Remember?

Posted By on 18th November 2014

Remember back in April the ‘fall-out’ when we cut down the hedge to half it’s size?

fallout

Well try to imagine what it looked like 6 months on, having had copious amounts of further hedge trimmings and tree prunings added to it. By October it covered the entire area where the blue flowers are in the photo and beyond.

Remember also what the pile of rubbish looked like after the garage had been removed but the demolished shed remained?

13a

When it became obvious that Adrian wasn’t coming back to remove any more of it, and having failed to find a local bonfire that might like to take the prunings off our hands, we decided to burn the lot ourselves.

And so after 4 days of dirty, back breaking work, spread over 7 days to allow for wind, rain and the fact that we’re getting too old for this kind of thing, this is what the two areas look like now.

1

You can see the brazier in which we did the burning, and of course no job would be complete without Gladys’s commode!

14a

One of the worst things to deal with was an old eiderdown. How long it had been lurking in the shed before we came along is anyone’s guess. It had certainly been languishing outside since the end of March and as a result was thoroughly soaked and the cover rotted.

Wet feathers smell and make a lot of smoke when you burn them, but no matter how wet they are feathers still manage to behave like feathers and by the time we’d finished, the garden looked like we’d just plucked several dozen chickens!

The job went smoothly, for the most part, except the day when I discovered my inner slapstick, stood on the head of the rake causing the end of the handle to hit me in the eye.

When I say ‘eye’ I really mean eye, the squidgy bit you see through, not the boney socket. Very unpleasant.

Elsewhere Leonard caught and ate a mouse that we had disturbed. I thought I had removed it to a place of safety and by the time I realised I hadn’t it was too late to intervene.

When I say ‘ate’ I mean he ate every single bit. Gross.

Previous cats of my acquaintance have usually left behind bits that I assume are less palatable. (?!!) Not Leonard. I suppose this was how he managed to keep body and soul together in the days before we found each other.

The down side of all this work is that I’ve had to go back to parking the car in the drive!

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