Likes and dislikes | The Tadpole Guidance Of Jesse Ventura | The Albany Road Files

The Albany Road Files

My next door neighbour and I were engaged in a friendly conversation over the garden fence. My garden is quite feral like a lazy old cat with bad habits, shaggy fur, long claws and a wild miaow, and with many a dandelion for a necklace.

His garden is painstakingly sculpted, like a Japanese pot plant trimmed using an electron microscope.

Not a single dandelion grew on his side of the fence. He was a ruthless enforcer of the Dandelion Act - a law he himself created.

Despite our differences in the botanical sphere, we were getting along fine.

However, all of a sudden, a maverick gust of wind liberated approximately 600 dandelion seeds which gusted upwards between us like a cloud of tiny Storm troopers.

At least half of this force invaded my neighbour’s pristine garden, landing softly but with firm intent on his precision tooled lawn. There was no question about the implications of this. Dandelions will beget dandelions. So it is written.

The conversation froze on our lips. The moment became heavily pregnant with tension. I think it was twins. Perhaps even triplets.

It was touch and go. A major diplomatic border crisis.

We could be plunged into war or we could maintain a civilised veneer. I apologised for the appalling manners of my dandelion seeds. His eyes were full of the horror of future weeds.

But he was a philosophical man. A forward thinking, practical man. Not one to harbour serious grudges. Our conversation gradually resumed like an un-paused film on an old projector that takes a few seconds to reach its appropriate speed.

All seemed to be well. I could not have foreseen the moral debit and credit calculations he was making in his head, like a floral accountant.

I thought this was the end of the matter. However, a few days later, he casually handed me a Dyson vacuum cleaner over the fence and asked me if I would mind hoovering up the remaining seeds - all in the same cheery unassuming manner as somebody asking you if you could lend them a teabag.

This is not a request I have received before in my life. There is no precedent to equip a person with how to deal with such a request.

Much to my disbelief, I complied, as if in a dream state. Like a semi-hypnotised demonic barber I methodically inflicted a Number 1 cut on every last plant.

The Dyson roared like a botanical death dragon and filled up twice with miniature umbrellas. Enough to half fill a large black bin bag. An entire generation of dandelions sat in the bottom of that bag feeling very sorry for themselves. I felt like a deputy of the grim reaper’s garden division.

A beautiful image flickered through my mind. Approximately 250,000 joyous, liberated dandelion seeds being shot into the air simultaneously from a home made bazooka and cascading down on our gardens like reproductive snow.