It’s true, honestly, gardening and tennis are key to living a long life

ELDRICK insists he is looking forward to becoming a gardener. Eventually. Sometime in or around the year 2060 he reckons maybe he will spontaneously pick up a hoe and set to work weeding the asparagus patch. Or perhaps he may then be moved to spring into horticultural action dead heading roses and spreading barrow loads of manure over the potato drills. Just not today. Just not this year. Just not this decade. In so many ways, our son is so very much like his parents. He boasts the broad hips of his proud father and the keen intelligence of his doting mother.

He seems to have inherited the Medders sense of humour along with Hermione’s gift for making friends.

He has followed his da on to the sports field and his ma into the choir, a true all-action chip off the old block.

He is blessed with his mother’s smile and his father’s ability to lose things, even big things in small spaces.

However, Eldrick has so far completely failed to demonstrate that there are any gardening genes whatsoever in his DNA makeup.

Yes, he can be persuaded to move a few bales of peat or mow a section of lawn – but only in response to financial reward or threats that he will not be fed.

There is no glimmer of a suggestion that he might actually enjoy the fresh air of the flower bed or the thrill of lifting a hefty turnip from the brown earth.

This lack of any apparent horticultural bent is not for lack of example, as both his parents have the bug.

When not up to their aged elbows in compost they are llikely to be found perusing nursery catalogues which list endless varieties of gooseberry or geranium.

And a similarly green fingered headline is set by Her Majesty, the mother-in-law, his grandmother, who is forever harping on about her hostas.

She has even been known to venture on to social media to tweet about the tomatoes she cultivates in the pleasurable warmth of the royal greenhouse.

Eldrick merely nods politely as his gran discourses on her delphiniums and he indulges her with every show of interest as she reveals the secrets of her stunning salvias.

Those secrets are safe with her grandson as he has no more intention of cultivating salvias than he has of walking barefoot up to the Barnsmore Gap.

‘Gardening is something old people do,’ he concluded one day and then, to emphasise the gulf he sees between the generations, he looked me full in the face and added: ‘old people like you.’

‘But Eldrick,’ I replied. ‘It could be that you are putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps the old people you see out with fork and secateurs have survived to be old precisely because they garden.

‘It is well known that gardening and tennis are the most likely pastimes of those who live to be a hundred.’

I realise that calling this desperately contrived factoid ‘well known’ was straining the bounds of credulity.

Strictly between ourselves, it was conjured up on the spur of the moment, drawing on gut instinct and half-digested newspaper articles.

It was a line of argument which failed totally to convince my sceptical son that he should lend a hand with pruning the orchard – or start practising his running forehand.

He pointed out that I never regularly darkened the door of the tool shed until I was fifty, preferring until then to spend my Saturdays at various sporting fixtures than in the garden.

He cited the example of his friend Rocky’s father, whose recently developed success in producing radishes and lettuce has coincided with a dismal lengthening of his golf handicap.

If the poor man can no longer keep the ball straight off the tee, he can at least serve up a decent home grown salad…

I left the son and heir taking selfies for his SnapChat account and pottered off to attend to my bark mulch.