London Letter: The lot of a gardener and a ‘suit’ differs at retirement

One of the quirks of our lives here is that we have a gardener.

Why I say this is quirky is because our garden is the size of a handkerchief. But even more bizarre is that he considers us valued clients.

I hasten to add that we only use him four times a year: in spring to spike the lawn; summer to chainsaw the hedges; autumn to prepare for winter; and in winter to suck up all the autumn leaves

with a fancy vacuum cleaner.

He has also done a couple of major projects such as building a patio and fishpond, but not enough to break the bank. Indeed, excluding those projects, we only pay him about 80 quid a year.

I reckon that’s a bargain as it saves me buying electric trimmers for our perimeter hedges that grow like weeds but give us privacy, and also gets rid of leaves that fall as thick as plush pile

carpets without me breaking my back with a rake. My argument that we need bigger hedges and more leaves doesn’t cut ice with management; thus our gardener is good value for money.

So why do I say are we are valued clients? I know this because he told me. I bumped into him in the supermarket a couple of weeks back and he said he was retiring, but he would still be keeping us on his books because he liked us. We always give him tea when he arrives and we always chatted to him about his family.

This brought him onto the next bit; his mum had recently died which had given him some musings about mortality and quality of life. He was now considering doing other stuff, like travelling to

Caribbean beaches or maybe some skiing in Austria.

I pricked up my ears, as I always do when someone mentions retirement. I would retire tomorrow if I could, mainly to do more fishing, more hiking in hills and have more opportunity to drink

brewskis without feeling guilty that it wasn’t the weekend. So I asked in a roundabout way how he, a gardener, could afford to retire while I, part of a senior management team, cannot even pay my bills when I’m working. The way the future looks for me, I’ll retire only when it’s time to fertilise daisies.

Well, he said, he had a few other clients with slightly bigger gardens than us. This was his gentle way of telling us we were his basket case and by slightly bigger gardens, he was referring to measurements in hectares. One of his clients with a garden the size of a football stadium wanted his landscape changed every few months. This was good money, something this client was not short of. However, he was rude and obnoxious and would be fired when our guy retired.

Hang on, I said, you’re keeping us who couldn’t play midget croquet on our lawn, but firing a guy could build a football stadium on his?

Indeed, he said. It’s all about quality of life. Clients like us aren’t stress. However, I think it’s a bit more prosaic than that. He’s now 65 so he’s on full state pension – something you only get

here if you’ve paid tax for 30 years. He also has a house with a fully-paid mortgage, which is a big deal. I’ve seen his house in the village. It’s three times the size of ours and he paid a fraction of the price.

We arrived in England when the property market was rocketing and tinier and tinier homes were going for increasingly humungous amounts of money. In other words, he can afford to retire.

So there you have it; the vagaries of life in England. I have a gardener who is going to sun himself in the Caribbean while I, a ‘suit’, slave away for the foreseeable future. Not only that, I have

a gardener who keeps me on for four seasonal sessions a year – but fires his super-wealthy clients who want perpetual landscaping.

Go figure.