With fewer than 60 days until the mobile shop opens I can feel a panic rising up. The clock is ticking. I have so much to do.
I’m Generation X. The slacker generation. The analogue generation. We’re the children of war babies. We spent the 80s worrying about a nuclear bomb being dropped. We spent the 90s refusing to grow up - what was the point we were all going to die anyway. And when the 21st Century rolled round we got proper jobs and proper partners and proper houses and had children. But we never grew up. We just looked like we did.
I got my first mobile phone when I was 30. I was 32 when I got a home computer.
My son grew up in a digital world. He’s a digital native. He’s the one who gives me social media advice. He and his girlfriend gave me a quick tutorial on how to use Tik Tok last week. I get Facebook. I get instagram. I get snapchat. I don’t get Tik Tok. I mean I don’t even use it and now I’m on it. And I was told the algorithms would send me stuff I wanted to see, but they haven’t. I keep getting teenagers dancing on their beds and twenty-somethings waving around pregnancy sticks.
Then I realised where I’d gone wrong. I wasn’t swiping. I didn’t know that you had to swipe up to see more stuff. Then I started seeing flowers and gardens.
I was dropping my son off at his friends flat on Friday when he told me he needed to give me another tutorial on Tik Tok. He said he’d looked at my posts, which were good, but my videos were too long. I said I made them the same length as the music clips. 1 minute long. He said I didn’t need to use the entire music clip. Nobody does. He said no one will hang around for a whole minute watching a clip. Apparently people have short attention spans on Tik Tok. Tik Tok is all about very very very short clips. I told him lots of people are viewing my videos - over 230. He told me that wasn’t very many and not to worry, he’d help me get more views. Am I missing something? Suddenly I feel old.
I planted my tulip bulbs and the blackbirds keep digging them up. Bloody asshole blackbirds. Every single day there are new bulbs to replant. How are they meant to grow if they keep ending up on top of the soil. It’s not like I have that many tulips.
I planted the sweet peas and made wigwams for them. I use skewers to hold the seedlings into the ground, otherwise those bloody asshole blackbirds will dig them up. I also planted some lavender snapdragons, pink agrostemma and rose dianthus seedlings.
I’ve been practicing opening and closing the pop top. Getting used to all its quirks. I’ve been experimenting with how to set it up and I think I’ve got it sorted. Mostly.
I’m going to use my vases. Orange, yellow, blue and white ones. I'm going to use wicker baskets and trays to display the vases with flowers in.
I had just enough flowers in the garden to make a bunch for the local book fair. I made a video of them spinning around on the lazy Susan for Tik Tok. Everything on Tik Tok has music. The music is what turns a middling video into a great video. I’m going with a 70s vibe. I refuse to use what everyone else is using. I picked Woodstock by Crosby Stills Nash & Young. I love their version of Joni Mitchell’s song. This video has had 669 likes. Which is great. But let’s get real. Most of the people liking my videos won’t be buying my flowers. They don’t even live near me. They probably don’t live in New Zealand. Back when I was 20 I wanted to be a film director. Finally I’ve got my chance.