Originally published by The Clifton Courier, January 29, 2020

Disposing of old flowers is a really unpleasant job.

I mean, there are plenty of jobs that I hate. Putting the vacuum cleaner back into the cupboard has always been my least favourite household chore, now matter the household. Vacuum cleaners tend to be stored in cupboards or nooks that require some minor disassembly to fit them into. It’s never an easy, one-hand job*. It’s a fiddly task that requires two hands and, often, an angry foot to jam the vacuum cleaner into its home. All this clunking around makes me irrationally angry, which is frustrating, because I actually really quite like vacuuming and the act of putting it away cancels out the calm I’d achieved thanks to the satisfying clinks of rice or gravel being sucked up.

* I was extra careful to make sure “hand” and “job” were seperate entities from one another, for obvious reasons. 

Another job I can’t stand is putting away Christmas decorations. This is 10 times as fiddly as putting away the vacuum cleaner, plus you’ve got the added layer of sadness in knowing that Christmas is gone, you’ve got nothing to look forward to and that time is marching on at a speed that suggests your once baby-soft skin will soon be the texture of discarded crepe paper. It’s also quite hot and sweaty time of the year when you actually get around to taking the Christmas decorations down, which makes things especially unpleasant. And depending on how elaborate your decorations are, this could be quite time consuming.

In fact, I would say that putting away Christmas decorations is the worst chore you can be stuck with. But since I managed to avoid that this year (I was conveniently out of the house when my housemates coiled the Christmas lights back up), so I’m going to channel my complaining powers towards dead flowers.

I mean, I don’t say this because I want to discourage people sending me flowers, because I love getting flowers – they smell great, they look great and they’re a very public declaration that someone, somewhere doesn’t think you’re a complete piece of poo.

Just seeing a bunch of flowers fills me with all kinds of cheer, but knowing someone was kind enough to gift them me specifically is especially lovely. I like to keep them within eyeshot of my bed, so I can wake up to the floral sentiment and nip any early-morning dread in the bud.

Make no mistake, being given a bunch of flowers is absolutely delightful (especially if they’re white Easter daisies, which I’m really into right now in case anyone’s wondering).

But nothing last forever and eventually those bright, sweet-smelling confirmations that you’re not a complete piece of poo begin to droop. And soon waking up the vase of cut flowers becomes the source of my early-morning dread.

Because I know those droops are going to lead to withering and the withering will lead to dry, crumbly death.

I know I will have to eventually through them out, but it’s just a matter of how long I can avoid it. I mean, the flowers are still a message of love, no matter how discoloured they may get. It’s still nice to be reminded of that.

But there’s only so long you can ignore festering flowers.

My sister gave me a lovely bunch for my birthday a recently, which I kept for as long as I could.

But the unfortunate thing about being born at the height of summer is that any flowers you’re given as a celebration of your existence wilts much faster in the heat. And when you have decaying plant matter in water, this can be quite unpleasant. The stems don’t just die, they rot.

And that rot is not just the smell of decomposing organic matter, but the smell of your hedonistic ways no longer being projected by Birthday Week privilege. When birthday flowers go, so too does your ability to write off gluttony and frivolity with a casual “but it’s my birthday”.

Eventually the dahlias’ heads bowed and the smell of decay lingered in the humid microclimate that is my bedroom. I had to turf them.

The smell was so bad that I nearly threw up my lunch. The stems, once removed, didn’t just drip water, but oozed a pungent brown goo. The liquid decay had formed some kind of skin on the water and left a sticky ring around the vase.

Not only did I have to chuck away flowers and wash a vase, but I had to de-stink the kitchen using a strong-smelling disinfectant to cleanse the house of the essence of death.

Yes, it’s unpleasant.

But not unpleasant enough to stop me from buying my own damn flowers to take the place of those before them. Some things are worth dry-retching for.