t think I’ll bother.

So I have recorded music. And even if my choice of music causes Charlotte to stick in her headphones and listen to something I regard as a third cousin of music, I’m enjoying it.

Mostly, though, I’m enjoying the garden.

Connie has made our little patch into a wonderful place.

Not sure whether to call her Connie Don or Monty Clinton. Or Montie Donton.

Anyway, it’s a great spot to sit in as the sun from the West beats down on us in the afternoons.

And of course, it’s spotless – apart from the odd dog poo which is scooped up fairly rapidly.

I was born into a house with a huge, long garden where my mother grew apples and pears, plums and cherries, strawberries, raspberries and loganberries, blueberries, gooseberries, rhubarb, potatoes and, of course, flowers.

(Oh all right I’ll admit we had a gardener who came once a week to help. An elderly man called Mr Kirwin who I liked until he told me, aged four, to plant my Easter egg telling me it would grow into an Easter egg tree. How he laughed when, a week or so later, I dug up the rotten slug infested remains of my egg.)

Our little patch is about the size of the area at the end of my mother’s garden where, long before the term recycling was ever coined, she had a pit for our vegetable waste which, a few months after it had been filled and topped with soil, produced a wonderful natural fertiliser.

Now, Montie Donton or Connie Don is growing an massive array of flowers whose names, apart from roses and clematis, I can’t even pronounce.

And there is hope of courgettes and cucumbers and strawberries and lots of herbs later in the year.

People are getting used to life without gardens as apartment living becomes the norm.

Pity.

A garden is an oasis.

Except unlike the Oasis with a capital O, everything in it seems to get along just fine.