A heron used to come and rob all the fish in the lake.  Cheeky bastard.

I christened him Bertie Aheron as there was a certain similarity in the beady eyes and the sneaky approach to life.

I haven’t seen him in a very long time and I sometimes wonder what happened to the thieving duplicitous little cunt.  I also wonder what happened to the heron.

I was up at the crack of dawn this morning [it may even have been as early as ten thirty] and the first thing I saw out the window was Bertie [Aheron, not the other little shit].  He was standing there in the middle of the grass looking somewhat frustrated.  And well he might, as I got tired of restocking the lake ages ago, so the only thing he’ll find in it now are some snails and an old supermarket trolley.  A lake isn’t a proper lake without a supermarket trolley.

I presume he was a descendent of the original Bertie, as I believe they have a lifespan of only five years. 

I managed to shoot him.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the rifle to hand [why can you never find a rifle when you most need it?] so I shot him with a camera instead.

That is a magnificent specimen of Ardea cinerea?

What the camera failed to capture was another magnificent specimen – Canis Sandii – who was at that moment travelling in the direction of the heron at about 150 miles per hour.

It was the fastest fucking take-off I have ever seen.

Anyone want some heron feathers?

When I say it was quite hot, it wasn’t actually.  The temperature was not all that high, but there was no wind and a high humidity.  And when there is high humidity our sweat doesn’t evaporate so we feel hot and sticky.

I did a bit of gardening and then brought the paper out to read in the sun.  The old sweat was pouring off me.

While I was sitting there trying to work obscene answers into the Simplex Crossword I noticed Sandy panting like mad.  Now dogs aren’t affected so much by humidity as they don’t sweat.  I began to wonder about how she will cope in France.

France tends to have higher temperatures and much lower humidity.  We [Herself and I] therefore feel about the same as we did yesterday but without the stickiness.  Sandy won’t have that equalisation.  She will just feel hotter.

The first thing I thought of doing was to try to remove some of her under-fur.  Now Sandy is a long haired dog.  But under all that long hair there is an additional layer of very fine soft fur.  By some method that leaves me baffled, this fur tends to migrate towards her arse, whereupon it falls out in fistfuls. So yesterday I got out her special grooming comb which is a lethal yoke with a load of very sharp blades.  I combed her vigorously which she enjoyed immensely and got rakes of the fine fur out.  I chucked it to the wind, but as there was no wind it just fell on the grass.  Now our lawn looks like it’s infested with small rats.

I’m still not sure about France though and how Sandy will cope.

It will have to be a combination of hosing her down and chucking her in the swimming pool.

Sandy hates water.

Heh!

They have a rather complicated system where they collect bottles on certain weeks, recyclables on other weeks and the rest of the shit any other time.  I could never get the hang of which day was the day for which shit.

I don’t know why they can’t do it like the French.  The French have a brilliant system where they have these little collection areas that have several large coloured bins.  Any time you feel like it, you can throw all your crap in there and someone comes along and collects it, but it doesn’t matter a damn when they do it, because you have already gotten rid of your junk.  That would be much too complex for our mob though, and if you miss the collection then that’s tough.

I don’t know what the hell they do with all the tons of crap they collect, but I have a sneaking suspicion they ship it off to China or somewhere where they convert it all into computers or politicians or anti-smokers or something else befitting its origins.

Just to confuse their complicated system of rubbish collection, they decided that they weren’t going to collect it on the appointed day any more, and I can’t remember which days they are collecting what and when. 

I got a letter from them a few weeks ago.  They apologised for the complexity of things and said they had new cutting edge technology that would see me right.  They said that if I gave them my mobile phone number, that they would text me the night before a collection and would tell me what kind of collection it was.  I phoned them and got chatting to a very nice girl.  I gave her my number and told her to text me when a collection was due, or phone me whenever she felt like a shag.

I’m still waiting for a text.

Or a phone call.

In the meantime, my rubbish is building up at an alarming rate in a great heap at the bottom of the garden. The pile is festering and steaming.  It is starting to make gentle undulating movements. I am going to have to revert to chucking it into the neighbour’s garden, and I am going to have to do that soon.

I have this fear that it’s going to start talking to me.

Here I am on a blustery Sunday afternoon trying to download some porn download some pirated films research the decline of the honeybee, and the fucking Interweb is acting like I am using an old modem thingy.  It’s not only slow, but it keeps disconnecting.  Fucking irritating.

It could be that the lightning we had last night screwed something up in which case there is fuck all I can do about it.

Or it could be that the trees and hedges have gotten a little out of control and are blocking the signal.

I’ll tell you one thing -

It’s a piss poor state of affairs if the fucking Interweb is nagging me to do some gardening.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t like me.

The old lawn was looking a bit tattered, seeing as it hasn’t been cut since last September or so.  Yesterday I thought I would take a spin around on the old ride-on mower. 

It is a fair sized lawn, and usually takes around an hour to cut.  It was very pleasant out yesterday so I spent the hour happily driving around in ever decreasing circles.  Fortunately, when I reached the centre of my ever decreasing circles, I didn’t vanish up my own arse, as the old joke would have it.

When the job was done, and the mower stashed away for another couple of months, I decided I deserved a grand mug of tea.  I filled the kettle and set it to boil.  Two minutes later, I returned to the kettle to find it covered in blood.  Being reasonably intelligent, I discounted the kettle as being the source of all the mess, and started looking nearer to home.  Sure enough, I had cut my finger and it was pumping the red stuff all over the place.

It was a tiny cut; so small that I didn’t even feel it yet it was pumping by the gallon.  I wrapped an old rag around the finger and sat down to enjoy my mug-full.

It was then I felt a slight stinging sensation in my leg.  I pulled up my trouser-leg and found a six-inch cut all the way up the calf.  It too was bleeding profusely.

Where do these cuts and nicks come from?  I don’t remember getting caught in anything.  What annoys me is that this happens every time I go into the garden.  It is almost impossible to step outdoors without getting something lacerated.  My arms and legs are covered in a crazy pattern of scars.  I don’t know where any of them came from, except that they are the result of entering the garden.

My blood is good stuff.  O Rh Negative, no less.  Also it is probably around 40% proof at this stage of my life, so I don’t fancy the idea of it just leaking out after a simple stroll around the demesne.

There is nothing else for it….

Herself will have to do all the gardening from now on.

We used to have a lot of wooden things in the garden that needed treatment such as a couple of sheds, a garden bench and a few other bits and bobs.  I loved the smell of creosote.  It was somehow a very clean smell.  The best thing about painting on creosote was the philosophy of the more the merrier.  I used to just slosh it on and as a result it got everywhere.

I have installed some new woodwork in the garden.  It was a messy job and I don’t want to be doing it too often, so here was a job for the old creosote.  A good soaking in the black stuff will keep the wood going for a few years.

I went into town to the hardware store.  It’s one of those gigantic help-yourself supermarket type places.  In other words, a fucking nightmare. Even worse, there is never a staff member around who has a clue about what I am looking for.  I traipsed up and down the isles looking for creosote.  Then I traipsed left and right.  Eventually I found some stuff in a large can that was called something like Creo-Coat.  I was rightly pissed off with the place at this stage so I grabbed a can and went home.

I opened the can, and to all intents and purposes, it is creosote all right, but why the fucking name?  Then it hit me – brand something and you can whack a good 20% onto the price.  That still didn’t explain why the shop didn’t stock plain ordinary creosote though.

This morning, I was messing around on the Interweb and I looked up ‘creosote’.  What I saw explained everything….

That fucking EU is poking its nose into my affairs again.  Someone in his infinite wisdom has decided that I am incapable of using the stuff properly.   Apparently there is something carcinogenic about it and we all know that we are not trusted to use anything that may, but won’t, harm us in some far distant future. Apparently it is still on sale, but only to ‘professionals’.  The common man in the street cannot be trusted as he will probably drink the stuff by accident.

Is there any small corner of life left where we are treated like sensible adults?  Is there any facet of living that hasn’t got a raft of Nanny Regulations attached?

It would nearly drive me to drink creosote.

I couple of days ago, for no reason at all, I began to think about our guinea pigs. Our K8 looked after them while we were on holiday in June, and I sort of, kind of forgot to collect them again. So she has been happily looking after them ever since.

Shortly after that, I got a comment on one of my musings from Sighs, of Guinea Pig Sighs fame. I hadn’t heard from him in a while which saddened me as I like guinea pigs with attitude, and I like having a guinea pig commenting on my site.

I thought it was a strange piece of coincidence that Sighs should comment on the very morning I had been thinking about our wee rodents, but dismissed it as just that. Coincidence.

Later on that afternoon, I had a phonecall from our K8. As usual, she wanted to borrow something and said se was calling over. I said that was fine, as I wasn’t doing much anyway. She then coughed quietly and asked if she could hold a funeral in the garden. Somehow, I knew what was coming next.

Poor wee Fizz kicked the bucket that morning.

Our garden is becoming quite a respectable graveyard. There are dogs, a cat and a rabbit buried there, and now a guinea pig has joined them. It was a moving funeral. Our Puppychild did a rather sweet oration at the graveside and then went off and played in a tree house I had built her. Kids are fierce resilient.

I’ll miss Fizz. Of the two, she was probably my favourite.

Sleep well, little Fizz

I was going to go back to sleep, but the devil got into me so I got up instead.  I’m glad I did.

Dawn was just breaking, and I stood out in the garden for a while.  The dawn chorus was quite spectacular.

There were blackbirds, thrushes, robins, tits [of the feathered variety], finches and a couple of pheasants [or it may have been peasants?] all vying with each other to be the loudest.  It was the most beautiful sound.

As I stood there, a fox strolled across the lawn which didn’t please Sandy.  She shot off after him and woke the neighbour who was fast asleep under the hedge.  I don’t know why it is, but whenever the neighbour has a rake of pints, he always ends up sleeping it off in my garden.  Doesn’t he know he has a garden of his own for that purpose?

I went back indoors, feeling full of the joys of spring.

Then it started to piss rain.

*sigh*

Now I’m tired.

After all, I’ve been up since dawn.

I think I’ll have a nap.

It was a beautiful day, so I decided it was time to do some long overdue jobs around the estate. There were hedges to be trimmed, ground to be dug and trees to be cut back.  I set Herself to the digging while I trimmed some shrubs.  I had to leave the tree pruning as I didn’t have a suitable saw.  I even cut the grass.

Of course, having cut the grass, I had to have a bit of a smoke.  Then the neighbours got wind of it, as it were, and they wanted a sample of the grass too.  We ended up having a bit of a neighbourly barbecue.

It’s funny how these things get out of hand.

Somebody suggested a spot of wife swapping.  I was all on for it, but for some reason Herself wasn’t too keen.  I persuaded her that it was all in the best interests of the community spirit, so we went for it.

I’m very glad we did.

I swapped her for the loan of a chain saw.

I know we have, because I built it.  In those days, there were no sewers or any of those so called modern conveniences, so you had two choices – a chemical toilet or a septic tank.  I don’t like the stink off chemical toilets, so a septic tank was the order of the day.

I read somewhere recently on the Interweb that these tanks are supposed to be pumped out on a regular basis.  I had a funny sort of idea that there was some kind of maintenance called for, and had idly decided that the thing to do is to wait until the tank stank.  It doesn’t stink at the moment, though I don’t generally go sticking my nose down the vents, so I have decided to let sleeping turds lie.

I built that tank back in ‘65 or ‘66.  It is the best part of forty five years old, but it has never been pumped, or cleaned out.  There are poos in there that I dropped when I was a teenager.  Maybe I should open it up as a museum?   

If something does go wrong with it, then I have a little bit of a problem.  Back in the days when it was built, there was easy access, but in the intervening forty five years, a load of trees have shot up, which means there is now no way for a lorry to get to it.  I don’t know what they do in this situation?  Do they take the lid off and empty it by hand, using buckets?  Maybe they could dig a trench and let it empty itself into the river that flows past our place?

I confess, I haven’t really given it much thought up until now.  It has lain there doing its business on my business and we have left each other alone.  To pump, or not to pump.  That is the question.  Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to let the neighbours suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous stench or to take arms against a sea of shite.

I think I’ll leave it alone.

It’s too nice a day to worry about these things.