I think I have got to that age.

First of all it was listening to Radio 2 (if you are not UK based that is the radio channel listened to by everyone other than the "yoof of today").

Then it was spotting the occasional silver highlights in the hair…

And now it is gardening!

Never thought it would attract me.

I have always appreciated a good garden but have never really wanted to get involved.

Sort of like Rugby really. 

I have always appreciated a good game of rugger - watching those brutes battle away in the scrum over that odd shaped ball - but I have never really wanted to get stuck in.

So today I found myself eating my lunch and perusing my partner's copy of Gardeners' World and for the first time I was vaguely interested!

What next?  Will I be getting a mid life crisis?  Or is this it?

Anyway, in a small feature on the editorial page the Gardeners' World team were giving there money saving tips (must be one of the most used and abused features in publications around the world over the last few months).

Jess, the Sub Editor made this recommendation:

"Grow Asparagus!  In the six years I've had mine, I've split it into 12 plants.  They look great dotted around the garden and make terrific presents for friends and family"

"Mmmm" I thought. 

That is strange.

Now I know what asparagus is.

I have eaten it, I have cooked it, I have even seen and recognised it in our garden but I have never thought of dotting it around the garden and then giving it as a "terrific present" to friends and family.

That seemed rather odd, even to a gardening virgin like myself.

So with a rather quizzical look on my face, I re-read the piece…

Ahhh I see…

Agapanthus not asparagus!

It should have read:

"Grow Agapanthus!  In the six years I've had mine, I've split it into 12 plants.  They look great dotted around the garden and make terrific presents for friends and family"

Now that does make more sense (in as much as it was not Asparagus but some other thing which I took to be a flower of some sort).

Has this ever happened to you?

Have you ever read something, thought it odd and when you went back it was because you had mis-read what was there?

Well it is a common occurence (go with me on this because it is a common occurence for me and so to convince myself I am not going mad I am declaring it to be a common occurence for everyone).

What happens is that the brain naturally tries to make sense of what it sees around us.

It takes what we know and tries to super-impose that on what we are experiencing.

99.9% of the time it is correct but every so often it comes up with an interpretation that is (often in hindsight) completely wrong.

This is the same part of the our thinking that we use when we look at a cloud and see a shape that (to us) looks like a dog or a man with a watering can.

In that instance we are forcing it a little and we know the cloud isn't a dog.

But when left to its own devices, the brain will "fill in the blanks" of the evidence presented to it and will come to a conclusion of its own.

When I first glanced at the word "Agapanthus", it was a word I had not seen written down before (I have some vague recollection that I might have heard it before but I am not sure about that because I have trained my partner to refer to flowers in our garden as "the red one" or "the blue spikey one").

And so my brain seeing the "A" and a word ending in "-us" in a gardening made the conceptual leap to "Asparagus".

It filled in the gaps and gave me an answer that made sense to it.

So this is further evidence (to me anyway) that it is the brain that does the reading.

This knowledge is extremely useful because once you grasp this point and understand what it means, it becomes far easier to improve your reading speed (and therefore effectiveness as a reader).

Knowing this, you appreciate that the techniques and strategies and practice required to read faster are the way they are because they are targetting the brain and not the eye.

And it helps to eat lots of asparagus too and give your friends heaps of agapanthus.

I have a feeling that as I read more gardening magazines, this is going to happen more and more.