Marriage is an odd institution at the best of times. I’ve felt for a long time now that while it’s important for the partners involved to be different, this will create differences. If you see what I mean.

My wife’s differences from me are largely complementary, and vice versa. For instance, while I’m good on the helicopter picture, she can fly a helicopter and I can’t. This sort of stuff is important. Things are less agreeable when it comes to sleep: Mrs Ward can sleep with twenty eight dogs variously snoring, wriggling and scratching their balls on our bed, and I can’t. Much of our approach to gardening is similarly incompatible.

Where I score is large-scale shifting around of soil, and plans for terraces at the far end of our plot where there is sheltered sun in summer from 8.30 am to 9 pm. Gardens are for lying in, and thus my main objective is to find good lying-on spots, and then create them. In due course.

I’m also a star when it comes to building rockeries, and then planting things on them. Jan is more your “what’s this fucking mess at the far end of our plot, and when are you going to weed the rockery?” sort of gardener. And whereas I’ll glare at the weeds in our gravel (and then search for cheap ecological damage on the Web) Jan will crouch patiently and pull the weeds out one by one. So by the time the Agent Orange arrives, the parking area is pristine anyway.

But the main suitability between us is Jan’s endless patience versus my inability to tolerate any obstruction for longer than three seconds. This partnership comes into its own on the subject of doors that won’t open.

There are few doors more important than cellar doors. For behind cellar doors lie branch-loppers and flower-pots and last year’s resting tubers. Well…that’s my wife’s take on cellar doors, but mine is simpler: in that cellar (the one I can’t get into right now) is a desirable collection of garden loungers and alcohol. Some of that alcohol is home-made hooch from the ’09 pear crop, and rather more of it is pretty damn fine claret just gagging to be drunk.

My reaction on finding a door-lock unwilling to open when I put a key in it (especially when that lock is the one thing separating me from chemical mind-alteration) is to go find an axe. Jan’s reaction, on seeing me brandishing an axe, is to suggest I wave it at old tree stump she’s wanted to see the back of for several years. And while I attack said stump in the manner of Basil Fawlty and a Morris 1100, Mrs W applies WD40, fiddling, logic and feminine wiles to the cellar door lock.

On such things are golden wedding anniversaries based. During any given day our paths may only cross in a tangentially accidental manner, but by evening time Jan has dirty fingernails, and I have suitably exercised biceps. This allows us to share a maturing bottle of cellar contents while watching the sun go down on what will (one day) be the terrace at the back of our small lodge.