5 September 2009 (Saturday) - Sieve That !!

The morning’s post brought a letter from Ashford district scouts inviting me to their annual bunfight. This is the same lot who gave me a five years service certificate after I’d been there twelve years, and who gave the medal for outstanding service to the bloke who only turns up to take the subs (and only does that when he feels like it). They’d obviously overlooked the fact I’d stopped helping them nearly a year ago.

To Sevenoaks to help with a garden project. Over the last few weeks various diggings in Bryan’s garden have uncovered all sorts of rocks and boulders. Not content with leaving them all where they were, he dug them out and piled them in a corner of the garden. Today’s job was basically to dig a great big hole to bury all these rocks and boulders in. I’m told it’s called a soak-away; the idea is to stop the garden getting waterlogged. I’m sure “project management” know what they are doing. It sounds odd to me, but I just did the digging. All the stuff that got dug out got sieved, and the loose stuff was used as topsoil. The stones and rocks went back in the hole at the end. The expression “sieve that” was used rather a lot during the day. It’s amazing how much sieving compacted rock takes to turn it into useable topsoil. It’s a whole lot easier when you see it on “Ground Force”.

Yes – I know. Seems a lot of fiddling around to me as well. And I was the one in the hole digging. I usually find it best not to offer opinions when someone comes up with such hare-brained schemes. Other than pointing out the relative merits of a fish pond (having dug a pond sized hole) I kept quiet. But there was some dinner and a couple of beers in it for me, so I wasn’t going to rock the boat. The only mishap was when we realised we’d left the home made bread in the oven for an hour too long. I suggested we turned the oven off, denied all knowledge of the thing, and if anyone asked we would say it was “uncut toast”. In the end it turned out that the loaf was perfect, so we got away with that one.

And now after the day’s exertions, I can hardly move…