Saturday June 2009 (Saturday) - Gardening

Something happened today that simply never happens. I overslept. The morning was somewhat rushed getting together, and pausing only briefly to get new shovels it was off to Sevenoaks to help with some gardening. I use the term “gardening” somewhat loosely. There was a vague plan to dig up a lawn which was established on a steep slope, and to re-lay the whole lot as a flat surface against a brick wall. However, as I have mentioned before, sometimes writing about these things in a blog is much easier than actually doing them.

The soil surrounding the abode of “Chez Wakefield” is solid. Really solid. In my back garden when I put a shovel in place and jump on it, the shovel sinks all the way into the soil. Today when I jumped on the shovel, it just bounced off the soil without making any impact whatsoever. I had been warned of this, and I had been promised something amazing to deal with the problem. I was a tad disappointed. Because of the hard ground, Bryan had borrowed a Kango. I was under the impression that a Kango was some sort of JCB/excavator/digger thingy. It wasn’t It was an electric shovel. And not just any electric shovel, but a rather weedy one that gave up within half an hour.

It has become something of a tradition that no serious gardening can be done without a tool breaking. In the past we have folded shovels, snapped spades and pick axes, to say nothing of strimmers catching fire. Following in the wake of quite frankly spectacular gardening failures, the death of the Kango was rather lame. It just started sounding rather pathetic, before packing up and leaking some oil. We made do with pick axes instead, but it was a bit more like hard work that way. After a few hours the pick axes started making some clanging noises as they hit the ground. Some six inches beneath the grass was a lot of rather solid concrete. Eventually these turned out to be buried concrete fence posts, but they took some shifting. By five o’clock we were all completely exhausted. I say five o’clock – my arms had got into cramp spasms a couple of hours before this, and for some time I’d been doing little more than dragging the wheelbarrow around.

CA had done us a smashing bit of tea of sossies & chips, and as we ate, we broke the sad news of the demise of the Kango. It transpired that the thing had been borrowed from a friend of CA’s friend. And it’s not really good form to take the thing back broken. So we had a look on eBay. The good news – a replacement could be bought. The bad news – for about five hundred quid. It turns out the man over the road will have a look at it. I offered to have a look at it, but it seems the man over the road might be able to do more than just announce that he thing has died.

Home to find a letter had arrived from the chokey. Regular readers of this drivel may recall that last Wednesday I posted some “literature” off to the chokey. Today his letter says that it was all a joke and he can’t believe I went out to get the stuff. I can’t wait to hear his reaction if the thing gets to him….