I might have been having too happy an evening to be feeling very literary.
That could be translated as: I have drunk a glass of gin and another of Salford rum, my head is feeling pleasantly swimmy and in any case it is almost bed time.
We have had a busy day, and just to top it off, we did not go to work.
We should have gone to work because of not having any cash, but we didn’t, we will rot in hell, probably after we have starved to death.
We have been recreating the front garden. Actually, mostly I have been recreating the front garden. Mark went off to the farm to fix the drains and tow some trailers about with a borrowed digger. It sounds as though it has been a successful day. We should have moved the trailers ages ago but couldn’t because there was a thrush’s nest in one of them, and so we left it where it was. The baby birds have grown up and buzzed off now, rather like our own babies, and so today Mark hauled the trailer up to the top of the field ready for the man from Morecambe Metals to show up and remove it.
It is a good job that we did not do it ages ago, because it has occurred to us that actually we would quite like some of the rusty junk contained therein for fixing up the garden.
We are going to build some arches with the bits of old trampoline, and possibly a flagpole from the bits of old scaffolding tube, and a cannon out of a bit of old drain pipe. I had a cannon in my garden once, many years ago, and have long regretted its loss. Mark has offered to build me another. I am very pleased about this and think I will point it at Number Fourteen, whom I don’t like very much. We suspect that Number Fourteen is the household behind the painting of the white line in the alley at the back of our house. There was a post-script to that story, because the builders on the other side of the alley called the council and objected strongly, which is a euphemism for lost their tempers and swore, and the council flatly denied that they had painted it at all. It appears, to my thrilled fascination, that it was privately done by somebody who knew some line painters, and who is therefore very probably an obsessive nutter.
The same somebody has taken to putting home made pretend parking tickets on cars that park there. I have been entertained about this, but the builders said that it was Impersonating A Police Officer and rang the police, who assured everybody that they cared, really and sincerely they did, and should we catch anybody pretending to be a police officer then we should let them know right away.
I think it would be less trouble just to build a cannon in the garden, that would jolly well show them.
Anyway, since we don’t yet have a cannon or a flagpole I have had to content myself with digging, which is what I have been doing for most of the day, and I would just like to tell you that digging is jolly hard work. I am moving the lawn to the sides, we are going to have a flat bit in the middle where the lawn used to be and Mark said he might lay some flagstones to make it look like a compass. We have seen some statues that we would like very much to put in the middle, but they are a very lot of money and so we might have to content ourselves with a scaffolding tube flagpole and a drainpipe cannon.
I dig and dug until my fingernails were very black even with rubber gloves on, and when Mark came home we sat on the doorstep and considered garden rearrangements until it started to rain, at which point we decided that we hadn’t got round to any of the other things we should have done with the day and also that it was too much trouble to go to work, so we didn’t.
It is all very satisfactory.
We are going to have an interesting garden, unless we get distracted first.
